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Opinion: The new Supreme Court justice will make a difference and not much difference at all
Justice Stephen G. Breyer is shown at the Supreme Court in April 2021. (Erin Schaff/Pool/REUTERS)
“Every time a new justice comes to the Supreme Court, it’s a different court,” Justice Byron R. White, who witnessed the arrival of 13 new colleagues during his 31 years on the bench, liked to say.
Well, yes and no. Wednesday’s news that Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer plans to retire at the end of the current term is as welcome as it is overdue. Senate Democrats are, as one said to me, a heartbeat away from losing the precarious majority they could need to confirm a new justice; Democrats could well cede control of the chamber in the midterms, and it is not hard to imagine Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), as majority leader, blocking the confirmation of a replacement. Been there, done that.
And yet: Whoever the new justice will be, she will make a difference and not much difference at all. On the side of difference: President Biden has told us she will be a Black woman, the court’s first. The court will, again for the first time, have four female justices.
Still, the rational response to Breyer’s announcement is more relief than joy. Because let’s be practical: There is a six-justice conservative majority. That is not about to change any time soon — certainly not, absent unexpected events, during the term of a Democratic president.
So while it is better to have three liberal justices than two, there will still be only three liberal justices — and that does not a majority make. Breyer’s replacement is apt to be more liberal — but again, that doesn’t make much difference. A dissent is a dissent, however powerful. It is not the law of the land. This time, the new court will be the same as the old court.
Breyer’s retirement was necessary in order not to squander Biden’s opportunity to replace him, but it is not sufficient — not even close — to accomplish a change in the law. A younger justice will be there for decades, but it may take that long for her to be able to write, or even join, a majority opinion in a fiercely contested area of jurisprudence. She will occupy a seat at the pinnacle of government power, yet she will be in many ways powerless, with colleagues who know what they think and who are unlikely to be swayed.
Consider the current legal landscape. It is a fair bet that by the time Breyer leaves at the end of this term in June or July, constitutional protection for the right to abortion will be removed or dramatically curtailed. The scope of Second Amendment rights for gun owners will be broadened. The separation of church and state — the “so-called separation,” as Justice Neil M. Gorsuch called it during a recent oral argument — will be further blurred.
The power of administrative agencies to respond to challenges such as the pandemic has already been diminished, and more regulatory handcuffing is in the offing. The next term promises to sound the death knell for affirmative action in higher education, as the court considers cases from Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The question of how far this conservative court will go to revolutionize the law, and how fast, is more or less outside the control of the liberal justices. They can maneuver to try to control the damage, but mostly they are consigned to the sidelines, dissenting.
In this sense, the impact of the next justice will be different from her three most recent predecessors. The death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016, when Barack Obama still had 11 months remaining in his presidency, had the prospect of dramatically changing the court, from a closely divided 5-to-4 conservative majority to a liberal one; McConnell ensured that would not happen, and Gorsuch’s arrival in 2017 maintained the court’s existing balance.
By contrast, the following year, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement and his replacement by Brett M. Kavanaugh moved the court significantly to the right, even though both were named by Republican presidents. And the most dramatic change of all came in 2020, with the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement by conservative Amy Coney Barrett. Overnight, outcomes shifted. To take just one example, the Texas abortion law would not be in effect if Ginsburg were still on the court.
This is a choice that Biden and the Senate should weigh seriously, whether the nominee is D.C. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger or someone else. Every Supreme Court nomination is consequential. But the consequences may not be felt for many years to come. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: D.C. officers who died by suicide after Jan. 6 should be recognized
Jeffrey and Erin Smith (Jack Reznicki for the family)
Regarding the Jan. 22 Metro article “Widow seeks honors for fallen officer”:
Jeffrey Smith and Howard Liebengood and other D.C. and Capitol Police officers were stunningly courageous in protecting the lives of our nation’s leaders on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.
Now it appears that D.C. leaders are unable to muster the courage to surmount the outdated notion that suicide cannot be regarded as death in the line of duty. I’m proud of all the D.C. officers who ran to the front line that day. I’m ashamed of the cowardice of the bureaucracy.
Mary Belcher, Washington | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Havana syndrome’s source should not be so easily dismissed
The Jan. 21 front-page article “CIA: ‘Havana syndrome’ unlikely a foreign attack” described a recent Central Intelligence Agency report that did nothing to further understanding of the phenomenon and merely invited an illogical conclusion.
“Havana syndrome” is the common name given the mysterious and often debilitating illnesses afflicting some U.S. Embassy personnel in Havana, beginning in late 2016, and subsequently elsewhere. A distinguished panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences determined that “many of the chronic, nonspecific symptoms are also consistent with known RF [radio frequency] effects, such as dizziness, headache, fatigue, nausea, anxiety, cognitive deficits, and memory loss.” The CIA found that in a majority of cases the symptoms could be attributed to preexisting medical conditions or environmental or other factors, inviting the illogical conclusion, in the words of a CIA official quoted in the article, that “it is unlikely that a foreign actor, including Russia, is conducting a sustained, worldwide campaign” responsible for the harm experienced by some of the victims.
What is missing in The Post’s coverage is a bit of historical perspective that argues otherwise. Near the end of World War II, the Russians gave the U.S. ambassador in Moscow a wooden plaque of the Great Seal of the United States that contained a passive listening device (“the Thing,” a.k.a. “the Great Seal bug”) that allowed them to listen in on the ambassador’s conversations — when it was excited by microwave radiation beamed at the embassy. It was in use for seven years before its discovery and made public by U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in 1960 in response to the U-2 spy plane incident.
Much has changed since then. What has not changed is the requirement for directed energy to power a passive listening device.
Jack Connerney, Annapolis | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The midterms could be a bloodbath for Democrats. And there may be little that candidates can do about it.
Supporters of Republican Glenn Youngkin dance during an election night rally at the Westfields Marriott Washington Dulles in Chantilly, Va., on Nov. 2. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Democrats are right to be concerned that the upcoming midterm elections could be a disaster. A close look at the data from 2021 elections in Virginia and New Jersey suggest it could become a bloodbath — and there’s likely little individual candidates can do to avoid it.
President Biden carried both states by large margins in 2020. That made the Republican sweep of all three statewide offices and close call in New Jersey a shocking development. This was amplified by the GOP’s gain of seven seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, giving them control of the chamber. The party also gained seats in the New Jersey State Assembly and Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli lost to Democrat Phil Murphy by only a little more than three points. In all, it was a terrible night for Team Blue.
These developments could be explained by local factors, such as Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe’s debate gaffe in which he suggested parents shouldn’t have a say in their children’s education. But the weight of the evidence strongly suggests it was largely driven by antipathy to Biden and the national Democratic Party.
Consider these facts: Biden won the 2020 popular vote by 4.5 percentage points, but on election day 2021, his net job approval rating on the RealClearPolitics polling average was negative 8 points, a 12.5-point swing in about a year. That’s eerily similar to shifts seen in state contests. Youngkin won by 2 points, a 12-point swing from Biden’s 10.1 point win the year before. Murphy won by 3.2 points, but a 12.7-point drop from Biden’s winning margin.
Identical patterns arose in both states’ lower house races as well. Democrats lost every seat in those chambers that Biden carried by less than 11.75 percent, according to data compiled by Daily Kos Elections. Democrats did narrowly hold one state Senate seat in New Jersey that Biden carried by 11.75 points — even as the two incumbent Democrat Assembly members from that seat were defeated (New Jersey elects two Assembly members per Senate district). In other words, Democrats lost 13 of 14 races in seats that Biden carried by 12.5 points or less just one year earlier.
That’s consistent with the ongoing trend in which races are increasingly nationalized and hyperpartisan. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was the only senator in 2020 to win in a state carried by the opposing party’s presidential candidate. The same is true for only 16 House candidates. In 2016, every winning senatorial candidate came from the same party whose nominee won that state. The 2021 results suggest this already strong trend went into overdrive in response to the Biden administration’s perceived shortcomings.
Democrats would suffer massive losses if the 2021 trend is replicated in 2022. Suppose Biden’s net job approval rating is still negative 8 points on election day, resulting in the same 12.5 shift from 2020 that we saw in November. Democrats hold 29 House seats at or below that threshold in states that have completed redistricting. With nearly 40 percent of the chamber’s 435 districts left to be drawn, 10 to 20 more seats will also be below that threshold when all the maps are final. That means Republicans would likely pick up the overwhelming majority of those seats, potentially netting a 35-seat gain, which would give them their biggest majority since the Great Depression.
And it could be even worse. Biden currently has a negative 14.4-point job approval rating on the RealClearPolitics average, a massive 18.9-point shift from 2020. If the 2021 trend holds firm and Biden doesn’t improve those numbers — and historical analysis from Inside Elections guru Nathan L. Gonzales suggests that’s unlikely — every Democrat in a district or state that he won by less than that amount could be seriously threatened. That includes seven Democratic senators up for reelection in 2022 — including Colorado’s Michael F. Bennet and Oregon’s Ron Wyden. Even Washington’s Patty Murray, already facing a well-funded challenger in Republican Tiffany Smiley, hails from a state Biden won by a bit more than 19 points. A 2021-style clean sweep on current polling data would give the GOP 57 Senate seats, more than any time since after the 1920 election. House Democrats could be looking at a loss of 60 members or more.
Past is not prologue, and it’s certainly possible that the 2021 results are not indicative of what will transpire in 2022. But if they are, and if Biden does not improve his job approval significantly by the fall, Democrats are looking at a wipeout unlike anything they have seen in a century. | null | null | null | null | null |
“What came to my mind was that he was one of the greatest champions — or Rafa [Nadal] or Roger [Federer], to be honest … and I just thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to make him work. If he wants to win it, he needs to fight to the last point.’”
In doing so, Medvedev revealed another truth about the 2022 Australian Open: Djokovic may not be in the draw after being deported on order of the country’s Immigration Minister, who concluded his unvaccinated status posed a risk, but the absence of the world No. 1 has been very much “present” throughout the tournament.
For Medvedev, Djokovic served as a source of inspiration at a critical juncture, when Auger-Aliassime’s powerful blasts and pinpoint serves had him short of breath, low on his stockpile of fresh shirts, and out of solutions.
“[I had] zero confidence in myself and the outcome of the match,” Medvedev said of his mind-set after losing the first two sets. “I was like, ‘Just be like Novak. Show him that you are better.’”
For other players, Djokovic’s absence — along with that of Federer, who skipped the tournament to continue recovering from a third knee surgery — represented a glimmer of possibility that hasn’t existed at the Australian Open at any point during their pro careers.
Moreover, this year is the first time since the 2003 Australian Open that only one of the “Big Three” has entered the tournament, culling the physical and psychological roadblocks to only Nadal.
At the same time, Dimitrov added, it takes seven victories to win a Grand Slam.
“Every match is very competitive,” said Dimitrov, 30, a three-time Grand Slam semifinalist (2014 Wimbledon, 2017 Australian Open, 2019 U.S. Open). “We can’t be like, ‘Oh, this player is not in the draw or that player is not in the draw.”
Denis Shapovalov, who pushed Nadal to five sets before conceding their quarterfinal earlier this week, said he was among those who saw the competitive door open slightly once Djokovic exited the 2020 U.S. Open, ejected from his fourth-round match for inadvertently hitting a linesperson with a ball blasted in a fit of anger.
He did just that, reaching the fourth round while toppling two higher ranked opponents in the process.
In the end, Djokovic’s absence didn’t pave the way for an upstart to storm into Friday’s semifinals. Those who’ll vie for a spot in Sunday’s final are an accomplished bunch that largely followed the tournament’s seeding. No. 2 Medvedev will take on fourth-seeded Stefanos Tsitsipas, while sixth-seeded Nadal, who was drawn to meet Djokovic in the semis, will face seventh-seed Matteo Berrettini of Italy instead.
All have reached this stage of a major before, Nadal, 35, is tied with Djokovic and Federer for a men’s record 20 Grand Slam titles. Medvedev, 25, has one Grand Slam title. And Tsitsipas, 23, and Berrettini, 25, were Grand Slam runners-up last season, at the French Open and Wimbledon, respectively. Both were beaten by Djokovic,
Should Nadal win two more matches in Melbourne to claim a 21st major, he insists that the achievement would be no sweeter because it separated him from Djokovic and Federer.
“I don’t believe that my happiness, my future happiness [is] gonna depend on if I achieve one more Grand Slam than the others, or if the others achieve more Grand Slams than me,” Nadal said. “… Every one of us, we did very special things in our sport. Let’s enjoy that.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: Race in America: The Power of Representation with Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.)
MS. SOTOMAYOR: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Marianna Sotomayor, congressional reporter at The Washington Post. As someone who covers the House of Representatives almost every day, I’m very excited to talk to Congressman Tony Gonzales. He is a Republican from Texas. He’s serving his first congressional term in the House of Representatives, and of course he is also the co-chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Conference, which is different than the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Congressman, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.
REP. GONZALES: No, thank you for having me, Marianna. I’m looking forward to it. We’re going to have some fun.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: Yes, exactly. I like the energy already. You know, before we actually talk about the power of representation, I actually wanted to talk to you about some of the news that we have been covering and I’m sure you’ve been following this past week, which is of course on the developments in Ukraine and Russia. You were actually there pretty recently last year. So I wanted to ask you what some of those takeaways were that you think should be applied moving forward and so far what you think the Biden administration has been doing right and maybe things that you would recommend to them to continue to do.
REP. GONZALES: Sure. So first off, I spent 20 years in the military, and I retired in 2019. So not too far--not too long ago I was still active duty, and I spent five years in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I know what conflict looks like, the good parts, the bad parts, the ugly parts. My expertise is cryptology. I was a cryptologist, so cyber in particular. You know, last year I had the opportunity of visiting Ukraine, among other places, Taiwan, South Korea and some other places as well. But Ukraine in particular, there was a couple of takeaways for me. One, it was the fact--I met with all different types of people--you know, leadership in the government, the embassy folks. Also, I met with veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian-Russian War. And the takeaway I got specifically from those veterans was they were ready to fight. They weren’t going to shy away from a fight. What they also--the takeaway was, they didn’t want to fight. You know, they were basically farmers. And you know, one guy in particular was wearing a Nirvana shirt, you know? And he goes look, man, I don’t want war. This is the last--he’s a doctor--or he's a nurse, a field medic. And he goes the last thing I want is war. But you know what? If Russia comes looking for a fight, we’re not going to shy away from one.
The other takeaway that I got was it wasn’t a matter of if; it was a matter of when. And they were asking then, just as they’re asking now, where is the United States going to be. A couple of takeaways for the administration, I think it is a positive measure that they sent some weaponry to Ukraine. I think that’s great. We need to do more of that, and I think that’s good that the president is going down that route. I would also say we need to turn--instead of just rhetoric, there has to be actions. And one thing in particular I think that we haven’t used is cyber. And this is an instrument in our toolbox that we can use to deter the Russians before there’s a kinetic response. So instead of sending tanks and troops and aircraft carriers and planes, you know, why not flip a switch and maybe turn off some oil pumps in Russia and just go, look, this is a small taste of what could happen if you go into Ukraine? These are a few options I think that the president should consider.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: You know, you mentioned cyber, and it’s something that doesn’t necessarily come to mind when you first mention war or tensions with another foreign country, right? We think of all those physical things you mentioned--airplane, carriers, tanks, that kind of warfare. But cyber is very important. And you know, DHS is actually warning--I’m sure you know this--that Russia could retaliate against the U.S. through cyberwarfare in some certain way. Besides what you’re already saying about how the U.S. should take actions now against Russia, how should we protect ourselves from potential hacks, potential cyberattacks by Russia?
REP. GONZALES: Yeah, you know, I spent 20 years in the intelligence community. It’s what I’ve done my entire adult life. What I can say is the United States has the best defenses when it comes to cyber. Now defense is very tough to--because you have to get it right every single time, and in cyber in particular it’s impossible to do. But don’t think for a second the United States doesn’t have top cyber defenses.
What I also say is the United States has top offensive offenses--or capabilities. And there isn't a close second. One thing that we haven't--we haven't seen more is using our offensive tools as a means for deterrence. And I think that's important.
As far as being back home, you know, funny enough you mentioned it, I literally visited the San Antonio Water System yesterday, the SAWS. It's where we get our local water. And we were going--we're going through everything, and one of the things I brought up was cyber. And I go, look, you know, why is Ukraine important to the people of my district? It's important because if a conflict comes, it comes back home in the form of cyber. And what happens when somebody turns the water off? What happens when somebody turns electricity off?
Kind of similar, I often relate to the winter storm that Texas had in February. It didn't matter how much money you had. It didn’t matter how wealthy you were. It didn't matter if you were in an urban city, or a rural community. Everybody was without power and water, some cases food. These are the type of things we need to prepare for.
I also think there's no--there should not be a divide. There shouldn't be a Republican, Democrat, liberal conservative. We should all be circling behind strengthening ourselves for future cyberattacks.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: It's actually a good point that you mentioned that a couple of my colleagues and I have been reporting about the appetite out in the public and also between Democrats and Republicans about foreign engagement of any kind. It's--there isn't much of an appetite out in the public to do that. And I actually want to hear more from you about how you kind of bring it or at least inform your own constituents about how real things can get at home, make it in a way for them to understand that we should be engaged in some form, or at least paying attention to what's happening between our allies and adversaries.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: Yeah, you're exactly right. And you know, I'd argue most people don't know where Ukraine is. Most people will go why is Ukraine important to my everyday life. So, you really have to bring it back. And in the cyber world, you know, there are no boundaries that--you know, everybody is operating in the same space. And we've seen small snippets of this from, you know, the oil pipeline that got hacked earlier this year. You've seen it in schools. You know, in San Antonio, we've had some school systems hacked. Pensacola, Florida, had their water system hacked. You've seen it in our food production areas. This is only a taste of what is to come.
You know, one of the things that I'm very proud of last year is I was able to pass three bills. One of those bills was the National Digital Reserve Act, and it passed through the NDAA. NDAA had over 800 amendments. And that particular bill was the second most bipartisan bill. We had over 40 different co-sponsors. You know, I had Democrats from all over the spectrum--you know, extremely liberal, moderates, I had Republicans--all over the spectrum. So, I think this is an opportunity to help bring our country back together. But we’ve got to start acting now. We can't think as if this is, you know, in the--way in the future and is never going to occur. It's here, and it’s here right now, and we have to prepare ourselves for it.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: You know, one other way that the government can try and put pressure on other governments is, you know, probably sanctioning Russia. And I know Biden yesterday said that he likely will put more sanctions not just towards the government but probably on things that Putin himself is also very much interested in. Is that the right course of action? Is there anything more that you recommend that the administration should do?
REP. GONZALES: You know, I think it is a good first step. You know, I'll go back to it. I spent five years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was in the service for 20 years. Eighteen of that was at war. I've seen war firsthand. Look, I love to fight, but I hate war. I mean, war is ugly. There are no winners from war, only losers. So anytime you can get ahead of a conflict, I think that's true leadership, right? And using the other instruments that we have in our toolbox--yes, we have a strong military. And yes, it should be used. But using the other instruments in our toolbox before it gets to that point, I think is so critical.
We talked about cyber. But your--to your point on the financial piece, the sanctions piece, that's critical. But let's do it on the front end, start really enforcing some of these things. It can't just be open rhetoric. It can't just be don't do this, or else. There has to be some teeth behind it, especially for an actor like Putin, who is very aggressive and that, you know, kind of determines his calculations off of that. Let's do a little more forward leaning on that. I wish the president would do that. That way we don't have to go down the traditional send troops and weaponry. Like I said, war is ugly. Everybody's a loser, if it comes to that.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: Actually, I want to shift gears now to talk about the power of minority representation in the hallways of Capitol Hill. Of course, with every congressional term, we're actually seeing more and more people who look like us who do represent the country. And given your position as the co-chairman of the Republican conference--you know, we talk about the Hispanic Caucus a lot because Democrats are in the majority--but Republicans are eyeing taking back the majority in the House. I want to talk about, you know, the goals that you all have currently, and especially now that you're thinking about the fact that you all could be very influential next year.
REP. GONZALES: I'm very excited about the direction that the Congressional Hispanic Conference is headed into. You know, this is something that isn't new. You know, it's been around for a very long--a couple of decades. You know, we're coming up on our 20-year anniversary here. But it's one of those things that it's the organization is only as strong as the people within it. And you know, Mario Díaz-Balart is the--is the chairman, and him and I get along fantastic. He's out of the Miami area. And I went to Mario, and I go, look, man, I'm here to work. I'm here to help push this--or this country in a positive direction. And I think Hispanics need to have a larger voice in that, need to have a seat at the table, especially Republicans. So, we talked about doing this.
And you know, Mario is--the one thing about Hispanics is there is no one size fits all. We come in different shapes and sizes. We have different backgrounds. You know, Mario's Cuban American, and the Cuban American community has been, you know, heavily represented in the Republican Conference for a very long time. I'm Mexican American. You know, I'm from San Antonio. I represent San Antonio to El Paso. You know, in Texas, there are 23 Republicans in the congressional house. Of that, 22 are Caucasian, and then there's Tony Gonzalez. Like that's a problem. We have to continue to grow this Conference and have the representation that reflect as such if we're going to succeed long term.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: You know, it's interesting you point out just the dynamics, that stark contrast that you are really the only voice representing not just your community but the backgrounds that we share. I’m curious to know, you know, Republicans, especially on Capitol Hill--I should actually say it's not just Republicans, it's Democrats and Republicans--when talking about immigration, for example, it has just become extremely politically toxic. It is somewhere where there's so much inflammatory rhetoric that it is hard to see and bridge divides, even though they exist.
REP. GONZALES: Yes.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: Curious to know if you've been talking to House leadership again? Now that you're possibly eying being in the majority, how they should be talking about this not to alienate, you know, especially Mexican American voters, and Hispanic voters of course, and also be able to bridge some of those divides after years of Democrats and Republicans saying immigration reforms are coming or, you know, we're going to address all those racial disparities through economics, which of course is an issue that is definitely at the forefront of many Hispanic voters' minds.
REP. GONZALES: Yeah, no, I've been very fortunate that Leader Kevin McCarthy has given me the opportunity to really lead on this issue. You know, one, my district is over 70 percent Hispanic. Two, I represent 42 percent of the southern border. That's 820 miles. I'm literally on the border every single day. So, when we start talking about the crisis that is occurring, you know, nobody has been on the border more or their constituency knows about it more than I. And this is what--this is--and the other thing, too, is I've hosted 41 members of Congress at the border. And what I tell every member of Congress is this, is, look, you can be hawkish on the border, you can be completely for border security, all in on ensuring terrorists don't enter our country, all in on ensuring drugs, fentanyl, you know, all these terrible things don't happen, these bad actors. We should be all in on preventing that.
And in the same breath, the Republican Party can be all in on legal immigration, on welcoming those that want to come and live the American dream. This is America. It's the greatest country on Earth. Sometimes we forget that because there's all this division. But we have to remember, look, race may make us different, but it shouldn't divide us. And that's what I tell all my colleagues. And I think, you know, politically, Republicans can lead on this effort. If we can find a manner and a messenger to deliver it, and deliver it in a way that goes wait a second, here, we are the party for legal immigration, now let's find some ways to reform the legal immigration system, I think that the country is ready for it. I think the Republican Party is ready to lead on it. But that starts, legal immigration or immigration reform starts with border security, because things are bad. They're as bad as they've ever been.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: I'm curious if you all have been talking to the Democratic Hispanic Caucus and talking to them about potential pathways because, you know, the Senate tried to talk in a bipartisan fashion kind of saying what you were suggesting, you know, we’ll put some money, a lot more security at the border, but also possibly provide pathway to citizenship on DACA and farmworkers, which are two bills, for example, that did receive bipartisan support in the House last year. What is the pathway forward realistically, again, given the fact that there's just--they've tried and tried? How are you all going to try differently?
REP. GONZALES: You know, I've never served in public office before. I did 20 years in the Navy. I retired as a master chief, and I jumped right into politics. So, this is my first time serving in public office. And you know, in the military, you work with all different types of people, from all different walks of life. And you don't ask them, you know, who do they go to bed with, what color their skin, where are they from, you know, who do they pray to? That doesn't matter. What matters is, hey, are you going to help me accomplish this mission. And then I get up to Washington, and it is as partisan as can be. I mean, it is a system that is not built to really work with the other side. It’s a system to go the majority body leads, and I completely get that. So, what I've learned is you have to go out of your way in order to build these relationships. It's not a natural thing. And that's what I've done, honestly, this first year, and I will continue to do it this next year in office, is find relationships, find people that want to work together to solve our nation's problems. And we've done that. You know, I won't get into specifics, but I went to a dinner with eight other Democrats. I'm looking--I'm literally the only Republican in the room, and I'm sitting in this dinner. And I think we just need to do more of this conversating. Like, we got to get out of our corners and start tackling the issues.
What I will say is this. For too long, Congress has punted to the executive branch, right? A prime example, you know, let's blame Biden for everything that's wrong. Or let's blame Trump for everything that's wrong. I think it's time for Congress to lead again. Congress needs to take an active role. We’re an equal body of government. The legislative branch has to come together, roll up our sleeves, and find solutions to these problems. Immigration reform is just one of them. But it takes some leadership, and it takes some people willing to push back against, you know, these rhetoric positions that are out there and go, you know what, we have to solve this because it's the right thing to do.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: I actually want to talk about the Latino vote. You know, one of the big takeaways from the 2020 election was the surprise that many Democrats had that they were losing a majority of Hispanic voters that did previously turn out for them, especially in that southern Florida region that you mentioned, and also in your district, in southern Texas, as well. You know, I've also been covering the Hispanic vote for a couple years, and you can talk to--and I'm sure you know this--Republican and Democratic operatives who have been studying the vote for a long time. And always, always, always they say, you just have to show up. I was actually pretty struck by, you know, reading your bio, you put in, I think, 7,000 miles into your car when you were campaigning?
REP. GONZALES: Seventy.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: Seventy thousand. My goodness. Well, your district is pretty big. But you know, it's almost as simple as that, right? I want to talk to you and get your insight on Republican strategy, but also broadly what Hispanic voters want.
REP. GONZALES: Yeah, I think it's pretty simple. You're spot on. Showing up matters, right. Showing up is 90 percent of life. So, you have to show up. And you can't just show up two weeks before the election and tell people how bad the other side is, you know, that you should be a Republican. That's not the answer. You have to show up early, and you have to show up often. You know, I put 70,000 miles on my pickup truck. And we had big crowds, and we had small crowds. And I met with people in their living rooms. You know, Texas 23 reminds me a lot of New Hampshire and Iowa, you know, that they expect to see their representative. They expect to talk to them, ask them tough questions. And that's what we did.
The other thing that I say is the messenger matters. You know, look, I'm Mexican American. My background, I've lived on my own since I was 15. I dropped out of high school at 18. I joined the Navy without a high school diploma. I go on, I get my high school diploma in service, associate’s, bachelor's, master's, and I'm working on my Ph.D. You know, I have six children. I'm Catholic. I'm a military veteran. Like all these things matter to a community that you represent. So, you know, when I show up and I start talking about, you know, conservative values, it's as if I'm already at the 50-yard line. That's why I think it's so important that the Republican grow--the Republican Party grow and look for candidates like Monica De La Cruz in Texas 15, like Juan Ciscomani in Arizona 6--you know, people that are going to be good leaders. You know, we can't have crazy people. I don't care the color of your skin. If you're crazy, I don't want you in Washington. But we have to have good leaders that are willing to represent our conservative values.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: I think one of the things, too, that surprised many people from the election was the fact that, you know, the former president, President Donald Trump, was pretty heated with his rhetoric, to put it lightly, when it came to Mexican American relations. You, of course, represent a district right at the border. But people still turned out for him. What do you think the takeaways are for the Republican Party on that, especially since you're seeing a bit of alienation with that kind of rhetoric?
REP. GONZALES: Yeah, I think honestly, it started with the Democratic Party really taking a hard left turn and really focusing on some of these social agenda items. You know, they went really anti-police. That's not a traditional Mexican American trait. A lot of Mexican Americans serve in military service or in--you know, they’re sheriffs or they’re police officers, or their brothers are. You know, it's a very service-oriented community. So, when you attack the law enforcement, you're really undermining that, you know?
And then the social programs, you know, one of the interesting things when the pandemic hit, you know, my district was one of the--one of the lowest districts to apply for unemployment benefits, and we're not a wealthy district. So, I'm thinking why aren’t--why aren't people applying for unemployment benefits. And as I went around and talked to people--one thing in particular, I talked to the small business owner. And she's struggling. You know, this was early in the pandemic. Things were closed down. I stop in to have lunch, and I start talking to her about PPP loans. I'm like, hey, why aren't you taking this. She goes--she goes, mijo, I don't want anything. I don't want anything from the government. I just want to be--just want to stay open. I go, you don't understand. The government is the reason why your doors are closed right now. Take the loans to keep your business open. My takeaway was this. And I'm generalizing right now. But the Mexican community isn't a community that has their hand out. They’re a community that's willing to take a second or third job, that wants to have dignity in work, that wants to--wants their children to have a better life than they are, but they want to work for it. And this is something I think the Democratic Party has missed.
And same thing along the border. I mean, when you just pretend it doesn't exist, it's bad. It really is bad. And you have to at least put some effort into it. It's a problem that every presidency has had to deal with. But for whatever reason, this presidency has not dealt with it in a manner that is productive. And the people on the ground, the Hispanic community on the ground, they see that and they're looking for change.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: I’m going to switch gears a little bit, you know, talk a little bit about other things that are part of the legislative agenda and topics of conversation. One of them, of course, is voting rights. When we're talking about race, Democrats especially talk about how a lot of these voting laws are likely going to suppress minority voters. Some of those laws we're seeing in Texas. I wanted to get your take on that. And how do you talk to your own community when they're asking about, hey, how can I, you know, make sure my own vote is counted in the next election?
REP. GONZALES: You know, this is an area that I think is extremely dangerous. And let me explain. You know, both sides have used this rhetoric of attacking our election system. And I think there is nothing more dangerous that--than that. You know, it's one thing if your horse doesn't win. You know, people can go, you know what, we didn't win this time, but we're going to push hard, and we're gonna win next time. But it's another thing when people do not believe in the election process. If they don't think their vote is counted, it's going to get ugly. So, we can't have both sides trying to have political gains off of this and start undermining our institutions. That's the worst thing that could possibly happen to this country.
You know, I look at our adversaries--once again, you know, my national experience, background--you know, Russia will never defeat us. China will never defeat us. America gets defeated from the inside out. And that starts by undermining our institutions. So, to your point on voting, this is something, a conversation we absolutely have to have. And it as best we can, it can't be politicized, because it's dangerous to our republic. What we should be focusing on is every legal vote needs to be counted, one, and it should be counted pretty damn fast. There's no reason why people should be waiting and waiting and waiting and then numbers change, because what it does is it leaves the impression that somebody is stealing the election in the middle of the night. We have to find a better way of ensuring--one, ensuring every vote is counted, but we got to do it in a timely process. Otherwise, it undermines things.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: So, in Texas, Governor Abbott I know recently passed two laws essentially meant to ban any mention of critical race theory. That is, of course, another topic of conversation when you're--when you're talking about schools, right?
REP. GONZALES: Right.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: How should schools be talking about that?
REP. GONZALES: Yeah, you know, I have six children. And you know, my children--you know, we were stationed all over the United States. We went to public schools. We went to private schools. We went to religious schools. We went to homeschools, you name it, everything under the sun. Right now, my school aged children go to public school. And one of the things is, I think you need to be having a relationship with your school system, and you need to be having a discussion with parents. You know, I take my Congress hat off. I'm a father. I'm a father first. You know, and parents should have a seat at the table and should be discussing on this.
I think one takeaway from the pandemic is a lot of parents started seeing what their--what their children were being taught. You know, you get very busy. You go in all these different directions. But when they were at home with you, and you're going, wait a second, what's going on here, it's just dangerous. So it's something me personally, I believe, you know, the education system should be held at--should be focused at the lowest possible level, at the local level, at the state level. What I don't want to see happen is the federal government overreach, and people to tell--you know, people from Washington to tell people from Texas what they should be teaching--or other places. But parents need to have a seat at the table. That's something that we should all be pushing for.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: You know, it's been a pretty busy and active year on Capitol Hill, especially for you.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: It's--you’re a freshman. You just completed, I think, your first year, with another one to go. You've mentioned a lot of the divisions that exist and the--how difficult it's been to bridge divides sometimes within your own conference. I'm curious just to hear from you. Has that impeded, you know, any goals, any conversations you've been trying to have, as you all kind of look at potentially taking back the majority next year?
REP. GONZALES: You know, it makes it a little bit difficult. You know, a lot of people in Washington, they grew up in politics. You know, they were state reps, and they were state senators and--or they were--they're mayors, and they were doing things before they were--they were members of Congress. You know, for me, I was--I was serving our country. So, I don't view the world through a political lens, if you will. And that's been--that's taking some adjustment to realize that, hey, some people, the first thing they look at is how is this going to help me politically, not is this the right or the wrong thing to do. But I'll tell you, you know, even though with that--with all these different obstacles, one person can make a difference. It's--you have to work a little harder. You have to build personal relationships.
But I would give you example. This morning--and this is just one example--this morning, you know, I'm going through my different articles. I'm reading different stuff. I see this one thing in particular that catches my eye. And you know, I'm on the Appropriations Committee. My subcommittee is Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, right? And I see this article in particular, and I reach out to my chairwoman, and I send her this message. And I go, hey, you know--and she's been very forward leaning on making sure that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have good housing--right?--proper housing. And I sent her this article, and I go, man, I really wish we could do a little bit more this year, on some of the housing. She texted me right away, she goes this is a top priority for us. We're absolutely going to hold hearings on some of these different things. And then--and then we just kind of continue the conversation from there.
What I'm getting at is, yes, we have different ways of doing things. Yes, our philosophical beliefs are very different. But you have to treat people like treat--like people, be respectful of one another, and find ways to work together for the betterment of America. We need more of that more--now more than ever, because there's dangers, real dangers not only abroad but here at home. We start tearing each other apart, and there's no coming back. We have to heal, and we’ve got to find ways to help, right? You mentioned education, healthcare, you know, mental health, military. I mean, the list should go on and on and on.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: Well, Congressman, this has been an extremely insightful conversation. To your earlier point, I think we did have fun. I hope--I hope you did. I could keep asking you so many questions, but I guess I'll have to save them for the hallways of Capitol Hill. I just want to thank you again for coming on and informing our viewers about your points of view and how things are going to continue in terms of representation in the Capitol.
REP. GONZALES: I love it, Marianna. Thank you again for having me on. Happy to do it anytime. And I'll just say America's best days are ahead of us.
MS. SOTOMAYOR: Well, thanks for that. And thanks to everyone who tuned in and watched our conversation. If you’re curious about what’s to come, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com. There’s also past conversations on many different issues there that you can listen to as well. I’m Marianna Sotomayor and thanks again for joining us. | null | null | null | null | null |
Bills fans arrested, charged with felony after using fake vaccine cards to attend games
A West Seneca, N.Y. couple is facing felony charges for allegedly using of fake vaccine cards earlier this month to attend the Buffalo Bills playoff win over the New England Patriots.
Vaccination status has been a point of contention across sports, particularly within the Bills organization, which had one of the NFL’s lowest rates of player vaccination. While some players recounted harrowing experiences while infected with coronavirus, others have been more outspoken about the issue. In late October, the Erie County Department of Health said at least 258 people were denied entry into Highmark Stadium after the team’s full vaccine mandate for fans went into effect before a home game against the Miami Dolphins.
The Bills won that game, 26-11, as well as the game against the Patriots, 47-17. Their season ended in epic fashion in Kansas City the following week. | null | null | null | null | null |
YouTube has had rules against posting false or misleading information about the coronavirus and vaccines since the beginning of the pandemic, though critics have said the company enforces its rules unevenly. In September, it took down the accounts of several anti-vaccine influencers after years of research from misinformation researchers suggesting the platform played a role in the growth of vaccine hesitancy. | null | null | null | null | null |
Justice Breyer to retire from the Supreme Court
President Joe Biden has pledged to nominate a Black woman to fill Breyer’s seat.
Supreme Court Justices, from left, John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch attend President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech on January 30, 2018, at the U.S. Capitol. Breyer is to retire from the high court this summer. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring, giving President Joe Biden an opening he has pledged to fill by naming the first Black woman to the high court.
Breyer, 83, is the oldest justice on the nine-member court. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton and joined the court in 1994. Although he is considered liberal, he has tried to find common ground with more moderate justices right and left of center.
Breyer’s departure, expected over the summer, won’t change the 6-3 conservative advantage on the court. That’s because his replacement will be nominated by Biden and almost certainly confirmed by a Senate where Democrats have a slim majority.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer said Biden’s nominee “will receive a prompt hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee and will be considered and confirmed by the full United States Senate with all deliberate speed.”
Republicans who changed the Senate rules during the Trump administration to allow Supreme Court justices to be confirmed with a simple majority — only 51 votes out of 100 — appeared resigned to the outcome.
Among the names being circulated as possible nominees are California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, prominent civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill and U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs, whom Biden has nominated to be an appeals court judge.
The president has not made a decision on a nominee, White House aides said, and is expected to take a few weeks. But he has expanded his pool of applicants by naming more Black women to the bench.
Often overshadowed by his fellow liberal Ginsburg, Breyer wrote two major opinions in support of abortion rights on a court closely divided over the issue. He also laid out his growing discomfort with the death penalty in several opinions in recent years that disagreed with the court’s majority.
In more than 27 years on the court, Breyer has been an active and cheerful questioner during oral arguments, when justices and attorneys discuss certain cases.
Early in his career, Breyer worked for the late Senator Edward Kennedy when the Massachusetts Democrat was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That experience, Breyer said, made him a firm believer in compromise.
His time working in the Senate led to his appointment by President Jimmy Carter as a federal appeals court judge in Boston, Massachusetts, and he was confirmed with support from Democrats and Republicans. Breyer served for 14 years on the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before moving up to the Supreme Court.
His 87-9 high-court confirmation was the last with fewer than 10 Senators voting against the nominee.
Born in San Francisco, California, Breyer became an Eagle Scout as a teenager and began a stellar academic career at Stanford University, then Oxford, then Harvard Law School.
Breyer and his wife, Joanna, a psychologist, have three children — daughters Chloe and Nell and a son, Michael — and six grandchildren. | 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 “fake information about vaccines” on the platform.
“We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators,” a Spotify spokesperson told The Washington Post in a statement. “We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.”
Young’s letter, which has since been deleted, was addressed to his manager and an executive at his record label and cited Joe Rogan, who hosts “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, 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,” Young wrote Monday, according to Rolling Stone. “Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.”
Young, the Canadian rock legend whose best-known hits include “Heart of Gold,” “Harvest Moon” and “Rockin’ in the Free World,” had roughly 6.6 million monthly listeners on the platform. His 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.”
Representatives for Young did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Rogan, who helms one of the most popular podcasts on Spotify, has repeatedly spread misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines to his estimated 11 million listeners per episode, of which he typically posts four to five a week. 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. “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.”
Last September, Rogan discussed catching covid himself and treating it with a number of therapeutics and treatments, including ivermectin, a medicine used to kill parasites in animals and humans, which is not authorized or approved by either the CDC or the FDA to treat covid.
In December, Rogan invited Robert Malone, a physician who has become a prominent skeptic of the coronavirus vaccines, to appear on his show. “Malone had a following before his ‘Joe Rogan Experience’ interview that was released Dec. 31 — but that show introduced him to an even wider audience," wrote The Post’s Timothy Bella. "On it, he promoted an unfounded theory called ‘mass-formation psychosis,’ telling Rogan that a ‘third of the population [is] basically being hypnotized’ into believing what the mainstream media and Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert and chief medical adviser to President Biden, report on the vaccines. Malone went on to compare the country’s pandemic policies to Nazi Germany.”
In response to Malone’s appearance on the podcast, more than 270 medical professionals signed an open letter urging Spotify “to immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform.”
“The average age of JRE listeners is 24 years old and according to data from Washington State, unvaccinated 12-34 year olds are 12 times more likely to be hospitalized with covid than those who are fully vaccinated,” the letter stated. “Dr. Malone’s interview has reached many tens of millions of listeners vulnerable to predatory medical misinformation.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Johnson noted “some evidence of a propensity towards violence in Defendant’s personal relationship,” citing testimony by his ex-wife, and added that Rhodes had no criminal history, and had not filed federal income tax since 2007.
Rhodes has been detained since his Jan. 13 arrest by the FBI, and his lawyers vowed they would appeal the decision. At a detention hearing Monday before Johnson, Rhodes sat in a black and white jail jumpsuit with his hands shackled at his waist as his attorneys, Phillip A. Linder and James Lee Bright, urged Johnson to release him, saying he posed no risk of flight nor danger to the public.
“You’ve seen what he looks like,” Bright said, referring to Rhodes’s trademark black eye patch and stocky build. “Everyone in America knows what he looks like. In terms of flight risks, there are none.” | 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.
On May 16, 1994, President Bill Clinton and Stephen G. Breyer walk to the White House Rose Garden, where Breyer was officially introduced as Clinton's Supreme Court nominee.
Then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), right, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, talks to Breyer, center, beside Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) in Washington on May 17, 1994.
Justice Breyer arrives for a discussion at Georgetown University Law Center on March 20, 2007, in Washington.
On Feb. 1, 2006, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Breyer talk before a ceremonial swearing-in ceremony for Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in the East Room of the White House.
Breyer reads to fourth-grade students from Amidon Elementary at the Supreme Court Library on April 12, 2007, in Washington.
Breyer holds a copy of the U.S. Constitution as he discusses the role of the Supreme Court with high school students at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept. 7, 2007.
Justices Breyer, left, and Clarence Thomas prepare to testify on Capitol Hill on April 23, 2009, before the House Appropriations subcommittee on financial services and general government.
From left, President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, Then-Vice President Biden, Breyer and Ginsburg listen to Regina Spektor perform May 27, 2010, honoring Jewish American Heritage Month at the White House.
Breyer takes questions about the Supreme Court and his book, “Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View,” at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on Sept. 29, 2010.
Prince Charles, left, walks with Breyer as he arrives at the Supreme Court in Washington 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.
President Donald Trump greets Stephen G. Breyer before the State of the Union address on Jan. 30, 2018, in the House of Representatives chamber on Capitol Hill.
Justices Breyer, center left, Neil M. Gorsuch, center, and Brett M. Kavanaugh, right, await the arrival of former president George H.W. Bush to lie in State in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Dec. 3, 2018.
Breyer, seated second from right, and the other justices of the Supreme Court, seated from left, Alito, Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, and, standing from left, Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, in Washington on April 23.
Breyer during an interview in his Washington office on Aug. 27. | null | null | null | null | null |
A West Seneca, N.Y., couple is facing felony charges for allegedly using of fake vaccine cards earlier this month to attend the Buffalo Bills playoff win over the New England Patriots.
Vaccination status has been a point of contention across sports, particularly within the Bills organization, which had one of the NFL’s lowest rates of player vaccination. While some players recounted harrowing experiences while infected with coronavirus, others have been more outspoken about the issue.
In late October, the Erie County Department of Health said at least 250 people were denied entry into Highmark Stadium after the team’s full vaccine mandate for fans went into effect before a home game against the Miami Dolphins. Kimberly Ray, a former Rochester, N.Y. radio host, was investigated by the state health department after she claimed to use a fake vaccine card to attend that game.
She posted a photo from the stands on Twitter, with the caption: “Here we are. Didn’t even look at my fake card lol.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“I would love to see a district attorney who finds a crime scene with a house full of Black people, a White guy in the yard with 9 bullet holes, and then detains them and lets them all go,” said civil rights attorney Paul Jubas, who is advising Spencer’s family. “I would love to see what the response is to that. That district attorney would be instantly out of office the next day. White America would not stand for that.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked 36 active hate groups in Pennsylvania — most of them with skinhead, neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies, according to its data. A history of sundown towns — or all-White communities where minorities were barred after dark by the threat of violence — is still entrenched in the state’s most rural areas, said Rev. Dale Snyder, a pastor at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The memorial service held on Dec. 31 for Spencer, Icilda said, was a roller coaster of emotions. There was frustration from being “ghosted” by authorities, she said, helplessness from not having answers, comfort from the tributes about her son’s kindness and also hope that some good would emerge from the tragedy.
“He always said ‘something good is going to happen’ and that’s where I’m going with it,” she said. “But I need people to treat my dead son as a person — not a thing or number. He was a person’s child and they need to listen to his story.” | null | null | null | null | null |
California redwood forest is returned to Native American tribes
A group of 10 tribes will now be responsible for more than 500 acres of the forest.
More than 500 acres of redwood forestland in Mendocino County, California, was donated Tuesday to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council. The conservation group Save the Redwoods League bought the land and turned it over to the council, made of up descendants of Native Americans who lived in the area before European settlers arrived. (Max Forster/AP)
The descendants of Native American tribes on the Northern California coast are reclaiming some of their heritage that includes ancient redwoods that have stood since their ancestors walked the land.
Save the Redwoods League announced Tuesday that it is transferring more than 500 acres on the “Lost Coast,” which it bought in 2020, to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council.
The group of 10 tribes that have inhabited the area for thousands of years are now responsible for protecting the land dubbed Tc’ih-Leh-Dun, or “Fish Run Place,” in the Sinkyone language.
Priscilla Hunter, chairwoman of the Sinkyone Council, said it’s fitting that they will be caretakers of the land where her people were removed or forced to flee before the forest was largely stripped for timber.
The league recently paid $37 million for a scenic five-mile stretch of the rugged and forbidding Lost Coast from a lumber company to protect it from logging and eventually open it to the public.
Allowing public access to the newly transferred property is not a priority because it is so remote, said Sam Hodder, president and chief executive of the league. But it serves an important puzzle piece wedged between other protected areas.
Hawk Rosales, former executive director of the council, said the new property adds a significant holding to the 4,000 acres that the group protects for cultural and ecological purposes.
More important, it recognizes the tribal group’s role in caring for lands. | null | null | null | null | null |
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve signaled Wednesday that it will likely begin a series of interest-rate hikes in March. That would reverse pandemic-era low-rate policies that have fueled hiring and growth — and stock market gains — but also high inflation. Chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference that inflation has gotten “slightly worse” since the Fed last met in December. He said raising the Fed’s benchmark rate, which has been pegged at zero since March 2020, will help prevent high prices from becoming entrenched. Powell said the central bank can manage the process in a way that prolongs economic growth and keeps unemployment low.
WASHINGTON — Will mortgage rates go up? How about car loans? Credit cards? How about those nearly invisible rates on bank CDs — any chance of getting a few dollars more? With the Federal Reserve signaling Wednesday that it will begin raising its benchmark interest rate as soon as March — and probably a few additional times this year — consumers and businesses will eventually feel it. The Fed’s thinking is that with America’s job market essentially back to normal and inflation surging well beyond the central bank’s annual 2% target, now is the time to raise its benchmark rate from near zero.
NEW YORK — An early market rally gave way to a broad slide for stocks and a surge in bond yields Wednesday after the Federal Reserve signaled it plans to begin raising interest rates “soon” to fight a spike in inflation that the central bank says is probably getting worse. Fed Chair Jerome Powell took repeated questions about how and when the Fed will start letting its balance sheet shrink after buying trillions of dollars of bonds through the pandemic. The S&P 500 fell 0.1% after giving up an early gain of 2.2%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 1.86%.
BEIJING — Richer, more heavily armed and openly confrontational, China has undergone history-making changes since the last time it hosted the Olympics, in 2008. Then, as fireworks exploded over Beijing, China was about to pass Japan to become the No. 2 global economy. The ruling Communist Party celebrated with the most expensive Summer Games to date in what foreign media dubbed China’s “coming out party,” echoing the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 that symbolized Japan’s recovery from its defeat in World War II. Now, China is leveraging its economic might against complaints by the U.S. and other governments over trade, technology theft and its treatment of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Muslim minorities.
DETROIT — Tesla Inc. has posted record fourth-quarter and full-year earnings. The results came as its vehicle deliveries soared last years despite a global shortage of computer chips that has slowed the entire auto industry. The Austin, Texas, company made $5.5 billion last year compared with the previous record year of $3.47 billion in net income posted in 2020. The company said in a letter to shareholders that there should be no doubt about the viability and profitability of electric vehicles. Tesla made $2.32 billion in the fourth quarter. Excluding special items such as stock-based compensation, the company made $2.54 per share. That beat Wall Street expectations of $2.36 per share. Revenue for the quarter was $17.72 billion, also ahead of analysts’ estimates.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is getting support from several business leaders on his economic agenda that has stalled in the Senate. It’s an effort to restart some momentum for his proposed nearly $2 trillion in spending and tax increases. Biden met at the White House with top executives from General Motors, Ford, Microsoft, Etsy, Salesforce and other companies. Biden asked the executives about the possible benefits from spending more on climate issues, manufacturing and child care. It’s unclear just how fast Congress will move to take up Biden’s plans. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin opposed the measure in December for its possible impact on the national debt and inflation.
SILVER SPRING, Md. — Sales of new single family homes in December rose to their highest level in 10 months as buyers snapped up cheaper homes in anticipation of higher interest rates. The Commerce Department reported that December’s increase put the seasonally adjusted annual sales pace to 811,000 for the month, an 11.9% increase over November’s figure, which was revised down to 725,000 from 744,000. The median price of a new home, the point where half the homes sold for more and half for less, fell to $377,700, last month, its lowest level since June but about 4% higher than December 2020.
CHICAGO — Boeing has reported a fourth-quarter loss of $4.16 billion after taking a big charge against earnings to cover delays in delivering one of its jets to airline customers. The aircraft maker said Wednesday that it took a charge of $3.5 billion to cover additional delays related to production problems with its 787 jetliner and compensation for airlines that are still waiting to get their planes. The company also says the problems will add $2 billion in unusual production costs to the 787, double an earlier projection. Deliveries of new 787s have been halted since May 2021 because of flaws including gaps where panels of the carbon-composite fuselage are joined. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rhodes has been detained since his Jan. 13 arrest by the FBI, and his lawyers vowed they would appeal the decision. Phillip A. Linder and James Lee Bright did not immediately respond to requests for comment after the judge released her order, but at a detention hearing Monday they argued for Rhodes release. They said he posed no risk of flight nor danger to the public during the hearing in which Rhodes sat before Johnson in a black and white jail jumpsuit with his hands shackled at his waist.
“You’ve seen what he looks like,” Bright said, referring to Rhodes’s trademark black eye patch and stocky build. “Everyone in America knows what he looks like. In terms of flight risks, there are none," he said, with Linder adding, “There will be a second decision.”
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the District, which is prosecuting Capitol breach cases, declined to comment.
In her detention decision, Johnson said that while Rhodes had no criminal history, there was “some evidence of a propensity towards violence in Defendant’s personal relationship,” citing testimony by Rhodes’s estranged wife. Rhodes has said he not filed federal income tax since 2007, the judge noted.
Johnson also said Rhodes’s continued advocacy for violence against the federal government was reinforced by his “technical savvy, military training and familiarity with encrypted communications,” which she said are nearly impossible to monitor and that Rhodes was known to use.
That combination "gives rise to a credible threat that Defendant’s release might endanger others by fostering the planning and execution of additional violent events,” the judge concluded. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: It’s a pandemic miracle: I’m defending the FDA against Ron DeSantis
A monoclonal antibody treatment center in Florida is closed on Jan. 25 after federal health regulators found the treatment ineffective against treating the covid-19 omicron variant. (Marta Lavandier/AP)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) truly is some kind of miracle worker. He is about to make me defend the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to keep a drug off the market.
Alt-right blogger Mike Cernovich went further, tweeting “The FDA is trying to make it so that people in Florida die of Covid. They’ll kill people to harm Republicans.” This was retweeted more than 3,200 times, including by Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary.
I am trying to find a less perjorative word than “crazy” to describe this situation. Don’t get me wrong: As a longtime critic of the FDA’s excessive caution, I get why conservatives might want a “right to try.” Moreover I understand why conservatives assume that the agency has been politicized; the decision to delay announcing the results of vaccine trials until after the 2020 election gave off political overtones, even if you think that’s a false impression.
To understand why, you have to understand how monoclonal antibodies or mAbs, work, and why experts believe these ones don’t. This helps explain the FDA’s (also correct) decision to leave vaccines on the market even though they also show reduced efficacy against omicron.
It all comes down to the antibodies. You can think of a virus as using a kind of key (such as the infamous spike protein) which unlocks our cells so the virus can get inside. Some antibodies glom onto part of that key, so that it no longer unlocks the door — as if you’d stuck a bit of clay onto the notches of your house key. Meanwhile, another part of the antibody “signals to the immune system: ‘Hey, I’ve got a live one’,” says drug researcher Derek Lowe, who was kind enough to walk me through the chemistry.
Kathleen Parker: Is it time for Fauci to exit the stage?
Your body responds to the virus by trying lots of different antibodies that react to different parts of the pathogen, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Manufactured monoclonal antibodies are more focused: Researchers find the ones with the highest activity and produce a whole bunch of just a few of them. The benefit of mAbs is that unlike vaccines, which do not help against an active infection, they can treat patients already infected with covid-19..
This helps explain what we’ve seen with omicron. Because this variant has so many mutations, people who have been vaccinated, or survived an earlier covid infection, have defenses that don’t prevent infection as well as they used to. But we might still have some antibodies that are effective, and a battery of other immune defenses that also kick in, so the infections still tend to be milder. Many monoclonal antibodies, by contrast, have lost some or all of their effectiveness — so much, in the two that were just withdrawn, as to render them basically ineffective.
But why not leave them on the market for people who have other variants? Well, omicron is now estimated to account for 99.9 percent of new cases. With those case rates, we’d need to pump a thousand doses into covid patients’ arms — at thousands of dollars a pop — in order to potentially help maybe one. And even that one wouldn’t necessarily benefit. Most people recover from covid without monoclonal antibodies, and some people don’t even if they get them.
None of this was remotely controversial before the DeSantis administration attacked the FDA. It was widely agreed that many previously effective monoclonals were now of little use against omicron. In the case of the withdrawn treatments, even the manufacturers, Eli Lilly and Regeneron, agree they don’t work. No sane governor should want to waste money and scarce medical resources on pumping useless antibodies into Floridian veins.
Of course, DeSantis is not insane; he is a shrewd political operator who is eyeing a presidential run in 2024. He has clearly decided that one way he can outflank former president Donald Trump with the Republican base is to appeal to vaccine skeptics, many of whom embraced antibodies enthusiastically. That might be one reason DeSantis made these drugs a centerpiece of Florida’s pandemic strategy — and why he is now manufacturing a controversy out of a completely unremarkable, and eminently defensible, decision by the FDA. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Russia’s looming invasion of Ukraine shows why Trump’s first impeachment was necessary and proper
President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in New York on Sept. 25, 2019. (Evan Vucci/AP)
It is easy to forget now that, before he was impeached for inciting an insurrection last January, Donald Trump was impeached for intervening in Ukraine’s affairs for his own political gain.
But as Russian troops mass for a likely invasion of the former Soviet satellite, Trump’s abuse of power in Ukraine is a reminder of the way the last administration treated the young republic like a second-class ally. And while ultimately unsuccessful, Democratic efforts to remove Trump from office for his actions appear even more justified two years later.
As a refresher: To boost his reelection prospects, Trump froze $391 million in vital security assistance in 2019 as part a broader conspiracy to coerce the Ukrainian government into announcing bogus investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden. Trump also withheld a coveted White House meeting that the new Ukrainian president felt he needed to demonstrate to the Kremlin that he had Washington’s support. Trump even forced out the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, as part of the scheme.
In a July 2019 phone call, Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate not only the Bidens but also a discredited theory that it was Ukraine rather than Russia that attempted to interfere in the 2016 American presidential election. When Zelensky said Ukraine wanted to buy Javelin antitank missiles, Trump interjected: “I would like you to do us a favor though.”
The American president then asked his counterpart “to look into” former vice president Biden’s role in encouraging Ukraine to remove a prosecutor in Kyiv widely viewed by the U.S. government as corrupt. Trump hoped to give credence to an unfounded conspiracy theory that the prosecutor had been removed because he was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas firm on whose board Hunter Biden sat. (It is worth noting, by the way, that Hunter had no business being on Burisma’s board and wouldn’t have been if his last name wasn’t Biden.)
The Trump-Zelensky call was so outrageously problematic that White House lawyers were alerted, and the summary of what the commander in chief had said was transferred to a super-secret computer system to reduce the number of people who had access. A whistleblower who heard about Trump’s self-serving shakedown of Zelensky filed a report, which set in motion a series of events that led to the security aid being unfrozen and the House launching an investigation. Trump released a partial transcript of the call, which he said was “perfect” and showed he did nothing wrong, an assertion that only underscored how unfit he was for the presidency.
Gordon Sondland, whom Trump appointed as ambassador to the European Union, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that “everyone was in the loop” about the “quid pro quo.” Then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney admitted publicly that Trump held up the military aid that had been approved by Congress. “Get over it,” Mulvaney told reporters. “There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”
Again and again, Trump treated Ukraine like a pawn. He placed his personal interests over the national interest. John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser at the time, declined to testify before Congress but later wrote in his memoir that Trump told him that he would not release the aid to Ukraine until he got information about his political enemies. Bolton also revealed that Trump ordered him to call Zelensky to ask him to meet with Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer, who had been spreading some of the most fanciful theories about the Biden-Burisma links. “The whole affair was bad policy, questionable legally, and unacceptable as presidential behavior,” Bolton wrote.
In addition to abuse of power, Trump was also impeached for obstruction of Congress after he refused to cooperate with the probe. A dozen witnesses followed Trump’s orders by refusing to testify. The White House, along with the State, Defense and Energy departments, refused to produce a single document in response to subpoenas.
The whole affair helps explain why Zelensky has struggled to navigate U.S. politics. He was reluctant to play along with the former president and announce an imaginary investigation of Hunter Biden because he didn’t want to antagonize the Democratic front-runner. Then he tried to keep the impeachment drama at arm’s length, playing down the pressure he’d faced because he was nervous about provoking Trump a second time.
All of this put daylight between Washington and Kyiv at a time when Vladimir Putin was known to have designs on Ukraine. All responsibility for an invasion, should it come, can only be laid at Putin’s door. But it is also a partial consequence of Trump’s reckless disregard for a fledgling democracy.
It’s another element of his legacy that will not be featured in any presidential library. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Bruce Schreiner | AP
FRANKFORT, Ky. — Kentucky’s top-ranking state House Democrat announced Wednesday that she won’t seek reelection this year, saying she won’t stand in the way of a “person of color” being elected in her newly redrawn district where racial minorities represent the majority of eligible voters. | null | null | null | null | null |
“I would love to see a district attorney who finds a crime scene with a house full of Black people, a White guy in the yard with nine bullet holes, and then detains them and lets them all go,” said civil rights attorney Paul Jubas, who is advising Spencer’s family. “I would love to see what the response is to that. That district attorney would be instantly out of office the next day. White America would not stand for that.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked 36 active hate groups in Pennsylvania — most of them with skinhead, neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies, according to its data. A history of sundown towns — or all-White communities where minorities were barred after dark by the threat of violence — is still entrenched in the state’s most rural areas, said the Rev. Dale Snyder, a pastor at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The memorial service held Dec. 31 for Spencer, Icilda said, was a roller coaster of emotions. There was frustration from being “ghosted” by authorities, she said, helplessness from not having answers, comfort from the tributes about her son’s kindness and also hope that some good would emerge from the tragedy.
“He always said, ‘Something good is going to happen’ and that’s where I’m going with it,” she said. “But I need people to treat my dead son as a person — not a thing or number. He was a person’s child, and they need to listen to his story.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D), who had armed demonstrators gather outside her home in December, said, “My immediate reaction to this is relief — in a time when local and state election officials are facing continued and escalating threats and harassment, it is a relief to know the Department of Justice is prioritizing investing in our safety and security, which is critical to ensuring our elections are safe and secure. The allocation should also help improve communication and collaboration between law enforcement and election officials, and removes from us the perpetual anxiety of trying to figure out how to fund needed security and protections.”
Amy Gardner contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Here are some of the winning images of AAP Magazine’s ‘23 Women’ contest
25 photographers this year were awarded the top three cash prizes for their work.
The competition was open to any photographer, regardless of gender.
First Place: Susanne Middelberg (Netherlands).
‘Daylight’
In my portraits, I am looking for honesty and vulnerability. I believe that vulnerability makes us nicer human beings and that this makes the world a little more friendly and more understanding. People who show themselves vulnerable give the other the confidence that they themselves may be who they are. I am most fascinated when I can see opposite qualities of a person at the same moment. I find this exciting because people are complex. I hope that the portrait touches something of the viewer himself. In this series, I chose to use only daylight to make the image as natural as possible. www.susannemiddelberg.nl
Second Place: Aline Smithson (United States)
‘Arrangement in Green and Black, Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother’
Inspired by the composition in Whistler’s class portrait of his mother, “Arrangement in Green and Black” is a series that examines compositional relationships, unassuming details and humor. Using my own mother as muse, this series was produced as hand painted silver gelatin prints. alinesmithson.com
Third Place: Maura Allen (United States)
‘Ranch Sage’
For centuries, the stories, images and ethos of the American West have been dominated by men — the lone cowboy, the hard-working rancher — with women relegated to the role of romantic ingenue or rodeo queen. Women’s roles and responsibilities in the West are (and were) significant but rarely documented or celebrated. That blind spot is surprising, considering that the history of photography and the settling of the American West are inextricably linked. In my project “Natural Order,” I seek to right the balance by telling a different story, one with women of the West in their rightful place, front and center. MauraAllenPhotography.com
‘Nod of Recognition’
“Nod of Recognition” is a series of portraits of strangers captured on the streets of New York. I walk, observe and photograph people, following the path of light as it moves around the city. I highlight a moment in time juxtaposed against today’s incessant world. I use the light and composition to frame the subject in this found setting. I attempt to capture authentic moments when my subject is unaware of my presence. The people in my photographs all project a characteristic, gesture or physical trait that I recognize in myself. This series is a composite of pieces of myself — a self-portrait. bjanelevinephotography.com
‘Conversations With Myself’
“Conversations With Myself,” a body of work in which I assume the roles of assorted women, from the era of my birth, 1950s, donning garments that previously belonged to a close relation. I conjure and perform as each of them, exploring through their embodiment multifaceted aspects of the female/human psyche, exploring the recognition and progression of self-awareness and identity, all the while braiding the past with the present. The work is ongoing, as I continue to look back, in, out and ahead, and consider my presence at home, in the environment and as a citizen of the world at large. joannchaus.com
‘Women of Islamic State’
I first went to war-torn Syria in August 2015. I witnessed the Kurds fighting against the Islamic State on the front lines. When the Kurds also liberated Raqqa, the capital of the caliphate, I finally met them — women who in a special way frightened and fascinated me. Women of Islamic State fighters, the wives of the most dangerous men on this planet. I met them first in January 2018, when I got permission to talk to captured women at Ain Issa camp near Raqqa. In this place, I met Zama from Dagestan, Lena from Germany, Sonja from Italy, Khadija from Tunisia. … There was the whole world in one small detention camp. In early 2019, I watched, along with troops of the Kurdish group the Syrian Democratic Forces, the last battle in Baghouz, a small town in Syria. During the fighting, many women and children fled from the area of the front line. The Kurds gathered them in the desert behind the front line. They were taken on trucks to another detention camp. Here they are until today. Nobody knows what to do with them. They wait only for the rise of a new Islamic State. en.lenkaklicperova.cz
‘The Devils’
Colette performs a star during a training session at the Devil’s Horsemen. I shot my project ‘The Devils’ during the nationwide lockdowns while isolating at the Devil’s Horsemen in Britain. The Devil’s Horsemen is a leading supplier of horses and stunt men and women to the film industry. constancejaeggi.com
‘Metaphysical Body Landscapes’
I spent my childhood at my grandmother’s house in Romania, near the Carpathian Mountains. Seeing humanity’s strong bond with the earth, observing nature, landscapes around influenced my understanding of the earth’s beauty and people’s connection to it. All things together are something whole, indivisible. Earth, sky, plants, fruits, mountains, rivers, men, women, day, night — all merge together and flow into each other. This process is infinite and harmonious. Humanity came from earth, lives on earth and will return to earth. Landscapes of earth are seen in the body’s curves. Growing up, I moved to live in big cities, my grandmother passed away, and I felt the loss of a spiritual connection with nature. To reconnect, I started to search the landscapes of the body in my photography. annalaza.com
‘Habito’
This project was born with the intention of keeping alive the memory of a small religious congregation: the “Ancelle della Provvidenza” for the salvation of the Child, of which they are now the last six sisters. I wanted to honor their lives of dedication to good, making them, at the same time, active protagonists. “Habito” is a tribute to wonderful people who can only be an example to imitate and to follow; it is the place of memories of those who have made their lives of the faith and also becomes the place to transmit these memories, a witness to be passed on to future generations, so as not to forget, and to continue to cultivate love for one’s neighbor, love for life. monicatesta.com
‘Domesticated Animals’
The “Domesticated Animals” series explores issues of identity, repression, connection, conformity and the constructed self in modern American society. Follow Lassman on Instagram @lassman_lenswork.
‘Noisy Brain’
“Creative Growth” is part of my series titled “Noisy Brain.” Using self-portraiture to examine the layers of my obsessions and anxieties, these constructed photographs provide insight into elements that affect my 21st-century brain. SandraKleinPortfolio.com
‘About Women’
Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, 2019 andreatorrei.com
‘At the Bus Stop’
“Passersby” is an ongoing project consisting of unposed portraits taken in public spaces in different cities around the world. A hybrid work that combines digital capture and cyanotype. joanramonmanchado.com
‘Women in the flow’
“Women in the flow” is a tribute to all visible and invisible women in the world and their spoken and unspoken voices. Strong faces, hidden identities, subtle shadows and fragments reflecting memories of love, youth and beauty, a narrative of women between centuries and cultures, between ancient traditions and brand-new identities. These images were made from Polaroids and new and old film, both the positive and negative sides. Some are mixed with one part that is hand-painted. These pictures were taken in Sweden, Morocco and Iceland. lisenstibeckphoto.com
Shima is a spoken word artist. The image was made using 35mm film. Verdant Luminul environment print, 2020. Shima goes by “Dwennimmen," the name of an ancient African Adinkra symbol, which means, strength, humility, learning and wisdom. All the artist’s images are 35mm film, traditional photography. franciswilley.com
‘Maze of Metamorphosis’
Makiko Sugawa is an artist, an illustrator, also of clothing. Because of a cancer, she lost her left leg completely, well above the knee. In fact, her prosthesis must be attached at her waist with a belt. She knows that clothes and fashion can have a big impact on how a woman feels about herself. So if a woman with a disability can be “stylish,” other girls in the same condition can follow her example. silviaalessi.com
‘Embrasure’
I’m terribly shy by nature, so a camera works for me as a kind of shield — a way to protect myself from the subject, as if the lens functions to insulate my insecurities. Only behind the safety of that glass do I feel comfortable focusing my gaze on another person. Somehow, holding a camera offers a way to legitimize my presence, allowing me to interact with people in a more intimate way. The images in this series present a view of each subject they hadn’t intended to reveal. By capturing an element of private uncertainty, a hint of elusiveness, they attempt to tell something about the subject through the trace of an expression or the tail end of a gesture, explorations into my conviction that the way one holds one’s body can reveal as much about a person as the representation of an unambiguous gaze. juliefowellsphotographs.com
‘German Youth’
Three young women posing for the camera at Volkspark Hasenheide in Berlin. aarondeppe.de
‘Growing Old’
This was the first image I made in 2010 when I decided to photograph myself. I wanted to see what I looked like, a photo that I could hold in my hand, not a fleeting image in a mirror. I tried several gestures with each hand and with both hands. When I saw the results, I knew this was the one that expressed for me what it feels like to be a woman, the strength, compassion, resilience, and softness that have sustained me through the years. marnaclarke.com
‘Without a Map’
How does one move through life with the scars of the past? When I was 10, my mother died unexpectedly of a heart attack. I couldn’t understand where she went or when she would return. Just as I began to comprehend this loss, my father died. I was without support from my family and community. I was lost. “Without a Map” reimagines this time that is deeply rooted in my memories. Visiting my childhood home, synagogue and family plot provided an entry into this personal retelling. Working with family photos, creating new images from my past and turning the camera on myself, I found the means to evoke, reinterpret and address unanswered questions born from early imprints that were buried long ago. guggenheimphotography.com
‘Selfhood’
“Ruby Red,” as part of the series “Selfhood,” depicts the search for a sense of independent identity crafted through outward appearance in relation to the female menstrual cycle. The visual contrast between the deep red and pure white of the image depicts the conflict between the traditional ideas of female sexuality perpetuated by society, and the need the woman feels to hide her vulnerability, shame, and pain behind that traditional trope of female beauty: the hair. However, the image of the messed cloud of hair symbolises the inner processes of the female, namely the menstrual cycle, that are perceived as grotesque and thereby need to be contained within a shell of purity and unblemished beauty. Although deviating from the unnuanced standard beauty norms, symbolised by the prim and proper red ribbon, women’s fertility and sexuality goes so far beyond what can be expressed through the eyes, on the face, or through physical appearance, and the inner, maybe even repressed, beauty of the female body should also be celebrated. vickymartinphoto.co.uk | null | null | null | null | null |
YouTube has had rules against posting false or misleading information about the coronavirus and vaccines since the beginning of the pandemic, although critics have said the company enforces its rules unevenly. In September, it took down the accounts of several anti-vaccine influencers after years of research from misinformation researchers suggesting the platform played a role in the growth of vaccine hesitancy. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man accused of selling gun to hostage-taker
The complaint against Williams, filed in federal court in Texas, says it is illegal for him to possess a gun because he has a prior felony conviction for aggravated assault.
The complaint says FBI agents traced Williams from Akram’s phone records.
When FBI agents interviewed Williams on Monday, he allegedly admitted to selling Akram the gun on a street in Dallas, the complaint says. Williams allegedly told law enforcement officers that Akram said he would use the gun for “intimidation” to get money he was owed. Williams is not accused of knowing that Akram planned to take hostages.
Akram, 44, interrupted Saturday services at the synagogue Jan. 15, demanding U.S. officials release Aafia Siddiqui, a convicted terrorist serving an 86-year sentence in a nearby federal prison.
— Devlin Barrett
Appeals court blocks execution of inmate
A federal appeals court on Wednesday blocked the state from executing an inmate convicted of killing a driver who gave him a ride, upholding a lower-court ruling that he can’t be put to death unless the state uses an untested, new method.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit refused to lift a lower court order blocking the execution of Matthew Reeves, which originally was set for Thursday. The state attorney general’s office said it would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, so it’s possible the execution still proceeds.
The dying man was robbed of $360, and then Reeves danced and mimicked Johnson’s death convulsions at a party soon afterward, evidence showed.
With Reeves contending he would have chosen hydrogen hypoxia over lethal injection had he understood the form, the defense filed suit asking a court to halt the lethal injection citing the lack of assistance from prison officials under the law. U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr. blocked the execution, ruling that Reeves had a good chance of winning the claim.
Man, teen charged in death of Chicago girl, 8
A teenage boy and a man were charged Wednesday with murder in last weekend’s death of an 8-year-old Chicago girl who was shot in the head by a gunman targeting someone else on the city’s southwest side.
Melissa Ortega of Chicago was walking on the street with her mother Saturday afternoon when someone fired shots at a 29-year-old alleged gang member who was leaving a nearby store, Police Superintendent David Brown said. The girl was pronounced dead Saturday at a hospital.
The girl and her mother moved to Chicago from Mexico last year, according to family members organizing an online effort to pay for a funeral expected to be held in Mexico. | null | null | null | null | null |
“It is time for me to focus on my family and spend more time being a dadt,” Chris Mack said. (Timothy D. Easley/AP)
Louisville announced Wednesday that it had parted ways with men’s basketball coach Chris Mack, who was in the midst of his fourth season with the program. Assistant coach Mike Pegues will take over in an interim capacity for the rest of the season.
Louisville is coming off a 64-52 loss to Virginia Monday that dropped the Cardinals’ record this season to 11-9 overall and 5-5 in ACC play. The team has gone 6-8, including 1-5 in its past six games, since Mack returned from a six-game suspension to start the season.
“To wake up every day these last four years as the head coach of the University of Louisville has been an opportunity that I will cherish,” Mack, who was hired in March 2018 after nine seasons with Xavier, said in a statement. “Over the past 50 years, this position has been among the most coveted in all of college sports and I count myself lucky to have been a part of this university’s storied history.
“It is with that sense of appreciation that I have made the decision to no longer be your coach,” he continued. “I know that I will miss the daily interactions with our student-athletes, coaches and my university colleagues, but after 25 years of coaching, including the last 13 as a head coach, it is time for me to focus on my family and spend more time being a dad.”
“Coaching transitions are always difficult, especially during the course of the season, but Chris and I agreed that it is in the best interests of our student-athletes that he step aside immediately,” Louisville interim athletic director Josh Heird said in a statement. “We will always prioritize our student-athletes and do all that we can to ensure that they have an incredible experience at Louisville. I want to thank Chris and his family for their service to the University and we wish them the very best in their next chapter.”
When Louisville suspended Mack in August, the school said he failed to follow procedures while handling an extortion attempt by former Cardinals assistant coach Dino Gaudio. Federal prosecutors accused Gaudio of threatening to reveal alleged infractions after learning he was set to be fired following Louisville’s failure to reach last season’s NCAA tournament.
Gaudio, a former head coach at Wake Forest and ESPN analyst, was sentenced last year in federal court to a year of probation and a $10,000 fine after he pleaded guilty to a charge of attempted extortion. His allegations of impermissible activities by Louisville staffers led to the NCAA last fall to amend a Notice of Allegations it had previously sent to the school, adding three it said occurred on Mack’s watch.
The original NOA related to alleged violations the NCAA said were committed by Louisville under former head coach Rick Pitino, who was fired in October 2017 amid a federal probe into corruption in college basketball. Louisville has yet to learn what penalties it may face from the Independent Accountability Resolution Process, which was formed in the wake of the corruption scandal.
Asked by a reporter Wednesday if he might have had “second thoughts” about taking the Louisville job if he knew the NCAA situation would still not be resolved by early 2022, Mack replied, “Yeah, that part’s tough. I’m not going to comment on it because obviously it’s still an ongoing case, but I mean, come on.”
Following the ouster of Pitino, who had coached Louisville since 2001, David Padgett steered the Cardinals through the 2017-18 season before Mack was hired. Pitino followed Denny Crum, whose tenure with the Cardinals dated back to 1971. After having had two head coaches in a 46-year span, Louisville is now set to hire its forth since 2017, not counting Pegues.
Mack went 215-97 at Xavier, with eight berths in the NCAA tournament and an appearance in the Elite Eight in 2017. His final Musketeers squad won a Big East Conference regular season championship with a 29-6 record and earned the school’s first No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. He went 44-21 over his first two seasons at Louisville and briefly had the Cardinals at No. 1 in national polls, but they have gone 24-16 since last season.
Mack said Wednesday he was “relieved” at having gotten closure on a situation he said had been building for some time.
“It’s a hard place,” he added. “You’ve got to win games.” | null | null | null | null | null |
ATLANTA — Bogdan Bogdanovic scored 18 points in his return from a knee injury, Onyeka Okongwu also scored 18 off the bench and the Atlanta Hawks recovered from a slow start to beat the struggling Sacramento Kings 121-104 on Wednesday night.
Hawks: The team had no players on its injury report for the first time since Jan. 3, 2020. ... F De’Andre Hunter started and had nine points in 17 minutes after being listed as questionable with lower back discomfort. ... F Jalen Johnson was recalled from G League College Park. | null | null | null | null | null |
“I don’t believe that my happiness, my future happiness is going to depend on if I achieve one more Grand Slam than the others, or if the others achieve more Grand Slams than me,” Nadal said. “For me, the fact that we are equal at 20 ... the only thing that says is that we share an amazing part of the history of our sport, and for me it’s a real honor to be part of it.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Sharks defenseman Nicolas Meloche scores San Jose's second goal, fresh off the Capitals failed to convert a 4-on-2 rush. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
The Washington Capitals are a veteran group familiar with the peaks and valleys of the long NHL season. As they battle through the doldrums of January having recorded just three wins this month, they remain steadfast in their refusal to panic.
Wednesday’s 4-1 loss to San Jose at Capital One Arena might not be a reason to suddenly change that approach, but it is fair to wonder when a course correction will be considered. The loss, which marked their first back-to-back defeats in regulation all season, not only dropped the Capitals to 3-6-2 for the month, but it marked the 12th straight game in which they scored four goals or fewer.
“We got a lot of great, talented players that expect to score when they are seeing opportunities,” veteran defenseman John Carlson said. “It has got to switch at some point. I don’t think anybody expects this to go on forever, but it’s tough. It’s tough as a player.”
Washington (23-12-9) entered the third period down, 2-0, but got an instant jolt when Daniel Sprong cut the Sharks’ lead in the half only 14 seconds into the period when he beat Sharks goaltender James Reimer on the short side. It ended a five-period goal-less streak for the Capitals.
Two days after the Capitals were dealt a 1-0 loss at home by Vegas and goaltender Robin Lehner (34 saves) — their first shutout loss all season — Reimer stopped 32 of the 33 shots that came his way Wednesday.
It looked like Washington had a prime chance early in the second when Alex Ovechkin, Evgeny Kuznetsov and Tom Wilson were part of a rare 4-on-2 rush. Not only did they botch the chance, but the Sharks’ Nicolas Meloche scored once the play turned the other way, giving the visitors a 2-0 lead at 3:58 of the second. It was Meloche’s first NHL goal.
“Listen, there’s no excuses for that,” Laviolette said of another slow start from his team. “They were quicker. They were more battle-ready. We have to be more prepared than that at the start of the game.”
The Capitals’ power-play woes also continued. They finished 0 for 3, extending a run of futility to 0 for 13 over their past four games.
“We just go to keep working for those chances and I think that is the biggest thing. Focus on what we are doing to get those good chances. Can we be a little more precise? For sure. But at the end of the day, I think we are going to get a lot of good opportunities and usually it will end up better for us,” Carlson said of the team’s power play.
What else to know about the Capitals’ loss to the Sharks:
Sprong was back in the lineup after being a healthy scratch for three straight games. Sprong had struggled in recent weeks on both ends of the ice. His goal Wednesday marked his first tally since Jan. 7 at St. Louis. He now has seven goals and five assists in 35 games.
Capitals Coach Peter Laviolette said recent conversations with Sprong have still been focused on improving both ends of his game. Sprong said Wednesday morning he felt his game had been trending the same as the team’s game: he’s been getting the shots they like; they just haven’t gone in.
“When things aren’t going in for me, especially as a shooter, just got to make sure the rest of your game is going well, got to be moving your feet, makes sure things aren’t going in,” Sprong said. “ … I know I’ve been on the ice for a couple against, so that doesn’t help my case either but I know pucks are going to be going in eventually.”
Samsonov made his first start since Jan. 16 in a 4-2 loss to Vancouver. Before Wednesday, Samsonov had given up three or more goals in seven of his past eight starts. The Russian goalie looked more comfortable in net Wednesday, making 13 of 14 saves in the first period. He kept the game in reach for the Capitals, including making a big glove save on Matt Nieto with six minutes left on a shorthanded breakaway.
Right after his save, he had an awkward collision with Alex Ovechkin that left Samsonov slow to get up. He stayed in for the remainder of the game and Laviolette had no further updates on his status after the game.
Washington has allowed the first goal for three straight games, and the Capitals were outshot 12-2 at the start of Wednesday’s game. The Sharks blocked nine Washington shots in the first period alone.
Laviolette spoke about the struggles of playing without the lead Wednesday morning.
“When you’re looking at the third period and you’re down a goal or you’re down two goals, you’re looking to get the guys out that have a history of putting up a lot of offense as much as you can,” Laviolette said. “And so I’ve shortened the bench in the third period in a few games here. It’s not because somebody is not doing something right, it’s because we are chasing that game and some guys have a history of scoring goals.” | null | null | null | null | null |
For all the talk about Intel Corp.’s entry into the chip foundry business, and the world’s over reliance on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., it’s easy to forget there’s another competitor plugging away in South Korea.
TSMC also said earlier this month that it expects to outpace the broader market in 2022 and is spending a record $44 billion to allow that to happen. Companies don’t tend to tell people if they expect to underperform, but when you have the two biggest names — accounting for at least two-thirds of the foundry market — making the claim, you know they can’t all be right. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sharks defenseman Nicolas Meloche scores San Jose's second goal, just after the Capitals failed to convert a four-on-two rush. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
The Washington Capitals are a veteran team familiar with the peaks and valleys of the long NHL season. As they battle through the doldrums of January, having recorded just three wins this month, they remain steadfast in their refusal to panic.
Wednesday’s 4-1 loss to San Jose at Capital One Arena might not be a reason to suddenly change that approach, but it is fair to wonder when a course correction will be considered. The loss, which yielded their first back-to-back defeats in regulation this season, not only dropped the Capitals to 3-6-2 for the month, but it marked the 12th straight game in which they scored four goals or fewer.
“We got a lot of great, talented players that expect to score when they are seeing opportunities,” defenseman John Carlson said. “It has got to switch at some point. I don’t think anybody expects this to go on forever, but it’s tough. It’s tough as a player.”
Washington (23-12-9) entered the third period down 2-0 but got a jolt when Daniel Sprong cut the Sharks’ lead in half only 14 seconds into the period when he beat Sharks goaltender James Reimer on the short side. It ended a five-period goal-less streak for the Capitals.
Two days after the Capitals were dealt a 1-0 loss at home by Vegas and goaltender Robin Lehner (34 saves) — their first shutout loss of the season — Reimer stopped 32 of the 33 shots that came his way Wednesday.
It looked like Washington had a prime chance early in the second when Alex Ovechkin, Evgeny Kuznetsov and Tom Wilson were part of a rare four-on-two rush. Not only did they botch the chance, but the Sharks’ Nicolas Meloche scored once the play turned the other way, giving the visitors a 2-0 lead at 3:58. It was Meloche’s first NHL goal.
“Listen, there’s no excuses for that,” Laviolette said of another slow start by his team. “They were quicker. They were more battle-ready. We have to be more prepared than that at the start of the game.”
The Capitals’ power-play woes continued. They finished 0 for 3, extending a run of futility to 0 for 13 over their past four games.
“We just got to keep working for those chances, and I think that is the biggest thing: Focus on what we are doing to get those good chances. Can we be a little more precise? For sure. But at the end of the day, I think we are going to get a lot of good opportunities, and usually it will end up better for us,” Carlson said of the team’s power play.
Here’s what else to know about the Capitals’ loss to the Sharks:
Sprong was back in the lineup after being a healthy scratch for three straight games. Sprong had struggled in recent weeks on both ends of the ice. His goal Wednesday was his first tally since Jan. 7 at St. Louis. He has seven goals and five assists in 35 games.
Laviolette said recent conversations with Sprong have still been focused on improving his game on both ends of the ice. Sprong said Wednesday morning that he felt his game had been trending the same as the team’s game: He has been getting the shots they like; they just haven’t gone in.
“When things aren’t going in for me, especially as a shooter, just got to make sure the rest of your game is going well, got to be moving your feet, make sure things aren’t going in,” Sprong said. “ . . . I know I’ve been on the ice for a couple [goals] against, so that doesn’t help my case, either, but I know pucks are going to be going in eventually.”
Samsonov made his first start since Jan. 16, a 4-2 loss to Vancouver. Before Wednesday, he had given up three or more goals in seven of his past eight starts. The Russian looked more comfortable in net Wednesday, making 13 of 14 saves in the first period. He kept the game in reach for the Capitals, including making a big glove save on Matt Nieto with six minutes left on a shorthanded breakaway.
Right after his save, he had an awkward collision with Alex Ovechkin that left Samsonov slow to get up. He stayed in for the rest of the game, and Laviolette had no update on his status after the game.
Washington has allowed the first goal in three straight games, and the Capitals were outshot 12-2 at the start of Wednesday’s game. The Sharks blocked nine Washington shots in the first period alone.
Laviolette spoke Wednesday morning about the struggles of playing without the lead.
“When you’re looking at the third period and you’re down a goal or you’re down two goals, you’re looking to get the guys out that have a history of putting up a lot of offense as much as you can,” Laviolette said. “And so I’ve shortened the bench in the third period in a few games here. It’s not because somebody is not doing something right — it’s because we are chasing that game and some guys have a history of scoring goals.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Yesterday at 12:11 p.m. EST|Updated today at 9:14 p.m. EST
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. also would 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 season 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,” said Dave Kasper, United’s president of soccer operations and sporting director. “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 against El Salvador on Thursday — posted on social media that United “did not push me out, but rather, this was a personal decision at a critical time in my life, for my career and family to ask to be open to a move.”
But it was also unclear how Arriola, a pure winger, would have fit into Coach Hernán Losada’s system. 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 an agreement on a transfer fee of more than $3 million (United also would’ve received a player on loan), but Arriola and Club América couldn’t agree on salary, one person familiar with the situation said.
After announcing the Arriola trade, United sent $250,000 from that stockpile to Nashville for an international roster slot.
Besides Fountas, D.C. is aiming to acquire at least two impact attackers, one of whom would be a designated player, Kasper said. A person close to the search said United has targeted Ecuadoran forward Michael Estrada, 25, from Mexican club Toluca.
Losada, entering his second season, has been “involved in all of our offseason planning,” along with General Manager Lucy Rushton, Kasper said. United also is sorting out its central midfield — it has yet to re-sign Júnior Moreno and Felipe Martins — and is eyeing a goalkeeper to challenge starter Bill Hamid.
Also, United is preparing to sell 18-year-old Kevin Paredes to German club Wolfsburg for a club-record $7 million. To fill Paredes’s role at left wing back, United is finalizing a trade with the Seattle Sounders for 27-year-old Australian Brad Smith, two people close to the situation said. United will relinquish general allocation money. It’s also entertaining offers for 19-goal scorer Ola Kamara, 32, whose contract expires after this season. | null | null | null | null | null |
For all the talk about Intel Corp.’s entry into the chip foundry business, and the world’s over-reliance on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., it’s easy to forget there’s another competitor plugging away in South Korea.
TSMC also said earlier this month that it expects to outpace the broader market in 2022 and is spending a record $44 billion to allow that to happen. When you have the two biggest names — accounting for at least two-thirds of the foundry market — making the same claim, you know they can’t both be right. | null | null | null | null | null |
ORLANDO, Fla. — Amir Coffey scored 19 points, Luke Kennard added 17 and Los Angeles rallied to defeat Orlando one day after matching the second-largest comeback in NBA history.
ATLANTA — Bogdan Bogdanovic scored 18 points in his return from a knee injury, Onyeka Okongwu also scored 18 off the bench and Atlanta recovered from a slow start to beat Sacramento. | null | null | null | null | null |
“What came to my mind was that he was one of the greatest champions — or Rafa [Nadal] or Roger [Federer], to be honest … and I just thought: ‘Okay, I’m going to make him work. If he wants to win it, he needs to fight to the last point.’ ”
In doing so, Medvedev revealed another truth about this Australian Open: Djokovic may not be in the draw after being deported on order of the country’s immigration minister, who concluded his unvaccinated status posed a risk, but the absence of the world No. 1 has been very much present throughout the tournament.
For Medvedev, Djokovic served as a source of inspiration at a critical juncture, when Auger-Aliassime’s powerful blasts and pinpoint serves had him short of breath, low on his stockpile of fresh shirts and out of solutions.
“[I had] zero confidence in myself and the outcome of the match,” Medvedev said of his mind-set after losing the first two sets. “I was like: ‘Just be like Novak. Show him that you are better.’ ”
For other players, Djokovic’s absence — along with Federer’s decision to skip the tournament as he continues to recover from a third knee surgery — represented a glimmer of possibility that hasn’t existed at the Australian Open at any point during their careers.
This year is the first time since the 2003 Australian Open that only one of the “Big Three” entered the tournament, culling the physical and psychological roadblocks to only Nadal.
At the same time, Dimitrov noted, it takes seven victories to win a Grand Slam.
“Every match is very competitive,” said Dimitrov, 30, a three-time Grand Slam semifinalist. “We can’t be like, ‘Oh, this player is not in the draw or that player is not in the draw.’ ”
Denis Shapovalov, who pushed Nadal to five sets before conceding their quarterfinal Monday, said he was among those who saw the competitive door open slightly once Djokovic exited the 2020 U.S. Open, ejected from his fourth-round match for inadvertently hitting a linesperson with a ball blasted in a fit of anger.
He did just that, reaching the fourth round while toppling two higher-ranked opponents in the process.
In the end, Djokovic’s absence didn’t pave the way for an upstart to storm into Friday’s semifinals. Those who’ll vie for a spot in Sunday’s final are an accomplished bunch that largely followed the tournament’s seeding. No. 2 Medvedev will take on fourth-seeded Stefanos Tsitsipas, while sixth-seeded Nadal, who was drawn to meet Djokovic in the semis, will face No. 7 seed Matteo Berrettini instead.
All have reached this stage of a major before. Nadal, 35, is tied with Djokovic and Federer for a men’s record 20 Grand Slam titles. Medvedev, 25, has one Grand Slam title. And Tsitsipas, 23, and Berrettini, 25, were Grand Slam runners-up last season, at the French Open and Wimbledon. Both were beaten by Djokovic.
Should Nadal win two more matches in Melbourne to claim a 21st major title, he insisted that the achievement would be no sweeter because it separated him from Djokovic and Federer.
“I don’t believe that my happiness, my future happiness [is] going to depend on if I achieve one more Grand Slam than the others, or if the others achieve more Grand Slams than me,” Nadal said. “… Every one of us, we did very special things in our sport. Let’s enjoy that.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Russian army service members drive armored personnel carriers during drills on Jan. 26. (Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters)
MOSCOW — The Russian government is refusing to be drawn on its response to a diplomatic path laid out by the United States and its NATO allies to defuse escalating tensions along its borders with Ukraine.
The United States and NATO on Wednesday delivered written responses to the Kremlin’s demands for security guarantees that would curtail the Western military alliance’s further expansion and activities in Eastern Europe. The responses, which NATO sent to the Russian Embassy in Brussels and U.S. Ambassador to Russia John J. Sullivan hand-delivered to Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, set “out a serious diplomatic path forward, should Russia choose it,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters. They also affirmed NATO’s commitment to an open-door policy for nations that want to join.
The Kremlin suggested it would be in no hurry to respond to the proposals, which Blinken said was coordinated with Kyiv, which is not a NATO member. “We will read it. Study it,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told the Interfax news agency when asked about thee alliance’s response. “The partners studied our project for almost a month and a half.”
Even as diplomacy continues, the United States and some European allies are ramping up preparations for a renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. that he wasn’t optimistic about the chances of achieving a diplomatic breakthrough and averting a Russian invasion, although there’s still “a chance.”
Amid the tension, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said early Thursday that five people were killed and five were injured in a shooting by a National Guard service member in the city of Dnipro. The gunman fled the scene carrying a weapon. Officials said in a statement that the motives for the shooting are not yet known.
Berlin became the subject of scorn in Kyiv after saying it would supply 5,000 military helmets to help with Ukraine’s self-defense — as other the United States and other NATO members send lethal weapons, including tons of arms and antitank missiles.
Though officials have not said what might be included in any package that targets Moscow, more controversial targets would be the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will carry natural gas from Russia to Germany when it is activated. Many European allies oppose the pipeline, which deepens Berlin’s reliance on Moscow.
“Unfortunately, we have practically exhausted the limits of retreat,” he said, according to the Tass news agency, in an apparent reference to NATO’s incorporation of several former Soviet republics that sought entry to the alliance.
In Ukraine, many residents are preparing for a return to the violence and unrest of 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. If a diplomatic solution fails, they hope for other forms of support from other European nations. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg speaks during a briefing at the White House in Washington in November. Buttigieg is vowing help to stem a rising U.S. epidemic of car fatalities with a government strategy aimed at limiting the speed of cars and redesigning roads to better protect bicyclists and pedestrians. (AP/Susan Walsh, File)
The city of 60,000 across the Hudson River from Manhattan has a “Vision Zero” plan that gathers data to identify dangers to vulnerable populations. The plan includes strategies to reduce speeding and protect walkers and bikers, among other changes. Hoboken last summer pointed to a three-year stretch of no pedestrian fatalities in the New Jersey city.
The strategy lays out steps the department will take over three years in five categories: safer people, roads, vehicles and speeds, and improving post-crash care. It calls for tying together the work of transportation agencies that oversee highways, trucking and driver and car safety, while appealing for the private sector and state and local governments to support a no-fatalities goal.
“Unfortunately, many roads are not designed to ensure safe travel at safe speeds for everyone, especially the most vulnerable road users,” Stephanie Pollack, the Federal Highway Administration’s deputy administrator, said in a statement. She said funding in the infrastructure law will allow for “incorporating safety for all users into every federally funded road project.”
In 2020, 38,680 people died on U.S. roads. In the first six months of 2021, that figure topped 20,000, an 18 percent jump. | null | null | null | null | null |
Yes, Fauci has a high salary by government standards, has been in the same unelected position for 38 years and oversees a budget of $6 billion that flows into grants; those are truths on which you can build a theory about corruption, unaccountable elites and a nefarious flow of money from this or that institution to this or that lab. | null | null | null | null | null |
Joseph Mercola, a leading anti-vaccine advocate whose screeds have been restricted by YouTube and Facebook, this month warned that the unvaccinated might soon be imprisoned in government-run camps. The week before, he circulated a study purporting to use government data to prove that more children had died from covid shots than from the coronavirus itself. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures struggles to keep its ego in check — like the ill-fated Newseum before it
The new $480 million museum faces both financial and curatorial challenges as it attempts to document the industry it celebrates
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which opened in September, includes a spherical structure with two theaters, designed by renowned museum architect Renzo Piano. (Iwan Baan/Academy Museum Foundation)
LOS ANGELES — The first gallery that visitors to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures encounter is a darkened space on the ground floor, full of screens showing snippets of familiar movies. Some are so revered you will remember where you were when you first saw them. Others are merely famous, but you may recall key scenes without ever having bothered to watch the whole thing. The effect is like one of those montage reels that clutter up the Academy Awards broadcast — all the best bits of the last year run together to suggest that your personal memory of the past is exactly coextensive with Hollywood’s manufacture of fantasy.
The museum opened in September, after years of delay, cost overruns and leadership turmoil. It occupies the old May Company building on Wilshire Boulevard, with a new, spherical addition next door. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is its neighbor, with the La Brea Tar Pits just beyond that. The final cost, more than $480 million, isn’t just a self-interested investment in the Hollywood hype machine, but also a major commitment to the city’s cultural infrastructure and civic identity.
Throughout its galleries, I was reminded of another museum, the Newseum in D.C., which closed its doors two years before the Academy Museum opened. Both are (or, one is) devoted not just to a cultural product — filmmaking or newsgathering — but to the industry that profits from that work as well. Both laid out enormous sums to occupy trophy buildings: the Newseum in a massive, corporate-looking space fronted by a giant stone inscription of the First Amendment on Pennsylvania Avenue near the U.S. Capitol; the Academy in buildings designed and remodeled by Renzo Piano, the dominant architect in the museum sector today (with additional interior gallery spaces designed by Kulapat Yantrasast). The Newseum closed in December 2019 and sold its home to Johns Hopkins University.
The Newseum shutters, symptom of a passing age of greatness
The Academy Museum, like the Newseum before it, does an imperfect job of balancing two basic identities and purposes, one essentially self-promotional, the other more civic-minded. It is both a shrine and pantheon, and a space for exhibitions and education. Among the more than 13 million objects in its collection are things like hand-annotated scripts and early cameras that have explanatory power, and many others that are merely sacred. Much is made of a pair of ruby slippers, one of several sets made for Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” But these are the museum equivalent of a random sighting of celebrity on the sidewalk. There’s a frisson, but little other value to the encounter.
The museum succeeds when its curators focus on the how and why of illusionism. A gallery devoted to sound uses a scene from one of the Indiana Jones films to reveal the surprisingly low-tech origins of the soundtrack: Biting into an apple or car wheels grinding on gravel give aural dimension to a snapping vine or a boulder rolling over stone. A double-height gallery includes a painted backdrop from Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” with a detailed look at how that two-dimensional image of Mount Rushmore, and selected sculptural pieces, were edited together to create a convincing illusion of a chase scene at the iconic monument.
There’s a rule in the museum world too little regarded by curators and designers: Distance is objectivity, immersion is ideology. The more objective moments in the Academy Museum include a look at the deplorable way the actors who played the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz” were treated, and the institutional marginalization of figures such as Oscar Micheaux, the African American filmmaker who directed or produced dozens of films and helped construct a parallel film industry to tell stories of people who existed in Hollywood’s output only as caricatures.
But when it reverts to the montage-style display of film in its opening gallery, the museum tends to lose that distance. The Newseum suffered from a similar problem. It often did a good job explaining the nuts and bolts of how news is gathered, processed, edited and disseminated. But it also lapsed into bathos at times, in galleries about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, or a shrine to journalists killed while on duty.
Is it a museum, or not?
Both museums underscore the danger of too much institutional self-inflation. The Newseum had a tendency to say to the audience not just “here’s how we bring you the facts of the world,” but rather, “we shaped that world for the better,” especially in exhibits dealing with civil rights or other social movements.
The Academy Museum goes even further, implicitly claiming not just to create illusions of the world, but also to manufacture it wholesale. One of its architectural curiosities is an upper-level terrace atop the new spherical space, accessed by crossing a bridge named for Barbra Streisand. When I visited, the chairs in this open-air gallery were arranged neatly in rows, like in a movie theater, looking out at the hills to the north, as if landscape and topography were all part of the show, a giant backdrop so finely painted that the illusion of reality is perfect.
Like the Newseum, the Academy Museum will inevitably struggle with the competing interests inherent to the industry it celebrates. There are the movie studios, with their corporate agendas, and then creatives and talent who will want recognition and acknowledgment. The greatest tension is likely that between good film and lousy film, between the artistic impulses of visionary filmmakers and the vast entertainment juggernaut that supposedly pays for everything else.
Will the Academy Museum face the same economic hurdles the Newseum faced? I asked Joanna Woronkowicz, faculty director of the Center for Cultural Affairs at Indiana University, who studies the economics of cultural institutions, whether the curatorial similarities are likely to translate to similar financial challenges. She thought not.
“Given who is involved in this project and where they are located, it is not going to be a disaster case,” she says, acknowledging that this is prognostication.
She pointed to the subject matter of the Academy Museum, which has an inherently broader appeal than the news industry. The people involved, the board and the donors, are deeply invested in the idea of an Academy Museum, and are likely to provide a steadier base for fundraising. And although the Academy Museum, like the Newseum, is charging admission, the Newseum did that in a city were many of the best museums are free. Los Angeles is also a major metropolitan entrepôt, and that means a steady supply of new visitors, people who want to experience a mostly invisible business — filmmaking — in a tangible way.
Perhaps the biggest difference is the basic audience attitude toward the two industries. People may be cynical about celebrity and indulge in schadenfreude when its pride is awarded the inevitable fall. But ultimately, they love what Hollywood does in a way that far exceeds any intellectual appreciation for the work of journalists.
Hollywood’s sins are manifold: It glamorizes violence, fetishizes youth, celebrates materialism and vulgar displays of raw power; it trivializes or ignores complexity, and appropriates cultural narratives shamelessly. Large parts of the industry are as bankrupt of moral and civic value as any other business, including the extraction of natural resources and speculation in real estate.
Underneath all that there is, occasionally, art. How that has survived, and how it might continue to survive, make up the essential narrative of any museum devoted to film. The first step, which the new museum does occasionally and imperfectly, is to disillusion people and show them the real, messy, historical truth of the business.
Judy Baca's Great Wall of Los Angeles is a monument for a new age of contested symbols
Planet Word, a museum devoted to language, is a high-tech, feel-good experience | null | null | null | null | null |
Four women shot, one fatally, at hotel in Northwest Washington
The shooting happened a few blocks from the campus of the University of the District of Columbia
Four women were shot, one fatally, early Thursday in a hotel on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington, according to a D.C. police spokesman.
The spokesman said the shootings occurred at a Days Inn in the 4400 block of Connecticut Ave., near the University of the District of Columbia and a few blocks from the Van Ness Metro station.
Dustin Sternbeck, a D.C. police spokesman, said the shootings occurred about 3:30 a.m. He said a woman was found dead inside a room and another was found injured in a hallway.
Two additional victims went on their own to a hospital.
Police were investigating Thursday morning and did not detail an apparent motive for the shooting. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg speaks during a briefing at the White House in November. (Susan Walsh/AP)
The New Jersey city of 60,000 across the Hudson River from Manhattan has a “Vision Zero” plan that gathers data to identify dangers to vulnerable populations. The plan includes strategies to reduce speeding and protect walkers and bikers, among other changes. Hoboken last summer pointed to a three-year stretch of no pedestrian fatalities in the city.
The strategy lays out steps the department will take over three years in five categories: safer people, roads, vehicles and speeds, and improving post-crash care. It calls for tying together the work of transportation agencies that oversee highways, trucking, and driver and car safety, while appealing for the private sector and state and local governments to support a no-fatalities goal.
“Unfortunately, many roads are not designed to ensure safe travel at safe speeds for everyone, especially the most vulnerable road users,” Stephanie Pollack, the Federal Highway Administration’s deputy administrator, said in a statement. She said funding in the infrastructure law will allow for “incorporating safety for all users into every federally-funded road project.”
In 2020, 38,680 people died on U.S. roads, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In the first six months of 2021, that figure topped 20,000, an 18 percent jump. | null | null | null | null | null |
Live updates:Covid-19 live updates: Even as U.S. cases drop, global vaccine inequity cou...
Opinion: Anthony Fauci’s ‘credibility gap’
Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden's chief medical adviser, in Washington on Jan. 11. (Greg Nash/The Hill via Bloomberg News)
In preparing to interview former national security adviser H.R. McMaster about his new book, I recently read his much-acclaimed 1997 book on the Vietnam War: “Dereliction of Duty.” It is difficult not to apply the lessons of the United States’ haphazard, stumbling and ultimately terribly destructive commitment to gradual escalation of military force in Vietnam to what we have experienced in the very different crisis presented by covid-19. McMaster’s study of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson’s strategy in the war’s early years shows government officials responding to a crisis in a way that guaranteed a collapse in public trust and a deepening domestic political division. Similar mistakes are being made today in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.
The differences between the two crises are obvious: The enemy now is a virus, not communists in Vietnam backed by the Soviet Union and China. Almost all the victims then were young men, while covid mostly kills older people or those with underlying medical conditions. Covid is far more deadly — 870,000 Americans and counting against the 58,220 Americans who died in Vietnam. While the war’s terrible cost was concentrated on the U.S. military and its families, the virus’s impacts have been felt more equally throughout the United States. And while the Constitution designates the president as the commander in chief, the “police power” — which includes the government’s inherent authority to protect citizens — is lodged with state governments.
But the similarities are surprising and striking. There was little expertise in the United States about Vietnam in 1961, and none about covid in 2020. “Fighting the last war” weighed heavily on decision-makers in both cases. There was a change of presidents early in the escalation of both national responses. And at the heart of both responses were charismatic, confident professionals who did not hesitate to bend the narrative. Johnson’s and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s dramatic willingness to lie was astonishing. Criticisms of Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, are likewise rooted in misrepresentations he’s made about masks and in his often changing guidance, unleavened by any willingness to accept responsibility or acknowledge errors. Deep interdepartmental rivalries marked both eras; internal dissent was suppressed; and mainstream media suspended disbelief for Democratic and liberal views.
As McMaster demonstrates in his book, McNamara maintained complete confidence in his own judgment and his commitment to continually escalating force against the Viet Cong and their patrons in Hanoi. Working with Maxwell Taylor, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, McNamara cut the Pentagon’s service chiefs off from Kennedy and then Johnson, and stacked every decision tree with carefully preselected acolytes. Johnson cared only for the politics of the situation, McNamara for his own vindication. But dissent didn’t vanish. It grew in an embittered senior military leadership and eventually broke into public view with publication of the Pentagon Papers. Public quiescence vanished slowly and, as costs escalated, the famous “credibility gap” grew. Disaster awaited with collapse of support for the war and for South Vietnam.
We have begun to see a similar deterioration of the public’s trust in public health and education authorities, and a deep, never-before-experienced suspicion of both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Part of this is the result of misinformation and anti-vaccination points-of-view that unfortunately have taken deep root. I was a strong and early supporter of vaccines and boosters and remain convinced that the best means of persuading the “vaccine skeptical” is engaging with them and calmly reviewing the evidence of effectiveness — not shaming, dismissiveness or caustic declamations.
But it is the “Fauci as McNamara” comparison that has now settled in my mind. A new NBC poll asked respondents: “Do you trust what the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says?” 44 percent said yes; 43 percent said no. That’s a crisis of trust in public health authorities, a new “credibility gap,” and it is itself a public health crisis.
Getting out of the Beltway brings you into contact with many who would answer that poll question in the negative. A few are vocal anti-Fauci influencers, driven by personal animus; others are longtime students of bureaucratic ineptness. But many more are hugely impatient parents, distressed by school district policies from masking to quarantine rules. They take seriously the vast accumulation of data on the vaccines’ efficacy. Yet the refusal to level with the public on all subjects at all times or to engage with serious critics has crushed public health agencies’ and school districts’ abilities to persuade. We are in the middle of a domestic equivalent of the Vietnam catastrophe brought about by the latest iteration of “the best and the brightest.” | null | null | null | null | null |
People walk past the Bataclan concert venue on August 30, 2021, before the opening of the trial for the November 2015 attacks, which killed 130 people and injured more than 350 people in Paris. (REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier)
An NFT is a unique digital representation of a product, created using the same blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrencies — and the model has grown increasingly popular over the past year. While NFTs have taken off in the digital art world — with some pieces selling for tens of millions of dollars — basketball highlights, recorded music and even newspaper articles have also been sold as NFTs.
“This young patient, who lost her boyfriend in this attack, had an open fracture of the left forearm with a remaining bullet of Kalachnikov [sic] in soft tissues,” the listing stated, referring to the type of assault rifle some of the terrorists used in the attack. | null | null | null | null | null |
ST. PAUL, Minn. — First it was a paramedic, testifying that the officers who restrained George Floyd didn’t call in critical information as his ambulance rushed to the scene where Floyd would soon be pronounced dead. Then it was an off-duty firefighter, recounting her frustration that Floyd obviously “needed help and wasn’t getting it.” | null | null | null | null | null |
By By Matthew Coles | AP
SALT LAKE CITY — Devin Booker had 43 points and a career-high 12 rebounds, Chris Paul scored 15 of his 21 points in the fourth quarter and the Phoenix Suns extended their winning streak to eight with a 105-97 victory over the Utah Jazz on Wednesday night. | null | null | null | null | null |
From Art Spiegelman’s “MetaMaus” — a 25th-anniversary “Maus” compendium. (Art Spiegelman and Pantheon Books)
A school district in Tennessee banned the use of “Maus,” a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, in its middle school classes, citing the work’s profanity and nudity in a 10-to-0 vote.
As leaders in conservative areas across the country push for more control over the way history is taught, the McMinn County school board expressed concern that the expletives in “Maus” were inappropriate for eighth-graders. Members also said Art Spiegelman’s illustrations showing nudity — which depict Holocaust victims forced to strip during their internment in Nazi concentration camps — were improper.
“I’ve read it and read through all of it. … I liked it,” said Mike Cochran, a board member who voted to restrict the graphic novel’s use. He said that the subject was important but that “there were other parts that were completely unnecessary,” according to minutes of the meeting this month. He cited scenes in which a father talks with his son about losing his virginity and a woman cuts herself with a blade.
Spiegelman, a cartoonist, wrote and illustrated “Maus” based on interviews with his father, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. (“Maus” is the German word for mouse.) The graphic novel, drawn in black and white, depicts Holocaust victims as mice and their Nazi oppressors as cats.
The story details the killing of infants, Nazi gas chambers and forced labor, among other atrocities that the German regime committed during World War II. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 after the publication of its second volume.
Spiegelman could not be immediately reached for comment. But when reached by the Daily Beast about the ban, he sent an image of a bookmark he had designed that read: “Keep your nose in a book — and keep other people’s noses out of which books you choose to stick your nose into!”
The McMinn County ban was first reported by TN Holler on Wednesday, though the school board’s vote occurred Jan. 10. The board said its decision was not influenced by the book’s topic, TN Holler reported, but it quickly inspired criticism from across the country amid a national debate over what topics should and shouldn’t be taught in its schools.
The 10 board members who voted in favor of banning the book didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said in a statement that “Maus” has been vital in educating students about the Holocaust through the detailed experiences of victims. “Books like Maus can inspire students to think critically about the past,” it said, noting that Thursday marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Julie Goodin, a former history teacher who was present at the board meeting, said she had urged members to keep the book in the eighth-grade curriculum. “There is nothing pretty about the Holocaust,” she said. “Are the words objectionable? Yes,” she added. But that is how Spiegelman sought to convey the horror, she said.
Jon B. Wolfsthal, the son of a Holocaust survivor and a former national security adviser to Joe Biden when he was vice president, said the book’s use of nudity and cursing is reflective of the horror of the Holocaust. Trying to sanitize the atrocities “diminishes the scale of the crimes committed,” he said.
His late father, Leon Brook Wolfsthal, was 15 when he was liberated in April 1945 after spending two years in the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany.
“I know he would laugh that people think you can stop an idea by banning a book,” Jon B. Wolfsthal said. “Then he would order 100 copies and have them sent to the public library … to ensure kids could read the book if they wanted.”
Others defended “Maus” on social media. Filmmaker and podcaster Rebekah McKendry called the ban “shameful,” tweeting that “Maus” was “the most detailed account I’d ever read about the holocaust when I 1st encountered them.”
Screenwriter Dan Hernandez tweeted that seeing “Maus” censored “fills me with disgust. I hope my children read it someday and learn what it has to teach.”
Books tackling race or sexuality have become flash points amid a Republican movement against the teaching of critical race theory, an advanced academic framework that examines the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism.
GOP politicians across the country have sought to emulate Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign focus last year on “parental control” of education, which revived calls to ban Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning “Beloved.” In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered a statewide probe of potential “criminal activity” into “pornography” in schools after two LGBTQ memoirs were pulled from some districts in his state. Around the same time in Kansas, a school board near Wichita announced it was removing 29 books from circulation, including Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.,” a history of the white supremacist group.
Critics of such moves, which include members of the Biden administration, have said that the restrictions risk whitewashing history and delaying advancements in racial equality. | null | null | null | null | null |
Joe Manchin might be principled. Or he might scorn his own constituents.
Standing up against one’s party can be courageous. But it can also reflect elitism.
From left: Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, 1825-1893 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division); Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) (From left: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Ashley Steenson
Ashley Steenson is a PhD student in American intellectual and political history at The University of Alabama, where her research considers the connections between political ideologies in the South and Northeast during the early 20th century.
On Dec. 20, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) voiced his opposition to the Build Back Better Framework, President Biden’s plan to “rebuild the middle class.” Although Manchin publicly stated that fiscal concerns including inflation had driven his opposition, he also allegedly told fellow lawmakers behind closed doors that Americans would use paid sick leave to go on hunting trips. Manchin also apparently claimed that people would buy drugs with money from child tax credits.
Left-leaning journalists including the Nation’s Joan Walsh and HuffPost’s Tara Golshan and Arthur Delaney compared the senator’s ideas to the “harmful myths,” in Walsh’s words, driving the Clinton-era welfare reforms. These ideas led to the imposition of conditions on beneficiaries such as mandatory drug testing.
But these historical ties — while accurate — miss the even deeper history behind Manchin’s argument that poor and lower middle-class individuals should not be trusted to make their own decisions. In many ways, it ties back to Plato’s argument against representative democracy in “The Republic” (c. 375 BC).
Manchin’s claims also echo the ideas of one of the strongest critics of direct democracy in American history: Sen. Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (D-Miss.), also the only Supreme Court justice from Mississippi. Lamar’s history serves to remind Americans that a lawmaker’s willingness to oppose popular opinion or take a lonely stance can be courageous — or it can reflect elitism and bias.
Throughout his life, Lamar took part in secession, raised a regiment for the Confederate States in the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction and had a role in the organization of the Western territories. As a lifelong legal and political scholar, Lamar ended his career with a tenure as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He remained committed to states’ rights throughout his life and often amended his politics to secure home rule and sectional gain.
Lamar’s politics were complicated: He was liberal on issues such as education and conservation. Responsible for the preservation of millions of acres of land, Lamar specifically argued against corporate interests to protect Yellowstone National Park from development. His most famous political act was a call for reconciliation in an 1873 eulogy for abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.), which earned him the label of being a moderate.
Yet, on two key issues — race relations and political representation — he remained a conservative. In 1877, Lamar became one of the architects — in the words of historian Joel Williamson — of “an unwritten contract … in which the South exchanged ‘home rule’ for the surrender of economic and political power in the nation.” To Northerners, Lamar personified “a South that could be trusted.” In this way, the South won the battle for home rule and states’ rights, despite losing the Civil War.
Although his political philosophy evolved over the span of his career, Lamar remained a critic of increased political representation based on his belief that the masses of all races needed the direction and support of elites. For example, in response to an investigation of Southern elections led by Sen. James G. Blaine (R-Maine), Lamar argued that Black Southerners had realized they were not “ready to vote.” Put more bluntly, not long after his return to Congress in 1873, Lamar claimed that Black Americans had “no idea of a principle of government or, of society, beyond that of obedience to the mandate of a master.”
This contempt for Black Americans and average citizens of all races also meant that Lamar didn’t think public opinion should factor into policymaking. In 1878, he refused to vote for the Bland-Allison Act. This legislation proposed an expansionary economic policy in which the federal government would purchase and circulate silver to produce inflation (which was seen as a good thing) and increase crop prices, among its intended positive outcomes. Part of the agenda embraced by the Free Silver movement, this populist policy drew support from Americans who were in debt, as well as from Western miners and many farmers in Deep South states such as Lamar’s Mississippi. Capitalist interests in the Northeast opposed the legislation, while the nascent labor movement and working people largely supported it.
Despite this support for the legislation back home, Lamar concluded, “Between these resolutions and my convictions there is a great gulf.” He saw himself as taking a principled stand, invoking politicians including former senators John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, who had disagreed with popular majorities at different points in their careers. To Lamar, it was “better to follow the example of illustrious men … than abandon altogether judgment and conviction in deference to popular clamor.” The young Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) went on to cite this quote in “Profiles in Courage” (1955).
Seen from another angle, however, Lamar’s refusal to support the legislation was no act of courage. Instead, it was an example of callous indifference to the needs of his constituents. Lamar’s vote conveyed his disregard for democratic governance and a failure to recognize the dignity of the farmers and working people of Mississippi who wanted Free Silver — and whose interests he was supposed to represent.
Though Bland-Allison passed over President Rutherford B. Hayes’ veto, the populist successes of the 1870s and 1880s were ultimately short-lived and foreshadowed many of the major blows to the populist movement that occurred in the following decade and early 20th century.
Today, Manchin, like Lamar, voices his stance as a principled refusal to acquiesce to the majority in his party. In an interview the day after announcing his opposition to the BBB Framework, he noted that other Democrats “figured, surely to God we can move one person. We can badger and beat up one person.”
Yet, some of the arguments Manchin allegedly made in private indicate that the senator from West Virginia may be channeling Lamar’s opposition to legislation like the Bland-Allison Act. Far from being courageous, Manchin’s stance on this particular bill could hurt average Americans, including his own constituents. Despite the inevitable — but rare — instances of fraud, working people would benefit from policies such as the expanded child tax credit and paid family leave. | null | null | null | null | null |
‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ still shapes the filibuster debate. That’s a problem.
The movie lionizes a pernicious tactic.
James Stewart clutches a wad of letters as Claude Rains looks on, both of the actors portraying senators on the floor of the U.S. Senate, in a still from director Frank Capra’s film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
By Landon Palmer
Landon Palmer is a film historian and an assistant professor in the department of journalism and creative media at the University of Alabama. He is the author of "Rock Star/Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom" (Oxford University Press).
On May 15, 1987, Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd (D) delivered a speech to the U.S. Senate posing the rhetorical question, “Has there ever been a better movie about the Senate than Frank Capra’s 1939 classic ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’?”
Indeed, images from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” have remained vivid in the public imagination, particularly those of the protagonist’s marathon filibuster at the climax of the film.
This film’s storied place in the national political imagination, however, is not simply a result of Hollywood promotion. U.S. senators have long invoked the film’s protagonist as a model for their own ambitions and actions. Over decades, “the world’s greatest deliberative body” helped to transform the film from a criticism of Congress’s upper chamber into a celebration of its rules and norms, including that of the controversial filibuster. Thus, advocates for Senate reform have found themselves contending with the legacy of a 1939 Hollywood film.
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” follows its title character, Jefferson Smith, an unassuming local hero of an unnamed Western state. Smith (played by James Stewart) is plucked from obscurity when the state’s governor appoints him to the Senate following the sudden death of a sitting senator. He works to move his pet legislation — a bill to establish a piece of land in his state as a campsite for boys — through the political process. But his proposed site for the camp conflicts with the plans that his governor and a fellow senator have to build a dam, a project promising to enrich the very men who gave Smith his job.
Realizing that he was appointed to be a political stooge, Smith enlists the help of his secretary (Jean Arthur) to harness Senate rules for the purpose of exposing corruption. With her help, he enacts what we now call a talking filibuster, a tactic by which a lawmaker stands to hold the floor for as long as they can to forestall the legislative process. After filibustering for 23 hours until he collapses in exhaustion, Smith’s dramatic display of principled resilience shames his fellow senator into a public confession, and thus he achieves a righteous victory over those who threatened to pervert democratic ideals.
In fall 1939, Columbia Pictures courted congressional acclaim of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” by premiering the film at Constitution Hall in Washington and inviting 45 U.S. senators. However, members of that upper chamber strongly objected to the film’s premise that legislative bodies were compromised by elite power brokers. Describing the film as “silly and stupid,” Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley (D-Ky.) assailed it for “mak[ing] the Senate look like a bunch of crooks.”
Concerned that the film undermined the United States’ international reputation, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy described it as “one of the most disgraceful things I have ever seen done to our country.” Rep. Louis Rabaut (D-Mich.) even made a public statement that the film threatened the goals of the nation’s Good Neighbor policy with Latin America. Rumors quickly circulated within the film industry trade press that the Senate planned to retaliate against Hollywood for “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” with regulatory legislation.
But audiences saw it differently. As film historian Eric Smoodin explains, theaters fostered an experience in which “watching the movie became the equivalent of exercising the rights of citizenship.” Theater lobbies were decorated as makeshift campaign headquarters and voting precincts, and moviegoers left showings longing to see Smith-type leaders as their own representatives. Writing to the “Motion Picture Herald,” a theater manager suggested that the film “be shown to every member of the Senate and Congress.” A constituent of Sen. Wayne Morse (D-Ore.) favorably compared Morse’s 1953 filibuster opposing the Submerged Lands Act to Smith’s valiant political drama on screen.
Repeated television airings kept images of Smith’s filibuster circulating in American life, and soon, senators and Senate hopefuls came to understand that Smith was a useful model for promoting images of themselves as political outsiders seeking to change the broken politics of Washington. Actor-turned-President Ronald Reagan, who successfully branded himself as an outsider to Washington, made this explicit as he celebrated James Stewart at the 1983 Kennedy Center Honors and stated, in reference to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” that he wished everyone in the D.C. audience would see the film.
By the 1990s, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” became a theme in electoral politics. Republican and Democratic strategists spun their candidates as Mr. Smiths, and Capra’s film was a common answer to questions directed at Senate hopefuls about their favorite movie. During the 2000 U.S. Senate race in New Jersey, the headquarters of the Bob Franks campaign greeted visitors with a poster of the film. In the 2006 U.S. Senate race in Connecticut, Ned Lamont’s campaign edited the candidate into a scene from the film.
On reaching office, senators have regularly invoked Mr. Smith’s filibuster in asserting the principles behind Senate rules. In 2005, amid Republican threats to rewrite Senate rules as a way to combat judicial filibusters, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) accused Republicans of “want[ing] to do away with Mr. Smith, as depicted in that great movie, being able to come to Washington.” During a 2017 Senate debate over lowering the 60-vote threshold for judicial nominees, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) quoted the film’s description of the filibuster as “democracy’s finest show” in his argument that such tactics be preserved for legislation.
Even those wanting filibuster reform highlight the difference between Smith’s spectacular fictional performance and the mundane use of the filibuster today. “It is not ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ ” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) stated last year in an op-ed when explaining that the current filibuster is an arcane technical maneuver that can be executed simply by a staff email without requiring a senator to stand and speak for hours on the Senate floor. Indeed, such explanations have helped to reinforce images of Smith’s filibuster as a kind of nostalgic ideal, as displayed in Senate Democrats’ recent push to revive the talking filibuster. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) recalled when Smith “withered and fell to the floor” as a noble model for reform, challenging filibustering colleagues to “be willing to stand up and speak their mind and stay on the Senate floor.”
Such reasoning stands to obscure a legacy of the talking filibuster that has been far less honorable than what was realized by Smith. After all, the closest Robert Byrd got to enacting the climax of what he considered to be the best movie about the Senate was his 14-hour filibuster protesting the Civil Rights Act.
The storied reputation of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” — not only in American culture broadly, but in the United States Senate specifically — continues to shape how we discuss and perceive the mechanisms by which federal legislation lives and dies. Former Senate staffer and filibuster-reform advocate Adam Jentleson opens his book “Kill Switch” by crediting the status of the filibuster as “the Senate’s most famous feature” to the influence of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” This famous feature persists even in the face of other, more urgent democratic principles. | null | null | null | null | null |
Justice Breyer announced he will retire. Here’s what happens next.
If Biden fulfills his promise to appoint a Black woman, he’ll make the Supreme Court more representative of the U.S. population
Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer during an interview in his office. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
By Paul M. Collins, Jr.
Lori A. Ringhand
The news that Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer intends to retire gives President Biden his first opportunity to make a Supreme Court appointment. Of course, Biden’s nominee, if confirmed, will not shift the ideological balance of the current court. But the new justice could change the nature of the court by making it more representative of the American public.
This will be especially true if Biden makes good on his pledge to nominate a Black woman, which would be a historic first. Doing so would follow in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan, who fulfilled a campaign promise to place the first woman on the court.
Here’s what to expect in the coming months.
The president nominates
The first step in filling a Supreme Court vacancy involves a presidential nomination. Before that happens, the president and White House officials ordinarily consult with high-ranking members of the Senate, trusted advisers and representatives from interest groups. In addition, the president may consult with the retiring justice for insights on who they might like as their successor. For instance, retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy suggested to President Trump that Brett M. Kavanaugh replace him.
As the president assembles a list of potential nominees, two types of background checks occur. The FBI conducts a private investigation that includes close scrutiny of a candidate’s financial affairs and interviews with the potential nominee and their associates. A separate investigation is conducted by Department of Justice officials, White House aides and, on occasion, private counsel. This typically involves poring over the candidate’s public record, including speeches and judicial opinions, as well as interviews with the would-be nominee.
These background checks are intended to ensure that the nominee has no problematic financial liabilities or skeletons in their closet, and to ensure that the president is appointing a like-minded nominee. These background checks do not always catch everything. For example, Reagan nominee Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his nomination after journalists revealed that he smoked marijuana as a law professor — something the background investigations missed. And of course, both Clarence Thomas and Brett M. Kavanaugh faced accusations of sexual harassment or sexual assault.
The Senate advises and consents
Once the president announces an appointment, the nomination is sent to the Senate. With the exception of President Barack Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland, every nomination not withdrawn has then been forwarded to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Before the committee holds hearings, three major things happen. First, the committee conducts its own investigation of the nominee. Committee staff conduct independent research into the nominee’s background, and the nominee is asked to fill out an extensive questionnaire that includes requests for financial disclosures, publications, potential conflicts of interest and a description of services to the disadvantaged.
Second, the nominee pays a series of courtesy calls to members of the Senate. During these visits, senators get to know the nominee, ask questions and mention the issues they care about. Although typically serious, these meetings can sometimes have a lighter tone. For example, former University of Chicago law professor Elena Kagan talked about her favorite Chicago restaurants in a friendly visit with then-Senator Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).
Third, the nominee prepares for Judiciary Committee hearings. Known as “murder boards,” these mock hearings often feature friendly senators, White House staff and members of the legal community playing the roles of Judiciary Committee members. The murder boards are intense — often carrying on for several hours a day over the course of weeks — and let the nominee rehearse while allies ask hostile questions.
Conservatives could control the Supreme Court until the 2050s, research finds
Supreme Court confirmation hearings
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings are the most visible aspect of the confirmation process. Millions of Americans tune in to the gavel-to-gavel television coverage. During several days of testimony, nominees face dogged questioning by senators on an array of topics, including their judicial philosophies, pressing legal and political issues of the day and their views of the court’s precedents.
Although these hearings have been heavily criticized as nothing more than theater, with nominees routinely dodging senators’ questions, this is not always the case. Research shows that past nominees have provided their positions on many significant issues, including the right to privacy, gender discrimination, the Second Amendment and, in the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, abortion rights. More recent nominees, however, have revealed less about their opinions, even on settled matters of constitutional law. For instance, Amy Coney Barrett refused to answer questions about the right to privacy, gender discrimination, and criminal bans on same-sex intimacy — questions most nominees before her felt at liberty to opine on.
After the hearings, the committee votes on whether to send the nomination on to the full Senate for debate and a vote. It almost always does. During the debate, senators take positions for and against the nominee, speak to their constituents and donors, and generate sound bites for the media. Since the senators’ minds are generally made up by this time, very little debating actually occurs.
When debate ends, a vote is traditionally taken. Since Republicans ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017, a simple majority vote is all that is necessary to confirm a nominee to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.
Each newly appointed justice changes the court in a variety of ways. This includes its ideological orientation, the extent to which it reflects the public it represents, and the everyday interactions among the justices, including where they sit on the bench.
The Biden nominee
If Republican senators and special interest groups follow past playbooks, they are likely to use the weeks after the appointment to attempt to make Biden’s nominee look unqualified for the court, either because of a lack of experience, a disfavored approach to judging, or a lack of the appropriate judicial temperament. But research finds that most nominees facing a Senate controlled by the same party as the president are confirmed. Even though the Democrats enjoy only a razor-thin majority in the Senate, expect Biden’s nominee to be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Paul M. Collins, Jr. is professor of legal studies and political science at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Lori A. Ringhand is J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia School of Law.
Together they are the authors of Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings and Constitutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2013). | null | null | null | null | null |
The looming question as Harris returns to Northern Triangle: Will corruption stymie progress?
Vice President Harris during a meeting with CEOs on Northern Triangle in the her office in May. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
When Vice President Harris attends the presidential inauguration of Xiomara Castro in Honduras on Thursday, the White House hopes it is much more than a show of support during a historic meeting of female “firsts.”
Harris will attend the inauguration Thursday morning and then participate in a bilateral meeting with Castro in the afternoon. The trip is Harris’s second to the Northern Triangle region of Central America since President Biden asked her to lead the administration’s efforts to attack the root causes of migration from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — a complex and politically volatile issue that has bedeviled generations of political leaders.
But the visit, and the hope that Castro’s government will resist the allure of authoritarianism and the dollars of drug cartels, underscores just how pervasive corruption in the region has become. The previous occupant of the Honduran presidential palace, Juan Orlando Hernández, has been named as an unindicted co-conspirator of narco-traffickers, accused of taking millions in bribes. In neighboring Guatemala, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Russian business executives bribed President Alejandro Giammattei to obtain a dock that would help their mining interests. Nearly half a dozen people connected with El Salvador’s president have been accused of corruption.
The United States sees a combination of public and private investment as a path out of poverty for people who live in Northern Triangle countries. A vice-presidential call to action has generated $1.2 billion in investment in the region. But experts say the plan will falter if businesses and aid groups fear that money meant to help people will instead be pocketed by politicians.
“The vice president has been working to develop collaboration with private industry and other agencies, international agencies to come in and help promote economic opportunities as well as combating the pandemic and making investments in the supply chain,” said Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and is traveling with Harris to Honduras. “And in order to do that, the investors and the stakeholders need to trust that the money is going where it is intended to go … Combating corruption is an underlying necessity in order to do any of these things.”
In a background call with reporters, Harris advisers said they were buoyed by Castro’s efforts to combat corruption, including allowing the United Nations to establish a corruption-fighting body within Honduras.
But observers say that while they are hopeful that Castro’s election is a positive step, rooting out corruption in many aspects of public life will not be an easy task.
“There’s still a lot of influence of organized crime, influence of drug cartels,” said Ana María Méndez Dardón, the director for Central America for the Washington Office on Latin America, a nongovernmental organization that promotes human rights and democracy in the region. “Illicit networks that are made up of an alliance between politicians and organized crime are working within the government. We see a lot of hope in this new administration. We see that Xiomara Castro has made some great promises. We know what she wants to do, but the how is the key question that we have.”
Even before Air Force Two departed for Tegucigalpa for the inauguration, there were signs of tumult. Castro’s allies have been unable to secure an uncontested ruling majority in parliament, raising questions about whether there is a path for her to fulfill her political promises. Dueling blocs of recently elected politicians have chosen different sets of leaders and both claim they have a majority, an impasse that remained unsettled on the eve of the inauguration. Administration officials have encouraged Honduran leaders to continue negotiating for an enduring resolution.
The outcome will not just impact Honduran politicians. It may also contribute to how history sees Harris.
In the United States, the vice president’s critics have sought to tie her to the crisis at the southern border, which saw a rapid influx of Central American migrants at the beginning of Biden’s presidency. Republican critics dubbed Harris Biden’s “border czar” in an effort to connect her to an immigration quagmire that no U.S. political leader has been able to solve. Harris is widely seen as likely heir to Biden in 2028, or 2024 if the oldest president in U.S. history opts to not seek reelection.
The criticisms come as historic numbers of migrants stream to America’s southern border. More than 178,000 migrants were arrested by Customs and Border Protection agents last month, a record high for December, but still down from a July peak of more than 230,000.
Harris’s first international trip showed the promise and peril of the assignment. She came to Guatemala bearing a raft of pandemic aid and promises of business investment. But that first trip was colored by an exchange with NBC News’s Lester Holt in which she awkwardly downplayed the urgency of visiting the border, as Republicans and other critics had urged her to do. Later that month, she bowed to pressure to go the border.
She also offered stern advice to any migrants mulling an attempt to get into the United States.
“Do not come. You will be turned back.”
Kevin Sieff and Nick Miroff contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
How much do vaccinated Americans dislike the unvaccinated? We measured.
Unvaccinated Americans don’t dislike the vaccinated with the same intensity
A dose of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine at Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago on Nov. 5. (Nam Y. Huh/AP)
By Sharif Amlani
Spencer Kiesel
E.J. Graff
Nearly a year after the first coronavirus vaccine was administered in the United States, about 1 in 5 American adults have yet to get vaccinated. By doing so, they remain at a greater risk for contracting, spreading and dying from the virus. That prolongs the pandemic, public health experts say.
While some media figures on the right talk about the unvaccinated as heroes fighting for liberty, others rage against them in national outlets under headlines like “I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated,” “Unvaccinated People Need to Bear the Burden” and “Readers are Furious at Vaccine Refusers.”
We wanted to know how many Americans are actually as angry as these headlines suggest.
In the summer of 2021, we collected a sample of 2,560 U.S. adults on Lucid’s opt-in Internet survey platform, with quotas to ensure researchers get the correct number of any given group to create a nationally representative sample. We asked them to tell us whether they were vaccinated or unvaccinated. Then we asked them for one word that would describe a vaccinated person and one word that would describe an unvaccinated person. Finally, we asked them to rate the two words they chose on a seven-point scale, measuring what feelings the word conveys, from “very negative” at minus-three to “very positive” at three, with zero for neutral.
Since the respondents rate the words themselves, they are giving their own emotional evaluation of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. These newer ways to measure open-ended responses help researchers identify and quantify the respondents’ state of mind.
With its vaccine mandate ruling, the Supreme Court is second-guessing the government like it's 1905 all over again
Vaccinated Americans don’t like the unvaccinated
First, both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals think of themselves positively. Vaccinated individuals most often report words like “smart,” “safe,” “good,” “responsible,” “caring” and “protected” when describing other vaccinated people. When respondents were asked to assign a sentiment to their word, 90 percent of vaccinated Americans report a positive feeling. At the same time, unvaccinated individuals report words like “smart,” “cautious,” “scared,” “normal,” “good” and “independent” when describing other unvaccinated individuals. While only 56 percent of unvaccinated citizens report a positive sentiment, that’s still a majority.
Second, most vaccinated individuals dislike the unvaccinated. They most commonly characterize these individuals as “stupid,” “selfish,” “ignorant,” “dumb,” “unsafe” and “foolish.” A majority of vaccinated people, fully 58 percent, report that their word conveys a negative sentiment. When we examine how positively vaccinated individuals feel toward their own group compared with how negatively they feel toward the unvaccinated, we find that 72 percent of vaccinated individuals feel more positively about vaccinated individuals than they do about the unvaccinated and only 23 percent feel roughly the same about both groups.
With nearly 800,000 U.S. covid deaths, what’s keeping people from getting vaccinated? Their own social circles.
The unvaccinated don’t reciprocate that dislike
Third, unvaccinated individuals do not report similar levels of hostility toward the vaccinated. They most commonly refer to the vaccinated as “safe,” “sheep,” “good,” “dumb,” “stupid” and “smart.” While some of those words are negative, overall, only 29 percent of the unvaccinated report that their word conveys a negative sentiment. When we examine how positively unvaccinated individuals feel toward their own group compared with how negatively they feel toward the vaccinated, we find that 40 percent of unvaccinated individuals feel more positively about unvaccinated people than they do about the vaccinated, while 36 percent feel roughly the same about both groups.
How will this affect pandemic politics?
Our research finds that, as journalists have been reporting, many vaccinated Americans are angry at those who have not been vaccinated. We expect that is likely to deepen the longer the pandemic endures.
Of course, that’s not true for all vaccinated Americans; some used positive words to describe the unvaccinated. But this strong dislike could limit interactions with the unvaccinated, further dividing the country and potentially making it harder for unvaccinated Americans to learn why or how they might want to get a coronavirus vaccine.
Sharif Amlani (@SharifAmlani) and Spencer Kiesel (@KieselSpencer) are PhD candidates in the department of political science at the University of California at Davis. | null | null | null | null | null |
Fans in Kansas City saw Josh Allen (17) and his Bills come up agonizingly short against the Chiefs in a playoff game. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
Kansas City Chiefs fans are taking a page from Bills Mafia by donating generously to a charity associated with an NFL player. The contributions are being made in honor of Buffalo quarterback Josh Allen, many in increments of $13.
Thirteen is the number that immediately entered NFL lore after Kansas City needed just 13 seconds to drive for a game-tying field goal in Sunday’s AFC divisional-round win over the Bills as time expired. The game then went to overtime, at which point Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes led a game-winning touchdown drive as Allen could only watch.
Now the Bills’ biggest star is getting a consolation prize in the form of donations to John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital in Buffalo. On Wednesday evening, the facility announced it had received over a quarter of a million dollars and thanked “Chiefs Kingdom” for setting the windfall in motion.
The hospital also noted the help of a Chiefs fan account called Chiefs Kingdom Memes, which on Monday first shared the idea of making $13 donations to a fund that bears the name of Allen’s late grandmother and benefits the children’s facility in Buffalo.
Brett Fitzgerald, the fan who runs the account, said in a post that his initial plan was to encourage $13 contributions to a charity established by Mahomes. A friend later pointed out to Fitzgerald that based on recent actions by Buffalo fans — a.k.a. Bills Mafia — they would have been likely to organize a fundraiser on behalf of the Kansas City quarterback if the Bills had managed to win.
“Changing the donation suggestion to Josh’s charity seemed more appropriate [at that point],” Fitzgerald wrote.
“It’s to celebrate, obviously, the Chiefs’ victory and how it was,” Fitzgerald told Kansas City’s KSHB-TV, “while giving due respect to Josh Allen, the Bills and Bills Mafia.”
The children’s hospital was previously showered with donations from Bills fans following the unexpected death of Allen’s grandmother late in the 2020 season. To help show support for their quarterback, who was in the midst of a breakout campaign after a shaky first two seasons, fans raised so much money — more than $1 million, much of it in increments of $17 to reflect Allen’s jersey number — that a pediatric recovery wing of the hospital was named in honor of his grandmother, Patricia.
“I know my family is forever ingrained here, myself included,” Allen said at the time. “I don’t ever want to leave, obviously. I want to play here for as long as I can and give back to the community and give back to the Bills Mafia here.”
Bills fans were previously known for their generosity toward players from other teams. A tradition of sorts began at the end of the 2017 regular season, when then-Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton helped engineer a win over the Baltimore Ravens that allowed the Bills to make the playoffs for the first time since 1999. To show their appreciation, Buffalo fans donated in large numbers to Dalton’s charitable foundation.
In a similar vein, some Steelers fans donated this month to causes supported by Las Vegas Raiders kicker Daniel Carlson after his last-second field goal knocked the Los Angeles Chargers out of the playoffs and gave a berth instead to Pittsburgh.
During last year’s playoffs, Bills Mafia sent a wave of $8 contributions, referring to Lamar Jackson’s jersey number, to a charity favored by the Ravens quarterback after Buffalo beat Baltimore. That win got the Bills to the AFC championship game, where they lost in Kansas City. Approximately a year later, Buffalo was only 13 seconds from reaching another AFC championship game when Mahomes and Co. pulled off the stunning drive.
“Obviously, it sucks the way it happened,” Allen said after the Chiefs’ remarkable victory. “We wanted to win that game. We had our opportunities. [We’re] taking it all in and holding on to that feeling and making sure that we don’t feel like this again.”
Allen may now be feeling a little better, at least about Chiefs fans if not their team’s penchant for season-ending wins over the Bills. As for the Kansas City fan who got the ball rolling, he was in a mood to give credit where credit was due.
“Bills Mafia was the catalyst in this,” Fitzgerald said Tuesday to Buffalo’s WKBW-TV, “and we’re just following their lead on it.” | null | null | null | null | null |
WASHINGTON — James Reimer made 32 saves, Jonathan Dahlen scored in one of his dad’s old home arenas and the San Jose Sharks beat the Washington Capitals 4-1 on Wednesday night to snap a two-game skid.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Matthew Tkachuk scored twice and Calgary fired a team-record 62 shots on goal in trouncing Columbus.
TORONTO — Auston Matthews scored the shootout winner and Toronto got three power-play goals in a victory over Anaheim.
DETROIT — Dylan Strome scored three goals and Chicago had its highest-scoring game of the season in a win over Detroit. | null | null | null | null | null |
Thursday briefing: Justice Breyer’s retirement; covid hospitalizations; weekend ‘bomb cyclone’; Spotify vs. Neil Young; and more
The 83-year-old is the oldest of the nine justices and one of three liberals. He is expected to step down by this summer.
What this means: President Biden will get to pick Breyer’s replacement while Democrats control the Senate, which confirms Supreme Court nominees. (We explain how that works here.)
Who could replace him? Biden has promised to choose an African American woman, which would be a first. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is at the top of the list.
U.S. coronavirus hospitalizations are slowing down.
The biggest drop is in the Northeast, where the omicron variant hit first. They’re also falling in the Midwest and leveling off in the South but still rising in the West.
What this means: The U.S. may be over the worst of the winter surge, but many hospitals still face staffing and equipment shortages.
Russia and the U.S. hit a diplomatic stalemate over Ukraine.
What happened? The U.S. and its allies responded to President Vladimir Putin’s demands yesterday, but didn’t budge on his key issue: keeping Ukraine out of NATO, a Western military alliance.
Russia’s response: A top official warned that tensions would be “seriously complicated” if that demand isn’t met.
There are more than 100,000 Russian troops and equipment circling Ukraine.
There’s a “bomb cyclone” headed for the Northeast this weekend.
What is that? A particularly strong and rapidly developing storm. It’s forecast to bring heavy snow with possible blizzard conditions, winds and potential coastal flooding on Saturday.
Eastern New England along I-95 could be hit hardest, including cities like Boston. New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., could also get snow.
The caveat: Meteorologists can’t predict the storm’s exact path yet, so the forecast will update.
Neil Young’s music isn’t on Spotify anymore.
Why? The artist (known for hits like “Heart of Gold” and “Harvest Moon”) gave the platform an ultimatum over Joe Rogan and “fake information about vaccines.”
Rogan, who hosts one of Spotify’s most popular podcasts, has repeatedly spread misinformation about coronavirus vaccines.
A SpaceX rocket will crash into the moon in March.
The Falcon 9 booster, which was left in space in 2015, will create a new crater on the far side of the moon when it crashes but shouldn’t cause significant damage.
Why this matters: Space junk is a growing problem — NASA tracks about 20,000 pieces — and this could be the first case of one unintentionally hitting the moon.
Amy Schneider’s history-making “Jeopardy!” run ended after 40 games.
She lost to Rhone Talsma, a librarian from Chicago, last night, drawing a blank in Final Jeopardy. (The answer: “What is Bangladesh?”)
The 42-year-old from California had the second-longest winning streak of all time and was the show’s most successful transgender contestant. She took home $1,382,800.
And now … what should you do when the markets are going wild? Our financial columnist Michelle Singletary has some tips.
Want to catch up quickly with “The 7” every morning? Download The Post’s app and turn on alert notifications for The 7 or sign up for the newsletter.‘ | null | null | null | null | null |
Speculation on whom Biden might choose began quickly after Breyer’s announcement Wednesday. Here’s a quick guide to three of the top contenders.
Kruger is from California and attended Harvard as an undergraduate, followed by Yale University as a law student, serving as editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal. She has clerked for former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens and for a judge on the U.S. Appeals Court in D.C. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Denver Broncos are finalizing a deal to hire Nathaniel Hackett as their head coach, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. Hackett, the offensive coordinator for the Green Bay Packers, would fill the first of nine head-coaching vacancies in the NFL and take over a team that has had three coaches since 2016.
The 42-year-old Hackett, a former play caller for the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, met with the Broncos twice — first on Jan. 15 and then again Monday at the team’s headquarters in south Denver — during their extensive search to replace Vic Fangio, who was fired Jan. 9.
NFL Network first reported the news. | null | null | null | null | null |
Juan Dixon, Andy Enfield and Ryan Odom should be on Maryland’s radar. (Joe Robbins, Ethan Miller, Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images) (The Washington Post)
Maryland needs a new men’s basketball coach.
The Terrapins have won their past two games under interim coach Danny Manning, but it is pretty apparent that Manning isn’t going to succeed his former boss, Mark Turgeon. Maryland’s leadership is bound to want a fresh start and a clean slate, and Manning, a former Turgeon teammate and longtime friend of the ex-coach, can’t represent that.
Who, then, should take over a program with the proven potential to contend for a national championship but a recent track record of postseason disappointment?
Let’s start with a name that has come up regularly since Turgeon departed Dec. 3: Rick Pitino. And let’s also say this: no, no and no.
No one disputes Pitino’s ability. His Iona team is 17-3 and he won national championships at Kentucky and Louisville, although the latter title was vacated by the NCAA.
That is one of two important reasons Pitino shouldn’t be in the conversation. He carries more baggage than a cross-country flight. That’s not to mention his vowing not to leave Providence, days before taking the New York Knicks coaching job; and vowing not to leave Kentucky, days before becoming coach/general manager/emperor of the Boston Celtics.
Pitino can be trusted to do one thing — win. Many Maryland fans would sign up for that in a heartbeat. But at an athletic department with a checkered recent past, Pitino should be completely out of bounds, even though he would walk to College Park if the phone rang.
There’s one other thing: Pitino would be 70 before coaching a game at Maryland. If you want to hire an older coach with a great track record — and no baggage — bring back Gary Williams. Sure, he’s almost 77, but he looks 50 and no one would get the fan base more juiced. Let him designate a coach-in-waiting, get the program rolling again and then return to the retirement he has enjoyed for the past 11 years.
Which leads to this: At the least, Williams should play a prominent role in deciding who the next coach will be. How’s this for a search committee? Williams as chairman, along with Tom McMillen, Buck Williams, Greg Manning, Joe Smith, Keith Booth, Steve Blake, Ed Tapscott and Fran Dunphy. The only non-Maryland grads on the list are Tapscott and Dunphy — both former Williams assistants and successful college coaches. I would make Lefty Driesell the co-chair if he wasn’t 90 and if travel wasn’t difficult for him, but pipe him in on conference calls when the committee meets.
Naturally, that’s not what Maryland’s doing. It has already gone the 21st-century route of hiring a search firm. Why athletic departments waste money on these headhunters, I have no idea. Why have an athletic director if his or her job isn’t to hire prominent coaches? Search firms always have an agenda: They almost certainly won’t look inside a coaching staff because they can’t take a bow if someone the school already knows about gets the job. What’s more, they’re likely to recommend someone who will then be in their debt. It’s a racket — period.
Some athletic directors will tell you search firms are hired to do screening and present an initial list. That’s what a search committee with ties to the school — and no agenda — should be doing. And a committee like the one I suggested would work for free.
Botching the first step doesn’t mean Maryland can’t hire the right coach. This will be Damon Evans’s first real test as athletic director, because hiring Michael Locksley in the wake of the DJ Durkin debacle was a no-brainer.
So who should be on the list of potential hires? In no particular order, my list includes Providence’s Ed Cooley; Southern Cal’s Andy Enfield; Utah State’s Ryan Odom; and North Carolina Central’s LeVelle Moton — an outside-the-box candidate who would leave a lot of Maryland boosters screaming, which is exactly why he should be seriously considered. Finally there’s Juan Dixon, who would be part of my imaginary search committee if he wasn’t coaching Coppin State.
Enfield has done terrific work at USC, where he was hired nine years ago after coaching Florida Gulf Coast to the 2013 Sweet 16 (and upsetting second-seeded Georgetown in the first round). The Trojans are 17-2 and will make the NCAA tournament for the fourth time in seven seasons — and it would be five if there had been a tournament in 2020. They also reached the Elite Eight a year ago.
Enfield is relatively young at 52, and he has ties to the area, having starred at Johns Hopkins. Would he leave Los Angeles to come back to the East Coast? Says here, yes.
Cooley is also 52 and has built a consistent program in 11 seasons at Providence, including a 17-2 record this year. The Friars will make the tournament for the sixth time under Cooley — and they would have been in the 2020 tournament had it been held.
Odom is 47 and is well-known in College Park because of his success in five seasons down the road at UMBC, turning around a moribund program and pulling the biggest upset in NCAA tournament history when the 16th-seeded Retrievers stunned top-seeded Virginia in 2018.
Odom is in his first season at Utah State but probably would jump at the chance to come east to a school that his dad, Dave, regularly competed against as a Virginia assistant and then as the head coach at Wake Forest.
NCAA tournament bracketology: Where things stand
Then there’s Moton, who is also 47 and is in his 13th season at NCCU, his alma mater. He has taken the Eagles to the NCAAs four times, from a one-bid league. He’s also one of the more thoughtful coaches in the country, someone who would probably recruit very well at Maryland. Evans might not have the guts to make a bold hire like that — because of the many fans who would demand to know why the school couldn’t land a bigger name.
That was the way Duke people reacted when Mike Krzyzewski was hired. It was also the reaction of North Carolina fans when a 30-year-old assistant named Dean Smith was hired to succeed Frank McGuire, and of Indiana fans when a young coach named Bob Knight was chosen. They all worked out pretty well.
Last, but not least, is Dixon. In some ways, he would be the perfect hire. He’s a Maryland hero, the star of the 2002 national championship team, a Cinderella story from Baltimore. At 43, he’s got five years of Division I head coaching experience.
Here’s the problem: He has never had a winning season. Records can be deceiving at HBCUs, because they have to play a slew of nonconference guarantee games on the road. But Dixon is 30-34 in MEAC games — 3-1 this season — and that might make it tough to justify his hiring.
Still, Maryland needs to pick a coach based not on his résumé nor on what some headhunter says but on what Evans feels in his gut. Any of the five men mentioned above would be a good hire. Cooley and Enfield have the best résumés; Odom understands the job and market well; Moton is the hidden gem; and Dixon would be a returning hero.
At his introductory news conference in 2018, Evans claimed Maryland was “going to take over this conference.” Surely he wasn’t suggesting Maryland would ever take over the Big Ten in football. That leaves basketball. Evans is being paid more than $700,000 per year. It’s time for him to earn that money. | null | null | null | null | null |
People pass the Bataclan concert hall in August 2021, one of the sites of the November 2015 attacks that killed 130 people and injured more than 350 in Paris. (Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters)
The terrorist attack at the concert hall was the deadliest incident of the strikes by gunmen and suicide bombers at six sites in Paris that night, which altogether killed 130 and wounded more than 350.
An NFT is a unique digital representation of a product, created using the same blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrencies, and the model has grown increasingly popular over the past year. While NFTs have taken off in the digital art world — with some pieces selling for tens of millions of dollars — basketball highlights, recorded music and even newspaper articles have also been sold as NFTs.
“This young patient, who lost her boyfriend in this attack, had an open fracture of the left forearm with a remaining bullet of Kalachnikov in soft tissues,” the listing stated, referring to the type of assault rifle some of the terrorists used in the attack. | null | null | null | null | null |
Speculation on whom Biden might choose began quickly after news reports emerged of Breyer’s planned retirement. Here’s a quick guide to three of the top contenders.
Kruger is from California and attended Harvard as an undergraduate, followed by Yale University as a law student, serving as editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and for a judge on the U.S. Appeals Court in D.C. | null | null | null | null | null |
The NLRB said that the U.S. Postal Service “has moved or will move” a mailbox on Amazon’s property. An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Amazon has moved or would move it. This article has been updated.
In its election rules for this year’s vote, the NLRB said that the Postal Service “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 |
What is ‘toxic positivity’ and why is it a problem? A new book explains.
Life isn’t a Hallmark card and that’s okay, writes therapist Whitney Goodman
(Nick Garcia Photography; TarcherPerigee)
By Kimberly Harrington
I came to Whitney Goodman’s new book, “Toxic Positivity,” with a healthy dose of skepticism, mostly because I come to any mention of positivity with a healthy dose of skepticism.
But first, a step back: Maybe you’re wondering, what is toxic positivity? And: How can positivity be toxic?
Do you feel annoyed when people pepper you with platitudes such as “Time heals all wounds” or “Life will never give you more than you can handle?” When you see “Live, laugh, love,” does it make you wonder where all the rest of the options are? Or maybe you’ve been told by a complete stranger to smile, as you seethe under your mask through yet another pandemic winter?
Best feel-good books of 2021
“Somewhere along the way,” Goodman explains, “we constructed this idea that being a ‘positive person’ means you’re a robot who has to see the good in literally everything. … [A]nything less is a personal failure.”
Toxic positivity posits that complaining is dangerous and feeling negative about anything — including genuine hardship, loss and discrimination — only invites more bad things. To use a very current example, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t felt pressure to grasp at some sort of “bright side” during a global health crisis on top of financial uncertainty on top of multiple climate-change-related crises, on top of racial and social and political unrest and, well, you get the idea.
“At its core, toxic positivity is a form of gaslighting,” Goodman explains. “It tells people that what they’re feeling isn’t real, they’re making it up, and that they’re the only one who feels this way.”
Goodman, a psychotherapist in Miami who runs the popular Instagram account @sitwithwhit, has set out to try to fix this — to remind us that it’s okay to be sad when you’re sad, angry when you’re angry and happy when you’re genuinely happy. And to also allow those around you to fully feel their rainbow of feelings, too.
If you’re rolling your eyes, I get it. I avoid self-help books in general, especially when, like this one, they’re written by a therapist who made her name on Instagram. (When Instagram precedes someone’s profession or creative calling, it’s easy to interpret that as a sort of downgrade, an indication of popularity or superficiality rather than credibility. Sometimes it is, but not here.) Still, I paused at Goodman’s claim that she had combed through all the history and research around positive thinking and toxic positivity (all of it?) and described her own book as “honest, authentic, and real.” (Maybe let the reader decide? Also, aren’t “real” and “authentic” the same things?) But those are quibbles, and they didn’t linger. Goodman’s writing is straightforward and firm but full of empathy and gentle guidance, exactly what you’d want from any therapist, Instagram or no.
‘How to Win Friends & Influence People’: Why the granddaddy of self-help endures
To be clear, this is not a book about Instagram nor is it a book about a social media trend. Goodman convincingly demonstrates that toxic positivity isn’t new. In fact, she shows that it’s long been woven into almost every aspect of American culture from this country’s earliest days and is, in many ways, our national religion.
From there Goodman widens the lens of how and where toxic positivity shows up in the world: from conversations about infertility, family estrangement, job loss and parenting, just to name a few. “The core of toxic positivity is that it’s dismissive and it shuts down the conversation. It effectively says, ‘Nope, that feeling you’re experiencing, it’s wrong — and here’s why you should be happy instead!’”
“Healthy positivity,” on the other hand, “means making space for both reality and hope. Toxic positivity denies an emotion and forces us to suppress it.”
Goodman does a good job of zooming out to bigger overarching truths, countering beliefs about how much control we actually have when it comes to living a 100 percent positive life, including: “The human brain’s main function is to look out for danger and keep us alive, not to make us happy” and “Emotions are an involuntary response to environmental stimuli and we don’t have full control over our emotional experience.”
This is the rare self-help book where readers might recognize themselves as both victim and perpetrator. No one would characterize me as a silver linings kind of gal and I’m not religious, yet I found examples of phrases I had uttered (or internalized) plenty of times. In particular, “everything happens for a reason.” I found it to be a comfort, a way of believing that horrible things were all part of some bigger plan. If I hadn’t had a miscarriage, I wouldn’t have this specific child now. But I retired that phrase permanently after Sandy Hook; there was no reason, there was no greater plan, often there are no silver linings.
This book doesn’t just examine the problems of toxic positivity but also guides the reader toward solutions and strategies. In doing so it becomes a bit of a pocket therapist with chapters like “How To Process an Emotion,” “How To Complain Effectively” and “How To Support Someone.” These might seem basic but … have you met people?
One of the most powerful chapters is “Discrimination With a Smile,” which should push reasonably open-minded readers to reflect on their own behavior and words. Goodman acknowledges that she is “not an anti-racism educator” but uses research and her own experiences with clients to explore how toxic positivity has diminished the real problems of marginalized groups. “Positive platitudes and the pursuit of happiness are ultimately being used as tools to keep people submissive and quiet,” she says, when “getting angry and expressing dissatisfaction is often one of the most effective ways to create change within a society.” Goodman calls this “happiness politics” and explores how it shuts down conversations about not only racial inequality but also body image and the treatment of people who are disabled or chronically ill, among others.
More than a self-help book, this is a society-help book. It’s ambitious but based on the simple idea of being, as Goodman describes herself, “radically honest” with each other. And it’s about not pushing don’t-worry-be-happy talk on everyone around you, including yourself. Isn’t that something to (genuinely) smile about?
Kimberly Harrington is the author of “But You Seemed So Happy” and “Amateur Hour” and a columnist and regular contributor to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed With Being Happy
By Whitney Goodman
TarcherPerigee. 304 pp. $26 | null | null | null | null | null |
Pedestrians carry shopping bags in the SoHo neighborhood of New York, U.S., on Sunday, Oct. 24, 2021. Consumers are facing dire warnings to get their holiday shopping done early this year, especially if they’re planning to do it online. Bottlenecks in the global supply chain are posing a new challenge to the e-commerce industry, and out-of-stock items represent a growing concern. (Nina Westervelt/Bloomberg)
The U.S. economy grew 5.7 percent in 2021, the fastest full-year clip since 1984, roaring back in the pandemic’s second year despite two new virus variants that rocked the United States.
The growth was uneven, with a burst of government spending helping propel a fast start, even as a surge in new cases and deaths in the second half of the year created new pressures. The economy grew 6.9 percent from October to December, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Thursday, a sharp acceleration from the 2.3 percent it grew in the previous quarter.
In a powerful rebound from 2020, when the economy contracted by 3.4 percent — its worst result since 1946 — 2021′s strong growth created a record 6.4 million jobs. But also brought with it a host of complications, helping fuel the highest inflation in 40 years and creating supply chain snarls as consumers hungry for products overwhelmed the global delivery system. To beat back rising prices, the Federal Reserve is now shifting its strategy and preparing for multiple interest rate hikes this year, convinced it has given enough support to help the labor market and now must keep the economy from overheating even further.
“We’re hitting on all cylinders producing goods, and that’s good," said Ben Herzon, executive director at IHS Markit. “But it’s also bad, because the economy wasn’t really set up to produce goods at the level that it’s producing now. That’s one of the reasons we’re seeing some of the problems on the supply side.” | null | null | null | null | null |
We are buckling under the cumulative strain of two years in the pandemic
An emergency room nurse in Toronto. (Carlos Osorio/Reuters)
Anya Kamenetz, who covers education for NPR, is the author of “Generation Debt” and “The Art of Screen Time.”
It honestly surprised me when Joseph Speyer started crying.
I was interviewing the Washington, D.C., father of a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old over Zoom for a story about omicron and children too young to be vaccinated. Though he and his wife were professionals, it was a strain to come up with the extra $1,000 to hire backup care when the younger child’s day care was closed for 10 days in December because of a covid-19 case — and then to do it all over again in January. But they had inflexible jobs, so they had little choice.
Speaking to me from his bathroom, where he could find a bit of peace in the house, he started out sounding angry. He directed his frustrations at what he considered poor guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and unthinking rigidity at the day care. Then suddenly, his voice broke. The pandemic had spanned his son’s entire life, and each day brought new uncertainties.
“It’s the changing routine we’ve had to constantly, you know, just force them into. New day. Every day. Totally different,” he said through tears. “It’ll probably be lost in the river of stuff that they’ve had to deal with over the past couple of years.”
Many people have cried in my Zoom room since March 2020, as I’ve been reporting for NPR and for my book about children and covid. Parents. Teachers. Children and teenagers. But the emotions seem even more raw now than they were in the early days of the pandemic, particularly for caregivers, paid and unpaid. This isn’t just because of the omicron wave. It’s the last two years — the cumulative weight of it, the “river of stuff” that father was talking about. The weight is being disproportionately carried by parents and those who care for a living — child-care workers, elder-care workers, health-care workers, teachers.
On one hand, we have vaccines. They keep tens of millions safe from severe illness and death. They ease my mind powerfully when I think about my own risk from covid-19 and my immunocompromised mother’s. But pandemics are social phenomena, and vaccination hasn’t yet managed to significantly alter this one’s dynamics.
Though some of the fear and uncertainty of the early months has abated as we grew to know our enemy, many of the support systems — and supportive attitudes — that took hold in that acute phase have petered out. The adrenaline has waned, replaced by monotony, exhaustion, burnout. Both parents and professional caregivers have been left behind as the public conversation has shifted from keeping everyone safe to propping up the economy and getting the country back on its feet.
Deaths in the United States are once again topping 2,000 souls per day. Cancer surgeries are being postponed. Parking garages are turned into overflow emergency rooms. Managers are taking front-line shifts at nursing homes. Some schools have closed because of a lack of staff. Grocery shelves sit unstocked as workers stay home due to illness, quarantines and caregiver responsibilities.
In the first few months of this, back in 2020, people stood on sidewalks applauding essential workers. Fancy restaurants sent free meals to hospitals. TV producer Shonda Rhimes quipped on Twitter in March 2020: “Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week.” Now, headlines are more likely to be about disputes about school safety measures and threats directed at health-care providers.
The federal government sent all households stimulus checks, and then sent families with children even more money through the reimagined child tax credit. Some working mothers told me the early pandemic, as scary and hard as it was, was also the only paid time they had ever had at home with their children.
Today, the stimulus checks are done. The child tax credit has expired. Federal incentives for employer-based paid leave are gone. President Biden’s Build Back Better plan and its “care is infrastructure” agenda are stalled in Congress, like a wagon train full of supplies snowed in just over the mountain pass.
And instead of feeling a renewed sense of solidarity in this time of scarcity, many people seem to have turned on each other. Mayors are lecturing teachers who don’t feel safe coming to work. Self-described progressives are attacking working mothers who want to send their children to school. Nurses face belligerent patients who don’t believe in the disease that’s killing them.
Alena Zachery-Ross, the superintendent in Ypsilanti, Mich., told me her teachers sometimes spend the entire weekend in bed, exhausted, only to drag themselves out Monday morning. She said this past fall was the toughest semester of the pandemic — not full-time remote learning in 2020, not the hybrid period in spring 2021 when some teaching was in person and some was remote, but under the pressure today to stay fully open as cases rise and janitors, substitutes and bus drivers quit.
A single mother I know became sick with covid-19 recently and gave it to her young daughter, because she couldn’t effectively isolate from her. Her employer, a private school that charges $55,000 a year in tuition, docked her pay for the two weeks they were quarantined because her sick leave was used up. Federal incentives to offer employees paid leave have expired.
And what really turns the knife? At the same moment that parents, teachers and caregivers are saying they are more exhausted than they have ever been, that they’re out of reserves and out of options, many are also surrounded by messages — from business and political leaders, but also from blue-state, fully vaccinated people in the general public — that Americans are done with the pandemic and the country needs to get back to work.
“Record job creation. Record unemployment declines. Record increases in the people in the labor force,” Biden crowed earlier this month. “I would argue the Biden economic plan is working, and it’s getting America back to work, back on its feet.”
But if you have a child under 5 or a partner with kidney disease, if you depend on public schools or day care or if you work in a classroom or an emergency room, that message lands as manically, absurdly cruel and clueless.
The pandemic has risen and fallen in waves, but the stresses on caregivers have been cumulative, leading teachers to retire and nurses to leave the profession. Those who are left, it feels, have barely had a few moments — weeks, here and there — to uncoil, relax and even start the process of recovery.
Caregivers, paid and unpaid, are not back on their feet. They are on their knees.
And where the most vulnerable of us stand, that’s where the country really stands. Because the economy exists to sustain human life and thriving, not the other way around. In the meantime, caregivers do what they have to do: They keep going.
“My mantra is, it’s got to get better,” Speyer told me. “This can’t go on forever.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Democrats look for bipartisan deal on China economic bill as rest of agenda founders
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is taking a lead role in courting Republicans to get the legislation through Congress. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
Democrats are turning their focus to legislation aimed at making the United States more economically competitive with China in hopes of scoring a bipartisan accomplishment as other aspects of the party’s agenda founder.
As soon as next week, the House is expected to consider a $250 billion proposal to strengthen U.S. technology, manufacturing and research as the Biden administration tries to address global shortages in areas such as computer chips that have contributed to the surge in inflation.
The Senate passed a similar bill last year with the support of 18 Republicans and key Democrats, and administration officials said they believe they can forge a final deal to be signed into law this spring. Democrats are betting that shared worries about the threat posed by China and support for boosting domestic manufacturing can overcome the bitter partisan mood ahead of the midterm elections — a similar playbook that was used for the infrastructure bill signed into law last year.
“There’s broad bipartisan agreement around the urgency of the problem and the need to get this done quickly, and I think people are committed to sitting at the table to work out the differences,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in an interview.
The House released its legislative proposal Tuesday, and so far Senate Republicans who supported their chamber’s legislation have signaled they are open to a deal. House Republicans have panned the legislation, with some arguing it should contain more punitive measures aimed at the Chinese government and others complaining they weren’t given a chance to offer more input.
The House’s proposed America Competes Act keeps key tenets of the Senate bill, including $52 billion in federal subsidies to incentivize construction of factories to produce computer chips, which are in short supply globally. This has led automakers and other chip users to slash production of their products, which in turn has caused a spike in car prices that is fueling inflation.
Republicans have also called for the chip funding, warning that the United States must become less reliant on chips produced in China and Taiwan.
But the House bill goes further than the Senate legislation by including $45 billion in loans and grants to support domestic manufacturing of critical goods and $600 million to construct manufacturing plants to make solar products, as well as opening green card opportunities for entrepreneurs and those with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It also includes funds to prevent pandemic-related shortages of goods like personal protective equipment and vaccine vials caused by a reliance on overseas manufacturing.
Like the Senate bill, the House legislation authorizes new funding for the National Science Foundation to support research and development, though it differs with the Senate legislation on how that funding should be deployed.
Senate approves sprawling $250 billion bill to curtail China’s economic and military ambitions
An aide to a GOP senator who supported the Senate bill said there “needs to be real negotiations to address differences” between the two bills. Both Republican and Democratic House aides said new language on trade, climate, foreign policy and research are just four areas that need to be reworked. The aides spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations.
Earlier this week, before the House language was released, a key Senate Republican expressed optimism that a deal could get done.
“We’re not going to get distracted this time, and the Democratic leadership in both the House and the Senate will see this thing across the goal line,” Sen. Todd C. Young (R-Ind.) said at an event this week hosted by Punchbowl News. The Senate bill “is perhaps the most bold and comprehensive China competitiveness legislation that our country has ever passed.”
Young led the effort to pass the Senate proposal along with Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has made the legislation a top priority as he seeks reelection.
The renewed push to prioritize a global-competitiveness package seven months after the Senate passed its version comes as Democrats’ other domestic policy priorities have been stymied by opposition from Senate Republicans and a pair of centrists in their own party. A multitrillion-dollar package that would expand programs in areas such as education, health care and climate change prevention has stalled, and voting rights legislation was once again blocked this month.
With most of the party’s agenda on ice and President Biden’s approval rating sinking, Democrats are worried about losing the House and Senate in the upcoming elections.
House Democrats facing the toughest reelection contests this fall argue the party needs to focus more on economic issues that address the concerns they are hearing back home, such as the rising cost of food and other goods. The competitiveness bill would also allow them to offer voters a policy response to Republican arguments that Democrats are not aggressively countering China as both a rival in financial markets and a potential adversary on the world stage.
“We continue to hear from constituents who are rightly concerned about supply chain backlogs and the rising price of goods,” a group of 25 House Democrats wrote to party leaders on Wednesday, urging them to put the legislation on the floor next week. “It is incumbent upon us to take swift action in response to these concerns and seize a once-in-a-generation opportunity to set the course for America’s economic future.”
Raimondo has taken a lead role for the administration in pushing the House to act and reaching out to Senate Republicans to try to keep at least 10 of them on board so the final bill can be cleared by Congress.
She expressed confidence the Republican votes will be there when needed, noting that the tenor of the conversations she is having is reminiscent of bipartisan talks she led on broadband expansion that was ultimately included in the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law in November.
“There were disagreements on exactly how we would get it done, and so we had to do the hard work of compromising, but it happened. I foresee a similar path here,” she said.
House Democrats take different approach to economic, national security threats posed by China
House Republicans are much less supportive of the competitiveness legislation, reminiscent of a situation last year when a group of Senate Republicans negotiated the infrastructure deal with Democrats despite harsh criticism from their colleagues in the lower chamber.
The sharp disagreement over the infrastructure package, which was fueled by former president Donald Trump, centered on whether Republicans should agree to any legislation supported by Democrats, even on issues that are not inherently partisan.
A similar dynamic is emerging on the competitiveness bill, with key members of the House GOP quickly criticizing the proposal as not tough enough on China.
Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks (Ind.) slammed the legislation as “weak and unserious” and said it fails “to do enough to counter the malign Chinese Communist Party activity happening within the United States, which should be our primary concern.”
Supporters of the bill disagreed, saying it includes tough new rules for trade with China.
One provision would make it harder for U.S. retailers and others to import low-cost goods from China without paying import duties or other taxes. The measure prohibits goods originating in China and certain other nonmarket economies from entering the country under the “de minimis rule” of the 1930 Tariff Act, which allows for duty-free import of goods under $800 in value.
Imports that aren’t charged duties at the border “gain a significant competitive advantage” over goods produced in the United States, House Democrats said in a release touting the legislation, particularly when those imports are produced in countries such as China that provide “unfair benefits to their companies.”
The Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA), an advocacy group representing U.S. manufacturers, applauded the measure, calling it a blow to Amazon and other e-commerce retailers that have benefited by selling low-cost items from China that enter the country duty-free. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The House bill “is a monumental shift in U.S. trade policy and incredibly positive. It’s one of the most pro-[American] worker pieces of legislation ever released in Congress,” said Nick Iacovella, a spokesman for the CPA.
The House legislation also includes a bipartisan measure that would establish a review process to screen planned U.S. investments in China and “other countries of concern” to ensure that they aren’t offshoring manufacturing capacity that is critical to national security, House Democrats said.
Medical supplies, masks and other personal protective equipment, as well as goods needed to maintain the nation’s electrical grid, are some of the items deemed critical under the measure, which is absent from the Senate legislation.
“Firms operating in critical industries would need to report outbound investments to certain foreign markets (such as China) and how that might compromise U.S. national security,” House Democrats said. The government “would, under limited circumstances, have the ability to block certain outsourcing activities while undertaking a review of the transaction.”
U.S. will miss electric-vehicle targets without big investments in semiconductor manufacturing, commerce secretary warns
The lack of Republican support in the House has put a focus on where liberal members of the Democratic caucus stand because their votes will be needed to get a bill through the chamber given the party’s slim majority.
Several liberal Democrats were critical of the Senate-passed bill for not including language condemning anti-Asian rhetoric that has increased during the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China. Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee said they have heeded their concerns by including language condemning anti-Asian rhetoric and violence and calling on the United States and other governments to fight racism directed at Asian communities.
Liberal lawmakers who count themselves as part of the “Squad” and the Congressional Progressive Caucus have not commented on the bill, saying they are reviewing the legislation.
Democrats who have pushed for legislation to address the United States’ lack of manufacturing capacity and to provide funding for research and development in areas where the country is competing with China said the party should not let internal disagreements sink the bill.
“If you’re for adding more technology infrastructure and manufacturing in the heartland of this country and across this country, you should be for this bill. That should be the central message we should keep harping on,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. | null | null | null | null | null |
Gas stoves pose a big risk to the planet and your health, study says
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today we're worried that climate change could come for our coffee addiction. ☕ But first:
Gas stoves in kitchens pose a greater risk to the planet and your health than previously thought
Research suggests that gas-burning stoves in kitchens across America may pose a greater risk to the planet and public health than previously thought, your Climate 202 host reports this morning.
Gas stoves release more methane, a potent greenhouse gas, than the Environmental Protection Agency estimates, according to the study published today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The appliances also emit significant amounts of nitrogen dioxide, an air pollutant that can trigger asthma and other respiratory conditions.
The findings come as scientists and climate advocates increasingly urge homeowners to switch to all-electric stoves, water boilers and other appliances, even as the natural gas industry fights in New York and across the country to keep the blue flames of gas-burning stoves as a staple of American homes.
“If you have the financial ability to swap out a gas stovetop for an electric induction cooktop, I do think it's a good idea,” said Rob Jackson, a co-author of the study and professor at Stanford. “It's a good idea for the planet and for air quality.”
The American Gas Association, a trade group that represents more than 200 companies, has defended the industry’s efforts to reduce its climate impact, noting that annual methane emissions from natural gas distribution systems have declined 69 percent since 1990 and that residential natural gas use amounts to only a small portion of U.S. emissions.
“We are committed to going even further by investing nearly $30 billion each year to modernize our system and $4.3 million every day to help our customers and communities shrink their carbon footprint through energy efficiency improvements,” Karen Harbert, the association’s president and CEO, said in a statement.
Here's what to know about the paper and its implications for climate science and policy:
Methane emissions and the EPA
The researchers measured emissions from stoves in 53 homes across seven California counties. They used their findings to estimate that gas stoves in the United States release more than 28,000 metric tons of methane annually — a comparable climate impact to the emissions from about 500,000 gas-powered cars driven for a year.
Tim Carroll, a spokesman for the EPA, noted that the agency previously has not included emissions from inside homes and buildings, known as “post-meter” emissions, in its Greenhouse Gas Inventory, an annual report on emissions from every sector of the U.S. economy. He said the agency plans to update its approach this year.
The EPA does not regulate indoor air pollution because it lacks the authority to do so under the Clean Air Act, which only covers sources of outdoor air pollution such as automobiles, power plants and other industrial facilities. But in 2018, the EPA set a one-hour outdoor exposure limit of 100 parts per billion for nitrogen dioxide.
Notably, the study found that families who don’t use their range hoods or who have poor ventilation can surpass the one-hour outdoor standard within a few minutes of stove usage, particularly in cramped kitchens, which are more common in poorer communities.
Gas ban battles
In recent years, cities around the country have sought to curb gas use in new buildings, prompting pushback from the gas industry — a trend to watch in 2022.
New York City last month became the largest municipality in America to prohibit gas hookups in new buildings. And last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) proposed the first-ever statewide gas ban by 2027, a move that climate activists cheered while calling for a faster timeline.
The gas industry has waged a campaign in statehouses across the country to preempt such bans, arguing that they deny consumers choice of a reliable fuel. Republican-controlled legislatures in states including Alabama, Kentucky and Texas have passed industry-backed bills to prevent cities from restricting fossil fuel use.
Despite campaign pledge, Biden fails to change course on fossil fuels
One year after announcing a halt to any new federal oil and gas leasing, President Biden has outpaced former president Donald Trump in issuing permits to companies to drill on public lands, The Washington Post's Anna Phillips reports.
After holding the largest offshore lease sale in U.S. history in the Gulf of Mexico last year, the Interior Department plans to hold its first onshore auction under Biden on more than 200,000 acres across Western states by the end of March, followed by 1 million acres off the coast of Alaska.
“The administration’s actions reveal an uncomfortable truth: Although Biden supports a shift to cleaner sources of energy, he has failed to curb fossil fuel development in the United States,” Phillips writes. “His push to suspend federal oil and gas auctions has run headlong into political and legal challenges, and his administration has offered no plan to address the climate impact of mining in Wyoming’s coal-rich Powder River Basin.”
The Biden administration insists that its hands were tied by a Louisiana federal judge's ruling that the Interior Department is legally required to hold lease sales. Interior spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said the department is “conducting a more comprehensive analysis of greenhouse gas impacts from potential oil and gas lease sales than ever before.”
Breyer's retirement has big implications for environmental law
Justice Stephen G. Breyer will retire at the end of the current Supreme Court term, giving President Biden an opportunity to nominate a liberal replacement and follow through on his campaign promise to select the first Black female justice, The Post's Robert Barnes reports.
Breyer is the last remaining justice who voted with the 5-4 majority in Massachusetts v. EPA, the landmark 2007 decision that established the EPA's legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. Three of the four justices in the dissent — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — are still active on the court, as E&E News's Pamela King noted.
Environmental groups urged Biden to pick a justice who is committed to preserving the nation's bedrock environmental laws. They noted that the Supreme Court is poised to hear oral arguments in two cases challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to combat climate change and ensure clean water under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, respectively.
“With the climate and extinction crises getting more dire every day, President Biden must now appoint a justice who understands that our existing laws must be used to their fullest extent to save our planet and future generations,” Kierán Suckling, executive director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “The status quo is failing all of us, so Biden’s choice is crucial.”
Interior Department cancels leases near Boundary Waters
The Interior Department yesterday canceled two leases to extract copper, nickel and other valuable materials near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, The Washington Post's Dino Grandoni reports.
Ann Marie Bledsoe Downes, Interior's principal deputy solicitor, wrote in a legal opinion that the leases were improperly renewed by the Trump administration, which conducted an inadequate environmental analysis and failed to consult the U.S. Forest Service.
The decision will help protect hundreds of lakes, streams and wetlands in one of America's most popular wilderness destinations from potential toxic leaching from mining.
Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta that had proposed a $3 billion copper-nickel mine near the southwest border of Boundary Waters, called the Biden administration’s decision “disappointing, but not surprising given the series of actions the administration has taken to try and shut the door on copper-nickel mining in northeast Minnesota.”
Sen. Markey: ‘We can use climate as a foundation’ for Build Back Better
Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) suggested yesterday that Democrats could pass a scaled-back version of the Build Back Better Act that contains $555 billion in climate spending and any other provisions with broad support across the caucus.
“We can use climate as a foundation for a deal on Build Back Better,” Markey said during a virtual town hall last night with leaders of environmental groups and White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory.
“We can bring climate justice to communities around the country and build a package that has 50 votes," he added. "Add in any other provisions on any other issues that have 50 votes, like climate, and that's our package.”
Meanwhile, Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, on which Markey sits, took to Twitter yesterday to blast the Biden administration's climate agenda ahead of the one-year anniversary of Biden's executive orders on the climate crisis:
Heavier rainfall related to climate change will make us need our umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh… 🎶 | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc of Monaco leads the field at the start of the Singapore Formula One Grand Prix, at the Marina Bay City Circuit in Singapore, Sunday, Sept. 22, 2019. Formula One signed a seven-year contract extension Thursday, Jan. 27, 2022 with the Singapore Grand Prix. F1 said in a statement that a deal to continue racing at the Marina Bay street circuit until 2028 was agreed with the Singapore GP and Singapore’s tourism board. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian, File)
PARIS — Formula One signed a seven-year contract extension Thursday with the Singapore Grand Prix. | null | null | null | null | null |
This weekend, there will be two remembrance events for the 100th anniversary of the disaster. The first event is a candlelight vigil that starts Friday at 6 p.m. in the plaza at 1801 Adams Mill Rd. NW and the second event is a centennial commemoration that begins Saturday at noon in the Adams Morgan Plaza, 18th and Columbia Rd NW. Both events will remember the disaster victims, the rescue workers and the medical professionals who cared for the injured and dying. | null | null | null | null | null |
Yes, Fauci has a high salary by government standards, has been in the same unelected position for 38 years and oversees a budget of $6 billion that flows into grants; those are truths on which a distrusting person could build a theory about corruption, unaccountable elites and a nefarious flow of money from this or that institution to this or that lab. | null | null | null | null | null |
In a powerful rebound from 2020, when the economy contracted by 3.4 percent — its worst result since 1946 — 2021′s strong growth created a record 6.4 million jobs. But it also brought a host of complications, helping fuel the highest inflation in 40 years and creating supply chain snarls as consumers hungry for products overwhelmed the global delivery system. To beat back rising prices, the Federal Reserve is now shifting its strategy and preparing for multiple interest rate hikes this year, convinced it has given enough support to help the labor market and now must keep the economy from overheating even further. | null | null | null | null | null |
District bill could expand college access for undocumented students
A new D.C. Council proposal would create a grant program for undocumented students in the District who want to attend college
A new D.C. Council proposal would create a grant program for undocumented students in the District who want to attend college. (Keith Lane for The Washington Post)
A group of D.C. Council members has introduced legislation that could help make college more affordable for the District’s undocumented high-schoolers.
Spearheaded by council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large), the proposed “DC Advancing College Hopes for Immigrants’ Education and Vocational Enrichment Scholarship” — or DC ACHIEVES — Establishment Act would provide grants to high school graduates who do not have U.S. citizenship. Undocumented students, unlike their peers, are ineligible for federal financial aid and have limited access to state aid programs.
“These are students who are graduating salutatorian or valedictorian and, unfortunately, just had a very difficult time continuing with their higher education pursuits because of the cost,” Henderson said. “If employers are saying a bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma, then I think it’s incumbent upon us as the public to ensure that our students are able to obtain what we would call a public good.”
The legislation is co-sponsored by council members Anita Bonds (D-At Large), Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1), Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), and Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large).
The pandemic disrupted ‘dreamers.’ Can Biden’s spending bill get them back on track?
The proposal would allocate about $17,000 per student. The figure is equivalent to the money a student would have received from the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant (DCTAG) — the well-known federally funded grant program that helps city students attend college — and from a federal Pell grant. Undocumented students are currently not eligible for either program.
The District’s public schools do not collect citizenship information, but Henderson estimates there are between 3,000 and 4,000 undocumented students in the system.
“Frankly, in my mind, it’s not a lot of money when you look at how it could truly change the life of a young person,” Henderson said. She added that the council passed legislation in 2014 that would have provided tuition assistance to District students, regardless of citizenship, who met certain income and residency requirements. The measure, however, was left unfunded following concerns about how it would affect federal support for DCTAG.
“But the need didn’t go away,” Henderson said.
An estimated 840,000 undocumented immigrants between the ages of 18 and 24 were living in the United States as of 2018, according to a 2021 report from the Department of Homeland Security. Just 18 states and the District provide those students with access to in-state tuition and some financial aid or scholarships, data from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal shows. Other states also offer access to in-state tuition or financial aid.
Undocumented students in the District can receive financial aid to attend the city’s sole public institution, the University of the District of Columbia.
At schools such as Trinity Washington University, where about 10 percent of students are undocumented, the campus shoulders much of the cost to attend, said Patricia McGuire, the university’s president. Many students receive scholarships from TheDream.Us — the country’s largest college access program for undocumented students shielded from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, policy — but still arrive on campus with “great need,” McGuire said.
“We do the best we can, but there comes a point where our students need additional help,” McGuire said. Federal coronavirus relief funding allowed the university to disburse emergency grants to help all students cover their tuition costs, as well as their basic needs. With money from the American Rescue Plan, the university even paid off outstanding balances for more than 500 students. But that money will run out. “There needs to be other forms of support for these students,” McGuire said.
President Biden’s $2 trillion Build Back Better agenda offered hope in a provision that would open financial aid eligibility to undocumented students. But it remains unclear whether the plan, in its current form, will garner enough support to pass in the Senate.
“I think the city knows and would certainly realize that investing in undocumented students is a great thing for the city and the city’s future,” McGuire said. “These are students that are as American as anybody.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“They looked right in [the brother’s] face and said, ‘Don’t go jumping to conclusions. This is a nice man,’ ” Crosland said.
The medical examiner’s conclusion has led to more questions among Smith-Fields’s grieving family as community members and activists demand her case be investigated fairly.
Smith-Fields’s case highlights the stark difference in how White victims are treated compared to Black ones and how victimhood is easily stripped from Black people, especially women, Crosland said. Questions and outcry over the unbalanced treatment of cases involving Black and Indigenous people arose again last year as the Gabby Petito case captured global audiences. Petito, 22, a White woman, was reported missing in September during a cross-country trip with her fiance and was found dead later that month.
“Black women don’t get the same treatment that Gabby Petito got,” Crosland told The Post. “Lauren Smith-Fields is dead and a White man walks out, and [police] have absolutely no interest in him.”
When Smith-Fields returned to her apartment, she allegedly went to the bathroom again for 10 to 15 minutes before returning to watch a movie and drink with her date. The man told police that Smith-Fields fell asleep on the couch, so he carried her to her bedroom, placed her on her bed and laid down next to her before falling asleep, according to the police report.
The man called 911, and when officers arrived, he was “frantic,” “trembling and visibly shaken,” the report says. Smith-Fields was on the floor of her bedroom. The man told police he’d done chest compressions on her, as instructed by an emergency operator. | null | null | null | null | null |
Taylor Swift vs. Olivia Rodrigo vs. the world: Why dance nights are serving up instant nostalgia
(Photo illustration by José L Soto/The Washington Post base on images by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
On any given day, perusing the event listings at a favorite music venue will result in the usual genre-spanning mix of musicians, whether up-and-coming or well-traveled, as well as DJ gigs and dance nights. As the world grapples with the latest wave of the pandemic, cancellations and postponements are more common than ever.
Apart from these coronavirus-caused disappointments, calendars are increasingly filled with dance nights dedicated to the present or not-so-distant past of pop music, pitting artists’ discographies against each other: Madonna vs. Gaga vs. Britney; One Direction vs. the Jonas Brothers; Taylor Swift vs. Miley Cyrus, Olivia Rodrigo or just herself.
These record shops give you an analog break from a digital world
Dance nights dedicated to nostalgia have been a regular feature of nightlife for years. 9:30 Club has hosted events dedicated to the ‘90s, aughts and 2010s; Cryfest — pitting the Cure against the Smiths — will celebrate its 20th anniversary at the Black Cat this February; and there are two distinct traveling shows dedicated to turn-of-the-millennium emo and pop-punk (one is even booked at Coachella).
But the rise in artist-specific dance nights — especially ones dealing in almost instant-nostalgia — seems to be yet another pandemic side effect, of both venues and promoters looking to fill slots emptied by tour changes and of audiences looking for a fix of familiar fun during a time when joy is in short supply.
“Listening to a few artists that you know so well and doing something communal is so important right now,” says Alisha Edmonson, co-owner of D.C.'s Songbyrd Music House. “We’re all trying to learn our way back into hanging out with our friends again. For two years, we’ve not had that much communal experience.”
For Isabelle Gillman, attending a Taylor Swift-focused dance party was a lark that turned into a genuine connection to the music community in the District, where she had moved a few months before. Gillman, 22, doesn’t describe herself as a huge fan of the singer-songwriter, but went to Union Stage’s “Look What You Made Me Do” party last August thanks to a roommate who is a serious Swift obsessive.
“She actually wanted to get her heart broken before the rerelease [of Swift’s ‘Red’] came out so that she could hear it better,” Gillman says.
Gillman was familiar with the idea of a Taylor Swift party because of videos of similar events on TikTok, so she was prepared for a crowd almost exclusively made up of 18-to-20-somethings, some dressed to resemble different eras of the star’s career while sipping cocktails named after her ex-boyfriends. Taking a break from the Swift-heavy playlist (with some Rodrigo and early Cyrus mixed in), Gillman struck up a conversation with a Union Stage employee that resulted in her volunteering for the venue; she eventually became the on-site supervisor for its street team.
“This Taylor Swift event — just like some random thing that my roommate forced me to go — has sparked a lot of connections,” she says.
Other Taylor Swift-focused dance nights have been rewarding on both sides of the stage. Gemma Sherry DJed a similar night at Songbyrd in November: “22 & Good 4 U,” an event that adds buzzy newcomer Rodrigo to the mix. An Australian singer, saxophonist and DJ who splits time between D.C. and Philadelphia, Sherry DJs mostly weddings and corporate events, along with supporting her own jazz albums (she was touring Australia when interviewed).
“Honestly, it was one of the best performances — DJ or singing or anything — I’ve done in my life, because it just felt great,” she says. “Everyone’s there for the right reasons: it was about the music.”
Like Gillman, Sherry was not a huge fan of Swift before the event, but since then, she’s become a self-described Swifty thanks to the gig. She was impressed with the “lovely” crowd that clapped after each song and came prepared with “Rocky Horror Picture Show”-like embellishments. At one point, the crowd passed around masks of ex-Swift beau Jake Gyllenhaal and draped Sherry in a red scarf — both nods to cult favorite “All Too Well,” a song understood to be about the actor. Plus, the applause and adulation she received made her feel like she was Taylor Swift.
“It was such a great community, everyone was so connected the whole night,” she says. “I just felt like we’re all in this together.”
The story behind Taylor Swift's 10-minute version of 'All Too Well,' the song making fans lose their minds
That sense of community has been an unexpected aspect of the “22 & Good 4 U” offering, which is the brainchild of L.A.-based promoter Ben Schechter. When concerts began to return last summer, Schechter — who has booked live bands for the past six years under his What the Sound banner — wanted to promote a party night. A fan of Swift and Rodrigo, he settled on a brand name that paid tribute to both artists and has found success with the concept around the country.
For Schechter, part of the appeal of artist-focused dance nights has been how these shows differ from traditional concerts, where the focus is chiefly on the performer and not always on cutting loose with friends and fellow attendees.
“You don’t really have to focus on anything else except for belting the lyrics that you already know so well,” he says. “I think that experience after the pandemic [began] is super powerful.”
Plus, the experience has another benefit, for music fans looking for a peaceful refuge as the pandemic rolls on and anxiety about the state of the world continues to grow.
“Both the venue owners and the attendees have the same feedback about just how safe and warm the night felt,” he says. “No drunk dudes are hitting on them and no frat guys are there.”
Taylor Swift vs. Olivia Rodrigo Dance Party, Feb. 3 at 8 p.m., and Taylor Swift Dance Party, Feb. 4 at 10:30 p.m., at Union Stage, 740 Water St. SW. unionstage.com. Sold out.
22 & Good 4 U, Feb. 19 at 10:30 p.m. at Songbyrd, 540 Penn St. NE. songbyrddc.com. $28.
D.C. coronavirus vaccination requirement: What you need to know | null | null | null | null | null |
“They looked right in [her brother’s] face and said, ‘Don’t go jumping to conclusions. This is a nice man,’ ” Crosland said.
The medical examiner’s conclusion has led to more questions among Smith-Fields’s grieving family as community members and activists demand that her case be investigated fairly.
Smith-Fields’s case highlights the stark difference in how White victims are treated, compared with Black ones, and how victimhood is easily stripped from Black people, especially women, Crosland said. Questions and outcry over the unbalanced treatment of cases involving Black and Indigenous people arose again last year as the Gabby Petito case captured global audiences. Petito, 22, a White woman, was reported missing in September during a cross-country trip with her fiance and was found dead later that month.
“Black women don’t get the same treatment that Gabby Petito got,” Crosland told The Post. “Lauren Smith-Fields is dead, and a White man walks out, and [police] have absolutely no interest in him.”
When Smith-Fields returned to her apartment, she allegedly went to the bathroom again for 10 to 15 minutes before returning to watch a movie and drink with her date. The man told police that Smith-Fields fell asleep on the couch, so he carried her to her bedroom, placed her on her bed and lay down next to her before falling asleep, according to the police report.
The man called 911, and when officers arrived, he was “frantic,” “trembling and visibly shaken,” the report says. Smith-Fields was on the floor of her bedroom. The man told police he had performed chest compressions on her, as instructed by an emergency operator. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Supporting Democrats is just a way of keeping the monster at bay
Kyle Middleton works in December 2018 at Mothership Strategies, a progressive digital fundraising and campaign agency in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
The Democrats are flooding my inbox again.
It’s my own fault, really. In the sheer panic surrounding the 2020 election, I was a donating machine and wasn’t very shy about sharing my email, address, or my phone number — or my credit card number. Now, I am paying the price. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) just texted me to let me know that she’s endorsed Texas’s Jessica Cisneros for Congress and that I should give Jessica $27.
If I’m honest, the panic of the 2020 election has subsided in me. And now, the Democrats are just on my nerves. I have learned, over time, not to expect much in the way of change while they are in office. My contributions to them both in dollars and in votes are tantamount to holding a crucifix in front of a vampire. Not a permanent solution. Just a way of keeping the monster at bay.
At 51, I fall solidly into Generation X. In my youth, I carried a wallet with a chain so long that it almost dragged the ground. I have seen my share of elections and I have voted in most of them. But I recall only three election nights vividly.
The first came when I was 10 years old, and politics wasn’t my thing. I remember the night vividly. My parents were glued to the television as the results came in; there was a palpable tension in the house. It was the night Ronald Reagan was elected president. My parents never spoke to one another about politics — at least not that I heard. But their despair spoke for them that night. A Republican had been elected and, for reasons they didn’t explain, I sensed that this was bad news for Black people.
The next few years showed such fears were not misplaced. My father was laid off from the steel mill where he worked, and an era of greed took hold while we were asked to wait for things to “trickle down” from places that, even now, have yet to spring a leak. It became clear to me throughout the next decade that Republicans only cared about one specific demographic of people.
Most Black Americans identify as Democrats; only a small percentage does not. Yes, there are Black Republicans. They tend to explain this choice by saying that at some point they “saw the light” or that they wanted to escape the “Democratic plantation.” They can say what they like.
But the implication always seems to be that most Black Democrats are suffering from some sort of fever dream about the racism of Republicans. That we are too dumb to know that we’re being duped. Or that we don’t understand the many historic contributions of a party whose way of addressing racism in America is to deny that it exists or to say it is the fault of the people who draw attention to it.
Black Americans know bad news when we see it. The Republican Party seems to bring out white supremacists and there are reasons for this. A generation ago, Republicans worked quietly to keep that portion of their supporters gagged and muffled, out of sight. They make no effort to confront or suppress it anymore. It is now part of their brand, even their identity.
The second election night I remember clearly came in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected. For many years after (and in complete contrast to that evening in 1980), my neighborhood was alive with excitement. I walked past a bar and the shouts of exaltation coming from inside were inspiring. I walked home with my head held high, feeling, at long last, like an American.
But Obama’s tenure wasn’t an eight-year miracle. He was, in the end, a Democrat, still largely a shield against Republican cruelty.
I still can’t talk about election night in 2016. We are still living with that hangover. And Joe Biden hasn’t cured mine yet.
So here is where I think we are: Black people don’t love Democrats. But, for right now, they seem to be the only thing standing between us and the racism of Republicans. Democrats are a bulwark against conservatives who want nothing more than to go back to a time when White men were on top and everyone else was an afterthought. You don’t have to be a racist to be a Republican. But it’s not discouraged, either.
So, the Democrats are in my inbox again. I find them annoying because they aren’t that much better than the other party. But they are better than nothing. I wish that we could all agree on someone, regardless of political affiliation, who put the quality of life of all Americans first. Until then, I’ll be reaching for my checkbook. And hoping. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Behind the ‘power law’: How a forgotten venture capitalist kick-started Silicon Valley
(Mario Wagner/For The Washington Post)
By Sebastian Mallaby
Sebastian Mallaby is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and most recently the author of “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future,” from which this essay is adapted. He begins a Post column next month.
Success has many fathers, and Silicon Valley is no exception. Searching for the origins of this miraculously innovative region, some fasten on 1951, when Fred Terman, the engineering dean at Stanford, created the university’s famous Research Park. Others begin the story in 1956, when William Shockley, the father of the semiconductor, abandoned the East Coast to launch a company on Terman’s campus and actually brought silicon to the Valley. But the most compelling origin story — the one that aims the spotlight squarely at the force that makes the Valley so distinctive — begins in the summer of 1957, when eight of Shockley’s young researchers rose up in revolt against their imperious employer and went out on their own. It was this act of defection that created the magic culture of the Valley, shattering traditional assumptions about hierarchy and authority and working loyally for decades until you retired with a gold watch.
The defection of 1957 was made possible by a new form of finance, what we call venture capital today. The idea was to back technologists who were too dicey to get a conventional bank loan but who promised the chance of a resounding payoff. The funding of the “Traitorous Eight” and their company, Fairchild Semiconductor, was arguably the first big venture deal in the Valley; and from that moment on, teams possessed of grand ideas and stiff ambition could spin themselves out, start themselves up and generally invent the organizational form that best suited their fancy. Engineers, inventors, hustlers and artistic dreamers could meet, combine, separate, compete and simultaneously collaborate, all courtesy of this new finance. Talent had been liberated. A revolution was afoot.
In its modern incarnation, venture capital involves a series of transactions. When a start-up is formed, “seed” investors might advance $1 million to help it develop its first prototype, receiving shares in exchange. If the start-up makes progress, it will raise a “Series A” round: This time, venture capitalists might advance $10 million so the company can hire salespeople and reel in the first customers. At each stage in the journey, a fresh round of financing depends on the attainment of an agreed milestone, and at each stage, the investors provide capital for shares. Of course, most start-ups fail, with the result that these shares turn out to be worthless — building companies is tough. But the few start-ups that make it often have exponential stock rises, delivering gains to venture capitalists that offset multiple losses.
The invention of this liberating finance explains more than most people still realize. Today, venture capital has morphed from a niche specialty into a global juggernaut, spreading far from the Valley to China, Israel, Europe and beyond. Venture-backed start-ups have changed how people work, socialize, shop and entertain themselves; how they access information, manipulate it and arrive at quiet epiphanies — how they think. But the significance of venture capital goes further. The liberation of the Traitorous Eight, and the countless entrepreneurial liberations since then, explain how Silicon Valley came to dominate innovation. Policymakers the world over have tried to understand the Valley’s secret sauce and bottle it. They must begin by understanding venture capital.
This, to be sure, is not what the standard history teaches. But the rival theories of what established the Valley’s preeminence — that it was home to Stanford University, that it benefited from military contracts, that it was blessed with a certain countercultural irreverence — have never been especially persuasive. After all, Stanford was no more distinguished than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was itself a short drive from Harvard, creating a research cluster more powerful than anything Silicon Valley could muster in its early days. And though Stanford did benefit from military research dollars, the famous military-industrial complex of the 1950s was primarily an East Coast alliance between the Pentagon and Cambridge, Mass. If military ties had determined the location of applied science, Cambridge should have been the center of the universe.
Meanwhile, the cultural explanation for California exceptionalism also falls short. The anti-materialist hacker ethic, championed by communalist nerds who obsessed over code and declined on principle to monetize it, is often cited as the source of California’s peculiarly inventive culture: “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” a Time magazine essay claimed in 1995. But the hacker ethic actually originated at MIT — with the Tech Model Railroad Club, a group of undergrads enthralled by the technology behind model trains before their attention shifted to computers. Similarly, Tim Berners-Lee, the British-born and Geneva-based inventor of the World Wide Web, combined creative imagination with an anti-materialist disdain for business: “If you’re interested in using the code, mail me,” he wrote in a public announcement, refusing to profit from his invention. In Finland, Linus Torvalds created the bare bones of the Linux operating system and gave it away for free. In short, there has been no lack of inventiveness outside Silicon Valley and no lack of countercultural anti-business prejudice outside it, either.
The truth is that the distinguishing genius of the Valley lies not in its capacity for invention, countercultural or otherwise. The first transistor was created in 1947, not in Silicon Valley but at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The first server software was from Minnesota. The first graphical browser was co-developed by Marc Andreessen, the billionaire entrepreneur who was then at the University of Illinois. So, too, early versions of the search engine, Internet-based social networking and smartphone all emerged outside the Valley. No single geography dominates invention. Yet all these breakthroughs have something in common. When it came to turning ideas into blockbuster products, the Valley was the place where the magic happened.
And the magic sprang from venture capital. By freeing talent to convert ideas into products, and by marrying unconventional experiments with hard commercial targets, this distinctive form of finance fostered the business culture that made the Valley so fertile. In an earlier era, J.P. Morgan’s brand of finance fashioned American business into muscular oligopolies; in the 1980s, Michael Milken’s junk bonds fueled a burst of corporate takeovers and slash-and-burn cost cuts. In similar fashion, venture capital stamped its mark on an industrial culture, making Silicon Valley the most durably productive crucible of applied science anywhere, ever. By the 21st century, an astonishing 70 percent of the publicly traded tech companies in the Valley could trace their lineage to Fairchild Semiconductor; and every hoodie-wearing innovator owed something to that crucible moment when it raised venture finance.
By the 21st century, an astonishing 70 percent of the publicly traded tech companies in the Valley could trace their lineage to Fairchild Semiconductor.
The investor behind the Traitorous Eight was a 30-year-old MBA named Arthur Rock. Slight, taciturn, his eyes often clouded behind large glasses, Rock was not an obvious founding father, especially not of a swashbuckling innovation in finance. He had grown up poor in Rochester, N.Y., the child of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and had worked as a soda jerk in his father’s small grocery store. He had suffered from childhood polio, performed miserably in athletics and been brutally victimized by antisemitic classmates. During a wretched stint as an Army conscript, he had bridled at reporting to superiors whom he considered “not too bright.” Perhaps because of these experiences, Rock was reserved to the point of being prickly. He suffered fools impatiently, and the fools always knew.
The pivotal moment in Rock’s still-early career arrived in the summer of 1957, in a letter mailed to the New York brokerage where he worked. The sender was Eugene Kleiner, one of the Eight and later himself a venture investor. Because venture capital barely existed at this point, Kleiner and his comrades had not thought of starting a new enterprise. Rather, they asked Rock’s firm to identify an alternative employer — “a company which can supply good management.”
Rock understood that the researchers wanted to escape the tyrannical Shockley, the semiconductor inventor whose scientific brilliance was matched only by his prodigious arrogance. Rock also understood that they wanted to keep their team together, believing they could be most inventive as a group. Rather than seeking out a new employer for them, Rock flew to the West Coast and proposed an unexpected alternative.
“The way you do this is you start your own company,” he told them. By striking out on their own, the scientists would capture the rewards of their creative wizardry. A self-made loner from outside the establishment, Rock felt strongly that a certain kind of justice would be served.
Rock’s idea shocked the researchers. “We were blown away,” recalled Jay Last. “Arthur pointed out to us that we could start our own company. It was completely foreign to us.”
Gordon Moore, another of the Eight, who would go on to achieve fame as a founder not only of Fairchild but also subsequently of Intel, characterized his reaction even more directly. “I’m not the sort who can just say, ‘I’m going to start a company,’ ” he told an interviewer later. “The accidental entrepreneur like me has to fall into the opportunity or be pushed into it.” In that summer of 1957, Rock was pushing firmly.
Rock promised the scientists at least $1 million, an ungodly sum of capital at the time. He also stressed that they would each own shares in their start-up.
The scientists duly launched Fairchild, and the results soon proved more raucous, and more glorious, than even Rock had imagined. This was the era of “The Organization Man,” of managers who marked their status with carved paneling, fake fireplaces and dressing rooms. But at Fairchild Semiconductor, the formality and hierarchy of 1950s business culture was tossed out the window. The team worked out of utilitarian cubicles. Company strategy was hashed out at collaborative bull sessions. Sales meetings featured brownies and whiskey. New hires straight out of grad school were empowered to make decisions.
Within a few months of its founding, Fairchild was pushing the frontiers of innovation at a pace that the suffocating Shockley never would have permitted. The scientists were trying out new products: innovative switches, a revolutionary scanner, new combinations of metals in semiconductors (those critical components of most electronic circuits). And the whole effort was self-consciously commercial. At other companies in the 1950s, researchers wore white smocks and were generally confined to the laboratory. But at Fairchild, they were out talking to the customers even before developing their first transistors, determined to discover what kind of device would sell. The goal was to make stuff that the market wanted — stuff that would cause the value of their personal equity to grow.
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Sure enough, it did grow. At the formation of the company, Rock had ensured that each of the Eight bought $500 worth of stock. Two years later, Fairchild sold to its main backer, and each founding scientist received $300,000, a bonanza amounting to around 30 years’ salary at the time.
And Rock had a feeling this was only the beginning. More important than the gratifying payout, Fairchild’s success had demonstrated the liberating power of venture capital. It was about unlocking human talent. It was about sharpening incentives. It was about forging a new kind of applied science and a new commercial culture.
At the formation of the company, Rock had ensured that each of the Eight bought $500 worth of stock. Two years later, Fairchild sold to its main backer, and each founding scientist received $300,000.
Over the next decade, Rock took his idea to the next level. He quit his East Coast brokerage, moved to San Francisco and raised a dedicated venture fund. Along the way, he solved one of the most intriguing puzzles in investment history: how to back risky start-ups that normal investors shun.
To begin with, Rock acknowledged the sound reasons why start-ups are so hard to fund. According to the standard rules of finance, allocators of capital should seek collateral. Creditors back companies with physical or financial assets, so if the business hits the skids, they can recoup their loans by selling buildings, stock portfolios or land. Equity investors analyze “book value,” a measure of the capital that can be extracted if the company is wound up. Rock announced cheerfully that he was seeking something different. In backing start-ups, he was betting on “intellectual book value” — the dreams and determination that lay hidden inside the heads of entrepreneurs. If the venture failed, he would not get his money back.
Another standard financial practice, then and now, is to forecast company profits. Investors like to compare the price of a share with projected earnings, combining these numbers into a price-to-earnings ratio. But this reassuring quantitative benchmark was also of no use to Rock: He was backing start-ups whose earnings existed only in an imagined tomorrow. The few props that Rock could grab onto were, again, intangible: the character of the start-up founders, the quality of their ideas. Judging such variables was necessarily subjective. Investment decisions about tech start-ups originated, as Rock put it, “either from ‘the seat of the pants’ or the ‘top of the hat.’ ”
When Rock raised $3.4 million for his first venture fund in 1961, most contemporaries regarded such pronouncements as reckless. But over the next seven years, Rock confounded them. The chief cause of his triumph lay in what venture capitalists came to call “the power law”: the idea that, while most start-ups end up being worth zero, a handful take off exponentially. “Venture capital is not even a home-run business,” Bill Gurley, the venture capitalist behind Uber remarked a few years ago. “It is a grand-slam business.”
Thanks to the power law, Rock’s difficulty in evaluating start-ups was not fatal. The subjective nature of his methods meant he would be wrong much of the time, but a tiny number of winners could make up for the losers. Sure enough, Rock’s first venture fund multiplied his backers’ money an extraordinary 22-fold, largely on the strength of one astonishingly successful bet. Defying the conventional wisdom that taking on IBM, the giant computer incumbent, was bound to be a losing strategy, he backed an upstart challenger, Scientific Data Systems. When SDS became the fastest-growing computer company of the 1960s, Rock’s $257,000 investment generated a jackpot of $60 million.
When word of Rock’s returns spread, the taciturn investor became a business celebrity. In 1968, Forbes posed the question on the minds of many readers, “How do you get to be like Arthur Rock?” After the Forbes article was published, ambitious imitators rushed to copy Rock’s methods. The following year, $171 million flowed into private venture funds, fully 50 times more than Rock had raised in 1961.
The boom set the stage for Silicon Valley’s takeoff, its eclipse of the rival tech cluster around Boston and, ultimately, the Valley’s enduring dominance of innovation over the next half-century. Strangely, Rock’s role in this story is seldom recognized. The prevailing narrative about the Valley lionizes inventors and company founders, neglecting the financiers who liberated them.
Thanks to the power law, Rock’s difficulty in evaluating start-ups was not fatal. The subjective nature of his methods meant he would be wrong much of the time, but a tiny number of winners could make up for the losers.
Today, Rock is a self-effacing nonagenarian active in philanthropy. “I never wanted to be the richest corpse in the cemetery,” he says of his charitable giving. But his business legacy is obvious. His “power law” approach to risk management has freed generations of VCs to back high-risk, high-potential start-ups, knowing they could absorb the cost of failures because the winners would be so profitable. The result is a financial specialty so influential that it demands a new framing of how capitalism works.
The economics profession has long recognized two great institutions of modern capitalism: markets and companies. Markets coordinate activity via price signals and arm’s-length contracts. Companies coordinate by assembling large teams led by top-down managers. But economists have focused less on the middle ground that venture capital inhabits.
Venture capitalists channel capital, advice and talented recruits to promising start-ups; in this way, they replicate the managerial direction and team formation found in corporations. At the same time, venture capitalists have the flexibility of the market. They can get behind a start-up with a fresh business idea; they can shape it, expand it, murmur its name into the right ears. But when a round of funding is exhausted, the market will decide what happens. If there are no enthusiastic buyers for the next tranche of the start-up’s equity, it will be forced to close, avoiding the waste of resources that comes from sticking with doomed speculative ventures. This blend of corporate strategizing and respect for the market represents a third great institution of modern capitalism, to be added to the two that economists traditionally emphasize.
Venture capital challenges economists in another way as well. A huge amount of energy in government and the private sector is spent on economic forecasting; without a clear view of the future, committing resources would seem irresponsible. But extrapolations from past data anticipate the future only when there is not much to anticipate; if tomorrow will be a mere extension of today, why bother with forecasting? The revolutions that will matter — the big disruptions that create extreme wealth for inventors and great anxiety for workers — cannot be foretold because they are so thoroughly disruptive. Rather, they will emerge from the murky soup of tinkerers and hackers and hubristic dreamers, and all you can know is that in 10 years the world will be excitingly different. The future can be discovered by means of iterative, venture-backed experiments. It cannot be predicted.
Of course, venture capital is far from perfect. The very success of the industry has attracted incautious investors who shower money on young companies without overseeing their founders. The result is multibillion-dollar “unicorns” with inadequate governance. In a few celebrated cases — the office-space company WeWork; the ride-hailing giant Uber; the blood-testing sham Theranos — entrepreneurs who thought themselves accountable to nobody cut ethical corners, with investors, employees and customers alike paying the price. The underrepresentation of women and minorities is another failing. Women account for only 16 percent of investing partners at VC firms. Black investors account for only 3 percent. An industry that involves subjective judgments about start-up founders is wide-open to bias and should stress diversity all the more. Without progress on this front, people of a certain type will fund people of a similar type. The venture industry is a meritocracy, up to a point. It is also what its critics call a “mirror-tocracy.”
Despite these important reservations, venture capital is a positive force for societies and economies. Only a fraction of 1 percent of firms in the United States receive venture-capital backing, yet this tiny minority accounts for fully 47 percent of the nonfinancial companies that do well enough to go public and 76 percent of the market capitalization of these firms. Venture-backed companies have delivered more progress in applied science than any kind of rival: more than centralized corporate research and development units, more than isolated individuals tinkering in garages and more than government attempts to pick technological winners. Studies repeatedly find that start-ups backed by good VCs are more likely to succeed than others.
Even as the public mood has turned against the tech-industrial complex, this positive case for venture capital needs to remain front and central in policymakers’ minds. As Silicon Valley’s origin story demonstrates, venture capital liberates talented people to be their most effective and creative. The United States needs the innovation that results if it is to compete with China’s rising tech complex — and this competition ranges from civilian technologies (pharmaceuticals, medical robots) to military ones (artificial-intelligence weapons and surveillance systems) and dual-use hybrids (Internet routers, drones). For the past generation, Americans have celebrated entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. But think of Arthur Rock and remember: Without the venture capitalists who helped them get started, Jobs and Musk might have remained unknown.
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Sebastian Mallaby: Behind the ‘power law’: How a forgotten venture capitalist kick-started Silicon Valley
Ruth Marcus: The Rule of Six: A newly radicalized Supreme Court is poised to reshape the nation
Perry Bacon Jr.: Have Democrats reached the limits of White appeasement politics?
George F. Will: The pursuit of happiness is happiness
Robert Kagan: It wasn’t hubris that drove America into Afghanistan. It was fear.
Megan McArdle: America forgot how to make proper pie. Can we remember before it’s too late?
Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh: In Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s clerics have groomed and promoted their ruthless enforcer
Michele L. Norris: Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same?
Karen Tumulty: How Nancy Reagan helped end the Cold War
Josh Rogin: How covid hastened the decline and fall of the U.S.-China relationship
Mike Abramowitz and Nate Schenkkan: The reach of authoritarian repression is growing. Now, not even exile is safe.
George T. Conway III: Trump’s new reality: Ex-president, private citizen and, perhaps, criminal defendant
Fareed Zakaria: The pandemic upended the present. But it’s given us a chance to remake the future.
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Besieged with problems, from Russia to the pandemic to a stalled domestic agenda, Biden could get a win at a crucial time by filling a Supreme Court vacancy
Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer during an earlier interview in his office in Washington. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
His plate overflowing with troubles and his political standing significantly weakened, the last thing President Biden might have wanted now was another challenge, another distraction, another big battle to contest. The pending retirement of Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, however, could be just the kind of diversion the president would welcome.
The news that Breyer plans to retire comes as Biden is intently focused on a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine that is fully testing his foreign policy experience and strategic capabilities. The president is struggling against a pandemic that is still not tamed and whose recent spread has forced the administration to defend itself against criticism that it was ill-prepared for yet another variant. Inflation has hit a 40-year high. His major domestic priorities, the Build Back Better bill and voting rights legislation, have hit a wall in the Senate, deflating his base. His poor job approval ratings have rattled Democrats looking toward November’s midterm elections.
With so much swirling around Biden, Breyer’s retirement could provide a modest circuit breaker for a president who badly needs something to rally his party — to draw clear contrasts with the Republicans, rather than continuing to be hamstrung by a focus on Democratic infighting. And if he is successful getting his eventual nominee confirmed, he would have a much-needed victory in Congress. All that assumes that he will find a nominee around whom all elements of his party can unite and who can command 50 votes in a divided Senate.
If Biden fulfills his pledge to nominate an African American female and thereby make history on the court, he could go a long way to patching up relations with Black voters — a critically important constituency for Democrats, one that has been disappointed at the lack of progress on voting rights and what they view as Biden’s other still unfulfilled promises.
A Supreme Court victory for Biden will not wipe away the concerns that many voters now have about his leadership. The tense standoff over Ukraine between the United States and its European allies on one side and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the other still stands as a critical and possibly defining moment of Biden’s presidency. For Americans exhausted by the pandemic, controlling the spread of the virus and easing restrictions that have gone on far longer than anyone had feared remain a paramount issue. The president hasn’t yet found a strategy on voting rights.
But putting his imprint on the court, however modest, and using the confirmation process to articulate his and his party’s values, could help alter the terms of debate in the run-up to the November elections.
The looming confirmation battle, as with all Supreme Court nominations now, looks to be hard-fought and divisive, an all-out fight. In the end, it will not change the makeup of a court that now has a 6-3 conservative majority. This will not be a nominee replacing the court’s swing vote, as conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh did in succeeding retired Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. It will not bring an ideological opposite to the court, as conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett did in succeeding the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The fact that it will not change the court’s balance could take a bit of steam out of the proceedings, but it probably will not stop groups on both sides from organizing, raising money, running television ads and warring in the media. The process of selecting a new justice will help define the midterm campaigns, focusing attention on the issues of constitutional rights in a year when the Supreme Court already is poised to rule on abortion laws, and provoke a debate about whether the court as now constituted is more conservative than the country.
“The country was to the right of the Warren Court a half century ago, so debates over the court helped [President Richard] Nixon,” Bill Kristol, a conservative strategist, said in an email exchange. “I suspect the conservative appointees on the court are now somewhat to the right of the country, as suggested, for example, by [Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.] joining the liberals so often. So a court debate could help the liberals — if they seem moderately liberal.”
Breyer’s decision to retire was not unexpected. The long-serving justice has been under considerable pressure from liberal activists to step down from the court this year, ahead of a midterm election that could put control of the Senate — and with it, the confirmation process for Supreme Court justices — in the hands of the Republicans. Many Democrats are still regretting that Ginsburg, a beloved liberal icon on the court, did not leave the bench before a long battle with cancer eventually took her life just ahead of the 2020 election, giving President Donald Trump and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) the ability to push Barrett through in barely a month.
The confirmation battle will piggyback on the most closely watched case of this term involving a restrictive Mississippi abortion law. If the court uses the case to overturn Roe v. Wade, or sidesteps that question but nonetheless upholds the Mississippi law, it will open the door to more restrictions in many states, a patchwork of abortion rights and a revived political struggle.
Several strategists suggested that the confluence of the battle over Breyer’s successor and the future of abortion rights will highlight for Democratic voters the importance of holding the Senate and having the presidency and possibly provide a spark of energy to a party whose enthusiasm about November appears to lag that of Republican voters.
“The most important benefit of filling the vacancy at this stage is that it is a powerful reminder of the importance of a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, even as some initiatives are blocked,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “Democratic voters are aware — most of them painfully so — of what would happen if Mitch McConnell was in charge of the Senate.”
Filling the vacancy created by Breyer’s retirement could give the president a chance to shift his focus away from his failure so far to get the Senate to approve the last big piece of his domestic agenda. One Democrat speculated privately that the confirmation process could take attention away from the Build Back Better bill, possibly providing time and quiet for an alternative to emerge that could win the support of Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
It also could turn the media spotlight away from those two Democratic senators, who have caused heartburn for the president on his domestic agenda but have otherwise supported his judicial nominees, and focus some attention instead on Republican senators such as Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, seen as two potential votes for a Biden nominee.
Biden’s first year has been a reminder that, however careful and strategic an administration tries to be about planning its moves, unexpected events create fresh obstacles that cannot be ignored. A president doesn’t have the luxury to ignore things when they arrive at the White House front door. But in this case, what has arrived is something for which the White House should be well prepared and the kind of issue with which Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is quite familiar.
Still there are risks. This is a battle Biden cannot afford to lose — and in a 50-50 Senate, as he has learned, there is nothing he can take for granted. As one Democrat noted, the concern is always that something happens — an unexpected revelation, a stumble in the hearings or a procedural hiccup — that creates an issue to get it done. Some Democrats fear that McConnell will seize on anything that could slow down the process or in other ways make Democrats and the president appear divided and ineffective.
Beyond that is the question of whether Biden can produce a nominee who truly does unite the party, one whose background and record excite progressives who have been unhappy as the Build Back Better bill has been chopped down repeatedly, and draw in moderate voters in the suburbs and elsewhere who may have turned away from Biden during his first year in office but could be lured back by a fight over a nominee they see as acceptable.
Little has come easy for Biden so far, and nothing says the coming clash over the future of the Supreme Court will be that easy, either. Nor will a victory fundamentally remake his presidency. But at a time when Biden needs to show off his leadership and his ability to get things done, Breyer’s retirement gives him a chance to try. | null | null | null | null | null |
One down, eight to go.
The Denver Broncos are finalizing a deal to hire Nathaniel Hackett as their head coach, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, making him the first hire in a year that has nine head-coaching vacancies across the NFL.
A former play caller for the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, Hackett met with the Broncos twice — first on Jan. 15 and then again Monday at the team’s headquarters in south Denver — during their extensive search to replace Vic Fangio, who was fired Jan. 9.
Although he left without a contract Monday, the Broncos stepped in just before he was set to fly to Jacksonville, Fla., on Thursday to interview for the Jaguars’ head-coaching job.
Timberlake’s on the headset, Yoda’s at the line: Enter the Nathaniel Hackett experience
Hackett, 42, takes over a team that has been rebuilding for much of the past six years, since its Super Bowl 50 win with quarterback Peyton Manning. Denver has cycled through three head coaches and had 10 starting quarterbacks in that span, and has a losing record for each of the past five seasons. In the 41 years prior — most of which were under the helm of late owner Pat Bowlen — the Broncos never had back-to-back losing seasons.
Hiring a head coach is the first of three major moves for Denver this offseason. The team is expected to be put up for sale, following multiple court battles between Bowlen family members and the trustees that run the team and Bowlen’s estate. It is also still searching for its long-term answer at quarterback.
Hackett’s arrival will come with speculation that he will help to lure Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers to Denver, though a person with knowledge of the Broncos’ thinking insists the hire was based solely on Hackett’s merits as a coach.
Following Green Bay’s divisional playoff loss to the San Francisco 49ers, Rodgers remained coy about his future, saying “there’s obviously a lot of decisions to be made” about multiple players in Green Bay and that he would soon talk to general manager Brian Gutekunst about his own future. Rodgers added: “I don’t want to be a part of a rebuild if I’m going to keep playing.”
Rodgers later indicated on The Pat McAfee Show that he would make his decision before the end of the franchise-tag designation period, which runs from Feb. 22-March 8. His star receiver, Davante Adams, is a tag candidate for the Packers.
Rodgers’ unhappiness with the Packers’ front office was made clear last offseason, and although he claimed relations have improved, the team’s financials have not. Green Bay is roughly $44 million over the projected salary cap for 2022 (not including the projected $20 million it would cost to franchise-tag Adams), and Rodgers’ contract has a cap charge of more than $46 million.
Whomever Denver lands as its next quarterback, he will have a roster with many intriguing pieces, including running back Javonte Williams; a receiving trio of Courtland Sutton, Tim Patrick and Jerry Jeudy; and a defense featuring safety Justin Simmons and cornerback Patrick Surtain II.
Hackett faces a tall task in pulling it all together, especially as a first-year head coach. But he arrives with an extensive football résumé, dating back to his years as a ball boy for the teams his father coached.
“Those were back in the days when we had two-a-days,” Hackett told The Washington Post last summer. "I was exhausted. I’m 13 years old, doing laundry twice a day, folding towels with Darren Kearns and Marcus Allen and all the guys in Kansas City. It was a big part of my life. … I grew up in a locker. My dad always joked, “Yeah, I apologize every day that he had to grow up in a locker room because he’s a little wild.'”
Paul Hackett, a former quarterback and offensive coordinator, coached for more than 40 years, including four (1993-97) as the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator.
Nathaniel Hackett, a linebacker and neurobiology major at the University of California, Davis, turned to coaching after graduation and began as an assistant in the college ranks, first at his alma mater, and then at Stanford, where he was thrown in on offense after spending his playing days on defense.
In 2006, he joined Jon Gruden’s staff in Tampa Bay as a quality control coach before eventually landing his first gig as a play-caller at the University of Syracuse. Following stints as the offensive coordinator with the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, who he led to the conference championship game in 2017, Hackett teamed with Coach Matt LaFleur in Green Bay to remake the Packers’ offense.
Together, they blended West Coast principles with big-play passes to create an offense that led the league in scoring in 2020 and led Green Bay to three consecutive 13-win seasons.
The system, Hackett said, is one he believes can be duplicated elsewhere.
“Without a doubt. Look at Tennessee and what Arthur Smith did last year. Look at the Niners. The Rams. When it comes to your personnel as a coach, you have to have a playbook that has enough stuff in it that can adapt to anybody,” he said. “If you look at our day one install from 2019 to our day one installed 2021, it’s completely different now. We still have all the same stuff. But what we’ve done is over time we’ve said, ‘Okay, these are the guys we have, this is what they do the best and this gives us enough ammo for the season to be able to tackle every defense we might face.’”
Although LaFleur called the plays in Green Bay, the system was built in collaboration with Hackett and the game plans installed with other assistants, including Adam Stenavich, the offensive line coach/ run-game coordinator who could be looked at as a candidate for the Broncos’ offensive coordinator position.
Another candidate for Hackett’s staff: Ejiro Evero, the Los Angeles Rams’ secondary coach, who may be considered for defensive coordinator. Hackett has described Evero as his “best friend,” dating back to their days at UC Davis, where Evero was a safety. | null | null | null | null | null |
This weekend, there will be two remembrance events for the 100th anniversary of the disaster. The first event is a candlelight vigil that starts Friday at 6 p.m. in the plaza at 1801 Adams Mill Rd. NW and the second event is a centennial commemoration that begins Saturday at noon at 18th and Columbia Rd NW. Both events will remember the disaster victims, the rescue workers and the medical professionals who cared for the injured and dying. | null | null | null | null | null |
Pentagon defends its preparation for Ukraine crisis, details military forces that could deploy
Members of the U.S. Army's 82d Airborne Division during military exercises in Latvia in 2018. (Master Sgt. Sonia Pawloski/Michigan National Guard)
The Pentagon is defending its preparations in response to the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, with a top spokesman on Thursday highlighting that the United States has provided millions of dollars in weapons to Kyiv and providing new details about U.S. military forces that could deploy to Eastern Europe to bolster security there.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the United States has been monitoring Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military buildup along the Ukrainian border for months. More than 100,000 Russian troops are amassed, including some in neighboring Belarus.
“I take issue with the idea that this is sort of 11th-hour, Hail Mary-pass-throwing stuff,” Kirby said. “We’ve been talking about this now for a couple of months, what we’ve been seeing on the ground.”
The comments came as the U.S. military prepared to potentially send thousands of troops from the United States to Europe. Kirby identified for the first time that elements of the 82nd Airborne Division and XVIII Airborne Corps from Fort Bragg, N.C., the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 4th Infantry Division from Fort Carson, Colo., were among an initial force of 8,500 troops that were put on high alert this week and could be among the first to go.
Other units also have been put on a heightened alert status, Kirby said. He declined to name them but said they are located at bases that include Fort Hood, Tex.; Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state; Fort Polk, La.; and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Troops from those units could provide medical, aviation and logistics support in addition to combat power, he said.
Underscoring the situation’s sensitivities, Kirby declined to say which units from those bases could deploy. But they could significantly enhance NATO’s capabilities. Davis-Monthan, for instance, is home to five Air Force squadrons of A-10 tank-killing attack jets. A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said that the Pentagon has become increasingly careful about the information it releases concerning U.S. forces in Europe, as the administration seeks to emphasize that diplomacy is still an option in the crisis.
The Pentagon’s deliberations over how to respond to the crisis come as it balances how to show resolve, work with European allies, avoid a potential quagmire and keep focus on security concerns posed elsewhere by China, according to current and former U.S. officials. President Biden has ruled out any U.S. troops fighting in Ukraine, but an array of other options are on the table.
Robert Brown, a retired Army general with experience in Europe, said he has not heard “anybody in their right mind who thinks we would go [into] Ukraine.” But there is a desire, he said, to look for ways to strengthen the military alliance in Europe in light of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent decisions and unpredictability.
“Folks were nervous before this about Russia’s aggressive actions,” Brown said. “Now once they cross that border into Ukraine, who’s to say they won’t keep going? I wouldn’t put it past Putin in a heartbeat.”
Russia’s current buildup follows its 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed through force and continues to control, and a 2008 invasion of the Republic of Georgia. Biden has promised allies that the United States considers its obligations to fellow NATO countries “sacred.” Under the terms of their treaty, which was signed by original members in the wake of World War II, an attack on one member must be consider an attack on all of them.
But that doesn’t mean that United States needs to shoulder most of the load, Republicans and Democrats agree.
“It’s on us to go to the allies and say: You’re going to have step up and do more this time, no kidding,” said Jim Townsend, a senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration.
NATO has a response force that includes up to 40,000 troops from member nations, including the United States. If all NATO members agree to deploy the force, Townsend said, it would be a “big deal” for the alliance, which could shore up defenses in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Once a part of the Soviet Union, they joined NATO in the 1990s.
“It would be a real signal that the allies themselves have cranked up the pressure on the military side,” Townsend said.
Launching such a NATO deployment, however, would require consent from all members, and there is reason to believe securing that could be difficult. Germany, a longtime U.S. ally that obtains natural gas from Russia, is seen as a potential holdout after Berlin declined to send lethal arms to help the Ukrainian military. If Germany does not consent, the United States could deploy troops independently to countries on Europe’s eastern flank that ask for additional security, Townsend said.
Kirby, speaking at the Pentagon, said the United States also could reposition some of the more than 60,000 U.S. troops permanently stationed in Europe. About 200 Florida National Guard members also are deployed in Ukraine to advise its military, but they are west of Kyiv, far from the border with Russia. Kirby said the Pentagon believes they could be withdrawn quickly if required.
At sea, the U.S. Navy has several previously scheduled deployments that could be a factor in the Ukraine crisis, a defense official said. They include surveillance flights from an airfield in Sigonella, Italy, by P-8 jets designed to hunt for submarines below the ocean’s surface.
The Navy also has joined this month with allies in a sprawling, previously scheduled NATO exercise in the Mediterranean Sea that includes the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and its accompanying escort ships, collectively carrying nearly 6,000 U.S. troops and dozens of strike aircraft.
The Navy has other vessels in the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas, as well, said Cmdr. Richlyn Ivey, a military spokeswoman. U.S. warships also regularly sail into the Black Sea, which abuts Russia and Ukraine, but no vessels are there at the moment. In December, U.S. European Command said that the destroyer USS Arleigh Burke had departed the Black Sea and was making a port stop in Turkey.
The Marines, though not among the units Kirby identified Thursday, but could get involved if requested, a senior Marine Corps official said. The service has Marines preparing for several deployments to the region this year, including a force of hundreds due to arrive in Norway for exercises in March, the official said.
“We would respond to tasking if told to do so,” the official said. “We could definitely do more, but we have to be asked.”
As preparations continue, some have questioned whether the Biden administration is disregarding security concerns posed by China, which the administration has described as its “pacing challenge.”
Elbridge Colby, a senior defense official during the Trump administration, said that he believes the Biden administration should clearly state that it supports NATO and will continue to be a part of it, but warn its allies that the United States must “truly prioritize” getting ready for China.
“People say, ‘Well, of course they need to focus on Europe now,’" Colby said. “Well, no, they don’t. Yes, there are going to be crises. But the fact that there are crises doesn’t change in the slightest the underlying facts, which is that Asia is the most important region, and China our top threat.”
Kirby said that the United States will continue to “walk and chew gum at the same time.”
“There’s a lot on our plate, and we’re focused on all of it,” he said. “Just because right now, one issue obviously is certainly capturing the attention of the world community doesn’t mean that we’re not equally pursuing and focused on other threats and challenges.” | null | null | null | null | null |
COLUMBIA, S.C. — An appellate court heard arguments Thursday in Planned Parenthood’s legal challenge to South Carolina’s new abortion law, with attorneys for the state arguing the nonprofit doesn’t have standing to bring the case.
“It is bedrock law that litigants have third-party standing to challenge a statute that directly restricts their activities,” Murray said, citing a case where the high court had “directly addressed the third-party standing of abortion providers ... and found that third-party standing did apply.” | null | null | null | null | null |
LeBron James, Kevin Durant reprise roles at top of NBA All-Star Game starting lineups
The Los Angeles Lakers forward, who was born in Akron and spent 11 seasons with the Cavaliers, surpassed Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry to lead the West. For the second straight season, Brooklyn Nets forward Kevin Durant will join James as one of the All-Star Game captains after beating out Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo as the Eastern Conference’s leader in votes.
James, 37, led all players in the fan vote for the sixth straight year and the ninth time overall. His 18th all-star selection ties him with Lakers legend Kobe Bryant for second all-time, one behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Durant earned his 12th career selection.
Wiggins, whose selection qualified as this year’s biggest surprise, edged out forward and Warriors teammate Draymond Green, Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert and Los Angeles Clippers forward Paul George for the third spot in the West’s frontcourt. Young claimed the East’s second backcourt spot over Nets guard James Harden and Bulls guard Zach LaVine.
After the coronavirus pandemic forced the NBA to relocate and condense the 2021 All-Star Weekend, league executives have expressed hope for a return to the standard festivities in Cleveland. Earlier this season, the NBA announced its 75th anniversary team and the league plans to honor the recipients during All-Star Weekend, just as it celebrated its 50th anniversary team at the 1997 All-Star Game, which was also played in Cleveland. | null | null | null | null | null |
Warriors’ Draymond Green signs deal with Turner Sports while still active in NBA
A Turner Sports executive praised Draymond Green for his “keen basketball IQ, charismatic delivery and forthright, thoughtful opinions that include and extend beyond sports.” (Jeff Chiu/AP)
Most athletes wait until their playing days are over to work as analysts for major media companies, but most athletes aren’t Draymond Green. The outspoken Golden State Warriors forward has entered into a formal, exclusive multiyear arrangement with Turner Sports, the company announced Thursday.
Green, 31, is sidelined with a back issue, but that could be to his new employer’s temporary benefit because it freed him up to appear on TNT’s “Inside the NBA” Thursday evening — just in time to discuss a game between his Warriors and the Minnesota Timberwolves. A three-time all-star and three-time NBA champion, Green may also be asked for his take on the announcement earlier in the evening of this year’s all-star starters.
Turner Sports said that in addition to making appearances during the rest of the season on “Inside the NBA,” Green will also contribute to some of its other platforms. He has previously served as a guest analyst for TNT, including during the 2020 NBA playoffs, and has been a panel member for discussions related to TNT’s “The Arena.”
“I’ve had an amazing experience working with Turner Sports in recent years and I’m a big believer in the way they entertain and genuinely connect with fans on all levels,” Green said in a statement. “Today’s announcement helps to formalize our relationship and I couldn’t be prouder to officially be a part of the of the TNT family.”
Tara August, Turner sports’ senior vice president for talent services and special projects, praised Green as “an incredibly versatile talent, both on the court and in front of the camera.”
“He’s a team player in every sense,” she said in a statement, “while offering a distinct perspective that is highlighted by his keen basketball IQ, charismatic delivery and forthright, thoughtful opinions that include and extend beyond sports.”
In February, August compared Green to NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, who became a star and prominent media personality at TNT.
“He really isn’t trying to go after anyone — he’s just speaking his mind about what he sees, and he’s okay with people agreeing with it or not, much in the same way that Charles has always been,” August told The Athletic last year. “He’s just authentic and comfortable in his own skin and really has a great mind in watching the game. We really think he’s got great potential long-term.”
With Barkley turning 59 next month, Green could be groomed as his eventual replacement on “Inside the NBA,” a popular studio show that also features Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smith and host Ernie Johnson. For now, per Turner, Green will join them in person and remotely as his schedule permits.
Given how well Green has played this season, there’s little reason to think that his NBA career will end anytime soon. His .153 mark in win shares per 48 minutes is his highest since the 2016-17 season, and his 35-13 Warriors look like a strong contender to win their first championship since 2018. In addition, a contract Green signed in 2019 that is worth almost $100 million still has two years to go, including a $27.6 million player option for the 2023-24 season.
One possible point of concern, though, is Green’s back injury. He’s been out for almost all of Golden State’s past 11 games, during which it has gone 6-5. He is scheduled for a reexamination by the end of the month. | null | null | null | null | null |
Activist Melanie Campbell leads the Black Women's Roundtable. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
By Vanessa Williams
Black women activists, buoyed by news that President Biden will nominate a Black woman to replace retiring Justice Stephen G. Breyer on the Supreme Court, say it’s long overdue and that they are mobilizing to make sure the historic opportunity becomes reality.
“I’m excited — and everybody I know is excited,” Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, said Thursday after Biden stated his commitment at a White House news conference. “Even though we’ve had people who were ready, who had the qualifications and the exceptional resumes, there’s never been a Black woman. It’s well past time, right?”
“There’s always a fight with nominations. Hopefully we won’t have to, but Black women are mobilizing in various ways to help the president with this nomination,” she said.
When Biden made the pledge to nominate a Black woman to the high court during a debate in South Carolina in February 2020, Campbell said, “it was refreshing to hear this candidate, who needed Black women’s vote, understand our power and our role in progressives being elected.”
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, also remembered that moment. “I will never forget how meaningful it was to hear then-candidate Biden announce to the world that he intended to appoint a Black woman to our nation’s highest court, should there be a vacancy during his presidency,” Beatty said in a statement Wednesday. Beatty said she would “continue to push … to ensure that the President upholds his promise to the American people and that the Senate confirms a Black woman to the Supreme Court without any unnecessary delay.”
House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) pushed Biden to make the announcement in the Palmetto State, where Black women make up a majority of the Democratic electorate. Biden’s strong showing in the state’s primary quelled concerns about his viability after poor performances in New Hampshire, Iowa and Nevada.
Campbell organized petitions and letter-writing campaigns in 2010 and 2016, urging former president Barack Obama to nominate a Black female jurist. He instead tapped Elena Kagan, a former solicitor general and dean of Harvard Law School, who was confirmed in 2010, and Merrick Garland, a former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who was denied a hearing or vote on his nomination by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Campbell, who also is the convener of the Black Women’s Roundtable, a network of nonpartisan activists around the country who register and mobilize Black voters, said Black women have earned a seat on the high court through their steadfast participation in elections, turning out in high numbers to support Democratic candidates.
Nominating a Black woman for the Supreme Court would be the second historic choice for Biden, who chose Kamala D. Harris, the first woman and Black and Asian American, as his running mate.
Janice Mathis, executive director of the National Council of Negro Women, one of the groups that joined in Campbell’s lobbying campaigns during the Obama administration, said she expects Biden to keep his word, but is concerned about opposition from “those who don’t want to see a Black woman on the Supreme Court.”
On Wednesday night, Ilya Shapiro, executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, tweeted the name of an Indian American candidate who he said “objectively would be the best pick,” but “Alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”
Following a backlash, Shapiro deleted the comment and apologized for what he described as an “inartful” tweet.
Mathis said she and other women are prepared to organize against efforts to block a Black female nominee. “We’re going to mobilize and educate people who feel the same way we do and make sure they know what’s happening so they can be in touch with their representatives,” she said.
Nadia E. Brown, a professor of government and director of women and gender studies at Georgetown University, said Biden’s nomination of a Black woman to the court could energize the Democratic base ahead of this year’s midterm elections. She noted recent polls that show disillusionment with Biden among Democratic voters, and Black activists have leveled harsh criticism at him for being unable to get voting rights legislation passed. Earlier this month, voting rights groups representing Black, Latino and Asian American communities boycotted what was billed as a major voting rights speech by Biden in Atlanta, where he called out Republicans for continuing to block federal voting protections.
The Supreme Court nomination would show “the Biden administration’s commitment to Black voters, that they recognize that Black voters are the ones that took them to the White House, help them to get there. And now that they know that they’re going to be key to making sure that the Biden agenda has a chance at passing,” Brown said.
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Georgia-based Black Voters Matter, was one of the activists who skipped Biden’s speech because she doesn’t think he has been forceful and focused enough on getting voting rights legislation passed. She said it will be important for him to choose a Black woman “who has a strong depth of understanding, knowledge and support for voting rights and civil rights in this country.”
“What I’m hoping is that he has the courage to make a bold pick, not someone that will appease the Republicans,” she said. “I am serious. I think if there’s any point in time that we needed a Thurgood Marshall, it’s now.
“Listen, her being Black isn’t good enough,” Brown continued. “We need somebody with a depth of civil rights and voting rights experience in light of this attack on democracy right now.” She cited Sherrilyn Ifill, who recently stepped down as the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, whose name has been mentioned along with several Black female judges.
In addition to the allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas, “there was also a sense and a recognition that he could not fill the shoes of Justice Marshall because he had no appreciation for civil rights,” she said.
But if a Black woman were to be seated, Browne Dianis said she would “strongly reconsider” her 30-year protest.
Browne Dianis, a civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Advancement Project, said even though conservatives would maintain a 6-to-3 advantage, a Black woman on the panel would make a difference. “A Black woman on the bench will bring her experience, her sense of justice and fairness, her sense of the history of this country and the principles of the Constitution in ways that will be different from the other experiences that are sitting there today,” she said.
A strong liberal voice also could add value to the body’s discussions, deliberations and decisions.
“It makes a difference because of the questions that will be asked of lawyers who are standing in front of the court. It makes a difference, too, because there are deliberations and there are conversations that happen behind closed doors between justices in which there are important lessons that get learned in those rooms,” she said. “And lastly, we always know, like Justice Sotomayor is one of them, that a good dissent is important because it puts a marker down around these issues and it gives us the lessons of how we really should be interpreting the law.”
Although some Black supporters at the time argued that once on the court Thomas, who grew up in the segregated South, would be an advocate for addressing historical and ongoing discrimination, Browne Dianis said that Thomas, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush to replace Marshall, “has not represented Black folks in terms of an acknowledgment of civil rights and the unconstitutional wrongs that have been thrust upon Black people.”
Elevating a Black woman to justice “is the moment to right that wrong of him being appointed to the Supreme Court, or at least to balance it out,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
For Biden, the chance to install a justice marks the culmination of a decades-long career at the intersection of the three branches of government, often buffeted by issues of race and gender. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden presided over Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing, later saying the proceeding was unfair to Anita Hill, who had accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Biden was vice president when President Barack Obama installed Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, two of the five women who have served on the court.
One of Biden’s biggest political problems is rising frustration among Black voters over his failure to enact legislation on voting rights and policing, and the Supreme Court vacancy creates a potentially powerful opportunity for him to reconnect with the Black community. Civil rights leaders praised Biden for keeping his commitment to nominate the first Black woman to the court and said they were prepared to fight for his nominee.
At the same time, Democrats are already taking care to not alienate key Republican senators who could help offer bipartisan cover to any future Biden pick. To that end, Durbin called Collins on Wednesday and assured her that the committee would offer all the materials that the famously studious Collins would need to make up her mind.
Mariana Alfaro and Mike DeBonis contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Los Angeles Lakers forward, who was born in Akron and spent 11 seasons with the Cavaliers, surpassed Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry to lead the West. For the second straight season, Brooklyn Nets forward Kevin Durant will join James as one of the All-Star Game captains after beating out Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo as the Eastern Conference leader.
James, 37, led all players in the fan vote for the sixth straight year and the ninth time overall, receiving 9.1 million votes to top Curry (7.6 million), Durant (6.7 million) and Antetokounmpo (6.4 million). His 18th all-star selection ties him with Lakers legend Kobe Bryant for second all-time, one behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Durant earned his 12th career selection.
Thanks to a wide margin in the fan vote, Wiggins, whose selection qualified as this year’s biggest surprise, claimed a starting spot even though he trailed Warriors teammate Draymond Green and Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert in the media and player voting. Young claimed the East’s second backcourt spot in a tight race with Bulls guard Zach LaVine and Nets guard James Harden.
After the coronavirus pandemic forced the NBA to relocate and condense the 2021 All-Star Weekend, league executives have expressed hope for a return to the standard festivities in Cleveland. The NBA announced its 75th anniversary team earlier this season, and the league plans to honor the recipients during All-Star Weekend, just as it celebrated its 50th anniversary team at the 1997 All-Star Game, which was also played in Cleveland. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ask Amy: Dad overstays his welcome in his son’s house. How to get him to go home?
Brad’s dad had surgery several weeks ago and is doing well now. He stayed with Brad while he recuperated for nearly two months — all through the holidays. The dad has his own home nearby and is a widower. He has settled into Brad’s home with absolutely no regard for other family members. Brad’s daughter recently packed her bags and moved out because there is no more privacy at the home.
Brad and I actually took the dad to a medical appointment and then took him to his house to see what shape it was in. The home is organized, cozy and his own, but he is refusing to leave Brad’s house.
Do you have any ideas on how to politely and tactfully ask Dad to return to his own home? Is there a way I can mediate this situation to take some of the burden of Brad?
Supportive: “Brad’s” father might be nervous about returning to his home post-surgery, and because he seems to have settled into his son’s home so thoroughly, he has no incentive to leave.
Dear Amy: When my husband died, one of his friends started calling me. I got a small amount from life insurance, and within six months he asked to borrow some money. I had him sign a note.
He paid monthly until I sold my house and moved to a smaller place. Then he stopped paying and answering my calls. I wrote off the debt to my new life’s “tuition.”
He called me recently. He said he had to know why I was mad at him. I said I was hurt that he used me as an ATM and that he could repair things by repaying me, but not to call me again.
We share some friends, and they say they have “given” him money. Most of them are still friends with him. I still get messages from him, as my friends tell him my new cell number.
ATM: You won’t lose your social circle if you remove this man from being at the center of it.
Stephanie: This was a very recent loss for “Wondering’s” friend, and thank you for offering your perspective. | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden Needs to Do More Than Talk About Democracy in Africa
The coup this week in Burkina Faso has been met with the usual bromides of reproach from the international community. In Washington, the designated hand-wringer was State Department spokesman Ned Price, who didn’t care even to turn an original phrase in a statement claiming the U.S. was “deeply concerned by events.”
Such apathy should shame any U.S. administration, never mind one that has made the promotion of democracy its shibboleth. President Joe Biden, who only last month hosted a Summit for Democracy, may not bear responsibility for the acceleration of democratic retrenchment around the world during his first year in office, but he must demonstrate more determination to reverse the trend.
There can hardly be a more propitious place to start than sub-Saharan Africa, where Burkina Faso has become the fifth country to experience a military takeover in the past year — after Mali, Chad, Guinea and Sudan. (It might have been the sixth but for an abortive attempt to topple the government of Niger.) All these countries are in the Sahel belt, which stretches across the width of the continent just south of the great desert.
Quite apart from democratic principles and promises to promote them, Biden should make the Sahel a priority for national security and foreign policy reasons. It is in this stretch of territory where Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram and other Islamic terrorist groups are putting down roots. Left unchecked, they will undoubtedly use the Sahel as a staging ground for attacks against the U.S. and its allies.
For the best part of a decade, the task of helping Sahelian states to root out the terrorists has fallen to international forces led by France — which ruled much of the region during the colonial era — with the U.S. very much a junior partner. But the French effort is flagging. President Emmanuel Macron, facing a tough re-election campaign, is keen to bring his troops home. Biden knows where he’s coming from, having withdrawn the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
Macron has rationalized his decision by claiming, disingenuously, that French efforts in the Sahel have been successful and implying that the governments in the region are capable of finishing the job with assistance from afar. Whether those governments are run by military strongmen or elected civilians matters not very much to Paris. After a period of finger-wagging, Macron tends to come to an accommodation with coup leaders.
But if we have learned anything from the fight against terrorism elsewhere, it’s that military governments often end up exacerbating the conditions that jihadists then exploit: misrule, corruption, poverty. Most analysts expect the conflict in the Sahel to get worse this year after the coups of 2021.
Biden’s challenge is twofold: First, to press coup leaders for a restoration of power to elected civilians, and then to press civilians to deliver better government.
Persuading the military to return to the barracks will be hard enough: Biden will need to stiffen Macron’s resolve for a joint diplomatic effort that combines French soft talk with the big stick of American sanctions. Strengthening democracy will require longer, deeper engagement with political parties and civic society.
There is plenty of evidence that Africans, and especially young Africans, want elected, inclusive governments: They aren’t fooled by the assurances of security proffered by military strongmen nor taken in by the promise of prosperity held out by advocates of Chinese-style autocracy. But they won’t settle for Biden’s platitudes, either. The promotion of democracy requires repeated demonstration of its virtues.
That effort should focus on countries that haven’t been blighted by coups but where men in uniform might be inspired by events in Mali, Burkina Faso and elsewhere. In Cameroon, Togo and the Ivory Coast, longstanding rulers will need to be coaxed into transferring power to a new generation of leaders.
The Biden administration should also draw attention to African countries that have recently made successful democratic transitions — notably, Niger in the Sahel and Zambia further south — and reward them with substantial financial, diplomatic and military assistance. In Senegal, President Macky Sall should be encouraged to keep his promise to respect the outcome of the vote in local elections on Sunday, when his party lost key cities.
Finally, the U.S. should pay close heed to the general election this summer in Angola, the continent’s second-biggest oil producer. President Joao Lourenco, whose party has maintained a lock on power for nearly five decades, looks vulnerable as anti-government protests have mounted. Lourenco has promised the election will be free and fair; he must be held to his word.
That’s how Biden can keep his.
The U.S. Can Help End Ethiopia’s Civil War: James Stavridis
Emmanuel Macron Is Dancing With Dictators: Bobby Ghosh
Guinea Can’t Shake the Resource Curse: Clara Ferreira Marques and David Fickling | null | null | null | null | null |
How Chip Neutrality Threatens Nvidia Deal to Buy Arm: QuickTake
By Ian King | Bloomberg
One of the most influential companies in the tech industry is unknown to most consumers. U.K.-based Arm Ltd. designs key parts of the chips that power almost every smartphone on the planet. Its strategic importance has brought a potential windfall for Japanese owner SoftBank Group Corp., and a big problem. A plan to sell Arm to Nvidia Corp. for $40 billion has alarmed antitrust watchdogs and security officials and the deal is now in trouble. The predicament shows how vital a company founded as a 12-person venture three decades ago has become to the digital economy.
SoftBank, which acquired Arm for $31 billion in 2016, announced in September 2020 that it was selling the business to U.S.-based Nvidia, the world’s largest chipmaker by market value. The announcement drew an outcry from Nvidia’s rivals, who said the deal threatens a cornerstone of Arm’s success: its neutrality. Arm’s technology has been used across the $400 billion semiconductor industry on the understanding that no one would get privileged access. Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and others had an incentive to use it as the basis for their innovation because of Arm’s ecosystem of compatible software and the legions of engineers who know and use it. Nvidia pledged to uphold Arm’s independence, but it’s now quietly preparing to abandon the purchase after making little to no progress in winning regulatory approval, people familiar with the matter said on Jan. 25.
2. What does Arm do?
Arm doesn’t own factories or produce its own chips. The company designs core semiconductor components and licenses the blueprints to other firms to produce them in exchange for a fee based on how many are made. The arrangement brings it around $700 million in revenue every quarter, making it one of the U.K.’s largest tech businesses. That’s still a fraction of the revenue of tech giants like Nvidia and Intel Corp., and Arm has a relatively small workforce of 6,000. Yet few companies reach so far across the tech ecosystem: Arm estimates that 70% of the world’s population uses its products on a daily basis, and that more than 200 billion chips have been made using its technology.
3. Where would I find Arm’s products?
They’re used in everything from the tiniest sensor to the most powerful data center. Amazon.com Inc., Samsung and Apple are important customers, among many others. Arm’s instruction set -- the basic code used by software to communicate with semiconductors -- is in billions of devices, and the effort required to switch to another company’s code would be enormous. Devices that work on batteries need chips that that can get by with relatively little power. Arm’s designs prioritized that from the outset. And when smartphones came along and started to demand more processing horsepower, the technology evolved into more computer-like chips. There are about 1.4 billion of these pocket computers sold every year, with more than 90% using Arm. More recently, major tech names such as Apple and Amazon have been seeking to supply their own chips. Many of those new components rely on Arm, and that’s beginning to threaten Intel’s lucrative hold on high-end computing processors.
4. Why does Nvidia want to buy it?
Co-founder Jensen Huang made his company a hit with investors by parlaying its strength in graphics processors into a presence in data centers and artificial intelligence processing. A deal for Arm would increase that reach and allow Huang to push faster into new areas such as automotive chips.
5. What’s the status of the proposed deal?
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to block the purchase in December, saying it would hobble innovation and undermine Nvidia’s rivals. The European Union and the U.K. are also investigating, with authorities in London highlighting Arm’s role in critical national infrastructure and military equipment. And the acquisition can’t happen without the approval of regulators in China, the largest market for semiconductors and home to much of the world’s electronics manufacturing. Both Nvidia and Arm’s leadership are still pleading their case, according to people familiar with the matter, and no final decisions have been made. However, SoftBank is stepping up preparations for an initial public offering of Arm as an alternative to the Nvidia deal, one of the people said.
6. What is China’s position?
The Beijing government is pushing to reduce dependence on U.S. semiconductor technology, so it may not welcome a transfer of Arm to American ownership. Chinese technology companies that rely on Arm, including communications giant Huawei Technologies Co., have complained to local regulators about the deal, concerned that Nvidia, under pressure from the U.S. government, may force Arm to cut off Chinese clients. A dispute between Arm and the head of its China business is complicating things further. It tried to dismiss the local chief executive officer, Allen Wu, for alleged conflicts of interest but he refused to leave. Arm China’s board, which is mostly made up of local investors, is in talks with authorities to get their help to remove Wu. So far, they haven’t taken any action. | null | null | null | null | null |
Iran is putting down roots in eastern Syria, outcompeting Assad’s regime in signing up fighters
Growing Iranian influence in strategic Deir al-Zour province aims at projecting Tehran’s power across the region
Syrian army tanks are seen in Deir al-Zour city in 2012 when army forces fought to reclaim the city from anti-government rebels. (Reuters)
BEIRUT — When the Syrian military opened offices in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour last month to enlist former rebels and repentant army defectors, almost no one showed up. So few in fact that, according to a local news site, Syrian security officers had to pull able-bodied passersby inside in hopes of registering them.
While Syria had promised forgiveness and a fresh start to many young men as part of broader reconciliation efforts, the initiative has faced a major obstacle: Iranian-linked militias active in the province have been offering a more attractive alternative, according to local experts and a former militia member.
Iran has been playing the long game in Deir al-Zour, successfully recruiting local Syrians to allied militias, providing services the deeply distrusted government cannot deliver and putting down roots in a strategic province that could further Tehran’s regional interests even after the Syrian civil war eventually ends and Iran’s support for President Bashar al-Assad is no longer as vital.
Iran has been building schools, opening schools and distributing food baskets, local experts said. It has tried to convert mosques in the Sunni Muslim province to Shiite Islam, the official religion of Iran, and while few Syrians have actually converted, the Shiite call to prayer is now heard for the first time.
When a young man named Abu Khadija joined an Iranian-backed militia three years ago, he wasn’t motivated by religion or ideology, he recalled. He wanted the pay and benefits. And like many of the young Syrians who join the militias, he saw them as “the only solution to escape the army,” said Abu Khadija, who spoke on the condition that his full name not be used, for fear of retaliation.
While the Syrian army in Deir al-Zour pays a monthly salary of 27,000 Syrian pounds, about $7.50, the Iranian-backed militias offer more than double that, with even higher pay in places like Bukamal city on the Iraqi border, he said. Abu Khadija, now 26, said he joined a brigade made up of 100 Syrians who largely guard Iranian warehouses in Deir al-Zour. They were assigned rotations of 15 days on duty and 15 days off. By contrast, the Syrian army often sends soldiers far from home for at least two months at a time, with home leaves of only five days, he said.
The militia ID card entitles the fighters to a monthly food basket, which includes sugar, cooking oil, rice, canned tuna and beans, he said. The cartons are emblazoned with a picture of the slain Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated in Iraq by U.S. forces two years ago, and a label in Arabic and Farsi that says “a gift from the Islamic resistance.” Cardholders are also offered free flights to Damascus every Monday and Thursday on Iranian aircraft, and those wanting to visit, for any reason, can register for the flight a day before.
The ID card not only allowed him to carry a weapon but more importantly, he said, protects him from being detained or interrogated by the Syrian army, which is detested and feared by much of the local population.
For much of Syria’s war, Iranian-backed militias have been crucial supporters of the Syrian government. But in some places, particularly in the east of the country, they are also competitors for local influence.
Iran has put a priority on consolidating its position in Deir al-Zour province, with various allied militias essentially taking control over key cities. Most important, perhaps, is Bukamal, also known as Albu Kamal, situated along the Euphrates River at the Iraqi border. This city represents a strategic crossing for Iran, which has sought to establish a “land bridge” — from Iran, across Iraq and Syria and into Lebanon — allowing for the transfer of military equipment to Tehran’s allies, most notably the militant Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. The movement of materiel and fighters along this land bridge gives Iran several strategic advantages, including a greater ability to confront its nemesis Israel.
To ensure that this corridor remains in friendly hands, Iran has been conducting its multipronged campaign to win residents’ support. “The Iranians want to create a popular base loyal to them in case they have to leave someday,” said Ammar al-Hamad, a Syria-based analyst specializing in tribal affairs in the east and northeast of the country.
Myriad militias operate in Deir al-Zour, some aligned with the Syrian government and its ally Russia in addition to those aligned with Iran. Several of the Iranian-linked groups are staffed and led locally by Syrians, who receive orders from more senior Iranian commanders, according to a local activist who goes by the name Abu Maria. He spoke on the condition that his full name not be published because of fear for his safety. Abu Maria estimated there are also about a dozen significant Iranian-aligned militias in the province composed of foreign fighters, including Iranians as well as Afghans and Pakistanis.
Abu Khadija said residents in his area have largely accepted Iranian hegemony, mostly because the Iranian-backed militias clearly have more power on the ground than the Syrian army. Residents even file complaints with Iranian officials when government soldiers cause problems. “They have more influence than the army,” he said.
Much of Deir al-Zour’s population is wary of the Syrian army, which is infamous for committing atrocities during the 10-year civil war. There is no such fear of the Iranians. “They are trying to win people over, unlike the army,” he said. “If the army wants something from someone, they break down the front door. The Iranians don’t do such things.”
Assad and his regime have raided and seized dozens of businesses, even targeting those that stuck by him
Omar Abu Layla, a native of the area who heads a monitoring network called Deir Ezzor 24, said, “There is no real power on the ground that is as strong as Iran in residents’ eyes." Iran is aware of the strong local anti-Shiite sentiments, he said, but added, “Iran is not stupid: It makes sure it doesn’t gain people’s enmity.”
Still, sporadic protests against the Iranian presence have broken out on the opposite side of the Euphrates River, where territory remains outside Syrian government control and the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces are in control. The modest protests, usually held by Syrians displaced from other areas, demand the right to return home and ouster of the Iranians, said Abu Layla.
As part of the effort to win over the local population, the Iranians have worked to help improve living conditions. The Jihad al-Binaa organization has been reconstructing schools, setting up field hospitals and opening preschools in Deir al-Zour as well as in the cities of Aleppo and Hama elsewhere in government-controlled parts of Syria, according to local reports.
Meanwhile, the Iranian Cultural Center has been rehabilitating mosques in an effort to spread Shiite Islam and, during the holy month of Ramadan, held Farsi language and Iranian history classes, offering financial incentives to families who finished the course, said Abu Layla. The center has also set up Shiite shrines to attract pilgrims and paid for repairs to a park destroyed during hostilities.
[Arab outreach to Assad raises Syrian hopes of a return to the fold]
[After backing Assad, Iran and Russia compete for influence and spoils of war] | null | null | null | null | null |
Brandon Dahl, who turns 2 on Sunday, woke his parents when their Alvord, Tex., home caught fire this month. (Courtesy of Kayla Dahl)
Kayla and Nathan Dahl were fast asleep when their toddler approached their bed one recent morning to utter two of the few words he knows so far — words that would save his family from danger.
“Mama, hot,” Brandon, who turns 2 on Sunday, said while tugging his mother’s foot.
Initially, Kayla, 28, said she thought her son just wanted his pajamas removed. But seconds later, she realized what her youngest child was trying to tell her: The family’s one-story colonial house in Alvord, Tex., was engulfed in flames.
None of the smoke detectors in their home went off. And the Dahls, who had recently tested positive for the coronavirus, hadn’t been able to smell the smoke filling their home.
Less than a minute later, the couple and their five children managed to escape uninjured through the front door. But their entire house was consumed by the flames, Kayla told The Post.
“It’s going to be a long hard road to get to be where we need to be and to replace those material items,” she said. “But at the same time, if it wasn’t for my son’s guardian angel that morning, I don’t know where we would be.”
The morning of Jan. 15, Brandon was not sleeping in the room he shares with one of his older brothers, Kayla said. He was not feeling well the night before, so the toddler slept in the living room that connects to his parents’ bedroom, where they could better monitor him.
“Somehow, by the grace of God, he was able to make it out of our almost fully engulfed living room into our room,” Kayla told The Post. “ … It’s a miracle from God that he was able to do that.”
By the time Brandon woke Kayla, she could already see 6-foot-high flames spreading toward their bedroom, she said. “At that point, I thought: ‘We have to get our kids and get out.’”
Kayla grabbed her cellphone to call 911 and ran out of the house while her husband — a 33-year-old volunteer firefighter — got Brandon and his four siblings to safety.
Once outside, the family stood at their neighbor’s home while waiting for firefighters to arrive, Kayla said. By then, the blaze had spread throughout the three-bedroom home they had lived in for almost six years. The family’s car and truck were also lost in the fire, Kayla said.
The couple and their children are now staying with family until they find a rental home. They are borrowing vehicles from friends and family to run errands. Kayla’s best friend set up a GoFundMe page to help the family with immediate expenses.
“I don’t think he quite understands the impact of what he did and the good thing that he is,” Kayla told The Post. “But he is relishing the abundance of attention. If we go to Walmart or the gas station and somebody recognizes us from the news, they’ll pat him on the back and try to shake his hand [saying], ‘You’re a hero!’ ‘I’m so happy to meet a hero!'" | null | null | null | null | null |
Responding to questions about a possible Michelle Bachelet visit, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that an invitation had been issued long ago, adding that “the purpose of the trip is to promote exchange and cooperation, not for an investigation.”
The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post was the first to report on the possibility that the long awaited visit would go forward but only after the Games have concluded, thereby delaying the release of a long-awaited U.N. report on alleged abuses in the region.
International human rights groups have called on the United Nations to release its findings on human rights abuses in Xinjiang as soon as possible and have responded with dismay at the reports of further holdups.
They accuse China of running vast internment facilities and systems of mass surveillance disproportionately targeting Uyghurs, Kazakh and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups in the northwestern region.
The report is expected to be the U.N.’s first comprehensive ruling on a campaign of mass interment, birth control and forced assimilation that multiple Western governments, including the United States, have called genocide.
As the Opening Ceremonies approach, pressure has mounted on Olympics sponsors and the International Olympic Committee to use the Games to confront the Chinese Communist Party on its bid to crush dissent and stifle civil society from Xinjiang to Tibet to Hong Kong.
A coalition of 243 international groups on Thursday jointly called for more countries to join the United States in a diplomatic boycott of the Olympics and for athletes and sponsors not to legitimize abuses.
The possibility of further delays to Bachelet’s report on Xinjiang added to mounting concerns by rights groups of a missed opportunity to use the Olympics to hold Beijing accountable. Discussions over a U.N. visit to Xinjiang began in 2018 after evidence mounted of a vast network of detention facilities in the region.
As part of a global propaganda effort to rebuff criticism of the crackdown, China has organized carefully orchestrated tours of the facilities where Western journalists were met with unusual scenes like a supposedly spontaneous rendition, in English, of the children’s song “if you are happy and you know it, clap your hands.”
Lyric Li in Seoul contributed reporting. | null | null | null | null | null |
In this photograph taken in 2016, a victim of marital rape poses near her home in New Delhi. (Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images)
NEW DELHI — A heated case underway this week in one of India’s high courts over whether to criminalize marital rape has prompted men on social media to declare they would go on an unusual strike — from marriage.
Marital rape is a crime in many Western countries, including the United States, Britain and Canada. But India is among nearly three dozen countries in the world where spouses cannot file a criminal complaint against their partners for nonconsensual sex.
A high court in Delhi will decide whether to eliminate the marital rape exception from the country’s rape laws, which were reformed in the aftermath of a brutal gang rape and murder in 2012.
Men’s rights group, however, are arguing that making martial rape a criminal offense would be tantamount to turning husbands into “rapists” and will lead to the breakdown of the institution of family.
A boycott of marriage is “necessary,” thundered one user. Another took aim at feminists, saying the strike was the only solution to end their “agenda.”
“Men don’t want to get married because their human rights are not getting protected,” said Anil Murty, 50, a tech entrepreneur and co-founder of the Save Indian Family Foundation, which campaigns for making laws gender neutral.
The petitions challenging the exemption say it is unconstitutional and violates the fundamental rights of women.
“Every act of violence should be punished,” said Kirti Singh, legal adviser to All India Democratic Women’s Association, one of the petitioners. Singh said there is no basis to treat rape within marriage as distinct from rape outside of it.
The ongoing court case has ignited a rare debate about consent in spousal relationships and female sexual autonomy in India, where divorce is rare.
A majority of marriages in the country are arranged by parents and families and take place within the rigid class and caste hierarchies. Premarital sex is not common, and most sexual encounters take place within marriage. Only 1.1 percent of Indian women were divorced in 2010, according to the most recent U.N. data.
While in the past decades India has rapidly transformed into one of the world’s largest economies, changes in societal practices and attitudes have been slower. Women in India today are better educated and have more rights than before, but the female labor force participation rate is dismal, and sexual violence against women is widespread.
A woman interviewed 100 convicted rapists in India. This is what she learned.
Singh, the adviser to the petitioner, pointed to laws governing domestic violence to question the exemption. “The law has recognized that violence in marriage in wrong. Rape is a gross act of violence,” she said.
A lawyer for a men’s rights group opposing the petition said forced sex within a couple could at best be called “abuse” and that women could take recourse within existing laws. He said the provision protected the institution of marriage, which is “important not only for the couple but for the family, which includes children and parents also.”
In line with global trends, 1 in 3 married women in India faced violence at the hands of their spouse. Domestic violence offenses in India are governed by a different set of laws than sexual violence and rape.
The section of the law criminalizing acts of physical or mental cruelty, including dowry-related harassment by a husband or his relatives, was formulated in response to dowry deaths that continued even after the practice was outlawed in 1961. Thousands of women in India are still killed every year over disputes for dowry, which in India refers to the practice of gift-giving by the bride’s family.
But men’s rights groups point to the same law to argue against criminalizing marital rape. The groups claim that the domestic violence law is misused and a new offense of marital rape will become a tool in the hands of women to file fake cases against men to extort money or blackmail them.
She was raped at 13. Her case has been in India’s courts for 11 years — and counting.
Murty, the men’s rights activist, said that the domestic violence law had turned men into “second class citizens” in India as they had no recourse if they get abused at home. “This will lead to a gender war situation,” said Murty.
Women’s rights groups that work on the issue say the concern over filing fake cases belies the reality on the ground.
Nayreen Daruwalla, the program director for prevention of violence against women and children at SNEHA, a group working in poor areas of Mumbai, said societal concerns often hamper women from reporting gender-based violence of all forms.
Women use formal reporting mechanisms only when they have depleted other resources, Daruwalla said.“It is an issue of honor and shame,” she said. “There is fear of the husband and family.”
More than 111,000 cases were filed under the domestic violence law in 2020, according to data from the national crime record bureau, the latest such figures available. Even as police filed charges in majority of the cases, the conviction rate under this section remains low.
The central government in 2017 opposed the demand to criminalize marital rape but has now asked the court for time to consult stakeholders.
Meanwhile, the war of words on Twitter continues. The Save Indian Family Foundation has proposed a new family structure that would exclude wives.
Indian women fired back.
Two years after infamous Delhi gang rape, India isn’t any safer
‘Have pity on me’: When a dowry dispute in India turned deadly
In India, it’s not easy to report on rape | null | null | null | null | null |
Freshman blues: Inside the new House Democrats’ unsettling first year
It’s been a year of trauma, big wins and major frustrations.
Freshmen Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) talk on the House steps before a news conference in March. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
By Ben Terris
Rep. Jamaal Bowman missed his chance to get arrested because of bad weather.
The freshman congressman from New York had planned to be in Washington on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but a winter storm postponed his travel; he was still en route from Yonkers the next day when a group of hunger strikers got themselves cuffed in front of the Capitol to protest a lack of movement on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a voting rights bill that was about to languish in the Senate.
“I couldn’t make it,” Bowman said later.
But being a new congressman means fighting for attention and rolling with disappointments, so a day later, after Bowman had made it into town, he called the hunger strikers back to the scene of the crime so he could get in on the action. The protesters, holed up in a warm hotel on what was supposed to be their day off, dutifully trudged back to the Senate steps.
“Today we wanted to recover,” Joseline Garcia, 27, said, rubbing her hands together and looking up at an American flag that flapped in the brisk winter wind. “Jail impacted our health.”
"I could never do a hunger strike, “Bowman said, patting his stomach through his wool jacket. “I like to eat too much.”
“We all love to eat,” said Kyla Frank, one of the young protesters. “But we need a democracy more right now.”
“I did a bad job layering up,” said Rylee Haught, 22, wearing sweatpants and Adidas sneakers that were so thin they looked like socks and sandals.
The group was nonetheless grateful for attention from a member of Congress, and soon they were lined up near Bowman with their signs as the former school principal from the Bronx read the text of Republican state laws, inspired by former president Donald Trump’s false claims about voter fraud, that the hunger strikers were desperate to counteract.
“An application for a ballot to be voted by mail on the grounds of disability must require the applicant to affirmatively indicate that the applicant agrees with the statement, ‘I am physically unable to enter a polling place on election day without needing personal assistance or injuring my health as prescribed by section 8202 … 002,” Bowman said. “Wow!”
The hunger strikers nodded wanly. A photographer snapped a few photos. Senators came and went, mostly ignoring the activity on the steps. Bowman was a member of Congress, but on this chilly January afternoon he was another disappointed citizen assembled outside the halls of power, talking into the wind.
He’d hoped that Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) might pass by on his way out of the building. Manchin was an obstacle on several Democratic priorities, including voting rights legislations. Though he says he supports the John Lewis bill, he has opposed changing Senate rules in a way that would allow the bill to come to a vote. “Rules, what little bit we have left, that maybe makes us take pause before we jump off of that bridge," the West Virginia senator cautioned that day, on the Senate floor. “We’d better be careful what we’re doing.”
One year of ‘President Manchin’: For the Democratic agenda, all roads go through West Virginia
Bowman thinks we’re already off the bridge. “If we don’t take necessary action because we’re scared that Republicans will go nuclear if they get into power, we will have passed up on our last opportunity to save our democracy,” he says, "and then Republicans will go nuclear anyway.”
Which is a point he might have tried on the gentleman from West Virginia, had he come down the steps. But Manchin never appeared.
“I reached out to him months ago,” Bowman told the protesters. “But it can be hard to get a meeting. I’m just a freshman.”
It has been a long, weird first year in office for the 17 newest Democratic members of Congress.
It began as it always does, with a chance for colleagues to get to know one another. But instead of doing so over cheese cubes and wine, newcomer Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) did many of her introductions cowering under a chair while clutching a gas mask.
“I was going through this traumatic experience with all these people I’d never met before,” she said about her first time in the House gallery, which happened to be on Jan. 6, 2021. “And I’m under a chair going, 'Oh, by the way, I’m Sara, I’m from San Diego, nice to meet you.”
Jacobs, who came to Congress after stints in the State Department and the United Nations, had expected to be sipping champagne with fellow freshman Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) to celebrate their party’s Senate wins in Georgia. Instead, she found herself sipping whisky after hiding out from a mob in Rep. Jason Crow’s office. That set a tone, to put it mildly.
“I never got the, ‘Wow, this is Congress,’ moment,” she said. “It was, like, immediately, ‘Holy s---, this is the place they tried to kill me.’"
“I’ve made it very clear that the 147 we are not going to work with,” said Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), referring to the Republicans who voted against certifying Biden’s presidency, 139 of whom serve in the House. “That is a heavy decision.”
Auchincloss, a 33-year-old former Republican, had studied alongside “woke” students (his word) at Harvard University, which had the effect of making him more conservative. He had served with a bunch of conservatives in the U.S. Marine Corps, which had the effect of making him more liberal. He’d come to Congress hoping he could help build bridges between the parties. That dream got a heavy reality check on Jan. 6, during an argument about vote tabulations, when Auchincloss says he watched Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), a bespectacled physician, nearly come to blows with Rep. Colin Allred (D-Tex.), a former NFL linebacker.
“It shows you how completely divorced from reality he was, to think he could take on Colin Allred,” he said of Harris, who voted against certifying Biden’s win.
“Picking a fight with Colin Allred strikes me as a kamikaze mission," said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) who recalls standing beside Auchincloss during the altercation.
Torres, a young Afro-Latino congressman who is seen by many as a rising star within the party, said that if he were to go back in time and tell his younger self about his two weeks in Congress—the insurrection, that altercation on the House floor, the pandemic, the vote to impeach a former president— his younger self would have said: “Well, that sounds like fiction.”
The Republican strategy of doubling down on Trump’s election lies might have dashed any hope of a normal first year for the freshmen of the 117th Congress. Within the Democratic cohort, however, the attack and its aftermath created close bonds. Auchincloss and Torres remain best buddies in Congress. Jacobs is on a group text chain with others who crouched in the House gallery during the Jan. 6 attack, whom she refers to as her “gallery group.” They participate in what she calls “Zoom therapy sessions” together and grab brunch when they can. (And they say making new friends in a pandemic is impossible!) Earlier this month, they gathered to mark the anniversary of that fateful day.
“I found that bottle of champagne," said Jacobs. “And I drank it to celebrate that democracy had lasted another year.”
This is what democracy looked like: Zoom hearings, votes by proxy, impeachment hearings and, oh yes, the censures.
“It’s like we have one every day,” Bowman said of the censures, spooning himself some asopao de camarones, a shrimp and rice stew, at a D.C. Puerto Rican restaurant.
It was December. A few days earlier, GOP freshman Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) had called Bowman and his closest friends in Congress the “Jihad Squad” on the House floor. A few weeks earlier, a veteran member, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), had shared an animated video that had him murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a member of same small group of young, nonwhite liberal House Democrats. Bowman was still stewing.
“I’m a street dude,” Bowman said, “If you threaten me, I’ll f--- you up. If you threaten one of my sisters, I’ll do the same.”
The House’s Democratic leaders settled for rebuking Gosar on the House floor and stripping him of his roles on the Natural Resources and the Oversight and Reform committees. (The former dentist was the second Republican whom House leaders stripped of committee assignments, after freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was nailed for old social-media posts about antisemitic conspiracy theories.) Boebert, they mostly ignored.
The punishments didn’t mark a cessation of hostilities so much as open up a new venue for score-settling. Bowman predicts that, if they take control of the House next year as expects, Republicans will retaliate in kind.
“When they get power, Ilhan is done, Cori is done,” Bowman said, referring to fellow “Squad” members Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and their own committee service. “They will probably try to get the rest of us, but maybe not.”
The lawmaking part of the job, meanwhile, has been frustrating. Bowman voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill — one of his party’s biggest accomplishments last year — not because he didn’t support it, but because he wanted it to pass alongside the enormous social-spending bill known as Build Back Better, which is now moribund.
“I campaigned on everything in BBB,” Bowman said about the Build Back Better bill, which included investments in public housing, green energy and the child tax credit. If the infrastructure wasn’t tethered to that larger raft of policies, he said, “How was I going to go back to my district and say I wasn’t going to stand up for what I ran on?”
How Jamaal Bowman used the AOC playbook to beat a 16-term incumbent
That was the feeling among many in the Congressional Progressives Caucus in November, when Bowman and the rest of the House’s most-liberal wing held an emergency meeting to discuss their stance on the bill. Then Biden called in via speakerphone.
“He was pleading with us, and I use the term ‘pleading’ intentionally,” Bowman recalled. “He said his entire agenda was on the line and he needed our vote.”
It was a new experience for the freshman, being asked to make history by a president. It felt like a movie, and Bowman felt the pull of instinct — to go “ride or die” with his teammates. When his they called for a show of hands in the room, Bowman could feel his arm wanting to raise in the air.
Then his Squadmates spoke up. Omar said she needed a break to make up her mind. Bush seconded the motion. In the amount of time it took for Bowman to walk to his office during the break, no longer swept up in the emotion of the room, he realized he needed to be a no. Later, he says he had to deny the vice president’s entreaties, too — personally, this time — when Kamala Harris called Bowman to try to change his mind. The White House ended up finding the votes without him and, just as he’d feared, Manchin blocked BBB once infrastructure was in the books.
Thinking back on it now, Bowman was somewhere between wistful and disappointed; awed by being a part of it all, startled by how close he came to caving to the pressure and proud of himself for sticking with his gut in the end.
“I’m amazed what I’ve learned about myself and this process all year,” Bowman said.
The freshmen Democrats have learned something about big plans and small majorities.
“A lesson I’ll take with me forever in my political career," said Auchincloss, a veteran of the Marines from Massachusetts, “is that it’s all about expectations and your performances relative to expectations.”
It’s not as if the House Democrats have done nothing. They impeached Trump over the Capitol attack, passed a $1.9 trillion pandemic recovery bill and finally put an end to the years-old joke about every week being Infrastructure Week. But those who dreamed of reshaping American life with an ambitious agenda of liberal policies might feel underwhelmed by the results so far.
“We are in something resembling an FDR moment,” said Torres, the freshman whose Bronx district borders Bowman’s —an FDR moment, he added, without an “FDR majority.”
“When you set expectations so high,” he said, "you run the risk of setting up the public for disappointment.”
A day after he’d joined their protest, Bowman saw the hunger strikers again on the Senate steps. The police were less tolerant this time around. The freshman lawmaker ducked under some police tape to reaffirm his solidarity, shook about 10 hands and was promptly arrested.
The officer fit the handcuffs gently; being a member of Congress got Bowman that much, at least. He came to Washington a year ago with the expectation to pass bold legislation on public housing, green energy and voting rights. Getting arrested outside the Capitol for one of these causes was, at present, the most he could do.
He stood quietly, hands behind his back, and the protesters began to sing: “Jamaal Bowman is a freedom fighter and he taught us how to fight.”
“I was glad when they stopped,” he said, “Because if they kept going I was going to start crying.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Fox News representatives have not responded to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League said Carlson’s film about Soros is “nothing more than far-right propaganda at best, and at worst a dangerous antisemitic dog whistle sure to be heard loud and clear by a large audience.”
The Open Society Foundations has objected to comments made by Fox personalities in the past, including Fox Nation host Lara Logan. In October, Logan appeared on Sean Hannity’s show and referred to “the puppet masters and the people from Open Society Foundations,” alleging that they “claimed to be charities and do charity work but are really a kind of enforcement of this radical political strategy.” She also made a conspiratorial remark about the group on Carlson’s show in September, referring to “all those people in the Biden administration that came from the Open Society Foundation that we’re not allowed to talk about because that’ll be the end of us, right? They’ll come for all of us.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Afghan aid stymied as Taliban, West continue sparring
People receive bread distributed as part of an anti-hunger campaign in Kabul on Jan. 18. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)
In a report issued Thursday, the Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the largest nongovernmental organizations working there, warned that “aid agencies are unable to operate at scale in the country because formal payment channels are almost completely unavailable to them."
The report — compiled with input from other humanitarian agencies — followed a United Nations Security Council meeting on the subject Wednesday, in which U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said that “for Afghans, daily life has become a frozen hell."
At the same meeting, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the administration was continuing “to examine various options to ease the liquidity crunch” that has resulted from a collapse of the Afghan banking system, including the country’s Central Bank, after foreign aid ceased with the Taliban takeover in August.
The administration has declined to address the question of the reserves, saying that the issue is involved in current litigation. Victims and their families of the Sept. 11, 2001 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, planned in Afghanistan, have sought to claim the money in judgments against the Taliban. The Justice Department is due to submit a statement in federal court Friday specifying its national security interests in the outcome of the case.
No country in the world has recognized the interim Taliban government installed in September, although Russia, China and some others have maintained their embassies in Kabul. The United States and many of its allies, while contributing billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance that aid agencies have said can be distributed without providing Taliban access to the funds, have said the situation will not be normalized until the militants fulfill their commitments to an inclusive government, full rights to minorities and women, and severing of relations with all terrorist groups.
While commending the Treasury Department for recent measures allowing Afghans outside the country to send personal remittances, and for issuing licenses that waived some U.S. sanctions restrictions, the Norwegian report concluded that significant remaining barriers hamper their “ability to respond at an appropriate scale and speed to pressing, and mounting, humanitarian needs of the Afghan people.”
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, who presided over the U.N. session, met Thursday with President Biden and separately with national security adviser Jake Sullivan to press the issue.
“I respect the complexities” of any dealings with the Taliban, Store said in an interview before the meetings, “but I think we have to move ... how America puts its feet here has huge implications for other countries, especially in the financial system.” Banks in other countries have been reluctant to do business with Afghanistan out of fear of U.S. sanctions.
“All of this is not about U.S. money,” Store said, but “the decisions the American government makes on frozen money, and on capital flows, of course have huge impact. Because there are other donor countries who will not move until the U.S. moves on some of these issues.”
But “this is possible. We just have to move along," Store said. “I think we have to be just very aware of the time frame here and what may be the consequences if we don’t act.”
Earlier this week, Norway hosted a meeting in Oslo among Taliban officials, Afghan civil society representatives — including delegates from women’s groups within and outside the country — and special representatives for Afghanistan from the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States.
In a communique issued Thursday, the envoys said their conversations with a Taliban delegation, headed by Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, focused on the humanitarian situation while raising human rights issues including “the strong need for an inclusive and representative political system,” removal of limitations on access for girls to education before schools reopen in March after the winter break, and a stop to “the alarming increase of human rights violations including arbitrary detentions ... forced disappearances, media crackdowns, extrajudicial killings, torture” and prohibitions on women in the workplace and “freedom to travel without a male escort.”
In what Store described as a step forward, the communique said that “participants noted the importance of increasing cash liquidity and support to the banking sector in order to help stabilize the Afghan economy.” | null | null | null | null | null |
When France invaded Spain over fears of having a liberal democracy on its border.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, in Moscow this month. (Sputnik/Pavel Bednyakov/Pool via REUTERS)
John Owen, author of "The Clash of Ideas in World Politics," is Taylor Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
Russia has 100,000 troops poised to invade Ukraine, and while that scenario conjures up memories of the Cold War or other recent bouts of aggression such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the most illustrative historical parallel is actually a forgotten episode from nearly 200 years ago.
In January 1823, not unlike today, a more powerful country ruled by an authoritarian leader deployed 100,000 troops to its border with a weaker neighbor governed by a liberal constitutional regime. But on that occasion, the countries were France and Spain. French King Louis XVIII worried that Spain’s liberal constitutional regime could bleed over into his country, putting his reign at risk.
Louis XVIII’s fears shed light on the current situation in Eastern Europe. Russia has demanded that NATO commit to never admitting Ukraine as a member, but the 1823 French invasion of Spain suggests that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s worries may be far deeper. He, too, may view a democratic neighbor as a threat to his regime and its international position.
In 1820, Spain underwent a revolution that forced its king, Ferdinand VII, to submit to a constitution and effectively retire.
This concerned Louis XVIII in two ways. Both had to do with the tendency of liberals across borders to sympathize with and help one another. The French king’s most pressing fear was that the liberals’ triumph over Ferdinand in Spain would strengthen liberalism in France. The French Revolution and Napoleon were gone, but liberal networks still threaded across Europe, working for more uprisings and sharing information and moral support. The 1820 revolution that laid Ferdinand low had already spread to Portugal, Piedmont, Naples, Greece and even to Latin America. Louis’ fellow absolute monarchs across Europe were likewise terrified that revolution abroad could produce revolution at home.
Louis’ more remote, but still serious, fear was that a liberal Spain would get out from under French influence. Ferdinand and Louis were both in the House of Bourbon; Ferdinand’s power was a carrier of French influence in Spain. But Spanish liberals hated the Bourbons, which meant that French influence in the country depended on restoring Ferdinand to full power.
And Louis saw this as key to France’s international influence and power. If Spanish liberals stayed in power, they could align with the relatively liberal Britain. Even though the great powers were at peace in the “Concert of Europe,” France still worried about holding onto its traditional sphere of influence. Spain also remained a strategically important country.
France waited until springtime, April 1823, to invade Spain. The French force met little resistance and soon restored Ferdinand’s absolute rule. For a time, Louis and France’s influence were secure.
Yet, the intervention was not enough to secure absolutism in either country for long. In the spring of 1830, revolution erupted in Paris, eventually ousting the Bourbon Charles X and placing in power Louis-Philippe, the “Citizen-King,” a constitutional monarch on the British model. As for Spain, within four years, it was to descend into a series of civil wars between liberals and absolutists that did not end until 1876.
The Bourbons, then, could not fend off liberalism forever. But recent social science implies that Louis may have read the geopolitical situation correctly and extended his rule in France. Rebellion can, indeed, travel across international borders, as dissidents draw encouragement from one another’s successes. Most recently, Middle Eastern despots learned that during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011.
Louis also was correct that countries’ foreign alignments are often linked to their ideologies or domestic regime types. It’s the reason that France and the other great powers of the 19th century — and, later, superpowers like the United States in the 20th century — often promoted their regime type in smaller states to put their friends into power and gain allies. International institutions such as NATO can reinforce this tendency, buttressing democracy in member states by normalizing it as a form of government. A country’s form of government and its foreign alignments, it turns out, are entangled; each can reinforce the other.
Which brings us to 2022. In the abstract, neither democracy in Ukraine nor the eastward advance of NATO threatens Russia. But Putin is reading the situation as Louis did in 1823.
Putin understands that liberal democracies on his border threaten his authoritarian regime, both by emboldening Russian liberals and by tipping the balance of power against Russia in Europe. “We will not permit the realization of another so-called color revolution scenario,” he told his fellow Eurasian autocrats after their recent joint intervention to prop up Kazakhstan’s autocracy. He meant the serial revolutions earlier in this century — Rose in Georgia, Orange in Ukraine, Tulip in Kyrgyzstan — that brought pro-democratic, anti-Russian regimes to power. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia; in 2014, Ukraine. Both invasions aimed to weaken the democratic regimes in these countries and scuttle their bids to join NATO.
It is by no means certain that Putin will invade Ukraine. He faces much stiffer international opposition than Louis did in 1823, including from the United States. But promising not to invite Ukraine into NATO may not be enough to prevent Russia from attacking, or at least from toppling Kyiv’s democracy and replacing it with authoritarian rule. Putin knows that constitutional self-government in Ukraine would perpetually threaten to spill over into Russia and loosen his grip on power.
Putin also understands that a democratic Ukraine would always be under pressure from its own people to move away from Russia and toward the West. In the second quarter of the 19th century, many European countries were internally divided between liberals and absolutists. Being a liberal meant wanting to distance your country from absolutist powers such as France (until 1830) or Austria; it meant wanting your country to align with liberal Britain. In 2022, in the divided countries of Eastern Europe, the situation is similar: being a liberal means opposing alignment with Russia and a strong wish to join NATO and the European Union.
Regardless of how the immediate crisis in Eastern Europe plays out, Russia under Putin will still desperately want to keep democracy away from its borderlands, and with good reason. The conflict between Russia and the United States is deep because the two countries have very different political regimes and values. Putin may be paranoid, but he is at least correct about this: Democracy is his enemy. | null | null | null | null | null |
Reducing child poverty is a no-brainer — but not because of effects on children’s brains
Poverty is bad for children. Their advocates don’t need to rely on the shape of children’s brain waves to push for greater supports.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) discusses the child tax credit on in July. (Michael Blackshire/The Washington Post)
By Mical Raz
Mical Raz is a professor of history and health policy at the University of Rochester, and a practicing physician.
A new study has found that babies of poor mothers who received cash stipends last year had changes in their brain activity patterns. As the expanded, refundable child tax credit (CTC) has expired and key politicians, in particular Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), have been withholding their support for reviving this important anti-poverty program, its supporters have expressed hope that this finding will perhaps help seal the deal. The expectation is that if cash benefits can improve the neurological development of infants, sustaining this policy is a no-brainer. As a pediatrician recently tweeted to his 30,000 followers, policy impacts biology.
Not so fast. This line of argument suggests that ending poverty in its own right is not a sufficient goal and that improving the brain function and biology of poor babies should drive policy. We have seen this before. In the 1960s, for example, Great Society policymakers worked to develop numerous anti-poverty interventions. Yet many of these valuable programs overpromised what they could achieve in children’s development, even claiming they would raise children’s IQs.
When these programs subsequently did not result in such measurable outcomes, they were roundly criticized and suffered a crippling lack of public support — even when they did achieve other meaningful anti-poverty goals. This is particularly clear with Project Head Start, the early-childhood education program pioneered in 1965. Its history points to the pitfalls of such thinking for CTC and anti-poverty advocates today.
Early enrichment was a popular anti-poverty measure in the 1960s. Scholarly research showed that children from poor families arrived to school unprepared and thus their academic achievement suffered. Scholars theorized that deficits in children’s home environment were leading to these poor outcomes. They likened the effect to that seen in experimental studies in sensory deprivation.
Legislators embraced these findings as they worked on policy interventions, and their reasoning went something like this: Poor children’s home environments were drab and colorless, devoid of interaction and lacking in books, and poor mothers failed to engage their children in a stimulating manner. Poor children, like experimental monkeys raised in darkness or in isolation, simply did not receive the necessary stimulation for their brain development. Placing these children in early-enrichment centers would help rectify these deficits and enhance their intellectual development.
When Project Head Start was announced in 1965, first lady Lady Bird Johnson described these deprived children. Some children “don’t even know a hundred words, because they have not heard a hundred words,” and some did not even know their own names, as they had never heard them spoken, she claimed — baselessly, echoing theories of extreme deprivation in poor homes.
Policymakers believed that deprived children would receive necessary enrichment only in educational settings outside their homes. While the stated goals of Project Head Start were to prevent cultural deprivation and promote school, because researchers had repeatedly suggested that cultural deprivation was the reason for low scores on academic aptitude tests, many policymakers also believed that early intervention would pay off in measurable academic and intellectual gains in poor children.
In the early years of Project Head Start, children 3 and up were able to experience their first educational program. It was launched as an eight-week summer initiative, and in its first iteration over 560,000 children enrolled in local programs funded through federal grants. It was later expanded to a year-round experience, and low-income families with preschool children clamored to participate in the community-based programming, which included education, health, nutrition and enrichment and involved local parents, volunteers and educators.
Early evaluations of Project Head Start’s effectiveness focused on whether children’s IQs had increased, a parameter easy to quantify but not necessarily reflective of the program’s broader goals. Then in 1969, a comprehensive evaluation of Head Start’s first four years commissioned by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) did not identify lasting academic gains in the following years. This result should not have been surprising — how could a short summer program or even a full-year preschool program translate to increased academic achievement in third grade, absent other interventions? Nixon administration policymakers who were already skeptical about anti-poverty programming embraced this critical report.
The report raised “very serious questions about the impact of the program and whether we are putting our money in the right place,” argued a high-ranking evaluator at the OEO. President Richard M. Nixon seized the chance to transfer the program from the OEO to a newly created Office of Child Development under the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, demonstrating the administration’s move away from anti-poverty work. This would foreshadow decades-long attacks on federal anti-poverty action.
Project Head Start survived, even as other anti-poverty programs shut down. But it remained plagued by questions about “effectiveness” rooted in the idea that ensuring academic gains was the only important outcome for the program. A better focus would have been how the program could best support poor children and families.
While the program moved away from its focus on measuring intelligence, it continued to define “school readiness” as part of its primary goals. But school readiness is closely tied to poverty, and offering an early-childhood program, while valuable, cannot address the many variables that shape why poor children often struggle academically.
The 1960s researchers whose ideas had shaped this approach missed a lot in their analysis. They entrenched harmful stereotypes and tropes about indifferent, incompetent or ignorant parents being to blame for children’s school performance. But the problem wasn’t the lack of colorful decor in the poor households or “unstimulating” parents — it was deep-seated economic inequality, reflected in children’s underfunded, segregated schools and neighborhoods.
Rather than marshaling support for policies to address these problems, adopting a brain-based, essentialist argument for anti-poverty family support programs not only bred disillusionment about these types of programs but also ran the risk of pathologizing poor families. Policymakers asked “what is wrong with poor children” and their families, rather than considering the many ways our policies were failing them.
This approach also helped fuel a renewed and ugly debate on race and intelligence. Scientists began poring over IQ and achievement test results to argue that compensatory education had tried and failed. Some argued the data showed that intelligence was primarily hereditary and that the (perceived) gap in intelligence between racial groups was because of an essential difference between them. This nature-nurture debate raged on, with figures such as Charles Murray publishing books in the 1990s on racial differences in aptitude, providing scholarly fodder for white supremacists and undermining political support for anti-poverty interventions.
With this new study showing brain benefits from giving poor children’s families money, it opens the door to troubling questions. If poor children’s brains are “improved” from cash benefits, does that imply that their brains are biologically inferior to begin with? Presenting social science interventions as having the potential of “fixing” poor children — and among this group the overrepresented number of children who are from minority backgrounds — has the distinct risk of fueling a debate about whether some children and families are innately and immutably inferior.
Reducing poverty in children is good policy because there is a wealth of evidence that poverty hurts children. Making sure children have food, shelter, clothing and access to the resources they need to thrive is a social good. Acting to prevent child poverty is good because, to put it bluntly, poverty is bad for children. Nearly 11 million children in the United States live in poverty, at a rate far higher than in our peer countries. These children deserve better, and their advocates don’t need to rely on the shape of children’s brain waves to make that case. | null | null | null | null | null |
House committees are hearing from fewer witnesses. That hurts public policy.
When members use hearings to grandstand, potential witnesses fear they will be used as targets.
By John D. Rackey
Lauren C. Bell
Kevin R. Kosar
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress met, as you probably haven’t heard. That’s partly because it was a sober affair, with members dutifully listening to experts about improving how members legislate instead of giving speeches masquerading as questions. In fact, the committee recently approved new recommendations to improve how the House as a whole does business, calling for more civility, relying more on evidence and incorporating better data into the lawmaking process.
One sign that congressional policymaking needs more data and evidence is this: The House’s use of expert witnesses is at a generational low. In fact, Congress’s committees have been hearing from fewer and fewer voices over time.
Fewer witnesses are appearing before congressional committees
In our new research, we collect and code every identifiable witness who appeared before every standing committee in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1971 and 2016, accounting for 435,293 witnesses appearing in 42,509 hearings over that 45-year period. Several patterns emerge from the data.
First, as you can see in the figure below, the number of witnesses appearing before Congress has sharply declined in recent decades. That number peaked in the 95th Congress (1977-1978), when House panels heard from 32,898 witnesses. By the 114th Congress (2015-2016), the number declined by nearly 80 percent, so that panels heard from only 6,632 witnesses.
Second, congressional hearings feature fewer witnesses on average today than they did in the past. In the 95th Congress (1977-1978), Congress heard from an average of 17.1 witnesses per hearing; by the 114th Congress (2015-2016), only 4.2 witnesses on average appeared. Recent scholarship and our own data suggest that witness appearances continue to fall. In the House Financial Services Committee, for example, the average number of witnesses per hearing fell to 3.7 during the 115th Congress (2017-2018) from 4.5 in the 114th Congress (2015-2016).
Legislators are taking the spotlight
Declining witness participation cannot be explained by tumbling numbers of committee hearings or bills introduced. As you can see in the figure below, although lawmakers introduced more bills during the 114th Congress than in the previous Congress, panels still heard from fewer witnesses than in the session before.
So, what are lawmakers doing instead of hearing from witnesses? They’re taking the limelight for themselves in ways that bring coverage in the news media. The media pays attention when a Cabinet secretary, a celebrity, or a well-known business tycoon appears before a congressional committee. But even congressional hearings on more-mundane policy matters can make the news when there’s a particularly heated exchange between legislators or when a legislator berates a witness or makes exceptional use of questioning time.
As these sorts of extraordinary moments spread across mainstream and social media, members of Congress and the public alike come to see hearings as occasions for lawmakers to get attention and embarrass political rivals, rather than as opportunities to gather objective information to help in legislating.
Witnesses shy away from hearings
These trends also result from witnesses’ increasing reluctance to appear before Congress. As part of our research, we interviewed several current and former federal government staffers and lobbyists to learn more about this troublesome trend.
A former House subcommittee policy director told us, “Nobody wants to testify anymore. We call and we ask for the [Cabinet] secretary. He won’t come. We ask for his deputy. He won’t come either.”
A former Trump administration official who now lobbies on Capitol Hill explained the trend this way:
You resist testifying as much as possible. Because if you agree, you’re putting a principal or a senior official in a position to be attacked for three hours. … Members are just trying to get sound bites out. They’re trying to trap [witnesses] in a corner to make a name for themselves.
Once, lawmakers gained important knowledge about significant public matters from congressional committee hearings. But, two things have changed. First, the decline in congressional civility, as a result of tight competition for control of the House, has lawmakers focused on competing for media attention rather than cooperating to make law. Second, House committees have ceded a great deal of lawmaking power to congressional leadership.
As a result, many congressional hearings have ceased to be substantive forums where lawmakers dig into details of public policy. Declining committee power affects lawmaking in other ways, too; nearly a third of the “special rules” that govern how the House considers bills puts them on the House floor before they’ve gone through the relevant committees.
How does all this affect lawmaking?
Hearing from far fewer witnesses hurts Congress’s lawmaking. Rank-and-file members have less information, of poorer quality, to guide decisions. Americans know less about what information goes into making law. And congressional committees become unable to meaningfully oversee the executive branch.
The modernization committee recommended a number of changes. Those include encouraging bipartisan committee events, such as agenda-setting retreats and working dinners; holding hearings in formats less amenable to grandstanding, such as sitting in a roundtable arrangement where Republican and Democratic members sit next to each other rather than on opposite sides of the room; and training members and staffers in civility and collaboration. If followed, these recommendations could help committees regain some of the respect and policymaking authority that they’ve lost in recent years, resulting in sounder public policy.
Of course, all that depends on whether party leaders are willing to lean on committees for policy advice, and whether committee leaders want to convene more meaningful hearings, call more witnesses and treat witnesses with respect when they appear.
John D. Rackey (@JDRackey) is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Oklahoma.
Lauren C. Bell (@rmcpsci) is a professor of political science and the dean of academic affairs at Randolph-Macon College, and author of “Filibustering in the U.S. Senate” (Cambria Press, 2011).
Kevin R. Kosar is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the co-editor of “Congress Overwhelmed: Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform” (University of Chicago Press, 2020). | null | null | null | null | null |
Is Africa losing ground in the battle for water and sanitation?
Afrobarometer surveys show citizens expect their governments to do more
Women draw water from a pump in Tougbo, Ivory Coast, on Jan. 22. (Sia Kambou/AFP/Getty Images)
By Daniel Armah-Attoh
In March, government, civil society and private-sector leaders gathering for the ninth World Water Forum in Dakar, Senegal, will try to move the world toward the United Nations’ sixth sustainable development goal: universal access to safe water and sanitation.
With billions of people still lacking these basic necessities, it’s an ambitious goal. The World Health Organization and UNICEF estimate that the current rate of progress would need to quadruple to meet the 2030 target. According to these agencies, progress is particularly slow in sub-Saharan Africa.
The coronavirus pandemic has added urgency to advocacy for expanding access to clean water needed for hand-washing as an important preventive measure against the virus, as well as other infectious diseases. And climate change is heightening water and sanitation concerns as increasingly frequent storms, floods and droughts threaten access to these critical services.
But will the pandemic and climate change boost clean-water efforts — or divert resources and delay progress? A decade of Afrobarometer data on access to clean water and sanitation in Africa reveals remarkably little progress toward the U.N. targets.
Deteriorating access to clean water
On some indicators, Africa’s water situation actually appears to be worsening, according to Afrobarometer surveys. Results from 48,084 face-to-face interviews in 34 African countries in 2019-2021 show that more than half of Africans have experienced shortages of clean water in the past year, and 1 in 7 have no access to sanitation facilities of any kind. The numbers of people experiencing these privations are growing — and citizens express considerable disappointment with government efforts to address them.
Obtaining clean water is a daily challenge for an increasing number of African households. Across 34 countries, more than half (56 percent) of survey respondents say they went without enough clean water at least once in the year preceding the survey, including 43 percent who suffered this form of poverty “several times,” “many times” or “always.”
Experiences vary widely by country: While fewer than one-fourth of Ghanaians (22 percent) and Moroccans (24 percent) report going without enough water, shortages affected more than three-fourths of citizens in Gabon (79 percent), Guinea (78 percent) and Cameroon (78 percent).
Across 30 countries Afrobarometer has surveyed on these issues for the past decade, the proportion of respondents who experienced water shortages increased from 49 percent to 54 percent. As shown in the figure below, the number who reported experiencing water shortages rose in 18 countries, including jumps of 19 percentage points in Benin, 18 points in Guinea and 15 points in Senegal. Only three countries show significant improvement, with surveys showing that fewer people experienced shortages: Tanzania (a decrease of 23 percentage points), Burkina Faso (down 12 points) and Ghana (down eight points).
How often do households lack enough clean water for daily needs? | 30 countries | 2011-2021
Stagnation on sanitation
Afrobarometer surveys also document little progress on broadening access to sanitation. Across 34 countries, one-third (34 percent) of Africans surveyed report having a toilet in their home, and 37 percent use a toilet or latrine elsewhere in their compound. This leaves nearly one-third (29 percent) having to go outside their compound, including 14 percent who say they do not have access to toilet facilities.
Toilets in the home are almost universal in Morocco (95 percent) and Mauritius (93 percent). But a majority of citizens don’t have a toilet or latrine in their home or compound in seven countries: Niger (65 percent), Malawi (59 percent), Uganda (58 percent), Liberia (57 percent), Benin (56 percent), Ghana (53 percent) and Ethiopia (50 percent). Indeed, in Niger, a majority (59 percent) of citizens report having no access to a toilet or latrine.
While access to toilets inside the home increased from 30 percent to 35 percent over the past decade, in some countries, open defecation appears to be on the rise, given an average five-percentage-point rise in the number of people who report having no access to any sanitation facilities, whether inside or outside their compound. As shown in the figure below, 13 of 30 countries have seen increases of five percentage points or more in survey respondents reporting no access to toilets or latrines, while only one country, Namibia, saw a decrease of at least five points.
No access to toilets/latrines | 30 countries | 2011-2021
Africans expect more from government
Under these circumstances, it’s no surprise that water and sanitation are priority issues for Africans. Water supply ranks fifth among the most important problems that people want their governments to address, after unemployment, health, education and infrastructure/roads. Guineans, who experience some of the highest levels of water deprivation, are particularly concerned: Almost two-thirds (65 percent) cite water supply as one of their top three priorities.
In light of these shortcomings in infrastructure and access, only 41 percent of Africans give their government a passing grade on water and sanitation. As the figure below indicates, about two-thirds of survey respondents approve of their government’s performance in Tanzania (67 percent) and Botswana (64 percent) — while fewer than 1 in 4 in Sudan (12 percent), Guinea (15 percent), Gabon (18 percent) and Liberia (22 percent) agree that their government is providing adequate water and sanitation services.
Government performance in providing water and sanitation services | 34 countries | 2019/2021
Alongside the daily struggles that these survey findings suggest, Africans may find that water crises like those experienced recently in Cape Town, South Africa, and Bouaké, Ivory Coast, also become more frequent. In these cases, governments and development partners showed they can respond effectively in an emergency.
Pressures from the pandemic and from climate change seem likely to strengthen citizens’ demands for action before things get to that point.
Daniel Armah-Attoh is the Afrobarometer project manager for Anglophone West Africa and North Africa. | null | null | null | null | null |
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