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In an era of oversharing, Janet Jackson remains unknowable
The enigmatic superstar’s new docuseries reinforces the airtight aesthetic of her music
Janet Jackson performs in Washington in 2017. (Josh Sisk for The Washington Post)
So yes, Jackson got a little public image bump in 2019 when she was finally inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but more importantly, her twin masterpieces — 1986’s “Control” and 1989’s “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814” — have felt nothing short of prescient amid the chaos of America’s past six years. Jackson has said she only ever intended for “Control” to reflect the command she was trying to take over her own musical career, but the album has since become a beacon of feminist pop that has resonated across the #MeToo movement and beyond. As for “Rhythm Nation,” its high-hearted demand for racial justice sadly remains timeless in this failing country we share.
Heavy world, light voice. The critic Margo Jefferson once described Jackson as “the original tiny-voiced teen girl rebel,” which holds true in the sense that her voice is as small as the edge of a blade used to cut broad, beautiful contours of the human condition. Halfway through 1989’s “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” the most ecstatic bright-spot in her entire songbook, Jackson sings as if shooing gravity: “I feel better when I have you near me.” Good luck trying to find a simpler, truer, better definition of love in any other song or anywhere else.
Yet as weightless and magnetic as she is in that moment, what makes Jackson’s work feel so perpetually disorienting must have something to do with her ability to pull us into a song while keeping us out of her life. Her best music feels deeply personal, but rarely confessional, and at her zenith, “Rhythm Nation,” the life that matters most is that of the collective. “Sing it, people,” she declares, inviting everyone within earshot to step into one of pop music’s greatest visions of utopia. “Sing it if you want a better way of life.”
The documentary’s most striking moment arrives when a camcorder lands on Jackson’s notebook in 1989, the first verse of “Rhythm Nation” scribbled down on an unlined page, proof of how something righteous and colossal can start with a few messy pen strokes. But sadly, there isn’t much more about Jackson’s process here. Instead, the film crescendos from controversy to controversy, with Jackson declining to say much about any of them.
She seems to excuse the allegations of abuse against her father (“He protected us”) while refusing to entertain the allegations of abuse against Michael (“My brother would never do something like that”). She isn’t angry with her exes. She isn’t mad at Justin Timberlake for what happened at, or after, the Super Bowl. There’s some muted anger at the media’s fixation on her tragic family, plus a dash of vague contentedness about the joys of motherhood. While Jackson always seems genuine, she also seems quite distant, which, in an era of endless digital oversharing, makes this entire undertaking feel like a convoluted privacy flex. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nick Scott and the Rams won't have to travel at all for the Super Bowl. (Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)
Sunday’s conference championship games were all about comebacks. In the AFC, the Cincinnati Bengals rallied from 18 points down to knock off the Super Bowl favorite Kansas City Chiefs in overtime, 27-24. And in the NFC, the Los Angeles Rams scored 13 straight in the fourth quarter to escape the San Francisco 49ers, 20-17. The Rams are now the title favorites and will host the Bengals at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on Feb. 13 in Super Bowl LVI.
Now, the spotlight shines bright on McVay. He has a talented roster and homefield advantage for only the second time in Super Bowl history. The last time Los Angeles played for a title, after the 2018 season, his high-powered offense was stifled by the New England Patriots in a 13-3 loss. This game offers him a shot at redemption, and he’s expected to capitalize: The Rams opened as a 3 1/2-point favorite, according to Bet Online.
But the NFL humbles teams by design—even those with great quarterbacks—and Mahomes seems to understand that. He told reporters the season had to end in the Super Bowl. | null | null | null | null | null |
TOKYO — North Korea had a busy month in January, capping it Sunday with its seventh missile test, the longest-range one launched in years, as the country pursues a sophisticated weapons arsenal.
North Korea announced Monday that it had test-fired the Hwasong-12, an intermediate-range ballistic missile, to “verify the overall accuracy of the weapon system.” It was the first test since 2017 of the missile, which is capable of reaching the U.S. territory of Guam.
In addition, the Biden administration has reportedly selected Philip Goldberg, a career diplomat and a former coordinator for U.N. sanctions on North Korea, as his nominee for U.S. ambassador to South Korea.
The selection of a former sanctions official has raised questions in South Korea about potential implications for the future of U.S. policy toward North Korea. Washington issued fresh sanctions over North Korea’s weapons program after Pyongyang said it tested hypersonic missiles.
China and Russia, members of the U.N. Security Council, have not only pushed back on the U.S. bid to impose new sanctions, but have promoted sanctions relief for North Korea, noting that Pyongyang has not tested any nuclear devices or intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States. | null | null | null | null | null |
A U.S.-pioneered tactic may now offer justice for Syrian victims in German courts
The rise of universal jurisdiction and its role in righting wrongs
Former Syrian intelligence officer Anwar Raslan appears in court in Koblenz, Germany, on Jan. 13, the last day of his trial. He was convicted on 27 counts of torture, murder, rape and sexual assault. (Thomas Frey/Pool/AFP/Getty Images)
By Maria Armoudian
Maria Armoudian is a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Auckland and author of "Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World; Reporting from the Danger Zone," and "Lawyers beyond Borders: Advancing International Human Rights through Local Laws and Courts."
Germany is leading the way toward a profound shift in global human rights. Currently, German prosecutors are trying a Syrian doctor for war crimes in their own national courts. In the trial of Alaa Mousa, the German prosecution accuses him of torturing opponents of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, including setting fire to a teenage boy’s testicles and killing another by lethal injection, while they were both in the hospital. His trial began a week after a German court convicted former Syrian colonel and intelligence officer Anwar Raslan on 27 of 58 counts of torture, murder, rape and sexual assault that included electrocuting, bludgeoning and stuffing victims into vehicle tires. The 58-year-old is expected to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Decades ago, it was Germany that had committed the worst atrocities of the era, under the Nazi government. In response to these and other egregious violations, the United States took a leadership role in preventing and mitigating human rights violations and redressing victims. Ideas articulated in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, which argued that “freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere,” propelled the development of the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, in which Nazi war criminals were prosecuted.
The goals, particularly of redressing these wrongs, developed further from the work of American civil rights lawyers who used civil litigation to advance international human rights through our own federal and state courts.
But today, these Syrian cases suggest it is Germany that is standing up for the survivors and prosecuting the violators, while the United States has backpedaled on its human rights commitments.
Yet the legal framework that Syrian refugees and survivors are using to demand justice and redress these wrongs has roots in the history of the United States, both in its earlier era of human rights leadership and in its more recent failure to uphold those standards in the “war on terror.”
In the late 1970s, a small group of civil rights lawyers began using litigation to expand gains they had made during the country’s civil rights movements to those who had suffered beyond our borders. Pioneering lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Peter Weiss and Rhonda Copelon, were the first to extend these pathways to justice to foreigners who had survived egregious human rights violations abroad, such as torture and genocide, but had nowhere else to turn for recourse.
Their civil rights colleagues, including Beth Stephens, Jennifer Green, Paul Hoffman and David Cole, picked up the mantle from there. They pursued cases against international figures who had committed such violence. Argentine Gen. Carlos Guillermo Suarez Mason had commanded the interrogation, torture or disappearance of some 5,000 Argentines in the country’s “dirty war,” under military dictatorship (1976-1983). After Argentina’s return to democracy, the general fled to Foster City, Calif., where survivors successfully sued him in federal courts.
Philippine survivors won a multimillion-dollar judgment against the country’s former president, Ferdinand Marcos, who oversaw the jailing, torture and killing of thousands of students, journalists, farmers and leftists. And years before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia tried and convicted Radovan Karadzic for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, Karadzic found himself sued in the United States by thousands of survivors of Bosnian camps who said they were raped.
These cases brought to life the concept of universal jurisdiction, the idea that the most heinous crimes should be prosecutable anywhere, enabled by a centuries-old American statute that granted federal courts jurisdiction in cases in which the torts violated the law of nations.
But after the watershed moment of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States itself turned to torture. Yet the federal courts dismissed the cases that sought to hold our own top officials accountable for these egregious abuses and deliver justice to their victims. In one case, for example, Canadian engineer Maher Arar, a Syrian national who had stopped to change planes in New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, found himself questioned by the FBI about alleged ties to terrorists and renditioned to Syria, where he was interrogated, whipped, hung, battered and electrically shocked, according to media and court records. The district court questioned “whether torture always violates the Fifth Amendment” and ultimately dismissed the case, primarily for reasons of national security. The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld the dismissal.
Prisoners detained by the U.S. military at Guantánamo Bay and released without charges also sought redress for their suffering. For example, in Rasul v. Rumsfeld, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said aliens were not “persons” with constitutional rights for purposes of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, one of the statutes used in the case.
These failures of justice sent Weiss looking abroad for statutes that enabled universal jurisdiction to bring these crimes to justice. Germany, he said, featured the strongest law in Europe.
Partnering with Berlin-based lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck, Weiss brought a case to the German prosecutor to hold top U.S. officials accountable. Although that effort failed because the German prosecutor declined to advance the case, Weiss, Kaleck and other human rights lawyers gained support for their universal jurisdiction movement. Together they founded the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is pursuing Syrian war crimes cases under German law.
Working with Syrian lawyers, defectors, students, rebels, journalists, witnesses and a network of Syrian civil society groups — many of whom risked their lives to seize, catalogue and analyze forensic data, including orders, chains of command and technical analysis — the group amassed the necessary evidence to persuade the German prosecutors to pursue these cases. Evidence included the photographs taken by “Caesar,” an official Syrian government photographer who risked his life to smuggle photos of mutilated bodies in his shoes and belt past multiple checkpoints.
These and many other universal jurisdiction cases throughout the world bring to light the important role of persistent creative advocacy and leadership over the arc of modern history in delivering justice, sometimes in unexpected ways — even when it seems impossible. As we await the outcome of Mousa’s trial in Germany, it is good to be reminded of the historic roles the United States played in addressing global injustices and bringing to life the concept of universal jurisdiction, even if it has been on the other side of human rights violations in recent history. | null | null | null | null | null |
What lies behind mistrust of government and doubts about the election? White racial bias.
Officials and candidates who encourage this mistrust are undermining democracy
A Trump supporter outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post)
By Alexandra Filindra
As the FBI has continued making arrests in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, investigators, reporters and political scientists are revealing that those who participated were mostly White people — especially men — who harbor deep mistrust in government institutions and unwavering faith in Donald Trump, disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories. Political scientist Robert Pape’s profiles of the rioters show that the majority were regular citizens, not members of extreme-right organizations.
Of course, far more Americans than just the rioters mistrust government institutions. Since the 1960s, many White Americans have expressed low faith in the federal government. That has important consequences. It’s harder for Washington to enact policies without very broad consensus that they are needed. When policies impose costs on some but not others, low trust in government makes it difficult to get citizens to agree to pay for social benefits. All that is visible today among Americans who resist mask and vaccine mandates meant to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Low trust correlates with more resistance.
So what is behind low trust in government?
My research with Beyza Buyuker and Noah Kaplan shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, racial prejudice — more than convictions about policies — has fueled White Americans’ hostility to government.
Early research suggested that White Americans’ mistrust in government began with such policies as school busing, the War on Poverty’s expansion of welfare, and affirmative action. But when these policies were abandoned, trust remained low. My research shows that public trust became chronically “racialized” — that is, it became linked to White Americans’ racial prejudices.
We used survey data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), a nationally representative survey conducted during presidential election years. We focused specifically on White respondents who participated in the survey between 1992 and 2020. For each year, we conducted statistical analyses to test whether people who scored higher on racial prejudice also scored lower on public trust, after controlling for many other factors such as policy preferences, partisanship, ideology and demographics.
Racial prejudice drives White mistrust in government
We found that in all eight surveys between 1992 and 2020, racial prejudice predicted lower levels of trust in government. For example, in 2020, White Americans who scored high on racial prejudice, as measured by agreement with negative stereotypes about Black people, were nine percentage points less likely to express trust in government than those who scored low on the same measure.
And it is not only trust in government that is associated with racial prejudice. My other work shows that racial prejudice has been a strong predictor of White Americans’ doubts in the fairness of the 2020 election.
Many White Americans did not expect a fair election in 2020
In addition to low trust in government, a significant proportion of White Americans today distrust election results. In 2020, the ANES asked three questions to gauge Americans’ trust in the integrity of the presidential election. These questions were asked before Election Day. Specifically, the ANES asked, “In the November 2020 general election, how accurately do you think the votes will be counted?” Twenty-seven percent of Whites said they expected the votes would not be counted accurately (“not at all” or “very little”); an additional 35 percent expressed a moderate level of doubt. Only 38 percent were very confident in the election.
Similarly, 21 percent said they had no trust or very little trust in local election officials, while 31 percent said they had a moderate level of trust in local elections officials. Finally, 14 percent said people who are eligible to vote are denied the right “very often” or “fairly often,” which is shown as “no confidence” in the figure below.
Racial prejudice also fuels low trust in the fairness of elections
In a second study, I analyzed data from the 2012 to 2020 ANES results to test whether racial prejudice is related to low trust in election fairness. Once again, my statistical analysis focused on White respondents and accounted for other factors.
I found that in 2012 and 2020, but not in 2016, racial prejudice predicted lower trust in election fairness. Others also have found that racial prejudice predicted lower trust in electoral outcomes in 2008 and 2012, but not in elections before Barack Obama’s two candidacies. In 2012, biased Whites were 16 percentage points less likely than other Whites to say that the election count would be fair. In 2020, biased Whites were nine percentage points less likely to think that the election count would be accurate; six percentage points less likely to trust local election officials; and five percentage points more likely to believe that eligible voters are denied the right to vote. It is likely that racially prejudiced Whites think of White Americans when they think of eligible voters and, thus, have concerns about people like them being denied the right to vote. The data suggest that Whites who harbor negative stereotypes about Blacks as lazy, unintelligent or violent may deem this group unworthy of political membership and, therefore, illegitimate voters.
Republicans and Democrats have split over whether to support multiethnic democracy, our research finds
When people don’t trust elections, it undermines democracy
The consequences of low confidence in elections can be grave. When people don’t trust elections, they don’t trust that the country is governed democratically. Scholars have shown that low trust in election fairness can alienate people from the political system and drive them to embrace anti-democratic leaders and policies.
Many elected officials — including many up for reelection in 2022 — seem to think that employing the racial dog whistle of critical race theory, “illegal voters” and “violent agitators” and encouraging fears about “stolen elections” can be a winning strategy. However, as we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, when people come to mistrust the government and its institutions — including the integrity of elections — democracy becomes vulnerable to grievances, passions and even violence. With the 2022 midterm elections around the corner, Congress may wish to vouchsafe the integrity of the nation’s system of elections administration. For instance, it might install nonpartisan and independent monitoring and other measures that increase voters’ confidence in election results. The stability of our democracy depends on people believing in their institutions.
Alexandra Filindra (@afilindra) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. | null | null | null | null | null |
Monday briefing: Skyrocketing rents; weekend snowstorm; Super Bowl; Winter Olympics; and more
(Jordan Robertson for The Washington Post) (For The Washington Post)
The U.S. and Russia will meet again this week over the Ukraine crisis.
What’s happening: There’s a U.N. meeting today, and U.S. and Russian officials will also speak tomorrow. This week may test whether diplomacy has made any progress.
How we got here: Russia has moved tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine’s border, creating a growing threat. About 9,000 of them are being sent back, it announced today, but it’s too soon to tell whether that’s a sign of de-escalation.
Rents have skyrocketed in cities across the U.S.
The numbers: The average monthly cost rose 14% last year, to $1,877 a month. In cities like Austin, New York and Miami, rents went up by as much as 40%.
What this means: Millions of Americans are being priced out and forced to move.
A powerful storm dumped heavy snow on parts of the East this weekend.
Nine states from Maryland to Maine got at least a foot, and Boston saw almost two feet, tying its snowiest day ever.
Thousands of people lost power, mostly because of high winds, but much of it was back online by last night.
The Los Angeles Rams will play the Cincinnati Bengals in the Super Bowl.
Takeaways from yesterday’s games: They were all about comebacks. The Bengals beat the Kansas City Chiefs (the favorites), 27-24, in overtime. The Rams came from 10 points behind to beat the San Francisco 49ers, 20-17.
When is the Super Bowl? Sunday, Feb. 13, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time. It will air on NBC.
Who’s performing at the halftime show? Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar.
Spotify will add content advisories to podcasts about covid-19.
Why? Musician Neil Young had the streaming service take down his music last week to protest creators (particularly podcaster Joe Rogan) who spread vaccine misinformation. Joni Mitchell and other artists joined him over the weekend.
Spotify responded yesterday by publishing its content policy and announcing the new disclaimers, which Rogan praised.
Cheslie Kryst, who was Miss USA 2019, died yesterday.
The 30-year-old lawyer and “Extra” correspondent apparently jumped from an apartment building in Manhattan, police said.
Her victory in 2019 was a highlight in a historic year that saw Black women win all five major beauty pageants. Kryst wore natural curls under her crown, hoping to give other women confidence to do the same.
The Winter Olympics kick off in Beijing this week.
The schedule: The Opening Ceremonies are Friday, but preliminary rounds of hockey, curling and freestyle skiing start as soon as Wednesday.
How the pandemic changed things: Rules for athletes and other attendees are the most restrictive yet. There will be few spectators — and no leaving the Olympic bubble.
How to watch: NBC at 8 p.m. Eastern every day or streamed live on Peacock. We have a full TV guide and schedule here.
And now … for a moment of delight: Meet Jonathan the tortoise, the world’s oldest living land animal. | null | null | null | null | null |
Travis McMichael, left, William “Roddie” Bryan, and Gregory McMichael during their trial at the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Ga. (Pool/AP)
A lawyer for Arbery’s mother, Lee Merritt, denounced reports of the agreement Sunday night in a statement, saying that agreement is a “back room deal” and a “betrayal to the Arbery family who is devastated.”
Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said federal prosecutors ignored her wishes in offering Travis and Gregory McMichael any kind of plea deal and said she plans to oppose it during a pretrial hearing scheduled at 10 a.m. Monday. Prosecutors said in the notice that details of the plea were shared with the court for its consideration.
Bryan, the only one of the three who was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, was not mentioned in Sunday’s plea deal notice.
Lawyers for the defendants have argued that the three men pursued Arbery in the belief that he was behind neighborhood break-ins, not because of his race. But prosecutors have portrayed the men as racist, pointing to texts and social media posts in court. Bryan, who filmed the fatal confrontation on his phone, told investigators that Travis McMichael used the n-word after shooting Arbery, a claim the younger McMichael’s lawyers denied.
In their statement, Arbery’s parents said the plea would allow the McMichaels “to enter federal custody and serve the first 30 years of their sentence in a preferred federal prison.”
When the indictment was filed in April, a lawyer for Travis McMichael, Bob Rubin, told The Washington Post, “We are deeply disappointed that the Justice Department bought the false narrative that the media and state prosecutors have promulgated,” adding that the indictment does not explain the hate-crime allegations and ignores Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law.
Kevin Gough, who represents Bryan, also expressed disappointment at the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute his client, saying at the time that Bryan had committed no crime. | null | null | null | null | null |
Podcaster Joe Rogan. (Vivian Zink/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
As a growing number of musicians yanked their work from the streaming service Spotify over misinformation about coronavirus vaccines, podcaster Joe Rogan posted a video this weekend admitting he could do more to better inform his millions of listeners, particularly when it comes to covid.
Rogan’s comments came amid a firestorm after hundreds of medical professionals called out Spotify earlier this month for letting the podcaster spread “false and societally harmful assertions” about the virus and vaccines, The Washington Post reported. Then, starting with folk rocker Neil Young a week ago, a growing number of artists and podcasters told the streaming service they would take their work off Spotify if the company did not stop Rogan from spreading covid misinformation.
Spotify chose Rogan, which gave the company exclusive rights to his podcast in 2020 for a reported $100 million. On Wednesday, Spotify started taking down Young’s music, including the hits “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
Ultimatums from other artists followed. Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell on Friday announced she was pulling her music from Spotify to “stand in solidarity” with Young over what she called “lies that are costing people their lives.” Nils Lofgren, frontman of the band Grin and a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, wrote in a statement on Young’s website that he was also cutting ties with the streaming service. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, who have deals to host podcasts for Spotify, on Sunday released a statement expressing “concerns” about covid misinformation on the platform.
On Sunday, the streaming giant broke its silence over the growing rebellion. The company announced it was publishing its internal rules that govern what’s allowed on the platform and tweaking its policies about coronavirus content by adding a disclaimer to any podcast dealing with covid.
Rogan hinted at “other things going on behind the scenes” that are driving the current controversy without specifying what those were. He apologized to Young, Mitchell and others who are upset.
On his podcast, Rogan has suggested that young, healthy people shouldn’t get vaccinated, contrary to recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When he caught the coronavirus in September, Rogan told listeners he’d treated the infection with the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, which the Food and Drug Administration has strongly recommended against in fighting covid. | null | null | null | null | null |
Boris Johnson handed report on Downing Street parties during pandemic lockdowns, set to address Parliament
Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives back at 10 Downing Street in London, Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
The British press has been banging the gong for the Gray report for weeks, as it was believed it could set Johnson’s political future. It was expected to be published in full last week. But then on Friday, the Metropolitan Police told Gray not to publish key details in her report, lest it influence an ongoing criminal investigation into the parties.
It is not clear which of the gatherings the police force is investigating, but presumably they are looking at the most serious allegations, meaning that any report — or “update,” in the governments terms — is likely to be narrow in focus and watered down.
Given the new constrains, the Gray report might not fully answer these questions, meaning that the whole scandal will drag on.
But the calculus for some may have changed since London’s Metropolitan Police announced last week that they were launching a parallel investigation — this one criminal — into the various dos and bashes.
For his part, Johnson has been keen to turn attention to other matters. In the House of Commons, he has boasted that he and his government are “leading” the West in warning Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would face “the toughest possible sanctions” if Russian troops were to invade Ukraine. Instead of talking parties, Johnson wanted to talk about reducing waiting times at National Health Service hospitals. The prime minister insisted, “I am getting on with the job.”
Johnson, in theory, could be interviewed by the police. If he is, he won’t be the first sitting prime minister to be the subject of a police investigation. Tony Blair, who served as British prime minister from 1997 — 2007, was questioned by police in what became known as the cash for peerages scandal. Blair was never charged but the episode cast a shadow over the final months of his premiership. | null | null | null | null | null |
Trump adviser Peter Navarro published a book, and in it he unveiled the plan to keep Trump in office. (Monica Rodman, Sarah Hashemi/The Washington Post)
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), an outspoken Trump critic who voted to impeach him on a charge of inciting an insurrection, said in a tweet that the former president would try to do it again.
“Trump uses language he knows caused the Jan 6 violence; suggests he’d pardon the Jan 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy; threatens prosecutors; and admits he was attempting to overturn the election. He’d do it all again if given the chance,” wrote Cheney, who is vice chairman of the select House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nick Scott and the Rams won’t have to travel for the Super Bowl. (Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)
Sunday’s conference championship games were all about comebacks. In the AFC, the Cincinnati Bengals rallied from 18 points down to knock off the Super Bowl favorite Kansas City Chiefs in overtime, 27-24. And in the NFC, the Los Angeles Rams scored 13 straight points in the fourth quarter to escape the San Francisco 49ers, 20-17. The Rams are now the title favorites and will host the Bengals at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on Feb. 13 in Super Bowl LVI.
Now, the spotlight shines bright on McVay. He has a talented roster and home-field advantage for only the second time in Super Bowl history. The last time Los Angeles played for a title, after the 2018 season, his high-powered offense was stifled by the New England Patriots in a 13-3 loss. This game offers him a shot at redemption, and he’s expected to capitalize: The Rams opened as a 3 1/2-point favorite, according to Bet Online.
But the NFL humbles teams by design — even those with great quarterbacks — and Mahomes seems to understand that. He told reporters the season had to end in the Super Bowl. | null | null | null | null | null |
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives back at 10 Downing Street in London on Jan. 25, 2022. (Alastair Grant/AP)
LONDON — An investigation of Downing Street parties held during pandemic lockdowns concluded that some of the gatherings showed “a serious failure” to observe the standards expected of government officials and the British population. A summary of the investigation, published Monday, said the parties showed a failure in leadership, involved excessive alcohol use, and “should not have been allowed to take place.”
The highly anticipated report provided little detail about 16 reported parties at British government buildings, including the prime minister’s office and residence, because at least eight of the gatherings are now the subject of a criminal investigation by London’s Metropolian Police.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has been fighting for his political life, unable to move on from the “Partygate” scandal, will make a statement to Parliament on Monday afternoon.
The prime minister has faced withering criticism not only from the opposition but from within his own Conservative Party. Johnson has said that he will not resign and that he and his government have got “all the big things right.”
In her report, senior civil servant Sue Gray found that against the backdrop of the pandemic, “when the government was asking citizens to accept far-reaching restrictions on their lives, some of the behavior surrounding these gatherings is difficult to justify.”
Gray concluded, “a number of these gatherings should not have been allowed to take place or to develop in the way that they did.”
On Friday, the police asked for the Gray report to include “minimal reference” to the events their officers were investigating to “avoid any prejudice to our investigation.” That meant what was released on Monday was narrowed in focus and potentially watered down.
Many Conservative lawmakers had said they were waiting to see the Gray report, presumably the full one with all the juicy details, before deciding whether to attempt to oust Johnson. The key questions: Did the British prime minister break the law? Who was responsible for the gatherings? Did Johnson have advance knowledge of the “bring your own booze” party? Were there get-togethers in the Johnsons’ apartment? What new details about various gatherings has she uncovered?
There are concerns that Downing Street has not committed to publishing the report in full after the police investigation is over.
Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, tweeted, “The fact that Number 10 is backpedaling on *ever* releasing the whole Sue Gray report is as disgraceful as it is predictable. This whole shambolic and dishonest government must be brought down.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Assistant Professor Carolyn Chun. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Chun outside the building where she teaches math at the U.S. Naval Academy. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
“If I’m going to be let go because I point out that the system is biased, then I’m okay with that,” Chun says. “I keep saying there’s bias, and people keep saying there’s bias, and I want to put my money where my mouth is.” (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) | null | null | null | null | null |
Germany isn’t turning its back on NATO. It only looks that way.
The nation struggles to find a role in the new era of Russian aggression.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock leave a joint news conference following their talks in Moscow, Jan. 18, 2022. (Russian Foreign Ministry Press Service via AP) (AP)
By Ulrike Franke
Ulrike Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Last week was a dismal one for Germany’s international credibility. “Is Germany a Reliable American Ally?” the national-security writer Tom Rogan asked in the Wall Street Journal, answering with a resounding “Nein!” The New York Times published an article entitled “Where Is Germany in the Ukraine Standoff? Its Allies Wonder,” and the German broadcast service Deutsche Welle pointedly wondered, “Is Germany Letting Its Allies Down?”
If Russian President Vladimir Putin were to spontaneously abandon all his demands of the United States and NATO and withdraw Russian troops from the Ukrainian border, there would still be substantial damage to allies’ trust in German reliability and, as a result, concerns over NATO cohesion.
The main bone of contention is the German government’s decision not to export weapons to Ukraine, as that country braces for a potential Russian intervention. Germany is even preventing Estonia from exporting German-origin weapons systems to Ukraine. (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have announced that they will send American-made antitank and antiaircraft missiles to Ukraine.) Reports that Germany had denied the British Royal Air Force overflight rights for its arms transfers to Ukraine were eventually debunked — the Ministry of Defense confirmed that it had never asked — but that so many commentators were willing to believe this reveals their suspicions of Germany.
Decision-makers in Berlin are probably baffled by the forcefulness of their allies’ reactions. But the government’s position should not be surprising to anyone paying close attention. The Political Principles of the Federal Government for the Export of Weapons and Other Military Equipment states that the country will not authorize exports of “war weapons” “weapons of war and other military equipment related to weapons of war” to nonmembers of the European Union or NATO “that are involved in armed conflict or where there is a threat of such conflict (or where “existing tensions and conflicts would be triggered, maintained, or aggravated by the exports”).
In its coalition agreement, the new German government has announced that it wants a “restrictive arms exports policy” that it aims to develop into a common E.U. policy. In particular, the Green Party — whose former co-leader, Annalena Baerbock, is now in charge of the Foreign Office — has in the past criticized German arms exports as too extensive.
But more important than the legal reasons is the fact that Germany’s leaders, and many ordinary German citizens, believe that their country’s approach is the right one for resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict — or, at least, for avoiding further escalation. To put it bluntly: What some commentators abroad see as appeasement, cowardice, and the triumph of economic interests over security concerns, many Germans see as a grown-up, sensible, and conciliatory approach to foreign policy. (A recent poll found that 59 percent of Germans supported the decision not to send arms to Kyiv.) Germans view themselves as enlightened, having moved beyond power politics, the national interest, and militarism.
Germans have forgotten what military might is for in liberal democracies. The idea of deterrence, or of the military being an element of geopolitical power needed for strong diplomacy is foreign to most German citizens. Those arguing for increasing the defense budget — for example, to meet the 2-percent-of-GDP threshold expected of NATO members — are often characterized as warmongers. (Germany still falls short of the 2-percent goal, though, it has in fact slowly increased its budget since 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine.)
In a debate about the Russia-NATO standoff carried by my local German radio station, the dominant view was that de-escalation and diplomacy are what’s needed, with one listener commenting, “I am against weapons in general,” and another warning that nobody should talk about war since, “If you talk about something, it becomes possible.”
Some commentators see Germany’s foreign policy as more self-interested than idealistic. They explain Berlin’s position by pointing to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline — slated to link Russia and Germany by circumventing Ukraine — and other German economic interests, as well as the presence of so-called Putinversteher (Putin sympathizers) in parts of the German political establishment. Self-interest exists, as does empathy for Putin, but these are not the root cause of the government’s current position.
Baerbock, the foreign minister, said that position was “rooted in [German] history.” Germans know what history she is referring to. They read the 20th century, and 1933-1945 in particular, as a lesson in the evils of geopolitics and militarism, and they internalized the post-1989 “end of history’ narrative better than anyone else. After the end of the Cold War, Germany spent decades insulated from the harsh world of power politics; most Germans believed that countries were converging toward a system that marginalized military power and favored economic power and legal proceedings. Now that great power competition and military conflicts are back, Germany does not know what to do.
Many decision-makers and voters in Germany remain deeply committed to the hope that all conflicts can be solved through dialogue under international law and international organizations such as the United Nations — as if all conflict resulted from misunderstandings instead of competing interests. In a 2020 poll, only 24 percent of Germans said they considered that under some circumstances, war could sometimes be necessary to achieve justice, while over 51 percent said war is never necessary. In the specific case of Russia, there is also a belief that Berlin might be better-placed than others to play a mediating role. Berlin should remain gesprächsfähig — “able to talk” with Russia.
Nonetheless, an increasing number of Germans are beginning to argue that one might also draw a different lesson from history — such as that it is not a good idea to try to appease aggressors. In an small gesture toward this ideal, the German minister of defense has announced the delivery of 5,000 helmets to Ukraine (nonetheless, some said this amounted to “sabre-rattling”).
Germany’s allies might find its habitual pacifism frustrating — but they should still try to understand the underlying mind-set. And Germany should do what it can to reassure these allies, even if it maintains its rejection of arms deliveries. The helmets, as well as the announcement that it will provide a field hospital to Ukraine, are steps in this direction — as are some recent public statements. In a speech in the German parliament on Thursday, for instance, Baerbock said military actions against Ukraine would have “massive consequences” for Russia. But German leaders should do more — for example, meeting with their counterparts in Kyiv to discuss ways in which they can help, apart from weapon deliveries.
In the end, despite the restrictions imposed by its laws, there is little doubt that the German government stands behind NATO and its allies. The new government put a strong message of support for NATO in its coalition agreement, and the foreign minister has been clear that Russia’s demands for so-called security guarantees — such as ruling out NATO expansion — are non-starters. But given the prominence of dovish voices in the country, German leaders need to redouble their efforts to show their resolve against Russian aggression. Otherwise, they only weaken NATO’s and Ukraine’s positions in the crisis, and hasten their own irrelevance. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi cheers from the sideline during Super Bowl I against the Kansas City Chiefs in Los Angeles, Jan. 15, 1967. The Packers beat the Chiefs 35-10. Frank Gifford famously noted Lombardi was “shaking like a leaf” when the broadcaster did his pregame interview with the Hall of Fame coach.(AP Photo/File) (Uncredited/AP) | null | null | null | null | null |
Former president Donald Trump speaks during a “Save America” rally at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds on Jan. 29 in Conroe, Tex. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
His assertion that he would “treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly” and that “if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons.” This leverages a convenient bit of rhetoric that suggests that hundreds of people arrested solely for trespassing at the Capitol that day are in jail (they are not) or that the unpleasant and unacceptable conditions they face are specific to them (they are not). But Trump is not saying “let’s improve their conditions or release them on bail.” He’s saying, “maybe I’ll give them a pass on participating in the riot aimed at securing me a second term in office.” | null | null | null | null | null |
This combination photo shows cover art for “Why” a children’s book written by Taye Diggs and illustrated by Shane W. Evans, left and a portrait of Diggs during the 2018 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour, on Aug. 6, 2018, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Feiwel & Friends via AP) (Uncredited/Feiwel & Friends) | null | null | null | null | null |
Parity and injuries open the door for new faces among NBA All-Star game reserves
Toronto Raptors guard Fred VanVleet has a good shot at earning his first NBA all-star selection. (Evan Vucci/AP)
Andrew Wiggins crashed the All-Star Game party last week, unexpectedly landing one of 10 starting spots thanks to a big assist in the fan vote from K-pop sensation BamBam.
The good news: Wiggins’s selection shouldn’t lead to any regrettable snubs when the coaches name the all-star reserves Thursday. Thanks to a rash of injuries to star players in the Western Conference, there’s still plenty of room for Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert, Warriors forward Draymond Green and other candidates who were passed over by fan voters in favor of Wiggins. Meanwhile, this year’s most interesting debates can be found in the Eastern Conference, where parity among the top six teams and down seasons from several household names have opened the door for new faces.
Here are The Washington Post’s selections for each conference’s seven all-star reserves, which consider individual statistics, availability and contribution to team success. Each conference’s reserve pool is made up of two backcourt players, three frontcourt players and two wild card players who can play any position.
The Washington Post's all-star starter selections
Backcourt: Zach LaVine (Chicago Bulls) and Fred VanVleet (Raptors)
LaVine’s willingness to sacrifice some attention by playing sidekick to DeMar DeRozan has been critical to Chicago’s high-powered offense and surprising jump to the East’s second seed. An efficient scorer who spaces the court and finishes with authority in transition, LaVine (24.9 PPG, 4.8 RPG, 4.3 APG) appears poised to make the first playoff appearance of his eight-year career.
Undrafted players like VanVleet (21.7 PPG, 4.7 RPG, 7 APG) don’t often rise to the all-star ranks, but the tough-minded guard has set the tone for the Raptors following Kyle Lowry’s offseason departure. Like Lowry, VanVleet makes a positive impact on both ends and creates good scoring opportunities for himself and his teammates.
Frontcourt: Jimmy Butler (Miami Heat), Jarrett Allen (Cleveland Cavaliers) and Khris Middleton (Milwaukee Bucks)
Butler (22 PPG, 6.3 RPG, 6.3 APG) has been bitten by the injury bug again after missing out on a 2021 all-star nod due to health concerns, but he remains Miami’s most obvious representative. The top-seeded Heat is made in his mold: unselfish on offense, forceful on defense and committed to making life miserable for opponents with their energy.
Cleveland’s incredible transformation has been a group effort, and it’s easy to forget about Allen (16.1 PPG, 10.9 RPG, 1.4 BPG) with rising stars Darius Garland and Evan Mobley drawing lots of hype. But the Cavaliers wouldn’t rank third in defensive efficiency without their long-armed, paint-controlling center, who is also averaging a career-high in scoring by shooting an eye-popping 81 percent from within three feet.
Despite his exceptional 2021 playoff run, the chronically underappreciated Middleton (19.8 PPG, 5.7 RPG, 5.3 APG) somehow finds himself overlooked in the all-star conversation again. While the Bucks have spent much of their title defense on cruise control, they are 26-14 with Middleton in the lineup thanks to his measured and savvy all-around contributions.
Wild cards: Jayson Tatum (Boston Celtics) and Trae Young (Atlanta Hawks)
Boston has been far too uninspiring for both Tatum (26.2 PPG, 8.4 RPG and 4 APG) and Jaylen Brown to return to the All-Star Game. Although Tatum’s efficiency is way down, he ranks seventh leaguewide in scoring and has enjoyed better health than Brown.
Young (27.7 PPG, 4.1 RPG, 9.3 APG) was selected as an all-star starter last week, though that spot went to James Harden on The Post’s ballot given Brooklyn’s superior record. Rewarding Young with a starting spot was difficult to justify given Atlanta’s atrocious defense and shaky start, but the Hawks’ current seven-game winning streak has been a reminder that Young captains one of the NBA’s most potent attacks. Indeed, Young’s central role in powering Atlanta’s No. 2 ranked offense was enough to lift him over other skilled scoring guards like Garland and LaMelo Ball.
Toughest snubs: LaMelo Ball, Darius Garland, Evan Mobley, Pascal Siakam
Backcourt: Chris Paul (Phoenix Suns) and Luka Doncic (Dallas Mavericks)
Phoenix boasts the NBA’s best record because Paul (14.8 PPG, 4.6 RPG, 10.3 APG) continues to be the league’s top closer. With their 36-year-old point guard enjoying perfect health, the Suns have posted an 19-3 record in games that are within five points in the final five minutes of regulation.
Doncic (25.6 PPG, 8.9 RPG, 8.9 APG) has shot poorly by his standards, but his do-everything approach to offense has Dallas firmly back in the playoff mix. Still just 22, Doncic is on track to join Oscar Robertson, Russell Westbrook and LeBron James as the only players to average 25 points, 8 rebounds and 8 assists in back-to-back seasons.
Frontcourt: Draymond Green (Golden State Warriors), Karl-Anthony Towns (Minnesota Timberwolves) and Anthony Davis (Lakers)
The best defensive player on the NBA’s top-ranked defense, Green (7.9 PPG, 7.6 RPG, 7.4 APG) was the Defensive Player of the Year front-runner until he was sidelined by a recent back injury. His high IQ and communication skills landed him a multiyear contract with TNT last week, making him the first active NBA player to serve as a television analyst for the network.
Thanks to his high-volume scoring and elite outside shooting, Towns (24.4 PPG, 9.4 RPG, 3.9 APG) should return to the All-Star Game for the first time since 2019, his last healthy season. The up-and-down Timberwolves have shown some progress as they track toward the play-in tournament, but there’s still a nagging sense that Towns has yet to completely fulfill his vast potential as a former No. 1 overall pick.
Andrew Wiggins, K-pop star BamBam and the NBA’s all-star voting problem
On The Post’s ballot, Wiggins’ starting spot was occupied by Rudy Gobert, who has carried the Jazz defensively. With Kawhi Leonard and Paul George out of the mix due to injuries, the West’s final frontcourt spot went to Davis (23.2 PPG, 9.5 RPG and 2.8 APG) rather than Wiggins. Davis and the Los Angeles Lakers have been disappointing, but the 28-year-old big man has displayed his tremendous versatility and two-way impact since returning to the court after missing time with a knee sprain. Wiggins has been healthier and steadier than Davis, but Davis is clearly more talented and harder for opponents to contain.
Wild cards: Devin Booker (Phoenix Suns) and Donovan Mitchell (Jazz)
Booker (25.1 PPG, 5.5 RPG, 4.4 APG) has followed up a heartbreaking Finals loss and a Tokyo Olympics gold medal with another year of dependable scoring and well-honed shot creation. His improved commitment on the defensive end has drawn praise from Gobert, and Phoenix deserves to have two all-stars given its consistent excellence.
With George sidelined indefinitely by an elbow injury, the final spot on this ballot came down to Mitchell (25.5 PPG, 4 RPG, 5.2 APG) and Wiggins. This was a fairly quick decision, as Mitchell is the leading scorer on the NBA’s most efficient offense. Even so, his three-point shooting and free throw attempts have dropped noticeably, and those developments could loom large in the playoffs.
Toughest snubs: Paul George, Brandon Ingram, Dejounte Murray and Andrew Wiggins
• Andrew Wiggins, K-pop star BamBam and the NBA’s all-star voting problem | null | null | null | null | null |
Race in America: History Matters with Deborah Watts
Mamie Till-Mobley stirred the conscience of the country after she insisted on an open casket funeral of her 14-year-old son and allowed Jet magazine to publish photos of his brutalized body. Her son, Emmett Till, was murdered by white supremacists in 1955. On Tuesday, Feb. 8 at 12:00 p.m. ET, Deborah Watts, co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation and a distant cousin of Emmett Till, discusses how Till-Mobley galvanized the civil rights movement in our continuing series about the role of Black women in the country’s history.
Deborah Watts
Provided by representatives of Deborah Watts.
Deborah Watts is an author, motivational speaker and entrepreneur. After spending 22 years in Corporate America, Deborah became the CEO of Watts-Five Enterprises an international marketing, management and business consultant to numerous organizations. It is under the Watt’s Five Enterprises’ umbrella that she established one of Minnesota’s first electronic magazines for urban professionals and communities of color called The Hookup Network.com. Thousands of readers have subscribed to the e-magazine offering news, jobs, community activities, arts and entertainment and more.
As the successful author of 101 ways to know you’re “black” in corporate America. She creatively provided a “voice to the voiceless” by exposing racism and discrimination experienced by people of color in Corporate America. She has served as a guest speaker and as a facilitator while conducting seminars and workshops to spark dialogue in corporate settings about the value of diversity/inclusion and the importance of creating healthy multicultural workplaces and relationships. Deborah is frequently asked to offer her “words of wisdom” and advice to young men and women who are entering the workforce today.
She has also been featured in the National Black MBA, Black Enterprise, Essence, Jet, I AM and Plymouth magazines and has appeared as a guest on BET and NPR, the Black Family Channel as Today’s History Maker, Comcast Newsmakers, The NAACP’s Crisis Today, Cox Communications, ABC, CNN, SiriusXM, MSNBC, NBC, TMZ, CBS and many other local and national TV and Radio networks.
Deborah is also the first African American woman to represent Minnesota’s third congressional district as a 2004 candidate for Congress in the United States House of Representatives.
Ms. Watts is now the co-founder and board president of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation (ETLF) and the Emmett Till Institute for Learning and Leadership (E-TILL). Founded in 2005, ETLF is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization committed to preserving the memory and legacy of (her cousins), Emmett Louis Till and his mother Mamie Till Mobley’s hope for justice and that his death not be in vain. As a promise to his mother, they are “creating a legacy of hope” and building an important bridge from the past to the present and future. While, “Preserving the Past and inspiring the future.” they offer programs, opportunities and scholarships that educate, equip, inspire and empower youth, women and their families for a better future. The organization engages with students, youth groups in colleges and universities and a wide range of audiences and communities across the country with two of their signature presentations: Who Killed Emmett Till? And the Power of History: Turning Tragedy into Triumph . Both provide a powerful platform for interdisciplinary, intergenerational interaction, discussion and solutions. Their hope is that this painful part of our history will not be repeated and will inspire youth and young adults to reach their fullest potential – something Emmett did not have a chance to do. | null | null | null | null | null |
A journalist from New Zealand made international headlines in the summer for confronting the Taliban in its first news conference after taking over Afghanistan about what the hard-line group would do to protect the rights of women and girls. Now, Charlotte Bellis is six months pregnant and has chosen Kabul as a temporary base as she fights to return to her native country — whose strict coronavirus restrictions, she said, left her stranded outside its borders.
Bellis, 35, from Christchurch, is one of what advocates say are thousands of New Zealand nationals unable to return because the border is largely closed — and she is calling out the government for a lottery system that kept her out, and for denying her application for an emergency medical exemption despite letters from medical experts confirming the dangers of giving birth in Afghanistan.
New Zealand’s minister for covid-19 response, Chris Hipkins, on Monday defended the system for allocating spots to returning nationals and said “there is a place in Managed Isolation and Quarantine for people with special circumstances like Ms. Bellis.”
Bellis said she has faced questions about why she didn’t go to another country. “And to that I say: Do people really expect a six-month-pregnant woman to jump on tourist visas from country to country, having lost her health insurance and her job, with no family support, without her partner, only to show up at a hospital when she goes into labor with a credit card and say, ‘Can I give birth here?’ ” | null | null | null | null | null |
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — An intellectually disabled former Tennessee death row inmate will be eligible for parole in about five years after a judge re-sentenced him Monday to serve two concurrent life sentences, giving hope to Pervis Payne’s family that he could be a free man relatively soon after serving more than three decades in prison. | null | null | null | null | null |
Race in America: History Matters with Tomiko Brown-Nagin
February 10, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. EST
Judge Constance Baker Motley was the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary and the only woman on the NAACP legal team who won the landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. On Thursday, Feb. 10 at 12:00 p.m. ET, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, discusses her new book, “Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality,” in our continuing series about the role of Black women in the country’s history.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Tomiko Brown-Nagin is Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and Professor of History at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, she was appointed chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and of the American Law Institute, and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her previous book, Courage to Dissent won the Bancroft Prize in 2011. She frequently appears as a commentator in media. She lives in Boston with her family. | null | null | null | null | null |
I’ve had my Instant Pot for more than three years now. I wouldn’t say I started out as a skeptic of the appliance itself, but more of my ability to make its purchase worthwhile. Those doubts have long since passed. I am officially an IP enthusiast, if not someone who tries to cook everything in it. Still, I often ask myself how I can wring even more use out of the appliance. | null | null | null | null | null |
Assistant Professor Carolyn Chun.
Chun outside the building where she teaches math at the U.S. Naval Academy.
“If I’m going to be let go because I point out that the system is biased, then I’m okay with that,” Chun says. “I keep saying there’s bias, and people keep saying there’s bias, and I want to put my money where my mouth is.” | null | null | null | null | null |
They were hearing from fellow Black journalists grappling with their experiences of working in a predominantly White industry, sharing stories of pay disparities, racism and managers who misunderstand or dismissed their ideas.
Their new site, the nonprofit Capital B, launched Monday morning with $9 million in philanthropic backing — the Ford Foundation and the American Journalism Project are their biggest funders — and a staff of 16 that they expect to expand to 27 soon.
They’re starting their work at a time when many large newspapers and television networks have pledged to hire and promote more Black journalists and prioritize coverage of race. But most of those efforts will ultimately serve “storytelling about Black people and Black issues for White people,” said Williams, formerly the editor in chief of Vox and now Capital B’s CEO. “We wanted to create something that wasn’t just going to do that.”
The site launched with a team dedicated to national reporting and one focused on Atlanta, with plans for more local newsrooms soon. Coverage will center on health, criminal justice, politics and education, and some stories will be made available to other news organizations that partner with Capital B.
On its first day, Capital B’s site published a profile of a housing activist turned-reluctant politician, elected during the blue wave that put many Black progressives in office; a feature on the “false promise” of hiring Black police chiefs after high-profile incidents; and the 1994 crime bill’s lingering impact on higher education in the prison system. Capital B’s Atlanta site published a guide to using free at-home coronavirus tests, a piece on Black homeowners fighting eviction and what locals said in a series of meetings and interviews about what they wanted from news media.
In recent years, Black newspapers have suffered some of the same readership and revenue drops as the broader media industry, though some executives maintain they’ve long faced a disparity in claiming ad dollars. But there have also been efforts to bolster the Black press, including “Word in Black,” a collaboration among 10 prominent publishers, and new local digital platforms, such as Chicago’s The TRiiBE.
“Black media still provides the news with cultural context, a different perspective, historical context,” she said. “It just does it in a way that is uniquely Black, for lack of a better way to say it.”
Williams said she still fields questions about whether the world needs another Black media outlet. “Decades ago, there used to be like three newspapers in a town, and people used to have options,” she said. “We’re not trying to be the only one, and we don’t think we should be. We think a community deserves options.”
Meanwhile, there has been no shortage lately of digital-media start-ups seeking a foothold in even more crowded markets — from Grid News, an explainer-heavy site that launched this month with a reported $10 million in financing; to the as-yet-unnamed global news site from former Bloomberg CEO Justin Smith and former New York Times columnist Ben Smith (who in an interview spoke of the “200 million college-educated people who speak English around the world” as an underserved audience).
“That’s not a comment on the quality of journalism that The Washington Post or anybody else produced,” Sebastian added. “It’s just a fact of being a Black journalist working in a mainstream newsroom. It is hard to over and over again have to explain why this moment is so gut-wrenching.”
White, previously a managing editor at The Atlantic, said there can be immense pressure being one of the few, or the only, Black woman in the room, “fighting for the lens through which you see the world to be seen,” while knowing Black America “is not a monolith.”
“I wanted to, instead of sitting on a perch at a White institution and trying to occasionally get that work done,” she said, “really do that work every single day.”
This story has been updated since the Capital B’s national website went live on Monday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sony is buying Bungie, maker of the “Destiny” games, for $3.6 billion. The news comes two weeks after Microsoft announced it was acquiring Activision Blizzard for a record $68.7 billion in an all-cash deal.
Sony, the dominant console maker, plans to run Bungie as a subsidiary with a board of directors that includes current Bungie CEO Pete Parsons.
Bungie, which is well known for making the “Destiny” games, will continue working on the franchise and producing new titles. The Bellevue, Wash.-based studio has more than 900 employees.
At the start of this year, the games industry has been full of consolidation news. A week before Microsoft announced its deal, Take-Two made waves on Jan. 11 for what had then been the largest video game purchase in history, agreeing to buy mobile game giant Zygna for $12.7 billion. | null | null | null | null | null |
The grave of covid-19 patient Johnnie Wayne Novotny, who needed an ICU bed and a specialist when he died on Aug. 8, 2021, when ICU beds were unavailable in a wide area in and around Stillwater, Okla. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Guys, look. It’s been a rough few years, and I understand that. But I think that you’ll agree when I say it’s simply time to move on, to start living our lives without fear. To stop trying to force folks to do things they don’t want to do simply in order to limit the small chance that people might die as a result.
At first I misread it and thought he was saying that there had been more deaths from covid-19 than had been murdered in the United States in its history, which is obviously wrong. But that was my mistake. Instead, he was pointing out that from Jan. 18 to Jan. 30, the country saw more new deaths from covid than there were murders in 1991. (If you’re about to start typing “dying with!!!!!!” in an email or a tweet, please read this.) Those 12 days were deadlier for Americans than the deadliest year of homicides in our country’s history.
We can take this further. The current covid-19 death toll — a toll that began less than two years ago — has taken the lives of about the same number of people as have been murdered since 1975. We’ve seen as many covid deaths since Jan. 21 as we did murders last year — a year in which murder spiked. We’ve seen as many deaths from covid-19 since early October of last year as there have been recorded murders since the beginning of 2010.
There are obvious differences between murder and covid-19, of course. One is that covid-19 deaths are almost entirely preventable. That while there have been concerted efforts to both tamp down on homicides and on deaths from the coronavirus, only the latter can be largely eliminated by a simple vaccine.
Here, too, there’s lots of misinformation. So we’ll appeal to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In December, Americans ages 50 and up were 18 times more likely to wind up in the hospital if they weren’t fully vaccinated. That gap nearly tripled when comparing the unvaccinated to those who had received a booster dose. Those who had been fully vaccinated were 15 times less likely to die; those who’d gotten a booster were 68 times less likely to die of covid.
A lot of Americans, however, choose not to get vaccinated. Some quit their jobs rather than take that step, even when it protects them and slows the spread of the virus to others. That, too, is a concern expressed by experts: Letting the virus spread unchecked means that both those who choose not to be vaccinated and those who cannot for medical reasons are at increased risk of infection. It means more strain on hospitals and hospital workers.
There’s a partisan gulf on that, as you would likely assume, but even among Democrats, views are about split. Even half of Democrats appear to think it’s time to simply get back to normal.
The irony is that 9 in 10 Republicans feel the same way. Most of them have been vaccinated, it’s important to note, although most of the unvaccinated are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. Vaccination rates among White Republicans are far lower than among White Democrats and lower than Black and Hispanic Americans. It’s a gap that’s likely to widen, given hostility on the right to booster shots. | null | null | null | null | null |
Former president Donald Trump speaks Jan. 29 during a Save America rally in Conroe, Tex. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
His assertion that he would “treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly” and that “if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons.” This leverages a convenient bit of rhetoric that suggests that hundreds of people arrested solely for trespassing at the U.S. Capitol that day are in jail (they are not) or that the unpleasant and unacceptable conditions they face are specific to them (they are not). But Trump is not saying “let’s improve their conditions or release them on bail.” He’s saying, “maybe I’ll give them a pass on participating in the riot aimed at securing me a second term in office.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo holds a news conference on coronavirus measures in Brussels on Jan 21. (Philip Reynaers/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK) (Philip Reynaers/Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
The measure will allow 65,000 civil servants to become unavailable at the end of the workday, but for “the event of exceptional and unforeseen circumstances requiring action that cannot wait until the next working period,” according to the Brussels Times. Workers won’t be penalized for holding off on responding to to emails or phone calls.
Belgium’s move is a step in the direction of a growing trend in Europe over the past five years, which has gained strength as the pandemic raises new questions about the future of work. Last November, Portugal approved a set of laws prohibiting employers from contacting remote workers after hours, a measure that applies to companies with more than 10 employees. Spain, Greece and Ireland, have mulled or enacted similar measures amid the pandemic. | null | null | null | null | null |
United States and Russia dispute Ukraine crisis in United Nations meeting
U.N. ambassadors from Russia and United States blame each other’s countries for making tensions worse.
The United Nations Security Council meets Monday in New York to discuss the tense situation between Russia and Ukraine. Ambassadors from the United States and Russia accused each other's countries of making the situation worse. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
Russia accused Western nations Monday of “whipping up tensions” over Ukraine and said the United States had brought “pure Nazis” to power in Kyiv as the United Nations Security Council held an intense debate on Moscow’s troop buildup near its southern neighbor.
“And they are attempting, without any factual basis, to paint Ukraine and Western countries as the aggressors to [make up a reason to] attack,” she said.
The harsh exchanges in the Security Council came as Moscow lost an attempt to block the meeting. It was the first open session where all nations involved in the Ukraine crisis spoke publicly, even though the U.N.'s most powerful body took no action.
The Security Council is a group of 15 United Nations member countries that meet to discuss peace and security issues. There are five permanent council members: the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France. For the council to call on some or all United Nations members to act, none of the five permanent members can vote to oppose the action.
Although more high-level diplomacy is expected this week, talks between the United States and Russia have so far failed to ease tensions in the crisis, with the West saying Moscow is preparing to invade. Russia denies it has demanded that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) promise never to allow Ukraine to join the military and political alliance, stop the deployment of NATO weapons near Russian borders, and roll back its forces from Eastern Europe. NATO says it would not agree to any those.
Nebenzia blamed the United States for Ukraine’s parliament removing the country’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. Yanukovych was friendly with Russia. Nebenzia said that incident created bitterness between Ukraine and Russia.
“If they hadn’t done this, then we to date would be living in a spirit of good neighborly relations and mutual cooperation,” he said. “However, some in the West just don’t clearly like this positive scenario. What’s happening today is yet another attempt to drive a wedge between Russia and Ukraine.”
Nebenzia left the council chamber as the Ukrainian ambassador started to speak, giving his seat to his deputy.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will visit Ukraine on Tuesday for talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky and will speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin later Monday, to urge him to “step back,” Johnson’s office said. Johnson says he is considering sending hundreds of British troops to NATO countries in the Baltic region as a show of strength. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sony is buying Bungie, maker of the popular “Destiny” game franchise, for $3.6 billion. The news comes two weeks after Microsoft announced it was acquiring video game mega-publisher Activision Blizzard for a record $68.7 billion.
Sony, the dominant video game console maker, plans to run Bungie as a subsidiary with a board of directors that includes current Bungie CEO Pete Parsons. Bungie confirmed Monday its games would continue to be available on multiple platforms, and not become exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation. Bungie’s “Destiny 2,” an online-only first-person shooter game, currently runs on Xbox, PlayStation, Stadia and PC.
The acquisition is still pending regulatory approval.
The deal would give Sony ownership over the popular online game, one that continues to evolve and deliver regular content updates, some available for players to purchase in-game, spending real money to obtain unique items.
“This is an important step in our strategy to expand the reach of PlayStation to a much wider audience,” said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “We understand how vital Bungie’s community is to the studio and look forward to supporting them as they remain independent and continue to grow.”
“Destiny 2′s” next update, “The Witch Queen,” comes out February 22. In the new update, players will be able to face off against a villain teased in the game series for nearly a decade.
Bungie, which is also known for creating the “Halo” franchise, will continue working on “Destiny” and producing new titles. The Bellevue, Wash.-based studio, founded in 1991, has more than 900 employees.
At the start of this year, the games industry has provided plenty of consolidation news. A week before Microsoft announced its deal, Take-Two made waves on Jan. 11 for what had then been the largest video game purchase in history, agreeing to buy mobile game giant Zygna for $12.7 billion. | null | null | null | null | null |
So for Israel, NSO has become a diplomatic asset. But the larger consequence may be the creation of a world where everyone is under watch. The United States, according to the Times, has displayed an increasingly “intense desire” for hacking tools, to serve the same crime-fighting purposes for which Pegasus was supposedly created. Other countries, understandably, have the same interest. These governments should hold themselves to account by pledging not to allow the export of any spyware to any client that doesn’t put into place requirements for its use based in the rule of law, or from any company that doesn’t do due diligence on its clients. Spyware is indeed a weapon, and an arms control treaty among nations devoted to civil liberties is essential to check its proliferation. | null | null | null | null | null |
Joe Rogan said in an Instagram post Sunday that he'll “do my best to make sure that I’ve researched” the topics discussed on his podcast. (Vivian Zink/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images)
As a growing number of musicians yanked their work from the streaming service Spotify over misinformation about coronavirus vaccines, podcaster Joe Rogan posted a video this weekend admitting he could do more to better inform his millions of listeners, particularly when it comes to covid-19.
Spotify announced Jan. 30 that they will add a content advisory to any podcast episode that includes discussion of the coronavirus. (Reuters)
Rogan’s comments came amid a firestorm after hundreds of medical professionals called out Spotify earlier this month for letting the podcaster spread “false and societally harmful assertions” about the coronavirus and vaccines, The Washington Post reported. Then, starting with folk rocker Neil Young a week ago, a growing number of artists and podcasters told the streaming service they would take their work off Spotify if the company did not stop Rogan from spreading misinformation on the coronavirus.
Spotify chose Rogan, who gave the company exclusive rights to his podcast in 2020 for a reported $100 million. On Wednesday, Spotify started taking down Young’s music, including the hits “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
Ultimatums from other artists followed. Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell on Friday announced she was pulling her music from Spotify to “stand in solidarity” with Young over what she called “lies that are costing people their lives.” Nils Lofgren, frontman of the band Grin and a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, wrote in a statement on Young’s website that he was also cutting ties with the streaming service. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who have deals to host podcasts for Spotify, on Sunday released a statement expressing “concerns” about covid misinformation on the platform.
On Sunday, the streaming giant broke its silence over the growing rebellion. The company announced it was publishing its internal rules that govern what’s allowed on the platform and tweaking its policies about coronavirus content by adding a disclaimer to any podcast dealing with covid-19.
Rogan hinted at “other things going on behind the scenes” that are driving the controversy without specifying what those were. He apologized to Young, Mitchell and others who are upset.
On his podcast, Rogan has suggested that young, healthy people shouldn’t get vaccinated, contrary to recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When he caught the coronavirus in September, Rogan told listeners he’d treated the infection with the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, which the Food and Drug Administration has strongly recommended against in fighting covid, the disease caused by the virus. | null | null | null | null | null |
Russia denounces U.S. at U.N. meeting for ‘whipping up hysteria’ over Ukraine
North Korea tests its longest-range missile since 2017
Zelensky to Russia: 'What is this sado-masochism?'
In a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Jan. 31 requested by the United States, Russian ambassador to the U.N. Vasily Nebenzya said there was “no proof whatsoever” of Russian military action against Ukraine. | null | null | null | null | null |
The grave of Johnnie Novotny in Pawnee, Okla. Novotny, 69, died of covid-19 in August amid a shortage of ICU beds in the region. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Guys, look. It’s been a rough few years, and I understand that. But I think you’ll agree when I say it’s simply time to move on. To start living our lives without fear. To stop trying to force folks to do things they don’t want to do simply to limit the small chance that people might die as a result.
At first I misread it and thought he was saying that there had been more deaths from covid-19 than people murdered in the United States in its history, which is obviously wrong. But that was my mistake. Instead, he was pointing out that from Jan. 18 to 30, the country saw more new deaths from covid than there were murders in 1991. (If you’re about to start typing “dying with!!!!!!” in an email or a tweet, please read this.) Those 12 days were deadlier for Americans than the deadliest year of homicides in our country’s history.
We can take this further. The current covid-19 death toll — a toll that began less than two years ago — is about the same as the number of people who have been murdered since 1975. We’ve seen as many covid deaths since Jan. 21 as we did murders in 2020 — a year in which murder spiked. We’ve seen as many deaths from covid-19 since early October of last year as the number of recorded murders since the beginning of 2010.
There are obvious differences between murder and covid-19, of course. One is that covid-19 deaths are almost entirely preventable. While there have been concerted efforts to tamp down on homicides and on deaths from the coronavirus, only the latter can be largely eliminated by a simple vaccine.
Here, too, there’s lots of misinformation. So we’ll appeal to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In December, Americans 50 and up were 18 times as likely to wind up in the hospital with covid-19 if they weren’t fully vaccinated. That gap nearly tripled when comparing the unvaccinated with those who had received a booster dose. Those who had been fully vaccinated were 15 times less likely to die; those who’d gotten a booster were 68 times less likely to die.
A lot of Americans, however, choose not to get vaccinated. Some quit their jobs rather than take that step, even when it protects them and slows the spread of the virus to others. That, too, is a concern expressed by experts: Letting the virus spread unchecked means that those who choose not to be vaccinated and those who cannot for medical reasons are at increased risk of infection. It means more strain on hospitals and hospital workers.
There’s a partisan gulf on that, as you would probably assume, but even among Democrats, views are about split. Even half of Democrats appear to think it’s time to simply get back to normal.
Nine in 10 Republicans feel the same way. Most of them have been vaccinated, it’s important to note, although most of the unvaccinated are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. Vaccination rates among White Republicans are far lower than among White Democrats and lower than Black and Hispanic Americans. It’s a gap that’s likely to widen, given hostility on the right to booster shots. | null | null | null | null | null |
The news last week triggered scrutiny over who could be the next nominee, with several names emerging as possible contenders. The White House has already confirmed that U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs, 55, of South Carolina, is under consideration. Others reported to be under consideration include Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Leondra Kruger, 45, a California Supreme Court justice. | null | null | null | null | null |
As the New York Times’ Jesse Wegman reported, the national archivist is refusing to add a 28th Amendment to the Constitution, all because the deadline for states to ratify it expired decades ago.
Practically, its passage means that discrimination based on gender, or treating women differently than men when it comes to divorce, property rights, or anything else is unconstitutional.
Debate over this amendment has tended to ebb and flow with civil rights debates in America more broadly. The push for Congress to ratify it revved up in the ’60s (which is the subject of the 2020 miniseries “Mrs. America”). Right after former president Donald Trump took office, and women started getting much more involved in politics, the issue got revived again. In 2017, Nevada became the first state in decades to ratify it. Illinois followed. Then Virginia in 2020.
The administration noted that the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a feminist icon, had made comments suggesting she realized the deadline was immovable: “I hope someday it will be put back in the political hopper, starting over again, collecting necessary number of States to ratify it.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden administration to send more than $1 billion to states to plug orphaned wells, which leak planet-warming methane
Curtis Shuck, founder of Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Bozeman, Mont., that caps abandoned oil and gas wells, observes measurements of leaking methane gas from a capped oil well in June near Shelby, Mont. (Adrián Sanchez-Gonzalez for The Washington Post) (Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez/For The Washington Post)
The White House on Monday announced new steps to help curb the emissions of methane, saying it will send $1.15 billion to states to clean up thousands of orphaned oil and gas wells that leak the powerful planet-warming gas.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement that the new funding “is enabling us to confront the legacy pollution and long-standing environmental injustices” that have long plagued vulnerable communities. “This is good for our climate, for the health our communities, and for American workers,” Haaland said.
Tens of thousands of abandoned wells dot the country, where the oil and gas companies or individual owners went out of business or are otherwise no longer responsible for their cleanup.
The Department of Interior reported earlier this month that there are 130,000 documented abandoned wells across the country. And, an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund and McGill University found that about 9 million people in the United States live within a mile of an orphaned well. As recently as 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the number could actually be as high as 2 to 3 million.
“Some might be relatively harmless, and some might be quite dangerous,” said Mary Kang, a researcher at McGill University who has long studied the problem. The wells can emit a range of gases, she said, including methane, which is the primary component of natural gas. In its first 20 years in the atmosphere, methane has more than 80 times the warming potential than that of carbon dioxide.
“It’s a pretty big problem that’s flown under the radar for a long time,” said Adam Peltz, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, who also worked on the analysis. He called the White House’s move “a down payment on this problem.”
The funds will go to the 26 states that submitted notices of intent to the Department of Interior late last year. The allocations range between about $25 million to Alabama, and $107 million for Texas. More will be spent in the coming months and years, as part of grants to states.
“Even if there was more money right this second, the states would be hard pressed to spend it effectively,” said Peltz, who applauded the move. He did note, though, that lawmakers will need to revisit the funding amounts as more orphaned wells are identified.
“We welcome the administration’s efforts to address orphaned wells,” Bethany Williams, spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement. The organization published a new standard last year related to well remediation and the cement plugs used to close the wells. “Safety and environmental protection are top priorities for our industry,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Allen was in the middle of a Zoom meeting on education when the texts started coming in about all the ambulances. He got to Half Street as soon as he could, only to find one of his good friends in despair — her mother was one of those dead.
“Then we went around the corner,” he said, describing another death, another daughter in despair. | null | null | null | null | null |
Shapiro, in an email to The Washington Post, said he expects to be vindicated.
“I’m optimistic that Georgetown’s investigation will be fair, impartial, and professional, though there’s really not much to investigate,” Shapiro wrote. “And I’m confident that it will reach the only reasonable conclusion: my Tweet didn’t violate any university rule or policy, and indeed is protected by Georgetown policies on free expression.”
In a tweet Thursday, Shapiro wrote: “I apologize. I meant no offense, but it was an inartful tweet. I have taken it down.” He posted a longer statement on Friday, saying he regretted his “poor choice of words,” but called it a shame that “men and women of every race” will be excluded from the president’s nomination process.
“A person’s dignity and worth simply do not, and should not, depend on race, gender, or any other immutable characteristic,” Shapiro wrote. “While it’s important that a wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds be represented in the judiciary, so blatantly using identity politics in choosing Supreme Court justices is discrediting to a vital institution.” | null | null | null | null | null |
When news landed last week that there would be a Supreme Court vacancy for President Biden to fill, some in the right-wing pundit class sprung into action: Biden’s promise to fill the slot with a Black woman amounted to discrimination — even affirmative action or a quota.
Collins was pressed on a similar promise Ronald Reagan had made in 1980 to nominate a woman to the court — a pledge that excluded a similar number of prospective candidates as Biden’s pledge does today. She maintained that what Biden did was different because it was done “as a candidate.”
While Collins is a key vote in the full Senate, neither she nor Wicker serves on the Judiciary Committee that will vet the nominee at confirmation hearings. But others who do signaled that they might press the issue.
“I gotta say: That’s offensive,” Cruz said on his podcast. “Black women are, what, 6 percent of the U.S. population? He’s saying to 94 percent of Americans, ‘I don’t give a damn about you. You are ineligible.’ ”
Cruz’s fellow Judiciary Committee Republican, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), told Fox News late last week that he didn’t want such picks to be the subject of a gender or racial “litmus test.”
(Hawley has said he had a litmus test for justices opposing Roe v. Wade, though, and he doesn’t appear to have complained when Donald Trump made his own promise to nominate a woman to the court in 2020.)
Other senators have declined to raise the same concern thus far. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) said Sunday, “I don’t see things as quotas like that, no. … You want folks with a diverse set of backgrounds, of course. So in that sense, no, I wouldn’t agree it’s a quota.”
Perhaps the key one is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who sits on the Judiciary Committee with Cruz and Hawley and is the committee’s former chairman. He disagreed with Collins that Biden’s promise was somehow different than Reagan’s. And he suggested that Republicans need to be careful with this.
Graham then seemed to caution against labeling this an affirmative-action hire, noting that that would entail arguing that the Black woman who is eventually nominated isn’t as qualified.
“Affirmative action is picking somebody not as well-qualified for past wrongs,” Graham said, before pitching one of the front-runners, South Carolina federal District Judge J. Michelle Childs, as a “highly qualified” and “fair-minded” judge.
On the other hand, pushing this line means drifting into territory Graham warned against: Suggesting that whoever is picked will indeed have that asterisk attached to them and might indeed be a “lesser Black woman.”
Both Graham’s and Cruz’s comments also spotlight the potential attractiveness of pushing this argument, though. Right now, it’s the subject of debate because we don’t actually have a nominee. But while Graham praised Fields, Cruz acknowledged that it might be difficult to fight against perhaps the front-runner, federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“As so many of the Biden nominees have had, she didn’t have these outrageously partisan statements; she didn’t have these wildly left-wing statements,” Cruz said of Jackson, who was his Harvard classmate. “I think more than a few people suspect those may be her sentiments, but she hasn’t left much of a paper trail. … So it’s hard to find something tangible in her record to object to.” | null | null | null | null | null |
H.S. basketball notebook: Potomac School starts 11-0; Westlake has look of a contender
The Potomac School Panthers are one of the few undefeated teams remaining in the area. (Courtesy photo/Susie Shaffer) (susan shaffer/Courtesy)
At a school that covers kindergarten through 12th grade, it can be a beautiful thing to watch a student grow.
For Potomac School girls’ coach Mike Hutton, that process is especially gratifying when he knows the student might grow into a pretty good basketball player. Hutton has been the varsity coach for eight years but is involved with the program at every level, and he knew a lot of his current varsity players when they were in the intermediate school program (seventh and eighth grade). So, despite losing most of last winter to the pandemic, he had reason to be excited about this season.
“I knew, in the pipeline, we had talent coming,” Hutton said.
The Panthers are 11-0, thanks in part to a talented group of underclassmen. The team is led by one senior starter — William & Mary commit Kayla Rolph — but much of its roster is young.
“These young kids are playing beyond their years,” Hutton said. “They bring with them basketball IQ and background. We haven’t had that too much in years past; we’ve had a lot of players where this was their second sport.”
In four conference games in the Independent School League A division, Potomac has won by an average of 26.5 points. Hutton said it was last week, when he saw his team stand tall in a 10-point win over previously undefeated Georgetown Day, that he realized the true potential of his squad.
“The thing that has pleased me is the competitive nature,” Hutton said. “I wasn’t sure, even though they had the skill and the IQ, whether they would be ready to compete against older players. But they were ready from day one.
“And it’s difficult to coach that, it has to be inherent. So we’re thriving on that right now. They bring to the table a desire and an intensity that is making their inexperience.”
Westlake shapes into Maryland contender
With his Westlake boys down by a point and about nine seconds remaining against Thomas Stone on Jan. 19, Coach Edward Mouton instructed his players to run their motion offense.
In Westlake’s previous season in 2019-20, Mouton may have called a play. In crucial situations, he often created opportunities for Cameron Tweedy, who was the Southern Maryland Athletic Conference’s top player.
This season’s team is balanced; six players average roughly eight or more points. In those final seconds against Thomas Stone, the Wolverines (8-1) passed until guard Myles Jackson sunk an open three-pointer for a two-point victory.
Last week, Westlake handed North Point its first loss, 81-63, behind guard Aaron Herron’s 24 points.
“Any given day, I can have a different leading scorer,” Mouton said. “If a guy is hot that night, then yes, of course, we want to feed him that basketball. But for the most part, I can go to any one of them.”
During the 2019-20 season, when the Wolverines lost in the third round of the Maryland 2A playoffs, Mouton saw potential in his sophomores. The group continued to develop with its AAU team, the Southern Maryland All-Stars.
Mouton believes this winter’s squad can reach the state finals for the first time since Westlake lost on that stage in 2014 and 2015.
“We are just as good as our 2014 and 2015 teams,” Mouton said.
Amare Wimbush, F, Wise. The senior got the Pumas back on track with a 37-point, 14-rebound performance in Thursday’s 74-72 overtime victory over DuVal.
Natalie Johnson, G, North Point. The senior recorded 27 points, 11 rebounds and five assists in the Eagles’ 69-50 win over Lackey.
Rodney Rice, G, DeMatha. The senior led the way with 23 points as the Stags upended Bishop McNamara, 77-50, to knock the Mustangs out of the No. 1 spot.
Yvonne Lee, G, Broad Run. The senior averaged 19.5 points, seven assists and 4.5 steals this past week, helping secure two double-digit victories as her Spartans continue to emerge as a possible Class 4 title contender.
Paul VI boys at DeMatha, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Edison girls at Mount Vernon, 5:45 p.m. Wednesday
Largo boys at Douglass, 7 p.m. Friday
Clarksburg girls at Churchill, 7:15 p.m. Friday
Lady Colts put D.C. on notice
DaNiya Warren-McClure sat beneath the basket flexing after she Euro-stepped through multiple defenders for an impressive and-one layup Friday. The 15 or so members of Coolidge’s boys’ team, watching their school’s girls’ game, lost their minds.
Some pretended to faint and others screamed as they sprinted down the sideline of the otherwise empty gym. The exuberant reactions were an acknowledgment of the junior guard’s resurgence following a brief midseason slump.
“It was an awesome feeling and greatly appreciated,” said Warren-McClure, who finished with 29 points, four assists and four steals as the Lady Colts knocked off then-No. 19 Banneker, 49-39. “In past games, I had stopped having fun and I was putting unnecessary pressure on myself mentally. But lately I’ve been letting the game come to me, having fun and getting back to basics.”
Despite the Lady Colts’ 11-2 record, most didn’t view Coolidge as a true D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association title contender after low-scoring losses to Wilson (36-27) and Dunbar (35-12), two of the league’s top teams.
But Friday, behind Warren-McClure’s big performance, Coolidge put the District on notice.
“Friday’s big win was exciting and challenging,” Warren-McClure said. “It proved to us that we have what it takes to be a top team in the city.”
South County makes necessary adjustments
After a 49-46 road win over W.T. Woodson on Saturday, the South County Stallions stand alone at the top of the standings in the ever-competitive Patriot District.
The program’s 6-1 conference record is a sign of growth for a team that came into the year without much varsity experience. Coach Mike Robinson, who led these Stallions to state championships in 2018 and 2020, returned just three players from last year’s spring season. He wasn’t about to lower the expectations for this program, but he knew adjustments might be necessary.
“The speed of the varsity game is just different,” Robinson said. “And the physicality. Early on, some of my guys were looking for calls and I just said ‘No, this is basketball now.’ ”
Robinson tested his roster right away, as the Stallions played two of their first three games against Hayfield and South Lakes, serious Northern Virginia contenders.
“The only way to get caught up to speed sometimes is to throw them in it,” Robinson said. “Let’s face it: the only way you’re going to be successful in this sport is to go through the grind and have some adversity.”
The Stallions coach has been most surprised by his team’s willingness to listen and their excitement to develop. He thinks they still have untapped potential, but everything is on the table for a team that is willing to learn.
“I don’t know if we’re as talented as two years ago, but these guys work a lot harder than the team I had two years ago,” Robinson said. “Which is great. It’s all you can want.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: World Stage: Crisis in Ukraine with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
MR. IGNATIUS: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. My guest today is Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, and the person who is at the epicenter of the crisis that’s building on the Ukrainian border. Mr. Secretary-General, thank you for joining us at this crucial moment for NATO and the West. Welcome to Washington Post Live.
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: Thank you so much for having me, David. It’s a great pleasure to be with you today.
MR. IGNATIUS: Before we start, I want to just remind our audience that if you want to join our conversation on this topic, please tweet any questions that you have to Post Live and we’ll try to take a look at them, and if we can, use some. Mr. Secretary-General, I want to start with a situation near the border. Over the last 48 hours, have you and NATO seen any increases in Russian forces, and do you think, based on any intelligence precursors that you’re seeing, that preparations for an attack are imminent, that they’re moving things that they would need to use in a hurry?
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: What we see is that the buildup continues with more and more combat troops, with artillery, with armored vehicles, with more ammunition, with more fuel and supplies. And we also see that they are now starting to move into an increased Russian presence in Belarus. We see, we also have planes and helicopters. So all of this together, of course, makes the warning time shorter and shorter. So we need to be prepared. There is a real risk for a new Russian invasion or some form of aggressive action against Ukraine. But at the same time, there’s no certainty. And we continue to work for a political solution. Russia has a choice either to engage in a political dialogue with NATO and NATO allies or to choose confrontation. It’s up to them.
MR. IGNATIUS: We’ll get to the diplomatic options in a moment, Mr. Secretary-General. I want to just stay with the military situation on the border. Russia has scheduled exercises with Belarus from February 10 to 20, and many have speculated that that might be the moment in which the risk of invasion would be greatest. Do you share that assessment?
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: It is a serious risk that exercises like the exercise that is scheduled in Belarus can be used as a disguise for a military action, invasion of Ukraine, because that has happened before. That was actually what happened back in 2014, when they annexed the Crimea, and also when they went into and took control over Donbass in parts of eastern Ukraine. So, Russia has used military exercises before as a disguise, as a cover. They have also moved in time their strategic exercise. Normally, that should have taken place several months ago. Now it will--came at the same time, take place at the same time as the military exercise in Belarus.
So, when you see the military buildup that continues, when we see all the different exercises that are planned in and around Ukraine, and combine that with the threatening rhetoric where they demand something from us they don't--they know they cannot get and say there will be consequences, "military-technical" consequences as they put it, if we don't meet their demands, and then on top of that, we have the track record of Russia using force against Ukraine before. So military buildup exercises, threatening rhetoric, and a track record, all of that together, of course, make this a serious threat we have to take very seriously.
MR. IGNATIUS: So, let me ask you a question that I think the world most wonders about in terms of NATO, and that is what your response would be in the hours after a Russian attack. Ukraine is not a NATO member and President Biden and others have been clear that NATO troops wouldn't be involved. But you would take actions to protect the alliance. Give us a sense of what they might be.
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: So, we have made it very clear that there will be severe consequence for Russia, a high price to pay. That is partly economic and political sanctions against Ukraine that NATO allies will impose, partly the fact that since 2014 NATO and NATO allies have trained, supported the Ukrainian armed forces in many different ways. So they’re much more capable of defending themselves now than in 2014, much larger army, better equipped, better trained, a better command. So the Ukrainians are able to actually also fight against invading Russian troops and forces.
And thirdly, and that’s that we will, of course, make sure that there is no misunderstanding about NATO’s readiness, commitment to protect and defend all NATO allies. Ukraine is a partner, but for NATO allies we have--and we support them--but for NATO allies we have a hundred percent security guarantees. Our collective defense clause, Article 5, an attack on one ally would trigger a response from the whole alliance. And therefore, we have already increased our military presence in the eastern part of the alliance, with more ships, with more planes. The U.S. has put for the first time in decades an aircraft strike group under NATO command. U.S., U.K., France, and others have made clear that they’re ready to deploy troops and forces to the eastern part of the NATO alliance. And we have increased already the readiness of the NATO response force, in total around 40,000 troops that can be deployed on short notice. So we have done a lot to make sure that we deter an aggression against NATO-allied countries and that we are able to--as we have already increased our presence but we’re also able to further significantly increase NATO’s military presence in the eastern part of the alliance if needed.
MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Secretary-General, despite statements like the ones you’ve just made this morning, there has been some skepticism in different capitals about the seriousness of this crisis led, not surprisingly, by Russia, which said today at the United Nations Security Council that the United States, and by extension NATO, was stoking hysteria. On Friday, as you know, Ukrainian President Zelensky complained that the U.S. and NATO were needlessly scaring Ukrainians and suggested that there might be a political motivation for this crisis and the rhetoric coming out of Washington and other capitals. You’ve seen the intelligence. You’re in the middle of this. What do you say to these arguments that this is politically motivating, stoking hysteria? What would the NATO Secretary-General say in response?
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: I will say that we are receiving a lot of intelligence. A lot is also available from open sources, from commercial satellites, and so on. And there’s no certainty about exactly what Russia will do, and most likely no final decision has been made. So in that sense, no one can predict exactly what will happen in the coming weeks and months.
But what we do know is that there’s a continued military buildup, the largest massing of forces in Europe since the Second World War, and these are combat-ready heavy equipped forces, and we see them from the south, Crimea, then we see them in the East, in proper Russia but also in Donbass, and we see, of course, now more and more to the north in Russia but also partly in Belarus. And there is no sign that this military buildup is slowing down. Actually, it continues.
And then--so that’s a fact. That is a reality. And then we can all read the very threatening statements and the kind of ultimatum Russia is putting to NATO which demands things from us they know we cannot deliver. And then we have the track record, as I said, and then we have the exercises. So, while we are describing the facts and the realities that Russia's military buildup is unexplained and unjustified, so it's for Russia to explain and for Russia to de-escalate and for Russia to engage in a serious political dialogue with NATO and NATO allies. We have made it clear that we are ready to do so.
When it comes to President Zelensky, I have regular contact with him, spoke with him many times over the last weeks or months. And of course, they are also concerned, but they also--they also now see the consequences of just the heightening tensions. For instance, when it comes to the financial flows out of Ukraine, and that's a serious concern. That's already the kind of price they have to pay for a Russian military buildup in and around Ukraine.
MR. IGNATIUS: So Zelensky has spoken Friday and in recent days about his concern about panic and statements that could panic his population in Ukraine. But I want to ask you whether it's possible that the U.S. and NATO are getting their signals crossed in this sense. We want to scare and deter the Russians to prevent them from invading, and we want to reassure the Ukrainians. But you sometimes wonder if we're doing the opposite. We're scaring the Ukrainians and in some odd ways may be reassuring the Russians. How would you react to that criticism?
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: It would have been irresponsible if we didn’t address the continued military buildup that has taken place over many weeks. If NATO didn’t react to that at all, then I think it would have been justified to criticize us for being passive. We are, as I said, describing the facts, but we’re also then conveying a message to Russia to deter them from using those forces. We are consulting very closely with Ukraine, at many different levels, also here in Brussels. And we are describing a way out, providing Russia an opportunity to sit down. And we met recently the NATO Russia Council who didn't agree, but at least that was a sign or a step in the right action to de-escalate and to find a political solution.
But again, for NATO not to respond to the biggest military buildup in Europe since the end of the Second World War--and actually, this is also in Belarus and also not so far from NATO borders--that would have been impossible, especially since this buildup is met with direct threats or threatening rhetoric towards NATO allies. They're asking us to do--to give up core principles for NATO--the right for every nation to choose its own path, and the right for NATO to defend and protect all allies. They want actually us to move out all troops and all the infrastructure from all NATO allies that joined NATO after 1997, meaning almost half our members. They’ll be some kind of second-class members because we don't have the same right and a possibility to defend these allies. So, there's no possibilities, no option for NATO not to react. And we really tried to be balanced. We prepare a message of deterrence, but also a message of dialogue. And again, we really urge Russia to choose the path of dialogue.
MR. IGNATIUS: Before we turn to diplomacy, Mr. Secretary-General, I want to just ask you one more fundamental military question. You said that NATO is prepared for the worst. NATO is a military alliance that is protected by U.S. and other nuclear weapons. It’s an alliance that absolutely guarantees the security of its members. What would NATO be prepared to do if this war spilled over the borders of Ukraine. For example, Poland is a close ally of Ukraine, and it's my understanding--I've written in my column, Poland is prepared to offer medical assistance to Ukrainians who are wounded in fighting. Suppose Russians chose to attack or block those pathways between Ukraine and Poland? Can you envision a situation in which NATO forces would have to get involved to protect Poland? And then the final question, how do you protect that from becoming an all-out crisis that could rise to the level of a nuclear confrontation?
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: So, NATO is the strongest military alliance in the world and in history, and we represent 50 percent of the world's military might and 50 percent of the world's economic might. And as long as we stand together, we are able to defend and protect all NATO allies against any threat. And to make sure that there is no room for miscalculation, misunderstanding about that, we have increased our presence, especially in the eastern part of the alliance. And we have done that over the last weeks and months.
So for instance, with the U.S. announcement of high readiness of U.S. troops that can be put under NATO command with the aircraft carrier under NATO command, and other allies are sending in capabilities--Spain, Denmark, and many--the Netherlands and many others.
But this is on top of what has taken place. Now over close to eight years, since 2014, NATO has implemented their biggest reinforcement to our collective defense since the end of the Cold War, with battlegroups, NATO led battlegroups in eastern part of the alliance, in the Baltic countries and Poland, with air policing, increased naval presence, and a new command structure. And we have seen more U.S. troops. The European allies are extremely grateful for the fact that the U.S. have over the last years deployed a new brigade in Europe, more pre-positioned equipment, more big exercises in the north and in the south and in the east of the alliance. And all of this sends a very clear message that we are ready to defend and protect all allies.
And the purpose of that is to prevent exactly what you talked about, to prevent that Russia or any other potential adversary tries to take control of any NATO territory or--because the consequences will be so devastating. So, the purpose of NATO is not to provoke a conflict. It is to prevent a conflict. The purpose of deterrence is to deter aggression. And we have done so successfully for more than 70 years during the Cold War when tensions were--was even higher and we had more troops and more of the armies lined up along the borders than we even have today. So, this has worked for 70 years. It's going to continue to work as long as we continue to do what NATO has done, to invest more in defense. And that's also something we've seen in the last years. After many years of cutting defense spending, all European allies have actually increased defense spending every year since 2014. Added together, it comes out to 260 billion extra U.S. dollars since we made a commitment at the NATO summit in 2014 to start to increase defense spending. So all of this is there to prevent any aggression against any NATO allied country.
MR. IGNATIUS: Obviously, the strength of this alliance lies in its unity. Some commentators in the last several weeks have expressed concerns about the unity of NATO, noting that on some issues major countries like France and Germany are not in precise alignment with the United States. Do you have concerns as the Secretary-General about NATO's unity?
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: So first, I think we have to distinguish between unity and then whether there are differences. NATO is an alliance of 30 allies from both sides of the Atlantic, with different governments, different capitals, different history, different political leaderships. And so of course, there are differences and different opinions among many things. That has been the case in NATO since we were established back to the Suez Crisis in '56, or in the '60s when France decided to leave the military cooperation in NATO, or the--or the Iraq war in 2003. So, there are and will be and has been differences between NATO allies.
But the strength of NATO is exactly as you said, our unity, meaning that we have always been able to unite around our core task, the core commitment, Article Five, that we are ready to protect and defend each other. And also, over the last years and the different U.S. administrations, we have seen not less but more U.S. presence in Europe. And for me, it's hard to see any stronger expression of allied willingness to protect and defend each other than we actually are standing up and doing more together. So, so, yes, there are differences. But on the core message of the readiness to defend, we do that together.
And now for instance, Germany leads one of the battlegroups in the eastern part of the alliance in Lithuania. Before 2014, we had no combat troops in eastern part of the alliance. Now Germany's leading one of the combat-ready troops or battlegroups in in the Baltics.
France has made it clear over the last weeks that they are ready--they stand ready to deploy yet another battlegroup to Romania under NATO command. And so other allies are also stepping up and declaring willingness to provide forces to different NATO missions and operations. So on the main issue, the unity and the commitment to defend, there is absolutely unity in our alliance.
MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Secretary, now let's turn to diplomacy, which we all hope can be successful in this crisis. We've just learned within the last few minutes that Secretary of State Blinken will talk to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov tomorrow, if my information is correct, to continue the diplomatic dialogue. NATO received a detailed draft treaty from Russia back in December, and you submitted a detailed written response to that Russian document in the last several weeks. Tell us about how NATO responded to the Russian treaty in as much detail as you can.
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: The first thing we did was actually to invite them to a meeting in the NATO Russia Council, and they accepted, which is a good sign, a first step, because Russia has refused to meet in the NATO Russia Council for more than two years. We sat down. We had open difficult discussions, but at the same time, that was exactly why the meeting and the--and the discussions were so important.
Second, I have conveyed the message to Russia and all the 30 allies and actually invited them for a series of meetings to continue dialogue and to see and to look for a way--a common ground and a way forward.
And thirdly, as you said, we sent them last week a written response, written proposals, and that outlines topics and areas where we see room for common ground. So, this is about partly the state of the NATO-Russia relationships--relationship, and this is about using the lines of communications we already have but also to establish new lines both for and strengthening civilian and military lines of communications. And this is about reestablishing the diplomatic relationships between NATO and Russia, because they closed down our NATO office in Moscow and the Russian mission to NATO. We should re-establish those offices. And this is also about all the ways of improving the--kind of the institutionalized relationship between NATO and Russia.
Then it's about NATO--sorry, European security, including the situation in and around Ukraine. They’ve also stated clearly that, of course, we are ready to sit down and listen to Russian concerns. But we also say clearly that we will not compromise on some core principles, including the right for every nation in Europe to join--or every nation to choose its own path, including whether or not it wants to be part of an alliance as NATO, and NATO’s right to defend and protect all allies.
We also identify arms control as NATO, where we can talk missiles, nuclear. We have seen that that has worked before. For instance, the ban on all intermediate-range missiles we had for many years, which was extremely important for Europe. We should reengage in talks on how to impose limits on missiles and other weapon systems.
Then transparency on military activities, this is very much illustrated now. They are going to have exercises in Belarus with tens of thousands of Russian troops, with advanced weapons systems, with missiles, and so on. Of course, that is--we need transparency. We need--we need mandatory inspections. And so far, Russia has always denied that. So, we need to strengthen the mechanisms for transparency on military activities. This is part of something that is called the Vienna Document, negotiated within the OSCE framework, and also mechanisms for risk reduction to prevent incidents and accidents. And if they happen, make sure that they don't spiral out of control.
So, these are some examples of issues we have identified. We have put our proposals on the table on how we can sit down and address some of the Russian security concerns and reduce tensions and address issues of, for instance, offensive weapons, missiles. But it has to be balanced, it has to be reciprocal, and it has to be verifiable. But that kind of issues, we are absolutely ready to sit down and discuss.
MR. IGNATIUS: And, Secretary General, let me ask you whether there's anything in your written response that speaks to the fundamental Russian complaint that their security is threatened because the alliance is so close to their borders and that asks for an ironclad guarantee that Ukraine would not be a member. You've made it clear, as has President Biden, that a guarantee like that is a non-starter but in your response, did you, for example, reiterate the membership criteria for NATO, which by most people's judgement would mean that Ukraine would be a distant, if ever likely member of the alliance? Anything like that that speaks indirectly to the fundamental Russian concerns?
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: I think that confidentiality is a precondition for any diplomatic progress or success, so therefore, we have not publicized the document, because we are ready to sit down and talk in good faith and also identify avenues--some of these issues have to be addressed bilaterally, U.S. and Russia, in what's called the strategic talks on, for instance, nuclear issues--but then, of course, from the U.S. side, in very close consultation with NATO Allies, as they have done again and again. Some may be discussed in the OSCE framework, and some may be discussed in the NATO-Russia Council. So different issues have to be addressed in different formats.
I also think, for instance, that the Normandy format, where Germany and France--is also a format to, for instance, address some of the issues we are more specific on the situation in and around Donbass. Well, what we have made clear is that, of course, to become a NATO ally, you have to be--NATO is for North America, U.S. and Canada, and for European countries. That's enshrined in the Washington Treaty. So, the first--the first, what should I say, threshold to pass is to be a European country.
But second, you have to share our values--democracy, rule of law, individual liberty. And thirdly, you have to meet NATO standards, and it has to--has to--has to, in a way, also strengthen transatlantic security. So therefore, when it comes to Ukraine, our focus has been and still is on the reforms, on helping them to modernize the defensive security institutions, to meet NATO standards, to fight corruption. And this is the focus, and we have made that clear to Ukraine, but also, of course, to Russia, because this is--this is well known that that's the focus of NATO.
But there's a huge difference between discussing when Ukraine can be a member of NATO and to say that we should sign a legally binding treaty, excluding any enlargement of NATO, because that goes far beyond Ukraine. That includes, for instance, Finland and Sweden. And one of the things that I think we should all carefully note is that Finland and Sweden, countries which are now currently not applying for membership, they have called very clearly on NATO not to sign such a binding treaty. I spoke with the Swedish Prime Minister, Magdalena Andersson, and the Finnish President, Niinistö, and they both conveyed the same message, that for them to see that NATO signs a treaty that makes it impossible any time in the future, forever, for Sweden or Finland to join NATO would actually undermine their right to choose their own path. So, this is about a fundamental right for all allies, for all countries to decide whether they want to belong to NATO or not, and that's for the aspiring countries and 30 allies to decide, no one else. That principle we’ll not compromise on.
MR. IGNATIUS: So, Mr. Secretary-General, we've we run out of time. I am going to ask you to in the briefest way answer what I think of as the Dave Petraeus question posed to him as U.S. forces were heading into Iraq in 2003. Tell me how this ends.
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: I will not tell you that because there is too much uncertainty. What I can tell you is that we will stand united, NATO allies, both in our efforts to find a political solution, as we have done with our common positions, our common invitations to Russia, but also stand united if Russia once again chooses to use military force against a neighbor, united in our support to Ukraine, but also a valid partner but also united in our rock solid and unwavering commitment to protect and defend all allies. And by doing that, we will deter any armed attack against a NATO-allied country.
MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Secretary-General, we are immensely grateful to you for spending this time with us to explain a crisis that has riveted the world's attention. Thank you for being with us today on Washington Post Live.
SEC. GEN. STOLTENBERG: Thank you so much for having me. It's a great honor.
MR. IGNATIUS: So, I hope you’ll come to our upcoming programming. We’ve got a lot of interesting things on Ukraine and other issues ahead this week. Please go to WashingtonPostLive.com to look at that programming. Thank you for joining us for this special session with the NATO Secretary-General. | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden administration to give states $1.15 billion to plug orphaned wells, which leak planet-warming methane
Curtis Shuck, founder of Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Bozeman, Mont., that caps abandoned oil and gas wells, observes measurements of leaking methane gas from a capped oil well in June near Shelby, Mont. (Adrián Sánchez-Gonzalez for The Washington Post)
The White House on Monday announced new steps to help curb emissions of methane, saying it will send $1.15 billion to states to clean up thousands of orphaned oil and gas wells that leak the powerful planet-warming gas.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement that the new funding “is enabling us to confront the legacy pollution and long-standing environmental injustices” that have long plagued vulnerable communities. “This is good for our climate, for the health of our communities, and for American workers,” Haaland said.
Tens of thousands of abandoned wells dot the country in places where the oil and gas companies or individual owners went out of business or are otherwise no longer responsible for their cleanup.
The Interior Department reported earlier this month that there are 130,000 documented abandoned wells across the country. And, an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund and McGill University found that about 9 million people in the United States live within a mile of an orphaned well. As recently as 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the number could actually be as high as 2 million to 3 million.
“Some might be relatively harmless, and some might be quite dangerous,” said Mary Kang, a researcher at McGill University in Canada who has long studied the problem. The wells can emit a range of gases, she said, including methane, which is the primary component of natural gas. In its first 20 years in the atmosphere, methane has more than 80 times the warming potential than that of carbon dioxide.
“It’s a pretty big problem that’s flown under the radar for a long time,” said Adam Peltz, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund who also worked on the analysis. He called the White House’s move “a down payment on this problem.”
The funds will go to the 26 states that submitted notices of intent to the Interior Department late last year. The allocations range from about $25 million for Alabama, up to $107 million for Texas. More will be spent in the coming months and years as part of grants to states.
“Even if there was more money right this second, the states would be hard-pressed to spend it effectively,” said Peltz, who applauded the move. He did note, though, that lawmakers will need to revisit the funding amounts as more orphaned wells are identified.
“We welcome the administration’s efforts to address orphaned wells,” Bethany Williams, spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement. The organization published a new standard last year related to well remediation and the cement plugs used to close the wells. “Safety and environmental protection are top priorities for our industry,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Allen was in the middle of a Zoom meeting on education when the texts started coming in about all the ambulances. He got to Half Street as soon as he could, only to find one of his good friends in despair — her mother, 72-year-old Gloria Hamilton, was one of those dead.
“Then we went around the corner,” he said. “And Mr. Lucas is in the alley, his daughter is right there. I try to console her.” That was 69-year-old Lawrence Lucas, according to police.
D.C. residents can text the phrase LiveLongDC to 888-111 to get naloxone free and confidentially, by delivery or pickup. | null | null | null | null | null |
Third party apps can help. iMazing is a Mac app with a free trial and $35 paid version for managing the data on your iPhone or iPad, or a backup you’ve made of a device and saved to your computer. If you’re working with an encrypted backup, you will need the encryption password for iMazing to be able to read the data. Or you can use an unencrypted backup of your phone. The app has options for exporting as a PDF, Excel file, CSV, text or just for pulling out all the attachments like images and videos. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Earth to GOP: All of Biden’s top Supreme Court candidates are qualified
From left: U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra R. Kruger, and U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. President Biden is considering all of them for the U.S. Supreme Court. (Charles Dharapak, Todd Rogers, Bill O'Leary/AP, The Washington Post)
There is a mythic version of the judicial selection process in which there is one exceptionally gifted candidate — the most qualified nominee — whom a president should choose for the Supreme Court. And nothing else should matter in determining this person other than their professional qualifications and temperament. Any extraneous factors are impurities, pulling an intellectual exercise into the bubbling bog of politics.
Compare this ideal with the recent and effective use of Supreme Court nominations as a political tool. In the summer of 2016, as Donald Trump was securing the Republican nomination for president, he faced skepticism from the judicially conservative about his potential Supreme Court picks. So Trump not only released a list of prospective nominees approved by the Heritage Foundation but also said: “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.” He also issued an updated list 55 days before his reelection loss.
Having made a particularly crass political use of Supreme Court selection, Republicans who criticize President Biden’s narrowing of his first Supreme Court choice to Black women are about to test the public’s tolerance for sanctimonious hypocrisy. In Sen. Roger Wicker’s (R-Miss.) attack, the consideration of race is an instance of “affirmative racial discrimination.” “Would be nice,” tweeted former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, “if Pres Biden chose a Supreme Court nominee who was best qualified without a race/gender litmus test.”
But just widen the historical aperture a moment. Over the centuries, U.S. presidents have selected Supreme Court nominees in part because they were Federalists, or Southerners, or from a Jewish background, or Westerners, or African Americans, or women (in the case of Ronald Reagan’s first choice), or Hispanic, or Federalist Society-approved. Now, with Black women treated this same way by Biden, some have declared the whole enterprise illegitimate. Everyone gets their day in the sun — until a group of Americans who, throughout our history, has suffered greatly from injustice and fought it mightily is about to be honored. Suddenly, the welcoming music stops.
The actual judicial nomination process is different. There is no single person most qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. There is, instead, a category of people we regard as having the background and temperament to be excellent justices. And within those boundaries, every president makes political choices. The real question is: Should presidents preface their announcements of nominees with the polite fiction that the search for a nominee had nothing to do with racial, ethnic or ideological background, even when it manifestly did?
Maybe. But this prevarication strikes me as a strange place to make an ethical stand. Rather, we should ask: Is it generally a good thing when the country’s highest court becomes more diverse in background? Of course it is. For his vigorous assertion of this point, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) deserves credit. “Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America,” the senator said. “You know, we make a real effort as Republicans to recruit women and people of color to make the party look more like America.”
Few would accuse Biden of considering candidates who are not qualified. Graham is partial to a contender from South Carolina, U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs, whom he calls a “fair-minded, highly gifted jurist” and “one of the most decent people I’ve ever met.” U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra R. Kruger and others draw similar praise. The whole process is highlighting the Supreme Court-level achievements of Black women. Why should this immediately strike some Republicans as evidence of affirmative action and litmus tests? Isn’t that tendency itself an indictment?
Allowing diversity to matter is also allowing history to matter. It matters that the Supreme Court, led from 1836 to 1864 by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — who wrote the decision that denied citizenship to all Black Americans — will eventually have a Black female justice. It matters that the historical legacy of the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which found Black people to have “no rights which the White man was bound to respect,” should die, in part, at the hand of a highly respected Black woman. It matters when the ghosts are finally exorcised and the spiritual high places of our democracy are cleansed.
None of this will be evident in the worst of the nomination process, when the culture war is revealed in its full ugliness. But what Biden promises to do in the elevation of a Black woman to the Supreme Court is not the problem. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mexico, which does not require visitors to show proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test, is now considered a “Level 4” country.
States that include popular tourist destinations like Cabo San Lucas, Cancún and Mexico City have seen cases rise sharply amid the omicron surge.
Other countries and territories that moved to the CDC’s highest level on Monday are Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, French Guiana, Anguilla, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Kosovo, Moldova, Singapore and the Philippines. | null | null | null | null | null |
The VMI Corps of Cadets march out of the barracks for a change of command ceremony at the Lexington, Va., campus in May. (Parker Michels-Boyce/For The Washington Post)
Helmer had urged his colleagues on the subcomittee to support the bill, saying VMI should not be held to a different standard than the state’s other colleges and universities.
For more than a year, VMI’s culture has been subjected to intense public scrutiny. A state-ordered investigation, conducted by the law firm of Barnes & Thornburg, concluded in June that the college suffers from a “racist and sexist culture.” The firm’s final report found that “sexual assault is prevalent at VMI" and that about 14 percent of female cadets surveyed — 11 out of 81 students — reported that they had been sexually assaulted at VMI. Another 63 percent of female cadets — 51 out of 81 surveyed — said that a fellow student confided in them that they’d been sexually assaulted or harassed at VMI.
In remarks before the subcommittee, Helmer did not hold back. He told fellow delegates that the “need for change at VMI is pretty legion" and that that the bill could lead to VMI cadets feeling more comfortable reporting that they’d been sexually assaulted. He cited the Barnes & Thornburg survey figures, along with recent reporting by The Post that a Jan. 22 sexual violence prevention class prompted mocking comments about female cadets and the course’s subject material on the anonymous social media app Jodel.
“This superintendent is committed to supporting and doing what is in the best interest of the victims of sexual assault and removing any barriers to minor infractions,” Parker said. “That said...these cases are extremely complex, and so it has been the historic position of the institute that the discretion to make decisions on disciplinary immunity should lie at the institute level, should lie with the institution, with the superintendent to make decisions based on the facts of each particular case.”
One of the subcommittee’s members, Del. Jeffrey M. Bourne (D-Richmond), pressed Parker, saying he didn’t understand the school’s “heartburn."
“Once you put it in code..[it’s] very inflexible, right? I mean, it doesn’t offer the flexibility to look at the circumstances of the case," Parker said. "And, the superintendent truly believes, given the inherent risk in our training environment, the superintendent believes that we need the ability to be able to make decisions on this or at least retain the tools to require access to [counseling] services [for drug or alcohol use] so that we can provide some accountability for a cadet who may disclose, and in that disclosure, reveal a larger problem.”
“We find ourselves in a position where VMI is telling us two different things. They’re saying, ‘Hey, this bill is not needed because the superintendent has the discretion...to grant immunity.’ They say, ‘Hey, nobody’s coming forward that’s been punished for this,’” Helmer said. “So, either there is no problem in granting this bill...passing this bill will have no impact on good order and discipline at VMI and we will learn nothing more about sexual violence. Or, there’s a huge problem and...the impact of us granting discretion to the superintendent is such that victims are terrified to come forward.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The Catholic Church needs reform — from the inside
Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. (Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images)
David Von Drehle’s Jan. 26 Wednesday Opinion column, “A complicit pope cannot claim moral authority,” really brought out the truth. Yes, the Catholic Church needs to be transparent by telling us about what has transpired, but it must also tell us why it is happening. If you don’t know why, how can you change anything? I believe the church leaders know but fear the truth is so embarrassing that it will tear the church apart.
I believe in the policy of transparency, justice and change. Regarding justice, all pedophiles and those who covered up for them must face civil as well as canon law. Justice also means addressing the needs of survivors. Professional counseling and inclusion in the church’s activities must occur. Change must happen. This is probably the hardest part. The very structure, policies and practices of the Catholic Church must be altered. There must be no clericalism. Priests should be allowed to marry. People with different gender preferences must be welcomed. Secrecy must disappear. The laity must be given positions of power, and women should be allowed to become priests and deacons.
I fear that the church will not do this on its own. It will probably take a bankrupt church with empty pews to bring this about! If this happens, all the good works accomplished by the church will be lost.
Mike Brinkac, Charlottesville
David Von Drehle’s Jan. 26 Wednesday Opinion column provided a sobering look at the Catholic Church’s deeply flawed handling of sexual abuse by priests. However, Mr. Von Drehle failed to mention a crucial item of context: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was appointed head of the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog office (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) in 1981. That means that his service as archbishop of Munich ended before 1985.
That year is important because, until then, psychiatrists believed that pedophilia was curable. Psychiatrists often advised bishops that abusive priests could and should be returned to pastoral ministry after treatment. So, until 1985, bishops and other religious leaders had a reasonable expectation (a legal term) that priests could safely resume parish work if they had undergone psychiatric treatment. Archbishop Ratzinger’s decisions in Munich should be seen in that context.
An example of when psychiatrists changed their view is a 1985 report on child sexual abuse by priests, written by the Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, a canon lawyer; the Rev. Michael R. Peterson, a psychiatrist and the founder of St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring; and F. Ray Mouton Jr., a secular lawyer. This report made clear that pedophilia was incurable and that once a priest was found to have committed child sexual abuse, that priest could never be returned to public ministry.
Kevin M. Davis, Chevy Chase | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy is less complicated than it seems
President Theodore Roosevelt, his wife and their children pose for a photograph in 1907. (Associated Press) (AP)
The Jan. 25 editorial “A complex legacy” heaped far too much praise on Theodore Roosevelt. It said, “Roosevelt’s legacy was infinitely more layered, hardly without sin but admirable on many levels.” The men of the 1st Battalion, 25th Infantry, falsely accused of shooting up the town of Brownsville, Tex., in 1906, would disagree. Their lives and livelihoods were destroyed by Roosevelt not following his own dictum: “To learn anything from the past it is necessary to know, as near as may be, the exact truth.”
Roosevelt knew the truth in the Brownsville case. The White officers of the 25th Infantry received courts-martial, including their commander, Maj. Charles W. Penrose, and were found not guilty. The same facts (truth) used to find the White officers innocent were denied the Black soldiers. They didn’t have a trial.
History, including your editorial, tends to whitewash the “sins” of White male heroes and characterize them as complex rather than lay bare the reality of what is.
Roosevelt’s legacy might have been complicated, but it is also racist. His invitation to Booker T. Washington concerned Roosevelt’s highhanded discharges without honor of the 167 Black soldiers. The correction of this injustice is available. Sixty-six years later, the dogged research of my late husband, retired Lt. Col. William Baker, in 1972 while stationed at the Pentagon, proved the soldiers’ innocence followed by their exoneration.
Bettye Foster Baker, Gettysburg, Pa. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The U.S. is drowning in its own secrets. It’s overdue for a rescue.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in McLean on July 27, 2021. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Nearly a decade ago, a federal board warned in a report that practices for classification and declassification of national security information were “outmoded, unsustainable and keep too much information from the public.” The report found that petabytes of data were being classified annually. (A petabyte is a million gigabytes.) Then, in 2019, a top U.S. official warned the government was creating petabytes every month and the system was “unsustainable, and desperately requires modernization.” In 2020, the federal board warned of an “explosion” of digital data now underway — and a “tsunami” in the years to come.
The U.S. government is drowning in its own secrets. Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, recently wrote to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) that “deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner.” The same conclusions have been drawn by the senators and many others for a long time.
The reasons for the logjam are well known. Too much national security information is over-classified and too little is declassified. The volume of digital secrets is burgeoning, but the declassification system lumbers along at an analog pace. According to the Public Interest Declassification Board’s 2020 report, “The transition to email and other forms of instantaneous communications, and the pervasive use of social media applications have profoundly altered the way the Government conducts business.” By contrast, the paper-based declassification system “was created before the United States entered World War II, and it remains entrenched today.”
Hopefully, action to fix this long-festering mismatch will finally get underway. The 2020 report recommended that a new high-level executive be appointed to oversee the effort, and a new national declassification system be created that would work toward timely release of information. Technology must be used to modernize the aging systems, the report found, and the government ought to deploy the tools of big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud storage and retrieval to build a modern system with automation. Not everyone is sold on the automation concept, but it deserves exploration. The slow, page-by-page declassification process is broken.
So far, Ms. Haines said, current priorities and resources for fixing the classification systems “are simply not sufficient.” The National Security Council is working on a revised presidential executive order governing classified information, and we hope the White House will come up with an ambitious blueprint for modernization.
The nation needs to guard its secrets to function properly. But over-classification is counterproductive and adds to public distrust. A big improvement would be to simplify the classification process into two tiers, secret and top secret, with appropriate protections and guidelines that will also prevent labeling as “classified” material that does not need to be protected. In the words of one chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board, Nancy E. Soderberg, “Transformation is not simply advisable but imperative.” She was right about both the need and the urgency. That was nearly 10 years ago. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mystics to sign defensive-minded center Elizabeth Williams to replace Tina Charles
Tina Charles (31) will be leaving the Washington Mystics while Elizabeth Williams (1) will be headed to the District. (Scott Taetsch for The Washington Post)
The Washington Mystics are getting defensive.
The team is expected to announce the signing of center Elizabeth Williams on Tuesday, the first day of the WNBA free agency period. Williams agreed to a one-year deal, according to a person with knowledge of the contract.
The addition of Williams gives the Mystics four players, including Natasha Cloud, Alysha Clark and Ariel Atkins, who were all-defensive team selections within the last three seasons.
Williams was the No. 4 overall pick by the Connecticut Sun in 2015 and played the last six seasons with the Atlanta Dream. The 6-foot-3, 200-pounder was named the league’s most improved player in 2016, earned an all-star spot in 2017 and was on the all-defensive first team in 2020. She averaged 5.8 points, 4.9 rebounds and 1.3 blocks last season while shooting 51.6 percent from the field.
As the Mystics add Williams, the Tina Charles experiment comes to a close. The WNBA’s 2021 scoring leader will not return to the organization, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. Charles was traded from New York to Washington before the 2020 season but opted out of playing that year and didn’t join the team until 2021.
The goal was to get a first championship for the 2010 No. 1 overall pick, but the Mystics were shorthanded because of injuries the entire season. Elena Delle Donne (back) played just three games and Clark (foot) missed the entire season. Charles, the 2012 MVP, led the league in scoring out of necessity last year (23.4 points per game), but she went to Washington with hopes of playing with a well-rounded roster that didn’t need her to carry the load.
“I just know I need to win a championship before I retire,” the eight-time all-star told The Washington Post after the season. “Obviously, some decisions are going to have to be made, and I have to look into everything. I’m thankful for my year here and just to see how they do things, and [that] will definitely help moving forward.”
Coach and General Manager Mike Thibault acknowledged it was time to hit the reset button after a two-year plan following the 2019 championship season didn’t pan out.
The Mystics also will part ways with 2019 Finals MVP Emma Meesseman as she intends to sign with the Chicago Sky, a person with knowledge of her decision confirmed. Meesseman did not play the 2021 season because of overseas commitments and will move on from the organization that drafted her in the second round in 2013. She was an all-star in 2015 and a key component in winning the Mystics’ first WNBA title four years later. Meesseman averaged 13.0 points, 5.3 rebounds and 4.5 assists in 2020.
The Mystics have agreed to a multiyear deal to keep Myisha Hines-Allen and are close to an agreement with Shatori Walker-Kimbrough, according to two people with knowledge of the negotiations. Walker-Kimbrough was a member of the 2019 title team but was part of the trade for Charles. The 5-9 guard was out of the league last season when Thibault brought her back, and she started 13 of the 17 games she played.
Hines-Allen was a second-round pick in 2018 and also a member of Washington’s 2019 championship team. Her breakout season came in 2020, when she averaged 17.0 points and 8.9 rebounds and was named second team all-WNBA. The versatile, 6-1, 200-pound forward is just reaching the prime years of her career.
The Mystics also own the No. 1 pick in April’s draft.
Svrluga: Mikaela Shiffrin’s Olympic prep has included covid, isolation, tears — and relief | null | null | null | null | null |
The news last week triggered much speculation over who could be the next nominee, with several names emerging as possible contenders. The White House has already confirmed that U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs, 55, of South Carolina, is under consideration. Others believed to be under consideration include Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Leondra Kruger, 45, a California Supreme Court justice.
In the Senate, senior Democrats again pledged to keep to an expeditious timeline for consideration of Biden’s eventual pick, although senators were already wary of the optics of rushing through a nomination like Republicans did with now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020.
Just weeks before the presidential election that year — and amid early voting in some states, the GOP-controlled Senate muscled through Barrett’s nomination in a record 27 days — a process Democrats widely decried as a procedural sham.
Durbin continued: “We have to go through a process that is defensible to members of the Senate first and to the American people.”
For his part, Durbin said he had already reached out to several key GOP senators, including Grassley, as well as a pool of other Republicans whom he believed could be swayed to support a Biden pick to the Supreme Court. He declined to elaborate on more GOP names, although he said the list of gettable senators is “longer than you would initially imagine.”
Durbin on Monday forcefully defended Biden’s pledge to diversifying the Supreme Court, noting that of the 115 justices in the court’s history, only seven were not white men.
“In order for a woman attorney to have reached a level of credibility to be nominated to this spot, you can bet in her background you will find some remarkable achievements, things never done before by any African-American woman,” Durbin said. “To be the first at anything, you’ve got to be good — start to finish good — and better than most.” | null | null | null | null | null |
After President Biden said he would pick a Black woman for the Supreme Court, Republican senators split over whether the pick amounted to discrimination. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
When news landed last week that there would be a Supreme Court vacancy for President Biden to fill, some in the right-wing pundit class sprang into action, saying Biden’s promise to fill the slot with a Black woman amounted to discrimination — even affirmative action or a quota.
Collins was pressed on a similar promise Ronald Reagan had made in 1980 to nominate a woman to the court. She maintained that what Biden did was different because it was done “as a candidate.”
While Collins is a key vote in the full Senate, neither she nor Wicker serves on the Judiciary Committee, which will vet the nominee at confirmation hearings. But others who do signaled that they might press the issue.
“I got to say: That’s offensive,” Cruz said on his podcast. “Black women are, what, 6 percent of the U.S. population? He’s saying to 94 percent of Americans: ‘I don’t give a damn about you. You are ineligible.’ ”
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, like Cruz a Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told Fox News late last week that he didn’t want such picks to be the subject of a gender or racial “litmus test.”
(Hawley has said he had a litmus test for justices opposing Roe v. Wade, though, and he doesn’t appear to have complained when President Donald Trump made his own promise to nominate a woman to the court in 2020.)
Other senators have declined to raise the same concern. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) said Sunday: “I don’t see things as quotas like that, no. … You want folks with a diverse set of backgrounds, of course. So in that sense, no, I wouldn’t agree it’s a quota.”
Perhaps the key one is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who sits on the Judiciary Committee with Cruz and Hawley and is the committee’s former chairman. He disagreed with Collins that Biden’s promise was somehow different from Reagan’s. And he suggested that Republicans need to be careful with this.
Graham then seemed to caution against labeling this an affirmative-action hire, noting it would entail arguing that the Black woman who is eventually nominated isn’t as qualified.
“Affirmative action is picking somebody not as well qualified, for past wrongs,” Graham said, before pitching one of the front-runners, U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina, as a “highly qualified” and “fair-minded” judge.
On the other hand, pushing this line means drifting into territory Graham warned against — suggesting that whoever is picked will have that asterisk attached and might indeed be a “lesser Black woman.”
Graham and Cruz’s comments also spotlight the potential attractiveness of pushing this argument, though. Right now, it’s the subject of debate because we don’t actually have a nominee. But while Graham praised Fields, Cruz acknowledged that it might be difficult to fight against the person who perhaps is the front-runner, federal appeals court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“As so many of the Biden nominees have had, she didn’t have these outrageously partisan statements. She didn’t have these wildly left-wing statements,” Cruz said of Jackson, who was his Harvard classmate. “I think more than a few people suspect those may be her sentiments, but she hasn’t left much of a paper trail. … So it’s hard to find something tangible in her record to object to.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Mexico, which does not require visitors to show proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test, is now considered a “Level 4” country. States that include popular tourist destinations like Cabo San Lucas, Cancún and Mexico City have seen cases rise sharply amid the omicron surge.
Other countries and territories that moved to the CDC’s highest level on Monday are Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, French Guiana, Anguilla, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Kosovo, Moldova, Singapore and the Philippines. The “Level 4” list includes more than 100 destinations, with several popular Caribbean islands added last week.
The U.S. State Department changed its travel advisory for Monday to “Level 4” — which means “do not travel" — due to covid-19. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sony will buy ‘Destiny’ game maker Bungie
Sony to buy 'Destiny' game maker Bungie
Sony Interactive Entertainment said Monday it would spend $3.6 billion to buy Bungie, an independent game publisher based in Bellevue, Wash. Bungie makes the popular game franchise Destiny and was the original developer of Xbox-owned Halo.
Sony is one of the world’s biggest video game companies, but Microsoft has been ramping up its gaming ambitions, most recently by announcing plans to buy high-profile game publisher Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion.
Bungie employs about 900 people.
Report: Record share for newly built homes
The scarcity of existing houses is so severe in the United States that a record share of available properties belongs to newly built ones.
About 34 percent of the country’s single-family inventory in December was new construction, up from 25 percent a year earlier and more than twice the historic average, according to an analysis by Redfin.
Builders are stepping up production despite supply-chain snarls and rising labor costs. But it’s not enough to make up for the extraordinary scarcity of previously owned houses.
Newly built homes have made up an increasingly big chunk of the housing supply over the past decade, and their share shot up in mid-2020 after the pandemic caused a stampede to the suburbs.
Purchases of new single-family homes jumped to a nine-month high in December, while the inventory — including lots and houses in various degrees of completion — rose to 403,000, the most since August 2008, government data show.
Meanwhile, the supply of existing houses listed for sale plunged to 780,000, the lowest level in history and down 11 percent from a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Brief: Pandemic has widened disparities
The pandemic has worsened disparities between White and minority workers in the retail, food service and hospitality industries when it comes to schedule instability, according to new research.
Men and women of color were more likely than White men and women to say they had less than two weeks’ advance notice of their schedules, according to a research brief from the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of California San Francisco. The percentages of workers of color reporting this are higher than before the pandemic.
Minority workers were also more likely to be on call, have shifts canceled, or be scheduled for fewer hours than they wanted, though the numbers are comparable to pre-pandemic figures.
During the pandemic, 67 percent of the men of color and 68 percent of the women of color surveyed said they had fewer than two weeks of notice for shifts. That compares with 62 percent for both White men and White women. Researchers surveyed about 110,00 workers between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2021.
ExxonMobil is restructuring its business into three divisions and moving its headquarters 250 miles south from Irving, Tex., to its campus north of Houston. The oil giant said Monday it will combine its chemical and refining operations, while centralizing its technology and engineering and other support services. It will also consolidate its exploration and drilling operations. Exxon said the reorganization will be effective April 1 and the move south will be complete sometime in the middle of 2023.
Boeing said Monday that Qatar Airways ordered up to 50 cargo planes and committed to buying up to 50 Boeing 737 Max jets. The companies did not disclose financial terms. Boeing said Qatar Airways will be the first airline to operate the 777-8, a cargo-carrying version of the twin-aisle 777. The airline placed a firm order for 34 planes and took options for 16 more.
From news services | null | null | null | null | null |
Medics took five people to hospitals and treated two other patients who refused to be transported over the span of about 75 minutes, D.C. Fire and EMS Chief John A. Donnelly said at a news conference Monday. He said the department first received calls for help about 11:15 a.m.
City officials said they were probing the deaths and the drug dealing that provided the fatal batches, reminding the public to call 911 in case of overdoses to prevent further fatalities. Officials asked residents to call the city for free doses of Narcan, a nasal spray designed to reverse overdose effects, and if it is used to call for medics to respond, as well.
Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), who represents the Southwest Washington area, thanked first responders for saving lives during “a mass casualty event.” Allen said the city not only has to ensure criminal accountability but also help to treat those with substance abuse issues.
Police leaders were joined Monday by Jarod A. Forget, DEA special agent in charge of the Washington division, and said they continue to investigate to try to determine the source of the latest batch of fentanyl and to target anyone who is arrested with federal charges in the deaths.
Officials said earlier this month that such a charge was filed in an overdose incident in the District. | null | null | null | null | null |
Former president Donald Trump speaks at a political rally in Conroe, Texas, Saturday, January 29, 2022. (Michael Stravato/For The Washington Post)
The National Archives on Monday took the unusual step of confirming the habit, saying in a statement that records turned over from the Trump White House “included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump." The statement came in response to a question from The Washington Post about whether some Jan. 6-related records had been ripped up and taped back together.
The National Archives transmitted over 700 pages of documents to the Jan. 6 committee last month that included a mélange of records concerning the events of Jan. 6, 2021, some of which were torn up and reconstructed, according to the three people familiar with the records, who requested anonymity to reveal sensitive details.
In its statement, the National Archives said that “White House records management officials during the Trump Administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records. These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump Administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House. The Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administrations.”
It’s unclear what documents in the tranche delivered to the Jan. 6 committee were damaged. But legal records indicate that the documents over which Trump sought to assert privilege included presidential diaries, schedules, appointment information, handwritten notes concerning the events of Jan. 6 from White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, speeches, remarks, and more.
Tom Hamburger contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Houthi attack foiled during Israeli's visit
The United Arab Emirates said Monday that it intercepted a ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement as the UAE hosted Israeli President Isaac Herzog on his first visit to the Persian Gulf business and tourism hub.
In the third such attack on the U.S.-allied UAE in two weeks, the Houthis’ military spokesman said the Yemeni rebels launched Iranian-made Zulfiqar missiles at Abu Dhabi and drones at Dubai. He reiterated a warning to residents and firms to “stay away from vital headquarters and facilities” in the UAE.
The United States condemned the assault, which followed a Jan. 17 strike on a fuel depot in Abu Dhabi that killed three people, in an escalation of the Yemen war between the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition, which includes the UAE.
The assaults have led to rare security jitters among some residents in a country where expatriates are a majority, but have had no visible impact on daily life, with restaurants and beaches packed during the peak mild winter season.
The UAE said that the missile was intercepted at 20 minutes past midnight and that its debris fell on an uninhabited area.
The attack came as Israel’s Herzog was visiting the capital, where he discussed security and bilateral relations with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Junta issues warning for coup anniversary
Myanmar’s military rulers have threatened to jail people who take part in a “silent strike” on Tuesday, as activists urged residents to stay indoors and businesses to close as a protest to mark the anniversary of the army’s seizing power.
Myanmar has been in chaos since Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and other figures from her National League for Democracy party were rounded up in raids, accused by the junta of rigging a 2020 election that the NLD won.
The overthrow of Suu Kyi’s government triggered huge street protests last year, but the bloody crackdown that ensued left hundreds of civilians dead and led to the forming of “people’s defense forces” to take on the well-equipped army.
In recent days, activists have urged people to go on strike, staging flash mobs, distributing pamphlets and using social media to get the message out.
A group that said it was coordinating the strikes urged the international community to recognize a shadow Myanmar government and to impose a no-fly zone in conflict areas and a global arms embargo.
A spokesman for the military rulers did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
In the northern city of Myitkyina, signs put up by the military warned residents not to join the protest and listed prison terms of three to 20 years under laws on counterterrorism, high treason, public mischief and telecommunications.
Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres urged the junta to allow greater humanitarian access.
Amnesty called out on apartheid report
Israel on Monday called on Amnesty International not to publish an upcoming report accusing it of apartheid, saying the conclusions of the London-based human rights group are “false, biased and antisemitic.”
Amnesty is expected to join New York-based Human Rights Watch and the Israeli rights group B’Tselem in accusing Israel of the international crime of apartheid based on its nearly 55-year military occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state and its treatment of its own Arab minority.
Israel dismissed the other reports as biased, but is adopting a much more adversarial stance this time. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has said Israel expects intensified efforts this year to brand it as an apartheid state in international bodies and hopes to head them off.
In a statement Monday, he said that Amnesty “is just another radical organization which echoes propaganda, without seriously checking the facts,” and that it “echoes the same lies shared by terrorist organizations.”
Amnesty did not immediately answer a request for comment.
Libyan lawmakers seek new government: Libyan lawmakers pushed ahead with plans to appoint a new transitional government, more than a month after the country failed to hold its first presidential election. Parliament will convene next week to deliberate and appoint a prime minister, a spokesman said. The move to replace Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah and his government is likely to fuel tensions between factions in the chaos-stricken country. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: Protecting Public Safety with St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones
MR. JACKMAN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Tom Jackman, a criminal justice reporter here at The Post. It’s my pleasure to welcome Mayor Tishaura O. Jones of St. Louis in our continuing conversations about protecting public safety and the role of policing. Thank you for joining us, Mayor Jones.
MAYOR JONES: Thank you for having me.
MR. JACKMAN: And here's a reminder to our audience: We want you to join the conversation. It doesn't have to just be me doing all the yapping here. Please treat your questions and comments to the handle. I said treat; I meant tweet your questions to @PostLive, @PostLive.
All right so, Mayor Jones, for those who aren't familiar with her, has a diverse background in finance, small business ownership. She has a master's in public health. She’s served in the Missouri legislature, and she was the St. Louis treasurer for eight years. And then, she was elected mayor last April, determined to improve public safety for her city.
So, homicides in St. Louis dropped from 263 in 2020 to 196 last year. That's about a 26 percent drop after hitting its record high. What happened, Mayor?
MAYOR JONES: Well, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. What happened in St. Louis when our homicides dropped is a data-driven strategy of deployment and a focus on deterrence, intervention, and prevention. We are trying to be smart about crime and deploying the right resource to the right call. We're also working with our community partners in the Urban League, and Organization for Black Struggle, and Cure Violence, and other community organizations, because this is an all-hands-on deck approach. It's not just one thing that's outshining anything else. It's an all-hands-on deck approach to public safety.
MR. JACKMAN: And I'm going to ask you about some of those programs specifically. You did mention the Urban League there. James Clark of the Urban League of St. Louis said in a recent Time magazine piece that residents are fed up with relying on law enforcement exclusively and they are becoming more involved in neighborhoods. What's your response to that view? How much have city authorities collaborated with community leaders and local residents in the response to violent crime?
MAYOR JONES: We've absolutely collaborated. This doesn't work without community involvement. I believe that people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. So, we've held town halls. We have our community violence interrupters through the Cure Violence program in four neighborhoods that are directly involved in the community and have a caseload of several people that they are following and working with. And sometimes with our interrupters, it's something as simple as giving someone a cigarette. So, you know, it's--like I said, it's not an either/or approach. It’s a both/and approach.
MR. JACKMAN: Well, that was one of the--one of--there's a lot of different programs you had. One of them, you have--well, here's one. Well, you just mentioned Cure Violence, and that you plan to dedicate--I've read--$5 million more to expand this program that--it also helps people find jobs and get others support. What else is involved in Cure Violence? And apparently, homicides dropped in the neighborhoods where Cure Violence was targeted last year.
MAYOR JONES: Yeah, so we're actually going to put $5 million not only towards expanding Cure Violence, but other community violence intervention programs. We're part of a small cohort of community violence intervention programs, cities that are dedicating money from ARPA to programs through the White House. And Cure Violence is one of them. Focused Deterrence is another. And--but we also want to listen to the community and have them let us know what other things are working, because a lot of times community organizations are working on the ground level, and we just don't know about some of the great things that they're doing. So, we're going to focus this money not just towards Cure Violence, but other programs as well.
MR. JACKMAN: So, one thing that is talked about a lot in places is that when people call 911, it's not always the police that should be sent. And so, your city has a program called Cops & Clinicians, which puts mental health professionals in police cars with St. Louis officers to provide resources to people in crisis at crime scenes. I've read that the program has logged more than 3,700 interactions since it was launched. What have you heard? How is that working? I mean, this is something that really a lot of cities would like to do, is to send people other than cops to mental health crisis calls.
MAYOR JONES: Well, it's not rocket science. And what I like to do is take ideas from other cities and bring them to our environment and let them roll. Denver has a program similar to this, under the leadership of Mayor Michael Hancock, as well as Oregon has a similar program. But our Cops & Clinicians program pairs an officer with a licensed clinical social worker or other behavioral health professional. And they just don't show up on the scene of violence interruption, but they also show up when there isn't an incident. They have been able to deter people from entering our emergency rooms, as well as entering the criminal justice system. So that saves us, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in care, and also from people entering our criminal justice system.
MR. JACKMAN: Yeah, I'm sort of fascinated by that. I mean, have you heard anecdotes about people that might otherwise have gone to jail or people that, you know, had a better outcome? And I was interested to know that you had this sort of public health background. And so, I also wondered what you would have thought about this back in the day, if somebody said, you know, how about if you go out on the calls with the cops now? So, what are you hearing from the street? Go ahead.
MAYOR JONES: Yeah, we're hearing also that they have talked people out of committing suicide, which is huge, right? And so, you know, when we have our licensed clinical social workers or behavioral health professionals also appear on the scenes of violent incidents, they're also able to talk families down from retaliating against that other family who's been involved in that incident, and that's key to reducing violent crime in our city. But let me be clear: One life lost to gun violence is one too many. And we have a lot more work to do. But we're seeing some really great interventions from the--from the methods that we're deploying.
MR. JACKMAN: That's fascinating. Maybe the mayors will be coming to you now and seeing what's going on in St. Louis and you guys show them how it's done.
MAYOR JONES: I hope.
MR. JACKMAN: What kind of--what kind of action would you like to see at the state and federal level? Missouri is a state with among the least restrictive gun laws. I notice that there are a lot of justifiable homicides in your city last year in which people shot and killed somebody. I think the number was 26 and it was ruled justifiable. And so, I don't know, you know, it could have just been a bad year for that. But what do you need to see from the states and--the state and the feds in terms of further help for St. Louis?
MAYOR JONES: So, the Missouri legislature has a love affair with the Second Amendment, so much so that they have relaxed our gun laws to the point where the NRA doesn't even want to play here anymore. They say, our job is done, and we're gone. And you know, what I would love to see from the Missouri legislature is the ability for mayors like myself to pass commonsense gun safety laws on the local level. They've passed preemption bills that prohibit us from doing so. And we have more guns on our--on our city than I'd like to count, and it ties our hands. It also makes our law enforcement officers are not safe as well, if there are more guns out there.
Then, they also passed the Second Amendment Preservation Act, which ties the hands of our law enforcement. It ties the hands of other local law enforcement from working with our federal partners. And if I had my way, I would love to see some federal gun control on the--on the federal level. And I'm not talking about taking away anybody's gun. But still, we have to make sure that we're doing this in a safe manner, because we're still losing too many people to gun violence.
MR. JACKMAN: I want to go to an audience question. We have Stephen Ban from Illinois who asked, "I live in Chicago. What lessons can or should our city take from St. Louis?"
MAYOR JONES: So, I was watching Mayor Lori Lightfoot just on TV just yesterday, and she said something that was really amazing. She said that we cannot arrest our way out of these problems. We have to invest our way out of these problems. And a lot of crime happens in neighborhoods that haven't seen investment for decades. So, how do we turn our policies to investing in people, to making sure they have thriving wage jobs, and that their neighborhoods are safe, and that--and built environment is safe for our children, with jobs that are located in their neighborhoods so their parents don't have to travel two to three hours just to just to work? So, there are a lot of investment decisions that we can make--intentional investment decisions that we can make that can change the environment in neighborhoods for the people that we represent.
MR. JACKMAN: Police officers have also been victims of gun violence. You had two officers shot just recently. And they feel--they feel under stress, that they’re targeted now; they're the bad guys. How has that affected the St. Louis Police Department, and what can you do about it?
MAYOR JONES: Well, first, I want to offer my prayers to the officers who were recently shot. And we also had two officers in an incident, in a car accident just days before. And this has been a rough month for our first responders in St. Louis. But the things that we're trying to do with transforming public safety, in my opinion, are going to help our officers. They are already exhausted, and so we want to take some of the burden off of their shoulders so they can do the work that they were trained to do in our academies, like our Cops & Clinicians.
You know, a lot of times officers have been deployed to intervene in mental health incidents where they aren't equipped to do that. But we can deploy a behavioral health professional to intervene in mental health and when someone is having a mental health crisis. And so, that takes the burden off of our officers to do the work that they were trying to do in our academies.
MR. JACKMAN: Yeah, and I want to talk a little bit more about that, because--and I do want to remind people who are watching to send in your questions on Twitter to @PostLive. The police department has put a stronger focus on high-level crimes. Where do you think we need to rethink the role of policing?
MAYOR JONES: Well, our public safety director has done just that. He is a criminologist. He has a Ph.D. in criminology, and we're using the data to guide our deployment decisions, data that shows, you know, where the--where the most crime is happening. And unfortunately, it's in Black and brown neighborhoods. But we're also using that data to guide our investment decisions, our economic development decisions to transform those neighborhoods, because unfortunately, you know, a neighborhood that has a lot of poverty is also subject to a lot of crime. So, we have to change, again, our neighborhoods and our environments to not make it a haven for crime and crime-involved activity.
MR. JACKMAN: What's your view on--well, I'll just say the word--"defund the police"? Where do you stand on police funding, and how do you respond to the concerns that the push to defund the police has hurt the ability of police departments to respond to violent crime?
MAYOR JONES: Well, I'm going to push back a little bit on that. Now, I have never uttered the phrase “defund the police.” I talk about how we’re trying to transform public safety and use our public safety dollars in different ways and be--innovate and using in more innovative ways. We have to do something different because doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.
And so, we're using our public safety dollars to make sure that we're deploying the right resource to the right call. Again, a lot of times our police, our first responders, respond to situations that they are not equipped to handle. But if we have a public safety department that has different resources and alternative methods of response, then that makes everyone safer.
MR. JACKMAN: I didn't mean to say that you had said to defund the police. And in fact, virtually every mayor I've spoken to disavows that term and says that's not--that's not the answer. They understand where that sentiment came from, but they don't necessarily say that that is the way to do it when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of running a city. I didn't mean to say that you had said that.
MAYOR JONES: Oh, no, I didn’t take it that way. I didn’t.
MR. JACKMAN: Okay, good. I’ll make my insults clearer in the future.
So, here's another positive stat out of the--you know, possibly related to criminology and thoughtful use of resources. You had the highest murder clearance rate since 2012, with a clearance rate of 55 percent on homicides. In 2020, the city's rate was 36 percent. Any idea why that happened? Are people cooperating more with the police? Or are they smarter? What's going on with that? That's a real accomplishment.
MAYOR JONES: Again, this is all-hands-on-deck. I would say a lot of that information comes through our community partnerships. Again, this can't be--this can't be on the shoulders of law enforcement alone. It's going to take everybody at the table, everybody working together in order to increase our clearance rates. And again, you know, our deployment strategy has also changed, and we are focusing more on violent crime and also being present in neighborhoods and in situations that could turn violent. And so, they're all--there are also a lot of relationships within the community with our law enforcement. So, we are deploying the right resource to the right call, as well as using data to drive our deployment strategies.
MR. JACKMAN: Next month marks 10 years since the death of Trayvon Martin, which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. How do you measure the impact of his death and the movement that followed?
MAYOR JONES: Well, as the mother of the most adorable 14-year-old son, you know, deaths like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, even local here to St. Louis, make me want to hug my son a lot tighter. However, it's my job as his mother to make sure that I can do whatever I can as mayor to make sure that things are safer for our children. My son and I were having a conversation just months before I won this race, and he was asking, you know, what the mayor does and what the mayor is responsible for. And I said, well, you know, I named, you know, streets and traffic and refuse, you know, and all of those things. And I said, the police, and he said, oh, well, that means I'll be safe. And it's--it just hit me like a ton of bricks, because my son should not have to feel like his mother has to be mayor in order for him to feel safe around law enforcement. So, you know, it's--again, it's my job as mayor to change the environment that our children grew up in, and to also see law enforcement as partners and not be scared.
MR. JACKMAN: So, speaking of our environment, the numbers look great. We've gone over a bunch of them, but we still have these headlines of bad things happening. You know, Representative Cori Bush's car got shot the other day. And St. Louis has no stronghold on this. You know, Washington is being overrun by carjackings. So, there's progress being made, but the headlines are still bad. What do you say to people who say, yeah, but I'm still afraid to go out there?
MAYOR JONES: You know, I would say that things are headed in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go. While we are encouraged by the numbers we saw in 2021, in the first nine months of my administration, I'm not celebrating. I'm making sure that we are doubling down on the strategies that we know work, and making sure that we provided a community where everyone feels safe in their neighborhoods.
MR. JACKMAN: Is the federal government doing enough to support cities in dealing with both immediate and the deeper root causes of this violent crime wave? I think the attorney general told the Conference of Mayors recently that the Biden administration was looking for a billion dollars’ worth of grants. Are you getting the help you need from the feds?
MAYOR JONES: So far, we are. Like I said, you know, St. Louis is one of 16 cities in a cohort that's using ARPA funds for community violence intervention programs, and we're gleaning a lot from our involvement there. I'm in the U.S. Conference of Mayors, on the advisory board. So, a lot of times I talk to my brother and sister mayors from across the country, gleaning ideas from what they've done. And I think one of the most important things that we have to remember is a lot of--a lot of the people who are committing crimes, it's about our young people. And so how are we developing ways to really put our arms around our young people and show them a different way and trying to cure poverty? Because if we don't cure poverty, you know, we're still treating this at the at the symptoms. And we have to treat the underlying disease just like we are with COVID, right? We're looking at the root causes of COVID and trying to mitigate those circumstances. We have to do the same thing when it comes to gun violence in our communities.
MR. JACKMAN: I got another question from a tweeter. A resident--I don't know if they're a resident, but sounds like it. "How does the mayor address juveniles committing serious crimes in St. Louis?" Actually, it's a DC resident. "For example, in D.C., a majority of carjackings in 2021 were committed by juveniles." So, it's sort of a separate kind of population, crime-committing population.
MAYOR JONES: Yeah, well, again, we have to--we have to put our arms around our young people and provide opportunities for them to have fun and safe and productive activities. In St. Louis, for example, just last summer, we had an increase in crime downtown that was committed by a lot of young people. So, what did we do? We got together with our civic and corporate partners and faith partners, and we started having activities downtown for our young people. We had a cypher or rap battle. We had eSports, and arts. And so we have to continue to have productive and safe activities for our young people to get involved in, because, you know, an idle mind is the devil's workshop. And so an idle downtown or an idle neighborhood is a troublemaker’s paradise.
MR. JACKMAN: Well said. All right, here's another question from Donna Cobb [phonetic]. "Are you doing anything around reentry to reduce crime, given recidivism rates among returning citizens?"
MAYOR JONES: Yes, absolutely. So, in St. Louis, we banned the box. And we--more oftentimes than not, we take a look at our returning citizens as potential employees. We're setting up a reentry support division that's going to be part of our corrections division. So--and you know, and I'm a daughter of an ex-felon. So, I believe that people deserve a second chance. And so, you know, I do what--I've done whatever I can as treasurer, and will continue to do that as mayor, to offer second chances to our returning citizens.
MR. JACKMAN: I’ve got a COVID question for you. How concerned are you about the strain on the healthcare system from the pandemic on your city's healthcare system and hospitals?
MAYOR JONES: I'm very concerned. You know, in St. Louis, we're the only city--I think we're the--one of the only cities left in the state that still has a mask mandate. We haven't lifted our--we reinstated our mass mandate back in July and haven't lifted it since, despite attempts from our attorney general to sue us to try to invalidate our mask mandate. We have a wonderful health director who has been laser focused on getting more shots in arms and getting more people vaccinated from five years and up. We have vaccine clinics in schools, in churches, in community centers.
And we're also taking the time to have those one-on-one conversations with people who are still vaccine hesitant. Vaccine hesitation is a real thing. And we still--and we have to be patient with our neighbors to try to convince them that this is the best way to stave off or mitigate the bad effects of COVID.
MR. JACKMAN: Here's a question from someone which I'm interested in. I hate to bring up the subject of the Rams. They’ll be going to the Super Bowl and all. But there was just a massive settlement for the city, your city because they left. The St. Louis Rams went away, $790 million, I want to say, and Nick Palazzolo [phonetic] asks what's going to happen with that money?
MAYOR JONES: So, we are still in negotiations with St. Louis County and the regional sports authority to divide the remaining pot after the lawyers got their 35 percent off the top, because it was a contingency case. And so we're looking to--once we reach a settlement amount, we will be looking to spend this money directly in the community in ways that are going to be sustainable for years to come.
MR. JACKMAN: I'm sorry, I got lost in all my questions here. Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel on--I wanted to go back to the COVID, I'm sorry--but do you see a light at the end of the tunnel on breaking this cycle of admissions and hospitalizations? Are you getting there?
MAYOR JONES: You know, I hope so. You know, the one thing that I have learned over these last couple of years is that COVID is very unpredictable. Just when we thought that we were in a good space last summer, then here came the delta variant, and then the delta variant went down, and then here's the omicron variant. And you know, I can only hope that, you know, if people are watching and they are not vaccinated, that they consider getting vaccinated, and if they're still hesitant to talk to a provider or a healthcare professional that they trust. This is the best way for us to get out of this pandemic.
MR. JACKMAN: Well, that was fascinating. I've really enjoyed speaking with you and you putting up with all my wisecracks. So--and I think we heard a lot about how a city is dealing with a lot of different things at the same time. So, thank you, Mayor Jones, for speaking with me today.
MAYOR JONES: It was wonderful. Thank you. It's such an honor. Thank you so much.
MR. JACKMAN: And thank you for joining us. You can always head to WashingtonPostLive.com to register and find more information about upcoming programs. And remember, we always want to hear from you, our audience, and you can share your thoughts and questions for our guests by tweeting @PostLive. I’m Tom Jackman. Thanks for watching Washington Post Live. | null | null | null | null | null |
UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council voted Monday to extend its political mission in Libya for just three months after a dispute between the West and Russia over the appointment of a new top U.N. envoy for the North African country, which is trying to form a united government after 10 years of turmoil. | null | null | null | null | null |
Medics took five people to hospitals and treated two other patients who refused to be transported over the span of about 75 minutes, D.C. Fire and EMS Chief John A. Donnelly Sr. said at a news conference Monday. He said the department first received calls for help about 11:15 a.m. Friday.
City officials said they were investigating the deaths and the drug dealing that provided the fatal batches, reminding the public to call 911 in case of overdoses to prevent further fatalities. Officials asked residents to call the city for free doses of Narcan, a nasal spray designed to reverse overdose effects. They also advised people to call 911 if Narcan is used, so that medics can respond.
Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) thanked first responders for saving lives during “a mass casualty event.” Allen said the city not only has to ensure criminal accountability but also help to treat those with substance abuse issues.
Police leaders were joined Monday by Jarod A. Forget, Drug Enforcement Administration special agent in charge of the Washington division, and said they continue to investigate to try to determine the source of the latest batch of fentanyl and to target anyone who is arrested in the deaths with federal charges.
Officials said earlier in January that such a charge was filed in an overdose incident in the District. | null | null | null | null | null |
The VMI corps of cadets march out of the barracks for a change-of-command ceremony at the Lexington, Va., campus in May. (Parker Michels-Boyce/For The Washington Post)
Helmer had urged his colleagues on the subcommittee to support the bill, saying VMI should not be held to a different standard than the state’s other colleges and universities.
For more than a year, VMI’s culture has been subjected to intense public scrutiny. A state-ordered investigation, conducted by the law firm of Barnes & Thornburg, concluded in June that the college suffers from a “racist and sexist culture.” The firm’s final report found that “sexual assault is prevalent at VMI” and that about 14 percent of female cadets surveyed — 11 out of 81 students — reported that they had been sexually assaulted at VMI. Another 63 percent of female cadets — 51 out of 81 surveyed — said that a fellow student confided in them that they’d been sexually assaulted or harassed at VMI.
In remarks before the subcommittee, Helmer did not hold back. He told fellow delegates that the “need for change at VMI is pretty legion” and that the bill could lead to VMI cadets feeling more comfortable reporting that they’d been sexually assaulted. He cited the Barnes & Thornburg survey figures, along with recent reporting by The Post that a Jan. 22 sexual violence prevention class prompted mocking comments about female cadets and the course’s subject material on the anonymous social media app Jodel.
“This superintendent is committed to supporting and doing what is in the best interest of the victims of sexual assault and removing any barriers to minor infractions,” Parker said. “That said … these cases are extremely complex, and so it has been the historic position of the institute that the discretion to make decisions on disciplinary immunity should lie at the institute level, should lie with the institution, with the superintendent to make decisions based on the facts of each particular case.”
One of the subcommittee’s members, Del. Jeffrey M. Bourne (D-Richmond), pressed Parker, saying he didn’t understand the school’s “heartburn.”
“Once you put it in code … [it’s] very inflexible, right? I mean, it doesn’t offer the flexibility to look at the circumstances of the case,” Parker said. “And, the superintendent truly believes, given the inherent risk in our training environment, the superintendent believes that we need the ability to be able to make decisions on this or at least retain the tools to require access to [counseling] services [for drug or alcohol use] so that we can provide some accountability for a cadet who may disclose, and in that disclosure, reveal a larger problem.”
“We find ourselves in a position where VMI is telling us two different things. They’re saying, ‘Hey, this bill is not needed because the superintendent has the discretion … to grant immunity.’ They say, ‘Hey, nobody’s coming forward that’s been punished for this,’ ” Helmer said. “So, either there is no problem in granting this bill … passing this bill will have no impact on good order and discipline at VMI and we will learn nothing more about sexual violence. Or, there’s a huge problem and … the impact of us granting discretion to the superintendent is such that victims are terrified to come forward.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Former president Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Conroe, Tex., on Jan. 29. The National Archives confirmed Trump's habit of ripping up White House documents. (Michael Stravato/For The Washington Post)
The National Archives on Monday took the unusual step of confirming the habit, saying in a statement that records turned over from the Trump White House “included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump.” The statement came in response to a question from The Washington Post about whether some Jan. 6-related records had been ripped up and taped back together.
Some of the documents turned over by the White House had not been reconstructed at all, according to the Archives.
The Archives transmitted over 700 pages of documents to the Jan. 6 committee last month that included a mélange of records concerning the events of Jan. 6, 2021, including those that were torn up and reconstructed, according to the three people familiar with the records, who requested anonymity to reveal sensitive details.
In its statement, the Archives said that “White House records management officials during the Trump Administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records. These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump Administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House. The Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administrations.”
It’s unclear what documents in the tranche delivered to the Jan. 6 committee were damaged. But legal records indicate that the documents over which Trump sought to assert privilege included presidential diaries, schedules, appointment information, handwritten notes concerning the events of Jan. 6 from White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, speeches, remarks, and more. The archivist is set to hand over more documents in the weeks and months to come.
Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and constitutional scholar, said White House documents torn up by Trump are clearly the property of the government under the Presidential Records Act.
“So destroying them could be a crime under several statutes that make it a crime to destroy government property if that was the intent of the defendant,” Gillers said. “A president does not own the records generated by his own administration. The definition of presidential records is broad. Trump’s own notes to himself could qualify and destroying them could be the criminal destruction of government property.”
This past weekend, the former president bashed the House Jan. 6 committee and raised the prospect of pardoning those who have been charged in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol if he ran and won reelection in 2024. | null | null | null | null | null |
So for Israel, NSO has become a diplomatic asset. But the larger consequence may be the creation of a world where everyone is under watch. The United States, according to the Times, has displayed an increasingly “intense desire” for hacking tools, to serve the same crime-fighting purposes for which Pegasus was supposedly created. Other countries, understandably, have the same interest. These governments should hold themselves to account by pledging not to allow the export of any spyware to any client that doesn’t put into place requirements for its use based in the rule of law, or from any company that doesn’t do due diligence on its clients. Spyware is indeed a weapon, and an arms-control treaty among nations devoted to civil liberties is essential to check its proliferation. | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden will host Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and ranking Republican Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) at the White House “to consult with them and hear their advice about this vacancy,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.
She noted that Durbin has worked on seven Supreme Court confirmation processes and that Biden — a former senator who previously served on the Senate Judiciary Committee himself as both the chair and the ranking Democrat — also has a long working relationship with and respect for Grassley.
The news last week has triggered much speculation over who could be the nominee, with several names emerging as possible contenders. The White House has already confirmed that U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs, 55, of South Carolina, is under consideration. Others believed to be potential candidates include Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Leondra Kruger, 45, a California Supreme Court justice.
On Monday, Psaki declined repeatedly to give specifics about the size of the pool being considered or other details of the process, saying only that Biden has been evaluating information on more than three potential candidates.
In the Senate, senior Democrats again said they would keep to an expeditious timeline for consideration of Biden’s eventual pick, although senators were already wary of the optics of rushing through a nomination like Republicans did with now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020.
Just weeks before the presidential election that year, and amid early voting in some states, the GOP-controlled Senate muscled through Barrett’s nomination in a record 27 days — a process Democrats widely decried as a procedural sham.
Durbin continued, “We have to go through a process that is defensible to members of the Senate first and to the American people.”
For his part, Durbin said he had already reached out to several key GOP senators, including Grassley, as well as other Republicans whom he believed could be swayed to support a Biden pick to the Supreme Court. He declined to elaborate on more GOP names, although he said the list of gettable senators is “longer than you would initially imagine.”
Several Republicans have criticized Biden for committing to nominating a Black woman. On Saturday, the White House issued a rebuke of Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who had said Biden’s pick would be a “beneficiary” of affirmative action and predicted she would “probably not get a single Republican vote.” Over the weekend, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) called Biden’s handling of the nomination “clumsy at best,” and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) suggested it was “offensive” for Biden to focus on a minority demographic in his search.
“Black women are, what, 6 percent of the U.S. population?” Cruz said on his podcast. “He’s saying to 94 percent of Americans, ‘I don’t give a damn about you.’ ”
Durbin on Monday forcefully defended Biden’s pledge to diversify the Supreme Court, noting that of the 115 justices in the court’s history, only seven have not been White men.
“In order for a woman attorney to have reached a level of credibility to be nominated to this spot, you can bet in her background you will find some remarkable achievements, things never done before by any African American woman,” Durbin said. “To be the first at anything, you’ve got to be good — start-to-finish good — and better than most.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) broke with his Republican colleagues Sunday and appeared to enthusiastically endorse Childs, who is a fellow South Carolinian. Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.), the No. 3 in House Democratic leadership and one of Biden’s closest political allies, has also been publicly boosting Childs.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) on Monday told reporters he had a “positive impression” of Childs. | null | null | null | null | null |
Niinisto says Moscow knew NATO would never agree to limits on possible expansion. “It’s so self-evident that we should only decide ourselves and self-evident that NATO will not close the doors,” he said, at least when it comes to the option of Finland joining.
That is eight percentage points higher than when the same question was asked two years ago. But 42 percent of Finns remain opposed, according to the latest survey.
In an interview with Reuters this month, Finland’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, said it was “very unlikely” that Finland would apply for NATO membership during her current term in office.
Niinisto said he could not divulge details of his separate calls with Biden and Putin but that he’d “had quite a long, lengthy discussion” with the Russian president on Jan 21, “only dealing with the current tensions.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Omar Assad died after he was detained by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank
Nazima Abdullah, the widow of Omar Assad, is comforted during his funeral Jan. 13 in Jiljilya, near the West Bank city of Ramallah. (Alaa Badarneh/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Two Israeli military officers were being removed from their positions immediately and a third will be formally censured over the death of a 78-year-old Palestinian American man who was detained at a checkpoint in the West Bank earlier this month, the Israeli military said Monday night.
The death of Omar Assad, a former Milwaukee grocery store owner, on Jan. 12 was the result of “moral failure” and poor decision-making by the soldiers who detained him, according to a statement from the Israeli Defense Forces.
The statement Monday summarized an internal army investigation of Assad’s treatment after an autopsy conducted by the Palestinian Ministry of Justice revealed that he suffered a stress-induced heart attack that was probably brought on by being bound, gagged and held by Israeli forces at a cold construction site.
Assad, who suffered from a coronary condition, was dragged from his car at a roadblock near his native village of Jiljilya, witnesses said. Soldiers then tied his hands, blindfolded and gagged him, leaving abrasions on his wrists and leaving him bleeding on the insides of his eyelids, according to the Palestinian medical exam.
The Israeli investigation said that after 30 minutes, Assad and other detainees were “released and freed from all constraints.”
The soldiers, however, assessed “that Assad was asleep and did not try to wake him,” the Monday statement said. “The soldiers failed in their obligations by leaving Assad lying on the floor without the required treatment and without reporting the incident back to their commanders.”
The inquiry, overseen by the head of Israel’s Central Command, concluded, however, that “there was no use of violence during the incident apart from when Assad was apprehended.”
Central Command is responsible for military operations in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
As a result of the investigation, the commander of the battalion, which is known as Netzah Yehuda, will be reprimanded, the statement said. It added that the platoon commander and company commander would be removed from their positions and would not serve in commanding roles for two years. | null | null | null | null | null |
Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for children under 5 could be available...
Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for children under 5 could be available by the end of February, people with knowledge say
People wait in line Dec. 16, 2021, in the District for coronavirus testing. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Coronavirus vaccines for children younger than 5 could be available far sooner than expected — perhaps by the end of February — under a plan that would lead to the potential authorization of a two-shot regimen in the coming weeks, people briefed on the situation said Monday.
Pfizer and its partner, BioNTech, the manufacturers of the vaccine, are expected to submit to the Food and Drug Administration as early as Tuesday a request for emergency use authorization for the vaccine for children six months to 5 years old. Older children already can receive the shot.
The FDA urged the companies to submit the application so that regulators could begin reviewing the two-shot data, according to the knowledgeable individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The companies in the last few months have been testing a third dose, following disappointing results for the two-shot regimen showing that while the vaccine is safe, two doses did not provide a strong enough immune response in all age groups. But data on a third shot will not be available until at least late March. Once that information is submitted, regulators can decide whether to authorize a third dose.
“The idea is, let’s go ahead and start the review of two doses,” said one of the people familiar with the situation. “If the data holds up in the submission, you could start kids on their primary baseline months earlier than if you don’t do anything until the third-dose data comes in.”
A Biden administration official said there is consensus among health officials in “seeing this move forward,” referring to the plan by Pfizer-BioNTech to submit an application. Last Friday, Pfizer presented updated trial data to federal health officials about the shots, according to an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.
The participants in the briefing included Anthony S. Fauci, chief medical adviser for the White House coronavirus response; David Kessler, chief science officer for the response; a representative from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and other officials from the Department of Health and Human Services.
The session included a “robust conversation” that three doses were likely to be much better than two shots, the administration official said. “But to get to three, you have to get two shots first. … There’s interest in seeing this move forward.”
The FDA’s outside advisers are expected to meet on the two-dose application in mid-February. The CDC’s outside experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, also are expected to convene to consider the issue.
In December, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that two doses of the vaccine in 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds did not trigger an immune response comparable to what was generated in teens and adults. But the two-shot regimen did create a protective immune response in children 6 months to 2 years old. That’s when drugmakers added a third shot to the trial to improve the immune response, a crushing blow to many pediatricians and parents who would now have to wait several months to protect children.
People familiar with the updated two-dose data say the vaccine has a good safety profile in young children and showed an ability to prevent a significant number of covid-19 cases.
But outside experts were eager to see any new data showing how effective the vaccine was. And some worried that any effort to speed access to the shots could backfire by increasing skepticism about vaccines.
In the trial, children between 6 months to 5 years old received two doses of 3 microgram shots, a tenth of the dose given to adults, three weeks apart.
The trial was designed to measure immune responses in younger children after immunization, to see if their immune responses were comparable to what was reported to be protective in teens and young adults. This approach is called “immunobridging.” It is often used to show vaccines work and are safe in other age groups — and typically takes far less time than efficacy trials, which enroll more study subjects and take more time because they wait to see if people who are vaccinated are less likely to fall sick than people who receive a placebo.
Pfizer and BioNTech are expected to provide updated data when they submit their request for authorization to the FDA. There were so many cases of covid-19 during the omicron surge when the trial was ongoing, that the companies have some data showing how well the vaccine worked to prevent illness.
Outside experts who were not involved in the trial said they would be interested to see what new data Pfizer submitted, but expressed skepticism about the idea that the two-dose data would be enough, if it depends on the likelihood that a third dose would raise the immune response.
“I would say it’s certainly fine to release an under 5 [year old] covid vaccine on the basis of immunobridging data, but there has to be sufficiently robust immune response,” said Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Additional data will become available when the company files with the FDA for emergency use authorization, according to people familiar with the situation.
“At this time, we have not filed a submission and we’re continuing to collect and analyze data from both two and three doses in our younger age cohort,” Pfizer spokeswoman Jerica Pitts said in an email. “As part of our ongoing commitment, we will share new updates as they become available.”
A segment of parents have been trying to push the FDA to move faster on children’s vaccines. A grass-roots group of physicians, parents and advocates called “Protect Their Future” has collected more than 5,700 signatures on a petition asking for vaccines to become available to younger age groups. That includes through off-label use of the higher-dose vaccine authorized for 5- to 11-year-olds, or by authorizing the vaccine in the youngest children, in whom it triggered a protective immune response.
The American Academy of Pediatrics said parents with children under 5 are facing “an especially challenging moment in this pandemic.”
“We understand the urgent need for a safe and effective vaccine for that age group,” American Academy of Pediatrics chief executive Mark Del Monte said in a statement. “We are eager to see the data and will continue to follow the science.”
But some doctors said they worry that an effort to accelerate pediatric vaccines could hurt the effort to increase uptake of boosters in adults and vaccinations in older children. Kavita Patel, a primary care physician who worked in the Obama administration, said Monday the government should avoid any steps that could undermine faith in the shots, considering the extensive skepticism that has dogged inoculation efforts.
While those demanding the vaccine have been vocal, vaccine uptake among other children already eligible has been slow — and some pediatricians fear that acceptance will be lower in younger age groups. In areas where shots have been available to 5- to 11-year-olds since early November, more than 70 percent of eligible children have not gotten a single shot, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Much of the conversation at the meeting involving Pfizer and the government officials Friday was about whether the manufacturers could ramp up production within the next four weeks to produce enough doses for this population, the administration official said. Pfizer said it could, the official said. | null | null | null | null | null |
This satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows a thunderstorm complex which was found to contain the longest single flash that covered a horizontal distance on record, at around 768 kilometers (477 miles) across parts of the southern United States on April 29, 2020. Two stormy parts of the Americas set records for longest lightning flashes back in 2020, the World Meteorological Organization said Monday, Jan. 31, 2022. (NOAA via AP) (Uncredited/NOAA) | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. sends Venezuelan migrants to Colombia under Biden’s new border plan
Record numbers of Venezuelans have crossed into the United States in recent months in search of humanitarian refuge. (Eric Gay/AP)
Venezuelans taken into custody along the U.S. southern border will be sent to Colombia under a new attempt by the Biden administration to contend with spiking numbers of migrants arriving from nations around the world.
Venezuelans have crossed into the United States in recent months in record numbers, typically after flying to a Mexican border city and walking across to surrender to American authorities. U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped 24,819 Venezuelans in December, up from 206 a year earlier.
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that it will begin returning Venezuelans to Colombia if they had previously resettled in that country, expelling them from the United States under the pandemic-era health authority known as Title 42. The emergency provision allows authorities to bypass immigration proceedings without affording asylum seekers a chance to seek protection under U.S. law.
“On January 27, 2022, the Department of Homeland Security returned two Venezuelan nationals to Colombia, where they had previously resided,” the department said in a statement.
“DHS is committed to ensuring that every migrant encountered is processed in a safe, orderly, and humane manner.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will begin returning Venezuelans to Colombia on a regular basis, officials said. The arrangement was first reported by CNN.
Venezuelan Migrants Are New Border Challenge for Biden
The U.S. government does not recognize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as the country’s legitimate president, and the lack of formal diplomatic relations makes it all but impossible for Homeland Security officials to deport or return migrants there.
That has raised fears within the administration of a mass migration wave. Nearly 6 million Venezuelans already have been displaced from their homeland, according to the latest U.N. figures, fleeing lawlessness, economic collapse and authoritarian rule.
Most of the displaced have resettled in South America. Colombia has been the largest recipient of Venezuelans, with nearly 2 million.
President Biden has struggled to cope with a record numbers of border arrests and stinging Republican attacks on his administration’s immigration policies. Authorities made 1.7 million arrests during the 2021 fiscal year that ended in September, an all-time high.
Biden also has angered immigrant advocacy groups and some Democrats by continuing the Title 42 expulsions, which started under President Donald Trump as a targeted enforcement tool. When Haitian migrants who had been living in South America crossed en masse into the Del Rio, Tex., area in September, Biden officials used Title 42 to expel them to their battered homeland. Crossings by Haitians immediately plunged.
In addition to large inflows of migrants from traditional sources such as Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, authorities have encountered soaring numbers of arrivals from Nicaragua, Ecuador, India, Russia and elsewhere. Mexican authorities have tightened visa requirements for several nationalities, including Venezuelans, at the behest of Biden officials.
In Latin America, Blinken calls for global sprint to show democracy can deliver
In October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Bogotá as Biden officials negotiated with Colombia to accept Venezuelan returnees, promoting a regional approach to managing migration pressures.
“The migration challenge that we’re facing in our hemisphere is not one country’s problem,” Blinken said during a speech at the gathering. “It’s our shared problem, and it cannot be solved by any one country.”
“In the past,” he said, “we often saw increased migration from a few countries facing some kind of acute crisis, but that’s not the case now. Instead, migrants are leaving many countries across the region all at once.” | null | null | null | null | null |
N.C. man offered explosives training, knowing trainees wanted to kill those in law enforcement, prosecutors allege
The Justice Department announced it had charged Christopher Arthur, 38, of Mount Olive, N.C., with teaching another individual how to make and use an explosive, knowing that the individual intended to use that instruction in the attempted murder of federal law enforcement. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
The website for Tackleberry Solutions tells prospective customers it “teaches wartime military tactics for home defense” and offers a free PDF on home fortification for those willing to provide an email address.
But the Justice Department alleged Monday that the organization’s trainer was secretly peddling a more sinister service — direction on how to make improvised explosive devices — and that he knew the recipient of his training was planning to kill law enforcement officers.
In a news release, the Justice Department announced that it had charged Christopher Arthur, 38, of Mount Olive, N.C., with teaching another individual how to make and use an explosive, knowing the individual intended to use that instruction in the attempted murder of federal law enforcement personnel. Arthur was arrested this month, and the case against him was unsealed Monday.
According to court documents, the FBI’s path to Arthur began after a dramatic 2020 chase and shootout in New York state between law enforcement officers and a suspected extremist. Investigators searching the home and vehicle of the slain suspect found guns, improvised explosive devices and an instruction manual from Tackleberry Solutions bearing Arthur’s name, prosecutors alleged.
A confidential informant working with the FBI later reached out to the company requesting one of its free PDFs, and Arthur allegedly began to offer more.
“According to these charges, the defendant provided someone with training on explosive devices knowing that person intended to use that information to murder or attempt the murder of law enforcement,” U.S. Attorney Michael Easley said in a statement announcing the case. “This type of behavior is criminal, it is unacceptable, and it will be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
Prosecutors said the suspect in the chase and shootout appeared to have attended training with Arthur at Tackleberry Solutions for multiple days in March 2020. That suspect, Joshua Blessed, was driving a truck in New York in May 2020 when he fled from a traffic stop.
The local sheriff said at the time that Blessed was an “anti-police extremist” apparently set off by police’s attempt to pull him over. An affidavit for a search warrant in Arthur’s case indicates that the FBI had been investigating Blessed since October 2018, “based on information that Blessed was organizing and attempting to recruit for a militia extremist group and preparing to engage in an apocalyptic battle against the U.S. Government.”
It was unclear on Monday what Arthur knew about Blessed’s plans. The affidavit alleges that investigators recovered from Blessed’s home a manual Arthur had written called “Quick Reaction Force-Modern Day Minutemen-lmprovised Explosives,” as well as 14 intact improvised explosive devices that appeared to be identical to those found in Tackleberry Solutions manuals.
The two also exchanged texts and calls, the affidavit says.
Damon Chetson, an attorney for Arthur, said in an email, “I do not generally comment about pending cases, and would not about this case.” Arthur is next scheduled to appear in court Friday.
After the FBI informant reached out requesting a PDF from Arthur, Arthur allegedly responded: “To prevent being flagged or shut down, I’ve had to keep parts of this information off of the internet. Especially since explosives are such a touchy topic.” The two continued talking, according to the affidavit, with the informant expressing interest in “militaristic force” training.
“Yeah well … with what they’re talking about in the Biden administration, that might be important, hadn’t it,” Arthur responded, according to the affidavit.
On May 5, the FBI informant met with Arthur at his North Carolina home and talked about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives having been to his own residence. Arthur told him he could: “Stand and fight or be, ah, not exactly where you’re supposed to be,” according to the affidavit.
“ARTHUR then explained how to properly place IEDs throughout the CHS’ property, the importance of creating a fatal funnel, the setup and use of remote activated firearms. and how to evade arrest after killing members of law enforcement,” an FBI agent wrote, using an acronym for confidential human source.
That meeting formed the basis of the charge against Arthur. The FBI agent wrote that Arthur also demonstrated how to make various components of IEDs, including tripwire switches and improvised initiators, and provided those components to the FBI informant. When investigators later searched Arthur’s home, they found multiple IEDs and components, a pistol suppressor, bulk gunpowder and mixed Tannerite explosive, prosecutors alleged.
The website for Tackleberry Solutions seems to contemplate possible legal consequences of its training, asking those who request the PDF to affirm, “I am responsible for knowing the laws in my own area and will not hold Tackleberry Solutions or anyone associated with Tackleberry Solutions responsible for my actions or the actions of anyone around me. Even if those actions are done as a result of the education I have received from Tackleberry Solutions.” The site does not explicitly advocate violence against law enforcement but does suggest its training could be used outside the home.
“After you’ve secured your family, then branch out to your neighbors, your friends, your coworkers. Contact your local law enforcement,” the site says. “Vote in a Sheriff that is willing to work with a local militia. Create a checks and balances for each other. The Sheriff’s duty is to ensure that the militia is operating within the bounds of the law. The militia’s duty is to ensure that the Sheriff is operating within the bounds of the constitution.” | null | null | null | null | null |
West warns time is growing short for Iran nuclear deal, as talks pause again
European and Iranian negotiators wait for the start of a meeting in Vienna on Dec. 17 on reviving the 2015 nuclear accord. (E.U. Delegation in Vienna/EEAS via Reuters)
With the pause of their eighth session of talks since early last year, representatives of Iran and global powers returned to their capitals over the weekend to consult about what European partners in the Iran nuclear deal called “the final stage” in negotiations over a U.S. return to the agreement.
Negotiators have said for the past month that only weeks remained before Iran’s nuclear program would advance so far beyond the parameters of the original 2015 accord that a return to its terms would be impossible. A senior State Department official said Monday that those weeks have now dwindled to only “a handful.”
“In other words, we will know sooner rather than later whether the United States is back in the JCPOA,” or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, “and Iran is back in fully implementing its obligations, or whether we are going to have to face a different reality of mounting tensions and crisis,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the State Department.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said Monday that his government had presented the other signers of the deal, including Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, with a written initiative that, if accepted by Washington, could result in a viable agreement on the day they return to the talks in Vienna, according to Iranian media.
The United States, which withdrew from the agreement in 2018, after President Donald Trump called it “a bad deal” and promised to punish Tehran with “maximum pressure” sanctions, has not been a direct party to the talks, but exchanges positions with Iran through the Europeans.
The State Department official declined to comment on any Iranian proposals, saying that the U.S. position has been clear throughout the talks. The Biden administration has said it is prepared to lift all “nuclear-related sanctions” immediately if Iran returns to the nuclear restraints of the JCPOA.
“We’ve been at this now for roughly 10 months,” the official said. The last Vienna round, adjourned on Friday, “was among the most intensive to date. We made progress narrowing down the list of differences … that’s why now’s the time for political decision.”
The question is “whether Iran is prepared to make decisions … that’s the reason why negotiators have returned for consultations with leaderships,” the official said.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who spoke over the weekend with his Iranian counterpart, President Ebrahim Raisi, the official said, “conveyed [that there is] a significant opportunity, but there is also urgency.”
The official, who briefed reporters on the status of the talks, advised them to ignore media reports that the release of four Iranian Americans imprisoned in Iran was part of the negotiations, and stressed that talks over the detainees was separate from the nuclear discussions.
“I stress that any news, any information on what’s happening” regarding the prisoners “will come from this administration … and urge journalists and others not to pay credence to what they may see from other sources, particularly from Iranian sources.” Such reports, the official said, were only “adding to the cruelty on the families” of the detainees and “putting out false information.”
The official also denied Iranian reports that it might be willing to speak directly to the U.S. side as an agreement is near, although the United States has long said face-to-face conversations would enhance the process.
“It’s not a matter of asking Iran to do us a favor,” the official said. “If Iran doesn’t want to talk to us, that is their decision.” Direct talks should take place “as a favor to the process, if our goal is to reach agreement quickly.”
Citing room for “a lot of misunderstanding, misinformation and miscommunications,” the official said that direct talks were “not a magical solution. We still might find ourselves at an impasse.” But “it would be regrettable” if one reason they did not succeed was “an inability to sit down” together. “We’re not begging for a meeting … we just think it would be the logical step to take if in fact we are determined to get back into the deal … it’s simply common sense.”
Since the United States withdrew from the JCPOA, Iran has vastly expanded both the quantity and quality of uranium enrichment, far beyond its limits restricting it to small amounts of low enriched ore and strict international verification. The Iranians are now using sophisticated centrifuges and enriching up to 60 percent, just below the level where it is possible to have enough fissile material for a weapon. That has reduced their so-called “breakout time” from about a year under the JCPOA to what is now a matter of a few weeks, according to U.S. officials. Iran has said its nuclear program is designed only for peaceful purposes.
The basis of the negotiations is a return to “compliance for compliance” under the original terms of the agreement. Core issues are which sanctions, among the at least 1,500 imposed by Trump, the United States is prepared to end in exchange for Iran’s return to full and verifiable compliance.
The United States has said that only those sanctions related to nuclear issues should be eliminated, while those covering Iran’s support for proxy wars in the region and its missile development program can remain under the original deal, while Tehran has demanded, at least in public, that all be removed.
What comes after ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran
As the protracted talks have continued, there also have been disagreements over Iran’s compliance with the agreement’s verification measures. Iran has barred the International Atomic Energy Agency from access to some sites and cameras until, it says, a deal is completed.
If the negotiations are unsuccessful, “the future is not hard to divine,” the State Department official said. “Obviously, Iran’s nuclear program … would not be constrained” and could continue “at an alarming pace.” The United States and its partners would “have to fortify our response — economically, diplomatically and otherwise.” | null | null | null | null | null |
DOVER, Del. — A former Democratic candidate for attorney general has been chastised by a federal judge for falling short of “serious lawyering” in a lawsuit involving the death of a Delaware prison inmate.
“Even though we may disagree with the judge’s decision, we are thankful it is without prejudice, ...” Johnson said. “But ultimately, the client will get justice against Connections, and that’s the bottom line.” | null | null | null | null | null |
In this photo of a video monitor, Julio Cesar Segura appears remotely in Clark County Superior Court in Vancouver, Wash., on Monday, Jan. 31, 2022, in connection with a Jan. 29, 2022, police pursuit that ended with the mistaken shooting of an off-duty Vancouver Police Department Officer by a deputy from the Clark County Sheriff’s Office near Battle Ground, Wash. (The Columbian via AP) (Uncredited/The Columbian)
SEATTLE — An off-duty officer in Washington state died after first being stabbed by a robbery suspect who showed up at his home while evading police, and then being mistakenly shot by a sheriff’s deputy who responded to the scene. | null | null | null | null | null |
Planned alternative yeshiva in D.C. is hit with stop-work order
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld listens to a Talmud reading by student Nicole Goldstein in the house that he is converting into a yeshiva. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
D.C. officials have halted work on what its founder hopes will be the city’s only yeshiva, or stand-alone Jewish study center, after regulators found a two-story building under construction — not the “enlarged family room” for which the city had given a permit.
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld announced late last year that he was leaving his longtime pulpit, Ohev Sholom, the District’s largest Orthodox synagogue, to found Yeshivas Reb Elimelech on a quiet residential street in the Northwest Washington neighborhood of Shepherd Park.
The yeshiva Herzfeld imagines will be something that experts say doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else in the country: An Orthodox yeshiva that welcomes people of all religious backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations to study together. And if they qualify, it will offer them types of ordination. The idea is for these people to learn Jewish texts in the intensive, traditional style that today is done almost exclusively among super-Orthodox males.
Yeshivas are mostly places where Orthodox men study the Torah. A D.C. rabbi wants to change that.
Herzfeld also in 2013 brought in one of the country’s first female Orthodox spiritual leaders, Maharat Ruth Friedman, now interim leader at Ohev, which is part of the Modern Orthodox segment of Orthodox Judaism.
The house, which was gifted to Herzfeld by its previous owner, was permitted in July “to demolish portions of an existing 1-story rear addition and build an enlarged family room for prayer, study, and religious-based use,” according to a Monday statement by the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.
Herzfeld also told The Washington Post last fall that he planned to build a study room off the house, and would house “several” men to start with in the house portion.
Neighbors who noticed the initial, one-level project started raising questions and concerns last fall, including some who took their concerns to Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Stacey Lincoln.
Lincoln said when Herzfeld told him he planned to have as many as 15 unrelated people living in the space, the commissioner said there were a lot of unanswered questions for a quiet neighborhood. How will it be run? How long will people stay? What about traffic and parking? Will you be charging money like a business?
“It’s like someone living next to you and you tear it down and put a McDonald’s there,” Lincoln said he told Herzfeld. “He said, this is different, but I said, no, it’s not. McDonald’s is selling burgers, you’re selling information. Neighbors at large can voice concern what kind of businesses they want in their neighborhood.”
Lincoln said about 20 neighbors have complained to him about the expansion and lack of community input. He noted that parking is “already at a premium” and that he supports the school, “just not there.” People have shared similar sentiments in the Shepherd Park online discussion group.
Don Squires, who lives three doors down from the yeshiva, said in an interview that the pandemic has also exacerbated tensions: “I wish we could sit down and discuss it dispassionately versus sniping over email.”
DCRA on Monday said the concept of the project is allowed “as a matter of right” as the law allows clerical residences for up to 15 individuals in residential zones. As far as the details, DCRA said current construction goes beyond the scope of the permit issued in July. Herzfeld has submitted a revision of the original permit “to reflect the expanded scope of work. That application is still under review,” DCRA wrote to The Post.
Herzfeld was brusque with a reporter when asked about the expanded project and repeated that it is “consistent with the zoning of D.C.”
“Our plan is consistent with the zoning; it’s very clear,” he said. “In the middle of the project we decided to put in for new permits and that’s that.” | null | null | null | null | null |
LOS ANGELES — Late in the third quarter of the NFC championship game, the Los Angeles Rams fell into a 10-point hole. For most of that period, they had showed few signs they could climb out of it.
Higbee has a sprained medial collateral ligament in his knee, and McVay doesn’t know whether he’ll be ready for the Super Bowl: “He’s such a tough guy. We’re going to do everything we can to get this guy ready to go.” ... The Rams had no other major injuries from the game. | null | null | null | null | null |
Survivor of ill-fated migrant voyage: Smugglers promise easy trip to U.S. but ‘it’s all a lie’
Juan Esteban reunited with his mother in Miami on Jan. 30. He was the sole person to survive a capsized boat carrying migrants. His sister did not survive. (The law office of Naimeh Salem)
FORT PIERCE, Fla. — The siblings living in a small Colombian city hard hit by the nation’s economic downturn and decades of civil conflict first got the idea to reunite with their mother in the United States on the Internet.
Traveling through Central America and crossing at the Mexico border was dangerous, they heard. But flying into the Bahamas — where no visa was required — and then going on two relatively short boat rides to Florida offered a quicker, seemingly less risky route.
The smugglers offering migrants such as Juan Esteban Montoya Caicedo, 22, and his sister María Camila, 18, a shot at the American Dream promised life jackets and a good boat.
“They tell you you’ll be in Miami in three, four hours,” Juan Esteban said. “It’s all a lie.”
On Monday, the sole survivor of a doomed trip from Bimini to Florida achieved part of his dream. Immigration officials decided not to detain him, allowing him to join his mother in the Unites States while he seeks political asylum. But alongside the relief was immense grief: The sister he hoped to start a new life with did not survive the journey.
U.S. Coast Guard officials suspended their search Thursday for at least 35 people believed missing after the boat capsized hours after departing from an island 50 miles from Miami — one of the deadliest migrant disasters off the eastern Florida coast in years. Authorities found five bodies, but not María Camila. Her brother says they lost each other when the boat overturned and that she drowned. He managed to cling to the overturned vessel for two days until his rescue.
“I had to live, they had to rescue me, because I had to tell my parents what happened,” he said from a hotel conference room after his release, often holding his mother’s hand.
The ill-fated trip has put a spotlight on a brewing migration crisis in the Caribbean. U.S. and Bahamian coast guard officers are finding ships on a weekly basis with as many as 200 people aboard — most of them from Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Many of the ships are overcrowded and in poor condition, and while a good number are caught, the United Nations estimates that at least 967 people have vanished into Caribbean waters between 2014 and 2021.
In a worrying sign, officers in the Bahamas are now also finding people like Juan Esteban from as far away as Colombia — a nation that residents fled by the thousands during the height of the civil conflict, but usually by plane. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has opened a criminal probe to determine who was behind the operation to smuggle the Colombian siblings and dozens of others to the United States aboard a ship that lost motor power hours after departing.
“They’re victims,” Juan Esteban’s attorney, Naimeh Salem, said of her client and his sister. “These people put too many people on a boat, without life vests.”
Juan Esteban and his sister, he said, were lured by the promise that the trip would be safe. They had not seen their mother, Marcia Caicedo, since she left 11 years earlier. As the pandemic shut down the world in 2020, Colombia’s economy nosedived, contracting more than 6 percent. Despite a peace accord to end Latin America’s longest-running conflict in 2016, dissident guerrillas are still a powerful force in long-neglected parts of the country. The chief prosecutor’s office has issued warnings in recent years about rebel presence in the same region where the siblings lived.
Despite the distance, the siblings had daily contact with their mother. Most mornings started with a call or text message from Houston, where Caicedo worked as a housecleaner and later got by cooking and selling Colombian food such as tamales. Their maternal grandparents took charge of raising them, teaching Juan Esteban and María Camila the same values as their mother. Their mother helped them make ends meet by sending items to resell in Colombia — sought-after American clothing brands and sweets for a candy business.
María Camila wasn’t one to take risks, her brother said. Quiet but charismatic, she was studying industrial engineering and “liked to do things right.” Juan Esteban helped his grandfather, who grew corn for a living, while finishing a degree in business. Still, they longed for three things they couldn’t find in Colombia: to better their lives, their safety and their mother.
“The situation in Colombia had them desperate,” Caicedo said.
The siblings were well-known in their hometown of Guacarí, about 30 miles northeast of Cali, but they told few about their decision to try to reach the United States, Juan Esteban said. They confided in their father, who he said discouraged them from taking the risky journey. But they were driven — boarding a flight soon after to the Bahamas, intent on arriving in Florida by sea.
Landing in a prime Caribbean tourist destination was the first step in the journey. From there, they boarded a boat to Bimini. Citing security reasons, Juan Esteban declined to say how much the siblings paid or who promised to get them to the United States. The first boat ride was easy. The turquoise waters were warm, the waves small. They arrived in a couple hours.
The second ship, departing from one of the westernmost isles of the Bahamas, felt riskier from the start. Despite being promised a boat that would not be overloaded, Juan Esteban said, there were at least 35 people aboard the ship. Among them: men and women from Haiti, Jamaica, the Bahamas. Only the ones from the Dominican Republic spoke Spanish. One woman carried a baby girl. The organizers did not provide life vests.
“That seemed bad to me,” Juan Esteban said, his skin darkened by days under the sun. “But I had such a desire to get to the country.”
They cast off Saturday about 10 p.m., the siblings seated together in the crowded boat. Several hours later, Florida was still nowhere to be seen. In the darkness, the motor stopped working. The waves got bigger, crashing water into the boat. The two huddled together, prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe and a saint said to grant miracles in their father’s hometown.
If the vessel overturned, he told his sister, hold on to the boat.
The sun was beginning to rise when a final wave tossed them all overboard. In the panicked moments afterward, he said the migrants tried to hold on to one another. He initially spotted his sister, but she was pulled under the water as he tried to get to her. He screamed her name. He swam under and around the boat. He could not find her.
“I looked and looked,” he said. “It was impossible.”
About 15 people initially survived, he said, and for a time they all held on to the overturned boat, finding it warmer to stay in the water than on the hull, where they were exposed to cold air. Two of the smugglers — both wearing life vests — were picked up by another boat, Juan Esteban’s attorney said. They promised to come back but never did.
One by one, those left in the water began drifting away, some apparently dying, others so exhausted they didn’t have the strength to hold on any longer, he said.
By early Monday evening, nearly two days after departing, he was alone.
Famished, dehydrated and injured from being repeatedly smacked by the boat, he said he was barely conscious when a tugboat crew spotted him the next morning. He was seated atop the hull and didn’t see the ship until it was practically next to him.
“I don’t know who they are,” he said of his rescuers, but “they’re angels.”
An image of Juan Esteban perched on the overturned ship, alone in the rolling sea, soon began circulating on social media — making him a symbol of the dangerous quest to reach the United States. In the week since, most of his days have been confined to a hospital bed. But on Sunday night, Customs and Border Protection allowed him to see his mother.
Before a framed image of the U.S. flag, the two wept as they embraced.
Most of those caught at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard or good Samaritans are deported to their country of origin or the one they departed from. Juan Esteban’s attorney said he was allowed to stay in the country while the case is sorted out — a process that could take years.
An ICE spokesman declined to comment on what grounds he was released, saying only that it is part of an ongoing investigation and that the agency is “focusing strictly on individual who are responsible for this crime.”
For now, he’ll attempt to start a new life in Houston.
His mother wants the U.S. Coast Guard to keep looking for her daughter. She can’t stand the idea that she is gone, and the thought of it is harder with each passing day. Juan Esteban, for his part, hopes others take from his story a message: Don’t flee by sea.
“It broke my heart in two,” he said. “And took part of it away.”
Paulina Villegas in Mexico City contributed to this report.
‘People will always come’: Inside a Haitian’s journey without end | null | null | null | null | null |
Number of migrants detained in Mexico surged 78% in January
A migrants exercises at a park as he waits for his chance to cross the US-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico, Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
MEXICO CITY — The number of migrants detained in Mexico surged 78% in January from a year ago, Mexico’s National Immigration Institute said Monday.
It said 16,740 migrants, mainly from Central America, were detained between Jan. 1 and Jan. 30. That compares with the 9,406 people detained without proper documents in the same period of 2021.
It was unclear if the number of migrants was less last year because of last winter’s brutal coronavirus surge.
Children and youths under age 18 made up 14.5% of the migrants detained, and a total of 780 were found to be unaccompanied by family members, the agency said.
Of the 16,740 migrants, 6,297, or 38%, were from Asia, Africa, Europe or other parts of the world outside the Americas.
Migrants smugglers in Mexico have recently been trying some innovative methods, including ferrying migrants for hundreds of miles on the backs of motorcycles or smuggling them in vehicles with fake logos.
Last week authorities said eight motorcycles, each with a driver and a Cuban migrant riding on the back, were stopped at a checkpoint in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco about 180 miles (300 kilometers) from where they had set out. They were headed for the northern state of Coahuila, more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away. The drivers were detained, and the migrants turned over to immigration officials.
Those detentions came just days after 28 Nicaraguans were found crammed inside a fake ambulance painted with logos from a government health agency. The vehicle was stopped in Mexico’s Pacific coast state of Oaxaca. | null | null | null | null | null |
FORT PIERCE, Fla. — The siblings living in a small Colombian city hard hit by the nation’s economic downturn and decades of civil conflict first got the idea to reunite with their mother in the United States on the Internet.
On Monday, the sole survivor of a doomed trip from Bimini to Florida achieved part of his dream. Immigration officials decided not to detain him, allowing him to join his mother in the Unites States while he seeks political asylum. But alongside the relief was immense grief: The sister he hoped to start a new life with did not survive the journey.
U.S. Coast Guard officials suspended their search Thursday for at least 35 people believed missing after the boat capsized hours after departing from an island 50 miles from Miami — one of the deadliest migrant disasters off the eastern Florida coast in years. Authorities found five bodies, but not María Camila. Her brother says they lost each other when the boat overturned and that she drowned. He managed to cling to the overturned vessel for two days until his rescue.
In a worrying sign, officers in the Bahamas are now also finding people like Juan Esteban from as far away as Colombia — a nation that residents fled by the thousands during the height of the civil conflict, but usually by plane. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has opened a criminal probe to determine who was behind the operation to smuggle the Colombian siblings and dozens of others to the United States aboard a ship that lost motor power hours after departing.
Juan Esteban and his sister, he said, were lured by the promise that the trip would be safe. They had not seen their mother, Marcia Caicedo, since she left 11 years earlier. As the pandemic shut down the world in 2020, Colombia’s economy nosedived, contracting more than 6 percent. Despite a peace accord to end Latin America’s longest-running conflict in 2016, dissident guerrillas are still a powerful force in long-neglected parts of the country. The chief prosecutor’s office has issued warnings in recent years about rebel presence in the same region where the siblings lived. | null | null | null | null | null |
Esteban Torres, congressman who advocated for Latino rights, dies at 91
Esteban Torres in 2004. (Damian Dovarganes/AP)
Esteban Torres, who emerged from the Chicano civil rights movement in Southern California and went on to serve eight terms in Congress pushing for social and economic change to help empower Latinos, died Jan. 25 at 91.
His family announced the death in a statement but gave no further details.
A labor organizer and anti-poverty activist in East Los Angeles, Mr. Torres held leadership roles with the United Auto Workers union before joining President Jimmy Carter’s administration in 1977. He served as U.S. representative to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris and as White House special assistant for Hispanic Affairs.
He had been an unsuccessful congressional candidate in 1974 but won in 1982 representing a district that included much of East Los Angeles, where he was raised.
In Washington, during his first term, Mr. Torres spearheaded the first comprehensive examination of West Covina’s BKK Landfill, one of the nation’s most hazardous. He also pushed for an overhaul of the country’s consumer credit reporting policies and helped draft legislation to ensure low-income victims of natural disasters received full federal assistance.
Mr. Torres, who did not seek reelection in 1998, also helped secure millions of dollars for public transit projects in Los Angeles County and beyond, according to the Los Angeles Times. From 1989 until 1991, he chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Mr. Torres was born in Miami, Ariz., on Jan. 27, 1930. His father worked in the copper mines and was deported along with more than 1 million other people of Mexican descent through the “Mexican Repatriation program” during the Depression, even though many were U.S. citizens. Mr. Torres never saw his father again.
After graduating in 1949 from high school in East Los Angeles, he enlisted in the Army and served in the Corps of Engineers during the Korean War.
After retiring from Congress, Mr. Torres served on the California Transportation Commission and was a visiting professor at Whittier College and the University of California at Los Angeles.
He was a founder of LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a museum in downtown Los Angeles that explores the cultural influence of Latinos in the city. He was an artist, and his work was displayed at galleries throughout Los Angeles.
Survivors include his wife, Arcy Sanchez; five children; 12 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man eluded police in chase the night before a fatal shooting, court documents say
Mario Samm has now been charged with first-degree murder in the Dec. 23 killing of Jahandar Rahman Darvish
Police have made an arrest in the fatal shooting that occurred Dec. 23 in Montgomery County. (Dan Morse/TWP)
Early the morning of Dec. 22, police in Montgomery County faced a choice: continue pursuing Mario Samm down Interstate 270, knowing he was wanted in connection with a crime in West Virginia, according to court documents. Or factor in that the alleged offense was relatively minor, and call off the chase.
Police chose to end the pursuit, following a department policy to limit a practice that can endanger the public and turn deadly. The next evening, just 42 hours later and still free, Samm gunned down an acquaintance inside his Germantown apartment, detectives alleged in court documents.
Samm, 31, has been charged in the Dec. 23 slaying of Jahandar Rahman Darvish, 25. Samm is being held without bond.
“There’s no question it’s a tragedy. There’s also no question the police did the right thing calling off the chase,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a police pursuit expert at the University of South Carolina Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
He said the Montgomery County police policy, which generally limits pursuits to those wanted for serious crimes or suspected of driving drunk, mirrors those of departments around the country.
The chase and murder charge, together with a felony assault case out of Frederick County, have collected around Samm since late December. An attorney listed for him in Frederick County court records could not be reached for comment.
Detectives tied him to the slaying, they alleged in court records, through phone records, shell casings, Instagram posts and a rental car agreement. Authorities provided no motive in Darvish’s killing. But arrest records in the Frederick County assault case — in which Samm is accused of pointed a gun at his brother’s chest and threatened to kill him in front of their father — allege Samm had recently ingested “laced” drugs.
The homicide victim, Darvish, was a member of a prominent Washington-area family known for its automotive business and philanthropy.
“He would never hurt anyone,” his aunt, Tammy Darvish, said Monday. “He was such a good friend to his friends.”
Tammy Darvish said her nephew was a musical artist with a wide social media following. He was raised by Terri Darvish, who had no other children, according to Tammy Darvish.
“When it’s your only child, it just compounds the pain and suffering,” Tammy Darvish said. “She did everything in the world for her son. She dedicated her life to doing the best she could for him.”
Early the morning of Dec. 22, at 1:53 a.m., a Montgomery County police officer was operating a speed detector on Interstate 270 near Watkins Mill Road, according to court records. A Honda Accord clocked at 92 mph passed him, the documents state.
The officer caught up and pulled over the driver, got a license from the driver, and ran a warrant check. That’s when the West Virginia charge appeared. The officer walked back to the Honda and asked him to get out. He didn’t, according to the court records, and instead drove off.
The officer pursued him, but after a few minutes the pursuit was called off by a supervisor, according to court records.
Just before 6 p.m., on Dec. 23, police were called for a report of shots being fired in an apartment building along Circle Gate Drive in Germantown. Inside one of the units, they found Darvish “obviously deceased and suffering from multiple gunshot wounds,” investigators wrote in a charging affidavit filed in Montgomery County District Court.
Police found several spent .40-caliber shell casings.
Detectives spoke with a witness who reporting being inside the apartment during the shooting. This person said that before the shooter arriving, Darvish had been on the phone with him providing directions from his old apartment to his current apartment, according to the affidavit. The witness also said that before this man’s arrival, Darvish said the visitor might be known to the witness because of Instagram posts.
After the visitor arrived, he, Darvish and the witness hung out for 20 to 30 minutes, according to court records. The visitor and Darvish got into an argument, which led to the shooting, detectives allege.
Detectives went to Darvish’s old apartment and spoke with the current resident, who told them of a visitor who had activated their Ring video system late the afternoon of Dec. 23. The video showed a man wearing a black winter jacket with a fur-trimmed hood standing at the door for several minutes before taking out his cellphone and leaving. The resident never opened the door.
Rising covid cases — once again — halt jury trials
Detectives believe, based on phone records, that the man at the door was Samm, who had gone to the apartment to see Darvish, not knowing he had moved, and then called him to get directions to his new place, according to court records.
After the shooting, on Dec. 26, in Frederick County, Samm allegedly had an altercation with his brother and father. Police there charged him in that case with first-degree assault, and he was ordered to remain in jail without the option for release pending trial.
Montgomery detectives spoke with Samm’s father, who told them he and his son argued over a rental car, according to court documents. The rental car matched a description of the GMC SUV seen leaving the homicide scene, detectives said.
Detectives also learned that when the younger Samm spoke with Frederick authorities, he spoke of firing a gun recently in the city of Frederick to “protect himself,” according to court records. Detectives went to that scene and found shell casings that matched those found at the Montgomery County homicide scene. | null | null | null | null | null |
A staff member hands a mask to a student outside of Harriet Tubman Elementary School on Jan. 6, 2022. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
D.C. Public Schools officials said Monday evening that they were reviewing the new health guidance. So far, the school system has launched a test-to-stay pilot program only in selected prekindergarten classes, whose students are not yet eligible for a coronavirus vaccine. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education will also help the District’s public and public charter schools interpret the guidance.
Students and staff participating in test-to-stay would have to test at least twice, the guidelines say — once within 24 hours after exposure, and again after five to seven days.
If no testing is done, then the person has to quarantine for 10 days.
The guidance also updates isolation rules for school staff and students who develop covid-19. They are to isolate at minimum for seven days and test negative on day five to return to school. They also must show an improvement of symptoms and be fever-free for 24 hours.
If the test comes back positive after day five, students and staff must isolate for 10 days. They also must isolate for 10 days if they do not test for the coronavirus.
The guidance released Monday also changed the definition of being “up to date” on vaccinations. People ages 18 and older have to receive all recommended vaccine doses and a booster shot to be considered up to date. | null | null | null | null | null |
People wait in line in the District for coronavirus testing in December. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Coronavirus vaccines for children younger than 5 could be available far sooner than expected — perhaps by the end of February — under a plan that would lead to the potential authorization of a two-shot regimen in the coming weeks, people briefed on the situation said Monday.
Pfizer and its partner, BioNTech, the manufacturers of the vaccine, are expected to submit to the Food and Drug Administration as early as Tuesday a request for emergency-use authorization for the vaccine for children 6 months to 5 years old, which would make it the first vaccine available for that age group. Older children already can receive the shot.
“The idea is, let’s go ahead and start the review of two doses,” said one of the people familiar with the situation. “If the data holds up in the submission, you could start kids on their primary baseline months earlier than if you don’t do anything until the third-dose data comes in.”
A Biden administration official said there is consensus among health officials in “seeing this move forward,” referring to the plan by Pfizer-BioNTech to submit an application. Last Friday, Pfizer presented updated trial data to federal health officials about the shots, according to an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.
The participants in the briefing included Anthony S. Fauci, chief medical adviser for the White House coronavirus response; David Kessler, chief science officer for the response; a representative from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and other officials from the Department of Health and Human Services.
The session included a “robust conversation” that three doses were likely to be much better than two shots, the administration official said. “But to get to three, you have to get two shots first. … There’s interest in seeing this move forward.”
The FDA’s outside advisers are expected to meet on the two-dose application in mid-February. The CDC’s outside experts, members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, also are expected to convene to consider the issue.
In December, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that two doses of the vaccine in 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds did not trigger an immune response comparable to what was generated in teens and adults. But the two-shot regimen did create a protective immune response in children 6 months to 2 years old. That’s when drugmakers added a third shot to the trial to try to improve the immune response, a crushing blow to many pediatricians and parents who would now have to wait several more months to protect children.
In the trial, children between 6 months and 5 years old received two doses of 3-microgram shots, a tenth of the dose given to adults, three weeks apart.
The trial was designed to measure immune responses in younger children after immunization, to see if their responses were comparable to what was reported to be protective in teens and young adults. This approach is called “immunobridging.” It is often used to show that vaccines work and are safe in other age groups — and typically takes far less time than efficacy trials, which enroll more study subjects and wait to see if people who are vaccinated are less likely to fall sick than people who receive a placebo.
Pfizer and BioNTech are expected to provide updated data when they submit their request for authorization to the FDA. There were so many cases of covid-19 during the omicron surge, when the trial was ongoing, that the companies have some data showing how well the vaccine worked to prevent illness.
Outside experts who were not involved in the trial said they would be interested to see what new data Pfizer submitted, but they expressed skepticism that the two-dose data would be enough, if it depended on the likelihood that a third dose would raise the immune response.
“I would say it’s certainly fine to release an under-5 [year-old] covid vaccine on the basis of immunobridging data, but there has to be sufficiently robust immune response,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Additional data will become available when the company files with the FDA for emergency-use authorization, according to people familiar with the situation.
“At this time, we have not filed a submission and we’re continuing to collect and analyze data from both two and three doses in our younger age cohort,” Pfizer spokeswoman Jerica Pitts said in an email. “As part of our ongoing commitment, we will share new updates as they become available.”
A segment of parents has been trying to push the FDA to move faster on children’s vaccines. A grass-roots group of physicians, parents and advocates called Protect Their Future has collected more than 5,700 signatures on a petition asking for the shots to become available to younger age groups. That includes off-label use of the higher-dose vaccine authorized for 5- to 11-year-olds, or authorization of the vaccine in the youngest children, in whom it triggered a protective immune response.
The American Academy of Pediatrics said parents with children under 5 are facing “an especially challenging moment in this pandemic.”
“We understand the urgent need for a safe and effective vaccine for that age group,” AAP chief executive Mark Del Monte said in a statement. “We are eager to see the data and will continue to follow the science.”
But some doctors said they worry that an effort to accelerate pediatric vaccines could hurt the push to increase uptake of boosters in adults and vaccinations in older children. Kavita Patel, a primary-care physician who worked in the Obama administration, said Monday that the government should avoid any steps that could undermine faith in the shots, considering the extensive skepticism that has dogged inoculation efforts.
While those demanding the vaccine have been vocal, vaccine uptake among children who are already eligible has been slow — and some pediatricians fear that acceptance will be lower in younger age groups. In areas where shots have been available to 5- to 11-year-olds since early November, more than 70 percent of eligible children have not gotten a single shot, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. | null | null | null | null | null |
FORT PIERCE, Fla. — The siblings living in a small Colombian city hit hard by the nation’s economic downturn and decades of civil conflict first got the idea to reunite with their mother in the United States on the Internet.
The smugglers offering migrants such as Juan Esteban Montoya Caicedo, 22, and his sister, María Camila, 18, a shot at the American Dream promised life jackets and a good boat.
On Monday, the sole survivor of a doomed trip from Bimini to Florida achieved part of his dream. Immigration officials decided not to detain him, allowing him to join his mother in the United States while he seeks political asylum. But alongside the relief was immense grief: The sister he hoped to start a new life with did not survive the journey.
U.S. Coast Guard officials suspended their search Thursday for at least 35 people believed missing after the boat capsized hours after departing from an island 50 miles from Miami — one of the deadliest migrant disasters off the eastern Florida coast in years. Authorities found five bodies, but not María Camila. Her brother says that they lost each other when the boat overturned and that she drowned. He managed to cling to the overturned vessel for two days until his rescue.
In a worrying sign, officers in the Bahamas are now also finding people like Juan Esteban from as far away as Colombia — a nation where residents fled by the thousands during the height of the civil conflict, but usually by plane. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has opened a criminal probe to determine who was behind the operation to smuggle the Colombian siblings and dozens of others to the United States aboard a ship that lost motor power hours after departing.
Juan Esteban and his sister, he said, were lured by the promise that the trip would be safe. They had not seen their mother, Marcia Caicedo, since she left 11 years earlier. As the pandemic shut down the world in 2020, Colombia’s economy nosedived, contracting by more than 6 percent. Despite a peace accord to end Latin America’s longest-running conflict in 2016, dissident guerrillas are still a powerful force in long-neglected parts of the country. The chief prosecutor’s office has issued warnings in recent years about rebel presence in the same region where the siblings lived.
“It broke my heart in two,” he said, “and took part of it away.” | null | null | null | null | null |
European and Iranian negotiators wait for the start of a meeting in Vienna on Dec. 17 on reviving the 2015 nuclear accord. (E.U. Delegation in Vienna/EEAS via Reuters)
Negotiators have said for the past month that only weeks remained before Iran’s nuclear program would advance so far beyond the parameters of the original 2015 accord that a return to its terms would be impossible. A senior State Department official said Monday that those weeks have now dwindled to only “a handful.”
“In other words, we will know sooner rather than later whether the United States is back in the JCPOA,” or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, “and Iran is back in fully implementing its obligations, or whether we are going to have to face a different reality of mounting tensions and crisis,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the State Department.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said Monday that his government had presented the other signers of the deal, including Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, with a written initiative that, if accepted by Washington, could result in a viable agreement on the day they return to the talks in Vienna, according to Iranian media.
The United States, which withdrew from the agreement in 2018, after President Donald Trump called it “a bad deal” and promised to punish Tehran with “maximum pressure” sanctions, has not been a direct party to the talks, but exchanges positions with Iran through the Europeans.
The State Department official declined to comment on any Iranian proposals, saying that the U.S. position has been clear throughout the talks. The Biden administration has said it is prepared to lift all “nuclear-related sanctions” immediately if Iran returns to the nuclear restraints of the JCPOA.
“We’ve been at this now for roughly 10 months,” the official said. The last Vienna round, adjourned on Friday, “was among the most intensive to date. We made progress narrowing down the list of differences … that’s why now’s the time for political decision.”
The question is “whether Iran is prepared to make decisions … that’s the reason why negotiators have returned for consultations with leaderships,” the official said.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who spoke over the weekend with his Iranian counterpart, President Ebrahim Raisi, the official said, “conveyed [that there is] a significant opportunity, but there is also urgency.”
The official, who briefed reporters on the status of the talks, advised them to ignore media reports that the release of four Iranian Americans imprisoned in Iran was part of the negotiations, and stressed that talks over the detainees was separate from the nuclear discussions.
“I stress that any news, any information on what’s happening” regarding the prisoners “will come from this administration … and urge journalists and others not to pay credence to what they may see from other sources, particularly from Iranian sources.” Such reports, the official said, were only “adding to the cruelty on the families” of the detainees and “putting out false information.”
The official also denied Iranian reports that it might be willing to speak directly to the U.S. side as an agreement is near, although the United States has long said face-to-face conversations would enhance the process.
“It’s not a matter of asking Iran to do us a favor,” the official said. “If Iran doesn’t want to talk to us, that is their decision.” Direct talks should take place “as a favor to the process, if our goal is to reach agreement quickly.”
Citing room for “a lot of misunderstanding, misinformation and miscommunications,” the official said that direct talks were “not a magical solution. We still might find ourselves at an impasse.” But “it would be regrettable” if one reason they did not succeed was “an inability to sit down” together. “We’re not begging for a meeting … we just think it would be the logical step to take if in fact we are determined to get back into the deal … it’s simply common sense.”
Since the United States withdrew from the JCPOA, Iran has vastly expanded both the quantity and quality of uranium enrichment, far beyond its limits restricting it to small amounts of low enriched ore and strict international verification. The Iranians are now using sophisticated centrifuges and enriching up to 60 percent, just below the level where it is possible to have enough fissile material for a weapon. That has reduced their so-called “breakout time” from about a year under the JCPOA to what is now a matter of a few weeks, according to U.S. officials. Iran has said its nuclear program is designed only for peaceful purposes.
The basis of the negotiations is a return to “compliance for compliance” under the original terms of the agreement. Core issues are which sanctions, among the at least 1,500 imposed by Trump, the United States is prepared to end in exchange for Iran’s return to full and verifiable compliance.
The United States has said that only those sanctions related to nuclear issues should be eliminated, while those covering Iran’s support for proxy wars in the region and its missile development program can remain under the original deal, while Tehran has demanded, at least in public, that all be removed.
What comes after ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran
As the protracted talks have continued, there also have been disagreements over Iran’s compliance with the agreement’s verification measures. Iran has barred the International Atomic Energy Agency from access to some sites and cameras until, it says, a deal is completed.
If the negotiations are unsuccessful, “the future is not hard to divine,” the State Department official said. “Obviously, Iran’s nuclear program … would not be constrained” and could continue “at an alarming pace.” The United States and its partners would “have to fortify our response — economically, diplomatically and otherwise.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Mystics to sign defensive-minded center Elizabeth Williams to replace Tina Charles
Tina Charles (31) will be leaving the Washington Mystics while Elizabeth Williams (1) will be headed to the District. (Scott Taetsch for The Washington Post)
The Washington Mystics are getting defensive.
The team is expected to announce the signing of center Elizabeth Williams on Tuesday, the first day of the WNBA free agency period. Williams agreed to a one-year deal, according to a person with knowledge of the contract.
The addition of Williams gives the Mystics four players, including Natasha Cloud, Alysha Clark and Ariel Atkins, who were all-defensive team selections within the past three seasons.
Williams was the fourth overall pick by the Connecticut Sun in 2015 and played the past six seasons with the Atlanta Dream. The 6-foot-3, 200-pounder was named the league’s most improved player in 2016, earned an all-star spot in 2017 and was on the all-defensive first team in 2020. She averaged 5.8 points, 4.9 rebounds and 1.3 blocks last season while shooting 51.6 percent from the field.
With the Mystics adding Williams, the Tina Charles experiment comes to a close. The WNBA’s 2021 scoring leader will not return to the organization, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. Charles was traded from New York to Washington before the 2020 season but opted out of playing that year and didn’t join the team until 2021.
The 2010 No. 1 overall pick came to Washington to try to win her first title, but the Mystics were shorthanded because of injuries the entire season. Elena Delle Donne (back) played just three games, and Clark (foot) missed the entire season. Charles, the 2012 MVP, led the league in scoring out of necessity (23.4 points per game), but she went to Washington thinking a well-rounded roster would mean she didn’t need to carry the load.
“I just know I need to win a championship before I retire,” the eight-time all-star told The Washington Post after the season. “Obviously, some decisions are going to have to be made, and I have to look into everything. I’m thankful for my year here and just to see how they do things, and [that] will definitely help moving forward.”
Coach/General Manager Mike Thibault acknowledged it was time to hit the reset button after a two-year plan following the 2019 championship season didn’t pan out.
The Mystics also will part ways with 2019 Finals MVP Emma Meesseman. She intends to sign with the Chicago Sky, a person with knowledge of her decision confirmed. Meesseman did not play the 2021 season because of overseas commitments and will move on from the organization that drafted her in the second round in 2013. She was an all-star in 2015 and a key component when the Mystics won their first WNBA title four years later. Meesseman averaged 13 points, 5.3 rebounds and 4.5 assists in 2020.
The Mystics agreed to a multiyear deal to keep Myisha Hines-Allen and are close to an agreement with Shatori Walker-Kimbrough, according to two people with knowledge of the negotiations. Walker-Kimbrough was a member of the 2019 title team but was part of the trade for Charles. The 5-9 guard was out of the league last season when Thibault brought her back, and she started 13 of the 17 games she played.
Hines-Allen was a second-round pick in 2018 and a member of Washington’s 2019 championship team. Her breakout season came in 2020, when she averaged 17 points and 8.9 rebounds and was named second team all-WNBA. The versatile 6-1, 200-pound forward is just reaching the prime of her career.
The Mystics also own the No. 1 pick in April’s draft.
Svrluga: Mikaela Shiffrin’s Olympic prep has included covid, isolation, tears — and relief | null | null | null | null | null |
Former President Donald Trump’s political team said Monday he began 2022 with $122 million in political cash, a massive fortune at his disposal as he teases another White House run and hints at using the power of a reclaimed presidency to wipe away the legal problems of people implicated in the deadly quest to overturn his defeat more than a year ago.
He is stockpiling money rather than spending it. Despite seeking to influence races nationwide with high-profile endorsements, his office said he doled out just over $1 million from his main political action committee to favored causes and candidates in the second half of last year. That’s despite raising what his office said was more than $51 million, which would represent a slight slowdown in fundraising from the first half of last year, when his leadership PAC, called Save America, brought in $62 million.
The figures are remarkable for an ex-president not currently running for office and stripped of the social-media megaphone that once connected him to his base. They show how receptive his supporters remain to the barrage of email and text solicitations distributed in his name. His team said more than 98 percent of donations in the second half of last year were under $200, a sign of support from the party’s grassroots that shows why he is a formidable contender for a future nomination.
Trump has endorsed about three dozen House candidates and more than a dozen Senate candidates, including challengers to incumbent Republicans Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mental health treatment suggested for Kansas man accused of threatening Biden
Scott Ryan Merryman, 37, of Independence, Kan., appeared in U.S. District Court in Maryland on Monday after he was charged with making threats against the president
Two men accused of threatening President Biden have recently been charged in separate cases in Maryland. (Leah Millis/Reuters)
A federal judge ordered a Kansas man accused of threatening President Biden and several U.S. Secret Service agents to remain detained pending a detention hearing set for Wednesday and indicated that he should receive mental health treatment.
Scott Ryan Merryman, 37, of Independence, Kan., appeared in U.S. District Court in Maryland on Monday after he was charged with making threats against the president and interstate communication containing a threat to harm.
An affidavit filed in court said Merryman traveled from Kansas to Maryland and told law enforcement he was traveling to see the president over phone calls on Jan. 25 and Jan. 26. The affidavit alleges that he said he was going to “cut the head off the snake in the heart of the nation,” according to a release from the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland.
In court on Monday, Merryman said he wanted to be released and “go home and hug my family.” Merryman was heard during the hearing interrupting the proceedings several times and at some points sounded emotional.
Kansas man who made Biden death threat said he was ‘coming for’ the president, Secret Service alleges
On Jan. 26, a Secret Service agent found no weapons on Merryman during a consent search in an interview with Merryman in Hagerstown, Md., the release said, but did find a loaded magazine with three bullets and a spotting scope.
The same day, Merryman called a Secret Service agent he spoke with in Kansas and threatened the agent, the U.S. attorney’s office alleges. According to the affidavit, he allegedly made additional threats online from Jan. 25 to Jan. 27 and called the White House switchboard on Jan. 27 and threatened Biden.
Merryman faces up to 10 years in federal prison, with each charge carrying a maximum sentence of five years.
An attorney was not yet listed for Merryman.
Merryman is not the only person to be charged in Maryland this month with threatening the president.
Another man, Ryan Matthew Conlon of Halethorpe, Md., is accused of sending messages to the FBI tip line that included threats to kill Biden and of a “bomb attack” at the White House, according to an affidavit filed by the FBI on Jan. 20 and unsealed Monday. He is also accused of sending messages related to threats to “blow up” the National Security Agency headquarters and shoot its employees. The threats were traced back to an iPhone and address allegedly belonging to Conlon, according to the affidavit.
Conlon was released under pretrial monitoring.
An attorney for Conlon could not be immediately reached for comment Monday evening. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Justice Department announced it had charged Christopher Arthur, 38, of Mount Olive, N.C., with teaching another individual how to make and use an explosive, knowing that the individual intended to use that instruction in the attempted murder of federal law enforcement. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
The website for Tackleberry Solutions tells prospective customers that it “teaches wartime military tactics for home defense” and offers a free PDF on home fortification for those willing to provide an email address.
But the Justice Department alleged Monday that the organization’s trainer was secretly peddling a more sinister service — direction on how to make improvised explosive devices — and that he knew the recipient of his training was planning to kill law enforcement officers.
According to court documents, the FBI’s path to Arthur began after a dramatic 2020 chase and shootout in New York state between law enforcement officers and a suspected extremist. Investigators searching the home and vehicle of the slain suspect found guns, improvised explosive devices and an instruction manual from Tackleberry Solutions bearing Arthur’s name, prosecutors alleged.
“According to these charges, the defendant provided someone with training on explosive devices knowing that person intended to use that information to murder or attempt the murder of law enforcement,” U.S. Attorney Michael Easley said in a statement announcing the case. “This type of behavior is criminal, it is unacceptable, and it will be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
The local sheriff said at the time that Blessed was an “anti-police extremist” apparently set off by the police’s attempt to pull him over. An affidavit for a search warrant in Arthur’s case indicates that the FBI had been investigating Blessed since October 2018, “based on information that Blessed was organizing and attempting to recruit for a militia extremist group and preparing to engage in an apocalyptic battle against the U.S. Government.”
It was unclear on Monday what Arthur knew about Blessed’s plans. The affidavit alleges that investigators recovered from Blessed’s home a manual Arthur had written called “Quick Reaction Force-Modern Day Minutemen-lmprovised Explosives,” as well as 14 intact improvised explosive devices that appeared to be identical to those found in Tackleberry Solutions manuals.
Damon Chetson, an attorney for Arthur, said in an email, “I do not generally comment about pending cases, and would not about this case.” Arthur is next scheduled to appear in court Friday.
After the FBI informant reached out requesting a PDF from Arthur, Arthur allegedly responded: “To prevent being flagged or shut down, I’ve had to keep parts of this information off of the internet. Especially since explosives are such a touchy topic.” The two continued talking, according to the affidavit, with the informant expressing interest in “militaristic force” training.
“Yeah well … with what they’re talking about in the Biden administration, that might be important, hadn’t it,” Arthur responded, according to the affidavit.
On May 5, the FBI informant met with Arthur at his North Carolina home and talked about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives having been to his own residence. Arthur told him he could: “Stand and fight or be, ah, not exactly where you’re supposed to be,” according to the affidavit.
“ARTHUR then explained how to properly place IEDs throughout the CHS’ property, the importance of creating a fatal funnel, the setup and use of remote activated firearms. and how to evade arrest after killing members of law enforcement,” an FBI agent wrote, using an acronym for confidential human source.
That meeting formed the basis of the charge against Arthur. The FBI agent wrote that Arthur also demonstrated how to make various components of IEDs, including tripwire switches and improvised initiators, and provided those components to the FBI informant. When investigators later searched Arthur’s home, they found multiple IEDs and components, a pistol suppressor, bulk gunpowder and mixed Tannerite explosive, prosecutors alleged.
The website for Tackleberry Solutions seems to contemplate possible legal consequences of its training, asking those who request the PDF to affirm, “I am responsible for knowing the laws in my own area and will not hold Tackleberry Solutions or anyone associated with Tackleberry Solutions responsible for my actions or the actions of anyone around me. Even if those actions are done as a result of the education I have received from Tackleberry Solutions.” The site does not explicitly advocate violence against law enforcement but does suggest its training could be used outside the home.
“After you’ve secured your family, then branch out to your neighbors, your friends, your coworkers. Contact your local law enforcement,” the site says. “Vote in a Sheriff that is willing to work with a local militia. Create a checks and balances for each other. The Sheriff’s duty is to ensure that the militia is operating within the bounds of the law. The militia’s duty is to ensure that the Sheriff is operating within the bounds of the constitution.” | null | null | null | null | null |
GOP splits over labeling Black female Supreme Court pick a ‘quota’ hire
When news landed last week that there would be a Supreme Court vacancy for President Biden to fill, some in the right-wing pundit class sprang into action, saying Biden’s promise to fill the slot with a Black woman amounted to discrimination — even affirmative action or a quota.
At the time, it wasn’t clear whether the argument would be embraced by GOP lawmakers who will, in all likelihood, fight the eventual nominee.
But now it’s become increasingly clear that it will — albeit apparently not in unison.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) got the ball rolling by telling a local conservative radio host that he expected Republicans to all vote against the still-unnamed pick. “The irony is that the Supreme Court is at the very same time hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination,” Wicker said, “while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) offered a somewhat gentler version of the argument, calling Biden’s promise “clumsy” and saying, “It adds to the further perception that the court is a political institution like Congress, when it is not supposed to be.”
Collins was pressed on a similar promise Ronald Reagan had made in 1980 to nominate a woman to the court. She maintained that what Biden did was different because it was done “as a candidate.”
In fact, Reagan also made his promise as a candidate.
While Collins is a key vote in the full Senate, neither she nor Wicker serves on the Judiciary Committee, which will vet the nominee at confirmation hearings. But others who do signaled that they might press the issue.
The q-word was also invoked this weekend by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).
“I got to say: That’s offensive,” Cruz said on his podcast. “Black women are, what, 6 percent of the U.S. population? He’s saying to 94 percent of Americans: ‘I don’t give a damn about you. You are ineligible.’ ”
Cruz compared it to the affirmative action that was used during his time at the Harvard Law Review.
“This is doing the same thing,” Cruz said. He added that “if you’re explicitly setting up a discriminatory quota, it’s unfair to everybody else, and it undermines whoever ends up getting asked.”
The argument seemed to echo one made by a conservative lawyer who said whoever is selected “will always have an asterisk attached” to their selection and would be a “lesser Black woman” than the supposed best pick. The lawyer deleted those and other tweets and apologized.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, like Cruz a Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told Fox News late last week that he didn’t want such picks to be the subject of a gender or racial “litmus test.”
(Hawley has said he had a litmus test for justices opposing Roe v. Wade, though, and he doesn’t appear to have complained when President Donald Trump made his own promise to nominate a woman to the court in 2020.)
Some Republicans, though, are trying to steer their party in a different direction.
Other senators have declined to raise the same concern. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) said Sunday: “I don’t see things as quotas like that, no. … You want folks with a diverse set of backgrounds, of course. So in that sense, no, I wouldn’t agree it’s a quota.”
Perhaps the key one is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who sits on the Judiciary Committee with Cruz and Hawley and is the committee’s former chairman. He disagreed with Collins that Biden’s promise was somehow different from Reagan’s. And he suggested that Republicans need to be careful with this.
“Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America,” Graham said. “You know, we make a real effort, as Republicans, to recruit women and people of color to make the party look more like America.”
Graham then seemed to caution against labeling this an affirmative-action hire, noting it would entail arguing that the Black woman who is eventually nominated isn’t as qualified.
“Affirmative action is picking somebody not as well qualified, for past wrongs,” Graham said, before pitching one of the front-runners, U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina, as a “highly qualified” and “fair-minded” judge.
Therein lies the GOP’s dilemma. On the one hand, this is an argument tailor-made for the Trump-era GOP, in which the idea that Democrats make everything about race is an article of faith and a huge political motivator. Cruz and Hawley, in particular, are very keen on appealing to that cross-section of the GOP.
On the other hand, pushing this line means drifting into territory Graham warned against — suggesting that whoever is picked will have that asterisk attached and might indeed be a “lesser Black woman.”
Graham and Cruz’s comments also spotlight the potential attractiveness of pushing this argument, though. Right now, it’s the subject of debate because we don’t actually have a nominee. But while Graham praised Fields, Cruz acknowledged that it might be difficult to fight against the person who perhaps is the front-runner, federal appeals court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“As so many of the Biden nominees have had, she didn’t have these outrageously partisan statements. She didn’t have these wildly left-wing statements,” Cruz said of Jackson, who was his Harvard classmate. “I think more than a few people suspect those may be her sentiments, but she hasn’t left much of a paper trail. … So it’s hard to find something tangible in her record to object to.”
The situation the GOP confronts is in potentially voting overwhelmingly against the first Black woman to ever serve on the Supreme Court, and potentially without a go-to attack on her record. Arguing about the process for the pick and perhaps voting against it based upon that could be an attractive fallback for some of them — similar to when Senate Republicans voted against convicting Trump at his second impeachment trial on a technicality. | null | null | null | null | null |
He is stockpiling money rather than spending it. Despite seeking to influence races nationwide with high-profile endorsements, he doled out less than $1.5 million from his main political action committee to favored causes and candidates in the second half of last year.
That included $1 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit founded by former senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) that brought on Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, as a senior partner. Beyond that, his leadership PAC, called Save America, distributed roughly $350,000 among 69 candidates and committees at the state and federal level.
The modest contributions were revealed in a federal filing made public on Monday.
They represent a fraction of the $51 million that his team said the former president raised from July through December of last year. That sum points to a slight slowdown in fundraising from the first half of 2021, when Save America brought in $62 million. | null | null | null | null | null |
He is stockpiling money rather than spending it, using only a fraction of the $51 million that his team said he raised from July through December of last year.
Despite seeking to influence races nationwide with high-profile endorsements, he doled out less than $1.5 million from his main political action committee to favored causes and candidates in the second half of last year. That included $1 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit where Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, serves as a senior partner.
Beyond that grant, Trump’s leadership PAC, called Save America, distributed roughly $350,000 among 69 candidates and committees at the state and federal level. The modest contributions were revealed in a federal filing made public on Monday, which also showed that the former president continues to direct donor money to his own business.
Save America spent more than $100,000 in the second half of 2021 on rent and catering at Trump properties, according to the filing. Another PAC he controls spent nearly $250,000 on rent and meeting expenses at his properties.
A six-month haul of $51 million would represent a slight slowdown in fundraising from the first half of 2021, when Save America brought in $62 million.
Still, Trump announced that he has twice as much cash on hand as does the RNC, which has agreed to pay up to $1.6 million of the former president’s legal fees devoted to fighting investigations into his business practices in New York. And he has nearly twice as much as nationally recognizable Republicans thought to be eyeing presidential bids in 2024, including Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Jamal Michel
I first learned about Gerald “Jerry” Lawson, one of Silicon Valley’s greatest gaming pioneers, a few years ago. Back in the 1970s, he and his team ushered in one of the earliest versions of consoles that utilized game cartridges — the same technology Nintendo would find infinitely more success producing for its debut home video game console a decade later.
Lawson’s cartridge technology revolutionized the gaming industry despite his console’s commercial failure, with many gamers celebrating his legacy as one of Silicon Valley’s few Black engineers at the time. His life’s work has often been cited as evidence that times have changed for the better for people of color in tech and gaming. However, despite strides that have opened doors for other gamers and creators of color, the industry still faces significant disparity with regard to representation.
The International Game Developers Association, the nonprofit whose annual and semiannual reports provide snapshots of the industry’s demographics, reported in 2005 that just 2 percent of their respondents identified as Black. The 2021 report showed, 16 years later, that number has only grown to 4 percent. The issue isn’t isolated to games, either; the technology sector has long been criticized for its continued lack of diversity despite ample lip service to inclusion initiatives.
The conversation about diversity reached a critical peak during the summer of 2020, when video game studios, publishers and content creators rallied behind the justice movement for George Floyd after he was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. The incident, captured on video, sparked debates and policy changes, and turned the spotlight toward conversations that had been brewing for decades.
As the trends and hashtags swelled, so too did the calls for action from protesters, activists and even consumers. Gamers took to social media to highlight how pervasive hostile and racist sentiments still exist in the video game industry — evidence of the vestiges of GamerGate and other damaging inflection points that transformed to match the times.
From 2020: Video game companies vow to fight racism in their communities, but offer few details
Since then, conversations about greater accountability in games haven’t stopped despite waning public attention. Developers and creators of color are still seeking support on a level commensurate with the gestures of solidarity expressed over a year ago. Gamers, industry veterans and indie developers of color have continually called for sustainable solutions to address disparities in the field, this push cresting whenever the exhausting cycle renews: Tragedy strikes, a sudden surge of promises and commitments follow, little to no progress ensues, then silence falls once more.
On the flip side, some Black developers say the open dialogue has substantially strengthened their bond with colleagues. Others note an added sense of visibility that’s equipped everyone involved in these conversations with the necessary language to vocalize concerns and better work toward solutions. Morgan Gray, executive producer at developer Crystal Dynamics, has been making games for two decades and said the industry has transformed drastically in that time.
“One of the great things about the gaming industry is that, by and large, everyone making games also plays them,” he said in an email interview. “This creates a bond among us as we all have something culturally in common there.”
For Gray, the overlap comes in the form of geek and nerd culture colliding, drawing on the interests of folks from various walks of life and allowing them to engage in genuine conversations about their favorite art.
“That isn’t to say we can’t use more people represented in game development, but it is to say that the youth of this industry, and shared common touchpoints, have certainly made it a better place to be than some traditional industries,” he said.
In the world of gaming and content creation, however, increased visibility often comes with heavy costs for members of various marginalized communities, such as battling online trolls, shouldering the responsibility of reflecting authentic Black experiences in their work and reckoning with Black trauma.
In August, Twitch content creators from marginalized backgrounds pushed for reform, begging the streaming platform to take a stand against the influx of “hate raids” plaguing their communities. The hashtag #TwitchDoBetter became the rallying cry for women, people of color and queer people on the platform beset by coordinated campaigns from online trolls. On Sept. 1, Twitch members organized #ADayOffTwitch to stand in solidarity with those targeted.
Neil “Aerial Knight” Jones, an indie developer whose penchant for stylish 3-D art comes alive in his current project “Never Yield,” said one of the challenges he’s faced is accessing a space where people genuinely listen to his concerns as a developer of color.
“One of the hardest things to deal with is talking about the real struggles Black game developers have, knowing that people are going to dismiss you,” he explained. Jones referenced instances where he was essentially told to “be better.” However, when visiting the portfolio of the 3-D artist from Detroit, it’s clear “better” is all he has done.
What comes as doubly frustrating for Jones is that when these issues are brought to light, they inadvertently court trolls that dogpile on the conversation. Jones has written for VICE, Polygon, PC Magazine and dozens of other high-profile media outlets, but his features don’t always garner a warm reception.
“I did an interview once and the comments on the article were mostly just people saying that I made my story up to sell my game,” Jones said.
Twitch hate raids are more than just a Twitch problem, and they’re only getting worse
Sadly, these stories of content creators facing bigotry online aren’t new, and speak to the larger conversation around diversity’s place in the industry. In a 2022 Games Developer Conference survey, nearly a quarter of developers said their studios had not focused any resources on diversity or inclusion initiatives within the last year. Relegating these initiatives to the sidelines can have lasting repercussions, signaling not only to other developers but to consumers who play their games that they shouldn’t be concerned about this lack of representation. Game development and consumption are not isolated from one another. Ignoring issues around representation in one part of the gaming ecosystem, be it developers or consumers, can reverberate to the other. And if a game ends up becoming a hit, Gray explained, that damage is amplified tenfold.
“When good games that are actually fun to play slip up, that can be an issue,” he said. “And generally, it’s because someone didn’t follow the adage ‘write what you know,’ and either tried to represent something they didn’t have familiarity with, or just copy-pasted some surface-level crap from other bad choices others have made.”
That practice of “writing what you know” is a necessary part of the conversation on representation, because developers of color still find themselves out of the writers room of studios leading the charge.
“Marvel’s Avengers” narrative consultant and “Rise of the Black Panther” author Evan Narcisse recalled how during a recording session for a project focusing on characters from marginalized communities, he said voice actors got choked up as their characters were engaging in dialogue about their lived experiences as people of color. That’s the result writers like Narcisse want — that the words land and a deeper sense of humanity comes through. However, shouldering the responsibility for that kind of engagement is hard work when you’re one of the few writers of color in the room.
“I get on as a consultant for most of my video game projects, which means I don’t have hiring power and I’m not in a position of creative control,” he explained. “I can make other people aware of what it’s like to experience things from my perspective but I’m not in that room in a permanent way.”
In these instances, Narcisse said he’s a “ronin” in the classic sense, a drifter. His search for permanence highlights the range of experiences creators of color in the video game industry navigate. It echoes the same concerns of other developers seeking more sustainable support that goes beyond public statements and corporate promises.
Without a support system on the inside — one that acts as the connective tissue for new and veteran creators — the likelihood that these same communities will receive financial support dwindles. Pointing to the lack of funding for underrepresented projects and developers, Derrick Fields, associate professor at Northwestern University and developer of the indie strategy game “Onsen Master,” called it a particularly vexing experience. Reliably, public support for marginalized communities surges only after a violent tragedy or blatant injustice, but results in no significant reform.
How video games can help LGBTQ+ players feel like themselves
“Studios only showing support during Black History Month or changing social media icons for a day has already shown itself to be performative, in most cases,” Fields said over Twitter. “Other spaces have begun to do the work by supporting creators of color with jobs, resources, or funding, but it needs to be reflected in AAA spaces as well.”
Black indie developers became the centerpiece for many games media outlets following Floyd’s murder in an effort to draw more attention to their work. Fields noted the upward trend, and hopes the move toward greater representation in the industry finds sustainable momentum.
“I’m in a place now where I’ve been able to connect with others who are interested in building the same type of experiences — ones that include new stories, gameplay and, of course, representation,” Fields said. That network of creators of color supporting one another has been long-standing, with Discord servers and online groups founded well before the inflection point of summer 2020 but are still in need of support.
Since the onset of the pandemic, video game conferences and trade events have been relegated online, but that hasn’t stopped young gamers from doing what Crystal Dynamics executive Gray did at the start of his career. He was adamant about connecting with other developers of color at these events, introducing himself and engaging in conversation that would help establish more than just rapport but a lasting connection, and this networking has remained a priority throughout his two decades in the industry.
“When I was starting out, I made a point to talk to people about what they did and how they got into gaming. I was a sponge,” said Gray, describing how he broke into the industry. “People generally like to talk about what they are into, so the response was always positive. I also made a point to network at industry events like GDC or PAX.”
Even when studios support diversity and inclusion initiatives, there’s the question of how to best address issues that White developers don’t regularly face, such as the drain of trying to bring authentic Black experiences to games and the associated trauma of that process. Other creators in the industry, like Narcisse, highlighted the struggle of doing your job in the face of Black trauma, as was the case with the murder of Trayvon Martin back in 2012.
“I was at my desk at Kotaku one day at work and Ta-Nehisi Coates had done an interview with [Trayvon’s] mother and I had read it and was just sitting at my desk emotional, and a co-worker had asked what was wrong — it was just hard to absorb,” Narcisse said in a Zoom interview.
Black trauma captured on video is a cornerstone of secondhand Black trauma, experienced by those bombarded by images of people of color brutalized in different spaces. For Narcisse, complications arise when creators and game designers must shift gears and get back to working on projects premised on Black characters and characters from marginalized communities. The responsibility weighs heavy.
“It’s never too far from my mind,” he said. “You want to do right by the communities you come from and also the ones that you know have been pushed to the margins.”
Still, there are those in the industry who feel that institutional standards have become increasingly entrenched and unquestioned, cultivated further by gamers, developers and the industry at large with little accountability. Veterans, like Crystal Dynamics’s Gray, provide a nourishing hope, though: That change is certainly going to come for independent creators, gamers from the margins and drifters who occupy the intersectional and nuanced spaces in between. | null | null | null | null | null |
Record numbers of Venezuelans have crossed into the United States in recent months in search of humanitarian refuge. (Eric Gay/AP)
Venezuelans taken into custody along the U.S. southern border will be sent to Colombia under a new attempt by the Biden administration to contend with spiking numbers of migrants arriving from nations around the world.
Venezuelans have crossed into the United States in recent months in record numbers, typically after flying to a Mexican border city and walking across to surrender to American authorities. U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped 24,819 Venezuelans in December, up from 206 a year earlier.
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that it will begin returning Venezuelans to Colombia if they had previously resettled in that country, expelling them from the United States under the pandemic-era health authority known as Title 42. The emergency provision allows authorities to bypass immigration proceedings without affording asylum seekers a chance to seek protection under U.S. law.
“On January 27, 2022, the Department of Homeland Security returned two Venezuelan nationals to Colombia, where they had previously resided,” the department said in a statement.
“DHS is committed to ensuring that every migrant encountered is processed in a safe, orderly, and humane manner.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will begin returning Venezuelans to Colombia on a regular basis, officials said. The arrangement was first reported by CNN.
Venezuelan Migrants Are New Border Challenge for Biden
The U.S. government does not recognize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as the country’s legitimate president, and the lack of formal diplomatic relations makes it all but impossible for Homeland Security officials to deport or return migrants there.
That has raised fears within the administration of a mass migration wave. Nearly 6 million Venezuelans already have been displaced from their homeland, according to the latest U.N. figures, fleeing lawlessness, economic collapse and authoritarian rule.
Most of the displaced have resettled in South America. Colombia has been the largest recipient of Venezuelans, with nearly 2 million.
President Biden has struggled to cope with a record numbers of border arrests and stinging Republican attacks on his administration’s immigration policies. Authorities made 1.7 million arrests during the 2021 fiscal year that ended in September, an all-time high.
Biden also has angered immigrant advocacy groups and some Democrats by continuing the Title 42 expulsions, which started under President Donald Trump as a targeted enforcement tool. When Haitian migrants who had been living in South America crossed en masse into the Del Rio, Tex., area in September, Biden officials used Title 42 to expel them to their battered homeland. Crossings by Haitians immediately plunged.
In addition to large inflows of migrants from traditional sources such as Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, authorities have encountered soaring numbers of arrivals from Nicaragua, Ecuador, India, Russia and elsewhere. Mexican authorities have tightened visa requirements for several nationalities, including Venezuelans, at the behest of Biden officials.
In Latin America, Blinken calls for global sprint to show democracy can deliver
In October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Bogotá as Biden officials negotiated with Colombia to accept Venezuelan returnees, promoting a regional approach to managing migration pressures.
“The migration challenge that we’re facing in our hemisphere is not one country’s problem,” Blinken said during a speech at the gathering. “It’s our shared problem, and it cannot be solved by any one country.”
“In the past,” he said, “we often saw increased migration from a few countries facing some kind of acute crisis, but that’s not the case now. Instead, migrants are leaving many countries across the region all at once.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs (11-10, 5-3 Big South) at High Point Panthers (9-12, 3-4 Big South)
BOTTOM LINE: High Point faces the Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs after Zach Austin scored 21 points in High Point’s 77-72 loss to the Campbell Fighting Camels.
The Runnin’ Bulldogs are 5-3 in conference play. Gardner-Webb is fifth in the Big South scoring 70.7 points per game and is shooting 44.7%.
D’Maurian Williams is scoring 14.4 points per game with 5.0 rebounds and 2.2 assists for the Runnin’ Bulldogs. Lance Terry is averaging 13.4 points and 3.9 rebounds while shooting 48.6% over the last 10 games for Gardner-Webb. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cerruti leads Albany (NY) against UMBC after 22-point performance
UMBC Retrievers (9-10, 4-4 America East) at Albany (NY) Great Danes (9-11, 5-4 America East)
Albany, New York; Wednesday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Albany (NY) hosts the UMBC Retrievers after Matt Cerruti scored 22 points in Albany (NY)’s 73-61 loss to the Vermont Catamounts.
The Great Danes are 3-4 in home games. Albany (NY) has a 4-9 record against teams above .500.
The teams square off for the second time in conference play this season. The Great Danes won the last matchup 66-54 on Jan. 20. Cerruti scored 20 points points to help lead the Great Danes to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Cerruti averages 1.8 made 3-pointers per game for the Great Danes, scoring 11.1 points while shooting 44.1% from beyond the arc. Jamel Horton is shooting 47.1% and averaging 16.6 points over the past 10 games for Albany (NY).
Keondre Kennedy is scoring 14.4 points per game with 5.2 rebounds and 2.4 assists for the Retrievers. L.J. Owens is averaging 10.9 points over the last 10 games for UMBC. | null | null | null | null | null |
East Tennessee State faces Western Carolina following King's 27-point outing
East Tennessee State Buccaneers (12-11, 4-6 SoCon) at Western Carolina Catamounts (8-14, 2-7 SoCon)
BOTTOM LINE: East Tennessee State plays the Western Carolina Catamounts after Jordan King scored 27 points in East Tennessee State’s 83-79 loss to the VMI Keydets.
The Catamounts are 5-3 in home games. Western Carolina is 1-2 in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Buccaneers are 4-6 against SoCon opponents. East Tennessee State is seventh in the SoCon giving up 72.7 points while holding opponents to 44.3% shooting.
The teams play for the second time in conference play this season. The Buccaneers won the last matchup 87-69 on Jan. 11. King scored 23 points to help lead the Buccaneers to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Nick Robinson is averaging 14 points and seven rebounds for the Catamounts. Joe Petrakis is averaging 1.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Western Carolina.
David Sloan is averaging 13.1 points, five assists and 1.7 steals for the Buccaneers. King is averaging 14.3 points over the past 10 games for East Tennessee State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Fordham and Rhode Island meet for conference matchup
Rhode Island Rams (11-7, 3-4 A-10) at Fordham Rams (9-10, 2-5 A-10)
BOTTOM LINE: Fordham plays Rhode Island in a matchup of A-10 teams.
The Fordham Rams have gone 5-3 in home games. Fordham is 5-8 against opponents with a winning record.
The Rhode Island Rams are 3-4 in conference games. Rhode Island scores 68.8 points and has outscored opponents by 6.0 points per game.
The Fordham Rams and Rhode Island Rams match up Wednesday for the first time in A-10 play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Darius Quisenberry is averaging 17.8 points for the Fordham Rams. Chuba Ohams is averaging 9.6 points over the last 10 games for Fordham.
Jeremy Sheppard is shooting 36.8% from beyond the arc with 1.6 made 3-pointers per game for the Rhode Island Rams, while averaging 11 points and 1.5 steals. Makhel Mitchell is averaging 8.4 points and 1.9 blocks over the past 10 games for Rhode Island. | null | null | null | null | null |
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