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Capsized boat found off Florida; 39 people missing
Capsized boat found; 39 people missing
The agency patrols the waters around Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and the Bahamas, along routes often used by migrants trying to reach the United States. The agency stops and repatriates foreigners found navigating in U.S. waters.
Last summer, the Coast Guard rescued 13 people after their boat capsized off Key West as Tropical Storm Elsa approached.
2nd officer dies days after Harlem shooting
A New York City police officer gravely wounded last week in a Harlem shooting that killed his partner has also died of his injuries, the city’s police commissioner, Keechant Sewel, said Tuesday.
McNeil’s mother told the New York Post that she was trying to persuade her son to get help for mental health issues and that she wouldn’t have called 911 had she known he was going to use violence against the officers.
Judge restores mask mandate for now
The state had initially instituted a mandate in April 2020 that required people to wear masks in most indoor settings outside their home. That rule ended in June 2021 for vaccinated people. Hochul (D) announced in mid-December, as coronavirus infections surged in the state, that it would go back into effect for at least a month. Earlier this month, the state health department said the mandate would be in place until Feb 1. | null | null | null | null | null |
Arguably the greatest hitter and pitcher of the steroid-tainted 1990s will have to rely on a veteran committee as their last chance to reach Cooperstown. Enough voting members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America decided the stars’ ties to performance-enhancing drugs disqualified them from that aspect of baseball immortality, though their numbers undoubtedly belong in the Hall.
Players need to receive 75 percent of the vote to be elected. On Tuesday, Bonds received 66 percent, and Clemens garnered 65.2 percent.
The writers did elect former Boston Red Sox star David Ortiz (77.9 percent) in his first year on the ballot, even though his candidacy was no less complicated than those of Bonds and Clemens. Ortiz spent most of his career as a designated hitter, meaning he rarely played the field. Among Hall of Famers, only Harold Baines, Edgar Martinez, Paul Molitor and Frank Thomas can say the same. Ortiz hit more home runs (541) than any of them, and his on-base-plus-slugging percentage (.931) is just two points lower than Martinez’s.
Because this was the last year Bonds, Clemens and Sammy Sosa, co-star of the 1998 home run chase, were on the ballot, the election was the latest referendum on the steroid era — a chance for BBWAA voters to declare whether those who are thought to have used illegal substances or violated MLB’s then-nascent drug-testing policy voided their chance at reaching Cooperstown.
Alex Rodriguez, one of the best shortstops of all time who accumulated 113.7 Wins Above Replacement, per FanGraphs, did not come close to reaching 75 percent in his first year on the ballot, finishing with 34.3. Rodriguez tested positive for steroids and was suspended for 162 games in 2014.
This is a developing story and has been updated. | null | null | null | null | null |
It is unclear what impact the reorganization will have on workers’ unionizing efforts.
The studio laid off 12 quality assurance contractors in early December, with their last day set for Jan. 28, which prompted several dozen workers across the company to strike in protest. That work stoppage lasted seven weeks, ending Jan. 22.
Raven is among the Activision Blizzard-owned studios set to be acquired by Microsoft. The maker of Windows and Xbox made waves across the tech and gaming industries Tuesday when it announced it would buy Activision Blizzard for nearly $69 billion in an all-cash deal expected to close by June 2023, pending regulatory approval. | null | null | null | null | null |
While details on the three new games remain sparse, EA did offer some personnel info. Development on the new “Jedi” game will be headed by Stig Asmussen, who helmed the previous entry and, before that, Sony’s “God of War III.” The new first-person shooter, meanwhile, will be directed by Peter Hirschmann, who previously worked on numerous Star Wars games including “Star Wars: Battlefront” and “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.” The strategy game will be designed by a new studio formed by Greg Foertsch, a developer on the revered XCOM series of turn-based, sci-fi strategy games. Respawn Entertainment, creators of Titanfall and “Apex Legends,” will lead development on the “Jedi” sequel and the shooter while handling production for the strategy game. | null | null | null | null | null |
Finality, though, doesn’t equal clarity, and there’s perhaps some more haranguing to come as it pertains to proven or suspected users of performance-enhancing drugs. Alex Rodriguez has nine more tries at this. Plus, there’s a last gasp provided by the 16-member “Era Committee,” but that group — formerly known as the “Veterans Committee” — swiftly and roundly rejected the case of Mark McGwire, 11th on the all-time home run list, admitted user of PEDs during his historic career. There’s no reason to foresee an about face with the two players who perhaps most define the era and all its perceived stains.
The numbers become overwhelming, and not just the home runs. In that ’04 season, Bonds walked 232 times, still a major league record — by a mile. The next closest: Barry Bonds in 2002, with 198. The next closest to that: Barry Bonds in 2001, with 177. The names that follow him: Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, two of the best hitters to dig into the box. Bonds owns the top OPS of all-time — an incomprehensible 1.422 from ’04. Only three men have ever produced a single season with an OPS higher than 1.250 — Bonds, Ruth and Williams. They combined for 12 of them.
Clemens similarly has historically outlying statistics, dominance combined with longevity. In 2005, when major league pitchers posted a collective ERA of 4.29, Clemens’s league-leading ERA was 1.87 — nearly two and a half runs better than average. It was the last of his seven ERA crowns, and it came 19 years after his first. Only Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson have more career strikeouts. No one had struck out 20 batters in a game before Clemens did it — twice, a decade apart. There’s nothing on his baseball-reference.com page — 354 wins, Cy Young awards at 23 and 42 and scattered in between — that suggests he’s anything other than one of the best to ply his craft. That’s hard to unsee.
That sounds like a dramatic and overwrought question to assign to what’s mostly a frivolous situation, until you envision Bonds at the podium delivering a speech to a Cooperstown crowd and you have to explain to an 11-year-old why the all-time home run king wasn’t a shoe-in to be delivering that speech in the first place. That’s tough.
“As far as excitement, that was unbelievable,” Felipe Lopez, the Nats’ starting shortstop that night. “I had goose bumps. It was awesome.”
Goosebumps or guilty? How to feel, all these years later? There’s no need for absolutes. Barry Bonds will not be inducted into the Hall of Fame, and that’s both justified and a damn shame. | null | null | null | null | null |
Coast Guard searching for 39 people off Florida coast after suspected smuggling boat capsizes
The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bernard C. Webber on July 19 in Miami Beach, Fla.
The U.S. Coast Guard was searching Tuesday for 39 people missing after their boat reportedly capsized over the weekend off Florida in a suspected human-smuggling venture.
Representatives for the Bahamian government did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Bahamas Air Sea Rescue Association, a voluntary organization that assists the Royal Bahamas Defense Force with its sea rescues, is not involved in this search as Bahamians would not deploy to the Gulf Stream, the powerful ocean current moving along the East Coast, said Capt. Chris Lloyd, the association’s operations manager.
Lloyd said the drift of the water and the lack of an immediate SOS call after the boat overturned could hinder a search effort in an area that he said covered a large stretch of sea.
“When you’re not traveling with safety equipment, you’re not able to get that information out that you need assistance,” Lloyd said.
A possible rescue would be complicated by the length of time the passengers have been stuck at sea. Coast Guard spokeswoman Nicole Groll declined to say whether the operation was considered a recovery mission at this point. It isn’t known where the boat overturned.
National Weather Service forecaster Chuck Caracozza said waves in a Saturday night storm about 20 nautical miles offshore reached seven to nine feet, with winds reaching 10 to 20 knots.
In 2021, the State Department reported that the high unemployment rate during the coronavirus pandemic may have exacerbated the smuggling crisis, as traffickers recruit migrants through false offers of employment. In the Bahamas, people without Bahamian citizenship, such as people born to a non-Bahamian father, are at heightened risk of trafficking, as well as those displaced by hurricanes.
This report is breaking and will be updated. | null | null | null | null | null |
Arguably the greatest hitter and pitcher of the steroid-tainted 1990s will have to rely on a veteran committee as their last chance to reach Cooperstown because, even though the majority of voting members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America believed they should be Hall of Famers, enough of them decided the stars’ ties to performance-enhancing drugs disqualified them from that aspect of baseball immortality. Players need to receive 75 percent of the vote to be elected. On Tuesday, Bonds received 66 percent, and Clemens got 65.2 percent.
The writers did elect former Boston Red Sox star David Ortiz (77.9 percent) in his first year on the ballot, making him the fourth Dominican-born player elected to the Hall of Fame and the first player elected by the writers since 2020. The gregarious slugger is one of the most beloved players in Red Sox history and a quantifiably clutch performer in the postseason, and he’s one of the best designated hitters of all time.
“I learned how difficult it is to get in first ballot. It’s a wonderful honor to get in on my first rodeo,” Ortiz said. “It’s something very special to me.”
Because this was the last year Bonds, Clemens and Sammy Sosa, co-star of the 1998 home run chase, were on the writers’ ballot, the election was the latest referendum on the steroid era — a chance for voters to declare whether those who are thought to have used illegal substances or violated MLB’s then-nascent drug-testing policy voided their chance at reaching Cooperstown.
Ortiz’s candidacy was no less complicated than those of Bonds and Clemens. Ortiz spent most of his career as a DH, meaning he rarely played the field. Among Hall of Famers, only Harold Baines, Edgar Martinez, Paul Molitor and Frank Thomas can say the same. Ortiz hit more home runs (541) than any of them, and his on-base-plus-slugging percentage (.931) is just two points lower than Martinez’s.
“You don’t know what anybody tested positive for,” Ortiz said when asked about that test. “… I never failed a drug test [after the testing policy was put in place in 2004]. What does that tell you?”
Clemens also has denied using performance-enhancing drugs. In a statement issued via his Twitter page Tuesday, Clemens said: “My family and I put the HOF in the rear view mirror ten years ago. I didn’t play baseball to get into the HOF.”
“I gave it all I had, the right way, for my family and for the fans who supported me. I am grateful for that support,” he continued. “I would like to thank those who took the time to look at the facts and vote for me. Hopefully everyone can now close this book and keep their eyes forward focusing on what is really important in life.”
Alex Rodriguez, one of the best shortstops of all time and who accumulated 113.7 Wins Above Replacement, per FanGraphs, did not come close to reaching 75 percent in his first year on the ballot, finishing with 34.3. Rodriguez tested positive for steroids and was suspended for 162 games in 2014.
Pitcher Curt Schilling, in his final year on the ballot, earned 58.6 percent of the vote. Third baseman Scott Rolen (63.2 percent, fifth year), first baseman Todd Helton (52 percent, fourth year) and pitcher Billy Wagner (51 percent, seventh year) also topped 50 percent but will need much more support to get elected.
“I really never dreamed of [making the Hall of Fame],” Ortiz said Tuesday night. “All I was looking for was the opportunity to be an everyday player. … Thank God it came through when I came to the Red Sox. The rest is history.”
“When I see [Bonds and Clemens], to be honest with you, I don’t even compare myself to them because I saw so many times those guys performing and it was something that was very special,” Ortiz said. “… Not having them join me at this time is something that is hard for me to believe.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“Privacy advocates might still cry foul that people are being tagged or categorized by topics,” said Ratko Vidakovic, founder of AdProfs, an independent advertising technology consulting firm. The new system is “arguably more privacy-safe” than FLOC, he said. “But that still might not be enough.”
For advertisers that are used to buying highly targeted ads, the new system is “basically pointless,” said Wayne Blodwell, founder and CEO of the Programmatic Advisory, an adtech consulting firm. Another issue is that by recording when someone goes to a certain website and using that information to decide which topic they should see ads on, Google is essentially using one website’s data to help other websites advertise more accurately, Blodwell said.
Other browsers, such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox, have already blocked most third-party cookies. But because Google’s Chrome makes up more than 60 percent of the market on both phones and desktop computers, what Google decides to do will have by far the largest impact on the Web. Google has said it won’t get rid of third-party cookies until the end of 2023.
Though the new system seems to be more private, it doesn’t address the competition concerns, said Lukasz Olejnik, an independent privacy researcher and consultant. “For those who were concerned, competition remains an issue. In this case control is still with the Web browser,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Shortly after the deadline, Brian Raffel, Raven’s studio head, sent an email to the staff. “After carefully reviewing and considering the CWA’s initial request of the company, we worked quickly to find a mutually acceptable solution with the CWA that would have led to an expedited election process. Unfortunately, the parties could not reach an agreement,” he wrote. “[We] expect that the union will soon be moving forward with the filing of a petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election of eligible Raven employees. If filed, the company will respond formally to that petition promptly.”
Activision Blizzard shared a statement that echoed Raffel’s email. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rhodes, the group’s founder and the most prominent figure charged in the Justice Department’s investigation of the attack, remains jailed pending a bond decision by a U.S. magistrate judge in Plano, Tex. The 56-year-old Army veteran and Yale Law School graduate was at the Capitol that day but has said he did not enter the building and has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of D.C. set a July 11 trial date for the group, with a backup date of Sept. 26. The judge said seven previously indicted co-defendants will go to trial in April on separate charges of obstructing a congressional proceeding related to the joint session Jan. 6 to confirm the winner of the 2020 presidential election. | null | null | null | null | null |
In new polling from the Pew Research Center, President Biden’s approval rating is at a remarkably low 41 percent. That’s in part because independents view him fairly negatively, as they have for a while. But it’s also because Democrats don’t love him as much as they used to.
On a slew of metrics, Democrats express far less confidence in Biden than they once had. The two biggest drops are on issues that he had repeatedly emphasized on the campaign trail and during his early days in office: managing the coronavirus pandemic and unifying the country. The former always seemed more feasible than the latter, and in March of last year, far more Democrats were confident that Biden could handle the pandemic (92 percent) than that he could unify the country (74 percent). Since then, though, Democratic confidence in each effort has dropped by more than 20 points.
Pew’s data also suggests that Democrats have not only lost confidence in Biden’s ability to work across the aisle (understandably) but also are far less likely to even see that as a useful outcome. Since a year ago, there has been a 23-point net swing away from Democratic support for working with Republicans and toward standing up to the right. There was a larger swing among Republicans, even as they were far less likely to support congressional leaders’ working with Biden a year ago.
Of course, Biden’s inability to pass legislation is a function not only of intransigence from the opposing party but also from within his own. Most Democrats think Biden is listening to both moderate and liberal members of his party, though they are also much more likely to say he’s listening only to moderates than to say he’s listening only to liberals. As for who he should be listening to, 6 in 10 Democrats say that he should be listening to both sides.
There are, of course, other concerns that filter in. Democrats share Republican frustration over increased prices for gasoline and consumer goods, though they view the changes in the past 12 months as less severe. (Four in 10 Democrats say gas prices have gone up a lot, for example, compared with 7 in 10 Republicans.) Confidence among Democrats in Biden’s ability to make good economic decisions is down 15 points over the past year.
Notice that much of this is out of Biden’s control. His pledges to unify the country — framed ambitiously to the point of near-delusion — were dependent on Republican acquiescence, which was always unlikely. The economy has been buffeted by factors that are not unique to the United States, such as supply-chain issues and inflation. And the government’s ability to combat the pandemic is hampered by indifference to that effort that itself overlaps with partisanship. As I wrote last week, though, Biden went from under- to over-promising on making change, probably contributing to the drop in confidence in his presidency. | null | null | null | null | null |
Pelosi, the first woman to be elected House speaker, has managed to unite the moderate and liberal factions in her party to pass legislation, while previous speakers — most notably John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) — often struggled with the fractious GOP.
Her reelection announcement was expected, but it remains to be seen whether she will remain the Democratic leader after the current Congress.
“The Speaker is not on a shift, she’s on a mission,” Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, said in an email when asked whether Pelosi plans to run again for speaker or minority leader.
Pelosi’s announcement came hours after longtime Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said he would not seek another term. Cooper is the 29th Democrat to decide against reelection or pursuit of another office. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cooper’s announcement comes after Tennessee’s Republican-controlled General Assembly approved a redistricting plan that will split Davidson County, which includes Nashville, into three congressional districts. Currently, the entire county is within the 5th District.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement that Cooper “has always been willing to reach across the aisle to deliver for his beloved home state, especially as a former co-chair of the Blue Dog Coalition.”
“For his ironclad commitment to respect, civility and service, Congressman Cooper has gained many admirers on both sides of the aisle, as well as among his former staffers and interns," Pelosi said.
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, thanked Cooper for his “decades of public service fighting for Tennesseans.”
“From his contributions to the fight for voting rights, to his dedication to keeping our fiscal house in order, Jim’s passion for good governance shines through in everything he does,” Maloney said in a statement. | null | null | null | null | null |
On Day 1 of my administration, I signed an executive order that delivered on a promise I made to parents, empowering them to make decisions regarding their children. While some are seeking to sow division between masking factions, I want to be clear: My executive order ensures that parents can opt-out their kids from a school’s mask mandate. It neither bans the wearing of masks nor the issuing of mask mandates. Parents can now choose whether wearing a mask at school is right for their child. There is no one better to determine what is best for children, especially after two years of a pandemic, than their parents. And only they should be able to decide whether wearing a mask in school is the right choice for their children. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cam Whitmore is averaging 22.4 points and 12.0 rebounds for Spalding this season. (Scott Taetsch/For The Washington Post)
Two D.C.-area basketball players were named McDonald’s all-Americans on Tuesday, the fifth consecutive year multiple local players were chosen for the high school showcase.
Archbishop Spalding forward Cam Whitmore was selected for the boys’ game, and Sidwell Friends guard Kiki Rice was chosen for the girls’ event. The games, set for March 29 in Chicago, weren’t played the past two years because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Whitmore ascended the national recruiting rankings during the pandemic while playing in Spalding’s summer league and with Team Melo, his AAU program. The 6-foot-6, 225-pound forward is the area’s top-ranked boys’ recruit in the Class of 2022; 247Sports lists him as the No. 20 prospect in the nation. In October, Whitmore, known for his highlight dunks, joined a lengthy list of local players to commit to Villanova.
This winter, Whitmore has turned the Cavaliers (16-3) into an unusual contender in the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association. The 17-year-old averages 22.4 points and 12.0 rebounds for the Severn private school, which The Washington Post ranks No. 2 in the area.
Whitmore is Spalding’s first McDonald’s all-American since 2004, when Utah Jazz forward Rudy Gay, who has played in the NBA since 2006, was picked. Although a local boys’ player was omitted from the honor between 2017 and 2019, a boys’ player has been picked each of the past three years. A local girls’ player has been chosen almost every year in recent history.
Unlike Whitmore, Rice has been one of the nation’s top recruits since eighth grade. The 5-foot-11 guard, ranked the country’s No. 2 recruit in her class by ESPN, was the D.C. Gatorade Player of the Year as a sophomore in 2018-19 and committed to UCLA in November.
This winter, Rice has powered Sidwell (13-0) to a No. 1 national ranking by averaging roughly 16 points, seven rebounds, five assists and three steals. Last weekend, the Quakers defeated national powerhouses Hopkins (Minn.) and DeSoto (Tex.) in the Girls Basketball Invitational, an showcase in Minnetonka, Minn., televised on ESPN’s networks. No local foes have challenged the D.C. private school, which defeated traditional powers Bishop McNamara and Paul VI by double digits.
Rice, a Bethesda native, is the first Sidwell player to be named a McDonald’s all-American. Her aunt Susan Rice formerly served as national security adviser and United Nations ambassador.
Despite last year’s McDonald’s all-American games being canceled, Paul VI guard Trevor Keels and St. John’s guard Azzi Fudd were selected. Keels is one of Duke’s top players this winter, but Fudd has missed most of Connecticut’s season with a foot injury. | null | null | null | null | null |
On Day 1 of my administration, I signed an executive order that delivered on a promise I made to parents, empowering them to make decisions regarding their children. While some are seeking to sow division between masking factions, I want to be clear: My executive order ensures that parents can opt out their kids from a school’s mask mandate. It bans neither the wearing of masks nor the issuing of mask mandates. Parents can now choose whether wearing a mask at school is right for their child. There is no one better to determine what is best for children, especially after two years of a pandemic, than their parents. And only they should be able to decide whether wearing a mask in school is the right choice for their children. | null | null | null | null | null |
Protesters at a mock garden party in Parliament Square in London on Jan. 12. (Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)
The Guardian published a photograph of a “wine-and-cheese party” that took place in the garden of Downing Street on May 15, 2020, when gatherings of more than two people were banned in outdoor public places. Visible in the picture are the prime minister, his wife, 17 staff members and bottles of wine.
Johnson’s private secretary, Martin Reynolds, sent an email to dozens of staffers, encouraging them to “bring your own booze” to a party on May 20, 2020 — at a time when the public was banned by law from meeting up with more than one person outside their households.
Johnson admitted attending the outdoor gathering “for 25 minutes.”
Johnson’s birthday
ITV News reported that Johnson’s wife, Carrie, helped organize an afternoon surprise party attended by about 30 people for the prime minister’s birthday June 19, 2020. Guests reportedly sang “Happy Birthday” as Johnson was presented with a cake. That same evening, the broadcaster said, family and friends gathered inside the Johnson residence.
A Downing Street spokesperson told The Washington Post that staff members “gathered briefly in the Cabinet Room after a meeting to wish the Prime Minister a happy birthday. He was there for less than 10 minutes.” The spokesman said Johnson hosted a small number of family members outside that evening.
Party at No. 11 Downing Street
According to Cummings, formal invitations were sent out. London was under Tier 3 restrictions at the time, preventing households from mixing indoors. Asked if there was a party on this date, Johnson told Parliament: “No, but I am sure that whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.”
‘Impromptu’ drinks inside a government office
Staff had drinks to celebrate Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s spending review Nov. 25, 2020. A spokesperson for the Treasury said a “small number” of staff celebrated at their desks. Pubs in the city were shuttered at the time due to coronavirus regulations.
A leaving party
The Department for Education admitted holding a Christmas party Dec. 10, 2020, with staff gathering inside the building after work — despite social mixing between households being barred.
“The gathering was used to thank those staff for their efforts during the pandemic,” a spokeswoman said, adding that, in hindsight, it would have been “better not to have gathered in this way at that particular time.”
The Mirror reported that Downing Street staff held recurring “wine time Fridays” throughout the pandemic, with staffers taking turns wheeling a suitcase to the supermarket to stock up. The tabloid published a photo of what it said was a 34-bottle wine fridge being delivered through the back door of the building Dec. 11, 2020.
Downing Street staff were reportedly among the attendees at a Dec. 14, 2020, party at the headquarters of the Conservative Party. The party allegedly included dancing into the early hours, despite Tier 2 restrictions in London. Former London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey apologized after a photo emerged and resigned as chair of the London Assembly’s policing and crime committee.
A Christmas quiz
Staff at the Department of Transport drank and danced after work on Dec. 16, 2020, as London was placed under “very high alert” and forced into Tier 3 restrictions. The department has apologized for the “inappropriate” event and for its staff’s “error of judgment.”
Cabinet staff parties
On Dec. 17, 2020, while England was in lockdown, staff members from the cabinet office gathered to say goodbye to Kate Josephs, a former senior civil servant who led the government’s coronavirus task force. Josephs has since apologized.
In a separate gathering on the same day, staff for the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case attended an event titled a “Christmas Party.” A government spokesperson said it was a “virtual quiz” and that Case didn’t take part but walked through the office. When reports of the gathering emerged, Case stepped down from leading an inquiry into the Downing Street parties.
On Dec. 18, 2020, Downing Street staff reportedly gathered to exchange gifts, sip wine and eat cheese in a rule-breaking event that was later joked about by Allegra Stratton, the prime minister’s then-press secretary. Stratton tearfully resigned last month.
Goodbye party for a defense adviser
The Mirror claims Johnson gave a speech at a leaving event for his then-defense adviser, 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 Ministry of Defense declined to comment.
On the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, on April 16, staffers held two parties for departing colleagues at Downing Street. The next day, Queen Elizabeth II was photographed mourning her husband of seven decades by herself, because she was abiding by the coronavirus restrictions put in place by Johnson’s government. | null | null | null | null | null |
No. 7 Good Counsel girls keep climbing with a 60-50 victory over No. 3 Paul VI
Sophomore Talayah Walker and the rest of the Falcons have embraced a defense-first mentality. (Michael Errigo/The Washington Post)
Three years ago, Angela Harris and Kadidia Toure felt lucky that they didn’t have to deal with the anxiety that can come with jumping to the high school level and having to impress a new coach. They knew Good Counsel girls’ basketball coach Milton Kimbrough before they arrived on campus in Olney, having played for his AAU program since the fourth grade.
But when they joined Kimbrough’s Falcons as freshmen, playing major minutes for a young team in one of the country’s best conferences, they faced a different type of challenge: keeping the faith. They trusted Kimbrough and knew success might take time but, quite simply, losing is not fun.
“Got very rough, very rough. Definitely,” Toure said with a laugh. “We had to trust the process.”
But now Toure and Harris are seniors, and the No. 7 Falcons have announced themselves as a team to beat in the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference. On Tuesday, they provided another reminder of how far the program has come with a 60-50 win over No. 3 Paul VI.
“Some of these players were thrown into the fire,” Kimbrough said. “They had to start right away, and I kept telling them to hang in there. … Now they’re kind of changing the face of the program.”
The Falcons (11-1) entered Tuesday’s contest undefeated in conference play, a sign of the strides they have made this winter: They had finished under .500 in league play each of the past three seasons. But the Panthers’ visit Tuesday offered another opportunity to show growth: Good Counsel had not beaten Paul VI (12-4) — which also entered undefeated in the WCAC — since 2016.
“We’ve never really had any type of hype around our names,” Harris said, “so we want to show people who we are.”
The first half featured the kind of physical, defensive play that makes the court feel crowded. There were whistles aplenty to regulate the scrappiness, blown for — among other things — moving screens, charging fouls, a five-second violation and a 10-second violation. The Falcons didn’t score until halfway through the first quarter. The Panthers went scoreless for nearly six minutes of the second.
“I’ve told them, ‘If you want to stay on the court, play defense,’ ” Kimbrough said. “It’s been our grind. It’s been our thing.”
The Falcons did seem comfortable in the gritty muck of a defensive battle, and their confidence was rewarded in the third quarter when their shots started to fall. After scoring 19 points in the first half, the Falcons put up 24 in the third quarter and went into the fourth with a six-point lead. They got most of their looks at close range, starting fast breaks with tight, pressing defense or showing some smooth interior passing.
By midway through the fourth quarter, the Falcons had pushed their lead to double digits and the home crowd egged them on as they poached one steal after another. In the final minutes, they looked like the aggressor against Paul VI, a role that would have seemed impossible a few years ago.
“It’s been a ride,” Toure said. “But things are coming together.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The numbers become overwhelming, and not just the home runs. In that ’04 season, Bonds walked 232 times, still a major league record — by a mile. The next closest: Barry Bonds in 2002, with 198. The next closest to that: Barry Bonds in 2001, with 177. The names that follow him: Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, two of the best hitters to dig into the box. Bonds owns the top OPS of all time — an incomprehensible 1.422 from ’04. Only three men have ever produced a single season with an OPS higher than 1.250 — Bonds, Ruth and Williams. They combined for 12 of them.
Clemens similarly has historically outlying statistics, dominance combined with longevity. In 2005, when major league pitchers posted a collective ERA of 4.29, Clemens’s league-leading ERA was 1.87 — nearly 2½ runs better than average. It was the last of his seven ERA crowns, and it came 19 years after his first. Only Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson have more career strikeouts. No one had struck out 20 batters in a game before Clemens did it — twice, a decade apart. There’s nothing on his baseball-reference.com page — 354 wins, Cy Young awards at 23 and 41 and scattered in between — that suggests he’s anything other than one of the best to ply his craft. That’s hard to unsee.
Goose bumps or guilty? How to feel, all these years later? There’s no need for absolutes. Barry Bonds will not be inducted to the Hall of Fame, and that’s both justified and a damn shame. | null | null | null | null | null |
After Kennard gave his team the lead at the line, the Washington Wizards’ 116-115 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers drew nothing but boos from the crowd. Washington somehow had managed to lose after leading by 35 points in the second quarter. According to Elias Stats Bureau, the NBA’s statistician, that tied for the second-largest comeback in the NBA’s play-by-play era, which dates from 1996-97. The Utah Jazz erased a 36-point deficit to beat the Denver Nuggets in 1996.
“We stopped playing,” Wizards Coach Wes Unseld Jr. said. “We had a good rhythm, we were playing well, and I think we thought we had the win in the bag. We just stopped playing how we played to get to that point.”
Asked if he agreed with Kuzma’s assertion that something must change in Washington, Bradley Beal huffed a short laugh.
Following a timeout, Washington was assessed a five-second violation on an inbounds play and turned the ball over. Kennard hit another three and Beal fouled him on the release.
Beal led seven Wizards scorers in double figures with 23 points, nine rebounds and six assists. Kyle Kuzma added 19 points and 12 rebounds.
The Clippers’ 36 points in the first half were the fewest a Wizards opponent had scored in any half this season and the lowest-scoring first half they had allowed in three years. Their 35-point lead late in the second quarter was their largest of the season.
“He had a good stretch early, I didn’t like his stretch to start the third … but collectively, from 1-10, myself included, this is embarrassing,” Unseld said. “We cannot let this happen. Cannot happen. An 80-point half, [19] turnovers for 23 points, game on the line.”
Washington is taking great care to reintegrate Bryant, who recently returned after tearing his ACL last season, and Rui Hachimura, who spent months away from the team for personal reasons, on a minutes restriction that has both on the court for shorter bursts than they otherwise might. | null | null | null | null | null |
What to know from the Terps’ 68-60 victory in New Jersey
Maryland guard Fatts Russell looks to drive to the basket as Rutgers guard Geo Baker defends Tuesday night. (Noah K. Murray/AP)
PISCATAWAY, N.J. — Maryland remembered all too well frittering away a double-digit lead in its most recent meeting with Rutgers. After building a 20-point lead in the first half Tuesday night against the Scarlet Knights, the Terrapins weren’t about to let that happen again.
Fatts Russell scored 23 points, Eric Ayala added 22, and Hakim Hart flustered Rutgers wing Ron Harper Jr. for much of the night, just 10 days after Harper torched the Terrapins in a comeback victory. This time, Maryland claimed a 68-60 victory at Jersey Mike’s Arena to earn a season split with the Scarlet Knights.
It was the second consecutive victory for Maryland (11-9, 3-6 Big Ten), which had dropped five of its previous six to fall to .500. Geo Baker and Harper scored 16 points apiece for the Scarlet Knights (11-8, 5-4), who lost for the first time in five conference home games.
Harper scored a career-high 31 points Jan. 15 at Maryland, including 20 in the second half as the Scarlet Knights turned a sloppy start into a surprisingly comfortable 70-59 triumph. This time, Maryland was prepared to greet the rugged 6-foot-6, 245-pound senior with a night of dealing with Hart.
The rangy, 6-foot-8 Hart has emerged as the Terps’ defensive ace as a junior, and he shadowed Harper throughout the night. When Harper subbed out for the first time each half, Hart went to the bench as well. And when Harper sauntered to the scorers’ table, Hart was invariably there by the time Harper was set to check in.
Harper had only four of his 14 points in the first half, and his output after the break didn’t allow the Scarlet Knights to cut the deficit into single digits until the final minute. Harper finished 7 for 16 from the floor and didn’t make a three-pointer — a dip from his 10-for-16 night earlier in the month, when he was 6 for 8 from beyond the arc.
With Harper largely bottled up, Ayala and Russell took turns knocking down timely shots and halting any hint of a Rutgers rally. Both made five three-pointers, the first time the Terps had two players do that since Kevin Huerter and Justin Jackson did so against Minnesota on Jan. 28, 2017.
Much like the teams’ first meeting in College Park, Maryland controlled the first half. Only this time, it was not largely a function of Rutgers throwing the ball away and fouling on seemingly every other possession.
Instead, the Terps outworked and outshot the usually rugged Scarlet Knights for much of the first 20 minutes. Russell made three outside shots as Maryland methodically built a 35-15 lead — its largest in Big Ten play this season.
The Terps also controlled the glass, holding a 20-11 rebounding advantage before the break, and set down an early marker by funneling it inside to center Qudus Wahab for buckets on each of their first three possessions.
Most concerning for Rutgers Coach Steve Pikiell’s team, though, was the dearth of offense. It’s a problem the Scarlet Knights have faced plenty this season; nonetheless, making 1 of 16 shots from the floor as the opponent goes on a 25-5 run is noteworthy even by Rutgers’s standards.
Baker shook the Scarlet Knights out of their shooting doldrums, making three three-pointers late in the half to let Rutgers pull within 38-26 at the break.
Here’s what to know from Tuesday’s game:
Russell’s triple vision
It’s no secret Russell’s greatest strength is his quickness, which allows him to zip past opponents and get to the rim. He entered the night as a 28.1 percent shooter from three-point range in his college career, including 27.5 percent this season, his first at Maryland.
He uncorked a 5-for-8 night against the Scarlet Knights, most notably knocking down his last make with 8:12 to go after Rutgers closed within 54-44. The effort was quite the contrast to Russell’s previous nine games, when he was 5 for 25 on three-pointers.
Lineup reset
After tinkering with his starting lineup for the past week and a half, interim coach Danny Manning returned to the group that started Maryland’s first 16 games.
Ayala, Russell and Hart got the nod in the backcourt, and Donta Scott and Wahab composed the starting frontcourt. All but Ayala had come off the bench at least once in the previous three games.
The most recent starter to come off the bench was Scott, who responded to the reserve role with a career-high 25 points Friday in an 81-65 win over No. 17 Illinois. He had three points in 38 minutes Tuesday. | null | null | null | null | null |
After Kennard gave his team the lead at the line, the Washington Wizards’ 116-115 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers drew nothing but boos from the crowd. Washington somehow had managed to lose after leading by 35 points in the second quarter. According to Elias Sports Bureau, the NBA’s statistician, that tied for the second-largest comeback in the NBA’s play-by-play era, which dates from 1996-97. The Utah Jazz erased a 36-point deficit to beat the Denver Nuggets in 1996.
“We stopped playing,” Unseld said. “We had a good rhythm, we were playing well, and I think we thought we had the win in the bag. We just stopped playing how we played to get to that point.”
Asked if he agreed with Kuzma’s assertion that something must change in Washington, Beal huffed a short laugh.
Following a timeout, Washington was assessed a five-second violation on an inbounds play and turned the ball over. Kennard hit another three, and Beal fouled him on the release.
Beal led seven Wizards scorers in double figures with 23 points and had nine rebounds and six assists. Kuzma added 19 points and 12 rebounds.
The Clippers’ 36 points in the first half were the fewest a Wizards opponent had scored in any half this season and the lowest-scoring first half they had allowed in three years. The 35-point lead late in the second quarter was their largest of the season.
“He had a good stretch early; I didn’t like his stretch to start the third. … But collectively, from 1-10, myself included, this is embarrassing,” Unseld said. “We cannot let this happen. Cannot happen. An 80-point half, [19] turnovers for 23 points, game on the line.”
Washington is taking great care to reintegrate Bryant, who recently returned after tearing his ACL last season, and Rui Hachimura, who spent months away from the team for personal reasons, on a minutes restriction that has both on the court for shorter bursts than they otherwise might be. | null | null | null | null | null |
Aaron Rodgers's Packers fell to the 49ers on Saturday. (Aaron Gash/AP)
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 wide receiver Chris Godwin and 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-vaccine advocate.
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 such as Rodgers and suggesting social media sites were in the wrong for censoring those, such as 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 and Prevention 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 November and was forced by the NFL’s protocols to miss a game.
For the record, yet again: The CDC does not approve of ivermectin to protect 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 passing yards 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’s perplexing stance on vaccination, 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-motormouth Shannon Sharpe wrote on Twitter 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 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 a vaccine skeptic), he was as conscious about social justice issues — which is exactly what vaccination is — as any athlete out there.
When then-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 involved in the fight against conflict mining, specifically in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where raw materials that make our phones and laptops are sourced under the 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.
In a small way, it isn’t surprising that Rodgers embraces progressive causes but has come out as anti-vaccine. There’s a corner of the left where suspicion of government and mistrust of corporate America have given rise to refusal of mandates and suspicion that “Big Pharma” is behind it all.
I wish we could be uncomplicated. But I recall marching to compel U.S. institutions and businesses to divest from South Africa only to see 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 will be back next year, in Green Bay or some other locale, where people who this week trolled him with online punchlines will cheer him as a potential savior.
For me, it reminded how convoluted, sometimes disingenuous and frequently preposterous we can be. All of us — including Rodgers and his newfound haters. | null | null | null | null | null |
Georgetown’s skid reaches seven with a 96-73 loss at No. 20 Connecticut
What to know from Tuesday’s defeat, which dropped the Hoyas to 0-6 in the Big East
Connecticut's Andre Jackson winds up for a dunk as Georgetown's Timothy Ighoefe defends Tuesday night. (Jessica Hill/AP)
The horrors just keep coming for Georgetown, which has matched its worst stretch under Coach Patrick Ewing.
On Tuesday night in Storrs, Conn., the Hoyas lost their seventh straight game, 96-73, to No. 20 Connecticut, never leading or even really threatening after the Huskies went up early. Georgetown’s winless start to Big East play already was the worst in program history, and that reached 0-6 on Tuesday. This loss matched the longest skid of Ewing’s five-year tenure, which came at the end of the 2019-20 season.
The Hoyas (6-11, 0-6) visit Butler on Saturday with a chance to top that lowlight.
“Hey, look, there’s no cavalry coming over the hill,” Ewing said. “This is our team. Banged up or whatever, covid or whatever — this is our team. We have to go out there and we have to compete and we have to get it done.
“We’ve played six [Big East] games ... so we still have a chance to get ourselves back in the hunt. We just have to stay positive, watch the film and show them things that we didn’t do right tonight. And we have to regroup and come back for our next game on Saturday.”
Georgetown trailed 52-40 at halftime despite showing outstanding touch. The Hoyas shot 53.3 percent, including a shocking 8 for 13 (61.5 percent) from behind the three-point line. But turnovers, defense and rebounding were issues.
Seven first-half turnovers led to easy transition buckets the other way. The Huskies went to halftime with 11 points off turnovers and 18 fast-break points. The Hoyas had just two points off turnovers and three on the fast break.
The defense couldn’t be called stout, either; Connecticut (14-4, 5-2) shot 55.9 percent and grabbed eight offensive rebounds off just 15 misses in the opening half. Add all of that to zero free throw attempts before halftime, and the Hoyas were in a hole they couldn’t escape. That they shot 36.7 percent in the second half made it impossible to rally.
“We just got to step up and play,” Ewing said. “Just got to keep on encouraging them, keep on patting them on the back. But we can’t keep making the mistakes that we’re making. That’s what’s causing us to lose. If you give up 19 offensive rebounds for 18 points and then 27 fast-break points, that’s a recipe for disaster. ...
“We have to show them the things that we’re doing wrong, but while we’re talking about the things that we’re doing wrong, we still have to encourage them.”
Freshman Aminu Mohammed led the way for Georgetown with 15 points and seven rebounds, but 13 of those points came in the first half. Collin Holloway added 11, and Donald Carey finished with 10.
The Huskies’ Adama Sanogo scored a game-high 19 points to go with eight rebounds. Isaiah Whaley had 15 points and seven rebounds. R.J. Cole, the former Howard standout, posted 14 points, seven assists and six rebounds, and Tyrese Martin ended up with 13 points and eight rebounds.
“In practice, you just see a deep team,” Martin said. “... It looks scary to see when everybody’s on fire and things like that, what we can do. And today was sort of something like that.”
Here’s what else to know from Tuesday’s game:
Mohammed has given opponents fits with his ability to get to the rim and his relentlessness in the paint. The freshman showed off a little something different Tuesday, making 3 of 4 three-point attempts in the first half.
The previous time he made more than one three was Nov. 16 against American — the second game of the year. Mohammed made eight three-pointers in the first nine games of the season but had just two in the next seven games.
Billingsley down
Freshman forward Jalin Billingsley left the game late in the first half; Ewing said afterward that he suffered a knee injury.
Billingsley finished a layup and then limped back on defense and tried to get through the possession before the officials halted play to let him exit the game. He went straight to the locker room, and the team announced early in the second half that he would not return.
Inconsistent minutes
Center Ryan Mutombo had six points and six rebounds in a season-high 22 minutes against the Huskies after not playing at all against Villanova on Saturday and getting a combined 12 minutes in the two games before that. The freshman has seen his court time vary wildly from game to game.
Ewing explained that Connecticut played a bigger lineup, which allowed the 7-foot-2 center to be on the floor more. Villanova played smaller, so Mutombo didn’t step on the floor. Mutombo’s minutes often will come down to matchups, Ewing said, to keep him from being a liability on one end. | null | null | null | null | null |
In this image provided by the U.S. Air Force, Airmen from the 436th Aerial Port Squadron load ammunition, weapons and other equipment bound for Ukraine during a foreign military sales mission at Dover Air Force Base, Del., on Jan. 24, 2022. (Tech. Sgt. J.D. Strong II/AP)
MOSCOW — The United States warned Tuesday that it could impose some of its toughest-ever sanctions against Russia, as it moves to prepare European allies for a Kremlin-initiated fuel crisis amid rising tensions over a renewed invasion of Ukraine.
Russia has threatened that to cut off its supply of natural gas flowing into Europe if sanctions were imposed. The move would be a significant blow against U.S. allies on the continent — which relies on Russia for about 40 percent of its natural gas needs — and could set off a global energy crisis. (Some European leaders, particularly those with closer ties to Russia, have expressed a reluctance to confront the Kremlin too directly.) U.S. officials noted that limiting gas exports would also harm Russia, but that nevertheless the Biden administration was preparing for the scenario.
Another U.S. official said the administration was “working with countries and companies around the world to ensure the security of supply and to mitigate against price shocks affecting both the American people and the global economy.” Biden plans to host Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, whose country is one of the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas, at the White House on Monday. The pair are set to discuss “ensuring the stability of global energy supplies” and channeling Qatari gas to Europe, the administration said.
U.S. officials have said there are no plans to increase the nation’s military presence inside Ukraine, where approximately 200 American troops are training and advising Ukrainian forces, but Washington has stepped up other forms of assistance. At Boryspil International Airport outside Kyiv on Tuesday, Ukrainian personnel unloaded some 300 Javelin missiles, shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapons and bunker-busters that had come from the United States. Other NATO members are also sending military equipment to aid in the defense of Ukraine, which is not a member of the Western military alliance.
The president said he may forward-deploy U.S. troops “in the near term” because “it takes time” to get them in place. He insisted such a move would not be “provocative,” a claim Moscow has rejected.
Still, U.S. officials remained concerned about the growing presence of the more than 100,000 Russian troops along Ukraine’s borders. “It’s like a gun to the head of Ukraine, and we don’t think that Ukraine should have to live with a loaded gun to its head,” the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, Kristina A. Kvien, said on ABC News. | null | null | null | null | null |
Arkansas visits Ole Miss following Ruffin's 21-point outing
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Ole Miss -4.5; over/under is 140.5
BOTTOM LINE: Ole Miss faces the Arkansas Razorbacks after Daeshun Ruffin scored 21 points in Ole Miss’ 70-54 victory over the Florida Gators.
The Rebels have gone 9-4 in home games. Ole Miss is 0-1 in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Razorbacks are 4-3 in SEC play. Arkansas has a 1-1 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Rebels and Razorbacks face off Wednesday for the first time in SEC play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Nysier Brooks is averaging 9.6 points and eight rebounds for the Rebels. Matthew Murrell is averaging 1.5 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Ole Miss.
JD Notae is averaging 18.6 points, 3.4 assists and 2.5 steals for the Razorbacks. Stanley Umude is averaging 7.5 points over the last 10 games for Arkansas. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ball State visits Northern Illinois after Thomas' 26-point showing
BOTTOM LINE: Ball State visits the Northern Illinois Huskies after Miryne Thomas scored 26 points in Ball State’s 81-64 victory over the Miami (OH) RedHawks.
The Huskies are 2-1 in home games. Northern Illinois is 0-5 when it turns the ball over less than its opponents and averages 14.3 turnovers per game.
The Cardinals are 3-4 in MAC play. Ball State gives up 76.7 points to opponents and has been outscored by 2.5 points per game.
TOP PERFORMERS: Anthony Crump is averaging 5.9 points and 5.1 rebounds for the Huskies. Keshawn Williams is averaging 15.9 points over the last 10 games for Northern Illinois. | null | null | null | null | null |
Navy takes on Bucknell, aims for 5th straight road win
BOTTOM LINE: Navy hits the road against Bucknell trying to prolong its four-game road winning streak.
The Bison have gone 3-4 at home. Bucknell is 1-9 in games decided by at least 10 points.
The Midshipmen are 5-3 against conference opponents. Navy is the best team in the Patriot allowing only 61.2 points per game while holding opponents to 41.7% shooting.
TOP PERFORMERS: Andrew Funk is scoring 17.2 points per game with 3.6 rebounds and 2.2 assists for the Bison. Rice is averaging 8.4 points and 1.6 rebounds while shooting 40.6% over the past 10 games for Bucknell.
John Carter Jr. is scoring 13.7 points per game with 4.4 rebounds and 1.2 assists for the Midshipmen. Tyler Nelson is averaging 7.3 points over the last 10 games for Navy. | null | null | null | null | null |
N.C. A&T visits Longwood after Hill's 20-point game
BOTTOM LINE: Longwood hosts the North Carolina A&T Aggies after Justin Hill scored 20 points in Longwood’s 73-49 victory against the Hampton Pirates.
The Lancers are 10-1 on their home court. Longwood ranks second in the Big South with 10.9 offensive rebounds per game led by Leslie Nkereuwem averaging 2.1.
The Aggies are 4-2 in conference games. N.C. A&T has a 3-3 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Lancers and Aggies meet Wednesday for the first time in Big South play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Hill is scoring 12.8 points per game and averaging 3.9 rebounds for the Lancers. Isaiah Wilkins is averaging 1.6 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Longwood.
Marcus Watson is scoring 12.4 points per game with 5.8 rebounds and 1.2 assists for the Aggies. Demetric Horton is averaging 12.9 points and 5.2 rebounds while shooting 53.2% over the last 10 games for N.C. A&T. | null | null | null | null | null |
No. 21 Xavier Musketeers host the No. 17 Providence Friars
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Xavier -8.5; over/under is 139
BOTTOM LINE: The No. 17 Providence Friars visit the No. 21 Xavier Musketeers.
The Musketeers have gone 10-1 in home games. Xavier is third in the Big East scoring 74.5 points while shooting 44.6% from the field.
The Friars are 6-1 in conference play. Providence is eighth in the Big East with 8.6 offensive rebounds per game led by Nate Watson averaging 1.9.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jack Nunge is averaging 12.3 points and 7.1 rebounds for the Musketeers. Colby Jones is averaging 6.9 points over the last 10 games for Xavier.
Watson is shooting 56.6% and averaging 14.1 points for the Friars. A.J. Reeves is averaging 2.1 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Providence. | null | null | null | null | null |
Southern Miss faces North Texas following Stevenson's 20-point outing
BOTTOM LINE: Southern Miss hosts the North Texas Mean Green after Tyler Stevenson scored 20 points in Southern Miss’ 74-60 loss to the Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders.
The Golden Eagles have gone 3-3 in home games. Southern Miss has a 4-12 record against opponents above .500.
The Mean Green are 6-1 in conference matchups. North Texas is 1-1 in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Golden Eagles and Mean Green face off Thursday for the first time in C-USA play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Stevenson is scoring 14.4 points per game and averaging 8.4 rebounds for the Golden Eagles. Jaron Pierre, Jr. is averaging 9.0 points and 2.7 rebounds over the last 10 games for Southern Miss.
Tylor Perry is scoring 14.3 points per game and averaging 2.4 rebounds for the Mean Green. Mardrez McBride is averaging 1.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for North Texas. | null | null | null | null | null |
Raven Software union moves to vote absent Activision Blizzard recognition
The 34 workers at Madison, Wisconsin-based Raven say they have a supermajority of votes within their department, meaning they can formalize their union via the NLRB without management recognition at Activision Blizzard. If the union, dubbed the Game Workers Alliance, wins 50 percent plus one of the votes within the department, Activision Blizzard must begin bargaining with the group over work conditions in good faith.
Shortly after the deadline, Brian Raffel, Raven’s studio head, sent an email to the staff. Activision Blizzard shared a statement that echoed Raffel’s email. “After carefully reviewing and considering the CWA’s initial request of the company, we worked quickly to find a mutually acceptable solution with the CWA that would have led to an expedited election process. Unfortunately, the parties could not reach an agreement,” Raffel wrote. “[We] expect that the union will soon be moving forward with the filing of a petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election of eligible Raven employees. If filed, the company will respond formally to that petition promptly.
“The most important thing to the company is that each eligible employee has the opportunity to have their voice heard and their individual vote counted, and we think all employees at Raven should have a say in this decision.”
The Game Workers Alliance and the CWA expressed confidence in their petition to the NLRB for a union election in a joint statement.
“We are proud to file with the NLRB as we enjoy supermajority support for our union and know that together, we will gain the formal legal recognition we have earned,” read the statement.
The Game Workers Alliance cited allegations of toxic corporate culture at their parent company among the reasons that motivated them to organize. Last July, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed a gender-based discrimination, inequality and harassment lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, alleging the company had a “frat boy culture” that included excessive drinking and sexual harassment. | null | null | null | null | null |
But within weeks, the story of a happy homecoming unraveled into tragedy. The parents, both now remarried with other people, fell out with Liu after he publicly claimed he had been sold, not given away. Liu asked for financial support. His birth mother blocked him on messaging app WeChat. As the fight played out on social media, commentators took sides and piled on, many blaming Liu for being selfish.
Before dawn on Monday, Liu died of an overdose of anti-depressants after being rushed to a hospital in the seaside town of Sanya, according to Chinese media interviews with emergency department staff.
Widespread scrutiny how Liu’s case was handled by the authorities and social media giants comes at a time when the pandemic, a slowing economy and a government campaign to promote “common prosperity” have drawn attention to the plight of China’s rural poor. Even after officials declared that extreme poverty had been eliminated, millions of people live on 1,000 yuan ($155) a month.
Some of the details of Liu’s birth and adoption, including his exact age, are disputed. (His birth father says he is 15, but his official identity card put him at 17.) But the account Liu gave in his social media posts, as well as Chinese media interviews with parents and guardians, sketch a life of Dickensian misfortune.
At the time, strict enforcement of China’s one-child policy combined with many families’ preference for male children exacerbated illegal trade of newborn boys. Liu’s adoptive family told The Paper, a Shanghai-based outlet, that they paid about $4,200 for the baby, most of which went to a middleman.
In 2009, Liu was orphaned after his adoptive parents died in a firework explosion. Their extended family took over guardianship. In his suicide note, Liu claims he was bullied and molested at school.
Liu was studying to be a teacher in the northern city of Shijiazhuang when he began searching for his parents. After his first video, police encouraged him to use a DNA database set up by authorities as part of a campaign to curb child trafficking and reunite families with children who were kidnapped, adopted, or otherwise lost contact with their birthparents.
His parents, who could not be reached for comment, have not publicly addressed Liu’s claims. In an interview with Beijing News, his birth mother, identified only by her surname Zhang, said that she had cut off contact with Liu because she wanted to return to a “quiet life.”
The fallout between Liu and his rediscovered parents split opinion on Chinese social media. While some argued Liu deserved support from his parents, others accused him of cynically playing the situation to his own advantage.
“Trolls and bullies were his last straw,” said Liu Haiming, a media studies scholar at Chongqing University, who believes cyberbullying — and social media platforms’ failures to police it — played an important role in Liu’s suicide.
When the request for compensation was disclosed, it made him an easy target for trolls. “The perfect victim became imperfect and even unreasonable in the eyes of many,” the professor said. “He acted tough but after all he was a teenager.”
As if as a reminder of that fact, one of the last things Liu shared on social media in the days before his suicide was pictures of himself in flip-flops on Sanya beaches, staring out to sea or horsing about with school friends. Across multiple posts, he had spelled out, in English, the word “rebirth.” | null | null | null | null | null |
In this photo released by the Royal Thai Navy, an aerial view from a navy plane shows a large oil spill off the coast of Rayong, eastern Thailand, Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2022. Thailand’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment said 160,000 liters (42,000 gallons) of crude oil were leaked near an offshore pipeline in Map Ta Phut, Rayong, eastern Thailand, and might affect several local beaches. (Royal Thai Navy via AP) (Uncredited/Royal Thai Navy)
BANGKOK — Thailand’s navy was helping Wednesday to clean up a spill of as much as 128 tons (160,000 liters) of crude oil that leaked from a pipeline in the Gulf of Thailand. | null | null | null | null | null |
Experts from NATO countries disagree on how to approach Ukraine.
Different countries have very different narratives about the crisis
The NATO flag is seen during NATO-enhanced battle group military exercises in Adazi, Latvia, in October 2019. (Ints Kalnins/Reuters)
By Volodymyr Kulyk
Nadiia Koval
Mykola Riabchuk
Kateryna Zarembo
Marianna Fakhurdinova
NATO members in Europe have begun deploying ships and fighter planes to Eastern Europe, a move NATO officials say is aimed at “reinforcing Allied deterrence and defense as Russia continues its military build-up in and around Ukraine.”
But are NATO allies in agreement on the Russia-Ukraine crisis? Last week, President Biden appeared to signal disagreement between the United States and its European allies on a potential response to Russian aggression against Ukraine. Top U.S. officials have since worked to walk back the president’s remarks and vowed a “united” response.
Our research, however, found that scholars and policy analysts in NATO countries have radically different understandings of developments in Ukraine after Russia’s 2014 intervention in Crimea and the Donbas. Some of these differences reflect cultural conventions and perceived national interests. Other key factors include how different authors view the concept of “justice” — whether its source is international law, or history and identity. These differences, in turn, create very different perspectives over what might be the optimal combination of deterrence and appeasement in Western responses to Russian actions.
Not one narrative, but many
We studied how Western scholars and policy analysts made sense of the conflict in and around Ukraine by closely examining their publications over a six-year period after the invasion of Crimea. How did they attribute responsibility for the ongoing conflict — and how did they propose to resolve it? After reviewing a total of 1,009 publications from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Greece and Poland, we identified six different narratives about the nature of this conflict and possible solutions.
Will deterrence counter Russian aggression?
The first narrative — dominant in Poland, prevalent among U.S. and U.K. authors, and popular with some analysts in France and Germany — calls out unprovoked Russian aggression, and advocates for deterrent measures. This view holds Moscow responsible for the violation of international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty. Appropriate responses, for those with this view, include intensifying Western efforts to counter the aggression, tougher sanctions on Russia, more aid to Ukraine, and greater support for its democracy and European integration.
Or would appeasement be a better option?
The second narrative — popular in France and Germany and prominent among U.S. realists who view Ukraine as marginal to American interests — tries to reconcile Russia’s aggression with a preference for dialogue with an essential global power. While the first narrative defends the rules-based order, the second shifts the focus to interests. The proposed dialogue can include different compromises with Moscow at Ukraine’s expense such as ditching Kyiv’s NATO membership agenda and reducing Ukraine’s control of parts of its territory to purely nominal.
A third narrative — one popular among academics and policy analysts in France and Italy, as well as Greece — presents Russia’s actions as a legitimate response to a perceived threat from Western encroachment into its traditional sphere of influence — and/or to irresponsible policies pursued by Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan government. In this view, the West and Ukraine — not Russia — are primarily responsible for the conflict, and this justifies significant concessions to Moscow that boil down to the recognition of Ukraine’s “limited sovereignty.”
The fourth narrative — prevalent in Greece and, to a lesser extent, Italy — blames the Ukrainian government for developments in Crimea and the Donbas, citing irreconcilable identity differences between Kyiv and/or western Ukraine, on the one hand, and the eastern and southern regions, on the other. This view portrays the West as complicit in Ukraine’s wrongdoings, but downplays Russia’s participation. To these analysts, the West can normalize relations with Moscow by pressuring Ukraine to change official policies — for instance, on regional autonomy for the Donbas and an official status for the Russian language.
A fifth narrative — also popular primarily in Italy and Greece — holds Russia and the West jointly responsible for the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. To these scholars and analysts, Ukraine’s own preferences are of little importance, as the country is merely the battlefield between Russia and the West. Ending the conflict requires renegotiating the world order, including regional security arrangements.
A sixth and final narrative among some analysts in the United States and Europe takes a neutral stance, and proposes no overarching solutions. It focuses instead on narrower policy questions like sanitation or child trafficking that have arisen during the conflict, and how dialogue of all parties is essential to end to the suffering of the affected populations.
Different experiences lead to different conclusions
Where a country sits historically and geographically says a lot about where its foreign policy establishment — and policy analysts and academics — stand on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. For instance, the strong tendency in Poland to blame Russian aggression and urge deterrence reflects both the country’s historical experience with Russia, and its position as a frontline state. This view is also widely held in the United Kingdom, in line with its government’s strong deterrence stance against Putin’s Russia.
By contrast, French policy analysts and academics are more likely to see cooperation with Russia as an opportunity to weaken U.S. influence and increase France’s political weight in Europe. While recognizing Russian aggression, they thus prefer the West to continue dialogue with Russia and compromise at Ukraine’s expense. Russia’s long cultural presence in France also helps shape another prominent view among French analysts and academics: that Russian actions are a legitimate response to a perceived Western threat.
In Italy, a lack of preoccupation with Ukraine in the academic and think tank community mirrors a lack of interest in Ukraine on the part of political elites. The two predominant narratives include justifying the Russian aggression by pointing out the historical ties between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, and viewing Ukraine as an object of geopolitical rivalry between the West and Russia.
What do these findings suggest is that Western scholars and analysts, just like Western policymakers, remain divided on how to respond to Moscow’s aggressive behavior. Should the West try to deter Russia, risking some imminent instability but maintaining the established order in the long run; or try to appease Russia and deal with any repercussions as they arise? With the new escalation of conflict, these differences within NATO allies have become particularly acute, and are unlikely to be resolved easily — a fact Russia may be counting on.
Volodymyr Kulyk in a head research fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Nadiia Koval is head of Information & Analytics at the Ukrainian Institute.
Mykola Riabchuk is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Kateryna Zarembo is a senior lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Marianna Fakhurdinova is a research fellow at the New Europe Center. | null | null | null | null | null |
But within weeks, the story of a happy homecoming unraveled into tragedy. The parents, both now remarried with other people, fell out with Liu after he publicly claimed he had been sold, not given away. Liu asked for financial support. His birth mother blocked him on the messaging app WeChat. As the fight played out on social media, commentators took sides and piled on, many blaming Liu for being selfish.
In 2009, Liu was orphaned after his adoptive parents died in a fireworks explosion. Their extended family took over guardianship. In his suicide note, Liu says he was bullied and molested at school.
“Trolls and bullies were his last straw,” said Liu Haiming, a media studies scholar at Chongqing University, who said cyberbullying — and social media platforms’ failures to police it — played an important role in Liu’s suicide. | null | null | null | null | null |
Peter Dinklage poses for photographers at the UK premiere of the film 'Cyrano' in London Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2021. (Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP)
Moviegoers who watched the 2003 indie film “The Station Agent” met main character Fin McBride while he was working at a model train store in Hoboken, N.J. After discovering the shopkeeper stood around 4-foot-5, some customers cracked jokes.
“They were very, very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’” Dinklage said, adding, “You’re progressive in one way … but you’re still making that … backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave. What … are you doing, man?”
Dwarfs "are still the butt of jokes. It’s one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice,” he told the magazine, before chiding those who do accept such roles.
When the Times Magazine asked Dinklage in 2012 if he wanted to be a champion for the rights of dwarfs, he made a sound of seeming exasperation, then held out his hands, palms up.
“I don’t know what I would say. It would be arrogant to assume that I …” He put his hands down on the table, according to the Times Magazine. “Everyone’s different. Every person my size has a different life, a different history. Different ways of dealing with it. Just because I’m seemingly O.K. with it, I can’t preach how to be O.K. with it. I don’t think I still am O.K. with it. There’s days when I’m not.”
Almost a decade later, Dinklage seems to have accepted the role of advocate, at least to some extent. On Maron’s podcast, he questioned if he had pushed hard enough, given that Disney was remaking what he called a “backward” movie that plays into harmful stereotypes about dwarfs by depicting them as one-dimensional cliches instead of full-fledged human beings. | null | null | null | null | null |
I’m not suggesting inflation will remain at current nosebleed levels. More likely is that having had a couple of decades of headline inflation that was on the low side - for central bankers, but not for anyone else - we are in for a few years when it remains above their targets.
To say that central bank purchases have had a large effect on yields would be an understatement. One way of seeing this is to split the yield of a longer-dated bond into the part that reflects the expected path of interest rates over the life of the security from everything else. That “everything else” is the term premium. This should compensate investors for, say, sudden surges in inflation. Clearly, this is no longer true. Depending on what model you use, the term premium on 10-year Treasury reached a high of 450 basis points to 500 basis points in the early 1980s. At the nadir of the pandemic, it was minus 100 points and is now about minus 10 points. To be clear, this means that you get less buying a 10-year Treasury than would be suggested by the expected path of rates over the life of the bond - expectations that are almost certainly too low.
The driving down of government bond yields also compressed yields and spreads on investment-grade and junk bonds. That was the intent. Junk spreads reached their narrowest level ever in June of last year. With so little yield available in fixed income and central banks seemingly always on hand to bail them out, investors flooded into equities. As a result, many developed-world equity indexes are either very expensive or, in the case of the U.S., not far off their most expensive levels ever based on valuation measures that are a decent guide to future returns. That is what a decade-and-a-half of market manipulation by central banks has done. | null | null | null | null | null |
San Francisco police mark 567% increase in anti-Asian hate crime reports in 2021
In a tweet, Breed highlighted measures the city has taken, such as a program that assigns people to accompany seniors who are worried about safety to their personal appointments and increased patrols in neighborhoods with more Asian American residents, while acknowledging, “We need to do more.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Disaster flicks like ‘Don’t Look Up’ won’t spur climate change action. Here’s why.
It all goes back to the 1980s and the fight over nuclear weapons
Protest placards in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin in April 2020. (Michael Sohn/AP)
By Justin McBrien
Justin McBrien is an environmental historian and lecturer at the University of Virginia. He is currently at work on a book manuscript concerning the history and politics of extreme weather disasters in the age of anthropogenic climate disruption.
“The real-life story of the climate crisis makes even the wildest, biggest-budget film like Don’t Look Up seem like a charming EM Forster adaptation. But does this story-of-all-stories get wall-to-wall news coverage? Nope. Not by a long shot.”
So observed director Adam McKay and marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in their recent Guardian opinion article calling for new messaging on the climate crisis.
Yet if you are in search of such new messaging in McKay’s blockbuster Netflix film “Don’t Look Up” — well, don’t look there.
Like other dramatizations about climate or planetary catastrophe, the film tackles trying to deal with a comet on a collision course with Earth. It is a humorous addition to the climate catastrophe genre, featuring a world where only scientists can save the planet — and only if they can persuade those in power to be reasonable. If that doesn’t work, kaboom!
“Don’t Look Up” inadvertently shows us the pitfalls of a common trope of fictional work on the risks of climate disruption. Since depictions connecting nuclear weapons and global catastrophe emerged in the 1980s, extraterrestrial interlopers such as comets and asteroids have often been used to evoke the climate crisis. But such portrayals haven’t been particularly successful in spurring action — because the metaphor doesn’t work. Stopping the climate crisis requires collective political action, not scientific approaches alone.
In 1980, a team of geologists and nuclear chemists detected a bizarre stratum of the rare element iridium in the geological record around the same time as the disappearance of the dinosaurs. They hypothesized that an asteroid impact — which would have sent enough dust aerosols into the atmosphere to alter Earth’s albedo and begin a cooling feedback loop — probably triggered an extinction event. Two years later, the atmospheric chemists Paul Crutzen and Paul W. Birks stumbled upon the possibility that ground fires in the aftermath of a nuclear conflagration could cause enough soot to enter the stratosphere to lower Earth’s temperature and potentially trigger an Ice Age.
These twin discoveries fueled research into the question of whether nuclear weapons could be an asteroid of human design. Would a nuclear war risk a repeat of the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs? Atmospheric scientists began to apply their increasingly sophisticated computer models to the potential environmental effects of nuclear war. The prospect of a “nuclear winter” soon spurred new fears.
The idea wasn’t new — government and military scientists had been studying the possibility since the 1950s — but now household names were discussing the issue on prime-time television.
The famed astrobiologist Carl Sagan perceived nuclear winter as the perfect symbol for all the existential issues of the day — nuclear holocaust, aerosol pollution, mass extinction and greenhouse gas warming. Sagan was part of a group of planetary scientists including NASA’s Jim Hansen whose gaze had turned from space back to Earth. They evoked nightmarish visions of our future in Venus’s hellish thermosphere and Mars’s dust-shrouded desolation.
Sagan collaborated with a group of scientists to test Crutzen’s hypothesis with their own models, which confirmed the theory. They published a famous paper that explicitly — and unusually for a scientific paper — aimed to boost the international disarmament movement. It thrust the scientists to the center of the most important policy debate of the era.
Press coverage initially took the scientists’ claims at face value. Nuclear war would cause “Climatic Disaster” by triggering a “New Ice Age” that would bring about “A Cold, Dark Apocalypse” that was “Beyond Armageddon.” The idea of nuclear winter allowed people to grasp the dangers of nuclear war while simultaneously calling attention to the new threat of rapid climate change. Sagan soon found himself testifying before Congress in front of grisly artistic depictions of nuclear holocaust.
The publicity given to fears about nuclear winter worked wonders for the anti-nuclear movement. By the late 1980s it was a cultural phenomenon. Heavy-metal songs, children’s movies and, yes, even absurdist satires about comets destroying Earth — all of these cultural touchstones made nuclear winter a visceral symbol of planetary catastrophe, one that helped convince close to 75 percent of the American public of the urgent need for nuclear de-escalation.
For the future politics of global warming, however, the concept was far less successful.
The connection between nuclear winter and global warming had real problems that prevented it from being a tool for convincing the public of the dangers of climate change. First, it framed climate change in the cultural imagination as a prospect of immediate “total extinction,” exposing scientists to charges of being “Chicken Littles.” Second, by mobilizing atmospheric models in the political arena, scientists left their models susceptible to politicization at the precise moment when the scientific consensus on global warming — and the public will to do something about it — seemed to be solidifying.
The Reagan administration saw the claims about nuclear winter as an existential threat to its rearmament strategy. When the craze did not fade away on its own, Fred Singer, the chief scientist at the Transportation Department and a proponent of contrarian views that benefited industries under scrutiny, became the administration‘s most vocal critic of the idea. Singer accused Sagan of making sensationalist claims based on flawed modeling.
And while the opposition could impugn Singer’s objectivity, even some allies questioned Sagan’s pronouncements. Climate modeling pioneers Stephen Schneider and Starley Thompson downgraded the prospects to a “nuclear autumn,” though they emphasized that it was cold comfort if the most encouraging news was not all life on Earth was going to die.
Accusations soon abounded that scientists warning about nuclear winter were playing too fast and loose with predictive capabilities for political ends. This charge, in turn, started to bleed into disputes over environmental modeling writ large. In 1989, MIT Technology Review published a story “about an imperfect computer model for managing national forests.” To the surprise of the publication’s editors, all of the responses were on the nuclear-winter debate. “Sagan’s big chill has been exorcised,” bemoaned letter-writer and Harvard geophysicist Russell Seitz, “but the greenhouse effect is not just a ghost in the machine.”
The nuclear-winter controversy inadvertently bloodied climate science right when the politics of global warming were heating up. Exxon’s establishment of the Global Climate Coalition in 1989 launched a whole industry devoted to “debunking” claims about the dire prospect of a rapidly warming atmosphere. Scientists such as Singer conflated the fight against the “nuclear winterists” with the global-warming debate, undermining faith in atmospheric experts’ ability to predict future climate change and discouraging people from listening to their policy advice. Rampant disinformation transformed climate “skeptics” into outright denialists supporting the fossil fuel lobby’s efforts to block government regulation and sabotage international agreements.
While the political will for action on global warming weakened, asteroid disaster flicks such as “Deep Impact” (1998) and “Armageddon” (1998) provided people an escapist fantasy of planetary catastrophes averted (for the most part) through scientific expertise and international cooperation. Climate catastrophe films kept the memory of nuclear winter alive but discouraged civic engagement in the process. Whether the mechanism was terrestrial (“The Day After Tomorrow,” 2004), extraterrestrial (“Earthstorm,” 2006) or of human design (“Snowpiercer,” 2013), the disaster was always an instantaneous cataclysm triggering a Snowball Earth. The movies presented audiences with the options of total extinction or technological salvation — options that rendered people powerless to join in mass mobilization to effect systemic change.
Yet, the climate crisis is very different from an errant asteroid. Stopping it demands far more than listening to scientists and trusting their technical solutions. For fiction to have an influence on the climate debate, it needs stories that highlight the ways climate change is disrupting everyday life, stories about its impacts — visible and submerged — on health and psychology, family and community, inequality and justice. This, far more than films about sudden Earth-killer comets or nefarious geo-engineering schemes, could help galvanize people to confront the dangers they face in their communities here, now, today. | null | null | null | null | null |
A new Mississippi bill is the latest in a long effort to suppress the truth about civil rights history
The state has a long history of trying to hide records and realities from the dark chapters of its past
State Sen. David Jordan (D) asks a question during a debate Jan. 12 at the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
By Justin Randolph
Justin Randolph teaches history at Texas State University and is writing a book on the civil rights movement and policing in Mississippi.
The 14 Black members of Mississippi’s Senate recently walked out in protest of the passage of Senate Bill 2113. This bill orders that no public educational institution “shall direct or compel students to affirm that any sex, race, ethnicity, religion or national origin is inherently superior, or that individuals should be adversely treated based on such characteristics.”
Passed by the White Mississippi lawmakers who remained in the chamber, the bill is strategically framed as affirming the equality of all people. But Black lawmakers have suggested that, in fact, it will be used to defund any state school, college or university that teaches students about the history of racism. “Mississippi doesn’t need this,” state Sen. David Jordan (D) said before leaving the chamber. “If anybody should be concerned about racism . . . it ought to be those of us whose parents watered these lands with their tears and made it rich with their bones. Those are my ancestors.”
Black lawmakers such as Jordan walked out because they recognize the bill as part of a larger wave of anti-critical race theory hysteria that threatens to make it more difficult for educators to share the true history of racial violence and activism in their state. Their stand is the latest in a decades-long fight against Mississippi’s historical censorship and archival destruction.
Like today, Mississippi’s White ruling class felt similarly victimized by truth in the 1950s. On Aug. 22, 1955, two White men named Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam tortured and murdered a 14-year-old Black Chicagoan named Emmett Till near the small town of Money, Miss. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till, waged a campaign for publicity and accountability, sitting for an expose in Jet magazine. She also ordered a glass casket for her son’s funeral. “Let the people see what they did to my boy,” Mamie Till said. An all-White jury acquitted Bryant and Milam, but the event helped catalyze the civil rights movement, inspiring the Montgomery bus boycott and catapulting the young Martin Luther King Jr. and his philosophy of nonviolent direct action to national prominence.
Just seven months after Till’s murder, in March 1956, Mississippi’s White lawmakers established the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission to fight the growing civil rights movement. As Black activists such as Medgar and Myrlie Evers organized local communities to protest hallmarks of the Jim Crow racial order, including school segregation, employment discrimination, voter disfranchisement and lynching, state funding went directly to investigators who spied on, slandered and blacklisted foot soldiers in the freedom struggle. The commission targeted local freedom fighters such as Fannie Lou Hamer and tourists with out-of-state license plates alike.
The commission hired White investigators to surveil civil rights activists throughout the 1960s. Sometimes these efforts proved buffoonish, as when an agent tried to determine whether a newborn baby was the product of a secret, illegal interracial relationship. Other investigators, some veterans of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, were more effectively menacing. They reported to White bankers who made sure activist Black farmers didn’t receive loans, threatening their livelihoods. Sleuths reported teachers who belonged to the NAACP to superintendents so they could be fired. One even aided in the 1963 state-sponsored death of a Black freedom fighter named Clyde Kennard, who had attempted to desegregate a state university before James Meredith’s successful bid in 1962.
Although state officials remained fiercely opposed to desegregation, the civil rights movement made critical gains. In particular, activists helped register Black voters and build political organizations such as the Council of Federated Organizations and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Immense grass-roots efforts such as Freedom Summer made good on the promises of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and proved the necessity of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Even so, the commission remained active. Along with White business executives, the commission launched Project B.I.G. (business, industry and government) in 1965, a public relations effort to “help refute many of the falsehoods told by those who visited the state in connection with the so-called Civil Rights Project.”
It was only after the abuses of Richard Nixon’s Watergate henchmen came into full focus that Mississippi looked with new scrutiny at its own band of dirty tricksters. In January 1977, the state legislature finally shut down the commission with little controversy.
But the organization’s spy files presented a predicament.
Some White lawmakers hastily proposed that the commission’s files be destroyed, either knowing or guessing that doing so would erase documentary evidence of harassment against Black Mississippians and civil rights organizers. Their resolution for archival incineration nearly made it to the floor for a vote.
But the legislature’s three Black members protested and publicized the proposed legislation.
Rep. Horace L. Buckley famously compared the proposed action to a “book burning.” A pastor from Jackson, Buckley was one of the first Black lawmakers elected in Mississippi since 1890. Rep. Fred L. Banks Jr. was another. “The Sovereignty Commission and these records are a part of the history of this state,” Banks said from the floor. “I don’t think we should be about the business of destroying any of the history.”
By Feb. 18, 1977, activists with the Greenville-based Delta Ministry joined lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi to sue the state government. An emergency federal court order restrained state officials from destroying any records.
These efforts worked. They stopped the quiet destruction of state records.
But this was only half the battle. Mississippians might still be waiting to see the rescued commission files had it not been for the 20 years of litigation to open the records that followed. Had the ACLU not sued to see state police records as well, the commission’s files might remain sealed today. In a compromise, the state agreed to open the commission’s files in 1998. Eventually, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History created a public, searchable, online repository for Sovereignty Commission records.
As a result, we have a trove of evidence that shows how the state worked to thwart civil and human rights for Black Mississippians.
While some records have been preserved and made available to the public, much about state repression of the civil rights movement remains shrouded. And powerful forces in the state are working to keep it that way. For example, the state government has quietly placed many state police records on schedules for retention and destruction. If preserved and released, these records could show the extent to which regular law enforcement joined in the commission’s counterrevolution against the civil rights movement. If destroyed or suppressed, we may never fully appreciate the Mississippi movement’s overthrow of the Old Jim Crow or our collective failure to end the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration.
Preserving records is one part of making sure that Mississippians can access their state’s full history. As today’s lawmakers recognize, so are debates about school curriculums and academic freedom.
Supporters of Mississippi’s anti-critical race theory legislation claim that erasing history is not their aim. The bill’s author, Sen. Michael McLendon, disagrees with its critics. “This bill has no intent of changing history, whatsoever,” the Republican said. “All it does is say we’re not telling any child that they’re inferior or superior to another.”
But as Jordan and others see it, a much longer history is at play. Born in 1933 to a Black sharecropping family, Jordan was 32 years old when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The husband of a retired schoolteacher, he speaks with some authority when he says McLendon’s bill threatens to warp educators’ and students’ ability to study or investigate injustice.
For Jordan, such legislation smacks of information control — a “turn back to the old system,” as he put it. Instead, it is time to heed the words of Ida B. Wells, a Mississippian forced to flee the Jim Crow South when she reported the truth of lynching: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” To do otherwise is to march back into darkness. | null | null | null | null | null |
Wednesday briefing: Weapons and diplomacy in Ukraine; crypto crash; police training; anti-Asian hate crimes; and more
The U.S. and European allies are sending weapons to Ukraine.
If Russia invades Ukraine, the U.S. warned that it could impose sanctions that target tech goods and President Vladimir Putin. Russia threatened to stop sending natural gas to Europe.
Ukraine’s president urged people there to stay calm and “protect your heart from panic.”
Up next: French, German, Russian and Ukrainian officials meet in Paris today.
Cryptocurrency has crashed around the world.
The numbers: $1.35 trillion of value has been wiped out since record highs in November, with the slide getting worse over the past week.
What that means: Some investors are looking for less-volatile bets. And the U.S. government is considering stricter rules and support for the industry.
What is cryptocurrency? A computer code generated by public software that allows people to store and send value — typically measured in dollars — online.
The Coast Guard is searching for 39 people off the Florida coast.
What happened: A boat reportedly capsized over the weekend in a suspected human-smuggling venture. It isn’t known where it overturned, but a witness said it came from the Bahamas.
What’s next: A rescue would be complicated by the lack of an immediate SOS call and the time passengers have been stuck at sea.
Reports of anti-Asian hate crimes spiked in San Francisco last year.
Sixty incidents were reported in 2021, compared with nine in 2020 and eight in 2019. Police said one man, arrested last year, is responsible for half of the 2021 incidents.
It’s part of a larger trend: Experts say the coronavirus pandemic fueled anti-Asian hate across the U.S. A survey last year showed 81% of Asian Americans saying violence against them increased.
The Post investigated how police officers are trained.
What we found: Speakers at training events demonized protesters, promoted violence as a primary part of policing and criticized the media.
How we know this: Our reporters interviewed 18 trainers and experts, attended one conference and watched sessions from another.
A key takeaway: Even as most Americans want police reform, there is little guidance or oversight on what officers are actually being taught.
Google is introducing a new way to track people on the Internet.
Chrome will assign users a set of advertising categories, such as travel or fitness, based on sites they visit. That would influence ads that they see.
Why the change? It’s part of Google’s plan to get rid of third-party cookies — the code from websites that follow you around the Web — by 2023.
Actor Peter Dinklage criticized Disney’s “Snow White” remake.
What happened: Dinklage, who is 4-foot-5, called the fairy tale a “backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave.”
Disney’s response: It’s “taking a different approach” with the characters, it said yesterday, to “avoid reinforcing stereotypes.” It also cast Rachel Zegler, a Latina, as Snow White.
And now ... it’s the middle of the week and we’re tired: Here are some expert tips on getting a better night’s sleep. | null | null | null | null | null |
The driving down of government bond yields also compressed yields and spreads on investment-grade and junk bonds. That was the intent. Junk spreads reached their narrowest level ever in June of last year. With so little yield available in fixed income and central banks seemingly always on hand to bail them out, investors flooded into equities. As a result, many developed-world equity indexes are either very expensive or, in the case of the U.S., not far off their most expensive levels ever based on valuation measures that are a decent guide to future returns. That is what a decade and a half of market manipulation by central banks has done. | null | null | null | null | null |
Just 27 years old, Shamir has experienced several pop-star lifestyles since breaking through in 2015. Back then, the singer-songwriter danced his pain away with bops like “On the Regular,” but soon stripped away the electro-sheen for lo-fi albums that embraced his alt-rock and country influences. Throughout it all, Shamir’s angelic countertenor has remained a guiding light through albums and songs that embraced vulnerability and truth-telling. And while his gender identity and sexuality have frequently been a topic of his songs and a prism through which his art is viewed, those issues appear to be at the forefront of his forthcoming album “Heterosexuality.” On noisy, operatic songs such as “Gay Agenda” and “Cisgender,” Shamir rejects binaries and orthodoxies, singing, “You’re just stuck in the box that was made for me / And you’re mad I got out and I’m living free.” Feb. 2 and 3 at 7 p.m. (doors) at 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. 930.com. Sold out. | null | null | null | null | null |
San Francisco police mark 567% increase in anti-Asian hate-crime reports in 2021
There were eight anti-AAPI hate crimes reported to the San Francisco police in 2019 and nine in 2020. In 2021, there were 60. These numbers are considered preliminary until the California Department of Justice makes its final determination on hate-crime statistics throughout the state, police said.
San Francisco’s police chief, Bill Scott, said at a Tuesday news conference that one man was believed to be responsible for half of the incidents reported last year. Scott said the man, who was not named, was arrested in August and could face enhanced hate-crime charges.
In a tweet, Breed highlighted measures the city has taken, such as a program that assigns people to accompany seniors who are worried about safety to their personal appointments and increased neighborhood patrols, while acknowledging, “We need to do more.”
The jump in hate-crime reports comes against the backdrop of a rise in anti-Asian hate across the United States that some experts say is fueled in part by the coronavirus pandemic. | null | null | null | null | null |
Peter Dinklage at the U.K. premiere of the film “Cyrano” in London in 2021. (Joel C Ryan/Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP)
Moviegoers who watched the 2003 indie film “The Station Agent” met main character Finbar McBride while he was working at a model train store in Hoboken, N.J. After discovering the shopkeeper stood around 4-foot-5, some customers cracked jokes.
“They were very, very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ ” Dinklage said, adding, “You’re progressive in one way … but you’re still making that … backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave. What … are you doing, man?”
Dwarfs “are still the butt of jokes. It’s one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice,” he told the magazine, before chiding those who do accept such roles.
“I don’t know what I would say. It would be arrogant to assume that I …” He put his hands down on the table, according to the magazine. “Everyone’s different. Every person my size has a different life, a different history. Different ways of dealing with it. Just because I’m seemingly O.K. with it, I can’t preach how to be O.K. with it. I don’t think I still am O.K. with it. There’s days when I’m not.”
Almost a decade later, Dinklage seems to have accepted the role of advocate, at least to some extent. On Maron’s podcast, he questioned whether he had pushed hard enough, given that Disney was remaking what he called a “backward” movie that plays into harmful stereotypes about dwarfs by depicting them as one-dimensional cliches instead of full-fledged human beings. | null | null | null | null | null |
Jex Blackmore, right, holds up what she says is an abortion pill before taking it during a televised interview on WJBK-Fox 2 on Sunday. (WJBK)
“Let It Rip” host Charlie Langton opened the discussion, asking abortion rights advocate Jex Blackmore about the Food and Drug Administration’s December decision to allow abortion pills to be prescribed via telehealth and shipped to patients in the mail.
After explaining how the mail-order system worked and arguing that the drugs are “incredibly safe,” Blackmore held up a white pill. She explained it was the first of two that a person would take to terminate their pregnancy. “I want to show you how easy it is, and safe it is, by taking it myself,” she said.
Blackmore then popped it in her mouth.
Rebecca Kiessling, an advocate and lawyer brought on to argue the antiabortion stance, dropped her jaw slightly, closed her eyes and shook her head. After the show, Kiessling later wrote in a Facebook post, “I just broke down in tears.”
The show had been scheduled during the weekend of the 49th anniversary of the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which established abortion as a constitutional right. In December, the Supreme Court indicated that it may uphold a Mississippi law that prohibits abortions after 15 weeks — which could pare back, or completely overturn, Roe and the 1992 affirming decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
About two weeks later, the Biden administration eliminated a long-standing rule that the abortion pill medication mifepristone needed to be dispensed in person. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000, mifepristone is used in conjunction with another drug, misoprostol, to carry out medical abortions. Mifepristone blocks a hormone needed for pregnancy, while misoprostol empties the uterus. The regimen is considered safe within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, according to the FDA.
Despite the FDA’s relaxing of the rules, 19 states still prohibit receiving the drugs through telehealth appointments, while at least 16 states are working to restrict it, The Washington Post reported. In Michigan, where Blackmore’s interview was broadcast, it is legal to receive an abortion pill prescription via telemedicine, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
FDA eliminates key restriction on abortion pill as Supreme Court weighs case that challenges Roe v. Wade
In an email to The Post, Blackmore said her on-air claim was no charade, insisting that she took mifepristone, the first of the two pills, to end a pregnancy.
“Abortion is a common and safe medical procedure surrounded by stigma,” Blackmore wrote. “Stigma keeps people silent about their personal experiences and creates space for harmful, inaccurate narratives. My action was intended to dispel some of those myths, misinformation, and stigma.”
Blackmore is an abortion rights advocate and former spokeswoman for the Satanic Temple, a nontheistic organization, according to its website. In 2015, Blackmore blogged about the days leading up to one of her abortions as a way to detail the complexities of her decision amid what she described as a lack of shared experiences from women in her position, The Post reported.
During Sunday’s show, Kiessling, the antiabortion advocate, said the abortion pill is reversible using certain hormones — a claim the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says is “not based on science” and one that does “not meet clinical standards.”
In her subsequent Facebook post, Kiessling described Blackmore’s actions as callously beginning “the process of killing her baby on TV.”
“It’s like someone pushing a button for a drone strike on innocent victims like it’s nothing because they don’t see them,” Kiessling wrote, “while the rest of us are fully aware of the carnage to ensue, the shocking loss of life.”
In light of the Supreme Court leaving in place a Texas law that bans most abortions after six weeks — and its signaling to uphold the Mississippi law — Blackmore told The Post that the “anti-abortion movement has been celebrating what looks like a victory to them but this victory is largely symbolic.”
“With medical mail order abortion,” she added, “we’ve actually expanded access more than ever before.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Years before anyone used the term intersectionality, Lorraine Hansberry (1930-65) saw, wrote and spoke about the ways class, race and gender discrimination were intertwined in the United States. Unsurprisingly, there’s been a resurgence of interest in her in recent years, with increasing attention paid to Hansberry’s journalism and political activism in addition to her best-known achievement, the play “A Raisin in the Sun.” Charles J. Shields’s biography is the third in little more than three years: Imani Perry blended biography with a personal tribute in “Looking for Lorraine,” while Soyica Diggs Colbert took a more scholarly approach in “Radical Vision,” making detailed analyses of Hansberry’s writings. Shields, also the author of biographies of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, offers general readers a well-researched account of Hansberry’s life and conscientious summaries of her literary and political work.
Making good use of private papers as well as published materials, Shields paints an evocative portrait of Hansberry’s childhood in Chicago. She grew up in affluence, “smart but spoiled” in the opinion of her older sister’s best friend, “fond of getting attention.” She may have been reacting to her mother’s rigid notions of gentility and propriety; Nannie Hansberry sent her 5-year-old daughter to her first day at a nearly all-white elementary school dressed in ermine, to show that “we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone.” (Lorraine got pushed in the mud by her tough, streetwise classmates.) In her youth, she lived the contradiction between her parents’ cosmopolitan world of African American culture and achievement and the hostile white society around them, which did its best to keep upward strivers like the Hansberrys in their designated place—metaphorically, by excluding black history from Lorraine’s schoolbooks, and literally, by suing to have them evicted from a building her father bought through a white front man in a neighborhood with restrictive racial covenants.
Carl Hansberry was a real estate speculator; his lawsuit victory enabled him to continue buying buildings in white neighborhoods, chopping up apartments into one-room, notoriously overcrowded and unsanitary “kitchenettes,” and renting them at an enormous profit to African American families eager to move up. The glaring disconnect between her family’s civil rights activism and their fortune, made by exploiting other Black people, likely played a role in Lorraine’s move towards Marxist politics, but Shields doesn’t explore it. By contrast, his depiction of her intellectual development is substantive, from her teenage readings in Harlem Renaissance literature through her discovery at the University of Wisconsin of theater, in particular Sean O’Casey’s Irish folk dramas. He also revisits a summer workshop in Mexico that cemented her commitment to social realism in art and her tenure as a journalist at the radical monthly Freedom after she dropped out of college.
When it comes to her personal and emotional life, however, Shields is regrettably hands-off. He mentions a “crush” on college classmate Edythe Anne Cohen and includes a few excerpts from Hansberry’s letters to Cohen that raise intriguing questions about how intimate they were; one refers to Lorraine’s interest in a “very wonderful young man. (I never thought it possible.)” Given her subsequent marriage to Marxist activist Robert Nemiroff and later lesbian affairs, this moment cries out for a consideration of Hansberry’s complicated sexuality; instead, Shields jumps to the fact that she met the man through a left-wing group supporting Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace.
Shields’s capable account of her journalism reminds us just how radical Hansberry was, presciently seeing the struggles of African Americans as part of the global battle by people of color against colonialism. She was an unabashed Marxist and fellow traveler of the Communist Party during the Cold War years, when it was very unpopular and dangerous, and her marriage to Nemiroff was at least in part an alliance of politically like-minded people. She also came to rely on him to keep her focused on the literary and dramatic work that she saw as her true calling, and here too Shields presents provocative source material without offering much in the way of analysis. He describes as “indulgent” an excerpt from a letter by Nemiroff urging Hansberry to stick to her writing that might well strike other readers, especially female readers, as patronizing and controlling.
The chapters on “A Raisin in the Sun” are Shields’s best, detailing an engrossing narrative of the creation and production of an American classic. Later chapters that chronicle Hansberry’s declining health and difficulties with the later plays “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” and “Les Blancs” are also compelling, though Shields also dodges the question voiced by several of how extensively Nemiroff revised Hansberry’s work when she was dying and after her death. Shields’s statement, “Whether he exceeded his mandate as her literary executor will be left to theater historians and scholars to determine,” feels disingenuous, given that he had access to Hansberry’s manuscripts and the published versions
The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun | null | null | null | null | null |
5 STATION ELEVEN (Vintage, $16.95). By Emily St. John Mandel. A group of musicians and actors travel through Michigan 20 years after a viral plague has killed most of the population.
9 THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS (Berkley, $16). By Ali Hazelwood. Two people pretending to be in love develop real feelings for each other.
10 THE NIGHT WATCHMAN (Harper Perennial, $18). By Louise Erdrich. A night watchman who is also a Chippewa Council member battles Native American dispossession in 1953.
4 ALL ABOUT LOVE (Morrow, $15.99). By bell hooks. The first volume in the iconic feminist’s Love Song to the Nation trilogy considers compassion as a form of love.
7 THE FIELD GUIDE TO DUMB BIRDS OF THE WHOLE STUPID WORLD (Chronicle Books, $15.95). By Matt Kracht. Birds from around the world are mocked in this guidebook parody.
10 KEEP SHARP (Simon and Schuster, $17). By Sanjay Gupta. The neurosurgeon and chief medical correspondent for CNN offers advice on how to prevent cognitive decline.
6 THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL (Bantam, $7.99). By Anne Frank. The diary of a 13-year-old Jewish girl as she hides from the Nazis in an attic during World War II.
8 THE WAY OF KINGS (DAW, $9.99). By Brandon Sanderson. The first volume in the Stormlight Archive series.
10 THE GREAT HUNT (Tor, $10.99). By Robert Jordan. Good and evil characters clash as they battle to find a legendary relic with otherworldly powers. | null | null | null | null | null |
Just 27 years old, Shamir has experienced several pop-star lifestyles since breaking through in 2015. Back then, the singer-songwriter danced his pain away with bops like “On the Regular,” but soon stripped away the electro-sheen for lo-fi albums that embraced his alt-rock and country influences. Throughout it all, Shamir’s angelic countertenor has remained a guiding light through albums and songs that embraced vulnerability and truth-telling. And while his gender identity and sexuality have frequently been a topic of his songs and a prism through which his art is viewed, those issues appear to be at the forefront of his forthcoming album “Heterosexuality.” On noisy, operatic songs such as “Gay Agenda” and “Cisgender,” Shamir rejects binaries and orthodoxies, singing, “You’re just stuck in the box that was made for me / And you’re mad I got out and I’m living free.” Feb. 2 and 3 at 7 p.m. (doors) at 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. 930.com. $41. | null | null | null | null | null |
House Democrats to launch three climate task forces
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today we learned that the International Institute for Environment & Development has created a version of Wordle for climate experts. It's called A Greener Wordle, and it features five-letter words such as “adapt” and “clean.”
House Democrats to launch 3 climate task forces as Build Back Better stalls in Senate
The House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition on Thursday will formally launch three task forces focused on tackling key aspects of the climate crisis, The Climate 202 scoops this morning.
The move by the coalition, a group of more than 70 climate-conscious House Democrats, comes as President Biden's Build Back Better proposal remains stalled in the Senate.
While leadership ultimately controls the party's agenda, the move signals that rank-and-file members are looking for creative ways to advance climate legislation, regardless of the fate of Build Back Better and its $555 billion in climate spending.
Each task force will seek to ensure that must-pass legislation, including annual policy and appropriations bills, contains robust climate provisions:
Coalition Vice Chair Rep. Chellie Pingree (Maine) and Rep. Kim Schrier (Wash.) will co-chair the Climate and Agriculture Task Force, which will aim to ensure that the next farm bill empowers farmers to address the climate crisis.
Reps. James R. Langevin (R.I.) and Katie Porter (Calif.) will co-chair the Climate and National Security Task Force, which will propose climate-related amendments to the annual defense policy bill as well as the defense appropriations bill.
Reps. Sean Casten and Raja Krishnamoorthi, both of Illinois, will co-chair the Power Sector Task Force, which will draft legislation aimed at achieving President Biden's ambitious clean energy goals, building on the provisions in the bipartisan infrastructure law.
“In terms of how we move climate legislation, we can leverage annual must-pass bills like the NDAA,” Langevin told The Climate 202, referring to the National Defense Authorization Act.
“We can use the vehicles at our disposal,” he added. “But I remain dedicated to getting the climate provisions of the Build Back Better Act over the finish line.”
Climate change is already threatening U.S. national security by fueling extreme weather, global instability, violence and migration. Meanwhile, the U.S. military is a massive emitter of greenhouse gases, sending more carbon into the atmosphere than entire countries.
Langevin has previously sponsored several climate-related amendments to the NDAA, including amendments requiring the Pentagon to update its climate adaptation road map and to report on heat illnesses in the military.
Climate-friendly agriculture
Pingree, a longtime organic farmer who will co-chair the agriculture task force, told The Climate 202 that agriculture often gets overlooked in climate policy discussions, despite its crucial role in curbing planet-warming emissions.
“There's a tendency to think about it very simplistically and say it's all about energy sector or it's all about the transportation sector,” Pingree said. “People don't generally have a good understanding of the role that agriculture can play. So this is a great opportunity.”
Agricultural activities contributed to about 10 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Pingree has introduced legislation that would empower farmers to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040.
The Build Back Better Act also would invest billions of dollars in encouraging farmers and ranchers to plant trees and sequester carbon in soil.
Pingree said that while the task forces were not formed in response to Build Back Better, she has been “frustrated” to see the bill stall in the Senate amid opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).
“I'm extremely frustrated that we haven't been able to move on Build Back Better, particularly because many of the agriculture and climate-related practices are not the controversial sections,” she said. “They're places where there's broad agreement.”
In addition to Build Back Better, the agriculture task force will make recommendations to the Agriculture Committee regarding the farm bill in 2023 while seeking to involve farmers in those discussions.
“Farmers could really be our magic solution to a lot of the climate crisis,” Schrier, the co-chair of the agriculture task force, told The Climate 202.
Power sector struggles
Casten, a former clean energy executive who is co-chairing the power sector task force, told The Climate 202 that it will have members from every committee of jurisdiction and will work in concert with the White House to meet Biden's clean energy goals.
In 2019, the electricity sector accounted for about 25 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA.
Biden has set an ambitious target of making the U.S. grid run on 100 percent clean electricity by 2035.
However, Democrats dropped the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would have rewarded utilities for transitioning to cleaner energy, from Build Back Better because of opposition from Manchin.
Notably, Casten said he would be open to crafting something similar to the program, although he acknowledged the difficulty of moving such legislation through the narrowly divided Senate.
“I would love to see us do something like that,” he said. “But let's do it in a holistic way where we look at the realities of the electric grid and harmonize with existing state policies.”
Federal judges skeptical of oil industry in Baltimore climate case
A panel of federal judges yesterday appeared skeptical of oil company claims that Baltimore's climate change lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry should be heard in federal court.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit seemed inclined to side with attorneys for Baltimore, who maintain that the case belongs in the state court where it was filed originally.
Arguing on behalf of 26 fossil fuel companies, Kannon Shanmugam, an attorney with the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, asserted that Baltimore's claims arise under federal common law, which is displaced by the Clean Air Act.
But Judge Stephanie Thacker took issue with that reasoning. "That sort of seems [like] a circular argument that at least for me defies logic," said Thacker, a Barack Obama appointee.
The three judges had few tough questions for Vic Sher, a founding partner at the firm Sher Edling who represents Baltimore as well as other states and municipalities that have brought similar climate cases.
Pat Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School who has informally advised Sher, told The Climate 202 that he thought the hearing was a "slam dunk for Baltimore."
Karen Sokol, a professor of law at Loyola University in New Orleans, agreed with that assessment.
“They were definitely more skeptical of Shanmugam's arguments,” Sokol told The Climate 202, adding that Thacker “really brought out some of the logical flaws in his argument, and I don't think he ever really recovered.”
Phil Goldberg, special counsel for the Manufacturers Accountability Project, an initiative of the National Association of Manufacturers that opposes the litigation, had a different interpretation.
“The judges clearly understood the fact that this litigation involves the production of fossil fuels and the City acknowledged that its allegations are about the worldwide emissions of [greenhouse gases],” Goldberg said in an email. “So, although Baltimore’s claims were creatively packaged under state law, the facts, legal issues and remedies are all beyond the scope of any state’s law.”
As possible Russian invasion of Ukraine looms, Europe fears gas shortages
The United States and its allies are scrambling to line up natural gas supplies for Europe in the event that Russia invades Ukraine, potentially triggering shortages, The Washington Post's Steven Mufson and Michael Birnbaum report.
In recent years, Europe has relied on Russia to meet about 40 percent of its natural gas needs, according to E.U. figures. But now Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatening to cut off the gas if his country faces economic sanctions related to aggression against Ukraine.
In response, Biden plans to host Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani at the White House on Monday to discuss sending more gas from Qatar to Europe.
“If Russia decides to weaponize its supply of natural gas or crude oil, it wouldn’t be without consequences to the Russian economy,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House has not announced specific policy responses.
EPA announces steps to monitor pollution in ‘Cancer Alley’
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan yesterday announced bold steps to address complaints from residents of environmental justice communities about tainted air and drinking water, The Post's Darryl Fears reports.
Regan said the agency will spend $600,000 on “mobile air pollution monitoring equipment” to deploy in a stretch of Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley” for its clusters of chemical plants, oil and gas refineries, and other industrial facilities located near homes and schools.
The move comes two months after Regan embarked on a “Journey to Justice” tour of overburdened communities in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
Research suggests that climate change could not only make weather more severe but also harder to predict, Jeremy Deaton reports for The Post.
The study focused on the middle latitudes, which include the United States, Europe and China. It found that storms grow faster in warmer climates, potentially allowing small errors in weather models to balloon into larger errors more quickly.
"It seems that colder climates are just inherently more predictable than warmer ones,” said Aditi Sheshadri, an atmospheric scientist at Stanford University and lead author of the paper. | null | null | null | null | null |
Matea Gold named National Editor, Philip Rucker named Deputy National Editor
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 25: Phil Rucker, right, and Matea Gold, Washington Post staff, in Washington, DC. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Announcement from Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, Senior Managing Editor Cameron Barr, Managing Editor Steven Ginsberg, Managing Editor Tracy Grant, Managing Editor Krissah Thompson, and Chief Product Officer and Managing Editor Kat Downs Mulder:
We are very happy to announce a new leadership team for the National staff.
Matea Gold, the driving force behind many of The Post’s most impactful and high-profile stories, will become National editor, and Philip Rucker, one of the nation’s premier political reporters, will serve as deputy National editor.
Matea and Phil are the perfect pair to lead the National staff at a time of continued growth and ambition. Their mission will be to chart new ways to expand coverage in Washington and across the country, while ensuring that we continue to break the biggest news stories, pursue the most revelatory investigations and surprise readers with innovative, ground-breaking features. They will also help lead a newsroom-wide effort focused on threats to American democracy.
Matea and Phil are natural collaborators who will form critical partnerships across the newsroom to ensure that everyone is mobilized to do their best work. They are conscientious and empathetic managers who champion diversity in all its forms — both in the makeup of the National staff and the stories it covers. They are fiercely competitive and committed to continuing The Post’s dominance of the biggest stories inside and outside Washington.
They represent a new generation of leadership for National – with a combined quarter-century of experience at The Post – and we couldn’t be more excited about what they’re going to do.
For the last four years, Matea has served as the national political enterprise and investigations editor, running some of The Post’s most sensitive stories, including coverage of the Russia investigation, the Ukraine pressure campaign and President Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election results. She has spearheaded some of The Post’s most innovative storytelling experiments and collaborative efforts, including “The Mueller Report Illustrated,” “America in Line” and “The Attack: Before, During and After,” an investigative series about the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Reporters and other editors gravitate to Matea for guidance and direction. She is relentless in pursuit of key facts and larger truths and compels reporters to do their best work, whether by spotting critical targets or providing unwavering support. She is as competitive as they come, never wanting to get beat, always supporting her staff.
Matea excels at mobilizing people and resources to tackle major news events and ongoing story lines. In 2020, when she ran The Post’s voting coverage, she built a team that helped us dominate coverage of developments and litigation in key states throughout the fall and deployed 56 reporters in 36 states on Election Day to monitor voting and potential unrest.
Before moving into an editing role in 2017, Matea spent two decades as a reporter – covering a wide range of stories that took her from dusty hillside settlements in Tijuana to the smoldering ruins of New York’s World Trade Center.
She joined The Post in June 2013 as a National reporter covering money in politics. In that role, she documented the aftershocks of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, exposing the growing influence of wealthy donors. She led an effort to map the Clinton donor network, traced the architecture of the Koch political operation and detailed how the Mercers built a populist power base in partnership with conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon. She also helped spearhead a global examination of Ivanka Trump’s fashion brand, an investigation that traced the production of Trump-branded products to countries where low-wage garment workers have few protections.
Before coming to The Post, Matea worked for 17 years for the Los Angeles Times and Tribune Publishing, most recently as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau. Before that, she was based for five years in New York, where she reported on the dramatic changes remaking television media for the Times Calendar section.
She spent 2000 and 2004 on the campaign trail documenting the presidential bids of former U.S. senator Bill Bradley, then-Vice President Al Gore, former Vermont governor Howard Dean and then-Sen. John F. Kerry. She was also a lead reporter in the coverage of two California gubernatorial races, two mayoral campaigns and Los Angeles City Hall.
A fluent Spanish speaker, she wrote extensively about immigrant communities on Los Angeles’s Eastside and traced the rising power of Latino voters and did a stint covering the U.S.-Mexico border.
Matea graduated summa cum laude from UCLA, where she served as editor in chief of the Daily Bruin.
She lives in Northwest D.C. with her husband, their two daughters and two cats.
As senior Washington correspondent this past year, Phil was one of the anchors of The Post’s ground-breaking investigation “The Attack: Before, During and After.” Before that, he served as White House bureau chief for four years and led our award-winning team chronicling Donald Trump’s presidency.
Phil wrote and helped conceive of some of our most compelling and distinctive news and analysis pieces about Trump and his administration, as well as in-depth narratives and long-term investigations, including a 2020 series examining the administration’s coronavirus response. Phil also was a leader representing The Post and the press corps more broadly, pushing for accountability and transparency from a White House known for neither and sharply questioning the president at news conferences in the face of personal attacks by Trump.
Phil previously served as national political correspondent, anchoring our coverage of the 2014 midterm elections and 2016 presidential campaign. He has been a newsroom collaborator and an innovator in story forms, working with Dan Balz and others on the staff to produce interactive oral histories of both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. He also represented The Post in helping design the Democratic presidential candidates debate on MSNBC in 2019 that Ashley Parker so ably moderated.
Phil joined The Post in 2005 as an intern in the Prince George’s County bureau and returned for good the following summer in Southern Maryland. After covering a succession of beats for Metro, he joined National following the 2008 election to help Al Kamen cover the Obama transition for his famed “In The Loop” column. Thus began a 13-year run during which Phil also covered Congress, Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and the Obama White House, as well as general breaking news, including the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and Fort Hood massacre. He has reported for The Post from all 50 states and dozens of countries.
In every role, Phil has been a consummate professional, generous co-worker and trusted partner. His skills as a reporter and writer, along with his gracious manner, have earned him the respect of everyone he interacts with and made him one of The Post’s strongest leaders.
Phil’s work has been recognized with a number of awards. He was part of the team of national security, investigative and political reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award for coverage of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Phil and Ashley Parker together received the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for distinguished reporting on the presidency. And last year, the White House Correspondents’ Association honored Phil with the Aldo Beckman Award for overall excellence in White House coverage.
In addition to his work for The Post, Phil partnered with Carol Leonnig to write two No. 1 best-selling books about the Trump presidency, “A Very Stable Genius” in 2020 and “I Alone Can Fix It” in 2021. Phil also has appeared for the past several years as a political analyst on NBC News and MSNBC, where he will continue to promote Post journalism.
Phil graduated with a degree in history from Yale University, where he was an editor and reporter for the Yale Daily News. He lives in Shaw with his cavapoo, Axel, named in honor of Phil’s past as a competitive figure skater. | null | null | null | null | null |
The findings at the residential school "where three generations of my family attended is traumatizing, yet it also serves as validation of the stories told,” said Phyllis Webstad, who founded a nonprofit for reconciliation.
In a tweet late on Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shared the number of a National Indian Residential School Crisis Line set up to support former students. “Today’s news from Williams Lake First Nation brings a lot of distressing emotions to the surface,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Omar Assad, 78, was seen being pulled his car and marched to the construction site where he was held for more than an hour.
Men stand next to a poster of Omar Assad in Jiljilya village in the West Bank, Jan. 12, 2022. (Mohamad Torokman/Reuters)
Omar Assad, 78, was found unresponsive in the early hours of Jan. 12, minutes after Israeli soldiers left him in the courtyard of a house that was under construction. He and several other Palestinians had been stopped and detained by at a late-night roadblock in Assad’s home village.
Three witnesses at the scene as well as leaked testimony by the soldiers involved describe how Assad was pulled from his car and marched to the construction site where he was held for more than an hour with a cloth tied around his eyes and gag on his mouth.
The examination found evidence that Assad had been tightly bound and blindfolded, with abrasions on his wrists and bleeding on inside of his eyelids. The report does not describe other evidence of beatings or physical trauma. His history of cardiac and lung disease were evident, including markers of chronic emphysema, according to the report.
The Israeli Defense Forces, which are conducting an internal investigation of the incident, declined to comment on the autopsy findings. The army has said it would that it would be a breach of regulations for soldiers not to provide aid to a detainee in detainee in need of medical care.
“We are continuing with the investigation,” said Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, a spokesperson, said in an interview. “If we find wrongdoing, we will act according to the findings, our protocols and our values.”
That contradicts accounts given to The Washington Post from two Palestinians who were being held at the same time. They said Assad was already laying on the ground and clearly unresponsive when the soldiers left abruptly.
Zaher, the physician who was on duty at a clinic two blocks from the construction site, said Assad’s face was already blue when he reached him within minutes of the soldiers’ departure and appeared to have been without oxygen for 15 to 20 minutes.
The soldiers told investigators they were checking for hidden weapons and anyone who might be wanted for questioning, according to the leak testimony.
Assad was stopped about 3 a.m. as he drove home from a night of card playing at cousin’s house less than a mile from his home. He had no ID with him, his family said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Cincinnati Reds briefly became the Redlegs during the Cold War. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
By Frederic J. Frommer
“And it was true that the headlines were filled with bad news about the other ‘Reds,’” Rhodes said. “We were battling the ‘Reds’ in Korea. We were engaged in a Cold War with the ‘Reds.’”
In his letter, housed at the Duquesne University Archives and Special Collections, the judge said that he was afraid “America is in for some terrible scares. It is inevitable that one headline or more will scream, ‘REDS MURDER YANKS!’” Musmanno wrote that it grieved him that Cincinnati “should have a baseball team named after the brutal bolshevistic gang of international bandits, who are terrorizing the world and instilling fear into the hearts of the American people who never knew fear before.”
Luckily for America, the Yankees took the ’61 series in five games.
In a rematch 15 years later — as the country was celebrating the ’76 bicentennial, no less — the Reds swept the Yankees, with Gabe Paul, the Reds GM who had switched to the Redlegs in the ‘50s, now running the Yankees’ front office. By then, the term “Reds” had lost its scary luster. Still, somehow Cincinnati’s baseball team once again shared a nickname with this nation’s communist adversaries. The Reds were so dominant in the 1970s they were called the “Big Red Machine” — the same moniker as the powerhouse Soviet hockey team. | null | null | null | null | null |
REI's flagship store in New York on Jan. 25. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
That could have come from any anti-union news 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 more than 15,000 employees. The company says that “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 its 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 it 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 saying that “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 might 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 — such as 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 of 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 |
Israeli special combat soldiers conduct a training exercise using virtual reality (VR) battlefield technology to simulate Hamas tunnels leading from Gaza to Israel at an Israeli Army base in Petach Tikva, Israel, on Wednesday, April 26, 2017. In a refurbished building on a military base in central Israel, soldiers are training in underground combat using headsets made by Oculus, the virtual reality headset maker owned by Facebook Inc., and Vive, owned byHTC Corp. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
From its birth in the War of Independence of 1948, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has carefully cultivated its reputation as a peoples’ army, unique in the world both as a fighting force and for the commitment of the population to its service. But while there is still mandatory conscription, the IDF’s place in Israeli society is changing along with the nature of modern warfare. That’s something neither the military nor the government should resist.
Today, Israeli men and women are conscripted at age 18, serve for two to three years and then are placed in active reserve units. There are exceptions to this universal draft. Married women, Arabs, ultra-orthodox men and those judged unsuitable are exempted or given early release. Still, most Israelis serve as a matter of course, and many with pride. | null | null | null | null | null |
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. signage is displayed outside of a store in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S., on Friday, May 15, 2015. Photographer: Luke Sharrett (Bloomberg)
By Brendan Case | Bloomberg
Walmart Inc.’s financial-technology venture agreed to buy two small companies and rebrand itself in a step toward providing an app that enables customers to save, borrow and receive money.
The venture, Hazel, will acquire fintech platforms Even and ONE for an undisclosed amount, Walmart said in a statement Wednesday. The combined business will operate under the ONE brand name after the deals close, which is expected to happen in the first half of this year.
The moves signal an acceleration in Walmart’s plans to shake up the banking world by offering tech-driven financial services to its 1.6 million U.S. employees and more than 100 million weekly shoppers. Omer Ismail, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. veteran whom Walmart poached last year, will lead ONE as chief executive officer.
“Consumers everywhere are being left behind by the world of financial services,” Ismail said in the statement. “Our vision is clear: build on Even and ONE’s success to offer a product that offers consumers the best way to spend, the best way to access their wages and helps millions save and grow their money.”
David Baga, CEO of Even, and Brian Hamilton, co-founder of ONE, will also serve in leadership positions. The combined business will have more than 200 employees and be capitalized with more than $250 million in cash on the balance sheet.
After the deals close, ONE will expand with new hires and potential mergers and acquisitions, Walmart said. Hazel is also backed by Ribbit Capital, an investor in stock-trading platform Robinhood Markets Inc.
Even’s online platform offers employees a way to access their wages, budget and save. ONE partners with Coastal Community Bank to combine saving, spending and borrowing in a single digital account.
Walmart, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, is also building businesses in health-care and digital advertising in a push to expand beyond stores and e-commerce. | null | null | null | null | null |
Léa Seydoux plays a celebrity journalist in ‘France,’ a movie about media and manipulation
Léa Seydoux in “France.” (R. Arpajou/Kino Lorber)
It would be a stretch to suppose that France de Meurs, the Parisian heroine of Bruno Dumont’s tonally complex, thematically sweeping movie “France” somehow represents the nation with which she shares a name. But it’s not out of place to wonder whether the film’s title — and, presumably, its true subject matter — refers to the place, not the person. There are simply too many big ideas — modern media and its manipulations; immigration and income inequality; privacy and voyeurism — bubbling around in this tasty and nutritious bouillabaisse of a film for it not to be trying to say something about the state of France today.
Or of the whole world, really.
France, the person, is played by Léa Seydoux (“No Time to Die”). She’s a television journalist whose American equivalent would be hard to find: not just a reporter/anchor/interview host, but a celebrity on par with a Kardashian, or a literal rock star. Everybody knows France’s name and France’s face, and many would say they love her.
The story opens with a presidential news conference featuring Emmanuel Macron; the Macron footage is real, not staged, but it’s been manipulated by Dumont to insert France into it, where she and her producer Lou (Blanche Gardin) — after exchanging a goofy pantomime of obscene gestures — attempt to ambush the leader for social-media “likes.” Lou’s favorite word for France’s performance here (and everything she does on camera is a performance, Dumont suggests) is “génial” — which translates to brilliant. She’s a shining star, whether covering politics or conflict zones, with helmet and bulletproof vest.
But things start to fall apart — or, rather, something implodes inside this star — after she is involved in a minor fender bender with a moped-mounted deliveryman (Jawad Zemmar), who dislocates his knee, making it impossible for the young man to support his immigrant family. They’re only too happy to play host to France when she visits their home, by way of apology. They don’t want to sue her, or even complain, but France insists on writing the family a check.
At this point — and it’s not clear exactly why — our protagonist has a breakdown, leaving her television show, her detached husband and bratty son (Benjamin Biolay and Gaëtan Amiel) and checking herself in to an expensive clinic in the Alps for treatment. This happens roughly around the halfway point of this two-hour-plus film, whose first section can be slow, meandering, diffuse and discursive, hopping around from one subject to another: from the political to the professional to the personal. If it’s a satire of television media — and it may or may not actually be one — it’s without much bite.
But something happens in the film’s second half. Make that several somethings. It’s best to leave the details of the story a surprise, but from this point on, “France” becomes a far better and far more interesting movie, and not just because its narrative becomes more incident-rich, sometimes shockingly so. Dumont doubles down on a trick he’s been using all along, but which I hadn’t really noticed until an hour or so into the movie: For many, many scenes in “France,” Seydoux looks directly — often in close-up — at the camera.
Some of this is due to the nature of her character’s job: As a journalist, France is used to working in front of a lens in the studio. Even in the field of battle — in scenes of violence, or on a boat overfilled with refugees — we’re shown how reality is reshaped (and often restaged) to heighten the impact. Seydoux is an amazing actress, and whether facing the lens of her cameraman (Marc Bettinelli) or Dumont’s, she has a face that reveals every flickering emotion.
If France de Meurs isn’t the subject of this film, then a world that can’t stop looking at her is.
“France” ends with a scene that’s open to interpretation, but what has come before isn’t: Dumont is clearly critiquing the way we mediate life via screens, large and small. There are times in this rambling story when the filmmaker’s point isn’t quite as obvious, but that’s only because he has a habit of trying to jab several moving targets with a sharp stick all at the same time.
Unrated. At area theaters. Contains strong language, mature thematic material, sexual humor and bloody images. In French with subtitles. 133 minutes. | null | null | null | null | null |
The NFL’s final four teams are set and it is shaping up to be a fantastic weekend of football. After a weekend of upsets where the lone favorite to advance prevailed in one of the most exciting playoffs games in sports history, we’re left with two surprising yet intriguing championship games.
If history is any guide, the underdogs might be done advancing but they could still line the pockets of bettors. Since 2002, the first year the league expanded to 32 teams, the underdogs are 12-26 straight up but their cover rate isn’t terrible against the spread (17-21). In fact, favorites have covered the spread by an average of one-point in the conference championship games over the last 19 seasons, giving some hope for those backing the underdogs at the betting window.
These two teams met in Week 17 and the Bengals walked away with a narrow 34-31 victory. Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow and his team’s offense scored 20 more points than expected based on the down, distance and field position of each play. Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs scored 17 more points than expected. The Bengals also earned a first down or scored a touchdown on over 85 percent of series, the same as the Chiefs.
San Francisco outplayed Los Angeles in both of the regular season matchups, resulting in a combined series success rate (the rate at which a series starting on first down earns a new first down or scores a touchdown on that series) of 78 percent compared to 67 percent for Rams in those games. Los Angeles and San Francisco also rank No. 5 and No. 6 respectively in Football Outsiders’ defense-adjusted value over average (DVOA) metric, which measures a team’s efficiency by comparing success on every single play to a league average based on situation and opponent, another testament to how close these teams are in ability.
There are other factors in San Francisco’s favor, too. The 49ers get a rest advantage having played Saturday while the Rams played Sunday afternoon and the Niners’ travel to SoFi Stadium is easy coming from Northern California, limiting any home-field advantage the Rams might enjoy. Not to mention the expected influx of 49ers fans at this game, which the Rams initially tried to prevent by limiting ticket sales to the opposing team.
If you want to back the 49ers, I would do it sooner rather than later because I think this spread tightens a bit and goes under the key number of three. If it does, you may be better served taking the 49ers money line because of the low probability of the game ending with a one or two-point margin of victory. If the line moves to +3, a fair-value money line is +130 based on how often teams getting three points in the spread win straight up and if it drops to +2½ a fair-value money line is +108.
There is also a prop bet in this game worth exploring. As of Wednsday morning, Fanduel was offering Jimmy Garoppolo over 222.5 passing yards at -114. Projections from Football Outsiders and Pro Football Focus forecast Garoppolo will have an average of 260 passing yards against the Rams. Those estimates infer a price of -330 for over 222.5 passing yards, a huge discrepancy that makes this an attractive proposition. | null | null | null | null | null |
When his death was confirmed by Chinese police, it triggered an outpouring of grief and nationwide soul-searching over cyberbullying, mental health and abandoned children. By Tuesday night, a hashtag of his name had been viewed 2.4 billion times on the microblog Weibo, as many asked how Liu could have been let down so frequently and utterly by society.
As if as a reminder of that fact, one of the last things Liu Xuezhou shared on social media in the days before his suicide was pictures of himself in flip-flops on Sanya beaches, staring out to sea or horsing around with school friends. Across multiple posts, he had spelled out, in English, the word “rebirth.” | null | null | null | null | null |
At the Art Museum of the Americas, a wide-reaching showcase of Mexican women
‘Women in All Their Diversity’ may not quite live up to the broad title, but this group exhibition is a testament to women’s creativity.
“Woman Walking by a Pink Wall,” by Joy Laville. (Gift of Elena and William Kimberly/Art Museum of the Americas)
From Joy Laville’s melancholy prints to Marta Palau’s exuberant installation art, “Women in All Their Diversity” covers a lot of territory. Still, the title of the group exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas is too sweeping. The 18 artists on view represent just one country — Mexico — and span less than a single century. Nearly all the artwork was made since 1940; the most recent piece is from 2010.
Yet even in that limited context, the selection is wide-reaching. Many of the artists are not natives of Mexico, and while some of the emigres stuck with European styles, others embraced their new land and its culture (or cultures). All the pieces are from the permanent collections of the Art Museum of the Americas (part of the Organization of American States) or Washington’s Mexican Cultural Institute, and were chosen by Marco Polo Juárez Cruz, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland.
The British-born Laville (1923-2018) is represented mostly by lithographs of domestic scenes, rendered in gentle pastels, and often with a serene sea in the background. The stylized images don’t convey contentment, however. Made after her husband died in a plane crash, the prints express isolation and even despair. In one, a woman sits in front of a picture of a couple on the wall behind her, kept company only by memories.
Palau, whose family fled Spain after dictator Francisco Franco took control, arrived in Tijuana as a child in 1940. She ultimately began to make modern-day ritual objects, inspired by Amazonian Indigenous art and Mexico’s pre-Columbian past. Her “Nualli: Círculo de Sal” is a six-foot-high fiber-and-paper sculpture, suggestive of both a tree and an animal. It’s pierced by three arrows and erected on a circular patch of dirt marked by a ring of salt. (In many traditions, salt is associated with purification.) “Naulli” means sorcerer or sorceress in Nahuatl, an Aztec language, and Palau’s installation has an incantatory power.
Teresa Olabuenaga, born in Mexico City in 1958, has also investigated her country’s pre-Hispanic handiwork. Her large piece of Amate paper, made of tree bark, has a lovely range of hues from earthy browns to glimmering, mineral-like golds.
Equally sensuous are the prints and paintings of Olga Dondé (1937-2004), a Mexican native who lived in D.C. in the 1980s. Her renderings of ripe, colorful fruit are both realistic and metaphorical, hinting at human fecundity and carnality. An etching of cactus paddles by Maria E. Figueroa, who was born in 1950, is as voluptuous in form as Olabuenga’s work, but monochromatic, with a composition keyed to a vivid contrast of black and white.
There’s a tropical lushness, but also a residue of European surrealism, in the lithograph by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), a British-born artist who arrived in Mexico after World War II disrupted her romance with German artist Max Ernst. “Tuesday” depicts a trio of women with such impossible animals as a striped cat with a lizardlike tail. Helen Escobedo (1934-2010) was born in Mexico, but clearly was exposed to European art. Her primary-colored print, one of the show’s few abstractions, is as geometrically musical as one of Mondrian’s boogie-woogie-inspired paintings.
Photographer Graciela Iturbide's ground-level view of modern Mexico
Among the more recent entries are photographs by artists with very different styles: Graciela Iturbide and Daniela Edburg. Iturbide, born in Mexico City in 1942, makes pictures of everyday life, such as this show’s black-and-white images of Mexican American women in East Los Angeles. Edburg, a Texas native born in 1975, poses fictional scenarios that often incorporate knitted and crocheted objects.
That doesn’t mean scarves and sweaters. In Edburg’s large-format 2010 digital photo, “Cerebro,” a woman appears to have paused during a trip through a rocky, mountainous landscape. She sits on a suitcase, next to a smaller piece of luggage that’s topped with a model of a human brain, knitted in pink and light-blue yarn. The scenario is rooted in the landscape yet highlights craft — specifically, a skill usually associated with women. Visually, “Cerebro” doesn’t have much in common with the other pieces in this show, but it is a testament to female creativity.
Women in All Their Diversity
Art Museum of the Americas, 202 18th St. NW. museum.oas.org.
Dates: Through March 13. | null | null | null | null | null |
Firefighters spray water to put out a fire at the Planned Parenthood building in Knoxville, Tenn., on Dec. 31. (Caitie McMekin/Knoxville News Sentinel/AP)
“This is a huge step for abortion access in Tennessee,” he said. Limits depend on individual doctors’ comfort levels, and most providers in the area are stricter, he added. Because of this, patients whose pregnancies fall outside their gestational age limit often travel to the closest clinics that can serve them — in Atlanta, about three and a half hours away.
Looking for more coverage on gender and identity? | null | null | null | null | null |
We can say a couple of things about this: One is that it doesn’t yet appear to be the prevalent view on the right — with views toward toward Putin. Polling also suggests that, despite in Ukraine’s favor. And two is that there are some signs that this could change.
A poll released in July by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was the latest to suggest Americans’ supposed noninterventionist turn in recent years wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It showed a continued increase in the percentage of Americans who favored sending U.S. troops if Russia were to invade Ukraine.
Likewise, an Economist/YouGov poll released just last month showed very little difference between the two parties. While 41 percent of Democrats said the U.S. should defend Ukraine with military force, 37 percent of Republicans agreed. (About 2 in 10 on each side opposed using military force. About 4 in 10 of each offered no opinion.)
But even in that poll, you begin to see where the partisan differences could creep in. The poll asked whether it was more important to take a strong stand so Russia doesn’t take over Ukraine, or for the U.S. to maintain good relations with Russia. While Democrats favored the former option by 50 points, Republicans favored it by 32 points.
And a more recent YouGov poll, conducted for Yahoo News and released this week, suggests that there could be some more cleaving on this issue. While Democrats said by a 44-23 margin that the United States has a responsibility to protect Ukraine, Republicans said it does not have such a duty, by a slight 40-36 margin.
That view echoes, in part, the kind of rhetoric we’re seeing from Carlson and a few House members like Reps. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Anthony Sabatini (R-Fla.) and the GOP congressman Kinzinger referenced, who have basically said there is no role for the United States in the looming conflict and that we shouldn’t pick sides against Putin.
What’s pretty clear about these views is that they are malleable. This issue came to the fore with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, but otherwise it’s not something that will have been front-of-mind for many Americans. That’s evidenced by the many who don’t offer an opinion in some of these polls. It also suggests the line pushed by the likes of Carlson could catch on, with potentially significant repercussions for U.S. foreign policy.
Carlson often pretends as if nobody has offered any real justifications for siding with Ukraine in such a conflict. In doing so, he ignores the most obvious ones like its strategic importance as a barrier between Russia and the rest of Europe, as well the fact that the United States in 1994 literally gave Ukraine assurances that it would be protected if Russia were to invade. (It did so in exchange for Ukraine giving up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, in what is known as the Budapest Memorandum.)
And however attractive that kind of dismissiveness toward our interests in Ukraine might be in some portions of today’s GOP, foreign policy is perhaps that one area in which the establishment wing of the party has shown some resolve in standing up to the loud, Trumpian portions of its base — and even standing up to Trump himself. Also, while Carlson has a significant following, this is otherwise something that’s being shouted largely from the rafters. Trump himself has used the Ukraine situation to criticize President Biden, but hasn’t otherwise taken a position on what should be done moving forward. | null | null | null | null | null |
An Oklahoma State football coach saved a national champion wrestler after a fiery car crash
A.J. Ferrari, seen here during the semifinal round of the NCAA wrestling championships last March, was airlifted to the University of Oklahoma Medical Center in Oklahoma City after a car crash Monday night. (Jeff Roberson/Associated Press)
An Oklahoma State football coach stepped up to do his “citizen duty” when he came upon the scene of a fiery car crash Monday night and discovered that it involved two of the school’s athletes.
Kasey Dunn, the Cowboys’ offensive coordinator, and an unidentified good Samaritan stopped and pulled A.J. Ferrari, the 2021 NCAA champion wrestler in the 197-pound class, from the wreckage of his 2019 Dodge Durango. Isai Rodriguez, a member of the track and field team and a passenger in the car, had managed to get out on his own.
Cowboys wrestling coach John Smith told reporters Tuesday that Dunn had phoned him and “you could hear it in his voice — as anyone would — there was some fright to it,” Smith said. “When you have another coach telling you that — and you knowing him well — you’re just thinking the worst and hoping and praying for the best.”
Ferrari, a 20-year-old sophomore, and Rodriguez, a 23-year-old senior, are inseparable friends despite competing in different sports and were headed back to the Stillwater, Okla., school after a youth wrestling practice in nearby Cushing when, according to an Oklahoma Highway Patrol report obtained by KOTV and the Tulsa World, Ferrari tried to pass three cars in a no-passing zone on a hill shortly after 8 p.m. on State Highway 33, striking a pickup truck head-on before going off the road and flipping “an unknown number of times.” Valenda McKee, the 56-year-old driver of the truck, was uninjured and all three were wearing seat belts.
Dunn sprang into action just before the car burst into flames. He wasn’t the only person who happened to come upon the wreckage.
“He did tell me a big man showed up and helped him figure out how to get [A.J.] out and they got him out and then all of a sudden, this guy was gone,” Smith said. “I don’t know what to think of that, but it’s a story we can all be thankful for.
“I’m sure glad he was there. I don’t know how many people would go to a car that was on fire and pull them out, but I’m sure glad Coach Dunn was there.”
The injuries to Ferrari, who was airlifted to the University of Oklahoma Medical Center in Oklahoma City, were the most serious, but his father, A.J. Sr., called it “a miracle that he didn’t have anything broken or any long term head issues” on Facebook. “He has fluid in his lungs that is affecting his oxygen levels and some bad bruising with some internal bleeding, so they are keeping him here. If you saw the car and A.J., you would know this is a miracle.”
The elder Ferrari asked for prayers for “Isaí and [for] A.J.’s oxygen levels to get back to normal, the removal of the fluid on his lung and the internal bleeding to stop. GodisGreat!” A hospital spokesperson told the Tulsa World that Ferrari is in serious condition. Rodriguez was taken to Stillwater Medical Center with internal torso, arm, leg and head injuries. OSU director of track and field Dave Smith told the World that he expected Rodriguez to remain hospitalized overnight.
“I didn’t see the vehicle until late last night,” John Smith said. “They’re lucky. Definitely somebody watching over those two, as well as the others that were involved in the wreck.”
Ferrari and Rodriguez forged a friendship that transcends their sports. “Those two dudes are kind of inseparable,” Dave Smith told the World.
They root for one another and are frequent workout partners, too. “I think they found a connection that both of them want to be the best in their sport,” John Smith said.
Ferrari, who is from Allen, Texas, recently signed with WWE as part of its “Next In Line” program. Rodriguez, who is from Ringwood, Okla., earned second-team All-America honors with a 10th place finish in the NCAA Championships last year.
OSU sports has had a history of tragic accidents involving athletes. In 2001, 10 people associated with the men’s basketball team died in a plane crash after a game in Colorado, and women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke and assistant coach Miranda Serna were killed in a 2011 plane crash during a recruiting trip to Arkansas.
Dave Smith was at home when a trainer called to tell him of Monday’s car crash, and the uncertainty of the information was unsettling.
“I just sat down immediately and said, ‘No, what happened,”’ Smith said. “She was very cautious in what she was telling me, but the information she had, it was severe and it was very emotional immediately. It didn’t turn out that way, so thank God, but my mind went to what was the worst case scenario based on what she said and it wasn’t good.”
He was unable to reach Rodriguez, whose phone was destroyed in the fire, and spent an “hour’s worth of panic” trying to reach his athletes and Rodriguez’s parents before just driving to Stillwater Medical Center. There, he was relieved to find Rodriguez.
“For an hour there, your mind kind of goes to the worst and you’re hoping for the best,” he said. “That hour was tough.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Barty is attempting to become the first Australian woman in 44 years to win the Australian singles title. The reigning Wimbledon and 2019 French Open champion holds a 2-1 career edge over Keys, including a win the last time they played in the quarterfinals at Roland Garros in ‘19, but she’s wary of the American’s array of shots. “Maddie is an exceptional athlete, she has a great serve, great first-strike off the return and off her first ball after her serve,” Barty said. “A lot of the time it’s about trying to put her in an uncomfortable position.” | null | null | null | null | null |
No longer Dad’s army. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
From its birth in the War of Independence of 1948, the Israel Defense Forces has carefully cultivated its reputation as a people’s army, unique in the world both as a fighting force and for the commitment of the population to its service. But while there is still mandatory conscription, the IDF’s place in Israeli society is changing along with the nature of modern warfare. That’s something neither the military nor the government should resist.
Today, Israeli men and women are conscripted at age 18, serve for two to three years, and then are placed in active reserve units. There are exceptions to this universal draft. Married women, Arabs, ultra-orthodox men and those judged unsuitable are exempted or given early release. Still, most Israelis serve as a matter of course, and many with pride. | null | null | null | null | null |
Md. board approves $3.4 billion contract to finish Purple Line
The new $3.43 billion construction contract includes about $1.1 billion of work that the state has paid for.
“This project is significant,” Franchot said before the unanimous approval. “Obviously we need to get it done, and we owe it to Marylanders to get it done as quickly as possible.”
The financial agreement is between the state and the private consortium, known as Purple Line Transit Partners and led by infrastructure investor Meridiam. The construction contract is between the consortium and a team led by the U.S. subsidiaries of Spanish construction firms Dragados and OHL.
State officials told the board that the new team, known as Maryland Transit Solutions, had the strongest technical proposal and lowest price of the two bidders. The board’s approval of the new construction contract was required as part of the legal settlement over the original contractor’s departure, even though the state isn’t a party to it.
State officials attributed much of the cost increase to changes in the project’s “risk profile” and the pandemic’s effects on insurance rates, labor shortages and the supply chain. The state will assume more financial risk under the new contract, including for “any unknown defects” in the work done by the original construction team and any additional pandemic-related problems.
Officials also are eyeing the line’s 21 stations to attract economic development in struggling, auto-dependent inner suburbs while providing better access to jobs from communities between Metro stations. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The International Olympic Committee finally takes a stand
Members of Israel's Olympic judo team celebrate after defeating the Russian Olympic Committee team in their bronze medal match at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo on July 31, 2021. (Vincent Thian/AP)
Emily Schrader is a former elite-level figure skater, the chief executive of Social Lite Creative and a columnist at the Jerusalem Post.
Ahead of next week’s opening of the 2022 Beijing Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has come under much-deserved criticism for allowing the Winter Games to take place in a country with an egregious human rights record.
It’s hardly the first time the IOC has faced condemnation for its refusal to take principled stances.
But after years of resisting calls to act, there is at least one small sign that putting pressure on the IOC is not completely futile: a report that late last year, the athletic body said countries would be barred from hosting international sports competitions if they banned Israeli athletes from taking part.
In recent decades, oppressive governments have repeatedly used international sporting events as political tools, which has resulted in nations denying entry to Israeli athletes and individual athletes refusing to compete against Israelis. Worse, it has also led to the arrest, imprisonment and even the execution of athletes who won’t play along with their governments’ policies.
Last month, the Jerusalem Post reported that a letter from the IOC states international sports federations must ensure that athletes from all nations can participate in their events. The letter reportedly called out Malaysia for incidents involving Israeli athletes and Serbia, which barred boxers from Kosovo from a competition.
Unequal treatment has been a recurring problem for Israeli athletes.
In November, the World Squash Championships were canceled after Malaysia, the host country, refused to grant competitors from Israel visas to enter the country. In 2019, the World Para Swimming Championships were moved for the same reason.
In the 2004 Olympics, an Iranian athlete withdrew from a judo match with an Israeli to avoid competing against him. In the 2016 Olympics, an Egyptian athlete would not shake the hand of an Israeli athlete in a judo match. In 2019, Iranian judoka Saeid Mollaei refused to withdraw from a match against Israel and was forced to flee for his life. Last year in Tokyo, Algerian judoka Fethi Nourine withdrew from the Olympics rather than compete against an Israeli, in “solidarity” with Palestinians. The IOC did nothing.
The lack of response from the IOC until now has emboldened oppressive regimes to increase the pressure on their own athletes. In one terrible, high-profile case, Iran executed wrestler Navid Afkari on trumped-up charges after he took part in protests against the government. Iranian Taekwondo champion Kimia Alizadeh, meanwhile, was forced to leave Iran over refusing to wear a hijab. At the same time, Iran sent Javad Foroughi, a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, to compete in the Tokyo Olympics last year as a sharpshooter.
Iran’s approach, and that of others who boycott Israel, is wildly unfair to the athletes — and it is also a violation of the principles of international sporting federations including the IOC. As a former elite athlete myself, I find it unconscionable that the IOC has continued to allow such action against athletes.
Sadly, there are many examples of IOC failures — from the Olympic Games in Nazi Germany to the brazen continuation of the 1972 Munich Games in which members of the Israeli team were massacred; to the current Iranian regime, which persecutes its own athletes, to holding the upcoming Winter Games in China.
After every incident, activists and human rights organizations have called on the IOC to penalize countries that violate the values of the Olympic Games. Yet the IOC has always dragged its feet, at least until now.
That’s why the news of last month’s letter stands out. It is precisely the kind of leadership from the IOC that has been so lacking in recent years, allowing the sports world to be polluted with politicking that should have no place in competition.
Although it’s not the IOC’s job to promote human rights around the world, it certainly is its job to ensure that participating countries respect the values of the Olympics and do not persecute their own athletes. As one of the world’s premier sports bodies, the IOC has the ability to set the example for other sports federations.
This first small step against discrimination represents a major shift toward correcting a historical failure. Though there is much more work to be done in terms of taking principled stands against human rights violations and protecting athletes around the world, this latest development regarding Israel at least raises the prospect of progress in other areas in the future. | null | null | null | null | null |
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo (D) speaks to reporters after meeting with President Biden at the White House in July. (Stefani Reynolds for The Washington Post)
City lawmakers in San Jose, Calif., took a preliminary vote Tuesday to require gun owners to carry liability insurance and pay an annual fee, a step toward adopting what the mayor said is the first measure of its kind in the United States aiming to reduce the risk of gun harm by incentivizing safer behavior.
The San Jose City Council overwhelmingly approved the Gun Harm Reduction Ordinances, despite opposition from gun owners who say the law would violate their Second Amendment rights. The push for liability insurance and an annual fee was introduced by San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo (D) after a May 2021 shooting at a light-rail facility that killed nine people and the gunman, who took his own life.
The city council decided in a 10-to-1 vote that gun owners would be required to purchase liability insurance through their homeowner’s or renter’s insurance so that the plan would cover everyone in their household. Lawmakers also voted, 8 to 3, for gun owners to pay an annual fee of about $25 that would go toward a nonprofit organization focusing on gun violence prevention programs in San Jose.
The ordinance must be approved next month before it can take effect by August.
Before the vote, Liccardo estimated that city residents incur about $442 million of annual gun-related costs, including “private financial costs to individuals and families,” and that gun violence costs San Jose taxpayers $40 million a year in emergency response services.
San Jose is the first city to pass such a measure, according to Brady United, a national nonprofit organization that advocates against gun violence. Gun owners and gun rights groups have promised to sue if the measure becomes law.
The president of the National Association for Gun Rights and executive director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights, Dudley Brown, did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday. Brown told CNN before the vote that there would be legal action if the city passed “this ridiculous tax on the constitutional right to gun ownership.”
Liccardo has contended that although the Second Amendment protects a citizen’s right to own a gun, “it does not require taxpayers to subsidize that right.”
The vote in San Jose comes weeks after President Biden called on Congress to take action on his gun-control agenda. The president has pushed for the Senate to pass several gun measures, including one that would require licensed firearms dealers to conduct background checks. About $470 billion of the American Rescue Plan — the $1.9 trillion stimulus package Congress passed last year — was earmarked for cities and states to pay for measures including reducing gun violence.
Liccardo told KTVU this week that the push for stricter legislation in San Jose came, in part, because of inaction in Congress, saying that lawmakers have not done enough outside of “thoughts and prayers” to address gun laws. The mayor said the proposals were modeled after the public health approaches to issues such as road-accident deaths, tobacco use and teen pregnancy.
The ordinance on liability insurance would require thousands of owners to have gun safes, install trigger locks and take gun safety classes. The liability insurance would cover damages or losses stemming from any accidental use of a gun, such as property damage, injury or death, the ordinance says.
On Tuesday night, the city council held an hours-long meeting to discuss the gun-related measures. Some council members and residents said they supported the ordinances because of their own personal experience with gun violence. One mother spoke of her daughter’s being killed because of gun violence in San Jose. Council member Maya Esparza referred to the 2019 shooting at a food festival in nearby Gilroy, Calif., that left three people dead and a dozen others injured.
“My own family has been touched by gun violence, particularly from the Gilroy shooting,” Esparza told CBS affiliate KPIX.
But some critics argued that the liability and fee requirements would do nothing to stop gun crimes, with one resident saying the city “cannot tax a constitutional right.” Others said the requirements do not address the issues surrounding illegally obtained weapons that are either stolen or purchased without background checks.
“People got killed and you got the audacity to come up in here and act like you’re going to be the savior of us all,” one resident said, according to KPIX.
Liccardo acknowledged some of those concerns, saying, “This won’t stop mass shootings and keep bad people from committing violent crime,” according to the Associated Press. He added that most gun deaths nationwide are suicides or result from accidents or other circumstances.
While the vote was denounced by gun rights groups, it was celebrated by gun-control advocates such as Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun reform nonprofit group.
“Following unthinkable tragedies from gun violence, San José has taken action that will save lives,” Watts said in a statement.
The mayor’s office said a private law firm has offered to represent the city at no charge, in case San Jose is sued by gun rights groups. Liccardo said in a news release that he hopes other cities will replicate the gun measure adopted in San Jose: “I look forward to supporting the efforts of others to replicate these initiatives across the nation.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Justice Stephen G. Breyer will retire at the end of the current Supreme Court term, according to a source familiar with his plans, giving President Biden the chance to make his mark on the Supreme Court by nominating the first African-American female justice and reinforcing the court’s liberal minority.
Breyer, 83, is the court’s oldest justice and he has been under unprecedented pressure to retire while Democrats have narrow control of the Senate, which must confirm Supreme Court nominees. The current term ends at the end of June.
NBC and CNN first reported the news, which had been expected.
A replacement chosen by Biden would not change the conservative supermajority on the court; Breyer is one of only three liberals. But it would give Biden the chance to have his nominee considered by a more favorable Senate, and mean a younger colleague for the court’s other liberals, Sonia Sotomayor, 67, and Elena Kagan, 61.
Recent Supreme Court confirmations have been largely party-line votes, with a Republican White House and GOP Senate in charge.
Biden’s pledge to nominate an African-American woman is a first. There have been two Black men on the court — Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas — and five women, including three current members of the court: Sotomayor, Kagan and Barrett.
The two women most often mentioned as possibilities for Biden are California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer Supreme Court clerk who in June was confirmed to join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit. | null | null | null | null | null |
Maryland board approves $3.4 billion contract to finish Purple Line
The new $3.43-billion construction contract includes about $1.1 billion of work that the state already has paid for.
“This project is significant,” Franchot said before the unanimous approval. "Obviously we need to get it done, and we owe it to Marylanders to get it done as quickly as possible.”
The financial agreement is between the state and the private consortium, known as Purple Line Transit Partners and led by infrastructure investor Meridiam. The construction contract is between the consortium and a team led by the American subsidiaries of Spanish construction firms Dragados and OHL.
State officials told the board the new team, known as Maryland Transit Solutions, had the strongest technical proposal and lowest price of the two bidders. The board’s approval of the new construction contract was required as part of the legal settlement over the original contractor’s departure, even though the state isn’t a party to it.
State officials attributed much of the cost increase to changes in the project’s “risk profile" and the pandemic’s effects on insurance rates, labor shortages and the supply chain. The state will assume more financial risk under the new contract, including for “any unknown defects” in the work done by the original construction team and any additional pandemic-related problems.
Local officials also are eyeing the line’s 21 stations to attract economic development in struggling, auto-dependent inner suburbs while providing better access to jobs from communities between Metro stations. | null | null | null | null | null |
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaks during a news conference in Berlin on Jan. 25, ahead of talks with French President Emmanuel Macron. (Tobias Schwarz/Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
The messages emanating from Germany are “much too soft” and can be interpreted by President Vladimir Putin as a “sign of weakness and hesitation,” Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, wrote in comments to The Washington Post. “The vast majority of Ukrainians even believe that this unwillingness of Germany to act preventively and not to put the Kremlin under extreme pressure is nothing else [than] a pure appeasement politics.”
For Germany’s new chancellor — who took over from the crisis-vetted Angela Merkel after 16 years — steering the country’s Russia policy has meant trying to helm a three-party coalition, negotiating with pro-Russian voices within his own party and navigating questions over the 750-mile, $11 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Germany and Russia.
The stakes are high, with an estimated 100,000 Russian troops amassed on the edges of Ukraine. But as NATO attempts to present a united front, Germany has appeared as a weak link that has often left it on the defensive with allies.
On Saturday, Berlin’s ambassador in Kyiv was summoned by the Ukrainian government to stress the “categorical unacceptability” of the German navy chief’s comments that Putin “probably deserves” respect. Meanwhile, Berlin faced questions over reports that it has blocked the transfer of decades-old howitzers from Estonia to Ukraine. (It says it has not done so, and just hasn’t made up its mind about whether to issue resale permissions, but has agreed to ship 5,000 helmets.)
It has been a baptism of fire for Scholz, who is known for his cautious public style. The fumbling may, in part, be a new government finding its feet. But analysts and foreign officials say it’s also the result of a years-overdue need for Berlin to reassess its policy toward Moscow, which has long tried to separate expanding trade and energy ties from politics.
“You see this German government still negotiating within itself and really, in the past week, putting up a very disunified front, which is frankly dangerous at this time,” said Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Germany’s position was of sufficient concern to the Biden administration to be brought up during a visit to Berlin by CIA Director William J. Burns earlier this month, according to two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal details of the visit. Burns encouraged German officials to take a stronger line against Russia despite Berlin’s concerns about how it might affect energy markets in Europe, which are deeply reliant on Russian exports, one official said.
Since that Jan. 13 meeting, Scholz has stopped referring to Nord Stream 2 as a purely private project and said that “all options” are on the table for sanctions in the case of a Russian invasion. Western diplomats said Scholz’s clearer comments in recent days have alleviated some concerns.
In his public comments, Scholz has consistently stressed the importance of avoiding escalation, keeping the peace and leaving a door open to Russia. When it comes to sanctions, it is “prudent” to choose measures that will have the greatest effect on those who violate agreed principles, he told German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung when asked about whether Germany was prepared to accept the high cost of putting Nord Stream 2 on the line, or blocking Russia from the SWIFT international banking system.
How a divided Europe is trying to confront a united Russia
Even aside from Nord Stream II, Germany and wider Europe are heavily dependent on Russian gas. Germany is Russia’s largest trading partner after China, much of which is accounted for by gas imports. Natural gas accounts for about a third of Germany’s energy consumption, second only to oil — and that could grow because of pledges to wean off coal and nuclear.
That also means Russian dependence is growing. Russian gas is currently estimated to account for between 50 percent and 75 percent of Germany’s gas imports. That’s up from 35 percent in 2015.
Scholz, 63, squeaked a win in the country’s September elections and was officially sworn in early last month after forming a coalition made up of his center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the more libertarian Free Democrats.
“This government wanted to do something about climate change, they want to change the face of Germany and want to make it carbon-free, and all of a sudden they are completely mired in a huge foreign policy crisis,” said Markus Ziener, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “And I think they are struggling with this quite a bit.”
The Social Democrats are divided. While Scholz is from its more pragmatic wing, there are still strains within the party rooted in its historic Ostpolitik, or Eastern Policy, which favors change through rapprochement, as espoused by the party’s Cold War chancellor Willy Brandt. And Scholz’s influence over his party is limited. He lost its leadership contest last year even though he was picked as the chancellor candidate.
However, there are differences over “whether it’s appropriate to give public interviews threatening the other side with sanctions,” Stegner said.
Particularly since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, many in Scholz’s party have taken a more realistic view of Ostpolitik. But that legacy remains.
“It’s very stupid to think all of that is just old business and doesn’t count anymore,” said Stegner. “Of course the circumstances have changed. What hasn’t changed is history, what hasn’t changed is geography, what hasn’t changed are the interests.”
“I don’t think anyone could really argue that Putin is worse than Brezhnev,” Stegner said of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. “It’s fair and necessary to see the other side’s interest, to talk about interests, rather than threatening the other side in public interviews.”
It’s a sentiment that’s also been echoed by Markus Söder, a leader of Germany’s Christian Democrats and one of the country’s most popular politicians. Russia is “a difficult partner, but not an enemy of Europe,” he said.
Past sanctions on Russia have had “hardly any effect,” and new ones could hurt Germany just as much, he said.
For some in Scholz’s SPD, providing weapons to Ukraine that might be used against Russian soldiers is simply a “no-go,” said Ziener.
“The Social Democrats have a couple of convictions when it comes to Russia. One is ‘never again’ — that we should never go to war with Russia again, even through proxies,” he said. “That is one of the reasons why the government has such issues with allowing others even to send weapons.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also has dueling pressures. She touted a hard line toward Russia during the election campaign, and was praised for her clear words during a joint news conference with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov last week on her first visit to Moscow, saying it was hard not to take the buildup of troops as a threat.
But she hails from the Green party, which, with its roots in the peace movement, has its own issues with arms deliveries.
Baerbock has cited Germany’s wartime history as the reason for not being able to help Ukraine with defensive arms. Germany has stressed that it is contributing to NATO troop reinforcements in Eastern Europe, and a military hospital in Kyiv.
While Germany’s arms exports hit a record $10 billion last year, the new government has said it hopes to pursue a more restrictive arms policy. Wednesday’s announcement to send 5,000 helmets is a “joke,” Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, told Germany’s Bild newspaper. “What does Germany want to send next in support? Pillows?” he said.
During her trip to Moscow, Baerbock acknowledged the wartime “suffering and destruction” Germans wrought upon the people of the Soviet Union.
But Melnyk, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, has said that — if history is the issue — Germany’s responsibility should be toward the Ukrainian people, who lost at least 8 million lives during the Nazi occupation. He called on Germany to “finally demonstrate a true leadership and not hide itself behind artificial excuses.”
Liz Sly in London, Vanessa Guinan-Bank in Berlin, and Shane Harris and John Hudson in Washington contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Judith Leyster (b. 1609). Self-Portrait, 1630. In the collection of National Gallery of Art. (National Gallery of Art)
Judith Leyster (b. 1609)
Self-Portrait, 1630
In the collection of National Gallery of Art
This Dutch painter was lost to art history for decades
Judith Leyster was mistaken for Frans Hals and not rediscovered until the end of the 19th century. But her smile was unmistakably her own.
I love this self-portrait by Judith Leyster, a 17th-century Dutch artist who, to art historians, didn’t exist until 1892. That year, someone decided to take a close look at a painting acquired by the Louvre as a Frans Hals. They found the initials “J” and “L” crossed by a star and soon enough linked it to Leyster. (Her family name means “lode star” or “guide star,” which was also the name of her father’s brewery.) Thenceforth, Leyster was magnanimously deemed both to have lived and to have left behind a convincing body of work.
More than 30 paintings have since been attributed to her. This one, at the National Gallery of Art, is probably the most famous, and you can see why. It shimmers with chutzpah. To be confident is one thing. To advertise that confidence with an unselfconscious, open-mouthed, haplessly disarming smile — to resist the urge, in other words, to fake an air of supercilious self-importance — is the very best thing.
The unfinished work on the easel in the picture belongs to the genre of the “merry company,” a loose term describing pictures of people carousing, drinking and making music in taverns, brothels and domestic interiors (it can be difficult to tell the difference). The genre was pioneered in Haarlem in the 1610s and ’20s by artists including Hals, his brother Dirck and Willem Buytewech.
Infrared photographs of the violinist on the easel show that Leyster had initially painted a woman’s face — almost certainly her own. But she turned that witty tautology (a painting of a painter painting a painting of herself) into something brighter, less self-enclosed.
There is no firm evidence that Leyster studied with Hals, but she made loose copies of several of his works and was a witness at the baptism of one of his children. She definitely learned from his and his brother’s manner of painting, which was loosely brushed and dedicated to capturing fleeting moments of happiness. (Monet, Manet and the Impressionists loved Hals.)
Leyster most likely painted this self-portrait as a kind of application to the Haarlem painter’s guild, to which she was admitted in 1633 — one of only two women in the 17th century to be so honored.
Painting was fighting for more prestige in the Dutch republic at this time, and Leyster’s rather formal costume here with its obtrusive starched ruff (not at all conducive to easel painting) would have aligned with her generation’s attempt to elevate the profession. “Take me seriously,” it says.
You only have to look at the palette in her left hand and the bristling quiver of brushes to see she means business. But to communicate a desire to be taken seriously with a truly authentic, life-loving smile is a sort of magic trick — like competing in the 100 meters at the Olympics in a banana costume. It’s to Leyster’s great credit that she not only makes it to the finish line, but also wins graciously.
“Self-Portrait as a Lute Player” (c. 1637-1638) by Jan Miense Molenaer. Oil on panel. (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C./National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)
Leyster’s career, like that of too many talented women — in that distant century and every century since — petered out after she married. Her husband, Jan Miense Molenaer, was also a painter, and for a time they shared a studio. But that arrangement doesn’t seem to have lasted. Molenaer’s 1637-1638 self-portrait playing a lute, also in the National Gallery, is impossible not to take seriously. But one thing’s for sure: He didn’t think smiling would suit him. | null | null | null | null | null |
Marina Picasso and her son, Florian Picasso, who live in Geneva, hope to introduce their ancestor — one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and a pioneer of cubism — to the crypto trend sweeping the art world.
Purchasers will not own the Picasso ceramic, or own the rights to images depicting it: They will be buying digital tokens of which there are limited copies, which the artist’s heirs are hoping will accrue value in their own right.
NFTs have caused a stir in the art world, with entrepreneurs and financiers predicting they will change how art is valued and upend the market for digital art. They’ve already generated millions of dollars for some artists. Last March, a digital collage by a South Carolina artist known as Beeple sold for $69 million — the third highest ever price for a work by a living artist. NFTs also allow digital creators to collect royalties each time an artwork changes hands.
The ceramic is "a work that represents a face, and it’s very expressive,” she told the AP. “It’s joyful, happy. It represents life ... It’s one of those objects that have been part of our life, our intimate lives — my life with my children.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Live updates Breyer to retire, giving Biden first Supreme Court pick of his presidency
Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer in Washington, D.C. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
The White House kept its distance Wednesday when news broke of Breyer’s retirement. “It has always been the decision of any Supreme Court Justice if and when they decide to retire, and how they want to announce it, and that remains the case today,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement.
On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to nominate an African-American woman to the Supreme Court for the first time if he had the opportunity. There have been two Black men on the court — Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas — and five women, including three current members of the court: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Barrett.
Though the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice is always a seismic event, Biden’s first addition to the court won’t alter the conservative majority that was cemented with President Donald Trump’s three successful nominees.
Breyer is among the three liberal justices on the nine-member court. He was chosen in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. He is considered more moderate than others on the left and willing to search for compromise among the court’s ideologically divided justices.
During Trump’s tenure, three new conservatives were added to the court: Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Two of those — Kavanaugh and Barrett — replaced more-liberal judges, altering the court’s balance.
It is not known whom Biden will pick, but it is certain to be someone whose judicial leanings are closer to those of Breyer than any of the court’s conservatives.
Biden has pledged to put a Black woman on the court. The two women most often mentioned as possibilities are California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer Supreme Court clerk who in June was confirmed to join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Others will surely be added to the list, and Biden will probably cast a wide net. There are few Black women on the federal appellate court bench, the traditional spot from which Supreme Court nominees are chosen.
By Mariana Alfaro12:53 p.m.
Amy Coney Barrett, the latest addition to the Supreme Court, was confirmed in less than a month by a Republican-led Senate in 2020.
Former president Donald Trump announced the nomination of Barrett to the court on Sept. 26, just eight days after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an enduring icon for liberals, died on Sept. 18, 2020. The Senate officially received word of the nomination on Sept. 29, marking the start of Barrett’s confirmation process.
A bitterly divided Senate confirmed Barrett as the 115th justice to the Supreme Court just a month later, on Oct. 26. All Democrats and Republican Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) voted against her confirmation, but at the time, Republicans — led by now-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) — held 53 Senate seats.
Barrett thus became the fifth woman to join the court in its 231-year history and further cemented its conservative shift.
The battle to confirm her plunged the Senate into deeper partisan acrimony, with Democrats accusing Republicans of hypocrisy after they blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for eight months in 2016, ahead of that year’s presidential election.
Barrett’s quick confirmation signals the chances that Biden’s pick to replace Breyer will receive swift attention in the Senate, where the candidate would need only 50 Democratic votes, plus the support of Vice President Harris, to be confirmed.
By Eugene Scott12:53 p.m.
Interest in Biden’s campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court resurfaced Wednesday after Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced plans to retire. And the name Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, attracted particular attention.
Jackson was Biden’s pick to replace Attorney General Merrick Garland on the appeals court. The former district court judge was confirmed last summer by the Senate, 53 to 44, largely along party lines.
At the time, Jackson became the sixth Black woman out of 286 judges to currently sit on a federal appeals court bench, which is largely viewed as a proving ground for the Supreme Court. After Harvard Law School, Jackson was a law clerk for Breyer, whom some Democrats have been pressuring to retire after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Even before joining the appeals court, Jackson, 51, was on the shortlist of possible contenders to fulfill the president’s promise to nominate the first Black woman to the high court.
At a June 2021 news conference, Biden said: “We are putting together a list of African American women who are qualified and have the experience to be on the court. I am not going to release that until we go further down the line in vetting them as well.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Justice Stephen G. Breyer will retire at the end of the current Supreme Court term, according to a person familiar with his plans, giving President Biden the chance to make his mark on the Supreme Court by nominating the first African-American female justice and reinforcing the court’s liberal minority.
NBC News and CNN first reported the development, which had been expected.
The two women most often mentioned as replacements are Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer Supreme Court clerk who in June was confirmed to join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, a former Department of Justice official who has represented the government at the Supreme Court as deputy solicitor general.
The person familiar with his plans said it is not likely Breyer will make an announcement Wednesday — although that could change — and that Breyer could make his leaving the court contingent on the confirmation of a successor. | null | null | null | null | null |
United received $2 million in general allocation money — the largest sum relinquished in a trade since the league’s launch in 1996 — and could reap another $300,000 if Arriola hits undisclosed performance thresholds. D.C. would also collect 30 percent of a transfer fee, should Dallas sell him to a club outside of MLS.
The move leaves a significant void in United’s attack — the quick, energetic Arriola was an influential presence for 4½ years — but provides the club with the means to acquire players before the Feb. 26 opener against Charlotte and in this summer’s transfer window.
“It was a big decision for the club obviously, but it was something he wanted to do,” Dave Kasper, United’s president of soccer operations and sporting director, said in an interview. “We felt like we got a great return that will give us a lot of roster flexibility moving forward.”
Arriola, who will turn 27 next week, requested to move elsewhere for “personal reasons,” Kasper said. He declined to go into detail. Arriola — who is with the U.S. national team in Columbus, Ohio, for a World Cup qualifier Thursday against El Salvador — was not immediately available for comment.
It was also unclear how Arriola, a pure winger, would have fit into Coach Hernán Losada’s system of play. With the World Cup on the horizon, Arriola wants to showcase in his best position all year.
His first choice was Mexican power Club América. The sides were close to agreement on a transfer fee of more than $3 million (United also would’ve received a player on loan), but Arriola and Club Ámerica couldn’t agree on salary, one person familiar with the situation said.
Besides Fountas, D.C. is aiming to acquire at least two impact attackers, one of whom would be a designated player, Kasper said.
Losada, entering his second season, has been “involved in all of our offseason planning,” along with General Manager Lucy Rushton, Kasper said.
United is also sorting out its central midfield — it has yet to re-sign Júnior Moreno and Felipe Martins — and eyeing a goalkeeper to challenge starter Bill Hamid.
Meantime, United is preparing to sell 18-year-old Kevin Paredes to German club Wolfsburg for a club-record $7 million, leaving a void at left wing back. It’s also entertaining offers for 19-goal scorer Ola Kamara, 32, whose contract expires after this season. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Path Forward: The Global Economy with Kristalina Georgieva
Kristalina Georgieva is the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the face of record inflation and supply chain backlogs, Georgieva joins Washington Post columnist David Ignatius to discuss the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook and how the organization is using its firepower to support its member nations. Join Washington Post Live on Wednesday, Feb. 2 at 10:00 a.m. ET.
Provided by the International Monetary Fund.
Kristalina Georgieva currently serves as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, a position she was selected for on September 25, 2019 and has served as since October 1, 2019.
Before joining the Fund, Ms. Georgieva was CEO of the World Bank from January 2017 to September 2019, during which time she also served as Interim President of the World Bank Group for three months.
Previously, Ms. Georgieva helped shape the agenda of the European Union while serving as European Commission Vice President for Budget and Human Resources. In this capacity she oversaw the EU’s €161 billion (US $175bn) budget and 33,000 staff, as well as the EU’s response to the Euro Area debt crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis. Before that, she was Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, managing one of the world’s largest humanitarian aid budgets.
Ms. Georgieva began her career in public service at the World Bank as an environmental economist in 1993. After serving for 17 years, and in many senior positions, including Director for Sustainable Development, Director for the Russian Federation, Director for Environment, and Director for Environment and Social Development for the East Asia and Pacific Region, her career culminated in her appointment as Vice President and Corporate Secretary in 2008. In this role, she served as the interlocutor between the World Bank Group’s senior management, its Board of Directors, and its shareholder countries.
Ms. Georgieva serves on many international panels including as co-Chair of the Global Commission on Adaptation, and as co-chair of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing. She has authored and co-authored over 100 publications on environmental and economic policy, including textbooks on macro- and microeconomics.
Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1953, Ms. Georgieva holds a Ph.D in Economic Science and a M.A. in Political Economy and Sociology from the University of National and World Economy, Sofia, where she was an Associate Professor between 1977 and 1993. During her academic career, she was visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2010, she was named “European of the Year” and “Commissioner of the Year” by European Voice in recognition for her leadership in the EU’s response to humanitarian crises. In October 2020, she received the Atlantic Council’s Distinguished International Leadership Award in acknowledgement of exceptional and distinctive contributions during her career of public service. | null | null | null | null | null |
The NFL and its rulemaking competition committee expect to consider making changes this offseason to the league’s overtime format, particularly as it relates to postseason games. But it is far from certain that any modifications actually will be enacted, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.
The offseason deliberations will come amid the renewed scrutiny of the overtime rules that followed Sunday’s 42-36 triumph by the Kansas City Chiefs over the Buffalo Bills in a memorable AFC divisional-round playoff game.
The Chiefs, in a thrilling game being hailed by many observers as one of the best in NFL postseason history, won the overtime coin toss and prevailed with an opening-drive touchdown, with the Bills not getting possession of the ball.
The league and team owners put that system into place, initially for postseason games only, in 2010. That format was applied to regular season games beginning in 2012. Before that, the first team to score in overtime won the game, even if by field goal.
The Chiefs made a rule-change proposal in 2019 to guarantee each team of at least one possession in overtime. They’d lost that year’s AFC championship game to the New England Patriots, concluding their 2018 season, on an opening-possession overtime touchdown by the Patriots. But the Chiefs’ proposal was not approved. It was tabled at the annual league meeting in March that year and then did not even come to a vote of the owners at their May meeting because of a lack of support.
Meanwhile, NFL rulemakers always have been wary of extending games because of injury risks and because teams must recover to play their following games; in the postseason, that consideration would apply only to the winning team. There has been reluctance to go to a college-style overtime format in which teams alternate possessions from a predetermined yard line. | null | null | null | null | null |
“The longer they remain in the water without food, without water, exposed to the marine environment, the sun, the sea conditions … every moment that passes, it becomes more dire and unlikely that anyone will survive in those conditions,” Burdian said.
“We do suspect that this is a case of human smuggling,” Burdian said. “This event occurred in a normal route for smuggling from the Bahamas.”
The number of migrants making the risky voyage to the Florida coast has been rising in recent months due to factors ranging from the coronavirus pandemic to instability in countries such as Haiti.
In 2021, the State Department reported that the high unemployment rate during the pandemic may have exacerbated the smuggling crisis, as traffickers recruit migrants through false offers of employment. In the Bahamas, people without Bahamian citizenship, such as those born to a non-Bahamian father, are at heightened risk of trafficking, as well as those displaced by hurricanes.
Migrants making the journey from nations such as Haiti frequently stop in the Bahamas en route to the United States. Some regroup in Bimini, the westernmost islands of the archipelago, before continuing on to the Miami area, which lies 50 miles west. The waters are frequently traversed by Coast Guard officers.
Since Jan. 1, the Coast Guard reported it has already rescued 557 Haitians and 586 Cubans attempting to migrate by sea. The numbers are significant compared with totals from all of 2021, when they rescued 1,527 Haitians and 838 Cuban migrants.
The trek is perilous: The boats often sail through treacherous channels such as the Mona Passage, which lies between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and is filled with tidal currents and sand banks, making it one of the most dangerous straits in the Caribbean. Migrants often travel in overloaded, poorly maintained and constructed vessels.
“The weather can change rapidly, and if you are traveling in a makeshift vessel, it is very easy to capsize and can result in people losing their lives,” Petty Officer Jose Hernandez said. “Especially if you are not wearing any proper safety equipment.”
Three Coast Guard vessels, known as cutters, and multiple Navy aircrafts are deployed for Wednesday’s search, Burdian said. Search conditions were good Wednesday, but she noted, “we can’t search forever.”
Since 2014, at least 967 migrants have disappeared during the voyages in the Caribbean, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. However, that does not account for the many vessels that go undetected, given the “secret” nature of these sea voyages and the remoteness of the routes, the agency said in a statement.
“Saving lives is an absolute priority,” she added. “The families of those missing migrants need answers, and those politically responsible need better information and data to guarantee a safe and dignified migration for everyone.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Justice Breyer will retire at the end of the current Supreme Court term, according to a person familiar with his plans, giving President Biden the chance to make his mark on the Supreme Court by nominating the first African-American female justice and reinforcing the court’s liberal minority.
President Bill Clinton and Stephen Breyer walk to the White House Rose Garden, May 16, 1994, where Breyer was officially introduced as Clinton's Supreme Court nominee.
Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), right, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, talks to Supreme Court nominee Breyer, center, as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) looks on from Capitol in Washington, D.C. on May 17, 1994.
Justice Breyer arrives for a discussion on "How the Electronic Information Explosion is Transforming the American Legal System" at Georgetown University Law Centerm, March 20, 2007, in Washington, D.C.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Breyer talk prior to a ceremonial swearing-in ceremony, Feb. 1, 2006, for new Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the East Room of the White House.
Breyer, center, reads to visiting fourth-grade students, from Amidon Elementary, at the Supreme Court Library, April 12, 2007 in Washington, D.C.
Breyer holds a copy of the U.S. Constitution as he discussed the role of the Supreme Court with high school students at Harvard Law School in Cambridge Mass., Sept. 7, 2007, during an event to promote the launch of consource.org, an online library of constitutional source documents.
Justices Breyer, left, and Clarence Thomas preside to testify on Capitol Hill, April 23, 2009, before the House financial services and general government subcommittee hearing on the court's fiscal year 2010 appropriations.
From right, President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Justices Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg listen to Regina Spektor perform at an event, May 27, 2010, honoring Jewish American Heritage Month in the East Room of the White House.
Breyer responds to a question at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on Sept. 29, 2010. Breyer spoke at a forum during which he took questions from a moderator about the Supreme Court and his new book, "Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View."
Prince Charles, left, walks with Breyer as he arrives at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on May 3, 2011.
Justices Breyer, left, and Antonin Scalia testify, Oct. 5, 2011, during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. The justice testified on "Considering the Role of Judges Under the Constitution of the United States."
President Donald Trump greets Breyer before the State of the Union address, Jan. 30, 2018, in the House of Representatives chamber on Capitol Hill.
Breyer, seated second from right, and the other justices of the Supreme Court, seated from left, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, and standing from left, Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, pose for a group photo in Washington, D.C. on April 23, 2021.
Breyer during an interview in his Washington, D.C. office on Aug. 27, 2021. | null | null | null | null | null |
Breyer's retirement won't change the Supreme Court's conservative bent
That conservative majority won't change with the retirement of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, which was reported early Wednesday afternoon. President Biden has pledged to nominate a Black woman, and those most often mentioned are “Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer Supreme Court clerk who in June was confirmed to join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, a former Department of Justice official who has represented the government at the Supreme Court as deputy solicitor general,” writes my colleague Robert Barnes. Breyer's retirement now, while Democrats still control the Senate, could smooth the path for his successor's confirmation.
The current 6-3 divide between conservative and liberal judges means Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is no longer a potential moderating middle vote — and that Trump’s most consequential legacy is also the culmination of a generational campaign by a network of right-wing lawyers.
How about the climate crisis? My colleague Robert reported Monday how “[t]he Supreme Court will take up a challenge to the Clean Water Act that could narrow the law’s reach in ways long sought by businesses and home builders.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Would Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema vote for the next Supreme Court justice?
Manchin and Sinema’s willingness to buck the rest of the Democratic Party has earned them the ire of party activists for the better part of last year, and they probably don’t feel particularly well supported by their party right now for it.
“I’m from West Virginia,” he said after announcing he wouldn’t vote for Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan. “I’m not from where they’re from, and they can just beat the living crap out of people and think they’ll be submissive, period.”
Sinema hasn’t been in the Senate quite as long as Manchin. She voted against Barrett, and she was running her election campaign when Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault. She at first declined to say whether she believed the accusations against him.
If Manchin and/or Sinema decided for some reason they don’t want to vote for Biden’s nominee, Democrats would have to convince one or two moderate Republicans to approve the person, perhaps people like Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who supported some of Democrats’ voting-rights push, or Mitt Romney (R-Utah) or Susan Collins (R-Maine). Collins supported both of President Barack Obama’s picks. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: “tick, tick...BOOM!” A Conversation with Steven Levenson & Lin-Manuel Miranda
MS. NORRIS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Michele Norris. I’m a columnist here at The Washington Post, and I am so excited to host this conversation about one of the giants in musical theater.
Jonathan Larson was the creative mind behind "Rent," a show that forever changed Broadway after its release in 1996. Sadly, Jonathan Larson never knew of his show's success. He died the morning of the first off-Broadway preview performance. He was only 35 years old.
“tik, tik...BOOM!” is a musical that Jonathan wrote about a young man hoping to break in the world of musical theater. It has an uncanny resemblance to his own struggles, the struggles he experienced himself on the path toward creating that seminal play, “Rent.”
I'm delighted today to be joined by the director of the film adaptation, Lin-Manuel Miranda; and the screenwriter, Steven Levenson. Lin, Steven, thank you so much for being with us.
MR. MIRANDA: Michele, thanks for having us.
MR. LEVENSON: Yeah, thrilled to be here.
MS. NORRIS: I love this film. I loved this film. And I loved, during the pandemic, that it felt like we were in a theater, experiencing theater all around, learning about theater, watching him perform. I liked the way that it went back and forth between his performance and what we see in sort of the back story.
And Steven, I want to begin with you, because you were approached about writing this film the night that you won a Tony award. So, big night for you, a lot of, you know, wonderful things raining down on your shoulders. Talk to us about that moment and what it meant to you to be approached about this film. Because I imagine that to do something about Jonathan Larson had to have special meaning.
MR. LEVENSON: Yeah, well, that’s--you know, my interpretation of events is slightly different. I was--I heard about--well, I knew that Lin was directing an adaptation of “tik, tik...BOOM!” and I--the second I heard that, I immediately threw my hand in the air and said, I would love to do this. I love this show. I love Jonathan Larson. I’m one of the many people--I know Lin included--for whom “Rent” was the defining theatrical event of my youth.
And so, for a few months, I had been sort of what I felt was lobbying pretty hard. And then, the night of the Tonys, I saw the producer, Julie Oh in the hotel lobby of the Carlyle Hotel, where there's a big Tony party. And actually, none of us could go upstairs to the party because it was too crowded, but there, in the lobby, she said, you know, I would love you to write this movie. And I was like, you know, I would love nothing more than to write this movie.
MS. NORRIS: So, there's a lesson in that, to go for those things that you care about. You know, raise your hand. Don't wait for opportunity to come to you.
MR. LEVENSON: Absolutely.
MS. NORRIS: Lin, this is, in some ways--it's a story about Jonathan Larson, but it also is in some ways your story. He had such an impact on you. I heard that you saw "Rent" on your 17th birthday, and that it was a definitional moment for you. You saw, through that, what musical theater could be. And the story of Jonathan Larson in some ways mirrors your own story. Could you unpack that for us?
MR. MIRANDA: Absolutely. And yeah, I loved musicals. I think, like most folks, I fell in love with musicals not by seeing Broadway, because it's expensive to see Broadway, but by doing the school plays in school.
And they always took place in some other land and some other time. You know, the closest we got was sort of "A Chorus Line" and "West Side Story," but even those are period pieces by the '90s. And so, I--you know, for my 17th birthday, my high school girlfriend, Meredith Sommerville got me tickets. We sat in the last row of the mezzanine of the Nederlander Theatre, and I'd never seen a show that felt so contemporary, that took place in my hometown, just a couple hundred blocks out, and looked like the New York I lived in. It was the most diverse cast I'd ever seen on the stage, and that's the night I went from admiring and loving musicals to thinking I could write one, because it was obvious that Jonathan had written with love about his community and it felt real and it felt approachable.
MS. NORRIS: When creating the set for his little tiny apartment with the shower in the kitchen and the bookshelves that are sagging and the music that you can see on the wall, as I was watching that, I remembered, Lin, a feature about you where you were talking about your own childhood bedroom. And I wondered, in creating this set, if you were creating Jonathan's home, but if you also had your own life in mind.
MR. MIRANDA: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. First of all, Alex DiGerlando and his incredible team did a painstaking version of Jonathan's apartment, and I think the only departure is the hallway is a little wider so we can fit cameras in it. But other than that, it's the apartment.
And again, there were so many times where it felt like Jonathan was giving us gifts. Julie sent us this video of Jonathan with a camcorder, and it's this first-person narrating all of the stuff on his shelves because he's scared there's going to be an electrical fire, and he's filming it for insurance purposes. So, as a result, we have the most detailed sort of look at his apartment from Jonathan himself. But it's interesting, when you're making a movie, you have to make so many decisions that you can't help but sort of show yourself in the process of making those decisions.
And I remember showing the first cut to one of my best friends, Quiara Hudes, with whom I wrote "In the Heights," and they had that first shot of Jonathan cradling his keyboard in his bedroom and she looked at me and said, Lin, that's your bedroom. [Laughs] And it looked exactly like my bedroom with the futon on the floor and the keyboard, you know, within arm's reach in my 20s. And I had this sudden fear of, oh, my God, this movie is so much more personal than I thought, because I remember thinking at every step, what would Jonathan Larson do? Let's get it right. But you can't help but sort of sweat into the recipe as you're making the meal.
MS. NORRIS: So, that's a beautiful image. I'll try not to think about that next time I cook.
So, you were guided by his camcorder, but you were also guided by his papers. Steven, you and Lin went to the Library of Congress where they keep Jonathan Larson's papers and you were able to swim through all of that. So, at some point, someone went through everything in that tiny little apartment and actually catalogued it. What was that like and what did you find?
MR. LEVENSON: Well, that was a really magical, incredibly special day at the Library of Congress where, you know, we went with Jennifer Tepper, who is a musical theater historian and just knows everything about everything, but especially about Jonathan Larson. And she was sort of our guide through the archive, and we basically just went through and found everything we possibly we could on “tik, tik...BOOM!” and everything on “Superbia,” which was the show that Jonathan was writing before “tik, tik...BOOM!” that much of “tik, tik...BOOM!” focuses on.
And we sort of madly took pictures of everything and made copies of everything and tried to find--the tricky thing with “tik, tik...BOOM!” is that it was--John performed it in his lifetime this solo show called “Boho Days” at times and then sometimes it was called “tik, tik...BOOM!” And he performed it a few times over the years, but it was never fully produced. It was never given a real production and it was certainly never published. And so, there was no sort of official script or final script, authorized script. So, what we were doing was trying to find every version we could, every iteration that he had done, and then we went home with all of those and sort of combed through them and tried to figure out the order in which they had been written. There were some clues of what year they had come in, but they weren’t super well-dated or anything.
And trying to figure out--you know, the show evolved a lot, as all shows do, over time and you know, it's interesting that the way--as you were introducing the story, how it was sort of about a composer with eerie parallels to John's own life. And it's interesting because, over the years, the show kind of bounced around between being super autobiographical and very overtly autobiographical, and then being much more fictionalized and much more sort of about John, an everyman composer.
And I think one of the decisions that we made certainly early on was that actually this was going to be the story of Jonathan Larson, and not everyman John, a musical theater composer. It was about Jonathan Larson in the specific moment of time, with this specific musical, "Superbia."
MS. NORRIS: Did that put more pressure on your shoulders, when you decided to make this story about Jonathan Larson, because he is--you know, he's so iconic. Did you feel like, I have to not only get this right, but I have to make sure that I'm showing the interior of his life in a way that the people who are closest to him will understand and the people who have grown to love him through his work will embrace?
MR. LEVENSON: Absolutely. I mean, I sort of think our research came in two phases. There was kind of the Library of Congress, the reading, the collating, the looking at documents; and then, the second phase of research was getting to talk to his friends and family.
And Lin and I got to speak to many of his friends, and certainly Julie Larson, who was there from the beginning in all ways. And that was how we kind of helped to fill in the blanks of who this person was, because I do think John, in writing his solo show, was a little bit at pains to not make it super--like, his personality doesn't necessarily come through in it. It comes through inevitably in the music, of course, but the little quirks, the little things--it was a 55-minute solo show. So, it didn't have time to dig into the intricacies of his life.
And the amazing thing with film, of course, is that, as Lin was saying, we are able to recreate his life in such incredible detail. And so, to get those details from his friends and family was--did--there was certainly a burden of it, a feeling of, we better get this right, but that they made it feel like a real joy to get to bring that back to life.
MS. NORRIS: And you know, in the ensemble, we all need a friend like Michael, you know, who will tell us what we need to hear in the moment. We saw it in the introductory clip: "There's only one Jonathan Larson," at a moment when he was ready to throw in the towel and head in another direction. We all need that person in our life.
Lin, because this is film, the stage is, you know, it seems where you are--I don't want to say "most comfortable," but where--we've gotten to know your work through stage, now increasingly through film, with "Mary Poppins" and "Encanto"--those of us who are singing it all day long, along with the soundtrack. So, big ups on that. But what elements of stage directing did you employ in making this film?
MR. MIRANDA: Well, that's such an interesting question and a great question. I think for me I knew I needed theater actors to populate this film from, number one on the call sheet, Andrew Garfield who, you know, I fell in love with watching him in "Angels in America" at the National Theater. You know, he is a stage creature. We know him as a movie star, but he's a movie star who can do an eight-hour Tony Kushner play and never miss a performance--to Robin and--and so, what I love about working with folks who came up in theater is there's a real discipline there and there's also a real sense of joy in collaboration because the difference between theater acting and film acting is the director leaves at a certain point in theater, and it's up to the actors to keep the show going, to continue to find those moments on stage.
So, to have basically an entire movie populated with theater artists was incredible because there was a real sense of collaboration. I think the biggest thing I brought was rehearsal. And I also learned that from working with Rob Marshall on "Mary Poppins." He was a Broadway director and choreographer who transitioned to film, and you rehearsed for three months before any camera is rolling on you, and I couldn’t afford to rehearse for three months, but we rehearsed as much as we could so that--not only the dance sequences, but really just sort of continuing to workshop the show. We did readings around a table for a year before we started pre-production. And again, that was my way of kicking the tires of it, as an evening, and that's what I know how to do best.
MS. NORRIS: So, wait, did--he has a theater background, but does he have a background in musical theater?
MR. MIRANDA: No, that was--
MS. NORRIS: Did he have to learn how to--
MR. MIRANDA: Yeah, he had to learn. Yeah, and he had never sung. But what was exciting was, when I sat down with him, I basically asked, I said, can you sing? And he said, I've never done that professionally, but it's a part of me that I've always wanted to explore and I've never had the opportunity to do it. And then, I knew we were fine, because if Andrew Garfield wants to do something, he figures out how to do it, and as we've seen time and time again. So, my job was to provide him with time and resources.
So, I set him up with Liz Caplan, who is an incredible vocal guru here in New York who really doesn't--she doesn't teach you how to sing. What she does is figure out what's blocking you from singing. I've worked with her several times and she worked with him for a year, and he also had to learn to play piano. I basically told him, you need to play just enough piano that I can pan from your hands to your face and sell that you're playing all the songs. Because it drives me crazy when I see someone going like this [indicating] and the music isn't matching what their shoulders are doing. I'm a real snob about whether people are really playing music in movies.
And he went and did the work, and joyfully went about the work. And I think I was so shocked at how ready he was to go and how game he was to go again and again and again. It was really--it was really thrilling to watch him sort of come into that power.
MS. NORRIS: Well, you know, speaking of coming into that power, let's take a look at that. We have a clip from "30/90."
MR. MIRANDA: Great.
[Video played]
MR. MIRANDA: Yay! [Claps]
MS. NORRIS: Steven, in the screenplay--you do. You want to cheer. You want to stand up and applaud.
In the screenplay for this, Steven, you capture the pressure that writers face. And you also beautifully capture something that is referred to in the title, the notion that he was running out of time, that something was on his back. And we see that in the story of his friends who are dying of AIDS, but also this sense that, I'm about to be 30, that it's all going to be over. Do you think that Jonathan in some sense had an idea that that was happening to him or also had an idea that his work would be regarded in this way?
MR. LEVENSON: Well, it’s so interesting because you know, I’ve said it before: It feels like we came up with the title “tik, tik...BOOM!” to be ironic, you know what I mean, after the fact. Like, oh, wouldn’t it be interesting if this young composer knew he was running out of time, but we didn’t come up with any of that. None of that is from us. That’s all John. John wrote a show called “tik, tik...BOOM!” John is the one who was obsessed with this idea of running out of time and we just put that on screen.
So, clearly, that--he did feel that. And I thought a lot about it, and the temptation, I think, is to say, oh, he did have some kind of prescience, he did have some sense that his time here was limited. And I think that what I've come around to think more is that he knew that all of us have limited time, and he was just more acutely aware of that than most of us would like to be. He knew that all of us have finite amounts of time and have things that we want to accomplish and he felt this urgency and this pressure to get it out into the world.
And something that Lin said from the beginning about John that really stuck with me, that we constantly went back to, was that John was not--he did not have imposter syndrome, as many artists do. He did not have the sense of, maybe I'm not good enough. That was never his problem. His problem was, what if the world doesn't recognize what I have? What if I put it out there and they don't see how special it is? And what if I don't have enough time to get it all out there? And that felt, I think, to both of us from the beginning, like an interesting kind of artist story, because it's different than the ones that we're used to hearing.
But I do think it's--you know, Lin and I from the beginning were very keen to get that sense of the clock ticking to make that feel very visceral, and to make that in a way that you can do on film. You can feel like you're inside of a character's head and inside of this conundrum of the clock ticking and is he going to be able to get this story out into the world fast enough.
MS. NORRIS: Yeah, he had vulnerability, but there's this wonderful moment where the director who's helping fund the workshop kind of leans in and says, okay, you were right. And he doesn't--he just says, I know.
MR. LEVENSON: Yeah.
MS. NORRIS: Of course I was right. I understand what I bring.
I want to ask you also about the diner scene, which is so interesting because it's built around a song called "Sunday," which seems like it is homage to Steven Sondheim and "Sunday in the Park with George." And it is, in this rendering, an homage to Jonathan Larson because, as you're watching it, you're like, oh, there's Chita Rivera, and there's--I mean, it seems like every major person in musical theater of the last 25 years shows up somewhere in this scene.
Let's take a listen.
MS. NORRIS: What do you think he would have thought of that scene, with that many people honoring him in such a magnificent way?
MR. MIRANDA: Oh, I hope he's doing backflips. That was the hope. You know, the sort of irony is he wrote this homage to one of the great group numbers at the end of act one, and he only ever sang it as a one-man song. And we realized we had an opportunity to make the choir of Jonathan Larson's dreams. And if one of his dreams is changing the landscape of musical theater, which he did but didn't live to see, we can also populate it with those shows that are influenced by his work.
So, that's why, you know, Beth Malone is there representing "Fun Home," and I have two of my Schuyler sisters in there, and there are his Rent original cast members, who some of whom he hasn't met, yet, in the timeline of this film. But it's a galaxy brain moment for him. And I'm so glad that you showed it from that moment because one of the other touches that I love that really happened later in the process was that final touch of the marquis--of the Moondance Diner turning into a marquis and saying, "Music and Lyrics by Jonathan Larson" in his handwriting. I think about how much he loved Sondheim and didn't live to see a Broadway theater renamed the Steven Sondheim where, you know, there's his name in Sondheim's handwriting. So, I wanted to do the same for John in the last brushstroke of the sequence.
MS. NORRIS: And he didn't see his name in lights like that. So, there was--
MR. MIRANDA: Yeah.
MS. NORRIS: --that beautiful moment.
You know, there's a scene where he has--he always carried a notebook with him and he was always scribbling in that. And you use that beautifully because you see when he's having kind of the thought bubble--it's not like a thought bubble, but it's the words populating the back of the screen in his handwriting from his notebooks.
And I wondered if we would see the same genius today if he was not just writing in notebooks, but if he was participating in social media in some ways. If there wasn't the outlet that we all have, you know, when we're always writing about what we think, showing what we think on TikTok, on Instagram, on Twitter, and because there wasn't that outlet, all of that was like a pressure cooker. It just sort of stayed inside his notebooks and stayed inside his brain.
MR. MIRANDA: Yeah, well, it's--I'm so glad you brought up those questions and his scribblings, because when we went to the Library of Congress, we talked to Mark Eden Horowitz, who curates his papers. And he gave us an insight that we ended up using in the film, which is that Jonathan writes differently. Like, he writes differently than I write. He would ask himself questions. A lot of his notebooks really were populated with questions, the most famous of which is, "How do you measure a year?" And there's a piece of paper that says, "52 weeks, 365 days," and then, circled, [singing] "Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes."
And it was such a beautiful insight because the last song of his piece, every lyric is a question, and that's really kind of exactly where Jonathan Larson is at the end of this film. He's asking questions and he's writing his way towards the next insight. It's--in processing the fact that no one wanted to produce "Superbia," he created this incredible portrait of the artist at a crossroads.
MR. LEVENSON: It is interesting--
MS. NORRIS: Lin, we have--go ahead, Steven.
MR. LEVENSON: I was just going to say it is interesting, the social media question, and the fact that all of these things--Superbia took eight years, you know, the show that he was working on. And “tik, tik...BOOM!,” he worked on for, I don’t know, four or five years; “Rent,” the same. And these things take time. And it is interesting in a culture where we’re expected to just keep sort of producing ideas and content and, like, trying to find that time is difficult.
MR. MIRANDA: He predicted social media. You know--
MR. LEVENSON: Yeah, he did.
MR. MIRANDA: --in the plot of "Superbia," he talks about these things called media transmitters that break on purpose so that you buy new ones, and that there would be the have-nots who watch the super-rich do things, which is the best description of Instagram I've ever heard, and--
MS. NORRIS: So, these films--this film took a long time. You workshopped it for a year. His productions took a long time: eight years, four years. And we see that he was struggling with this and didn't know if he could stick with it.
We have a question from Anne in Minnesota, and she asked, "Have either of you ever thought about throwing it in and ever thought about quitting?" And what is--you know, what keeps you going?
MR. LEVENSON: Well, I mean, this sounds hyperbolic and it sort of is, but it's like, yes, every day. You know, I mean, I think that--not quite, but like, that's I think what you learn--or I've certainly learned as a writer, is that those insecurities, those fears, that sense of, I just can't do it this time, that never goes away.
Because you know, I think, especially when I was a young writer, I had a feeling of, well, once I have some success, then I'll feel set and then I'll know how to do this and keep doing this. But as a writer, you always go back to the blank page. You know, that's always there for you, and I think--I find that comforting in some ways because we all have it. You know, there is no writer--you think of Sondheim, you think of Jonathan Larson, just because they made incredible things doesn't mean that they didn't wake up the next day and go back to that blank page and back to those same questions and back to that same burning need to express themselves and trying to figure out the form in which to do it.
MR. MIRANDA: I also think that a huge advantage I had was seeing this show when I was 21 years old. I was a senior in college when I saw the posthumous off-Broadway production of "Rent" that was beautifully directed by Scott Schwartz and starring a young Raúl Esparza, Jerry Dixon, and Amy Spanger.
And what the show asks you, that 90-minute show, is are you okay with chasing your passion if the world doesn't notice while you're alive? That's a tough question when you're 21 and you're a theater major and it's the field you want to go into. And I sat with it for a long time. I remember stumbling out of that theater because of the questions the show asked of me, but it also clarified my resolve. I remember thinking, if I, you know, have to keep teaching or I have to wait tables to get to do this, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that tradeoff, if I get to spend my time making this stuff.
So, seeing the show really kind of strengthened my resolve and also told me it was going to be hard, but also strengthen my resolve to see this as a calling, not as a meal ticket--that it probably wouldn't be.
MS. NORRIS: And there's that wonderful--you know, all of the supporting cast, every single one of them, made the most, even if it was limited.
So, when Judith Light, as Rosa, his agent, tells him, honey, you just got to sit down and start writing again. And you do it over and over and over again, because that's what a writer does. And as a writer myself, someone who's trying to finish a book, that really spoke to me.
I have loved talked to both of you. I am so sorry that we didn't have time to talk about "We Don't Talk About Bruno," because we could do a whole conversation about that. I'd love to know your thoughts about why that song in particular has struck a chord. And we should say that it's dethroned "Let it Go" as the biggest billboard hit from a Disney movie, ever--ever.
So, you're raising your eyebrows as if you didn't know that. I have a feeling you probably did know that.
MR. MIRANDA: I'm hearing it. I still don't believe it.
And but I think it’s because we’ve been locked up and that song really resonates. You know, we’ve been locked up with our families, and I think everyone has the experience of the stories you can tell at the dinner table and the stories you can’t tell in front of mom, or abuelo, or your children. And so, there is--there’s something that’s resonating with families. I’m just amazed an ensemble number has done this. Ensemble numbers are always my favorite and they never get love like this. So, I’m really grateful and thrilled.
MS. NORRIS: Well, thank you so much for putting this film into the world that celebrates an iconic giant of the theater, but also celebrates friendship and perseverance and creativity. We need films like this. So, thank you very much. Steve and Lin, it's been great to talk to you.
MR. MIRANDA: Thank you, Michele. Big fan, thanks for talking to us.
MR. LEVENSON: Thank you so much.
MS. NORRIS: Thanks so much.
Unfortunately, we are out of time. Thank you so much for being with us this morning. If you haven’t seen “tik, tik...BOOM!,” take the time; it’s absolutely worth it. And thank you for joining us, today. I’m Michele Norris. There’s some information about upcoming events at WashingtonPostLive.com. Check it out. There’s some great conversations coming up.
Have a bountiful day. | null | null | null | null | null |
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson listens to arguments as local high school students observe a reenactment of a landmark Supreme Court case at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Biden is not expected to officially step down before the court’s term ends in June, creating an usually long period during which he will be on the bench while his departure is anticipated. Senior congressional aides said the Senate can process a nomination for a Supreme Court seat before it is formally vacant.
Clyburn has been recommending that Biden select Childs for the D.C. Circuit since last January, before the president was formally inaugurated, according to a person close to the veteran lawmaker. He never put Childs’s name forward for the 4th Circuit, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discussion private deliberations. In her nominee questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Childs said she was first contacted by the White House for an appeals court vacancy on Sept. 29, although she did not specify which circuit.
Childs, 55, has not only broad experience on the federal trial court since 2010 but also as a state court judge. She served in state government on the workers’ compensation commission and was deputy director of the state Department of Labor. Childs was the first Black female law partner at the Columbia firm Nexsen Pruet, said her former colleague W. Leighton Lord. | null | null | null | null | null |
The 17-year-old male juvenile was charged with robbery resulting in death and concealment of a dead body in the case. The Post generally does name juveniles charged with crimes.
The investigation determined that Sarabia knew Ebrahim and that Sarabia and the juvenile planned to rob the victim on Jan. 16, police said. Sarabia and the juvenile met up with Ebrahim and police say Sarabia shot Ebrahim as he sat in his car in the 6200 block of Lachine Lane in Franconia. The pair later disposed of the victim’s body, police said. | null | null | null | null | null |
In its election rules for this year’s vote, the NLRB said that Amazon “has moved or will move the mailbox” away from the warehouse entrance. No one is allowed to put a tent or sign or similar items near the mailbox. But the union said this does not do enough to remedy the issue and called on the agency to make sure the mailbox is entirely removed from the property. | null | null | null | null | null |
A SpaceX Falcon9 rocket blasts off the launchpad on Feb. 11, 2015, carrying the NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory spacecraft that will orbit between Earth and the sun. (Red Huber/Tribune News Service via Getty I)
Then, Gray, an independent researcher in orbital dynamics, figured out this month why he couldn’t get readings on the booster to show up on his Project Pluto software after early March: The SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the moon, he said.
Since his blog post earlier this month, other space observers have confirmed the data and agreed that the rocket, which weighs about 4 metric tons, is set to crash into the far side of the moon in March, in what Gray believes might be “the first unintentional case” of space junk hitting the moon. The expected crash will create a new crater, but it will not significantly damage the moon, Gray said, noting that it’s “built to take this sort of abuse.” The rocket is projected to touch down at a velocity of about 2.58 kilometers a second, or about 5,770 mph.
“As more players get into deep space, we need to have more attention paid to the junk that we’re leaving out there,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who confirmed Gray’s findings. “It’s not as much about what SpaceX does now because it’s a perfectly standard practice to leave your junk in deep-Earth orbit and just abandon it.”
A spokesperson with SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
SpaceX launched its first interplanetary mission in February 2015 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The Falcon 9 traveled 1 million miles — a distance four times further than the moon — to help the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Deep Space Climate Observatory start its journey to Lagrange point 2, a gravitationally stable solar orbit on the opposite side of the sun from our planet.
But after the rocket’s second stage completed a long burn to reach a transfer orbit, it was so high that the booster did not have enough fuel to return to the Earth’s atmosphere. Meteorologist Eric Berger explained in Ars Technica that the rocket also “lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system,” which resulted in the booster’s chaotic orbit for nearly seven years.
Gray, 57, said there are, at any given time, dozens of objects in high orbits around the moon that move slowly enough for him and colleagues to take a short series of observations. He’s been tracking the SpaceX rocket every few weeks or months and updating its orbit using his software.
Once he saw on Jan. 14 that the rocket was expected to crash into the moon, Gray reached out to a group of astronomers to confirm that the data was correct. He noted the group consisted of several amateur-level astronomers in the United States and Europe who “do professional-level work” — and that their observations matched with his.
A NASA spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.
Private space companies have had other notable instances of space junk hitting the moon. In April 2019, Bersheet, the lunar lander for Israel Aerospace Industries, became the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. But when Bersheet crashed, the lunar lander spilled thousands of tardigrades — microscopic animals also known as water bears that are regarded as the toughest animals on the planet — onto the moon, according to WIRED.
“This SpaceX case is a marker that deep space is just starting to get busier, and it’s time to start thinking about our policies for deep space.”
Gray said the rocket’s collision with the moon will likely go unobserved from Earth. He and McDowell highlighted how the booster’s crash would result in a fresh lunar crater caused by an object whose properties researchers understand and can learn from. | null | null | null | null | null |
Breyer’s impending retirement after 28 years embodies the demise of the court’s pragmatic personality, every bit as much as the likely decision to overturn the abortion-rights precedent Roe v. Wade this spring will signify the end of pragmatic jurisprudence in this historical era.
Breyer’s pragmatism infused everything he did before becoming a justice. It infused his jurisprudence. And it is now infusing his decision to retire, which he took mindfully, with care and intentionality. Having recently published a pithy and powerful book arguing for the court’s institutional authority to be protected and preserved, Breyer is stepping aside so that the bare Democratic Senate majority can ensure that he is replaced by a like-minded successor. Would that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have acted similarly.
In the Supreme Court’s era of pragmatism, O’Connor often got to write the opinion that became law, but Breyer’s fingerprints could frequently be seen on her centrist conclusions. Much of Breyer’s greatest work came in his efforts to push the other justices to follow logic and reason, not intuition or ideology. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: To prevent another pandemic disaster, we must fix public health
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
The United States is a wealthy nation that lavishes spending on health care, supports a world-class biomedical research effort and was top-ranked for pandemic readiness. So why was it such a failure when covid-19 hit? A major reason was that our public health agencies, from local and state governments to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were overwhelmed. The CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, has called for rebuilding public health in the United States, and it is none too soon.
By public health, we refer to those experts who monitor and provide warning, tracing, analysis and communications to protect the overall health and well-being of the population, watching over everything from clean water and safe food to disease outbreaks and disaster response. This network has become “fragmented, insufficient, and marginalized,” former CDC director Tom Frieden and colleagues wrote in 2020. Ms. Walensky told Politico that a major overhaul is needed. “The CDC alone can’t fix this,” she said.
A high priority is to build the equivalent of national early warning radar for disease. Genomic sequencing makes it feasible to rapidly identify pathogens and send up a flare, as South Africa did with the emergence of omicron. A viral and bacterial surveillance network will provide a clear picture of threats and more time to respond properly.
Next, we must invest in people. Even before the pandemic, turnover was high among state public health officials, and once the crisis set in, state and local workforces became exhausted and burned out. Ms. Walensky said the workforce needs more than just money: “We need to train it. We need to make public health an attractive workforce to enter.” Public health workers have been at the front line of bitter political debates about vaccine and mask mandates, too often subject to toxic public threats and political interference. At the same time, they must redouble efforts to earn the public’s trust with clear, transparent communications and overcome the deleterious impact of misinformation and disinformation. The CDC needs to get out of its ivory tower and play a more direct and urgent role in addressing the public.
Data is the lifeblood of public health. The CDC and states have suffered for years with antiquated systems. In an unpredictable pandemic, this is a serious liability to decision-making. Ms. Walensky promised to make upgrades a priority. “The pipes have to connect,” she said.
Pandemic preparedness needs a major boost. Everything the military does is to prepare for war; similarly, public health at all levels needs to be poised to respond to a pandemic emergency. When it comes time to break the glass, the necessary stockpiles, expertise and systems should be at hand.
Rebuilding public health also requires funding with bipartisan support. Public health agencies are chronically starved for resources. The United States spends an estimated $3.6 trillion annually on health, but less than 3 percent is aimed at public health and prevention, according to a 2020 report from Trust for America’s Health. We must end the cycle of crisis and complacency. President Biden and Congress have made some down payments. But there’s a lot more to fix. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Republicans’ main job right now isn’t defining themselves. It’s breaking with Trump.
Donald Trump in 2020. Photographer: (Yuri Gripas/Bloomberg)
“What are Republicans for?” President Biden demanded during his news conference last week. “What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for.”
Biden wasn’t asking as a friend, of course. He clearly has no sympathy for the present Republican predicament. He has made that clear ever since his harsh comments on the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Biden’s calling card is his empathy, and so he ought to understand that many Republicans remain too hurt and disoriented to think about what they’re for. They’re smarting over being kicked out of the White House. Worse, they are still in denial about how Donald John Trump done them wrong. The fact that Trump’s post-election attacks on democracy were assaults on all Americans — including those who loved him — is still a truth too raw for many to admit.
So, “What are Republicans for?” Fair question. But before the Republican Party can redefine itself, it must first divorce itself from Trump — and for many, that thought remains distressing.
Breaking up with Trump isn’t as easy as some might think. I can relate. I was on Team Trump from the beginning, back when his enemies explored impeaching him even before he was elected, through the reckless accusations of Russian collusion, through false claims that he suggested ingesting bleach to fight the coronavirus and countless other groundless attacks filtered through the lens of a mostly liberal media universe so rattled by his existence that they changed the rules of journalism — even allowing reporters to call him a liar.
Sure, I was sometimes critical of Trump myself, even before 2020. I recognized his narcissism, acknowledged that sometimes he was a jerk and concluded that he would never be regarded as a great president because too many young Americans considered him cruel.
I didn’t abandon him, though — until he refused to accept the election results. That was the breaking point for me. His truculence led to the spread of unfounded doubts and conspiracy theories and culminated in the shameful events of Jan. 6. Trump’s post-election belligerence was a dereliction of presidential duty.
But it’s clear many people need more time, something those who never got Trump’s appeal in the first place will never understand. For the first time, tens of millions of us felt we had finally found someone who got us. It’s something that’s hard to let go.
So, to all those still hanging on, take some advice from a friend: It can be done.
First, accept that the relationship is over. Second, distance yourself by ignoring the rallies and shoving the MAGA hats to the back of the closet. Third, avoid social media and cable news. Fourth, reach out to any family members and friends who have avoided you since Trump came along.
And, finally, visualize yourself without him. Imagine wearing a DeSantis, Christie, Noem, Haley, Cruz or Rubio lapel pin. Make them court you. You deserve to be appreciated.
Remember, just because you end the relationship with Trump doesn’t mean you have to regret that it ever happened. You can still treasure, as I do, the memory of his election in 2016, an upset that rocked the status quo. And you can still love all the things you shared — the desire for a secure Southern border and energy independence, resisting cancel culture wokeness, supporting an “America First” foreign policy and railing against liberal media bias.
Guess what? You’ll find there are plenty of other presidential candidates who share those interests.
Yes, someday you’ll need to figure out what you want in the long term. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House leader, is reportedly consulting with former House speaker Newt Gingrich on some ideas. But it really doesn’t need to get sorted out until 2024, when the path forward will be determined by whoever emerges as the next GOP nominee. This year’s midterm elections will strictly be a referendum on the Biden administration. What matters is that Republicans are the alternatives, waiting in the wings.
In the meantime, take a page from Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who was asked last week what Republicans would do if they won back the Senate. He replied, “That is a very good question. And I’ll let you know when we take it back.” McConnell gets it. It’s too soon. There’s plenty of time to figure out what comes next.
And so let the critics ask mockingly: “What does the Republican Party stand for?” Don’t worry about that. Your main job for now is moving away from Donald Trump, and that’s more than enough. | null | null | null | null | null |
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Alex Palou had a fabulous first year with Chip Ganassi Racing. He won his first IndyCar race and parlayed it into the series championship. He bought his first car — a Porsche — and attended his first concert and first NASCAR race and quietly married his longtime girlfriend during the offseason. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: “Capehart” with Barbara F. Walter
MR. CAPEHART: Good afternoon, and welcome to the “Capehart” podcast on Washington Post Live. I am Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post.
Well, American exceptionalism used to be a mantra that both sides of the aisle used to tout. But after four years of Donald Trump and the January 6th insurrection, not only is that in question but so is our standing as a democracy. A compelling new book argues that we haven’t been a traditional democracy for a few years, and worse, we are following a well-worn path that has led many a nation to civil war. Could it happen here again? Can we stop the slide? The name of the book actually is already on my bookcase. “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.” And joining me now is its author, Dr. Barbara F. Walter. Dr. Walter, welcome back to “Capehart”--or welcome to “Capehart” on Washington Post Live.
MS. WALTER: Yeah, it’s nice to be back and to have a longer conversation with you, Jonathan.
MR. CAPEHART: Yeah, so I confused myself because we have spoken before but on my MSNBC show for a very short period of time. So, I’m glad we’re going to have this, you know, 30 minutes to really talk about this.
MS. WALTER: Yeah.
MR. CAPEHART: And before I get into some of the factors that play here that predict a civil war, I want you to talk about the quote that we had there on the screen, where the start of it says most Americans don’t even think that it’s possible that we could have another civil war. Talk more about that, and then we’ll get into the specifics.
MS. WALTER: Yeah. So, I started writing this book in 2018 when people really still were--they were worried about Donald Trump but they weren’t thinking about anything beyond having a president that they didn’t like. And even my colleagues at the university thought that this topic was misguided. They didn’t understand why I was writing it. They thought it was absolutely impossible and implausible. They worried that this might be alarmist. And I didn’t feel that way at all. In fact, I knew they weren’t right. And the reason I know it was because I had been serving on this taskforce for the U.S. government. I served on it from 2017 till the end of 2021, and our job was to look at civil wars outside the United States, look at all countries around the world and come up with a predictive model for where political instability and violence might break out.
We never looked at the United States. We didn’t talk about the United States. We looked at places in South East Asia and Central Asia and the Middle East and Africa. And we put in over 30 variables. It included things that we thought might lead a country towards political violence and war. We included things like poverty, income inequality, how ethnically and religiously diverse a country was. And only two factors came out highly predictive.
And the first was this variable that we called anocracy. That’s just a fancy term for partial democracy. It’s countries that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. They’re something in between. And countries become anocracies oftentimes when they’re democratizing--so they’re moving from an authoritarian system to a democracy--or if they’re a democracy and they’re backsliding.
And then, the second factor was what we called ethnic factionalism, whether a country’s population was organizing itself politically not around ideology, so not around whether you’re for tax breaks or against tax breaks, but they’re organizing around racial, ethnic, or religious lines. And then, the party that does that becomes predatory.
Now, these terms are what the taskforce used. This is what we saw out in the world over decades. And then in 2018, I’m sitting in a room, we’re talking about these other countries, I’m watching what’s happening in my own country, and all I could think about, oh, my God, these two factors are emerging here in my own country, and they’re emerging at a surprisingly rapid rate, and people don’t know what these warning signs are. So, I started writing it when I had all this information, all of this amazing scholarship. I knew about this model, and Americans did not. And so, I could understand why they were incredulous.
MR. CAPEHART: Right, right. And that--you just laid out perfectly why your book is so interesting. But it also like lays out your whole book and also lays out the questioning that I have for you. So, let’s get into the specifics.
So, the first factor you were talking about was the polity score, and that identifies whether a country, as you said, is transitioning to or away from democracy. What is the United States’ polity score?
MS. WALTER: Yeah. So, the polity scale goes from a negative 10 to a positive 10. The negative 10 are the most authoritarian countries in the world. That's where North Korea is, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. They're negative 10s. Positive 10s are the most democratic countries in the world. This is where Denmark, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States was a plus 10 for decades and decades and decades.
And then, this--the nonprofit the Center for Systemic Peace, which collects data and crafted this anocracy measure, it downgraded the United States for the first time in 2016. So, it went from a plus 10 to a plus 8. And it downgraded for a variety of reasons. But one of the reasons was that international election observers were here for the 2016 election. That's common. And they deemed our election free, but not entirely fair. Partisan--there was partisan politics involved in the elections. And even our intelligence agencies announced that Russia had attempted to meddle in those elections. So, there are a variety of reasons for that.
The U.S. was downgraded again in 2019 to a positive seven. And that was a result of the Trump administration, the executive branch of our government refusing to respond to requests by Congress for information and refusing to respond to subpoenas. Now, that might not seem like a big deal, but it was. The main check on executive power here in the United States is our legislative branch; it's Congress. It was designed to be of equal strength as the executive branch. But our executive branch, our president here in the United States, has been becoming significantly more powerful than any other branch for the last few decades. And when you have a president refusing to respond to Congress, that is a clear sign that we do not have a balanced system of checks.
And then, by the end of the Trump administration, we were downgraded to a plus five. Negative--between negative five and plus five is this anocracy zone. This is that middle zone which we have found is the most unstable and most violent prone state--place for countries, and the U.S. was downgraded by the end of the Trump administration because you had a sitting president who questioned the results of the election and attempted to overturn those results, attempting to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
MR. CAPEHART: And you write--
MS. WALTER: Now, we have since been upgraded, which we could talk about that.
MR. CAPEHART: Oh!
MS. WALTER: But yeah.
MR. CAPEHART: Oh, no. Talk about that real--well, wait.
MS. WALTER: Yeah, yeah.
MR. CAPEHAT: Before you tell us about the upgrade--because you’re right. When the United States was downgraded to--from plus seven to plus five, you write in your book, we are--at the time, we are no longer the world's oldest continuous democracy. That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are--no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a plus 10 on the polity index. So, you just said that the United States has been upgraded. So, it’s been upgraded from plus five to?
MS. WALTER: Plus eight. So that statement is still correct. So, the U.S.--the last time the U.S. was a plus five was in 1800. And once we dropped down from being a full democracy, our tenure as the longest standing consistent democracy ended.
MR. CAPEHART: So, let's talk about the second factor when you were talking about factionalism.
MR. CAPEHART: And you say in the book that politics goes from being a system in which citizens care about the good of the country as a whole to one in which they care only about members of their group. Talk more about why that is particularly threatening to democracy.
MS. WALTER: Yeah, I'm going to give you an example, Jonathan. If you think back to the former Yugoslavia, back around 1989-1990, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Yugoslavia suddenly had the opportunity to pick whatever government it wanted. And Yugoslavs wanted democracy. And so, suddenly they were organizing competitive elections. It was looking like this was going to--the country was going to democratize quickly. It was--in fact, during that time, it moved from an authoritarian regime under Tito to this this middle zone. And people were incredibly hopeful. And you had these leaders--think about Slobodan Milosevic. He had been a former Communist Party member. He had been a ruler in the former government during the Soviet era. He suddenly finds himself unhinged, untethered from a party, and suddenly he has to make a decision. How do I compete in elections? Yugoslavs at the time hated communists. They knew Milosevic was a tried and true communist. He--Milosevic knew they were not going to elect him. And so, being very savvy, being very strategic, he started thinking, okay, how can I gain support? And he realized that the biggest ethnic group in the former Yugoslavia were Serbs, and he was a Serb. And so, he started to hammer home this narrative that Serbs have to band together during uncertain times, during times of rapid change. Serbs had to band together, and they had to support a Serb leader. And if they didn't do this, then the Croats were going to do that, and the Croats were going to come to power. And once the Croats were in power, they were going to throw all the Serbs out of their jobs, and potentially start killing them, like some Croats had done during World War II. And so, he crafted, you know, an ethnic party based solely on being Serb.
And it's a smart thing to do if you--if you want to guarantee support, because if you ensure, if you convince people that they can only vote for a Serb, then no matter what you do, if you are a Serb leader, they're going to support you, because there's nowhere else for them to go.
MR. CAPEHART: And you know, that sounds really familiar. It sounds like what Donald Trump did and continues to do as the still sort of titular head of the Republican Party.
And that leads to another factor that you write about, and that is the downgrading of status of a once favorite group. That's what you were getting out there with the Serbs and Croats. But we're going through that here in the United States. And we have an audience question that is tied to this notion.
MR. CAPEHART: And the question is, "Do you think the Civil War some Americans are aiming for is between White and Black people, not between Democrats and Republicans?"
MS. WALTER: It is absolutely between White and non-White people. It's not between Democrats and Republicans. And I'll give you a little historical perspective, and then I'll talk about what's happening here in the United States.
So, you know, I've been studying civil wars around the world for 30 years. There's an incredibly rich body of research about who starts civil wars and how they start. And it's not how people think. The people who tend to start wars are not the poorest groups in society. They're not the groups that are most discriminated against, or most oppressed. They're not the immigrants. Those groups tend to be too weak and too disempowered to have any chance to organize. The groups that tend to start wars, especially ethnic wars, are groups that had once been dominant, and have either recently lost power, or they see themselves losing power demographically over time. They're the ones who feel this deep sense of loss, loss of status. They feel this deep sense of resentment. And importantly, they truly believe that the country is theirs, that that the country should look like them, it should practice their religion, it should be based on their culture, because it's always been like that. And I'm speaking about--when I say this, it sounds like I'm talking--I'm being informed entirely by the United States.
MR. CAPEHART: Yeah.
MS. WALTER: But this research was done decades ago. If you look at the Muslims in Southern Mindanao, Southern Mindanao had been a Muslim majority region of the Philippines for forever, and then they became part of the Philippines. The Philippines is heavily Catholic. It's also far more populated than Mindanao. And when the government started creating incentives for Catholics to move south to settle in Mindanao and gave them some of Mindanao’s rich land, gave them some of the best civil service jobs, the Muslims saw their influence and their power, their political power, their economic power, their cultural power declining.
And they tried to work within the system, but they were grossly outnumbered, and eventually extremists within their group formed a military and began to fight the central government to try to regain power. And you could look at the Catholics in Northern Ireland. You could look at the Palestinians in Israel. You could look at the Assamese in India. You see this again and again and again.
MR. CAPEHART: And so, then, in the United States, I mean, it's really interesting to hear you say when you're--initially that, you know, it could be torn from the headlines from what we're going through right now, but it is, as I said in the intro, a well-worn path.
I want to read something else from your book. For those who might have a copy, it's page 116. You write, “Before autocracy came about when military generals launched coups, but now it's being ushered in by the voters themselves. This is happening in large part because social media allows candidates to sow or capitalize on doubts that citizens might have about democracy as a form of government.” You write a lot about the impact of social media and how social media is partly or largely to--I use the word to “blame” for the rise of autocracy and the rise of people choosing authoritarianism, either at the ballot box or willingly choosing authoritarianism, making it possible for tanks not even to be necessary.
MS. WALTER: Mm-hmm. So, I'm going to give you an example that's pretty shocking and most people don't know about: Sweden. We think of Sweden as this model democracy. And in many ways, it is. But Sweden, like many White majority countries, has been going through a demographic change with greater immigration.
And in fact, in Europe in 2015, they had a large influx of refugees, many from Syria, some from Afghanistan, as a result of the wars. So, these White-majority countries have been experiencing demographic change. Sweden has had a neo-Nazi Party forever, probably since the end of World War II, and it's called the Sweden Democrats. The Sweden Democrats were a fringe party. Nobody really had heard of them. They couldn't get their message out. They were inconsequential. And the reason they couldn't get their message out was because Sweden televisions--Swedish television and Swedish Radio refused to have them on. They couldn't get any platform there. And even the Swedish postal service for the most part refused to mail any of their leaflets. So, they were operating essentially, you know, in back rooms where nobody knew about them.
That changed in the late 2000s. And remember, the smartphone started coming on the scene in the mid-2000s. You started to see much more--greater Internet penetration. You saw the rise of social media and people increasingly getting a majority of their news from social media, which of course is entirely unregulated. You could put anything you want on social media. And not only that, the recommendation engines will take the material that holds people's attention the longest, which tends to be those that tap into the emotions of hate and anger and fear. So, the more incendiary material gets dispersed much more widely.
So, the Sweden Democrats are struggling. Nobody knows about them. They're not gaining any traction. And they have a new leader come to power, who's younger, and he decides that he's going to create a bunch of Facebook pages. And then, he also creates a bunch of, kind of we'll call them news sites--that's a very generous term--but news sites online where he starts--he and his team start spewing anti-immigrant stories. Every story is about an immigrant robbing an old lady or hordes coming in, and you know, not adhering to Swedish culture. It's one story after another after another. And those sites got an enormous following. By 2014, the Sweden Democrats were the third largest party in parliament, where they are today. And this this went amazingly fast. And in the absence of social media, they would never have been able to do that.
MR. CAPEHART: Right. And in fact, you write, it took a mere nine years for them to go from obscurity to having seats in parliament. You also make the point about how, you know, internet penetration, you know, in places like North Korea or Africa was minimal, and that you write, access to the internet--to the internet began to increase in Africa in 2014. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter made inroads in Sub-Saharan Africa starting in 2015. And as they did, the level of conflict began to rise. So, now let's look here specifically at the United States.
MR. CAPEHART: Are we already experiencing a modern civil war, given all the factors that we've been talking about now for the last 20 minutes?
MS. WALTER: Yeah, yeah. So, in the book, I talk about how the next civil war will not look like the first Civil War. And I do think one of the reasons why most people thought that this could never happen again here is because they were thinking about the 1860s. They're thinking that it's going to be two large armies meeting on a battlefield, wearing uniforms. It's going to be, you know, a whole series of states that will have to be--agree that secession is the way to go, and that is not what it's going to look like at all. And in fact, that's not what most modern civil wars look like, especially when they're directed at really powerful governments with powerful militaries, like the United States, or like Israel, or like the United Kingdom. These--you're not going to see another big conventional war in these countries.
What you are going to see and what I--what I think would happen here in the United States would be an insurgency. So, insurgencies tend to be decentralized. They tend to be fought by multiple different factions, paramilitary groups. Sometimes they're working together. Sometimes they're competing with each other. And they're using unconventional tactics, predominantly domestic terror directed at civilians, directed at minority groups, directed at civil servants, directed at the police, anybody who is not sympathetic to their cause. They are not going to engage U.S. soldiers if they can avoid it. So that's the type of civil war we're likely to see. And oh, go ahead if you want to.
MR. CAPEHART: Well, I wanted to bring up--I wanted to bring up something from a former member of the taskforce that has an opposing view. Jay Ulfelder said recently, in an--in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that Civil War is really unlikely to happen based on the definition that outlines a thousand deaths tied to war activity. Do you think we're on the brink of seeing violence that amounts to that death toll, especially given what you were just saying in terms of insurgency rather than military?
MS. WALTER: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, in a country as populous as the United States, a thousand deaths related to an insurgency a year is not very high. I mean, think about Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City. That was over 200 people. You have a couple of--you have, you know, a handful of attacks like that in a year, and you meet not only the conventional definition of civil war, but experts, we think about it is as there's major civil war, which is a thousand deaths a year, and there's minor civil wars, which is about 25. So, you have, you know, four attacks like Timothy McVeigh's in a year, and you reach what we consider a major conflict.
And I wanted to go back to a question you asked earlier that I that I didn't answer yet.
MR. CAPEHART: Sure.
MS. WALTER: And that is, are we in an insurgency? And no, we are not yet. People wondered if January 6th was the start of it. And we now know that it wasn't. But we also know that the far-right militias haven't gone away. If anything, they've doubled down. They are--they are angry. They are resentful. They absolutely believe the election was stolen from them. And you know, the more extreme elements believe that the only way to improve things--and they see this as an improvement--is through violence.
So, the CIA actually has a manual on insurgency. And again, the CIA only looks outside the United States. This was something that they put together because they're interested in trying to understand why and when insurgencies breakout in countries outside the United States, and they're particularly interested in identifying that because they want to know if they need to design counterinsurgency campaigns. But their 2012 manual is open source.
MR. CAPEHART: Wow.
MS. WALTER: You can find it online. Most of it actually is not redacted. It's really interesting to read. And you have the same déjà vu feeling when you're reading that manual as when you're hearing about the taskforce predictive model. You're reading that manual, and they're talking about insurgency as going through three phases. There's the pre-insurgency phase. There's what they call the incipient conflict phase. And then there's open insurgency.
So, the pre-insurgency phase, stage one, is when you have a group that's unhappy with the status quo and they're beginning to organize. Leaders are emerging who are able to articulate what they're unhappy about. They start recruiting supporters. You know, sometimes they'll put together a manifesto about what they're angry about and what they want. So, it's the very early stages of organization.
The incipient conflict stage, stage number two, is when these groups get a militant arm. That's when they start creating militias, right? And this is the stage when you start to get your very first attacks. And what's really dangerous about this phase--and the CIA lays this out, they're telling them--the U.S. government, they're saying what's dangerous about stage two is that governments who--governments in these countries and citizens in these countries, they see these attacks, and they see them as isolated incidences.
MS. WALTER: They dismiss them. They're the result of a lone wolf. They're not going to happen again. So, they aren't able in stage two to connect all the dots.
MR. CAPEHART: And, Barbara--
MS. WALTER: And of course, you think back--yeah.
MR. CAPEHART: And, Barbara, real quickly, because we now have 90 seconds left. But I want you to--
MS. WALTER: Oh, damn.
MR. CAPEHART: I know, I know. We get to talking and then the time just flies. But I do want you to real quickly talk about phase three. And then, I have a final question that we're going to be completely over time with but I have to ask it, but real fast.
MS. WALTER: Yes. So, phase three is when you start to see a consistent series of attacks. You know, so that it's impossible to think that these are isolated.
MR. CAPEHRAT: Right.
MS. WALTER: You also start to see these groups recruiting from the military, recruiting from police forces. They're looking for experienced soldiers, and you see some of them going abroad for training. And so, they're really ratcheting up the military arm, and they're starting to coordinate their activities.
So, when I said we were wondering if January 6th was the start of that, what the--what we were wondering was, okay, are we now going to see a series of sustained attacks, as opposed to an isolated attack here and then--which is more indicative of stage two.
MR. CAPEHART: Right. And so, so far, we haven't seen sustained attacks. We have one more audience question. And real quickly, the question is, "Are there examples of countries who have been at our level of approach to civil war where it has been averted? And if so, how?" I'm just going to ask you if there is a country, not the if so how, because we're way over time.
MS. WALTER: I know. I’m so sorry.
MR. CAPEHRAT: No, no, no. This is fantastic. Have there been countries that have been able to avert civil war?
MS. WALTER: Yes, Jonathan. There was a country that was far, far worse off than us, and it did, and it was South Africa. I mean, think back to the apartheid regime, a minority regime that was not only deeply oppressive, but was ratcheting up violence against civilians, killing children. We thought--everybody thought we were going to have a civil war there, and they were able to avoid it.
MR. CAPEHART: That is a fabulous example. Dr. Barbara F. Walter, author of “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them,” thank you so much for coming to “Capehart” on Washington Post Live. Great to see you again.
MS. WALTER: Nice to see you too, Jonathan. Thank you.
MR. CAPEHART: And thank you for joining us. To check out what interviews we have coming up, head to WashingtonPostLive.com to find out more and to register. Once again, I’m Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Thank you for watching “Capehart” on Washington Post Live. | null | null | null | null | null |
A group of residents is suing Prince George’s County over redistricting plans that a divided council approved in November, resurrecting debate that has deepened divides among Democrats in this blue suburb.
The redistricting map — which was slammed by more than 150 residents during public testimony — removed three liberal politicians from districts in which they had started or were considering campaigning, prompting accusations of blatant political gerrymandering that eroded trust in government.
Now, with election season underway, former county council member Eric Olson, who was removed from the district in which he was campaigning, is backing a lawsuit that asks the county to adopt the redistricting plan originally proposed by a nonpartisan committee, rather than the controversial one crafted by council members. Olson is not a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, which was filed Monday in Prince George’s County Circuit Court, but his campaign is paying for it.
“We must prevail to keep our communities together, and to allow my candidacy to continue for the District 3 seat,” Olson said in a message to his supporters Tuesday night about the lawsuit, noting that he had spent “many hours consulting with attorneys, redistricting experts, friends and family on how to best move forward.”
The lawsuit argues that the redistricting process was improper because it was done via a resolution, which does not require a signature from the county executive, rather than a bill. The first hearing is scheduled for Friday, said Matthew G. Sawyer, who is representing the plaintiffs.
Neither County Council Chair Calvin Hawkins (D-At Large) nor county council spokeswoman Karen Campbell responded to requests for comment. Gina Ford, spokeswoman for County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D), did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Olson, who considers himself a political progressive, was sometimes at odds with the county’s political establishment while on the council, particularly on development-related issues. The other politicians who were drawn out of their districts — Krystal Oriadha in District 7 and Tamara Davis Brown in District 9 — have also at times been vocal critics of leaders in power. Their victories would have meant a shift in power on the council, where a group of moderate members often aligned with Alsobrooks currently have a majority.
Unlike redistricting battles at the state and national levels, the fight in Prince George’s — a county where about 85 percent of residents are Black and Latino — is being fought among Democrats, with a mostly younger, more liberal generation of leaders clashing with the county’s more moderate political establishment. In deep blue Prince George’s, the June primary tends to be decisive.
“They are just trying to stop change in any way possible,” said Oriadha, who moved from Seat Pleasant to Capitol Heights so she could still run in District 7, where she is running against incumbent council member Rodney Streeter (D).
“Both of us are pushing back on the system and what they tried to do, just in different ways,” Oriadha said, referring to Olson.
Brown, who is still considering whether to run for the council, said she also supports the lawsuit because “leaders should not be able to pick their voters.”
The map was adopted as part of the decennial redistricting process, in which the council ultimately decided between two maps. The first, largely noncontroversial map was presented by a nonpartisan redistricting commission and made small changes along the boundaries of council districts to account for population changes recorded in the 2020 Census. The second map, which was introduced by Derrick Leon Davis (D-District 6) and amended by Mel Franklin (D-At Large), made more sweeping changes.
Among them was dividing Lakeland, a historically Black community that the government pushed Black families out of in the 1970s in the name of urban renewal, into two council districts. Lakeland Civic Association’s Robert Thurston — who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit — said that the redistricting effort felt like the latest example of government action being taken without input from the people affected.
He campaigned against the plan this fall with Olson, who has worked with residents in Lakeland over the years.
Council members who supported that map said it was important to put College Park in mostly one district and to make District 2 majority Latino to reflect the county’s growing share of Latino residents. They said the intent of the map was not to exclude particular candidates. In previous interviews and in the November public hearing, they said the proper rules and procedures had been followed.
But some acknowledged that it is an inherently political process.
“I am not acting like I am naive. I know this is a political process,” Hawkins, the council chair, previously told The Washington Post. “Everyone knew where everyone lived.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The 17-year-old male juvenile was charged with robbery resulting in death and concealment of a dead body in the case. The Post generally does not name juveniles charged with crimes.
The investigation determined that Sarabia knew Ebrahim and that Sarabia and the juvenile planned to rob the victim on Jan. 16, police said. Sarabia and the juvenile met up with Ebrahim and police say Sarabia shot Ebrahim as he sat in his car in the 6200 block of Lachine Lane. The pair later disposed of the victim’s body, police said.
The Fairfax County Public Defender’s Office, which is representing Sarabia, declined to comment on the case. | null | null | null | null | null |
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasts off in February 2015 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Red Huber/Tribune News Service/Getty Images)
This month Gray, an independent researcher in orbital dynamics, figured out why he couldn’t get readings on the booster to show up on his Project Pluto software after early March: The SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the moon, he said.
Since his blog post this month, other space observers have confirmed the data and agreed that the rocket, which weighs about 4 metric tons, is set to crash into the far side of the moon in March, in what Gray believes might be “the first unintentional case” of space junk hitting the moon. The expected crash will create a new crater, but it will not significantly damage the moon, Gray said, noting that it’s “built to take this sort of abuse.” The rocket is projected to touch down at a velocity of about 2.58 km a second, or about 5,770 mph.
“As more players get into deep space, we need to have more attention paid to the junk that we’re leaving out there,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who confirmed Gray’s findings. “It’s not as much about what SpaceX does now because it’s a perfectly standard practice to leave your junk in deep Earth orbit and just abandon it.”
SpaceX launched its first interplanetary mission in February 2015 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The Falcon 9 traveled 1 million miles — a distance nearly four times farther than the moon — to help the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Deep Space Climate Observatory start its journey to Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable solar orbit on the opposite side of the sun from our planet.
But after the rocket’s second stage completed a long burn to reach a transfer orbit, it was so high that the booster did not have enough fuel to return to Earth’s atmosphere. Meteorologist Eric Berger explained in Ars Technica that the rocket also “lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system,” which resulted in the booster’s chaotic orbit for nearly seven years.
Gray, 57, said there are at any given time dozens of objects in high orbits around the moon that move slowly enough for him and colleagues to take a short series of observations. He’s been tracking the SpaceX rocket every few weeks or months and updating its orbit using his software.
Once he saw Jan. 14 that the rocket was expected to crash into the moon, Gray reached out to a group of astronomers to confirm that the data was correct. He noted the group consisted of several amateur-level astronomers in the United States and Europe who “do professional-level work” — and that their observations matched with his.
Private space companies have had other notable instances of space junk hitting the moon. In April 2019, Beresheet, the lunar lander for Israel Aerospace Industries, became the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. But when Beresheet crashed, the lunar lander spilled thousands of tardigrades — microscopic animals also known as water bears that are regarded as the toughest animals on the planet — onto the moon, according to Wired.
“This SpaceX case is a marker that deep space is just starting to get busier, and it’s time to start thinking about our policies for deep space,” he said.
Gray said the rocket’s collision with the moon will probably go unobserved from Earth. He and McDowell highlighted how the booster’s crash would result in a fresh lunar crater caused by an object whose properties researchers understand and can learn from. | null | null | null | null | null |
Spotify is in the process of removing Neil Young’s music two days after Young posted a letter on his website demanding that his catalogue be removed in response to the “fake information about vaccines” on the platform.
Young’s letter, which has since been deleted, was addressed to his manager and an executive at his record label and cited Joe Rogan by name as part of his issue with Spotify.
“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines — potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” he wrote in the letter, according to Rolling Stone. “Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.”
Representatives for Young have not yet responded to The Post’s request for comment.
Rogan, who hosts one of the most popular podcasts on the platform, has repeatedly spread misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines. In April, for example, he came under fire for suggesting healthy, young people shouldn’t get vaccinated.
“If you’re like 21 years old, and you say to me, ‘Should I get vaccinated?’ I’ll go no,'” he said on his podcast. He continued, “If you’re a healthy person, and you’re exercising all the time, and you’re young, and you’re eating well, like, I don’t think you need to worry about this.” He added that both of his children got covid-19 and it was “no big deal.”
“He is incorrect when he says that young people don’t need to worry about covid,” Rebecca Wurtz, an infectious-disease physician and population health informaticist who teaches at the University of Minnesota, told The Post at the time “I’m really glad that his children had minimal symptoms from the virus. I hope that anyone who caught it from them, or caught it from those who caught it from them, are doing as well.”
Young’s manager, Frank Gironda, told the Daily Beast that the issue was “something that’s really important to Neil. He’s very upset about this disinformation.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Fed Does What’s Expected, Not What’s Needed
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 11: Jerome H. Powell, Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, speaks during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on January 11, 2022 in Washington, DC. Powell has been nominated by President Joe Biden to serve a second term as Chair of the Federal Reserve. (Photo by Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images) (Photographer: Pool/Getty Images North America)
The Federal Reserve’s statement on Wednesday delivered what markets wanted and expected. In the process, however, the central bank has fallen further behind economic developments on the ground.
After its two-day deliberations this week, the Federal Open Market Committee signaled that it would start a rate-hiking cycle soon (read March), follow that with a gradual reduction in its balance sheet and, by the way, end its asset-purchase program by early March.
Markets had already well internalized all three of these monetary policy measures, so there was relatively little reaction in asset prices to the statement. But this will not shield the Fed from criticism.
First, the market calm did not survive the press conference that followed the statement. Chair Jerome Powell’s attempts to explain the policy outlook led to a notable increase in yields on government bonds and reduced stock gains.
Second, the Fed’s announcement will not satisfy those who had urged it to maintain maximum flexibility in light of an economy that faces so many competing influences and markets that have experienced considerable volatility recently.
Third, it will also not satisfy those who worry that the Fed is already lagging behind economic realities and could well be forced into an excessive bunching of measures later this year that exposes economic livelihoods to otherwise-avoidable damage.
As to my reaction?
The Fed delivered what I expected but not what I think is needed for sustainable economic well-being. It should have stopped purchasing assets immediately and given a clearer signal on rate increases. Instead, the central bank doubled down on its 2021 trade-off of trying to please financial markets at the cost of increasing the challenges ahead for the economy, sound policy-making and its own credibility. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Biden can’t be blamed for Afghanistan withdrawal
Families walk toward their flight during ongoing evacuations at Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, on Aug. 24. (Sgt. Samuel Ruiz/U.S. Marine Corps via Associated Press)
The excellent Jan. 20 editorial “Mr. Biden can fix his presidency” discussed a mixed year of success and frustrated hopes for President Biden.
However, it was wrong in calling the president’s leaving Afghanistan an “unforced” error. John Bolton, who served as a national security adviser in the Trump administration, in his book “The Room Where It Happened” wrote, “This Afghanistan deal is entirely Trump’s … there should be no mistaking this reality. Trump will be responsible for the consequences politically and militarily.”
President Donald Trump and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo negotiated the Afghanistan withdrawal with the Taliban excluding the Afghan government. They agreed to a date certain of May 1, 2021, to remove all forces from Afghanistan and to release 5,000 hardcore Taliban prisoners.
Mr. Biden achieved what three other presidents never accomplished. He ended a 20-year war that had cost countless lives, more than $200 billion a year and more than $4 trillion overall.
The 13 courageous U.S. military members killed while helping their British counterparts to bring people to the Kabul airport must be praised and honored.
In all our wars in recent memory, no administration, Ronald Reagan’s (Lebanon) or Gerald Ford/Henry Kissinger’s (Vietnam), successfully airlifted more than 124,000 Americans and allied nationals.
Fariborz S. Fatemi, McLean
The writer was a House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member. | null | null | null | null | null |
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