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Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey speaks during a school board meeting last summer. Mackey said this week that some parents are complaining about how Black History Month programs constitute critical race theory. (Screenshot via YouTube/WSFA)
Even though critical race theory is not taught in K-12 classrooms in Alabama, the state has already approved a resolution banning the teaching of divisive concepts associated with critical race theory in the classroom, and it is considering passing additional similar bills. While education officials and Democrats have long stressed that critical race theory does not have a presence in Alabama classrooms, especially during Black History Month, some state Republicans have insisted, without evidence, that it does.
Steve Murray, director of the Alabama Department of Archives, told The Washington Post that the complaints from parents that Black History Month programs constitute critical race theory are “foreboding indicators of what we can expect following passage of legislation restricting topics in history classrooms.”
Issues involving race and history have played out throughout Alabama during the first week of Black History Month. The University of Alabama announced Thursday it would rename Graves Hall to Lucy-Graves Hall, in honor of Autherine Lucy Foster, the first Black student to enroll at the school on Feb. 3, 1956. In doing so, she will share a building name with Bibb Graves, the former Alabama governor who was a former officer of the Ku Klux Klan, according to the Crimson White, the student newspaper.
At this week’s Alabama House Education Policy Committee meeting, Mackey reiterated that people who are calling to complain about critical race theory don’t know what it is. | null | null | null | null | null |
The agreement “may have been intended to prevent the public release of certain information related to the investigation absent the agreement of both parties,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to Commissioner Roger Goodell Friday, “meaning that either the WFT or the NFL could try to bury the findings of the investigation.”
As chairwoman of the investigative arm of the U.S. House of Representatives, Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) has the power to subpoena documents not willingly provided. | null | null | null | null | null |
Norway's Aleksander Aamodt Kilde leads the season-long standings in Alpine’s two fastest disciplines. (REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay)
BEIJING — The first couple of Alpine skiing is like most of us at these covid Olympics, together but apart. Aleksander Aamodt Kilde and Mikaela Shiffrin can dine with each other in the Olympic Village, separated by plexiglass. They can FaceTime and exchange videos to analyze. They can wave from a balcony down to the sidewalk as the other walks by. And that’s about it.
Stateside, the 29-year-old Norwegian has been introduced to American fans because he and Shiffrin began dating last year. But on the World Cup circuit, he is a monster, winner of six races this season — three downhills and three Super-Gs, placing him first in the season-long standings in Alpine’s two fastest disciplines. With that, he has established himself as a favorite in Sunday’s downhill that opens the Olympic Alpine competition.
Their entire life, their entire relationship, is a balance. On the globe-trotting World Cup circuit, the men and women most often exist on parallel planes — the men in, say, Kitzbuehl, Austria while the women race in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. There are overlaps, and the Olympics are the most significant. But covid protocols are limiting interactions here. That’s fine. Kilde and Shiffrin have developed communication routines during the season, and they’re maintaining them now — even when they’re both citizens of the same Olympic Village.
The support has run both ways. In the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season, Kilde won the World Cup overall championship — the prestigious title that considers results in all of alpine’s disciplines, a title Shiffrin has won three times. The following December, he won twice in the midst of an eight-race run in which he never placed outside the top six. But in January 2021, he suffered a torn ACL during training. Not only was that season over, but the coming Olympic season was suddenly in doubt.
Since the first two races of the season — a getting-the-toe-back-in-the-water ninth-place finish in Lake Louise, Can., to open the season, and a crash off the course the next week in Beaver Creek, Colo. — Kilde has raced 11 times. He has finished second once and won those six times, including the famed Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzbuehl in his second-to-last race before arriving here.
“I mean, Kitzbuehl, it’s iconic,” Shiffrin said. “I was so, so happy for him when he won there. He deals with all my drama …”
In between might be a shared meal, likely a FaceTime call, and definitely the space necessary to let the other prepare as they need to. The first couple of Alpine is at their first Olympics together. If they feed off each other, watch out. | null | null | null | null | null |
But for LGBTQ people, that swell of pride has historically come with a gargantuan caveat, as queer athletes haven’t always been given a fair shake. LGBTQ Olympians have long had to hide in the closet in order to compete, or else been subjected to invasive and discriminatory poking and prodding, particularly if their perceived gender expression didn’t match their gender identity. Some couldn’t do it and quit. Others have been shut out. | null | null | null | null | null |
Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey says some parents are complaining that Black History Month programs constitute critical race theory. (Video still/YouTube/WSFA)
Even though critical race theory is not taught in K-12 classrooms in Alabama, the state has already approved a resolution banning the teaching of divisive concepts associated with critical race theory, and it is considering passing additional similar bills. While education officials and Democrats have long stressed that critical race theory does not have a presence in Alabama classrooms, especially during Black History Month, some state Republicans have insisted, without evidence, that it does.
Steve Murray, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, told The Washington Post that the complaints from parents that Black History Month programs constitute critical race theory are “foreboding indicators of what we can expect following passage of legislation restricting topics in history classrooms.”
Issues involving race and history have played out throughout Alabama during the first week of Black History Month. The University of Alabama announced Thursday it would rename Graves Hall to Lucy-Graves Hall, in honor of Autherine Lucy Foster, the first Black student to enroll at the school on Feb. 3, 1956. In doing so, she will share a building name with Bibb Graves, who was an Alabama governor and an officer of the Ku Klux Klan, according to the Crimson White, the student newspaper.
At this week’s Education Policy Committee meeting, Mackey reiterated that people who are calling to complain about critical race theory don’t know what it is. | null | null | null | null | null |
Travis McMichael withdraws plea admitting guilt to federal hate crime charges in murder of Ahmaud Arbery
Travis McMichael, left, speaks with his attorney Bob Rubin at the sentencing of McMichael, his father, Greg McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan in Brunswick, Ga., on Jan. 7, 2022. (Stephen B. Morton/Pool/Reuters)
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Travis McMichael on Friday withdrew his plea admitting guilt to federal hate crimes charges in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, opting to stand trial with his father after a deal with prosecutors fell apart.
The two White men already have been sentenced to life in prison without parole for the fatal shooting of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man. They and their neighbor, 52-year-old William “Roddie” Bryan, will face a jury on the federal charges despite previously agreeing to admit that racism played a role in the February 2020 killing. | null | null | null | null | null |
“I put a bunch of pressure on myself, and to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it at all,” Langland said in December, sitting outside a Copper Mountain, Colo., coffee shop. “I wasn’t enjoying not getting the results I wanted. As I’ve grown over the last four years and how my riding has grown over the last four years, I know I’m just going to enjoy it way more if it’s only for me and it’s not for the result.”
Essentially, after years of success, Langland has returned to how she viewed the sport at the start. Geoff Langland started snowboarding as it morphed from weird activity that irritated skiers to full-blown industry. He went to Lake Tahoe every week, working for a time as a janitor at Boreal for the free lift ticket. For five years he rode as a sponsored pro, before he decided he needed something more stable. He moved to southern California for school, met his wife, Michelle, and found work in IT. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Washington Post partners with Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting in new internship program
Applications will open Feb. 7 to join the Investigative team this summer
The Washington Post today announced a new summer internship program in partnership with the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. One student journalist will have the opportunity to work on ambitious projects alongside reporters and editors on The Post’s award-winning Investigative team.
“This internship expands on The Post’s longstanding efforts to cultivate the next generation of journalists who have a strong desire to hold the powerful to account,” said Carla Broyles, senior editor at The Washington Post. “We look forward to this collaboration with The Ida B. Wells Society, an organization that embodies the ideals of its pioneering namesake and is dedicated to increasing the ranks of journalists of color in investigative journalism.”
“We are honored and excited to partner with The Washington Post and its storied team of investigative reporters this summer,” said Rhema Joy Bland, director of the Ida B. Wells Society. “To offer a young, aspiring journalist, the opportunity to learn accountability reporting right in the hotbed of political power is truly invaluable with skills and knowledge that will serve them long into a career of impactful storytelling.”
The selected intern will help reporters in every phase of story development, from gathering data and documents through records requests and analyzing information to developing lines of reporting and story ideas. The 10-week internship, funded by the Ida B. Wells Society, will also include several weekly training sessions covering an array of topics including backgrounding and sourcing. In addition, the intern will be assigned a professional journalist to serve as a mentor.
The application will open Monday, Feb. 7. The deadline to apply is Friday, March 4 at 5 p.m. ET. More details can be found here. Special consideration will be given to students or recent graduates from historically Black colleges and universities. Interested participants can register for an internship preparation session with Morgan State and Howard University’s IBWS student chapter here. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Washington Redskins running back John Riggins (44) eludes a tackle-attempt by Miami Dolphins’ Don McNeal (28) during NFL football’s Super Bowl XVII in Pasadena, Calif., Jan. 30, 1983. Washington was a power team, using running back — more like a fullback — John Riggins to batter defenses behind the original “Hogs” offensive line. Washington beat Miami 27-17. (AP Photo/File) (Uncredited/AP)
PASADENA, Calif. — Hail to the “Hogs,” Washington’s fun-loving offensive line, and their partner, running back John Riggins, who set a Super Bowl rushing record and led the Redskins to the National Football League championship. | null | null | null | null | null |
Syrian emergency personnel work amid debris on a building destroyed during a counterterrorism mission conducted by the U.S. Special Operations forces in Atma, Syria, on Feb. 3, 2022. (Mohamed Aldaher/Via Reuters)
This was a more than sufficient basis for the deadly operation according to how Biden — and before him, Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama — interprets the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which Congress passed days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to broaden the president’s powers to use military force in the Middle East.
Over the years, members of Congress have put forth proposals to update, revise or repeal the 2001 AUMF and a second one, passed in 2002, which authorized the invasion of Iraq. President Biden has even expressed his support for putting more of the power to wage war back in Congress’s hands.
But no changes have yet been made and, two decades later, the Qurayshi raid once more raises questions about Washington’s continued, expansive use of the authorization.
While the AUMF was specifically written with the perpetuators of 9/11 in mind, Obama argued in 2013 that it also applied to the then-rising Islamic State — which did not exist in 2001 — because it was an “associated force” of al-Qaeda.
This interpretation of the AUMF has since been the legal backbone for many other U.S. military operations, including in Libya and Somalia, carried about by the president without congressional approval or oversight. It was similarly the legal basis for the 2019 deadly raid in Syria on Qurayshi’s predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Luke Hartig, a fellow in New America’s security program and former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, said he found the broad use of the 2001 AUMF “troubling” because the president’s authority to use military force should “not be open-ended.”
International treaties additionally govern the laws of war. The United Nations charter permits a member state to strike another as an act of self-defense, which it leaves vaguely defined. Even less clear is what this means about the legality of one country attacking a violent nonstate actor in another without that country’s approval.
In 2014, the Obama administration put forth a different legal rational, arguing that U.S. operations against the Islamic State in Syria were permitted under international law because the Syrian government was itself “unwilling or unable” to stop the group from threatening the United States. | null | null | null | null | null |
Emergency personnel are seen Feb. 3, 2022, at a building heavily damaged early that day during a counterterrorism mission conducted by U.S. Special Forces in Atma, Syria. (Mohamed Aldaher/Via Reuters)
This was a more-than-sufficient basis for the deadly operation, according to how Biden — and before him, Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama — interpreted the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which Congress passed days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to broaden the president’s powers to use military force in the Middle East.
But no changes have been made, and, two decades later, the Qurayshi raid once more raises questions about Washington’s continued, expansive use of the authorization.
This interpretation of the AUMF has since been the legal backbone for many other U.S. military operations, including in Libya and Somalia, carried about by the president without congressional approval or oversight. It was similarly the legal basis for the deadly 2019 raid in Syria on Qurayshi’s predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. | null | null | null | null | null |
Torch bearers Dinigeer Yilamujiang and Jiawen Zhao of Team China lit the Olympic Cauldron on Friday night in Beijing. (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
During the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics, two Chinese athletes — cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang and Nordic combined athlete Zhao Jiawen — lit the Olympic cauldron on Friday in Beijing.
The choice was controversial because Yilamujiang is an ethnic Uyghur from Xinjiang. China has been accused of committing human rights abuses against the Uyghur population, which led to a diplomatic boycott of the games by the United States and other Western governments.
Here’s what to know about Yilamujiang, as well as Zhao Jiawen:
Yilamujiang, a 20-year old from Altay, Xinjiang, was involved in athletics from a young age and her dad is a cross-country skiing instructor. By the time she was five years old, she started to learn to ski to navigate her snowy hometown of Altay in Xinjiang.
Yilamujiang trained for both cross-country skiing and the biathlon — which combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting — when she was younger and was a distance runner in high school. She shifted her training focus to primarily cross-country skiing by the time she was 15 years old.
She made her debut in an FIS event — the International Ski Federation — in 2018 and finished in 184th place in sprint cross-country skiing. By 2019, she was on China’s national team and, in March of that year, became the first Chinese medalist in an FIS-level event by finishing second in the opening women’s leg of a three-leg sprint series in Beijing.
“I am super excited to be able to finish my first international race with a result that I didn’t expect at all,” she said at the time to China Daily.
At the 2021 world championships, Yilamujiang finished 41st individually in the 10 km event and helped her teammates finish 13th in the team sprint event. Before that, she finished in the top-10 of the 5 km twice in three Junior World Championship appearances.
She heads into the Olympics on a strong note following some of her best finishes at an FIS event at Hot Spring Xinjiang. She had top-four finishes in all three events she participated in during early January, including a first-place finish in a 5 km C event.
“My goal is to win a medal at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics,” Yilamujiang said to CGTN.
Like Yilamujiang, Jiawen got his start in cross-country skiing as well. But in 2016, after his cross-country coach moved to Nordic combined skiing — a mix of cross-country skiing and ski jumping — Jiawen was convinced by his coach to change discipline. Jiawen is making history in this Olympics, becoming the first Chinese athlete to compete in Nordic combined at the Olympic Winter Games after qualifying with a 22nd-place finish at the Continental Cup in Russia in November 2021.
“I really like the feeling to fly,” Jiawen said in 2020 in an interview. “To move in the air, to feel the different currents, it’s pure excitement. Those moments in the sky are the most precious to me.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Officials said they are aware of online threats made to schools in Montgomery but that they’re not credible
(iStock) (iStock)
Montgomery County Police and school officials said Friday that they were aware of “a number of online threats” made to public schools but did not consider them to be credible.
In a statement, officials said that Wheaton High School was mentioned by name and that the “social media threats are similar in style and content and mention a school shooting intended for today, Friday, Feb. 4 and include racial and hateful comments.” They said also that county police had investigated and found “these threats to be noncredible.”
The Montgomery County Police Department said on Twitter that a suspect was identified and is a former student who no longer lives in the United States, and that more time would be needed to complete the investigation.
In the statement, officials said police and school authorities “monitor social media and will actively investigate any specific threat in our community.” They also encouraged the community to not “share these types of messages but to report such threats to local law enforcement.”
Montgomery County Public Schools spokesman Chris Cram said that all schools in the system were open Friday and that police were present at county high schools — as they have been since Jan. 21, when a student was shot inside a bathroom at Magruder High in Rockville.
Magruder High School student shot; suspect in custody, police say
Dan Morse contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Beijing Winter Olympics won’t stir visions of a blissful tomorrow. The events may be an entertaining reprieve, if you can codify enough ignorance about all the trouble swarming society. But for all the spirit Zhang portrayed in directing the curtain-raiser, the night couldn’t shed an ominous feeling.
It seemed more like “Together for a Shared Ruse.” The original motif doesn’t reflect an evening in which the standouts among the heads of state in attendance were Xi Jinping, the president of flagrant human rights abuser China; and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who threatens to invade Ukraine and test the peacekeeping resolve of the United States and its NATO allies. With the United States and many other countries declining to send representatives in a diplomatic protest of China, the presence of Xi and Putin and perceptions of their allegiance intensified the anxiety of an already uneasy world.
Inside a half-empty Bird’s Nest, all our problems might as well have joined the Parade of Nations. There was little in Zhang’s script that covered how to bridge them and arrive at unity.
These are not the kinds of people who will unify the world. On Thursday, IOC President Thomas Bach lamented “the dark clouds of the growing politicization of sport on the horizon.” That’s what he thinks of athletes who have concerns about humanity. In the past two Olympics, Bach has led an organization terrified that too many human beings might protest the inhumanity in our messy world, pointing his finger at Rule 50 of the Olympic charter and casting their desires to act on such empathy as in opposition of the sanctity and universality of these Games.
“We also saw that in some people’s minds, the boycott ghosts of the past were rearing their ugly heads again,” Bach said, describing in the most cumbersome and embarrassing way possible this time in which a new generation of athletes have gravitated to activism. “This is why we have been working even harder to get this unifying mission of the Olympic Games across to as many leaders and decision-makers as possible.”
If these Olympics play out as planned, with nearly 3,000 athletes scared silent and the IOC acting as if it bestowed a blessing upon the world, we will exit tranquilized, rather than inspired, by the experience. Maybe that would be acceptable if Bach trumpeted the Games solely for their volume of athletic brilliance. But he can’t laud the Olympics as having transcendent geopolitical meaning without leaving room for the Olympians to breathe as influencers. | null | null | null | null | null |
“CODA” A Conversation with Marlee Matlin
Marlee Matlin joins Washington Post Live on Friday, Feb. 4 (The Washington Post)
“CODA” is a coming-of-age film about Ruby Rossi, the only hearing member of her family. On Friday, Feb. 4 at 1:00 p.m. ET, Academy Award-winner Marlee Matlin joins the Washington Post’s Frances Stead Sellers for a conversation about the film and its history-making ensemble that features several deaf actors.
Provided by representatives with Marlee Matlin.
Marlee Matlin is the youngest Academy Award Winner for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work in CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD. She has received critical acclaim for her work in her current film, CODA, as well as several prestigious awards and nominations, including AFI and NBR, Critics Choice, Golden Globe, SAG, AARP, Hollywood Critics, Gotham award and an International Press Academy nomination. Matlin executive produced the Oscar Nominated short film FEELING THROUGH. Her previous work in “Reasonable Doubts,” earner her two Golden Globe Award nominations and a People’s choice Award. Since then, she received nominations for four Emmy awards for her appearances on “Seinfeld,” “Picket Fences,” “The Practice,” and “Law and Order: SVU.” Marlee’s other notable TV credits include critically acclaimed series, “West Wing,” “The L Word,” and “Family Guy” just to name a few.
Matlin has been instrumental in many activities to grant accessibility to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities — Marlee has worked tirelessly on making all media provide Closed Captions. She helped get legislation passed that mandated ASL interpreters be present at ALL COVID-19 press conferences. She also organized a PSA that included leaders in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community that aided Deaf and Hard of Hearing Americans in accessing resources on how to vote in the past elections. | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden’s legal justification for striking ISIS leader in Syria — and why not everyone agrees
Rescue workers are seen Feb. 3 at a building heavily damaged that day during a counterterrorism mission conducted by U.S. Special Forces in Atma, Syria. (Mohamed Aldaher/Via Reuters)
This was a more-than-sufficient basis for the deadly operation, according to how Biden — and, before him, Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama — interpreted the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which Congress passed days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to broaden the president’s powers to use military force in the Middle East.
But no changes have been made, and two decades later, the Qurayshi raid once more raises questions about Washington’s continued, expansive use of the authorization.
This interpretation of the AUMF has since been the legal backbone for many other U.S. military operations, including in Libya and Somalia, carried about by a president without congressional approval or oversight. It was similarly the legal basis for the deadly 2019 raid in Syria on Qurayshi’s predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
This interpretation also is “not without controversy,” said Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale University and a former national security lawyer in the Defense Department’s Office of General Counsel. “There are many [nations] who think that this is fairly weak.”
A handful of key U.S. allies, such as Britain, Canada and Germany, have explicitly endorsed the “unwilling and unable” doctrine. A small contingent of countries, including Mexico and Syria, have rejected it. Most nations have remained either silent or vague in their positions.
Although the raid on Qurayshi made international news, “legally speaking, this isn’t all that different from [U.S.] strikes that are pretty common in Syria against ISIS,” Hathaway said.
What it did, she said, is “bring attention to the fact that we are still very active in operations in Syria” and “operating under some very old legal theories that many think are pretty weak. ... It’s an occasion to revisit whether the president really has all the legal authority that he needs” to authorize such missions.
In describing the operation, Washington stressed that to minimize civilian casualties, U.S. forces raided the building rather than strike it from the air. Intelligence showed that an unrelated family lived on the bottom floor of the three-story building. The Pentagon said it evacuated six people who had been on the building’s first floor. U.S. officials additionally attributed the majority of deaths to a bomb they said Qurayshi detonated, killing himself and members of his family.
If the U.S. military narrative is accurate, said David Bosco, a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, the efforts to minimize civilian casualties appeared to be in keeping with the Geneva Conventions, which regulate armed conflict.
This question was raised after the 2019 killing of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, whom the United States struck by drone near the Baghdad airport. The Trump administration said Soleimani was behind various plots against U.S. personnel in the region, which it considered sufficient justification.
This week, Turkey’s military struck sites in Syria and Iraq belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and other affiliated groups that Ankara has banned. Turkey has repeatedly justified these cross-border raids using arguments similar to those relied on by the United States, said Haque. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mothers from West Virginia meeting with lawmakers Feb. 2 about expanding the child tax credit program arranged 500 teddy bears on the National Mall, each representing 100 of the state's children who could slip back into poverty due to the end of the tax credit — 50,000 children in West Virginia alone. (Kyle Swenson/The Washington Post)
They had already tried so much. They had collected signatures on petitions and sent email blasts. They had tried to catch viral fire with hashtags on social media and mailed out handmade blankets. They had set up conference calls with lawmakers, always asking schedulers for the latest possible time slot, to accommodating working parents, calls that some participated in from the pediatrician’s waiting room or while picking a child up from school.
Since the summer, this group of West Virginia parents has done whatever it could think to explain to lawmakers the importance of the expanded child tax credit program. Those efforts had been shot through with urgency since the program expired in December, largely due to the opposition of the group’s own senator, Joe Manchin III (D).
“Each of these bears represents 100 children,” Amy Jo Hutchison, a Wheeling mother and organizer of the event, speaking into a microphone during a brief rally with a half-dozen other “Mama Bears” who had made the trip to Washington. “Together these 500 children represent the 50,000 West Virginia kiddos who have been pushed back into poverty since the halt of the child tax credit payments.”
When the program launched in July, monthly payments of up to $300 per child began helping families across the country patch the holes in their monthly budgets. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that maintaining the expanded version of the credit would cut child poverty by 40 percent compared with reverting to the credit’s less generous form. For millions of Americans, the monthly checks helped pay for everyday items and essentials, including the women speaking at the Mall.
After Hutchison’s short speech, a handful of other women spoke. Then the contingent headed to the U.S. Capitol, where they were scheduled to visit the offices of their congressional delegation — Manchin and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R), and Reps. David B. McKinley (R), Alex Mooney (R), and Carol Miller (R).
The day in D.C. asked from the woman more than just their time and travel. Their meetings with congressional staff members were an opportunity to shorten the distance between policy and everyday life. But that also required an honesty and openness about their own struggles, such as the way one mother had begun noticing how her 12-year-old was starting to check price tags at the grocery store, or how a daughter now always worried if there was enough gas in the car. Here they had to share what others could afford to keep to themselves.
Meghan Hullinger explained that the school district her two children attended didn’t have a mask mandate to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. “My daughter has been quarantined six times,” she said.
The consensus among the women was that the visits went well. Only one member of the delegation — Rep. Carol Miller — met with the mothers; the others dispatched staffers.
A Manchin spokesperson pointed out the senator “has always supported the existing child tax credit that is still in place despite the pandemic emergency enhancement sunsetting at the end of 2021,” and that the senator “continues to support policies that reward hard working families as the effects of costly inflation taxes strain their budgets.”
But whether the child tax credit could survive as a separate bill or as part of the reconciliation process if the Build Back Better legislation passes in some form, the women left the Capitol unsure if they made an impact. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Olivia Rodrigo performs “Good 4 U” at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sept. 12, 2021, in New York. Rodrigo has been named Woman of the Year by Billboard, landing her in the same company as Taylor Swift, Cardi B and Billie Eilish. Rodrigo will be honored at the annual Billboard Women in Music Awards on March 2. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
ROANOKE, Va. — For the second time in as many weeks a federal appeals court threw out a permit for the Mountain Valley Pipeline on Thursday.
Last week, the same three-judge panel shot down a permit that would have allowed the pipeline to pass through a 3.5 mile (5.6 kilometer) section of the Jefferson National Forest. In both cases, the judges faulted the U.S. Forest Service and the wildlife agency for failing to adequately assess the pipeline’s environmental impact. The 303-mile (487-kilometer) pipeline would transport natural gas drilled from the Marcellus and Utica shale formations through West Virginia and Virginia. | null | null | null | null | null |
Marriott recruiter Mariela Cuevas, left, talks to Lisbet Oliveros during a September job fair at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla. (Marta Lavandier/AP)
If we overlay two ways of measuring how those numbers changed, we see two versions of the same story. The three-month average of new jobs added goes from over 750,000 in July to around 300,000 for the last three months of 2021, a big slowdown. Hence the overall trend of job growth sliding lower.
There are many reasons that the numbers have been wonky of late, largely centered on the pandemic. But that we have seen so many fluctuations in our understanding of how the economy has progressed should serve as a useful warning/reminder: Be cautious in how far you’re willing to read into what the numbers say.
And as a bit of advice for one network in particular — let’s call it F.N. — maybe wait until the numbers are actually out before misreading them. | null | null | null | null | null |
Junior Erin Gemmell is the latest potential Olympian powering the Gators
Stone Ridge swimmer Erin Gemmell during a practice session for the Nation's Capital Swim Club at Lakewood Country Club on Jan. 27 in Rockville. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Most Olympians will go their whole lives without approaching Katie Ledecky’s feats. But when high school junior Erin Gemmell swims at Stone Ridge, Ledecky’s alma mater in Bethesda, she has more than a chance to replace the seven-time Olympic gold medalist’s name on the school’s towering red-and-white record board: She has already done it and has become the face of a team that has arguably achieved more than the Gators did during Ledecky’s tenure from 2011 to 2015.
Building of the momentum from the Ledecky era at the private, all-girls school, Stone Ridge has become a dominant regional power, having won the Independent School League title in January and seeking more at Saturday’s Washington Metropolitan Prep School Swim Dive League championships at the University of Maryland.
So how did a school with an enrollment under 1,000 and a restriction against recruiting for athletics enter the national conversation?
“I think having Katie has made a big difference in the support that Stone Ridge has for swimming, since it isn’t necessarily the biggest sport like lacrosse or basketball is,” Gemmell said. “Katie is a motivator.”
Gemmell moved from Delaware to D.C. in 2012 so that her father could coach Ledecky at Nation’s Capital Swim Club (NCAP). Her brother, Andrew, swam in the Olympics in London that year, and she first got in the pool years earlier before she could form complete sentences. She is the latest in a line of elite swimmers who have attended Stone Ridge after Ledecky.
Even in the D.C. area’s frenetic youth-swimming culture, Stone Ridge’s track record has been unparalleled. Just look at its top times.
“There’s 12 individual events in high school swimming, eight of which are individual events,” Stone Ridge Coach Bob Walker begins before delivering the data — that Ledecky holds the fastest times in the 200- and 500-yard freestyle while fellow former Gator Phoebe Bacon reigns in the 100 backstroke. “ … So here’s Stone Ridge sitting with three of the eight fastest high school times ever.”
Slowly, Ledecky and Bacon’s success became a powerful word-of-mouth pull that spread among the area’s young swimmers, as well as their parents, and helped bring kids to the program. At NCAP, where many of the region’s top swimmers compete, they also talk, and they know how Stone Ridge administrators, teachers, and coaches assist students through hectic swim schedules that include out-of-state meets and more than 15 hours of practice each week, year-round.
Unlike in other sports that emphasize team chemistry, many elite high school swim teams allow their athletes to train almost exclusively with their club teams, because schedules conflict. That has become true at Stone Ridge, too.
The girls who swim at NCAP leave school 15 minutes early every day, and for big meets they can miss school entirely. Junior Eleanor Sun, Gemmell’s teammate at Stone Ridge and NCAP, missed roughly 10 days last semester for swimming purposes. Her academic and aquatic profile remained strong. She’s committed to swimming at Princeton in two years.
Even though the school harbors standout swimmers, it doesn’t necessarily create them.
“There’s no: ‘You come to Stone Ridge and all of a sudden you’re an Olympic champion,’ ” Walker said. “That’s not how swimming or any sport works. We’re just a three-month program.”
But Walker and the program’s support has given the girls the requisite time and motivation, they say. It feels as if that is culminating now. Take the ISL championships: In the eight years following Ledecky’s first meet at the school, the Gators won just one ISL title. They’ve now captured back-to-back trophies, with depth they only dreamed of during earlier years.
Ledecky remains close with the school, which provides a motivational boost. This past winter, she visited kids in the lower, middle and upper schools. She also stays in contact with the swimming program, occasionally watching the live streams of their meets.
“All the kids having mouths’ wide open, eyes wide open, staring right up there at this person who did exactly what they did,” Walker said. “She still looks like a student. She’s still young enough to say ‘Yes, I did that too.’ ”
“She’s the best swimmer in the world, and she’s just over here wishing us luck at our meet on some random Friday,” Gemmell said. “That’s kind of insane.”
While Gemmell wouldn’t call herself the next Ledecky or Bacon — after all, Ledecky was an Olympic gold medalist before her sophomore year at the school, while Bacon had collected two Pan-American gold medals by the time she graduated — her résumé makes her one of the best and busiest swimmers in the country.
Gemmell is committed to swim at Texas in two years. She finished ninth in the 200-meter freestyle at Olympic trials last June and recently toppled two school records at the ISL championship.
Just the presence of the name Ledecky can inspire the Gators.
“When we’re at meets,” junior Lauren Tucker said, “and I look up at the board, and I see their names, I see Katie Ledecky’s name on the record board; it just motivates me, and I’m sure the rest of the team, to continue the legacy that they left behind.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Prosecutors say the base had to be evacuated and cleared for bombs twice on Feb. 22, 2021, because of the threats made by D’Carlo Nimis Deluca. A federal judge in Newport News, Va., sentenced him Friday to two-and-a-half years in prison.
While on pretrial release, he was arrested while allegedly trying to enter a federal courthouse in Manhattan with methamphetamines, a dinner knife, and a digital scale. He claimed to have affiliations with MS-13 and terrorist groups, and his attorneys said he went to the courthouse with the belief that he was informing his probation officer about criminal activity in his neighborhood.
But the childhood trauma was already affecting his mental health, Deluca’s defense attorneys wrote. He began abusing drugs and suffering from manic, psychotic, and delusional episodes, they said. He was in and out of mental health and substance abuse treatment; the calls to Langley and other threats he made around that time came right after he was discharged from an in-patient behavioral health program. | null | null | null | null | null |
2022 Beijing Olympics - Alpine Skiing - Training - National Alpine Skiing Centre, Yanqing district, Beijing, China - February 4, 2022. Travis Ganong of the United States in action during training. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse (Denis Balibouse/Reuters)
YANQING, China — Every Olympic skier arriving in China this past week or so has had some version of the same experience: the highway stretches toward the mountains northwest of Beijing, and there in the distance, stark against a landscape of jagged, brown earth, is a lonely ribbon of white, unseen by any of them until that moment: the Yanqing National Alpine Skiing Centre, host of the Alpine competition at these Winter Games.
When the first skiers launch themselves down Xiaohaituo Mountain (altitude: 7,211 feet) in Sunday’s traditional Alpine opener — the men’s downhill — they will be doing so on a speed course, nicknamed “The Rock,” that none of them have raced before, a course that had existed in their minds as little more than some drone video footage that got passed around last year, and the handful of training runs they were permitted this week.
Though Yanqing’s Olympic venue, with its 100-percent man-made snow and setup overseen by seasoned International Ski Federation (FIS) officials, has drawn mostly rave reviews from the assembled skiers this week, its distinguishing feature as a competition venue is its newness.
To have 33 coveted Olympic medals — in the men’s and women’s downhill, super-G, slalom, giant slalom and Alpine combined, plus the mixed team event — decided on a slope so unproven seems capricious at first glance. But it also could prove to make these Olympics the sport’s ultimate test, with every skier in the same position of unfamiliarity.
“It’s uncomfortable. You don’t know what the terrain’s going to do. You’ve never been on it,” said Team USA’s Bryce Bennett, who won the World Cup downhill at Val Gardena, Italy in December. “So you’re kind of nervous at the start, but [you just have to] commit to it.”
The U.S. men haven’t medaled in an Olympic downhill since Bode Miller took bronze in Vancouver in 2010 and haven’t won gold since Tommy Moe in Lillehammer in 1994. In PyeongChang in 2018, the American men were shut out of the podium entirely for the first time since Nagano in 1998. | null | null | null | null | null |
Voters lined up in Cranberry, Pennsylvania on November 03, 2020. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
There are no more ordinary elections in America; every one seems like, to use the old cliché, “the most important election of our lifetimes.” If Democrats are not desperate yet as they grapple with how to win the midterms despite the axiom that the ruling party almost always loses big, they ought to be.
They have a chance to make it happen. But it will require an understanding of what will convince voters in the middle to choose them, and just as important, get their own supporters energized enough to turn out in large numbers.
On the other hand, the average Republican thinks we’re living through a nightmare of socialist tyranny, and if it doesn’t stop soon everything they cherish will be destroyed.
So Democrats have two tasks. The first is to convince voters in the middle that Republicans are awful, and giving them more power would be a terrible idea. They don’t have to make those voters love Democrats; even finding them reasonably tolerable might be enough.
Their party spends its time purging those who are insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. The consensus Republican view of the Jan. 6 insurrection is moving past “regrettable episode that should never have happened” and toward “heroic crusade that should have succeeded.”
In Congress, its senators can’t seem to stop launching racist attacks against Black nominees. Across the country, the Republican attack on schools and teachers grows more terrifying by the day: Not only are they working to ban books and make it illegal for teachers to mention things like sexual orientation, they’ve set up tip lines so people can report on teachers and they want to put cameras in every classroom.
“When are they going to start holding book burnings?” you might ask. Well guess what: It’s already happening.
Trump looks increasingly likely to run for president in 2024, and if he does he will be the Republican nominee. He holds the GOP in his hands. Every day it becomes more and more a reflection of him: angry, bigoted, corrupt, thuggish, and with an outright contempt for the American democratic system.
Can Democrats wrap all that up, everything about Trump and the Republican Party and the disturbing place they want to take America, into a single idea that people will find both understandable and motivating? They haven’t done it so far.
Above all, as Democrats consider the case they want to make to the public for the next nine months, they can’t forget that this is no ordinary election. And if they act like it is, they’ll lose. | null | null | null | null | null |
WASHINGTON, DC - July 14: The entrance to the auditorium in the newly renovated Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library on G St. in Washington, DC on July 14. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
But that prompted outrage from local activists and residents last week after DCist/WAMU reported that the board of trustees voted in favor of naming the auditorium after Bezos. Organizers launched a letter-writing campaign opposing the decision that, as of Friday, led to more than 17,000 sent.
“We are thrilled that Jeff Bezos has recommended that the MLK auditorium be named for Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. We could not think of a better individual to be honored in our beautiful new building. We look forward to reaching out to the Morrison family for their support.”
In an email sent Thursday night to the D.C. Public Library Foundation and provided to The Washington Post, Bezos wrote that he was first “honored and grateful” when the foundation offered to name the auditorium after him — a recognition he said he did not seek out when making his donation.
“Since then, some in the community have suggested a person of color would be more appropriate as a name for the auditorium, especially as it sits inside the Martin Luther King Jr. library,” Bezos wrote. “That makes considerable sense to me.”
“Jeff Bezos does not reflect my values, nor the values Dr. King fought to uphold,” the letter people were encouraged to sign and send to the library reads. “On behalf of Black Washingtonians, working class people around the globe, and everyone who uses the DC Public Library system, I ask that you reopen this decision and not give a place of honor at DC’s flagship library to someone who represents the worst of our economic system.”
Nee Nee Taylor, along with three other activists among the group behind the letter-writing campaign, stepped off the elevator onto the library’s fourth floor Thursday afternoon and saw the words “D.C. CHANGEMAKERS.” The exhibits outside the doors of the auditorium, they saw, honored civil rights leaders like King and celebrated D.C.’s unique history, highlighting go-go music and former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry Jr.
“Can you imagine having a go-go event and saying it is going to be at the Jeff Bezos Auditorium? It doesn’t even add up,” said Taylor, who grew up in the District and is co-conductor for Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black-led mutual aid and community defense organization.
MLK Library will reopen in September, giving D.C. a renewed central hub
The board had voted during its Jan. 26 meeting to rename the auditorium the “The Bezos Auditorium,” with four votes in favor and one abstention, according to a recording of the meeting the library provided to The Washington Post.
Bezos did not acknowledge the criticism of his wealth or business practices in the Thursday email to the foundation. and a representative did not respond to a request to comment on the pushback to the auditorium naming. | null | null | null | null | null |
Alpine skier Richardson Viano will become the first Haitian to participate in the Winter Olympics. (Piero Cruciatti/AFP/Getty Images)
Every Olympics seem to have a handful of nations making their first appearances at the Games, and the 2022 Beijing Olympics are no different. Here’s a quick look at Haiti and Saudi Arabia, the two rather warm nations that are participating in the Winter Games for the first time.
The Jamaican bobsledders were trailblazers in terms of Winter Olympians from the Caribbean, but Viano is set to become the first Alpine skier representing that tropical portion of the world (along with Jamaica’s Benjamin Alexander, who also will make his skiing debut in Beijing).
At the age of 3 in 2005, Viano was adopted from a Haitian orphanage by an Italian couple who live in Briançon, France, which sits in the French Alps and is home to a major ski resort. His adopted father is a ski instructor and soon had Viano on skis, with the hope that one day he would ski for France.
“I didn’t believe it. I thought it was a joke from a friend,” Viano said, per the official Olympics website. “At the end of the call, I did some research on the Internet and discovered that there was indeed a ski federation in Haiti. A few days later, I called him back and then we met him with my parents.”
In 2019, Viano received his Haitian passport and made his debut representing the country at an international competition. Last year, he finished 35th in the giant slalom at the world championships in Italy and soon had enough qualifying points for entrance into this year’s Winter Games.
“Thanks to this commitment, I was able to get closer to my country of origin,” Viano, 19, told Olympics.com. “I got back in touch with the orphanage where I came from and I am proud to show them my success. I really want to go back there to see my roots and especially to give dreams to young people through sport and its values.”
Fayik Abdi, Alpine skiing
Abdi, 24, learned how to ski at an early age, not in Saudi Arabia but in Lebanon, which has a handful of ski resorts in the country’s mountainous north-central portion. Soon, he was traveling even farther afield in search of slopes, his country’s deserts providing nothing of the sort.
“As I got older I started traveling to Switzerland to a winter camp,” he said. “I loved the sport from a young age, I just didn’t have the accessibility to the sport living in Saudi Arabia until I moved to Utah in 2016, where skiing really picked up.”
Abdi, who was born in San Diego but spent most of his early years in Saudi Arabia, eventually graduated from the University of Utah after spending a whole lot of time on the slopes: He worked as a ski technician and told Arab News he majored in criminal justice “because I wanted to study something relatively easy so I could ski.”
After graduating in December 2020, Abdi returned home hoping to somehow further the sport of sand skiing in Saudi Arabia, which also is building a planned tourist city in northwestern Tabuk province that will include a ski area. (Yes, there are parts of Saudi Arabia that receive snow.) He then was approached by members of Saudi Arabia’s winter sports federation, who offered him funding in hopes of becoming that country’s first Winter Olympian.
“They asked me if I wanted to go to the Olympics,” Abdi told Arab News. “I didn’t know if they were for real. I was like, ‘Well, the Olympics is in 11 months and I’ve never trained for anything like that.’ ”
The short time frame and the coronavirus pandemic made things challenging, but Abdi was able to compile enough points to qualify for Beijing.
“My goal is just like every race: Just to try and ski the best you can. A race is just skiing and I think that’s what a lot of racers forget sometimes; they try and do something different in a race to what they do in training,” he said. “I want to beat as many nations as I can. I’m going to be competitive.”
Abdi and Viano both will compete in the giant slalom in Beijing. Their first runs are Feb. 12 at 9:15 p.m. Eastern, with their second to follow the next day at 12:45 a.m. | null | null | null | null | null |
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at her weekly news conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
After months of stalled negotiations, the House on Friday passed a bill aimed at making the United States more economically competitive with China by boosting the nation’s manufacturing and research capabilities.
“The America Competes Act will ensure that America’s preeminence in manufacturing, innovation and economic strength … can outcompete any nation,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday ahead of the vote. “Hundreds of members of Congress have been involved in putting this legislation together, overwhelmingly bipartisan in its development, regardless of how the Republicans choose politically to vote today.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) was the only Republican to vote for the bill, while Rep. Stephanie Murphy (Fla.) was the only Democrat to oppose the measure. She said her objection was based on the trade section of the legislation, which she said includes “problematic, poorly-vetted provisions and excludes sensible, bipartisan provisions that were part of the Senate-passed version of the bill.” Neither lawmaker is seeking reelection.
Biden administration officials and Democratic lawmakers have expressed optimism that a deal can be struck so that the legislation can be sent to President Biden for his signature this spring. The Senate Republicans who supported the bill have been cautious in their comments about the upcoming negotiations, saying several changes will need to be made to the House bill. But they have not echoed the harsh criticisms that their House GOP colleagues have directed at the legislation.
The House’s America Competes Act keeps key tenets of the Senate bill, including $52 billion in federal subsidies to incentivize construction of factories to produce computer chips, which are in short supply globally. This has led automakers and other chip users to slash production of their products, which in turn has caused a spike in car prices that is fueling inflation.
The House bill goes further than the Senate measure by allotting millions to help end the supply chain crisis, which during the pandemic has exposed the U.S. reliance on other nations for critical goods.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and several prominent advocacy organizations spent the week lobbying lawmakers to generate bipartisan support. The National Association of Manufacturers, the largest manufacturing association in the United States, circulated a letter to all House offices Thursday expressing support for the legislation, while 18 former national security officials from the last three administrations wrote to House leaders backing the bill.
While individual measures within the House package, such as reauthorizations for the National Science Foundation, passed through the chamber with bipartisan support, House Republicans soured on the entirety of the legislation.
Some amendments authored by Republicans were added to the legislation on Thursday evening, including one by Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) concerning whether certain companies involved in the manufacturing of solar panels should be sanctioned for allegedly using the forced labor of Uyghurs in China.
But the adoption of these GOP amendments was not enough to overcome Republicans’ broader opposition to the measure.
“I voted NO on Pelosi’s America COMPETES Act today because this bill would help China and hurt Americans. Democrats are using the China issue which has broad, bipartisan public support as a cover to pass their liberal agenda,” Banks said in a statement.
Senate Republicans also have expressed concerns about the House bill, saying it is filled with partisan “poison pills” on issues such as trade and climate change.
“I think unfortunately their product is going to be dead over here,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said Thursday.
Senate Republicans, however, have remained optimistic that the changes made by House Democrats will not jeopardize the bill’s pathway to becoming law — if it is pared down considerably during upcoming House and Senate negotiations. Sen. Todd C. Young (R-Ind.), who was a lead proponent of the Senate bill, said the House measure would have to undergo large changes for a deal to be struck.
“I know it rubs my Republican friends in the House the wrong way, it would rub me the wrong way,” he said Thursday about the House bill. “I know that a number of my Republican friends in the House are very open to supporting whatever we produce in the conference committee.”
Republican and Democratic House aides both said they understood that their chamber’s provisions on trade, climate, foreign policy and research need to be reworked for Senate approval.
While it could take several weeks for a conference to formally begin — given that leaders must determine how to establish one under an equally split Senate — it is possible that House and Senate committee chairs and ranking members will soon start informally negotiating, according to people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Americans again were outfitted by Ralph Lauren, and just like four years ago in PyeongChang, the designer has stuffed the coats with science.
As Vogue tells it: “To create the anoraks, for instance, Ralph Lauren used a high-tech, temperature-responsive fabric called Intelligent Insulation. It has the ability to adapt to cooler temperatures by creating an extra layer of insulation. The fabric itself is made of two separate materials, which expand or contract in response to temperature changes. Items made using the innovative fabric reportedly have the ability to transition through three seasons.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Wastewater samples from the Ballenger-McKinney wastewater treatment facility in Frederick, Md., are collected twice a week and sent to a lab to screen for the coronavirus. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to expand a system that detects coronavirus in wastewater to better predict surges and declines of covid-19 and, eventually, wants to harness the network’s early-warning power to find other deadly pathogens and to control foodborne disease outbreaks.
Wastewater surveillance can be used to track other diseases and health concerns, Kirby said. Officials are working to expand surveillance to gather data on other pathogens by the end of the year, with targets including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, norovirus, influenza, a deadly fungal pathogen called Candida auris and foodborne infections caused by E. coli and salmonella.
In response to the pandemic, the agency launched a national wastewater surveillance system in September 2020. Sewage surveillance has been used for years around the world to identify polio outbreaks. Several other countries, including France, Germany and the Netherlands have been monitoring sewage systems for the coronavirus.
CDC gets data from about 400 testing sites that measure coronavirus in wastewater. Some health departments are also able to conduct advanced genetic sequencing to track variants of concern. California, Colorado, New York City and Houston were the first to detect evidence of omicron in community wastewater.
Universities, colleges, states and cities and commercial testing companies collect samples from sewage pipes to monitor the spread of the virus. Cities, including Boston, were able to identify impending surges of cases and conclude that omicron had peaked.
The CDC until 2020 did not have a national system to track infectious disease through wastewater. The agency has since provided money to 37 states, four cities and two territories for utilities to collect sewage samples and for laboratories to get those samples tested, and for state officials to send the data to CDC. Many of these states are still implementing their systems.
On Friday, CDC said it was making public on its website the data it has received from 28 states and the District. Some states have that data available on their websites, but the CDC data allows consumers to compare data across states.
More than 34,000 samples have been collected from communities representing about 53 million people. CDC plans to add 255 testing sites in the next few weeks, and additional sites during the next few months, expanding the reach of the program “to look into most states” and territories and tribal communities, Kirby said.
Kirby said her team is working with the rest of the agency’s covid response to “find ways that wastewater surveillance can help provide situational awareness for what’s going on in the community, as well as serving as that early warning system that a new increase may be coming in a community.”
In Ohio, a color-coded map on the state health department website shows the increase or decrease in virus levels in wastewater for an area. Substantial increases in virus levels trigger an email notification to health districts, utilities and community health leaders, according to a CDC report last fall.
In Utah, wastewater data are one of the main components of a ranking system to determine where to dispatch mobile testing teams.
Out of 255 surveillance systems with data, 70 percent showed a decline in virus the past 15 days, while the remainder reported increases. No clear patterns emerged from the data and, in many cases, treatment plants showing increases are next to plants with decreases. | null | null | null | null | null |
The investigation, details of which were briefed to the media Friday, was ordered after a member of Islamic State-Khorasan, the extremist group’s affiliate in Afghanistan, detonated a suicide vest Aug. 26 in a crowded outdoor corridor at the international airport in Kabul, killing 13 U.S. troops and more than 170 Afghans. The attack on the airfield’s Abbey Gate occurred as the U.S. military personnel raced to evacuate thousands of allied Afghans during a roughly two-week rescue operation set in motion after the Taliban seized control of the country.
Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, chief of U.S. Central Command, acknowledged Friday that the investigation contradicted statements he made in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. At the time, defense officials believed that there was one, and possibly two, explosions and that gunmen opened fire on the crowd after.
“The fact that this investigation has contradicted our first impression demonstrates to me that the team went into this investigation with an open mind in search of the truth,” McKenzie said. “It also confirms the age-old fact that the battlefield is a confusing and contradictory place, and it gets more confusing the closer you are to the actual action.”
Investigators found that the explosion ejected 5-millimeter ball bearings that tore into the crowd at high velocity. Forty-five U.S. troops were wounded in the blast, with some suffering brain injuries that surfaced later, defense officials said.
Photos and videos reveal crowded checkpoints, chaos at Kabul airport on day of the attack
The bombing unleashed chaos. U.S. Marines had to cut through a chain-link fence to reach the blast site at the edge of the airport. And in addition to the explosion, some U.S. personnel were exposed to CS gas released when ball bearings pierced canisters the Marines wore on their body armor.
It was initially reported that some Marines and British troops opened fire in the confusion after the explosion, believing they still could be under attack. The investigation found that two British troops and one U.S. service member fired only warning shots to disperse the crowd while one American shot at a “suspicious individual” in a water tower outside the airport perimeter. Investigators said there was no indication anyone was hit with gunfire during or after the incident. | null | null | null | null | null |
NASA and SpaceX are investigating spacecraft parachutes but say safety is not a concern
Officials said that one of the Dragon spacecraft’s parachutes sometimes inflates more slowly than others but doesn’t affect landing
This screenshot of the NASA broadcast of the Crew-2 return shows the Dragon spacecraft carrying the astronauts back to Earth from the International Space Station on Nov. 8, 2021. On this mission, and a subsequent cargo delivery flight, one of the parachutes opened more slowly than the others. NASA and SpaceX are investigating but say it poses no danger. (Image courtesy of NASA) (NASA)
The issue poses no danger to the astronauts who are now on the space station and scheduled to return in April, NASA and SpaceX said. The system is also designed to land safely if only three of the parachutes deploy. But they said they want to do everything they can to ensure that the system is as safe and robust as possible.
After the Crew-2 return, officials said they thoroughly inspected the chutes and found no problem. And they said that the descent rate of the capsule was well within the safety margins. When the cargo capsule returned last month, the rate of descent was also fine, officials said.
He said it had happened on other cargo missions as well, but couldn’t say how many.
SpaceX’s next human spaceflight mission, Crew-4 is slated for mid-April and the return of Crew-3 is scheduled for the end of that month. | null | null | null | null | null |
The past three days have brought headaches for airlines and their customers, as more than 10,000 flights have been canceled since Wednesday. In recent weeks, airlines had begun to recover from a series of cancellations that began Christmas Eve and extended well into the new year.
On Friday, freezing rain caused new power outages in the Northeast and made roads from the Hudson Valley to Massachusetts treacherous for travel.
Airports were hit hard; more than half of scheduled departures out of Boston’s Logan International Airport were canceled Friday, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware. Airports across New England reported significant numbers of cancellations. Vermont’s Burlington International reported that 72 percent of flights were canceled. | null | null | null | null | null |
Chasing Cancer: Women & Cancer
Every five minutes, a woman is diagnosed with a gynecologic cancer. Coupled with the outsized impact of COVID-19, the burden of cancer on women is only expected to rise in coming years, with breast cancer becoming the most common type of cancer diagnosed. On Wednesday, February 23, join renowned oncologists, researchers and global advocates on Washington Post Live as they examine the status of cancer around the world, with a particular focus on how women are impacted. | null | null | null | null | null |
A boy walks in the Puerta 8 shantytown in Buenos Aires, where laced batches of cocaine were found by authorities Feb. 3. (Tomas Cuesta/AFP/Getty Images)
Authorities in Argentina have urged residents to dispose of any cocaine after a batch laced with an unknown substance killed at least 23 people in the capital, Buenos Aires, and surrounding areas this week.
Twenty people remain hospitalized, ten of whom are in intensive care. Fourteen of the 23 victims died inside their homes or on the street, without the chance to get medical assistance, the Clarín newspaper reported.
Officials have called the deaths an unprecedented tragedy and warned that the death toll may still rise.
“It is an exceptional event, we have no precedent,” said Marcelo Lapargo, attorney-general for the San Martin district of the capital, Clarín reported. “It makes us think that the substance was included deliberately. It is not an error in the process.”
The drugs were sold out of Puerta 8, a shantytown in the Tres de Febrero district, located in the Greater Buenos Aires region, police said. The substance apparently used to lace the cocaine has not yet been determined, but authorities believe that it could have been a synthetic opioid used to boost the drug’s effects.
“I woke up with my liver shot to hell, vomiting, and with stomach pains,” Santillán said. His mother, a nurse, rushed him to the hospital.
Berni Wednesday had called on those who purchased drugs over the past 24 hours to throw them away. Provincial health minister Nicolás Kreplak reiterated the plea in a press conference Thursday.
“We had three cases of people hospitalized with intoxication last night, who returned today because they consumed the drugs again," he said, according to the Ámbito Financiero newspaper.
Aquino, who was born in Paraguay, is believed to be the successor of imprisoned drug leader Miguel Ángel “Mameluco” Villalba, Berni said.Aquino refused to make a statement to the police Friday.
Authorities have speculated that the incident could have been the result of a turf war between rival gangs. | null | null | null | null | null |
Memphis activist Pamela Moses was sentenced to six years and one day in prison this week. Moses, who was convicted of trying to illegally register to vote, was told by officials in 2019 that she had regained her voting rights. They later acknowledged that they had made a mistake. (Screenshot via YouTube/WREG)
Pamela Moses felt that she had taken all the steps to restore her voting rights in Tennessee.
But there was a problem: The officials who signed off on Moses being eligible to vote acknowledged that they made an error in saying her probation was over, meaning her voting rights had not been restored. So when the 44-year-old Black woman submitted the certificate as part of her voter registration, she was charged with trying to illegally register to vote.
Her sentencing Monday has been decried by critics as a much harsher sentence compared to other recent voting fraud cases involving conservative White men. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund tweeted that the case captured how “there are two criminal justice systems in America.”
Moses has maintained that she thought her voting rights were restored when she received a letter saying as much, noting in court, “I did not falsify anything.” Her defense only angered Criminal Court Judge W. Mark Ward, who thought that she had intentionally deceived probation officials to restore her voting rights.
Then, the next day, the state Department of Correction wrote a letter to the Shelby County Election Commission noting that they had made a mistake in restoring voting rights to Moses. Officials did not offer an explanation for the mistake.
But Moses has maintained that no one ever told her that the good news she received in September 2019 was reversed the next day. She refused to take a plea deal for the charges this time because Moses felt that she had done nothing wrong, Anyanwu said. Yet she ended up being convicted last year. | null | null | null | null | null |
“The questions for entry had little to do with being Black and had more to do with being leftist,” said Cordoza, who won in November by fewer than 100 votes in what had seemed a safe Democratic seat.
Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, a Jamaican immigrant and the first woman of color elected statewide in Virginia history, took issue with the caucus’s vote on Twitter Friday morning.
“I don’t think his response to the questionnaire had much to do with...why he didn’t receive enough votes,” said Del. Lamont Bagby (D-Henrico), chairman of the Black caucus, referring to a survey new members must fill out before joining.
In his speech, Cordoza revealed that he had applied to join the VLBC but was voted out, and said it was based on his answers to a questionnaire. He said the questions included topics such as his top three environmental justice priorities, whether he favored charter schools, if he would favor overhauling the process for recalling public officials to “end harassment,” and if he would work to repeal sovereign immunity for police officers.
“These questions... spit in the face of our ancestors who fought to have all of our rights guaranteed,” Cordoza said. “I asked myself what any of those things mentioned have to do with being Black. The answer is it has nothing to do with being Black... The caucus is not about being black, it’s about being leftist.”
But aside from Cordoza and Earle-Sears, there has only been one other Black Republican delegate in modern times: In 1997, Paul Clinton Harris of Albemarle became the first Republican African American elected to the House since Reconstruction.
“People join groups because they believe certain things. There’s not a problem with that,” she said. “This is not about race … If it were, the Black guy would have gotten in … Clearly it is about politics. It is better for them to call themselves the Democratic Caucus. If a Black person isn’t Black enough to get into the Black Caucus, then pray tell, who can get into the Black Caucus?”
“Standing ovation on both sides,” Bagby said. James is “the model individual for both sides of the aisle to look at. Somebody that can disagree on... some of the major issues, but still the content of her character cannot be challenged... If Kay Coles James was a member, she would be in that caucus yesterday.” | null | null | null | null | null |
What’s more, the first winter Olympic athlete who identifies as nonbinary will be competing in the Winter Games: pairs figure skater Timothy LeDuc. LeDuc has given voice to what it means to have to work twice as hard and often settle for half as much, while being subjected to exponential scrutiny: “So often queer people have to adjust themselves and sacrifice authenticity to achieve success,” they said last month. | null | null | null | null | null |
Voters line up in Cranberry, Pa., on Nov. 3, 2020. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
There are no more ordinary elections in the United States; each one appears to be, to use the old cliche, “the most important election of our lifetime.” If Democrats are not desperate yet as they grapple with how to win the midterms despite the axiom that the ruling party almost always loses big, they ought to be.
They have a chance to make it happen. But it will require an understanding of what will persuade voters in the middle to choose them, and just as important, get their own supporters energized enough to turn out in large numbers.
On the other hand, the average Republican thinks we’re living through a nightmare of socialist tyranny, and if it doesn’t stop soon — everything they cherish will be destroyed.
So Democrats have two tasks. The first is to persuade voters in the middle that Republicans are awful, and giving the GOP more power would be a terrible idea. Democrats don’t have to make those voters love them; even being viewed as reasonably tolerable might be enough.
Their party spends its time purging those who are insufficiently loyal to former president Donald Trump. The consensus Republican view of the Jan. 6 insurrection is moving past “regrettable episode that should never have happened” and toward “heroic crusade that should have succeeded.”
In Congress, its senators can’t seem to stop launching racist attacks against Black nominees. Across the country, the Republican attacks on schools and teachers grows more terrifying by the day: Not only are they working to ban books and make it illegal for teachers to mention things like sexual orientation, they’ve set up tip lines so people can report on teachers and they want to put cameras in every classroom.
“When are we going to start seeing book burnings?” you might ask. Well guess what: It’s already happening.
Trump looks increasingly like he will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. He holds the GOP in his hands. Every day it becomes more and more a reflection of him: angry, bigoted, corrupt, thuggish, and with an outright contempt for the American democratic system.
Can Democrats wrap all that up, everything about Trump and the Republican Party and the disturbing place they want to take the United States, into a single idea that people will find both understandable and motivating? They haven’t done it so far.
Above all, as Democrats consider the case they want to make to the public over the next nine months, they can’t forget that this is no ordinary election. And if they act like it is, they’ll lose. | null | null | null | null | null |
2022 Beijing Olympics — Alpine skiing — Training — National Alpine skiing Centre, Yanqing district, Beijing, China — February 4, 2022. Travis Ganong of the United States in action during training. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse (Denis Balibouse/Reuters)
YANQING, China — Every Olympic skier arriving in China this past week or so has had some version of the same experience. The highway stretches toward the mountains northwest of Beijing, and there in the distance, stark against a landscape of jagged, brown earth, is a lonely ribbon of white, unseen by any of them until that moment: the Yanqing National Alpine skiing Centre, host of the Alpine skiing competition at these Winter Games.
When the first skiers launch themselves down Xiaohaituo Mountain (altitude: 7,211 feet) in Sunday’s traditional Alpine opener — the men’s downhill — they will be doing so on a speed course, nicknamed “The Rock,” that none of them have raced before, a course that had existed in their minds as little more than some drone video footage that was passed around last year, and the handful of training runs they were permitted this week.
To have 33 coveted Olympic medals — in the men’s and women’s downhill, super-G, slalom, giant slalom and combined, plus the mixed team event — decided on a slope so unproven seems capricious at first glance. But it also could prove to make these Olympics the sport’s ultimate test, with every skier in the same position of unfamiliarity.
Underpinning the competition, of course, is the unspoken threat of risk, inherent in a competition in which humans propel themselves downward at speeds of up to 90 mph, protected only by a helmet and their own abilities and experience. With a maximum incline of 68 degrees, Yanqing is considered one of the steepest venues in the sport.
“It’s uncomfortable. You don’t know what the terrain’s going to do. You’ve never been on it,” said Team USA’s Bryce Bennett, who won the World Cup downhill race at Val Gardena, Italy, in December. “So you’re kind of nervous at the start, but [you just have to] commit to it.”
The U.S. men haven’t medaled in an Olympic downhill since Bode Miller took bronze in Vancouver in 2010 and haven’t won gold since Tommy Moe in Lillehammer in 1994. In PyeongChang in 2018, the American men were shut out of the podium in all Alpine events for the first time since Nagano in 1998. | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden extends tariffs on imported solar equipment but leaves exemption in place
Biden keeps solar tariffs, exemption
President Biden is extending tariffs on imported solar equipment but leaving in place a critical exemption, attempting a middle-ground approach that could boost domestic manufacturing as well as U.S. renewable-energy deployment.
The tariffs had been scheduled to expire in early February and will now run for another four years, under a proclamation Biden issued Friday. President Donald Trump introduced the tariffs in 2018.
Biden’s move includes an exemption for imported two-sided, or bifacial, panels that are widely used in utility-scale solar projects. The exclusion was first granted by Trump, and though he later tried to eliminate it, the exemption remains in place.
Biden faces dueling priorities on solar power. The president’s goals for slashing carbon dioxide emissions depend on boosting renewable power in the United States. Yet tariffs that help U.S. panel-makers compete with Chinese rivals can make it more expensive to reach renewable targets.
The exemption for two-sided panels — previously decried by some domestic-manufacturing advocates as a loophole — could ensure steady low-cost imports of those devices.
Court orders new trial in Apple patent case
A U.S. appeals court on Friday threw out a jury verdict ordering Apple and Broadcom to pay $1.1 billion to the California Institute of Technology for infringing its WiFi technology patents, and ordered a new trial on damages.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the January 2020 award by the federal jury in Los Angeles, one of the largest ever in a patent case, was “legally unsupportable.”
It also upheld the jury’s findings that Apple and Broadcom infringed two Caltech patents, and ordered a new trial on whether they infringed a third patent.
Caltech had sued Apple and Broadcom in May 2016, alleging that millions of iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and other devices using Broadcom chips infringed its data transmission patents.
Caltech spokeswoman Shayna Chabner said the Pasadena, Calif.-based school was confident that the value of its patents would be “fully recognized” at a new damages trial.
Apple is a major purchaser of Broadcom chips, and in January 2020 it reached a $15 billion supply agreement that ends in 2023. Broadcom has estimated that 20 percent of its revenue comes from Apple.
Caltech’s damages model was based on an argument that the school could have simultaneously negotiated a license with Apple for devices containing Broadcom chips and a license with Broadcom for chips used elsewhere.
Royal Dutch Shell has made an oil discovery in Namibia, an area where previous explorers largely failed to find commercial resources. Searching for oil and gas in the waters of the southwest African nation has been compared to the early days of exploration in the North Sea, where a number of wells were drilled before any significant discoveries were made.
Nearly 80 scientists and academics, including a former U.S. energy secretary, on Thursday urged California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to delay closure of the state's remaining nuclear plant to comply with state laws on fighting global warming. Faced with rising costs for operating the plant's two reactors, the utility PG&E decided in 2016 to allow their licenses to expire in 2024 and 2025, which would close the last nuclear plant in the state.
Britain's competition regulator said Friday that it had fined Facebook owner Meta $2 million over fresh issues regarding its purchase of Giphy, a sanction that the U.S. firm said it would accept. Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has taken a tough line with major tech groups in recent years, investigating their dominance of markets such as digital advertising and seeking to block the Facebook-Giphy deal. The CMA ordered Meta to sell the animated-images platform, which it acquired for a reported $400 million in May 2020, after it decided that the remedies offered by the U.S. company did not answer its concerns about the impact on digital advertising. | null | null | null | null | null |
Former Burke pastor charged with sex offenses in alleged contact with minors
A former Burke, Va., pastor has been charged with multiple sex offenses for allegedly having unlawful sexual contact with a minor at Pilgrim Community Church, Fairfax County police announced Friday.
Authorities are seeking the extradition of 37-year-old Sung Woo Hong, known as “Pastor Sam,” from his home country of South Korea, where he returned in 2019 after being fired from the church, police said.
The investigation began in August when a juvenile alleged unlawful contact with the former pastor, police said. An investigation determined that the alleged assaults occurred inside a secluded office in the church between 2016 and 2019, police said. An additional victim was also identified.
Hong served as an intern pastor at the church between 2015 and 2018, police said. He also presided over youth activities and taught the church’s youth band in 2018. Church officials declined to comment on the case.
Hong was charged with three counts of aggravated sexual battery in October, police said. Authorities did not say why they were announcing charges roughly four months later.
Police said they are concerned that there may be additional victims and asked anyone who has details of Hong having inappropriate contact with juveniles to contact detectives.
Hong’s case was not listed in the court system, so it could not be determined whether he had an attorney. | null | null | null | null | null |
“The questions for entry had little to do with being Black and had more to do with being leftist,” said Cordoza, who won in November by fewer than 100 votes in what had seemed a safe Democratic seat
With judges’ ruling in recount, GOP cements two-seat majority in Virginia House of Delegates
Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, a Jamaican immigrant and the first woman of color elected statewide in Virginia history, took issue with the caucus’s vote on Twitter on Friday morning.
“I don’t think his response to the questionnaire had much to do with ... why he didn’t receive enough votes,” said Del. Lamont Bagby (D-Henrico), chairman of the Black Caucus, referring to a survey new members must fill out before joining.
In his speech, Cordoza revealed that he had applied to join the VLBC but was voted out, and he said it was based on his answers to a questionnaire. He said the questions included topics such as his top three environmental justice priorities, whether he favored charter schools, if he would favor overhauling the process for recalling public officials to “end harassment,” and if he would work to repeal sovereign immunity for police officers.
“These questions ... spit in the face of our ancestors who fought to have all of our rights guaranteed,” Cordoza said. “I asked myself what any of those things mentioned have to do with being Black. The answer is it has nothing to do with being Black. ... The caucus is not about being Black, it’s about being leftist.”
But aside from Cordoza and Earle-Sears, there has been only one other Black Republican delegate in modern times: In 1997, Paul Clinton Harris of Albemarle became the first Republican African American elected to the House since Reconstruction.
Virginia lieutenant governor Earle-Sears makes her mark in Richmond during tumultuous first week
“People join groups because they believe certain things. There’s not a problem with that,” she said. “This is not about race. … If it were, the Black guy would have gotten in. … Clearly it is about politics. It is better for them to call themselves the Democratic Caucus. If a Black person isn’t Black enough to get into the Black Caucus, then pray tell, who can get into the Black Caucus?”
“Standing ovation on both sides,” Bagby said. James is “the model individual for both sides of the aisle to look at. Somebody that can disagree on ... some of the major issues, but still the content of her character cannot be challenged. ... If Kay Coles James was a member, she would be in that caucus yesterday.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Right on cue, Gingrich displayed his anti-democratic instincts. He said on — where else? — Fox News that if Republicans regain the majority in the House, lawmakers on the Jan. 6 investigate committee are “going to face a real risk of jail for the kind of laws they are breaking.”
As Jonathan Chait noted in New York magazine, Gingrich “obsessively criminalized his opponents, both real and imagined, calling at various times for the arrests of such disparate figures as Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, Madonna and various poll workers." | null | null | null | null | null |
117th Congress: Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.)
Today at 4:22 p.m. EST|Updated February 8, 2022 at 3:00 p.m. EST
He’s the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, keeping a close eye on the Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border. Join Washington Post Live on Tuesday, Feb. 8 at 3:00 p.m. ET, when Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) talks with Washington Post opinions writer Jonathan Capehart about possible sanctions the Senate may impose on Russia and how the Biden administration should respond to any Russian aggression.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.)
Provided by the office of Sen. Robert Menendez
He grew up the son of Cuban immigrants in a tenement building in Union City and has risen to become one of 100 United States Senators. He is currently the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served as Ranking Member in the 116th Congress. He has earned a national reputation for his international leadership in the Senate, which pairs with his long-time reputation as a fighter for New Jersey families who puts their economic security ahead of powerful special interests. | null | null | null | null | null |
A boy walks on Feb. 3 in the Puerta 8 shantytown in Buenos Aires Province, where authorities said laced batches of cocaine were sold. (Tomas Cuesta/AFP/Getty Images)
Authorities in Argentina have urged residents to dispose of any cocaine after a batch laced with an unknown substance killed at least 23 people in the greater Buenos Aires area.
Twenty people remain hospitalized, 10 of whom are in intensive care. Fourteen of the 23 victims died in their homes or on the street, without the chance to get medical assistance, the Clarín newspaper reported.
Officials have called the deaths an unprecedented tragedy and warned that the toll may still rise.
“It is an exceptional event, we have no precedent,” said Marcelo Lapargo, attorney general for the San Martin municipality in the Buenos Aires province, Clarín reported. “It makes us think that the substance was included deliberately. It is not an error in the process.”
The drugs were sold out of Puerta 8, a shantytown in the Tres de Febrero municipality in the greater Buenos Aires region, police said. The substance apparently used to lace the cocaine has not yet been determined, but authorities believe that it could have been a synthetic opioid used to boost the drug’s effects.
“I woke up with my liver shot to hell, vomiting and with stomach pains,” Santillán said. His mother, a nurse, rushed him to the hospital.
Berni on Wednesday called on those who purchased drugs over the past 24 hours to throw them away. Provincial Health Minister Nicolás Kreplak reiterated the plea in a news conference Thursday.
“We had three cases of people hospitalized with intoxication last night, who returned today because they consumed the drugs again,” he said, according to the Ámbito Financiero newspaper.
Aquino, who was born in Paraguay, is believed to be the successor of imprisoned drug leader Miguel Ángel “Mameluco” Villalba, Berni said. Aquino refused to make a statement to the police Friday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Former attorney Michael Avenatti, representing himself, presents his closing arguments during his criminal trial at the United States Courthouse in the Manhattan borough of New York City on Feb. 2, 2022. (Jane Rosenberg/Reuters)
NEW YORK — Michael Avenatti, an attorney who rose to national prominence representing adult film actress Stormy Daniels as she took on former president Donald Trump, was convicted on Friday of charges related to taking $300,000 from Daniels by siphoning payments of her book-deal advance.
Avenatti was found guilty on counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. He faces up to 22 years in prison at sentencing.
Prosecutors argued that Avenatti stole from Daniels by faking her signature on a form that rerouted wire transfers from the promised $800,000 advance from her memoir “Full Disclosure” to an account he controlled. He then spent months brushing off her questions about the missing installments — leading her to believe the publishing company was failing to pay her.
“What he cannot explain is why he didn’t just tell Ms. Daniels: ‘I’ve got your money,' ” Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky said in a summation rebuttal on Wednesday afternoon.
Daniels, who hired Avenatti with a $100 retainer agreement, testified that she could not afford other attorneys she’d spoken with. To finance his representation and associated costs, they agreed he could start a crowdsourcing fundraising campaign.
“When my father was a teenager he sold hot dogs at a ballpark — ” Avenatti began before the prosecutor, then the judge, cut him off.
At trial, Daniels’s testimony over the course of two days also had its strange moments. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Billionaires have the power to influence change
Leon Cooperman in his home office in Boca Raton, Fla., on Jan. 24 (Scott McIntyre for The Washington Post)
In the Jan. 30 front-page article “The moral calculations of a billionaire,” Leon Cooperman sounded like a kind and thoughtful gentleman. He has pledged to give away most of his money to charities and good causes. He is thoughtful about how he donates and spends his money, not valuing a lavish lifestyle.
He both believes that “what made America great is our system of capitalism” and acknowledges, “It’s not exactly a fair system until you even up the odds.” Society and systems are arranged so that, through no fault or virtue, the same circumstances (such as covid-19) can send one person to live and die on the streets, or greatly increase another’s wealth, as the article reports. Reflecting on this, how satisfying can it feel merely to give away money to charity and for scholarships?
Mr. Cooperman’s real power in this capitalist system lies in influencing the system that he says is “not exactly a fair system.” He is one of the few who have the power to change the system because the system facilitated his having that power, i.e., money. He has the power to influence change so that our society, laws and regulations are more equitable, making the distance from poverty to wealth 10 times smaller (as it was in his day) and making systems truly reward “work and effort and ingenuity.”
My deepest wish is that he uses his power and desire for good in this way.
Robbin Phelps, Washington
The Post’s sympathetic profile of Leon Cooperman could have done justice to an apparently generous self-made man of relatively moderate habits while still taking a tougher look at the role of extraordinary wealth in a democratic society.
The article reported, for instance, that Mr. Cooperman and his wife set up a foundation to eventually distribute the bulk of their wealth to charity. But it doesn’t note the tax benefits: If, as is likely, he established the foundation with a donation of appreciated assets, more than half of that donation will be underwritten by other taxpayers through the charitable deduction and avoidance of capital gains taxes. Nor did it note the continued control the couple will have over the use of that money even after “giving it away.”
The article also fails to explore solutions. The Billionaires Income Tax, for instance, would annually tax those hundreds of millions of dollars in extra wealth Mr. Cooperman can’t seem to help racking up every year, even if he doesn’t sell the underlying assets. Under current law, those leaps in wealth can go untaxed forever. In the end, the moral calculation in this case must be made not just by billionaires but by all of us.
Frank Clemente, Washington
The writer is executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The Federal Reserve is concerned with employment, too
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell on Capitol Hill on Jan. 11. (Graeme Jennings/Bloomberg News)
Regarding George F. Will’s Jan. 30 op-ed, “The Fed doesn’t need two political activists”:
Mr. Will, an incisive writer, recently wrote that “the Fed, having slipped the leash of its primary job — to preserve the currency as a store of value …” should not be in the business of achieving maximum employment.
It seems that Mr. Will has chosen to ignore some important Fed history. In October 2020, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago published an article titled “The Federal Reserve’s Dual Mandate,” in which it noted that “in 1977, Congress amended the Federal Reserve Act, directing the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee to ‘maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates.’”
In short, the Fed is in the business of preserving both currency value and employment.
Edwin S. Rothschild, McLean
Regarding the Jan. 27 news article “Fed prepares to raise rates as it tries to bust inflation”:
I have been saying for several months that interest rates have to be raised immediately. Finally, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell has decided to raise rates in March. Unfortunately, it will be too little, too late. The economy is headed for a hard landing.
Paul Schoenbaum, Richmond | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Judge Srinivasan would be a great pick for the Supreme Court. But he’s not the only great pick.
Judge Sri Srinivasan in 2019. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Regarding the Jan. 28 news article “Activists mobilize to cheer on a Black woman, and fight for her if necessary”:
I refuse to be swayed by Ilya Shapiro’s divisive tweet saying that Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit “objectively would be the best pick” to fill the vacancy of retiring Justice Stephen G. Breyer.
Undoubtedly, Judge Srinivasan would be an eminently qualified nominee who would provide much-needed diversity to the Supreme Court. But his qualifications do not provide support for Mr. Shapiro’s claim that there are no Black women with equally impressive qualifications who could serve with distinction as a justice.
Mr. Shapiro’s call-out of Mr. Srinivasan follows the well-trodden path of racists seeking to maintain political power by inciting discord and infighting among segments of our population who should be natural allies in seeking justice and freedom for all. Mr. Shapiro’s tweet is not just a cynical ploy, but the last thing that our nation needs in our time of disharmony.
I urge everyone — not just Blacks and Asians — to stand together, reject the divisive rhetoric of those who seek an unjust and unequal America, and embrace the future of a diverse nation.
Geary S. Mizuno, Bethesda
President Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to fill the coming vacancy on the Supreme Court is justified by the past 250 years of jurisprudence almost exclusively by White men. The goal of creating a Supreme Court that reflects the population of the United States is a worthy one.
However, it is unlikely to be met with a limit of just nine seats. It is imperative that the size of the Supreme Court be expanded to make the goal of proportionate representation anywhere near possible. Adding two seats for a total of 11 is probably not enough. Adding six seats for a total of 15 is probably too many. It would seem that adding four seats for a total of 13 would be the most sensible course of action. Choosing that number would also be nod to the original 13 colonies that formed the United States of America.
Appointing all federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, to one 18-year term would also be a welcome improvement to the federal judiciary, especially because it would provide for more orderly successions and ensure that more presidents would contribute to the process.
All of these changes would go a long way toward restoring the public’s confidence in the federal court system overall and in the Supreme Court in particular. There is a lot of reputational damage that must be repaired.
Robynne A. Williams, Silver Spring | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: School systems are being pushed to their limits
Students at a public school in Miami Lakes, Fla., on Aug. 23, 2021. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg)
The Jan. 31 front-page article “Public schools facing a crisis of epic proportion” went into detail about how “schools are on the defensive” when it comes to their own education programs.
The coronavirus has left a serious dent in the education system, and it’s not just one demographic. Students have been heavily affected by virtual learning, leading to them doing poorly during in-person instruction. Many aren’t used to doing schoolwork to a full extent anymore, since the year of online school worsened motivation and academic integrity. Students struggle now that they are in the building, and teachers are pushed to their limits helping them.
Teachers are facing their own challenges, including low staffing and having to help students more than normal. Parents of students are making the stress on teachers worse, demanding that parents get more of a say in education programs. However, the school system has changed since they were students. As people have learned more, this knowledge has been put into the curriculum. Old information might be outdated: information that these parents might still believe.
Parents demanding for more of a platform in public education should just let the professionals do their jobs.
Audrey Bridges, Springfield | null | null | null | null | null |
Three charged with murder in fatal shooting last year in Prince George’s County
Three people, including a 17-year-old, have been arrested and charged with murder in the shooting death of Jether Bonds in Fort Washington in July, Prince George’s County police said in a news release.
Kyle Moorehead, 19, of Oxon Hill and Zion Wormley, 20, of Capitol Heights, along with the male juvenile, are being held without bond at the county jail, police said. They are all charged as adults.
Detectives who investigated the shooting believe Bonds was killed during a drug-related robbery, according to the news release.
Bonds, 29, of Fort Washington, was found with multiple gunshot wounds on July 24, when police were called to the 6800 block of Cherryfield Road to investigate a shooting. Bonds died at the scene, police said. | null | null | null | null | null |
What is — and isn’t — in the joint statement by Putin and Xi
Russian President Vladimir Putin met face-to-face with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for the first time in nearly two years Friday. The leaders convened in Beijing at the start of the Winter Olympics — and issued a lengthy statement detailing the two nations’ shared positions on a range of global issues.
The English version of the joint statement runs a whopping 5,364 words — but none of those words is “Ukraine." Analysts say that the omission likely reflects China’s unwillingness to support a Russian invasion of its neighbor to the west.
“China doesn’t want to throw its weight to say it supports Russia’s actions on Ukraine, because it doesn’t,” says Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Resisting Western influence is something both Moscow and Beijing can get behind. The statement also criticizes U.S. military expansion in the Indo-Pacific and through AUKUS, a trilateral security agreement between Australia, Britain and the United States. That pact includes what the three nations said is a “shared ambition” to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines.
Not in the statement: “Alliance”
Their statement suggests that this bond is only deepening, with the two leaders calling the partnership “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era.” There are “no limits” or “forbidden” areas of cooperation, it says — meaning that joint military action is not off the table.
”It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one,” they said in the statement, in a reference to repeated Western criticism of the lack of political freedoms in both Russia and China. (The United States and a handful of other nations are currently staging a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games to protest China’s human rights abuses).
But while the criticism of Western democracy isn’t new, its inclusion in a joint statement at the opening of a high-profile such as the Olympics is a reflection of Russia and China’s growing resolve to build a coalition of ideologically like-minded nations.
The statement included brief criticism of “unilateral sanctions” — a jab at Washington — but it didn’t address if and how China might support Russia if the latter is sanctioned over Ukraine. The State Department warned Chinese firms Thursday against trying to evade any export controls on Moscow, saying that they will face consequences. If the Trump era was any indication, then further sanctions against either Russia or China will likely deepen their economic partnership. The statement said that the two sides would strengthen cooperation on artificial intelligence, a high-tech sector in China that has come under U.S. sanctions.
Xi backed Putin Friday in his immediate crisis facing off against NATO over Ukraine. But the statement includes many more mentions of the ways in which Russia has also stood up for China. Russia said that it supports China’s position as it relates to the search for the origins of the coronavirus, a sensitive topic for Beijing. It also echoed China’s opposition to “any forms of independence” for Taiwan, the self-ruled, democratic island claimed by China. | null | null | null | null | null |
Prosecutors say the base had to be evacuated and cleared for bombs twice on Feb. 22, 2021, because of the threats made by D’Carlo Nimis Deluca. A federal judge in Newport News, Va., sentenced him on Friday to 2½ years in prison.
While on pretrial release, he was arrested while allegedly trying to enter a federal courthouse in Manhattan with methamphetamines, a dinner knife and a digital scale. He claimed to have affiliations with MS-13 and terrorist groups, and his attorneys said he went to the courthouse with the belief that he was informing his probation officer about criminal activity in his neighborhood.
But the childhood trauma was already affecting his mental health, Deluca’s defense attorneys wrote. He began abusing drugs and suffering from manic, psychotic and delusional episodes, they said. He was in and out of mental health and substance abuse treatment; the calls to Langley and other threats he made around that time came right after he was discharged from an inpatient behavioral health program. | null | null | null | null | null |
WASHINGTON — In a surprising burst of hiring, America’s employers added 467,000 jobs in January in a sign of the economy’s resilience even in the face of a wave of omicron infections last month. The government’s report also drastically revised up its estimate of job gains for November and December by a combined 709,000. It also said the unemployment rate ticked up from 3.9% to a still-low 4%, mainly because more people began looking for work and not all of them found jobs right away. The strong hiring gain for January, which defied expectations for only a slight gain, demonstrates the eagerness of many employers to hire even as the pandemic raged.
NEW YORK — Amazon workers and organizers in Bessemer, Alabama, are making door-to-door house calls, sporting pro-union T-shirts and challenging anti-union messaging by Amazon-hired consultants as they try to convince their peers for the second time to unionize their warehouse. The union election starts Friday by secret ballot. The new organizing tactics come two months after the National Labor Relations Board ordered a do-over election upon determining that Amazon unfairly influenced the first election last year. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union estimates more than half of the 6,000 workers who voted last time around remain eligible this time. But the RWDSU still faces an uphill battle from Amazon, which doesn’t seem to have let up its aggressive anti-union stance.
NEW YORK — Stock indexes ended mixed and Treasury yields jumped Friday as Wall Street’s expectations rise that the Federal Reserve may soon start raising interest rates sharply. The Labor Department said employers added 467,000 jobs last month, triple economists’ expectations. The stronger-than-expected data seems to lock in the Fed’s pivot toward fighting inflation by making moves that would ultimately act as a drag on markets. The S&P 500 climbed 0.5%, even though more stocks fell than rose in the index. The index got a boost from Amazon, which leaped 13.5% following a strong earnings report. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.1%. ___
BRUSSELS — The European Union and the United States have agreed to resume trade in oysters, clams, mussels and scallops from the end of February. The deal announced Friday settles a 10-year trade dispute. Trade in live mollusks between the EU and the U.S. had stopped in 2011 due to a divide in regulatory standards. Under the deal, Spain and the Netherlands will be allowed to export mollusks to the U.S., while Massachusetts and Washington can now trade to the EU. Both sides praised the deal as another positive step in their trade relationship since U.S. President Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump.
NEW YORK — Kohl’s says that recent offers to purchase the department store chain undervalue its business, and it is adopting a shareholder rights plan to head off any hostile takeovers. The shareholder rights plan is effective immediately and expires in a year. The move comes as Kohl’s has received multiple buyout offers in recent weeks. Private equity firm Sycamore Partners had reportedly approached Kohl’s about a potential deal last month. A group called Acacia Research, backed by activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP, bid $64 per share, or about $9 billion. At the time the Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin-based retailer said that its board was reviewing the offers.
WASHINGTON — Fine art isn’t just nice to look at. It’s also attractive to criminals trying to launder money, finance terrorism and trade illegal drugs and arms. And the Treasury Department wants art dealers and financiers to do something about that. The agency issued a report Friday recommending that financial firms and art dealers set up an information-sharing database to track how sales of fine art are linked to bad actors who make anonymous purchases. The need to monitor art sales has become more complicated and necessary with the recent rise in sales of digital assets known as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.
WASHINGTON — The Wall Street Journal’s publisher, News Corp., says it has been hacked, with data stolen from journalists and other employees. The cybersecurity firm investigating the intrusion, Mandiant, says Chinese intelligence-gathering is believed to be behind the operation. The Journal reported that people briefed on the intrusion said it appeared to date back to February 2020 and that scores of employees were impacted. It quoted them as saying the hackers were able to access reporters’ emails and Google Docs, including drafts of articles. News Corp. says customer and financial data were so far not affected, nor were company operations interrupted.
FARGO, N.D. — The interior solicitor in the Biden administration says the mineral rights under the original Missouri River riverbed belong to a North Dakota tribal nation. The 68-page memorandum posted Friday by the U.S. Department of Interior is contrary to a May 2020 Trump administration opinion concluding that the state is legal owner of submerged lands beneath the river where it flows through the Fort Berthold Reservation. That memo rolled back an Obama administration opinion favoring the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. At stake is an estimated $100 million in unpaid royalties and future payments certain to come from oil drilling beneath the river. | null | null | null | null | null |
Phyllis E. Oakley, who retired as an assistant secretary of state in 1999 after more than 25 years of federal service — and four decades after she quit the Foreign Service because her marriage to a fellow officer was unofficially prohibited at the time, died Jan. 22 at a hospital in Washington. She was 87.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said a son, Thomas Oakley.
In an oral history, Mrs. Oakley told the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training that she “accepted that discrimination without batting an eyelash. ... It never occurred to me to challenge the department on its personnel policies. I was deeply in love, ready for marriage. I did not see myself as a victim in marrying Bob."
She accompanied her husband to Africa when he was named ambassador to Zaire (now Congo) in 1979, but as an employee of the U.S. Information Agency, not under his direct supervision. He later held the high-ranking title of “career minister” and served as ambassador to Somalia and Pakistan before retiring in 1991.
To the public, she was probably best remembered for a well-publicized quip when she was asked by reporters — chasing a rumor — to describe where on his body the secretary of state may have had a tattoo of the Princeton tiger (his college mascot). | null | null | null | null | null |
Russian President Vladimir Putin met face-to-face with Chinese President Xi Jinping for the first time in nearly two years Friday. The leaders convened in Beijing at the start of the Winter Olympics — and issued a lengthy statement detailing the two nations’ shared positions on a range of global issues.
The English version of the joint statement runs a whopping 5,364 words — but none of those words is “Ukraine.” Analysts say the omission probably reflects China’s unwillingness to support a Russian invasion of its neighbor to the west.
“China doesn’t want to throw its weight to say it supports Russia’s actions on Ukraine, because it doesn’t,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Resisting Western influence is something Moscow and Beijing can get behind. The statement also criticizes U.S. military expansion in the Indo-Pacific and through AUKUS, a trilateral security agreement comprising Australia, Britain and the United States. That pact includes what the three nations said is a “shared ambition” to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines.
Not in the statement: ‘Alliance’
Their statement suggests that this bond is only deepening, with the two leaders calling the partnership “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era.” There are “no limits” or “forbidden” areas of cooperation, it says — meaning joint military action is not off the table.
”It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one,” they said in the statement, in a reference to repeated Western criticism of the lack of political freedoms in Russia and China. (The United States and a handful of other nations are staging a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics to protest China’s human rights abuses.)
But while the criticism of Western democracy isn’t new, its inclusion in a joint statement at the opening of a high-profile event such as the Olympics is a reflection of Russia and China’s growing resolve to build a coalition of ideologically like-minded nations.
The statement included a brief criticism of “unilateral sanctions” — a jab at Washington — but it didn’t address whether or how China might support Russia if the latter faces sanctions over Ukraine. The State Department warned Chinese companies Thursday against trying to evade any export controls on Moscow, saying that they would face consequences. If the Trump era was any indication, then further sanctions against Russia or China will probably deepen their economic partnership. The statement said that the two sides would strengthen cooperation on artificial intelligence, a high-tech sector in China that has come under U.S. sanctions.
Xi backed Putin on Friday in his immediate crisis facing off against NATO over Ukraine. But the statement includes many more mentions of the ways in which Russia has also stood up for China. Russia said it supports China’s position as it relates to the search for the origins of the coronavirus, a sensitive topic for Beijing. It also echoed China’s opposition to “any forms of independence” for Taiwan, the self-ruled, democratic island claimed by China. | null | null | null | null | null |
Medical emergency leads to death of off-duty police officer in Gaithersburg crash
A Montgomery County police officer died in a car crash that followed a medical emergency, officials said. (iStock)
An off-duty Montgomery County police officer died in a car crash Friday after he had a medical emergency while driving his 9-year-old daughter to school in the Gaithersburg area, county officials said.
Police identified the officer as Douglas Haggerty, 36, an 11-year member of the department who most recently served as a patrol officer in the Rockville area, according to a statement released by police.
The single-car crash happened on Spencerville Road, near Good Hope Road, about 8:06 a.m. when Haggerty “began to experience an incapacitating medical event,” which the preliminary investigation reveals led to the crash, the statement said.
Haggerty’s daughter was in the vehicle and sustained minor injuries. She called 911, according to police and County Executive Marc Elrich (D). Both Haggerty and his daughter were taken to a hospital, but the officer was later pronounced dead, police said.
County officials held a news conference to announce the death and honor the officer.
“We are grateful for his nearly 12 years of service to our communities,” Elrich said. “He’s going to be missed but he’s not going to be forgotten.”
Police Chief Marcus Jones said he supervised Haggerty for four years when Jones was a patrol commander and described him as a well-liked “team player” who put crime victims at ease, took pride in patrolling his beat and worked to help young officers.
“Today a human tragedy occurred,” Jones said. “We have lost a great friend, a dedicated officer a fabulous servant to this community.
“Such a beautiful soul.” | null | null | null | null | null |
How to pitch stories to Launcher
Launcher is looking for original reporting — features, profiles, reported analysis and more — and we want to hear from you. Launcher aims to be an authoritative, clarifying voice on the video game industry and the culture and mass audience that has developed around it. We hope you’ll help us, by pitching stories about the creators, companies and communities that are changing the industry.
Here are some general guidelines to keep in mind when pitching us.
A concise description of your story
To whom you have spoken, or plan to speak, for this story. (If you’re pitching a story that revolves around getting answers from these sources, we’d like to know in advance that they’re willing to speak with you).
Clips of your work, especially those that align stylistically with what you want to write for Launcher.
Some things to keep in mind:
Some pitches start with “I want to look into how x is impacting y.” The result might make for a fascinating story, but if you’re pitching this to us, you should include the answer to the question (Here’s how x is impacting y) and explain why the result is compelling.
We do not accept op-eds, and we rarely accept reviews (our staff handles most of these) or essays (which fall slightly outside of the scope of what we usually publish). If you’d still like to propose a review, please do so early and outline why you would be a good fit to write it. The same goes for essays; here’s an example of the kind of essay we do accept.
Please do not send us pieces that have already been published in some format (this includes tweets that capture your idea in full).
There’s a particular kind of story that stands out to us: We want reported stories that reveal some kind of tension. What’s a challenge that a person or community faces? How is the subject of your story changing the industry? Who are the stakeholders who will have to adapt? What’s something or someone people have been overlooking, and why is that an issue? Pitches that demonstrate that you’ve homed in on a source of tension and that you’re well versed in the answers to the crucial questions surrounding it jump to the top of our list.
Here are some examples of freelancers' stories that we really like:
This story about the rise of esports as a form of professional development, by Gregory Leporati
This story about cosplayers who adapted after the United States went into lockdown to mitigate the covid-19 pandemic, by Lauren Orsini
This profile of a Smash pro who is hated because he plays a character people dislike, by Zane Bhansali.
This piece on the consultants working behind the scenes to make games and the industry more accessible, by Grant Stoner.
This reported news story on the challenges of organizing AGDQ, by Elizabeth Henges.
Target length: 1,200 to 1,500 words / $450; Reviews, on the rare occasion that we assign them, pay $650.
Launcher does not cover travel costs.
Please send pitches to LauncherPitches@washpost.com. We’ll try to get back to you in 2-3 days, but please feel comfortable following up with us if we don’t get back. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Ballenger-McKinney wastewater treatment facility in Frederick, Md. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to expand a system that detects the coronavirus in wastewater to better predict surges and declines of the virus and, eventually, wants to harness the network’s early-warning power to find other deadly pathogens and control outbreaks of food-borne disease.
Wastewater surveillance can be used to track other diseases and health concerns, Kirby said. Officials are working to expand surveillance to gather data on other pathogens by the end of the year, with targets including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, norovirus, influenza, a deadly fungal pathogen called Candida auris and food-borne infections caused by E. coli and salmonella.
In response to the pandemic, the agency launched a national wastewater surveillance system in September 2020. Sewage surveillance has been used for years around the world to identify polio outbreaks. Several other countries, including France, Germany and the Netherlands, have been monitoring sewage systems for the coronavirus.
The CDC gets data from about 400 testing sites that measure the coronavirus in wastewater. Some health departments are also able to conduct advanced genetic sequencing to track variants of concern. California, Colorado, New York City and Houston were the first to detect evidence of the omicron variant in community wastewater.
Universities, colleges, states and cities, and commercial testing companies collect samples from sewage pipes to monitor the spread of the virus. Cities including Boston were able to identify impending case surge and conclude that the omicron variant had peaked.
The CDC until 2020 did not have a national system to track infectious diseases through wastewater. The agency has since provided money to 37 states, four cities and two territories for utilities to collect sewage samples, for laboratories to get those samples tested and for state officials to send the data to the CDC. Many of these states are still implementing their systems.
On Friday, the CDC said it was making public on its website the data it has received from 28 states and the District of Columbia. Some states have that data available on their websites, but the CDC data allows consumers to compare data across states.
More than 34,000 samples have been collected from communities representing about 53 million people. The CDC plans to add 255 testing sites in the next few weeks and additional sites during the next few months, expanding the reach of the program “to look into most states” and territories and tribal communities, Kirby said.
Kirby said her team is working with the rest of the agency’s coronavirus response to “find ways that wastewater surveillance can help provide situational awareness for what’s going on in the community, as well as serving as that early warning system that a new increase may be coming in a community.”
In Ohio, a color-coded map on the state health department’s website shows the increase or decrease in virus levels in wastewater for an area. Substantial increases in virus levels trigger an email notification to health districts, utilities and community health leaders, according to a CDC report last fall.
In Utah, wastewater data is one of the main components of a ranking system to determine where to dispatch mobile testing teams.
Out of 255 surveillance systems with data, 70 percent showed a decline in the virus over the past 15 days, while the remainder reported increases. No clear patterns emerged from the data, and in many cases treatment plants showing increases are next to plants with decreases. | null | null | null | null | null |
The investigation, details of which were presented to the media Friday, was ordered after a member of Islamic State-Khorasan, the extremist group’s affiliate in Afghanistan, detonated a suicide vest Aug. 26 in a crowded outdoor corridor just outside Hamid Karzai International Airport, killing an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops. The attack on the airfield’s Abbey Gate occurred as the U.S. military raced to evacuate thousands of Afghan allies during a frantic, two-week rescue operation set in motion when the Taliban seized control of the capital.
Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, chief of U.S. Central Command, acknowledged Friday that the investigation contradicted statements he made in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. At the time, defense officials believed there was one, and possibly two, explosions and that gunmen opened fire on the crowd after.
The Defense Department released video footage of Marines at Abbey Gate before the Kabul airport attack on Aug. 28, 2021. (Department of Defense)
That the investigation has “contradicted our first impression” was a testament to the independence of those who conducted it, McKenzie said. “It also confirms the age-old fact that the battlefield is a confusing and contradictory place, and it gets more confusing the closer you are to the actual action.”
The airport bombing was one of two high-profile incidents during the evacuation for which U.S. officials were criticized after it became apparent they had distributed inaccurate information about what transpired. The other occurred three days later, when a U.S. drone strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children — an attack senior military officials initially defended as “righteous,” saying they had killed a suspected Islamic State-Khorasan bomber preparing to hit airport. The target, in fact, was an aid worker, and several family members also perished in the attack.
Army investigators determined the explosion at Abbey Gate ejected 5-millimeter ball bearings that tore into the crowd at high velocity. Forty-five U.S. troops were wounded in the blast, with some suffering brain injuries that surfaced later, defense officials said.
The bombing set off chaos inside the airfield’s outer perimeter, where Afghans clamoring to secure seats on U.S. evacuation flights had crowded.
Defense officials said Taliban foot soldiers guarding initial checkpoints made it difficult and dangerous for potential evacuees to access the airfield, forcing many to seek alternative routes inside with the assistance of U.S. personnel.
Newly released video shows crowds at Kabul's international airport after the attack on Aug. 28, 2021. (Department of Defense)
A sewage canal along the airfield’s perimeter had acted as a natural barrier early on, aiding troops with crowd control, said Army Brig. Gen. Lance Curtis, who led the investigation. But that “changed dramatically and rapidly” as more people began taking alternative paths into the airport, he added.
Officials said they believe that the Islamic State bomber, carrying 20 pounds of explosives, bypassed the Taliban checkpoint and that the Taliban had no advance knowledge of the attack.
In the moments leading up to the attack, hundreds were packed into and along the edges of the sewage canal, with Marines standing on its inner wall, spotting and pulling people from the crowd, officials said. Had U.S. personnel tried to push outward, to fortify the perimeter as the crowd surged, the Americans would have been at greater risk, Curtis said.
Investigators, he said, had concluded the attack “was not preventable.”
Disoriented service members who rushed to aid the wounded encountered tear gas — unleashed from ruptured canisters the Marines carried on their body armor — and there was initial confusion over whether the Taliban had been involved and whether the attack was still ongoing, the investigation found.
It was initially reported that some Marines and British troops opened fire in the confusion after the explosion, believing they still could be under attack. The investigation found that two British troops and one U.S. service member fired only warning shots to disperse the crowd, while one American shot at a “suspicious individual” in a water tower outside the airport perimeter. Investigators said there was no indication anyone was hit with gunfire during or after the incident.
Curtis said the gunfire caused an echo as it traveled through the confined space, creating the illusion of a firefight. Further adding to the confusion, wounds resulting from the ball bearings resembled those caused by gunshots, officials said.
The military’s inquiry lasted more than three months. It spanned five countries and involved interviews with more than 130 people, officials said. Although U.S. officials were in routine contact with the Taliban leading up to the attack and in its aftermath, investigators did not interview any Afghan witnesses.
Karen DeYoung contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Phyllis E. Oakley, who retired as an assistant secretary of state in 1999 after more than 25 years of federal service — and four decades after she quit the Foreign Service because her marriage to a fellow officer was unofficially prohibited at the time — died Jan. 22 at a hospital in Washington. She was 87.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said her son, Thomas Oakley.
In an oral history, Mrs. Oakley told the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training that she “accepted that discrimination without batting an eyelash. … It never occurred to me to challenge the department on its personnel policies. I was deeply in love, ready for marriage. I did not see myself as a victim in marrying Bob.”
She accompanied her husband to Africa when he was named ambassador to Zaire, now Congo, in 1979, but as an employee of the U.S. Information Agency, not under his direct supervision. He later held the high-ranking title of “career minister” and served as ambassador to Somalia and Pakistan before retiring in 1991.
To the public, she was probably best remembered for a well-publicized quip when she was asked by reporters — chasing a rumor — to describe where on his body the secretary of state may have had a tattoo of the Princeton tiger, his college mascot. | null | null | null | null | null |
MINNEAPOLIS — The parents of a 22-year-old Black man shot and killed by Minneapolis police during a predawn, no-knock raid early Wednesday said their son had been “executed” by an officer and called for charges to be filed.
The raid took place just before 7 a.m. on Wednesday, and the footage captures officers shining a bright light toward Locke, who appears to be lying on the couch in the darkened apartment.
On Friday, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced he would jointly review Locke’s “tragic death” with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, whose office has overseen the prosecutions of police officers including the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Huffman confirmed Thursday Locke was not the subject of the warrant and that police were still gathering information about why he was at the scene. Asked why the police had initially described Locke as a “suspect,” Huffman blamed a lack of information in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and said it remained “unclear” what connection, if any, Locke had to the St. Paul investigation.
“We have a city that just refuses to learn,” Storms said. “We continue to be known for these colossal civil rights failures. And so now the question is, is the city going to hold itself accountable? And can we believe the city anymore when it says it’s going to learn from its own mistakes? ... How many more people have to die?"
On Friday afternoon, Frey issued an “immediate moratorium” on the “request and execution” of no-knock warrants in the city. In a statement, his office said the “only permissible way for MPD officers to execute a warrant is the ‘knock-and-announce’ approach," which requires officers to knock, announce and wait “a reasonable amount of time” before entering. But Frey’s office said exceptions to the no-knock moratorium could be made if there is an “imminent threat" to an individual or member of the public.
Frey announced the city would partner with activist DeRay Mckesson and Pete Kraska, an expert on police militarization who is based at Eastern Kentucky University, to “review and suggest revisions” to the MPD’s policies on “unannounced entry."
"No matter what information comes to light, it won’t change the fact that Amir Locke’s life was cut short,” Frey said in a statement. He has said the body-camera footage of Locke’s shooting “raises more questions than answers.”
“What do we have to do to stop the police from killing people that look like us?" he said at a news conference with Locke’s family. "This is America. This is not Afghanistan or Somalia. ... This is not the SEAL team that is catching Osama bin Laden or somebody. This is our kids. ... This should have never happened.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Former vice president Mike Pence. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
The reaction on Friday seems to largely be an example of a very common reaction in the Donald Trump era of American politics. From the outset, critics of the former president have been on the watch for a signal moment in which it all collapses, a have-you-no-shame encounter or a comment or action from Trump so egregious that his position becomes untenable. There have unquestionably been moments in which that seemed like it would occur — his mocking of Sen. John S. McCain’s military record, his disparagement of a family who had lost a son in Iraq, the “Access Hollywood” tape, his reaction to the deadly protest in Charlottesville. That gets us about seven months into his presidency, but you get the gist.
It seemed, too, like Jan. 6 would be — or even was! — that moment, given his ouster from social media and the White House soon after. But those who assumed that the Republican Party would respond to that splinter by ejecting it from the body rather than forming a pearl (to create a metaphorical monster) would be proved wrong. Trump advocated for the end of democratically elected presidents and Pence said he wouldn’t play ball … and Trump continues to define the GOP’s agenda and impulses. So much so that, a few hours before Pence’s speech on Friday, the GOP formally approved a resolution condemning two Republicans who had taken a much harder and more consistent position of condemnation against the former president. That the resolution was a poorly written pastiche of exaggerated rhetoric that would be at home in a Trump news release was very much beside the point. The point was that the GOP was not going to say that Trump was wrong and that the only people who would really care that Pence had said it were people looking for that signal moment.
For example, that resolution criticizing Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for participation in the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 included a reference to the committee engaging in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” As The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported, this was a clumsily phrased reference to subpoenas issued to people who were engaged in the broader effort to overturn the election, not the day’s violence. Yet, on the hunt for the signal moment, observers — including Cheney — decided that the resolution was saying that the riot was being waved away as “legitimate political discourse.”
The important thing here is that it wouldn’t matter if that was the intent. We know that the Republican Party is whitewashing the riot. We know that the far-right media is spreading misinformation about it. We know that those arrested for participating in violence are getting sympathetic responses from powerful Republican officials. To insist that there is greater significance in the phrasing used for a resolution than the accreted evidence of efforts to play down what happened that day is simply bizarre. What matters isn’t that linguistic detectives are on the case, what matters is literally everything else we know.
It happened this week, too. When Trump released that statement saying Pence could have overturned the election had he acted on Jan. 6, this was hailed as a novel confession of guilt. Perhaps a prosecutor will see it as such after comparing it to the letter of the law. But this was not, in itself, a revelation of intent! No kidding that Trump wanted Pence to overturn the election! What did you think was happening for the two months from the 2020 election to President Biden’s inauguration? A rational, good-faith consideration of what the voters had intended? | null | null | null | null | null |
Juli Briskman, who was fired after a photo showed her flipping off President Donald Trump's presidential motorcade while riding a bicycle, campaigns in her Sterling, Va., neighborhood in 2019 during a successful run for a seat on Loudoun County's Board of Supervisors. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
He was maskless, unlike all the workers and most of the customers around him.
“Yeah, look around you, Governor, you’re in Alexandria,” the woman said. “Read the room, buddy.”
Briskman, who lost her job in the who fiasco, ran for office and is now a hard-working county supervisor.
By total coincidence, both Patton and the shopper performed quiet acts of kindness that go beyond their public-minded jobs as educators.
Patton just finished the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Textbook Fund campaign, raising more than $31,000 to help buy textbooks for students at Howard University and Morgan State University.
With hearts as big as these men’s hubris, these women have earned the right to speak their truths. | null | null | null | null | null |
MINNEAPOLIS — The parents of a 22-year-old Black man shot and killed by Minneapolis police during a predawn no-knock raid early Wednesday said their son had been “executed” by an officer and called for charges to be filed.
The raid took place just before 7 a.m. Wednesday, and the footage captures officers shining a bright light toward Locke, who appears to be lying on the couch in the darkened apartment.
On Friday, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced that he would jointly review Locke’s “tragic death” with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, whose office has overseen the prosecutions of police officers including the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Huffman confirmed Thursday that Locke was not the subject of the warrant and that police were still gathering information about why he was at the scene. Asked why the police had initially described Locke as a “suspect,” Huffman blamed a lack of information in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and said it remained “unclear” what connection, if any, Locke had to the St. Paul investigation.
“We have a city that just refuses to learn,” Storms said. “We continue to be known for these colossal civil rights failures. And so now the question is, is the city going to hold itself accountable? And can we believe the city anymore when it says it’s going to learn from its own mistakes? … How many more people have to die?”
On Friday afternoon, Frey issued an “immediate moratorium” on the “request and execution” of no-knock warrants in the city. In a statement, his office said the “only permissible way for MPD officers to execute a warrant is the ‘knock-and-announce’ approach,” which requires officers to knock, announce and wait “a reasonable amount of time” before entering. But Frey’s office said exceptions to the no-knock moratorium could be made if there is an “imminent threat” to an individual or member of the public.
Frey announced the city would partner with activist DeRay Mckesson and Pete Kraska, an expert on police militarization who is based at Eastern Kentucky University, to “review and suggest revisions” to the MPD’s policies on “unannounced entry.”
“No matter what information comes to light, it won’t change the fact that Amir Locke’s life was cut short,” Frey said in a statement. He has said the body-camera footage of Locke’s shooting “raises more questions than answers.”
“What do we have to do to stop the police from killing people that look like us?” he said at a news conference with Locke’s family. “This is America. This is not Afghanistan or Somalia. … This is not the SEAL team that is catching Osama bin Laden or somebody. This is our kids. … This should have never happened.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Right on cue, Gingrich displayed his anti-democratic instincts. He said on — where else? — Fox News that if Republicans regain the majority in the House, lawmakers on the Jan. 6 investigative committee are “going to face a real risk of jail for the kind of laws they are breaking.”
As Jonathan Chait noted in New York magazine, Gingrich “obsessively criminalized his opponents, both real and imagined, calling at various times for the arrests of such disparate figures as Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, Madonna and various poll workers.” | null | null | null | null | null |
China courted the world the last time it hosted the Olympics. Not now.
A security official looks on during an ice hockey practice session at the National Indoor Stadium in Beijing on Feb. 3. (Carl Court/Getty Images)
China’s attitude toward the world has undergone a transformation since Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008. In the run-up to those Games, Chinese leaders embraced the theme of “one world, one dream,” and the title of the Olympic song, “Beijing Welcomes You,” captured the prevailing mood. A mass program was launched to teach Beijingers basic English so they could help foreign tourists in need. China even bent to the reality that human rights groups opposed its hosting the Games, designating three locations as protest zones during the Olympics (although they were never used). The Opening Ceremonies ended up attracting more than 80 state and government leaders, including those from the United States, Australia, Germany and Japan.
The scene is dramatically different 14 years later, as the city hosts the Winter Olympics. Forget about learning English: As part of the movement to reject Western influence, not only is teaching English increasingly discouraged, but a few weeks ago, the Beijing municipal government replaced English words on subway signs with Pinyin that few foreigners understand (“station” is now “zhan”). Beijing rejected some health protocols recommended by the International Olympic Committee is pursuing its own outbreak-control strategy that seeks mostly to minimize Chinese people’s exposure to foreigners arriving for the Games. Unlike in 2008, Beijing has not made any high-profile promises of human rights improvements. Disregarding international pressure for a boycott by diplomats, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said, “No one would care whether they come or not.” These developments signal a sea change in China’s stance toward the outside world: Rather than integrating into the global community, it wants the world to “adapt to a more confident China.”
Through a network of closely guarded “bubbles” designed to keep the participants from the rest of the country, China has built a wall between itself and the Olympics so that thousands of athletes and other outsiders do not upend its zero-covid strategy. Fourteen years after the last Olympics in Beijing, China’s leaders simply see less reason to welcome foreigners, or foreign ideas, into the country.
It is not surprising that as China’s economic and military power has grown, so too have its ambition and capability to display on a stage like the Olympics its priorities and values. But the pandemic has bestowed on China unprecedented self-confidence. The United States and many other Western democracies, which have long presented themselves as standard-bearers for public health and good governance, floundered in the face of the coronavirus. By contrast, China’s success in quickly containing the virus, even before vaccines arrived, using lockdowns and rigorous quarantines drew the notice of the world. Although not all public health experts believe that China can keep the virus at bay forever, the perceived performance gap (as I noted in a new Council on Foreign Relations report) only bolstered the notion among Chinese authorities that China is rising and the West is descending, and that there is not much China can learn from outsiders, including those from the West.
In the past, the West could encourage China to cooperate in public health projects because of the promise of funding and technical know-how. That worked with previous crises, like HIV and AIDS prevention and control. But today, China no longer thinks it needs that sort of help. As President Xi Jinping proclaimed in July: “By no means will we accept someone bossing us around like a teacher. The [Chinese Communist Party] will stride proudly ahead on the path we have chosen and grasp the destiny of China’s development and progress in our own hands.”
What people in the United States may view as an illiberal and excessive approach toward fighting the coronavirus — shutting down regional economies to prevent any cases — is cherished in China for protecting lives and putting people first. “I’m not interested in being lectured by the so-called expert from a country where 620,000 people have died from covid,” a Chinese intellectual commented in August on an article I wrote calling for China to coexist with the virus.
This new attitude, coupled with the national narrative of China’s “century of humiliation” period between 1839 and 1949, when the country was a pushover for Western powers, encourages growing hostility toward the West. As Yan Xuetong, a leading international relations scholar in China, observed at a conference in Beijing last month, the nation’s Gen Z students think “humankind’s universal values such as peace, morality, fairness and justice are China’s inherent traditions” and that “only China is just, while other countries, especially Western countries, are evil.” Such a dichotomous view of the world not only tolerates no criticism of China, it also attributes China’s problems to external, especially Western, forces or factors. While the evidence seems clear that the coronavirus first emerged near Wuhan, for instance, Chinese diplomats have suggested that a bioweapons project at Fort Detrick, Md., spawned it. Just last month, Beijing health authorities blamed international mail or imported frozen food for causing the covid flare-ups in the country. No serious health official unaffiliated with China takes that view seriously.
This antagonistic approach, though, reinforces negative views of China in the West as a threat to a rules-based international order. In turn, Western nations’ moves to counter China, such as not sending official government delegations to the Olympics in protest of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, only confirm the Chinese perception of the West’s malicious intentions. According to a think tank scholar in China, “Chinese government has never extended invitations to those anti-China politicians, who hurriedly turn the ‘diplomatic boycott’ into a farce but are just foolishly sentimental and acting ostentatiously to impress others.” Recent reports that some U.S. Embassy staffers sought approval to leave China briefly because of the prospect of snap lockdowns helped illustrate this dynamic: Commenting on the idea, some Chinese experts contended that it exposed “the true intention of Washington in sabotaging the Winter Olympic Games.” Around the same time, the official China Daily reported that “anti-China forces in the United States” had tried to buy off athletes to “politicize the sports and maliciously disrupt and spoil the Beijing Winter Olympic Games.”
Starting with these Olympics, the rest of the world may learn that our biggest challenge is not to coexist with the virus but to coexist with a reinvented China that increasingly plays by its own rules. | null | null | null | null | null |
Norway's Aleksander Aamodt Kilde leads the season-long standings in Alpine skiing’s two fastest disciplines. (REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay)
Their entire life, their entire relationship, is a balance. On the globe-trotting World Cup circuit, the men and women most often exist on parallel planes — the men in, say, Kitzbuehel, Austria, while the women race in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. There are overlaps, and the Olympics are the most significant. But coronavirus protocols are limiting interactions here. That’s fine. Kilde and Shiffrin have developed communication routines during the season, and they’re maintaining them now — even when they’re both citizens of the same Olympic Village.
The support has run both ways. In the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season, Kilde won the World Cup overall championship — the prestigious title that considers results in all of Alpine skiing’s disciplines, a title Shiffrin has won three times. The following December, he won twice in the midst of an eight-race run in which he never placed outside the top six. But in January 2021, he tore an ACL during training. Not only was that season over, but the coming Olympic season was suddenly in doubt.
Since his first two races of the season — a getting-the-toe-back-in-the-water ninth-place finish in Lake Louise, Canada, to open the season, and a crash off the course the next week in Beaver Creek, Colo. — Kilde has raced 11 times. He has finished second once and won those six times, including the famed Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzbuehel in his second-to-last race before arriving here.
“I mean, Kitzbuehel, it’s iconic,” Shiffrin said. “I was so, so happy for him when he won there. He deals with all my drama …”
In between might be a shared meal, probably a FaceTime call and definitely the space necessary to let the other prepare as they need. The first couple of Alpine skiing are at their first Olympics together. If they feed off each other, watch out. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hundreds died in the ensuing battle. Here’s how it played out.
HASAKAH, Syria — The militants of the Islamic State announced their most brazen attack in years with a truck bombing that blasted a hole in the exterior wall of a Syrian prison holding thousands of their comrades. The Jan. 20 attack triggered a 10-day battle that spilled into the surrounding streets of Hasakah in northeastern Syria, drew American and British ground and air forces back into combat in support of their local allies, and energized global supporters of the Islamic State like little else since its so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq was defeated three years ago. By the time the fighting was finished and the devastated prison was back in the hands of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, more than 500 people were dead, about three-quarters of them suspected militants, the SDF reported. And scores, maybe hundreds, of prisoners had escaped, free to raise the Islamic State’s black flag and fight again.
It’s finally over, SDF officials say. The prison is back under control, and in the surrounding neighborhoods, the guns have largely fallen quiet. The largest, deadliest battle with the Islamic State since the defeat of its so-called caliphate nearly three years ago has come to a close. “We announce the end of the sweep campaign in Sina’a prison in Ghwaryan neighborhood of Hasakah and the end of the last pockets in which ISIS militants were holed up in the [prison’s] northern dormitories,” the SDF announces. It would later disclose the death toll: 121 among the SDF, 374 suspected members of the Islamic State and four civilians. Officials would not provide figures for the number of prisoners unaccounted for. | null | null | null | null | null |
In a 4-3 decision divided by party lines, the state’s highest court found that Republican lawmakers drew maps that deprived voters of their “substantially equal voting power on the basis of partisan affiliation,” according to the 40-page order. The ruling is the latest in consequential redistricting wins for Democrats that could determine whether they hold on to their razor-thin majority in the House — amid all-out war in courtrooms over partisan gerrymandering and voting rights.
The Republican-drawn maps created last year would have given the party control of as many as 11 of the state’s 14 House seats ahead of what is expected to be a strong Republican election cycle. Voting rights groups argued in court that the maps eliminated competitive districts and were overall skewed for political gain. Democrats accused the other side of rigging elections as well as disadvantaging Black voters. In the map drawn by Republicans, Rep. G.K. Butterfield’s district replaced Black voters with rural White voters. Butterfield (D), who is Black, decided not to run for reelection, saying the plan was “racially gerrymandered.”
With North Carolina’s primaries scheduled for May 17, the court ruled the legislature must redraw the map by Feb. 18 and submit it to a panel of three trial judges with an explanation of what data they relied on and methods they used to determine that their districting plan is constitutional. The panel last month ruled in favor of the GOP-controlled legislature, saying that while the map was drawn pro-Republican, it did not violate the state constitution.
On Friday, Gov. Roy Cooper (D), who does not have the right to veto the congressional maps, praised the court’s decision.
In his dissent, Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, said the order places redistricting decisions with judges rather than legislators, a violation of the separation of powers, in a “partisan” attempt to seize “the opportunity to advance its agenda.”
Republicans have also complained about Democratic gerrymanders in Illinois, Maryland and New York. Republicans on Thursday announced a lawsuit against a map New York Democrats passed that overwhelmingly helps their prospects in November.
Republicans caught Democrats largely unaware a decade ago when they gerrymandered a number of key competitive states, including North Carolina, that sealed their power in the House for most of that time. By the end of the decade, Democrats had successfully challenged maps in Pennsylvania and North Carolina that were redrawn, but Republicans won on those maps for several cycles.
Ahead of this redistricting, Democrats had advocated for constitutional amendments banning partisan redistricting, for independent commissions to take over the process and for the election of Democratic governors to block GOP legislatures from drawing unfair lines.
After the supreme court’s order, Rep. Kathy Manning (D-N.C.) said the ruling was “a victory” but the fight continued over access to the ballot box and campaign finance.
“Voters should choose their representatives; politicians should not choose their voters," she said in a statement. “This decision is a crucial step toward protecting every North Carolinian’s right to democratic representation.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Cadets 6, Cubs 5
St. John's goalie Amelia Haywood makes one of her many stops during the third period against Georgetown Visitation in the Mid-Atlantic Girls Hockey League championship at Gardens Ice House. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
St. John’s goalie Amelia Haywood had been tested all night, making more than 50 saves, and with 18 seconds to play in the Mid-Atlantic Girls’ Hockey League championship Friday in Laurel, the senior had one more big decision.
Georgetown Visitation dumped the puck into the St. John’s zone, and Haywood chose to cover it up rather than risk passing it out. “The only thing I was focused on was the puck and not trying to let another one in,” she said.
The decision prompted a faceoff in her own zone, and though the Cadets didn’t win that faceoff, they caused a turnover, sending the Cubs chasing the puck as time expired to seal a 6-5 victory and the first MAGHL title for St. John’s since moving up to the more competitive Red division.
“The MAGHL, we moved up a division and the competition is a lot harder … so it’s been super fun to play in these games because we’re playing teams who are our match,” Haywood said.
First-year St. John’s coach David Sauer called Haywood a “brick wall,” had confidence the senior would perform well against a strong Visitation offense.
“I knew she could do this, and it was not a surprise at all to me” Sauer said. “It was business as usual; she was excellent.”
St. John’s (5-2-3) was the underdog coming into the game, making it to the final after an unconventional victory over Stone Ridge in the semifinals Wednesday. With St. John’s up 7-6, that game was stopped five minutes before time would have expired because the teams ran out of ice time at Herbert Wells Ice Rink and had to cede the facility to another game.
“It was unfortunate because no one ever wants to be on either side of a game like that,” Sauer said. “I personally would have liked to play it out, but I will take what we can get, and it worked out today.”
Visitation (7-2-1), meanwhile, had been more dominant both in its semifinal game — which it won, 10-1, over Holy Child — and throughout the season. It had scored 80 goals in its nine games, including a win and a tie against the Cadets in the regular season.
On Friday at Gardens Ice House, St. John’s senior captain Jen Albero scored twice and nearly netted a third if not for an unforgiving left post. Still, the puck went her Cadets’ way by game’s end, which, this time, the teams got to reach.
“It’s crazy, I’ve waited all four years to win and the team played great today,” Albero said. “I’ve watched the team grow over the last three months, and it’s big — we’ve got a lot better over the course of the season, and it’s a huge win.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Beijing Winter Olympics live updates U.S. women’s hockey returns; first medals to be awarded
Weather halts men’s downhill training at Alpine skiing course
Who is Dinigeer Yilamujiang, the Uyghur athlete who lit the Olympic cauldron?
Beijing 2022 announces 26 confirmed positive tests at airport, 19 inside ‘closed loop’ Friday
Three-time Olympic champion Eric Frenzel announces positive coronavirus test
Hailey Langland had to rediscover her love of snowboarding
The winter coats of the Opening Ceremonies, critiqued
Haiti, Saudi Arabia make their Winter Olympic debuts
Meet the Florida grandmother who launched three Olympians’ careers
Highlights from the Opening Ceremonies
Perspective: Olympics open with a glossy coat that can’t cover what’s underneath
By Jake Lourim11:09 p.m.
The men’s downhill training session scheduled for Saturday was suspended because of high winds at the Yanqing National Alpine Ski Centre. Only three skiers completed the course.
The speed course built on Xiaohaituo Mountain for these Olympics was always going to be a challenge because none of the competitors have raced on it before. The contenders had some training runs this week ahead of the opening race Sunday, the men’s downhill. Saturday’s weather means the downhillers skiing Sunday will have even less experience on the new course.
“Due to the present situation with high winds and no window in the forecast for decreasing winds, in the best interest of safety, the jury together with the organiser have decided to cancel today’s run,” the International Ski Federation said in a statement.
Wind is expected to be an issue throughout the Olympics at Yanqing; Friday’s training session was delayed, also because of wind.
After training runs this week, several downhill skiers described what they saw as an above-average degree of difficulty on the course nicknamed “The Rock.”
During the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Winter Olympics on Friday, two Chinese athletes — cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang and Nordic combined athlete Zhao Jiawen — lit the Olympic cauldron.
The choice was notable because Yilamujiang is an ethnic Uyghur from Xinjiang. China has been accused of committing human rights abuses against the Uyghur population, which led to a diplomatic boycott of the games by the United States and other Western governments.
Here’s what to know about Yilamujiang, as well as Zhao:
By Emily Giambalvo10:48 p.m.
BEIJING — The Beijing organizing committee announced 45 new coronavirus cases from tests administered Friday. All of those cases were confirmed through additional tests.
Of the 287 people who arrived in Beijing on Friday, 26 tested positive at the airport, including 20 athletes and team officials. Nearly 72,000 tests were taken inside the “closed loop,” and there were 19 confirmed cases among those people, including five athletes and team officials.
BEIJING — Germany’s Eric Frenzel, a three-time Olympic champion in Nordic combined, announced that he tested positive for the coronavirus. Frenzel won the men’s individual normal hill gold medal in 2014 and 2018, and won another gold medal in 2018 in the team event.
The men’s normal hill event will be held Wednesday, so it would be difficult for Frenzel to recover and produce negative tests in time to compete for a third straight gold medal. The large hill competition is Feb. 15 and the team event is Feb. 17.
Frenzel’s teammate Terence Weber also tested positive, the German Olympic Sports Confederation announced. For Frenzel and Weber, additional tests confirmed the positive tests taken at the airport, the federation said. Four more suspected cases from the German skeleton and hockey teams have not been confirmed after two additional tests.
YANQING, China — Every Olympic skier arriving in China in the past week or so has had some version of the same experience. The highway stretches toward the mountains northwest of Beijing, and there in the distance, stark against a landscape of jagged, brown earth, is a lonely ribbon of white, unseen by any of them until that moment: the National Alpine Ski Centre, host of the Alpine skiing competition at these Winter Games.
When the first skiers launch themselves down Xiaohaituo Mountain (altitude: 7,149 feet) in Sunday’s traditional Alpine opener — the men’s downhill — they will be doing so on a speed course, nicknamed “The Rock,” that none of them have raced before, a course that had existed in their minds as little more than some drone video footage that was passed around last year and the handful of training runs they were permitted this week.
On Monday, the women’s competition gets underway on the technical course — nicknamed “The Ice River” — with the giant slalom as Team USA’s Mikaela Shiffrin, a three-time Olympic medalist and three-time World Cup overall champion, launches an ambitious program that could see her enter all five women’s races over an 11-day span.
Every Olympics seem to have a handful of nations making their first appearances at the Games, and the 2022 Beijing Olympics are no different.
Alpine skier Richardson Viano is the first Winter Olympic athlete to represent Haiti. At the age of 3 in 2005, Viano was adopted from a Haitian orphanage by an Italian couple who live in Briançon, France, which sits in the French Alps and is home to a major ski resort. His adopted father is a ski instructor and soon had Viano on skis, with the hope that one day he would ski for France.
Fayik Abdi is the first Winter Olympian to represent Saudi Arabia. Abdi learned how to ski at an early age, not in Saudi Arabia but in Lebanon, which has a handful of ski resorts in the country’s mountainous north-central portion. Soon, he was traveling even farther afield in search of slopes, his country’s deserts providing nothing of the sort.
“As I got older I started traveling to Switzerland to a winter camp,” he said. “I loved the sport from a young age. I just didn’t have the accessibility to the sport living in Saudi Arabia until I moved to Utah in 2016, where skiing really picked up.”
By Cate Cadell8:49 p.m.
By Eric Adelson8:23 p.m.
Hildebrand pulled into her driveway, entered her home and turned on the television to discover the news: Erin Jackson, a long track speedskater she had trained since childhood, had wobbled during the 500-meter race at the U.S. Olympic trials, finishing third and missing a shot at the Beijing Olympics.
But a short time later, Hildebrand received another text from Brittany Bowe, another former pupil.
By Roman Stubbs, Glynn A. Hill and Andrew Golden7:55 p.m.
NBC will show a replay of Friday’s Opening Ceremonies during its prime-time window beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
The event was live beginning at 7 a.m. Eastern time Friday morning. To help guide you while you watch the re-air, or in case you don’t feel like sitting through the whole show, here are the highlights from National Stadium: | null | null | null | null | null |
This image from a video released by the Department of Defense shows the explosion, behind he two U.S. Marines in the foreground, by a suicide bomber at Abbey Gate outside Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 26, 2021, in Kabul Afghanistan. The military investigation into the deadly attack during the Afghanistan evacuation has concluded that a suicide bomber, carrying 20 pounds of explosives packed with ball bearings, acted alone, and that the deaths of more than 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members were not preventable. (Department of Defense via AP) (Uncredited/Department of Defense) | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - This file photo provided on Jan. 15, 2022, by the North Korean government shows a missile test from railway in North Pyongan Province, North Korea, on Jan. 14, 2022. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: “KCNA” which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency.(Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File ) (í©ëNí êMé–/KCNA via KNS)
By Hyung-Jin Kim and Kim Tong-Hyung | AP | null | null | null | null | null |
Mothers from West Virginia meeting with lawmakers Feb. 2 about expanding the child tax credit program arranged 500 teddy bears on the National Mall, each representing 100 of the state's children who could slip back into poverty. (Kyle Swenson/The Washington Post)
They had already tried so much. They had collected signatures on petitions and sent email blasts. They had tried to catch viral fire with hashtags on social media and mailed out handmade blankets. They had set up conference calls with lawmakers, always asking schedulers for the latest possible time slot, to accommodating working parents, calls that some joined from the pediatrician’s waiting room or while picking a child up from school.
Since the summer, these West Virginia parents have done whatever they could to explain the importance of the expanded child tax credit program. Those efforts had been shot through with urgency since the program expired in December, largely because of the opposition of the group’s own senator, Joe Manchin III (D).
“Each of these bears represents 100 children,” Amy Jo Hutchison, a Wheeling mother and organizer of the event, said during a brief rally with a half-dozen other “Mama Bears” who had made the trip to Washington. “Together these 500 bears represent the 50,000 West Virginia kiddos who have been pushed back into poverty since the halt of the child tax credit payments.”
When the program launched in July, monthly payments of up to $300 per child began helping families patch the holes in their monthly budgets. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that maintaining the expanded version of the credit would cut child poverty by 40 percent, compared with reverting to the credit’s less generous form. For millions of Americans, the monthly checks helped pay for everyday items and essentials, including the women speaking at the Mall.
After Hutchison’s short speech, a handful of other women spoke. Then the contingent headed to the U.S. Capitol, where they were scheduled to visit the offices of their congressional delegation: Manchin and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R); and Reps. David B. McKinley (R), Alex Mooney (R) and Carol Miller (R).
The day in D.C. asked more than just the women’s time and travel. Their meetings with congressional staff members were an opportunity to shorten the distance between policy and everyday life. But that also required an honesty and openness about their own struggles, one mother’s noticing how her 12-year-old was starting to check price tags at the grocery store, or how a daughter now worried whether there was enough gas in the car. Here the women had to share what others could afford to keep to themselves.
Meghan Hullinger said the school district her two children attend didn’t have a mask mandate to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. “My daughter has been quarantined six times,” she said.
A Manchin spokesperson said the senator “has always supported the existing child tax credit that is still in place despite the pandemic emergency enhancement sunsetting at the end of 2021,” and that the senator “continues to support policies that reward hard working families as the effects of costly inflation taxes strain their budgets.”
Tatum Wallace, Miller’s communications director, noted in a statement that “Miller takes every opportunity to talk with her constituents and was happy to meet with some of West Virginia’s moms in Washington. As a mother and grandmother, she understands their concerns.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Great Chocolate Showdown (CW at 8) The bakers are tasked with making impressions in chocolate using household tools.
48 Hours (CBS at 10) Investigators thought they were assessing the wreckage of a fire in 1991 at an Austin frozen yogurt shop but were shocked to uncover a quadruple murder case of four teenage girls.
Shenmue (Cartoon Network at 12:30 a.m.) The English-language dub of an animated series inspired by a video game saga that began on the Sega Dreamcast.
Single Black Female (Lifetime at 8) A woman is excited to start a job as an afternoon talk show host, but her new assistant has sinister plans to ruin her career and life.
Around the World in 80 Days (PBS at 8) Fogg and Passepartout are at each other’s throats due to imminent starvation.
Billions (Showtime at 9) Prince is surprised to be challenged in his bidding.
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (Bravo at 9) Mary and Meredith bond as the other women poke the latter to set a date for her father’s memorial.
Two Sentence Horror Stories (CW at 9) Two episodes air: a teen combats the mysterious stranger who appears at his family’s motel, and a Hawaiian woman defends her home and heritage.
The Righteous Gemstones (HBO at 10) A return to the present, where Jesse tries to figure out who tried to kill him and his wife.
Power Book IV: Force (Starz at 9:15) The spinoff to “Power” finds Tommy Egan (Joseph Sikora) about to start a new life in Los Angeles before a pit stop in Chicago unearths family drama and unfinished business.
Claws (TNT at 9) Desna takes one final stand against Quiet Ann while trying to ferry her crew out of Palmetto.
Guy’s Chance of a Lifetime (Food at 9) The six candidates compete in Nashville before Guy hands the keys over to the winner.
The Tuck Rule (ESPN at 8:30) The latest entry in the “30 for 30” series takes a look at the infamous play 20 years ago with Tom Brady and Charles Woodson in conversation with each other.
Love & the Constitution (MSNBC at 10) A documentary takes a look at Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) over three years in Congress and during the time where he mourns the death of his son.
Jamie Raskin's Year of Grief and Purpose | null | null | null | null | null |
In this photo provided by ESPN Images, from left to right, ESPN’s Barry Melrose, Steve Levy, Mark Messier and Chris Chelios do a pregame segment at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Fla., before the Tampa Bay Lightning against the Pittsburgh Penguins NHL hockey game on Oct. 12, 2021. ESPN has returned to televising the NHL for the first time since 2004, but the All-Star Game, Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022, in Las Vegas begins a stretch where more games will be available on ABC and ESPN. (Allen Kee/ESPN Images via AP) (Allen Kee / ESPN Images/ESPN Images) | null | null | null | null | null |
People go to hospital after shots reported in Blacksburg, Va.
Va. Tech campus told briefly to “secure doors.”
Blacksburg is the home of Virginia Tech, and the university told the campus in a Twitter message early Saturday to “stay inside” and to “secure doors.” The instruction about doors was rescinded about 3:15 a.m., but students were told to avoid downtown.
The site of the reported incident is about a block or two from the southeastern edge of the school campus.
The nature and extent of any injuries was not immediately clear early Tuesday. The precise number of those taken to hospitals was not immediately known.
As of about 3 a.m., police said their investigation was continuing.
An online photograph, taken in 2019 shows a one-story, glass-fronted building in a row of storefronts along a red brick sidewalk.
A campus calendar indicates that classes began for the spring semester on Jan. 18. Spring break is about a month away.
In a tweet sent about 12:30 a.m. the university said someone with a gun was reported near W. Roanoke Street and Draper Road. It was unclear what if any connection existed between that incident and the report of shots at the lounge.
The lounge is about one block from the Roanoke and Draper intersection. | null | null | null | null | null |
The United States' Mikaela Shiffrin returns after winning a gold medal in the giant slalom four years ago in PyeongChang. (Marco Trovati/AP)
Alpine skiing is one of the signature disciplines of the Winter Games, having been part of the Olympic program since 1936. Historically, it has been dominated by Alpine countries, with Austria owning by far the most gold (37) and overall (121) medals.
The competition will take place at the Alpine Skiing Center in suburban Yanqing.
Here’s what to know about Alpine skiing at the Winter Olympics in Beijing:
What events make up Alpine skiing?
Alpine skiing consists of 11 medal events, with men and women competing in downhill, super-G, slalom, giant slalom and combined, plus a mixed team event — the last of which made its Olympic debut at PyeongChang 2018.
How is each event different?
The downhill and super-G are speed events, featuring skiers zooming down the mountain, while the slalom and giant slalom are technical events, requiring more side-to-side skill as skiers navigate carefully placed gates.
The downhill is the purest, fastest race down the mountain, with skiers sometimes approaching speeds of 100 mph and jumps several dozen yards long. The super-G combines the speed elements of downhill with the turns of giant slalom.
The giant slalom is the faster of the technical events, with skiers approaching 50 mph, while the slalom is the bigger test of technical skills, with gates positioned close together. In combined, skiers compete in downhill and slalom on the same day.
What are the formats for competition in Alpine skiing?
In downhill and super-G, competitors get one run to post their fastest time, with one major difference: In downhill, skiers are permitted practice runs to get to know the course, while super-G competitors are not.
Slalom and giant slalom are contested over two courses, with the cumulative time from both determining the winner.
In the combined, skiers make one run each of downhill and slalom, with the cumulative time determining the winner.
In mixed team, each nation’s team consists of four skiers — two male and two female. Each run features two teams competing against each other in a parallel slalom race, with two skiers racing each other side-by-side on the same course. The first to the finish line is the winner, and the team that wins three of the four races advances. If each team wins two, the one with the lowest aggregate time advances.
Who were the Alpine skiing Olympic gold medalists in 2018?
Men’s downhill: Aksel Lund Svindal, Norway
Women’s downhill: Sofia Goggia, Italy
Women’s super-G: Ester Ledecka, Czech Republic
Men’s giant slalom: Marcel Hirscher, Austria
Women’s giant slalom: Mikaela Shiffrin, United States
Men’s slalom: Andre Myhrer, Sweden
Women’s slalom: Frida Hansdotter, Sweden
Men’s combined: Marcel Hirscher, Austria
Women’s combined: Michelle Gisin, Switzerland
Mixed team: Switzerland (Luca Aerni, Denise Feierabend, Wendy Holdener, Daniel Yule and Ramon Zenhausern)
Who is on the Team USA roster for Alpine skiing?
Men: Travis Ganong, Ryan Cochran-Siegle, River Radamus, Bryce Bennett, Luke Winters and Tommy Ford.
Women: Mikaela Shiffrin, Nina O’Brien, Paula Moltzan, Jackie Wiles, Bella Wright, Keely Cashman, AJ Hurt, Alix Wilkinson, Mo Lebel, Tricia Mangan and Katie Hensien.
What is the schedule for Alpine skiing in Beijing?
Feb. 5: Men’s downhill, 10 p.m.
Feb. 6: Women’s giant slalom, 9:15 p.m.
Feb. 7: Men’s super-G, 10 p.m.
Feb. 8: Women’s slalom. 9:15 p.m.
Feb. 9: Men’s combined, 9:30 p.m.
Feb. 10: Women’s super-G, 10 p.m.
Feb. 12: Men’s giant slalom, 9:15 p.m.
Feb. 14: Women’s downhill, 10 p.m.
Feb. 15: Men’s slalom, 9:15 p.m.
Feb. 17: Women’s combined, 9:30 p.m.
Feb. 18: Mixed team, 10 p.m. | null | null | null | null | null |
‘Very Cold People’ relays the realities of girlhood with stunning clarity
By Michele Filgate
“How much of human life is lost in waiting!” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote — and perhaps no stretch of time can feel like more of a slog than the endless years of childhood and adolescence, two decades when every trivial and critical thing can take on extra weight and significance. It’s a time of judgment, of other people and especially the self.
In Sarah Manguso’s debut novel, “Very Cold People,” a woman named Ruthie reflects on growing up in the aptly named fictional small town of Waitsfield, Mass. “I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me. … My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else’s dream.” In looking back at that time, she can give herself a more definitive shape. (One can’t help but think of the title of Eimear McBride’s novel, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.”) It’s impossible to read Manguso’s novel without wondering how much of the writer’s own life is in it. After all, her pithy and profound nonfiction (including “300 Arguments” and “Ongoingness”) deals with time and mortality, among other topics, and she grew up in the same state. But to look for her between the lines misses the point in a book that gets at larger truths about countless girls caught in the cycle of generational trauma.
Manguso’s attention to the chilliness and reservation of certain New Englanders crackles like a room-temperature beverage poured over ice. There are frigid temperatures outside and inside Ruthie’s home. Her parents don’t have a lot of money. They keep a “warming sweater” in the coat closet to save on utilities, and their daughter has to field phone calls from creditors.
Ruthie’s short, vivid memories accumulate like snowflakes on a windowsill, many centered on her complicated relationship with her difficult mother, a woman whose coldness is its own distinctive parenting style. She’s the kind of mother who makes her own better version of a scarf that Ruthie knits for her, then gives the inferior one back to her daughter. “After school I walked home from the bus stop,” Ruthie recalls. “When I turned the corner to our street, I could see my mother waiting at the front window. Sometimes she made a face at me with puffy lips. I had braces on my teeth and she wanted me to know that I wasn’t fooling anyone, trying to close my mouth around them. She wanted me to know I was ugly. She was helping me get ready for the world.”
Ruthie points out the surreal qualities of living in a hometown laden with so much history, even stating that her own childhood felt like it took place in the 1600s, but she also fixates on more concrete and visceral moments. She thinks about the pleasure from “white wet snow squeaking against my teeth, melting clear in the heat of my mouth.” Manguso captures both the repelling and beautiful aspects of girls’ bodies: oily hair and fingernails “peeling off in layers like mica” — what’s visible and what shimmers right underneath the surface.
As Ruthie matures and learns about men taking advantage of or abusing her friends, it hits even harder when she realizes her own mother has suppressed traumatic experiences. What elevates “Very Cold People” above a traditional coming-of-age novel is Manguso’s insistence on not being fooled by exterior markings — historical houses with plaques on them, people with icy demeanors. The greatest threat to girls and women is the unwillingness to see what’s right in front of you, barely obscured. “It was clear to me that what had happened to [my mother] wasn’t rare but normal, that it was too common even to register as a story. It wasn’t even a story at all.”
But it is perhaps the story, what happens to girls and women behind closed doors and out in the open. How can mothers protect their daughters if they can’t acknowledge what they went through? Especially when they live in small town America, in cloistered communities where seemingly endless cycles of violence and silence are reinforced by what has come before and what will happen again. In “Very Cold People,” danger is everywhere: in old, looming homes, in schools, in psychiatric wards, even in seemingly lighthearted pursuits. “Crouched there at the side of the pool, I stared into the bright blue depths,” Ruthie recalls. “Something unendurable lay at the bottom of that pool.” Manguso portrays the fears surrounding girlhood with a blistering clarity.
Michele Filgate is a writer and the editor of the essay collection “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About.”
Hogarth. 208 pp. $26 | null | null | null | null | null |
Students from BASIS DC entertain themselves after school Thursday in the auditorium of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, in downtown D.C. (Amanda Voisard/Amanda Voisard/for The Washington Post)
But local activists and residents were outraged last week after DCist/WAMU reported that the board of trustees had voted to go through with that name change. A group launched a letter-writing campaign opposing the decision that, as of Friday morning, led to more than 17,000 sent.
“We are thrilled that Jeff Bezos has recommended that the MLK auditorium be named for Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison,” he said. “We could not think of a better individual to be honored in our beautiful new building. We look forward to reaching out to the Morrison family for their support.”
Morrison’s son, Harold Ford Morrison, was happy to hear about the recommendation but did not have an official comment at this time, said Nicholas Latimer, a spokesman for the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. The King family could not be reached for comment.
Organizers of the letter-writing campaign on Friday called it “wonderful” that Morrison’s name was being considered for the auditorium space, located inside the newly renovated library at 9th and G streets NW. But they said such a recommendation should come from the community — not from Bezos.
“I would never fight against Toni Morrison’s name being on that library, because that’s a name that truly honors the legacy of Dr. King,” said Nee Nee Taylor, one of the core organizers and a District native. “Yet the process of how that was developed is still hurtful and harmful to the community of D.C.”
The library system’s policy for naming spaces at neighborhood libraries and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library notes that a donor may be recognized with named places such as study rooms, auditoriums and gardens.
In an email sent Thursday night to the D.C. Public Library Foundation and provided to The Post, Bezos wrote that he was first “honored and grateful” when the foundation offered to name the auditorium after him — a recognition he said he did not seek out when making his donation.
“Since then,” he wrote, “some in the community have suggested a person of color would be more appropriate as a name for the auditorium, especially as it sits inside the Martin Luther King Jr. library. That makes considerable sense to me.”
“Jeff Bezos does not reflect my values, nor the values Dr. King fought to uphold,” the letter that people were encouraged to sign and send to the library reads. “On behalf of Black Washingtonians, working class people around the globe, and everyone who uses the DC Public Library system, I ask that you reopen this decision and not give a place of honor at DC’s flagship library to someone who represents the worst of our economic system.”
Rotterdam to dismantle part of historic bridge so Jeff Bezos’s yacht can pass through
Taylor, along with three other activists among the group behind the letter-writing campaign, stepped off the elevator onto the library’s fourth floor Thursday afternoon and saw the words “D.C. CHANGEMAKERS.” The exhibits outside the doors of the auditorium, they saw, honored civil rights leaders like King and celebrated D.C.’s unique history, highlighting go-go music and former D.C. mayor Marion Barry.
“Can you imagine having a go-go event and saying it is going to be at the Jeff Bezos Auditorium? It doesn’t even add up,” said Taylor, who is also a co-conductor for Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black-led mutual aid and community defense organization
The board had voted during its Jan. 26 meeting to rename the auditorium for Bezos, with four votes in favor and one abstention, according to a recording of the meeting the library provided to The Post.
Bezos did not acknowledge the criticism of his wealth or business practices in the Thursday email to the foundation. A representative did not respond to a request to comment on the pushback to the auditorium naming. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cate Le Bon’s ‘Pompeii’ helped her find light in the darkness of the pandemic
Welsh musician Cate Le Bon. (Cate Le Bon)
In the early, dystopian days of the pandemic, Welsh artist Cate Le Bon received an unexpected gift. It was a painting of a female figure — stoic, saintly, and in possession of a quiet power — that her partner, artist and musician Tim Presley, created in a flash of inspiration. At the time, the two of them were sheltering in place alongside Le Bon’s longtime creative collaborator, Samur Khouja, in Cardiff, Wales. Le Bon was hard at work on her sixth album, “Pompeii,” the follow-up to 2019’s critically acclaimed “Reward.”
“What bowled me over about the painting was this unexpected nature of a new image,” Le Bon said when we spoke at the beginning of January. “I couldn’t get my head around that. … I felt like I wanted it to be me. Everything that I felt like this painting possessed, I wanted to possess it myself.”
Presley’s painting provided a guiding light for Le Bon as she worked on “Pompeii” in the darkening shadow of the pandemic, even if the story behind it was mostly unremarkable. “There was no planning, no sketch,” explained Presley in a follow-up email sent from the home the two now share in Joshua Tree, Calif. “I just mixed colors together on canvas and it became what it is.” No matter, the final product transfixed Le Bon. The more absurd life outside their terrace house grew, the more she invested in the painting.
“It just resonated with every page turn and new complicated thought that I’d have on the daily,” she said. In the holy figure’s powerful pose and steely, knowing stare, Le Bon recognized a way forward — both for herself and the album she was making. She would do what the many dadaists she admires had done in the chaotic aftermath of World War I — surrender. “Pompeii” is an exploration of life after the white flag is waved; it is the joyful yet harrowing sound of Le Bon’s acceptance of the unknown.
Le Bon, 38, was born in a rural section of southwest Wales. Growing up, her parents encouraged her and her sisters to play outside by politely kicking them out of the house every weekend. “Go take your goat for a walk,” Le Bon was often told as a child. Wandering through the emerald green farmland, goat by her side, Le Bon began creating her own fantasies. “I spent a lot of time by myself, making things and writing songs,” she recalled. “I suppose it was a tool for escapism.”
Eventually, Le Bon’s vivid imagination gave way to an appreciation for the uninhibited and ambiguous works of fellow Welsh artists like onetime Velvet Underground member John Cale and Gruff Rhys, the lead singer of the band Super Furry Animals whom Le Bon opened for in 2006, and whose house she, Presley and Khouja stayed in throughout the pandemic. That band’s surreal and abstract style felt in tune with how she experienced the world, as did dadaism. “It’s something to me that’s congruent with how complicated it is to be human,” Le Bon said when considering her natural appreciation for the post-war school of thought that produced artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. “From a really dark setting, you can lean into joyfulness and playfulness. You can extract that from the darkness, you can take refuge in it.”
But you can hide in it, too, mistake ambiguity and irony for depth, and revel in a false sense of security by responding to the universe’s cruelty with a casual shoulder shrug. “Absurdity without emotion or thought is just nonsense, which has its place,” Le Bon explained. “But, to me, true absurdity that is fueled by honest, unguarded emotion can catch people unaware and can make unexpected connections that have deeper roots than something literal and spelled out.”
Le Bon cites key dadaist figures like Milan Kundera and the French photographer Claude Cahun as masters of using the absurdist framework to explore difficult-to-explain emotions. In the right hands, absurdism allows for what Le Bon calls “an endless transference of energy.” When, for example, a painting of a divine woman emerges from a pandemic and inspires an album that stares down catastrophe, which is then shared with audiences who interpret it in a multitude of ways that carry the original work well beyond its original intention. “It’s endless,” Le Bon said. “We’re all getting constantly recycled.”
Le Bon explained her theory after returning to Joshua Tree from a six-week stay in Topanga, Calif. She was temporarily stationed in the dreamy, canyon town to produce her friend Devendra Banhart’s upcoming album. The two met soon after Le Bon moved to Los Angeles in 2012. The opportunity to cross the pond came from an unexpected three-year visa that arrived toward the tail-end of Le Bon’s 20s.
Coming from Cardiff, where the weather had been “absolutely diabolical for about two years,” Le Bon took immense pleasure in the simple, sun-filled moments that most Californians fail to register after a certain point. “Christ, even just sitting on the steps of our apartment was wild to us,” Le Bon remembered, laughing a little at the image of two pale Welsh kids that she had conjured in her head. “Sitting underneath all these beautiful exotic trees and flowers and the sun. I hadn’t seen the sun like that in so long.” Enamored by her new surroundings, Le Bon, befriended several like-minded artists that she remains close with today: Kevin Morby, Tim Presley, Josiah Steinbrick, Stella Mozgawa (who played drums on “Pompeii”), Noah Goergeson and Samur Khouja, who has engineered five out of her six full-length albums.
Over the course of those first five albums, Le Bon learned to create the conditions she needs to bring out her best work. Often it involves traveling to a remote location and vacuum-sealing herself off from the rest of the world. For “Reward,” Le Bon flocked to England’s lake district and lived alone in a rented cottage where she fiddled with the album’s elaborate melodies late into the night. Similar to being submerged in a sensory deprivation tank, Le Bon says, isolation forces you to “strip yourself of all the things that can catch you and ground you, when you’re trying to become invisible.”
To make “Pompeii,” Le Bon and Khouja hoped to once again retreat to a remote, gorgeous corner of the world. Maybe Chile or Norway, Le Bon thought. Instead, because of the pandemic, she ended up in a house that she’d lived in over a decade ago, in a city where she’d spent most of her 20s. “It was almost like the opposite of the conditions that I was trying to fabricate to make this record,” Le Bon said. “That was a real battle for me.”
But Le Bon had her weapons. Under the spell of Presley’s painting and with her dadaist instincts at attention, she embraced her unsettling surroundings and created art out of the clutter. The disorientation Le Bon felt when she encountered her old drum kit in the basement (where she’d left it 15 years ago) reasserts itself in the album’s nonlinear architecture and atonal melodies. Consider the vocal arrangement on the title track: Behind Le Bon’s sonorous lead vocals lay another set of vocals so echoey they sound piped in from a cave in Croatia. The effect strips the song of any discernible temporality. It sounds both like it’s always been here and like it’s yet to fully arrive; ancient and futuristic, just like Presley’s painting, which is just what Le Bon wanted.
To create an album that mirrored what she felt when looking at Presley’s painting, Le Bon held individual sounds up to the figure and asked herself if the two things seemed carved out of the same materials. “Cate found this interesting tête-à-tête between the songs and the painting, which is so remarkable,” Presley said. Presley sees his painting in the album’s “elegiac lyrics, … strong-willed and entrancing imagery” and “wistful, haunted, beauty.” When asked if the figure in the painting is, in fact, Le Bon, Presley replied without hesitation: “It is absolutely her.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden marks 900,000 covid-19 deaths and urges: 'Get vaccinated, get your ki...
Birthday balloons float next to one of thousands of white flags in Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg's “In America: Remember,” a memorial for Americans who died due to the coronavirus, next to the Washington Monument on October 1, 2021. (Leah Millis/Reuters)
The death toll would have been higher without coronavirus vaccines, Biden said, estimating they had “saved more than one million American lives,” as he urged non-vaccinated Americans to “get vaccinated, get your kids vaccinated, and get your booster shot if you are eligible.”
It was less than two months ago that the White House marked 800,000 covid-19 deaths in the United States. While nationally the current wave of cases, fueled by the more transmissible omicron variant, appears to be trending down, some states are still seeing rising cases, as hospitals remain overwhelmed and public health experts warn the vaccination rate is too low.
A tracker by Johns Hopkins University recorded over 901,000 deaths from covid-19 since the pandemic began. A Washington Post tracker, which uses data from the university and local and state government sites, shows at least 894,680 reported deaths since Feb. 29, 2020. Not all tracking sites use the same sources or report dates, so case and death numbers can differ.
The United States is still lagging behind other wealthy countries on vaccination as a mix of political polarization, misinformation, confusing public health messaging and barriers to access continues to hobble its vaccination drive. Sixty-four percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, according to Washington Post data, and 42 percent of the fully-vaccinated have received their booster dose.
Recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that between October and November 2021, in 25 jurisdictions in the United States, unvaccinated people were 53 times more likely to die of covid-19 than people who were vaccinated and boosted.
There was an average of 326,666 reported covid-19 cases in the United States over the past week — far less than the 7-day average of 553,000 recorded just a month ago. Meanwhile, hospitalizations are still high but trending downward after peaking around mid-January.
In late January, Anthony S. Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic, said on ABC’s “The Week” he hoped that the country would soon be entering what he called a best-case scenario, provided adequate vaccinations, testing, masks and treatments were in place. | null | null | null | null | null |
Conditions were sunny but frigid and blustery midday at Genting Snow Park, adding difficulty to what riders agreed is already a technically challenging course. At 12:30 p.m., the wind chill measured on an iPhone read minus-12 degrees, with 13-mph gusts blowing at the bottom of the slopestyle run.
It felt windier. And at the top of the final jump, a bright red windsock stuck straight out almost all afternoon. It took less than a minute to lose feeling in any fingers or hands not covered with multiple gloves, and icicles appear almost instantly on eyelashes and eyebrows because of warm air escaping from even the most fitted KN95 and N95 masks.
“It sucks. You guys feel it; it’s cold,” said Jamie Anderson, the slopestyle gold medalist who will ride for a third consecutive in Sunday’s final. “It’s hard to keep your core temperature warm, and then doing tricks feels a little bit more intimidating, you’re just like a little bit stiff. We’re making due.”
Wind could be a complicating factor across the Games for multiple sports held in China’s mountainous regions. Wind conditions canceled the third round of training for women’s ski jumping in Zhangjiakou, and around the same time the women’s slopestyle qualification was starting at Genting Snow Park in host city Zhangjiakou, the men’s downhill training at the Alpine skiing course in Yanqing was suspended for high wind.
Zhangjiakou is also host to cross-country, biathlon and Nordic combined. Moderating an athlete’s core temperature is important in all three endurance sports, as cold saps the body’s energy. But even trickier is biathlon and Nordic combined, where cross-country ski races are combined with other elements such as shooting (biathlon) and ski jumping (Nordic combined).
Zhangjiakou’s conditions are colder than those they’ve faced in years. Competing on a tour that primarily winds its way through central Europe, biathlete Susan Dunklee said she hasn’t raced in temperatures below 15 degrees since before 2020. | null | null | null | null | null |
“Such an accident is a rare occurrence and in this case was caused by the unexpectedly large size of the fish caught,” the Pelagic Freezer-trawler Association said in a statement Friday. It added that the vessel had recorded the quantities of lost fish with the authorities of its flag state, Lithuania, and that they would be deducted from the vessel’s quota.
However, the French wing of conservation group Sea Shepherd, which took photos of the dead fish in the Bay of Biscay, described it as an illegal discharge of an estimated 100,000 unwanted fish.
The mass of blue whiting, a subspecies of cod used in the manufacturing of fish fingers, fish oil and other products, covered a surface of nearly 32,300 square feet, the nonprofit said. It also noted that the Margiris supertrawler had been banned from Australian waters because of concerns over its impact on the local ecosystem.
Trawlers use long dragnets to catch fish and process them in factories onboard. Environmentalists widely criticize the practice that they say depletes fish stocks and marine life — particularly when other species of fish are caught and discarded, or when the nets injure marine mammals such as dolphins and seals.
The European commissioner for environment, oceans and fisheries, Virginijus Sinkevičius, also said he would launch an inquiry with fishing authorities in the region and the flag state of the Margiris, “to get exhaustive information & evidence about the case.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Shop makes, sells clothes for Baltimore’s top public schools
Ricky Herman, owner of Herman’s Discount on Greenmount Avenue, chats with customer Camira Black, a 9th grader at City College, Jan. 27, 2022 in Wavely, Md.. The sale of school uniforms is a large part of his business, but survival during the pandemic depended on the sale of other clothing and household items. His business also produces custom embroidery and silk-screening for school and team uniforms.(Amy Davis/The Baltimore Sun via AP)
By Jacques Kelly, The Baltimore Sun | AP
BALTIMORE — There’s a Baltimore destination that goes one better than the phrase “shop local” — Herman’s Discount in Waverly. At this quirky emporium, what many shoppers carry home has a Baltimore edge to it.
“The more I pounded the books and studied and studied, I realized how hard it was going to be,” he said. “So my father was operating his own store, formerly a Princess Shops, on East Monument Street and it was time for me to do something when I graduated.”
There was a family conclave. They found a vacant storefront, a largish double wide retail space. It was not promising. The old Becker’s clothing shop closed in 1995. Its premises didn’t have much to offer.
“Even the Provident Bank across the street had closed,” Herman said.
But he never looked back, cleaning out the old interior and bringing in goods — shower curtains, cleaning supplies, adhesive bandages, a few toys and everyday clothing.
To this he added his extended family. He works alongside his wife, Aarti, and his mother, Alexandra. His sons, Raja and Kiran, are being groomed to join the venture.
One shopper, Sandy Waters, said: “I love the place. Any little thing I need, I’ll find it there. And Herman’s support for the school system is incredible.”
She said she likes shopping in a family-operated business, one that reminds her of an old fashioned F. W. Woolworth’s.
“My goal is to get my two sons, my boys, totally immersed here,” said Herman, who is enthusiastic about the Baltimore school system.
While he initially sent his two sons to the Saint Pius X School on York Road, he later enrolled them in public high schools.
“City College offered my son Raja a real, real education,” Herman said. “He met people from all walks of life. I wanted him to stay humble and stay grounded.”
Raja Herman recently created Herman’s Discount website and a New York City school recently placed an order for custom embroidered shirts.
Herman laughs a bit about the interior of his business, the part shoppers see.
“People tell me it’s a bit chaotic,” he said. “The shirts are next to the boxes of toilet seats, which are next to the computer mouse pads.”
His office is no larger than a closet and he struggles to find inventory because of supply chain issues.
“You might be able to find some small and extra larges, but no mediums. It’s crazy outright,” he said.
Herman said that while much of his stock is intended for students, certain high schools, like City College, have graduates who remain faithful to the school colors, blazing Oriole orange and jet black.
“City College has a crazy loyal alumni,” Herman said. “They’ll pay $250 for a premium leather jacket.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Wayne M. Crocker, director of library services for Petersburg Public Library, is shown on Jan. 18, 2022 in Petersburg, Va. Crocker, is a primary leader in the effort to transform the old Petersburg Public Library in the McKenney House, which has been vacant since 2014 when a new library opened, into a Black history museum. (Daniel Sangjib Min/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP) | null | null | null | null | null |
He really did want to overturn the 2020 election and he never meant it when he said those who broke the law on Jan. 6 should have to pay
Former president Donald Trump speaks at a rally on Jan. 29 in Conroe, Tex. At the rally, Trump said: “If I run [for president in 2024] and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly, and if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.” (Michael Stravato/For The Washington Post)
Former president Donald Trump has told some big lies over the years. One of the biggest, it now is clear, came on Jan. 7, 2021, the day after his supporters assaulted the Capitol.
On Jan. 6, as law enforcement fought valiantly against an armed mob of rioters attacking the Capitol, Trump remained in the White House, silent in the face of repeated efforts by advisers, family members and allies, who pleaded with him to try to call a halt to the violence.
He didn’t mean it, as he made clear last weekend. Speaking at a rally in Conroe, Tex., he told his followers, “If I run [for president in 2024] and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly, and if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”
The former president still feels he was unfairly denied a second term, that he is the victim of a massive fraud, despite the lack of evidence. What he is saying now provides a preview of how he might try to use his powers if restored to the Oval Office.
The Texas rally was just one event in a week in which the former president gave America a wide-open look at what has long been assumed: That his false claims of a stolen election were much more that the complaints of a sore loser. His goal all along was to do more than disrupt the process of certifying President Biden’s victory. He wanted to find a way to overturn the results of the election.
Trump had repeatedly implored Pence to block certification of Biden’s victory. Pence told Trump he did not have the power to do so, but even at the rally preceding the assault on the Capitol, Trump was still urging Pence to do what Pence had said he could not do. Talk of amending the act that governed those proceedings has apparently outraged the former president. Here is his statement from last Sunday:
That’s exactly the danger that continues to exist, a weariness with all of it, a desire to put those difficult moments from early 2021 in the rearview mirror. Pence, however, was not ready to ignore Trump’s wild claim. Speaking Friday at a gathering of the Federalist Society in Florida, Pence rebuked the former president as he called Jan. 6 “a dark day” in the history of the Capitol. “This week, our former president said I had the right to ‘overturn the election,’” Pence said. “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.”
Friday marked a day in which future battle lines were being drawn inside the Republican Party, with a handful of elected officials like Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) standing up for Cheney and Kinzinger while so many others, symbolized by the RNC, follow alongTrump’s dangerous path. Other revelations during the past week provided additional reminders of just how serious Trump, his advisers and especially some of the conspiracy theorists trying to influence him were about trying to delay, disrupt and possibly overturn the election through the extraordinary use of government power. Reminders too of the stakes ahead.
The New York Times reported that, weeks after the election, Trump asked lawyer and adviser Rudolph Giuliani to check with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to see if the government could legally take possession of voting machines in some key states. Giuliani was told DHS lacked such authority. Trump reportedly had raised the issue of seizing voting machines with then-Attorney General William P. Barr, who according to the Times, also told Trump the Justice Department had no such authority — nor that there was any evidence of a crime in the conduct of the election.
The Post reported on efforts by Trump’s outside allies, who prepared a memo calling on Trump to use the powers of the National Security Agency and the Defense Department to go through raw intelligence with the hope of showing that foreign powers had tampered with election results. “Proof of foreign interference would ‘support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies,’” the memo stated, according to The Post’s reporting. The words “in a manner superior” to the courts is a chilling suggestion of the use of extrajudicial powers.
The belief that because it didn’t happen, it can’t happen remains strong. Yet Trump continues to reveal himself, his true motives and perhaps what he would do if he were again to become president. No one should be surprised. | null | null | null | null | null |
A view on Oct. 1, 1935, of the Maples, 630 South Carolina Ave. SE. (Library of Congress)
I grew up in D.C. and have fond memories of Friendship House in the late 1940s. It was in Southeast, a block off Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a great place for kids: a quiet room for homework, lessons of all kinds for a quarter. I took piano, tap dance and hula. Do you know the history of this house and is it still there?
— Barbara Thompson, Southern Maryland
As a matter of fact, the house that Friendship House was in still exists, even if the charity that was Friendship House no longer does.
When it was completed in 1796, the Georgian-style house — on South Carolina Avenue, though its address today is 619 D St. SE — was known as the Maples. Merchant William Mayne Duncanson, the original owner, speculated that land in the new capital would increase in value. But he miscalculated and wound up bankrupt.
“So he wasn’t actually resident in the house that long,” said Nancy Metzger, a neighborhood historian who lives two blocks away.
According to a Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia post by Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, “Subsequent owners included Francis Scott Key and [U.S. Capitol artist] Constantino Brumidi, who decorated a ballroom addition with his own frescoes.”
In 1936, the Maples was purchased by Friendship House, which tasked District architect Horace W. Peaslee with enlarging it to 55 rooms and adapting it for use by the charity.
Friendship House was a settlement house, one of many that popped up across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The best known was Hull House in Chicago, co-founded by social reformer Jane Addams. These were places that aimed to improve the lives of the urban poor by serving their needs, both physical and intellectual.
Founded in 1904, Friendship House was originally at 324 Virginia Ave. SE. A 1913 article in the Washington Evening Star outlined some of the activities there: “At Friendship House, girls are taught scientific housekeeping and practical home hygiene and sanitation to enable them to be able to maintain healthful, well-kept homes in the future, and there are other classes where girls are being taught music, sewing, embroidering and other things which will make them happier and more useful.”
Daycare was available, too, a rarity at the time. Explained the Star: “Mothers who have work to do, or who are sick, are invited to leave their children at Friendship House during the day, and even at night, in case of sickness.”
Milk was sold at reduced rates. Friendship House was used by neighborhood adults for meetings. It was also home to a branch library.
Chief among the workers at Friendship House in 1913 was Lydia Burklin, a native Washingtonian who had joined the staff in 1909. By the time of her retirement in 1954 at age 70, Burklin was the director, overseeing a staff of 14, along with part-timers and volunteers.
In 1936, Friendship House moved to the larger Maples.
“Capitol Hill at that time had a lot of people who were workers at the Navy Yard and the Government Printing Office,” said Metzger. “A lot of people came down from West Virginia and there were a lot of immigrants.”
Blue-collar newcomers to the city needed help establishing themselves here. That’s what Friendship House provided. While some settlement houses were connected with religions, Friendship House was nondenominational.
It was also, like so much of the city, segregated: for Whites only. Friendship House wasn’t integrated until after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954.
Activities at Friendship House evolved over the years. But old buildings are notoriously expensive to maintain. Many an organization has faltered trying to stay on top of the upkeep. Out of money and having defaulted on a loan, Friendship House had to sell the Maples in 2010.
It was purchased by Virginia-based Altus Realty, which transformed the 1796 house and its many later additions into 19 condos.
As construction was underway, Metzger had a chance to visit the site. Propped up in one of the rooms was an oil portrait of a matronly Lydia Burklin, who died in 1964 at age 80.
A worker later asked Metzger if she could take the painting for safekeeping. She did, assuming there would be some lobby or common space to which it could be returned.
“Well, there isn't,” she told Answer Man. “So I still have this portrait sitting in my living room.”
Metzger is hoping a new home can be found for Lydia.
Next week: Washington’s African-American community supported its own settlement houses. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - A busload of arrested Jewish men are questioned by government officials before being taken away in Berlin on April 11, 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler’s takeover of power in Germany. The notion of being Jewish is complicated and includes a combination of religion, race, nationality, ethnicity, culture and history, says Greg Schneider, executive vice president the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference. (AP Photo/File) (Uncredited/AP)
By Luis Andres Henao, Peter Smith and David Crary | AP | null | null | null | null | null |
By Dave Goldberg | AP
PASADENA, Calif. — Phil Simms grabbed the spotlight after usually operating in the shadow of Lawrence Taylor and the New York defense and passed the New York Giants to a 39-20 victory over the Denver Broncos in their first Super Bowl. Simms was unanimously voted the game’s Most Valuable Player after he completed 22 of 25 passes for 268 yards and three touchdowns and set Super Bowl records with his 88% completion rate and his 10 consecutive completions. Much of the pregame hype centered on John Elway but the Broncos quarterback finished with 22 completions in 37 attempts for 304 yards with one touchdown and one interception. The Associated Press is republishing verbatim the story of that game. | null | null | null | null | null |
To open the evening, in classic short-track style, France’s Tifany Huot-Marchand was knocked off balance and sent flying into the safety padding halfway through the first lap of a women’s 500-meters heat. No crowd exasperation. Huot-Marchand spent the past four years training to make it here. She doesn’t have a sponsor, so when she needed money for new equipment, she set up a crowdfunding site, asked for donations and received about $4,500 in financial support. She exemplifies the journey here for many athletes, and within 60 meters of her first race she fell out of contention in the 500 meters. That’s short track, ludicrous and unfair yet captivating because of the unknown.
In Heat 7 of the men’s 500 meters, a speed skater’s blade broke, and the race was stopped and restarted. No reaction. If not for typical game presentation — flashing lights, booming music, overcaffeinated public address announcer — light clapping and brief flag-waving and whistling for the Chinese participants would’ve been the only sights and sounds competing with the bite of blades on the ice.
The strangest part came during the semifinal round when China came terrifying close to elimination. It finished third in the semis, crossing the line behind the United States. But after a long review, the Americans were penalized for blocking an infield skater. China advanced instead of the United States, but as with the rest of the action, the suspense was difficult to detect inside the arena.
All of a sudden, those few hundred quite spectators stood, and the sound they made vaguely resembled a roar. It was a gentle roar, a kind of emotion they came close to releasing as the final began, a low rumbling significant enough that the announce said “Quiet, please!” just before the start. | null | null | null | null | null |
Said U.S. alternate Tess Johnson, "I want to be clear that the other girls are not undeserving. … I just believe I deserve a spot as well." (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
BEIJING — The night before she was to head home from the Beijing Olympics, Tess Johnson turned on the TV in the hotel room and flipped the channels until she found it: the opening qualification round of the women’s moguls competition. In her mind, she should have been on the screen, wearing bib No. 5 to designate her World Cup ranking. Instead, she watched while packing her bags for the trip home.
Four years ago, Johnson had competed in PyeongChang, finishing 17th in the first round of qualifying. But this time, the entirety of her Olympic experience amounted to a seven-day stay in an isolation hotel, feeling aggrieved by a contentious team selection process that left her as an alternate. A case of food poisoning on her first full day in Beijing was just an added insult.
“It was hard. But I’ve survived, and I’m okay, and I’m heading home for the first time in six weeks. I’m looking ahead,” said the 21-year-old from Vail, Colo. She spoke by phone Friday evening from the waiting area at Gate B46 of Denver International Airport, where she was preparing for the fourth and final segment of her trip home, a trip that went: Beijing to Tokyo to Los Angeles to Denver to Vail.
“I really couldn’t start healing until today.”
On Jan. 17, Johnson had been in a Deer Valley, Utah hotel room — watching her favorite movie, “Ratatouille” — when she received a phone call from Team USA head moguls coach Matt Gnoza. She was expecting the call, but not the news: She was being left off the four-woman moguls team that would compete in Beijing.
Three women — Olivia Giaccio, Hannah Soar and Jaelin Kauf — qualified automatically for the team through the International Ski Federation (FIS) points standings and designated tryout events. For the fourth and final spot, Team USA had the option of making a discretionary pick, and Johnson was a compelling candidate. She had reached the podium twice during this World Cup season, more than any other American woman, and her No. 5 ranking was second only to Giaccio among U.S. women. Johnson also was the top American on the FIS Olympic Allocation List, which other countries use to round out their teams.
“I was led to believe I had a really good shot” to earn the final spot, Johnson said. “I don’t think I was falsely confident.”
Instead, Team USA adhered to the FIS season points standings, which handed the fourth and final spot to 17-year-old phenom Kai Owens.
“I want to be clear that the other girls are not undeserving. Our team is incredible. We’re all medal contenders … I just believe I deserve a spot as well,” Johnson said. “These girls are my best friends, too. I don’t want to diminish any of them or their accomplishments. This is about my experience as a competitor and a person and a team member.”
In response to Johnson’s comments regarding the selection process, U.S. Ski and Snowboard provided a statement from CEO and President Sophie Goldschmidt, which explained, in part, that the selection committee that made the final choice voted unanimously and “acted diligently and properly in its review and application of the selection criteria.”
“Our criteria-setting process is deliberately designed well in advance with community involvement and transparency to aid athletes in the pursuit of their Olympic dreams,” Goldschmidt said. “It pains us that we are limited to four quota spots and that this results in athletes not having the opportunity to compete in the Olympics.”
Johnson made the trip to Beijing as an alternate — a designation that meant an Olympic credential that was inactivated and, thus, a stay in isolation — because, between coronavirus testing and injury risk, there was at least a reasonable chance she would be needed. It almost happened. On Thursday night, Owens crashed during training, suffering injuries to her eye and face. She sat out Friday’s opening round of qualifying, but signaled her intention to ski in Sunday’s second round.
Johnson acknowledged she had hopes of being pressed into duty, but those hopes were tempered by concern over Owens’s health.
“Kai’s my teammate; I just want her to be healthy,” Johnson said. “I’m very relieved she’s okay.”
As she packed up to head to the airport for the long journey home, the finality of a dream denied brought a sudden sense of relief.
“It’s called delayed grief,” she said. After the Jan. 17 call from Gnoza, “All I wanted was to come to terms with it, and to start healing from seeing my 2022 dreams crushed. But I really couldn’t until that moment when all hope was eliminated.”
Johnson said Saturday she understands the risk of criticizing the selection process and the coaches and officials who run the team. Of her relationship with Gnoza, the U.S. head moguls coach, she said, “We’re not on the best of terms right now, unfortunately.”
“Right after the call, I felt like someone I loved died,” she said. “That may sound dramatic to some, but the 2022 Olympics were everything for me. That was my dream. While, yes, I’ve experienced some anger over the past few weeks, mostly I’m just heartbroken, because this is what I’ve been working for all these years.”
Johnson also understands how she might come across. There are would-be-Olympians who fall short before every Winter and Summer Games, with every sport using its own selection criteria to pick teams. Few of those spurned athletes choose to air their grievances so publicly.
Johnson can face that criticism because, she said, “I’m not bitter. I’m heartbroken. There’s a difference.”
Back in Vail, Johnson planned to bury herself in the embrace of her parents, T.J. and Carol, and reacquaint herself with the familiar pleasures and comforts of home. It wouldn’t be the triumphant return she envisioned, but a welcomed respite nonetheless from an anguishing few weeks.
“It’s going to be bittersweet,” she said. “I wanted to be able to hug them after the whole Olympic experience with a medal around my neck. But that’s okay.” | 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.
Opinion: The carping over Biden’s Supreme Court pledge is historically inaccurate and racially tinged
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?
Opinion: Lindsey Graham’s shockingly rational answer about the Supreme Court
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 |
Alexei Navalny, the Russian anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader, often said President Vladimir Putin runs a party of “crooks and thieves.” Mr. Putin’s security forces subsequently attempted to assassinate Mr. Navalny with a military-grade chemical weapon; when he survived, the regime unjustly handed him a prison sentence a year ago Wednesday and later outlawed his organization as “extremist.”
Mr. Navalny endures days and nights in a prison barracks with the windows covered in white paper so he can’t see out, under constant watch by other inmates, but he won’t be silenced. He recently exchanged letters with Time magazine, in which he urged the West to put pressure on Mr. Putin by going after his riches abroad. “Everybody knows the names of the oligarchs and friends of Putin who hold his money,” he wrote. “We know those who finance his yachts and palaces.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Trucks are parked near Parliament Hill in Ottawa as truckers and supporters continue to protest coronavirus vaccine mandates on Feb. 4, 2022. (Lars Hagberg/Reuters)
OTTAWA — Canada’s capital on Saturday was bracing for a surge of demonstrators to join a week-long protest of public health measures and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that has blockaded much of the downtown core, unnerved residents and been described by officials as an “occupation” and a “siege.”
Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly, under fire for what critics have called a lenient response to the blockades, said police would be “hardening” the perimeter around the protests and deploying 150 more officers to “deliver a clear message” that “the lawlessness must end.” Roads, highway ramps and bridges also could be closed.
“The demonstrators … remain highly organized, well-funded, extremely committed to resisting all attempts to end the demonstrations safely,” Sloly, who said he had received death threats, told reporters Friday. “This remains, as it was from the beginning, an increasingly volatile and increasingly dangerous demonstration.”
The protests were initially started in response to U.S. and Canadian rules requiring cross-border truckers to be fully vaccinated to enter either country. But the demonstrations have ballooned into a movement against all public health measures, which are mostly imposed by the provinces, and Trudeau, who was reelected in September.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a watchdog group, has documented links between several of the convoy’s organizers and the far right.
The number of protesters had thinned considerably from the estimated 8,000 people who congregated on Parliament Hill last weekend. Police estimated that roughly 250 people remained heading into this weekend, when reinforcements were expected to arrive.
The convoy has spurred solidarity demonstrations, including a blockade near a U.S.-Canada border crossing in Alberta. Protests in places including Quebec City and Toronto are planned this weekend.
A women’s shelter said some residents have admitted themselves to hospital “due to the increased trauma from the noise and fear.” A downtown drop-in shelter for vulnerable youths said it would close this weekend to protect its staff and customers.
A downtown ice cream shop said it would close until Wednesday after one of its employees was physically assaulted on the way to work, “blocked on the sidewalk by two men and shoved to the ground for wearing a mask.”
The organizers have vowed to remain until their demands have been met. They’ve built a wooden structure and stockpiled diesel fuel and propane near Parliament, raising security concerns and prompting police criticism.
Sloly has defended the police response, citing worries that protesters will use vehicles against officers and that protesters might be armed.
Police have charged at least four people in connection with the demonstrations and issued about 30 traffic tickets. They’ve opened a hate crimes tip line and said that dozens of investigations are underway, including into the desecration of the National War Memorial, which is now fenced off.
Vaccine mandates have been popular in Canada, according to public opinion polls, and Canada has one of the world’s highest vaccination rates. The Canadian Trucking Association, an industry group, has distanced itself from the demonstrations, noting that the vast majority of its truckers have been vaccinated.
Even if Trudeau dropped the vaccination requirement for cross-border truckers, unvaccinated Canadian truckers still would not be able to cross the border because of the U.S. vaccination requirement.
Several lawmakers have cheered the convoy on, even happily posing for photos against a backdrop of the big rigs that have paralyzed the city. They’ve drawn charges of hypocrisy because many of them called for an aggressive police response when an Indigenous-led movement blockaded railroads to protest a pipeline in 2020.
On Friday, some federal Conservative Party lawmakers broke ranks. That group included Danny Patterson, a senator who resigned from the Conservative caucus, deploring the flying of Confederate and Nazi flags by some protesters last weekend. | null | null | null | null | null |
Canadian officials are expressing cautious optimism that meetings with their American counterparts in Washington last month might have broken a deadlock and that at least some Prince Edward Island potatoes could be heading to parts of the United States and its territories in the coming weeks.
But until the impasse is resolved, the suspension’s effects continue to be far-reaching, from Prince Edward Island, where growers worry about losing farms that have been in their families for generations, to Massachusetts, where Canadian farmers are running ads warning of a “Spudpocalypse,” to Puerto Rico, which imports most of its potatoes from the province.
“Farmers are worried sick. They’re frustrated,” said Greg Donald, general manager of the PEI Potato Board. The board estimates that at least $20 million in direct sales to the United States — a market of about $95 million a year — have already been lost. “This has just been a nightmare.”
About 60 percent of the tubers grown in Prince Edward Island are processing potatoes, used to make potato chips and french fries. Table potatoes make up 30 percent. The rest are seed potatoes, which are replanted to grow new potatoes.
Canadian officials suspended the export certificates in November, after potato wart was detected in two fields. Donald said the fields were already under surveillance by Canadian food inspection officials, and those potatoes were ineligible for sale outside the province.
The fungus isn’t known to be present in commercial production fields in the United States.
In December, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said a national survey detected no potato wart in seed potato fields not already under surveillance. It categorized the risk of spread as “negligible” and provided that information to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
Canadian officials and farmers say the United States should at least allow table potatoes across the border because the safety measures in place are strong and the science shows they’re safe. They argue that, because the potatoes won’t be replanted, they threaten neither crops nor people.
“This has absolutely nothing to do with science,” island Premier Dennis King told a local radio station this week. “This belongs as a trade issue, and there are opportunities within our trade negotiations and our partnerships with the United States that we could get a quick hearing to deal with this.”
The United States banned Prince Edward Island potatoes in October 2000 after potato wart was detected on 72 tubers on a plot smaller than an acre. Canadian farmers called for retaliation. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rogan made the apology in response to a compilation video shared widely on social media this week showing various moments over 12 years in which Rogan said the n-word on his show. The video was posted by singer India. Arie, who recently removed her catalogue from Spotify in response to Rogan’s “language around race.”
“I was trying to make the story entertaining and I said: ‘We got out, and it was like we were in Africa, like we were in Planet of the Apes,’” he said. “I did not, nor would I ever, say that Black people are apes, but it sure … sounded like that. And I immediately afterwards said, ‘That’s a racist thing to say.’” | null | null | null | null | null |
Rogan, already under fire in recent weeks after medical professionals and musicians decried him for helping spread misinformation on the coronavirus, posted a video on Instagram to address what he described as “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.”
Rogan made the apology in response to a compilation video shared widely on social media this past week showing various moments over 12 years in which Rogan said the n-word on his show. The video was posted by singer India.Arie, who recently removed her catalogue from Spotify in response to Rogan’s “language around race.”
Rogan noted how the discussions linked to the clips where he said the slur were about how the n-word had been used by a White comedians like Lenny Bruce or Black comedians such as Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor. He added that he never used the n-word “to be racist because, I’m not racist.”
The apology comes as Spotify has been under increased pressure to do more against Rogan for spreading misinformation on a show that reaches an estimated audience of 11 million people an episode. Rogan has repeatedly downplayed the need for coronavirus vaccines and used his platform to flirt with misinformation about covid-19. Podcasters and artists such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have told the streaming service they were taking their work off Spotify because the company was allowing Rogan to spread misinformation on the pandemic. Spotify acquired Rogan’s podcast library in 2020 in a reported $100 million deal.
After Spotify announced that it was tweaking its policies about coronavirus content by adding a disclaimer to any podcast dealing with the virus and the disease it causes, covid-19, Rogan admitted last Sunday that he could do more to better inform his millions of listeners, particularly when it comes to the pandemic.
The compilation video featuring Rogan’s use of the racial slur spread on Twitter this past week. After posting the clip, which was shared by many other accounts across social media, Arie said on Instagram that Rogan “shouldn’t even be uttering the word.”
On Saturday, Rogan also addressed a clip shared of him telling a story about being around Black people while seeing the film “Planet of the Apes.”
“I was trying to make the story entertaining and I said: ‘We got out, and it was like we were in Africa, like we were in Planet of the Apes,’” he said. “I did not, nor would I ever, say that Black people are apes, but it sure … sounded like that. And I immediately said, ‘That’s a racist thing to say.’”
Rogan concluded by saying that “it makes me sick watching that video.” He said he hoped this moment “can be a teachable moment” for him moving forward.
“There’s nothing I can do to take that back. I wish I could, but obviously that’s not possible. I never thought it would ever be taken out of context and put in a video like that,” he said. “My sincere and humble apologies. I wish there was more that I could say.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Hilary Knight and the U.S. beat the Russian Olympic Committee on Saturday. (Brian Snyder/Pool Photo via AP)
BEIJING — On Saturday night, Hilary Knight found Savannah Harmon during Team USA’s pregame skate and cracked a joke. “Just find yourself down there on the dots,” she told Harmon. “It’s coming through.”
By the time Knight looked over her shoulder, Harmon chipped the puck into a wide-open net for the game’s first goal. And by the time the night was all over, the U.S. women’s hockey team had added four more — rolling to a 5-0 win over the Russian Olympic Committee.
“In my head, I’m like, ‘She’s going to figure out a way to get me this puck,’ ” said Harmon, 26. “And there she does.”
That role could not be overstated on Saturday night as the Americans played in their first full game without star Brianna Decker, who was lost for the tournament after suffering a left leg injury in the team’s opening win over Finland on Thursday night. The Americans were crushed, but Knight has helped put her teammates at ease. She has a gift for making everyone around her better, but it doesn’t hurt that her supporting cast is bursting at the seams with talent and depth.
Case in point: After Harmon fired a wrister from the blueline early in the second period, Knight — who had elbowed her way to the front of the net — tracked the shot and tilted the shaft of her stick just enough to redirect the puck into the top of the net to make it 2-0.
“Everyone is bringing their A-game. What a wonderful time for us to be resilient,” said Knight, who donned a backward baseball cap and shrugged off questions about Canada as she met with reporters afterward. “I think the start has been a good growth opportunity … we know our character, we know our identity.”
Then she turned serious. She told spoke of jumping up and down on her couch as a 10-year-old to celebrate Granato and the United States team that won the first Olympic gold medal in the sport in 1998. “Cammi Granato and this number holds a special place in my heart … the ’98ers is where it began,” she said. “That sparked a dream for me.” | null | null | null | null | null |
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