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New movies to stream this week: ‘Torn,’ ‘They/Them/Us’ and more
From left: Max Lowe, Sam Lowe-Anker, Conrad Anker and Isaac Lowe-Anker in “Torn.” (Chris Murphy/Disney Plus/National Geographic)
Niche sports documentaries — especially those focusing on the peculiar, even obsessively risk-taking personalities of the athletes, whether they be mountain climbers or cave divers — have moved into the mainstream in recent years. (See the excellent “Free Solo,” “The Alpinist” and “The Rescue.”) Focusing on the life and career of climber Alex Lowe, who died in an avalanche in 1999, “Torn” would initially seem to be of that ilk, but it takes a different tack. Directed by Lowe’s son Max Lowe, the film’s true subject is the impact that Lowe’s love of climbing had on his surviving family and friends: the filmmaker himself, his two brothers, Lowe’s widow and Lowe’s longtime climbing partner, Conrad Anker. (The film’s title, it seems, alludes to Alex Lowe’s inability to fully reconcile his love of a dangerous sport with the needs of his wife and children. But it also hints at the need for healing.) “Torn” manages to be several things at once: a commemorative retrospective of Lowe’s accomplishments and a deeply personal, often profoundly moving reckoning with all the complicated feelings left in the wake of the climber’s death. It’s a worthy addition to the canon of similarly-themed films about the costs — and the benefits — of pursuing one’s passion at the highest level. Unrated. Available on Disney Plus. Contains mature thematic elements. 92 minutes.
Discovery of missing climbers, preserved in glacier, ‘brings closure and relief’ 16 years after deadly avalanche
In the post-apocalyptic thriller “Last Survivors,” Stephen Moyer and Drew Van Acker play a father and his adult son whose utopian, off-the-grid existence is disrupted by the arrival of mysterious woman (Alicia Silverstone) who begins an affair with the son. The Hollywood Reporter compares the film to “A Quiet Place” and “It Comes at Night,” while noting that “Survivors” also attempts to deconstruct the allure of such tales: “ ‘Last Survivors’ can’t be accused of thoughtlessness — it’s clearly a film with a lot on its mind, one that’s eager to grapple with the gnarled roots of its own appeal.” Unrated. Available on demand. 98 minutes.
Executive-produced by David Lynch (“Twin Peaks”), “The Other Me” stars Jim Sturgess (“Upside Down”) as a married architect with a rare vision disorder who embarks on an affair with a mysterious woman (Andreja Pejic) after he starts experiencing hallucinatory visions. Unrated. Available on demand. 98 minutes.
Winner of the audience award for best horror, thriller or science fiction film at last year’s Cinequest film festival, “Slapface” is the story of a bullied boy (August Maturo) who develops a relationship with a monster. Dan Hedaya also appears as the town sheriff. Unrated. Available on Shudder. 85 minutes.
The dramedy “They/Them/Us” follows the sexual and parenting travails of Charlie (Joey Slotnick of “Pirates of Silicon Valley”) and Lisa (Amy Hargreaves of “Homeland”), two divorced,
40-something parents, raising four challenging teenagers between them, who meet online and form a blended family. Both “underrated” character actors, according to the New York Times, Slotnick and Hargreaves portray Charlie and Lisa with a “rich, nuanced shading that elevates the film.” Unrated. Available on demand. 90 minutes. | 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 1,000 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 terrifyingly 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 announcer said, “Quiet, please!” just before the start. | null | null | null | null | null |
“The biggest takeaway I have from that behavior is it reflects a conviction that he was above the law, that the statutes and the norms and the customs that were designed to protect the American people’s right to hold their leaders accountable, ” said presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky. “He did not see himself bound by those things and they didn’t apply those rules apply to him.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Gitlin remained politically involved after the ‘60s, but also clashed at times with fellow liberals. In the 1990s, he was critical of some of the academic debates over the literary canon and the predominance of male white writers. In his 1995 book “The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars,” he alleged that the focus on what he and others called “identity politics” was weakening the left overall, writing that while Republicans were gaining power in Washington, the left has been “marching on the English department.”
In 2020, he was among the signers of a widely debated letter that appeared in Harper's magazine and denounced so-called “cancel culture” and the rush to “swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Johnson appoints new chief of staff
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson hired a new chief of staff Saturday as he rebuilds his top team following scandals that have left him fighting to shore up his authority.
Cabinet minister Steve Barclay, formerly Brexit minister under Theresa May’s administration, will head Johnson’s staff, 10 Downing Street said.
Johnson, who in 2019 won the biggest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher in 1987, has repeatedly refused to resign over reports that he and some of his staff attended Downing Street parties during pandemic lockdowns.
Muslims criticize government forum
With France bloodied by past Islamic extremist attacks and having hundreds of citizens who went to fight with Islamist militants in Syria in past years, few disagree that radicalization is a danger. But critics — including many of France’s 5 million Muslims who consider the religion a part of their French identity — say the government’s latest initiative is another step in institutionalized discrimination that holds the whole community responsible for the violent acts of a few.
The Forum of Islam in France leadership will be made up of clergy and laypeople to help guide the largest Muslim community in Western Europe. All of its members will be handpicked by the government, and women will make up at least a quarter of them.
Beating death of refugee prompts protests across Brazil: Demonstrators gathered in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities Saturday to protest the fatal beating of a 24-year-old Congolese refugee that has sparked outrage and revulsion across the nation. Police in Rio are still investigating the circumstances of the Jan. 24 slaying of Moïse Mugenyi Kabagambe. Many felt no need to await official findings in a city where murder often goes unpunished; they asserted that Kabagambe's death was evidence of racism, xenophobia and impunity. "Moïse was beaten for 15 minutes, on a busy beach, where people pass by all the time, and at no time did anyone call the police and try to separate them," said attorney Rodrigo Mondengo, of Brazil's Bar Association in Rio. "We have no doubt that if it were a White person there being beaten, someone would go to that person's rescue."
Tropical cyclone makes landfall in Madagascar: Cyclone Batsirai made landfall on Madagascar's eastern coastline late Saturday. There were fears that Batsirai could compound the devastation wreaked by another cyclone, Ana, which hit the island about two weeks ago, killing 55 people. A local weather bulletin said the Batsirai storm system hit an area about nine miles north of the town of Mananjary in Madagascar's southeast about
8 p.m. The cyclone had average winds of about 100 mph, the bulletin said.
At least four injured in blast in market in eastern Congo: An explosion rocked a crowded market Saturday in the city of Beni in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, injuring at least four people, days after the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Kinshasa, warned that there could be an attack there. Beni is in a region where Congolese and Ugandan forces have launched a campaign against rebel fighters. It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion at the market and whether anyone had been killed. The U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa on Tuesday said that it believed "terrorist attacks" were planned in Beni "in the near future" and warned Americans against traveling there. | null | null | null | null | null |
Although Jill Biden didn’t speak about it at the moonshot relaunch, she also lost her mother, Bonny Jean Jacobs, to cancer. In a sense, she lost her twice. Years before her death, Bonny Jean had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and required extensive surgery that destroyed her bowels — only for them later to find out that, because of a clerical error, her pathology had been mixed up with another woman’s and she’d never had cancer at all. She became weak, and when she later was diagnosed with lymphoma, deteriorated even further during the chemotherapy treatments. Her final days came while Jill was on the 2008 campaign trail, as her husband was running in the Democratic primary he lost to Obama.
She was running when a Secret Service car pulled up beside her to tell her that her mother had a turn for the worse. Bonny Jean died surrounded by her five daughters. “It was so hard to let her go — emotionally, physically, spiritually,” the first lady wrote in her memoir. “She left before I was done needing her.”
Biden has made a point of prioritizing cancer causes since the Obama years. Her first trip outside Washington in February last year was to participate on a panel about health disparities at a cancer center in Richmond. She spoke about the need to bring cancer screening and treatment directly to underserved rural areas and communities of color. And she again made the case in October at a cancer center in Charleston, S.C., bringing attention to the fact that Black Americans have a higher death rate to most cancers than all other racial and ethnic group, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Previous versions of this article misspelled the name of Jill Biden's mother. She was Bonny Jean Jacobs, not Bobby Jean. This post has been corrected. | null | null | null | null | null |
Jason Epstein in 2001. (Jim Cooper/AP)
He was working in his first publishing job, at Doubleday, making $45 a week. Unable to afford many books, he proposed that Doubleday publish classic literature and criticism in inexpensive paperback editions. Before then, most paperbacks released in the United States were lowbrow escapist fiction. | null | null | null | null | null |
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, the men’s downhill training at the Alpine skiing course in Yanqing was suspended for high winds.
Zhangjiakou is also host to cross-country skiing, 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 are biathlon and Nordic combined, in which 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 many athletes have 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 |
Evan Boblits of St. Mary's Ryken handles James Hanley of St John's in the 113-pound class at the WCAC wrestling championships at Paul VI High in Chantilly on Saturday. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
It took less than a minute for Mekhi Neal to go in for the kill. Halfway through the first round of the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference wrestling championships’ first-place bout at 145 pounds, Neal threw Gonzaga’s Matt Van Sice near the boundary. A few seconds later, Neal earned a win by fall to triumph in his weight class.
Neal was one of 10 wrestlers from Ryken to medal at Saturday’s event held at Paul VI Catholic High in Chantilly. Ryken dominated the team event to defend its 2020 WCAC title, after no event was held last season. The Knights’ 277 points gave them a 102-point margin over second-place Gonzaga.
Neal’s quick pin fit Ryken’s season-long game plan. After canceling its season last year, Ryken entered this season under the radar but with a slew of talented, young wrestlers eager to make a statement.
“We’re looking to prove our name,” Neal said. “We don’t want to be the team who ‘barely won.’ We want to come out here and show what we’ve been working on and how hard we’ve been working.”
Thirteen of Ryken’s 14 wrestlers made it to the first-place match Saturday. The team recorded a meet-high 21 pins.
“We’ve been preaching all year, do the right stuff in every aspect of your life, do the right stuff in the room. That’ll carry over,” Ryken Coach Bob Seidel said. “We told them this week, ‘You’ve been doing everything right.’ ”
Alongside multiple transfers and nine underclassmen, Seidel is also a new face for Ryken. He arrived by way of Colts Neck High in New Jersey — where he coached the first five state place-winners in the school’s history — and most recently Waialua High in Hawaii, where he led the boys’ and girls’ judo teams for multiple seasons. Seidel said he was planning on returning to the East Coast when the job at Ryken opened up.
“I knew Southern Maryland had some great clubs and we were going to get kids with some experience and great technical skills,” Seidel said.
Ryken’s next big target, the Maryland Independent Schools state tournament, begins Feb. 15. After that, Ryken will set its sights on nationals, which this year are at at Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro.
“We’ve been working all year towards a state title,” Seidel said.
In addition to Neal, Will Buckler (152), Brandon Jefferson (170), Ezekiel Gayle (195), and T.J. McCauley (285) all won their first-place matches by fall for Ryken. McCauley pinned his opponent in the first-place bout in 18 seconds, pushing his record to 24-0.
Keegan McMahon was the only wrestler from Paul VI to medal in his home gymnasium. He won the first-place bout at 126 pounds after a back-and-forth tussle with Ryken’s Koen Bowling that included multiple reversals and near-pins.
“We wrestled Ryken earlier in the week in a dual and it was a tough match like that,” McMahon said. “My freshman year, I lost to a kid from Ryken, so it was really nice being able to beat and take away some of their team points.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Germany isn’t turning its back on NATO. It only looks that way.
The nation struggles to find a role in the new era of Russian aggression
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock leave a news conference in Moscow on Jan. 18. (Russian Foreign Ministry Press Service/AP)
By Ulrike Franke
Ulrike Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
January 31, 2022 at 10:27 a.m. EST
Last week was a dismal one for Germany’s international credibility. “Is Germany a Reliable American Ally?” national security writer Tom Rogan asked in the Wall Street Journal, answering with a resounding “Nein!” The New York Times published an article entitled “Where Is Germany in the Ukraine Standoff? Its Allies Wonder,” and the German broadcast service Deutsche Welle pointedly wondered, “Is Germany Letting Its Allies Down?”
The main bone of contention is the German government’s decision not to export weapons to Ukraine as it braces for a potential Russian intervention. Germany is even preventing Estonia from exporting German-origin weapons systems to Ukraine. (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have announced that they will send American-made antitank and antiaircraft missiles to Ukraine.) Reports that Germany had denied the British Royal Air Force overflight rights for its arms transfers to Ukraine were eventually debunked — the Defense Ministry confirmed it had never asked — but that so many commentators were willing to believe this reveals their suspicions of Germany.
Decision-makers in Berlin are probably baffled by the forcefulness of their allies’ reactions. But the government’s position should not be surprising to anyone paying close attention. The Political Principles of the Federal Government for the Export of Weapons and Other Military Equipment states that the country will not authorize exports of “weapons of war and other military equipment related to weapons of war” to nonmembers of the European Union or NATO “that are involved in armed conflict or where there is a threat of such conflict” (or where “existing tensions and conflicts would be triggered, maintained, or aggravated by the exports”).
In its coalition agreement, the new German government has announced that it wants a “restrictive arms exports policy” that it aims to develop into a common E.U. policy. In particular, the Green Party — whose former co-leader, Annalena Baerbock, is now in charge of the Foreign Ministry — has in the past criticized German arms exports as too extensive.
But more important than the legal reasons is the fact that Germany’s leaders, and many ordinary German citizens, say their country’s approach is the right one for resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict — or, at least, for avoiding further escalation. To put it bluntly: What some commentators abroad see as appeasement, cowardice and the triumph of economic interests over security concerns, many Germans see as a grown-up, sensible and conciliatory approach to foreign policy. (A recent poll found that 59 percent of Germans supported the decision not to send arms to Kyiv.) Germans view themselves as enlightened, having moved beyond power politics, the national interest and militarism.
Germans have forgotten what military might is for in liberal democracies. The idea of deterrence, or of the military being an element of geopolitical power needed for strong diplomacy, is foreign to most German citizens. Those arguing for increasing the defense budget — for example, to meet the threshold of 2 percent of the gross domestic product that is expected of NATO members — are often characterized as warmongers. (Germany still falls short of the 2 percent goal, though, it has in fact slowly increased its budget since 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine.)
Some commentators see Germany’s foreign policy as more self-interested than idealistic. They explain Berlin’s position by pointing to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline — slated to link Russia and Germany by circumventing Ukraine — and other German economic interests, as well as to the presence of “Putinversteher” (Putin sympathizers) in parts of the German political establishment. Self-interest exists, as does empathy for Putin, but these are not the root cause of the government’s position.
Baerbock, the foreign minister, said that position was “rooted in [German] history.” Germans know what history she is referring to. They read the 20th century, and 1933-1945 in particular, as a lesson in the evils of geopolitics and militarism, and they internalized the post-1989 “end of history” narrative better than anyone else. After the end of the Cold War, Germany spent decades insulated from the harsh world of power politics; most Germans believed that countries were converging toward a system that marginalized military power and favored economic power and legal proceedings. Now that great power competition and military conflicts are back, Germany does not know what to do.
Many decision-makers and voters in Germany remain deeply committed to the hope that all conflicts can be solved through dialogue under international law and international organizations such as the United Nations — as if all conflict resulted from misunderstandings instead of competing interests. In a 2020 poll, only 24 percent of Germans said they considered that under some circumstances war could sometimes be necessary to achieve justice, while over 51 percent said war is never necessary. In the specific case of Russia, there is also a belief that Berlin might be better-placed than others to play a mediating role. Berlin should remain gesprächsfähig — “able to talk” with Russia.
Nonetheless, an increasing number of Germans are beginning to argue that one might also draw a different lesson from history — such as that it is not a good idea to try to appease aggressors. In an small gesture toward this ideal, the German defense minister has announced the delivery of 5,000 helmets to Ukraine (nonetheless, some said this amounted to “sabre-rattling”).
Prematurely sanctioning Russia will accomplish nothing
Germany’s allies might find its habitual pacifism frustrating — but they should still try to understand the underlying mind-set. And Germany should do what it can to reassure these allies, even if it maintains its rejection of arms deliveries. The helmets, as well as the announcement that it will provide a field hospital to Ukraine, are steps in this direction — as are some recent public statements. In a speech in the German parliament on Thursday, for instance, Baerbock said military actions against Ukraine would have “massive consequences” for Russia. But German leaders should do more — for example, meeting with their counterparts in Kyiv to discuss ways in which they can help, apart from weapons deliveries.
In the end, despite the restrictions imposed by its laws, there is little doubt that the German government stands behind NATO and its allies. The new government put a strong message of support for NATO in its coalition agreement, and the foreign minister has been clear that Russia’s demands for so-called security guarantees — such as ruling out NATO expansion — are non-starters. But given the prominence of dovish voices in the country, German leaders need to redouble their efforts to show their resolve against Russian aggression. Otherwise, they only weaken NATO’s and Ukraine’s positions in the crisis, and hasten their own irrelevance. | null | null | null | null | null |
The All-Star Game, the second of Kuznetsov’s career, was a reward for his strong bounce-back season with Washington. He’s been an anchor for a Capitals group riddled with injuries and absences through the first half of the season, and hopes to continue that productivity in the coming weeks.
But all-star weekend — an NHL event designed to be fun, creative and high-energy — was less about Kuznetsov’s personal game, and more about his personality. It was about Kuznetsov just simply being Kuznetsov, his cheerful disposition in the spotlight in Las Vegas.
“Nah, I just don’t give a f---,” Kuznetsov said in a recent interview with The Washington Post, as he broke out into laughter once again.
Kuznetsov’s lighthearted personality was exemplified on a national stage Friday night in the all-star skills competition, where he finished dead last in the fastest skater competition and knocked over a cone in the process. The Russian looked on cruise control during the event, just skating for fun. But when he reached the finish line, he raised his hands up in the air like he won the entire thing. His fellow all-stars on the bench burst out laughing.
Kaprizov — who named his cat Kuzy, after Kuznetsov — did the rest. He threw on an Ovechkin all-star jersey, wore his signature yellow laces and did Ovechkin’s his famous “hot stick” celebration.
Kuznetsov was there in Las Vegas to have a good time — and it showed. Winning, as Kuznetsov said, isn’t everything. Sometimes it’s about being happy for the others that do.
Kuznetsov’s philosophy is something he wants to instill in his two children, especially his 6-year-old, Ecenia. His son, Fedor, turns 3 in June.
Kuznetsov’s parenting beliefs are also built around learning from past mistakes. He tested positive for cocaine while representing the Russian national team at the world championships in 2019. His discipline and commitment was questioned last year, during an up-and-down season that included two stints on the NHL’s coronavirus protocols list.
He admits he’s had his fair share of issues, but believes sharing his experiences can help others.
And as it’s been for the majority of the season, the all-star weekend in Las Vegas was a collection of “ups” for Kuznetsov. His voice carried in any room he was in, keeping the conversations light but serious when needed. On the ice, he put on a show. He let loose and had fun; his wide smile omnipresent. | null | null | null | null | null |
Conservative-led school board fires superintendent after allegations of private ultimatum, teacher protest
Douglas County Superintendent Corey Wise is seen Feb. 4. (Douglas County School District)
A school board outside Denver voted to fire the district’s superintendent Friday night in a controversial move that came amid accusations that the newly elected conservative majority had violated state open-meeting laws.
The Douglas County, Colo., school board voted 4 to 3 in a special meeting Friday night to fire Corey Wise without cause, dismissing the superintendent with two years left in his contract. Wise, voted in by the board last April, supported policies on in-school masking and equity that were overturned in the months since by four conservatives who campaigned against critical race theory and other diversity initiatives and were elected to the board.
As she cast her vote against Wise’s firing, Elizabeth Hanson, one of the board’s three liberal members, said that the actions of her conservative colleagues amounted to “an attack on public education.” Board member Susan Meek said she was in “shock and dismay” when she, Hanson and David Ray were alerted last week to the alleged collusion from the conservative majority to ouster Wise without cause.
Meek accused the conservative board members of “illegal” conduct by allegedly meeting in secret to push out the superintendent — a claim at least one of the conservative members denies. Mike Peterson, the school board president, said in a statement that he rejected reports that “I or any of the majority board members [violated] any laws related to the discussion of any personnel matter.” He did not provide further details.
Douglas County is seen as a stronghold for conservatives, having supported Donald Trump in the presidential elections. The school board race in the county drew so much attention that the conservatives were featured on Fox News in the run-up to the election. All four members of the “Kids First” group won, tipping the school board majority to the right.
Then, on Jan. 25, the conservative majority voted to change an equity policy that was adopted last year, which called for hiring a more diverse workforce and evaluating the curriculum. Conservative members said there were “legitimate questions” raised by parents and district employees regarding the “feelings of shame and guilt” generated by the initiative.
Meek said she and her fellow liberal board members learned on Jan. 28 that Peterson and Williams, and potentially other conservative members, allegedly met privately with Wise, a 25-year district employee. They allegedly gave the superintendent an ultimatum to resign by Tuesday at midnight or be fired through a school board vote.
National School Boards Association stumbles into politics and is blasted apart
Among those at the meeting was Kelly Mayr, a 54-year-old mother of nine who has lived in the district since 1997. Mayr still has five children attending Douglas County public schools, including some with special education needs. She’s deeply concerned about the direction the district is going with the ouster of Wise, who, she said, prioritized special education. | null | null | null | null | null |
Beijing Olympics live updates Karen Chen takes the ice; Zoi Sadowski-Synnott seizes control in slopestyle
Zoi Sadowski-Synnott takes control in first run of women’s slopestyle final
China’s Zhu Yi struggles in figure skating team event
United States leads entering second day of figure skating competition
New Zealand's Zoi Sadowski-Synnott reacts after her first slopestyle run Sunday. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
By Jake Lourim9:05 p.m.
On a grueling first run at the women’s slopestyle final, New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott took control of the event with a strong ride punctuated by a backside 1080 on the final jump. She scored 84.51 to pace the field.
The first run proved to be a challenge for most of the contenders, as six of 12 stumbled or fell at some point and scored 35.01 or lower. Australia’s Tess Coady stands in second with a first-run score of 82.68, followed by Canada’s Laurie Blouin at 77.96.
Two-time reigning gold medalist Jamie Anderson, from South Lake Tahoe, Calif., scored 22.98 after catching the lip of her board coming off a rail early in the race. The other two Americans, Hailey Langland and Julia Marino, also stumbled.
They’ll all have a tough act to match after seeing Sadowski-Synnott’s first effort. Sadowski-Synnott won the slopestyle world championships in 2019 and 2021, as well as the gold medal at the X Games last month.
BEIJING — The Chinese figure skating team, expected to rely on standout performances from pair skating duo Sui Wenjing and Han Cong, suffered a blow to its medal chances. In the women’s short program, Zhu Yi struggled through her short program with mistakes on multiple jumps to score just a 47.03. That’s the lowest mark among the first three skaters.
China entered the second day of the team event in third, behind only the United States and the Russian Olympic Committee, two teams expected to medal.
“Mostly I’m so proud that, you know, my goals for today were to keep fighting, to never give up, to ski with the best technique I could,” Diggins said. “It feels so good to have one race under my belt. I’m so excited for this week.”
BEIJING — The United States leads the figure skating team event entering the second of three days of competition. The Americans started strong with top finishes from Nathan Chen in the men’s short program and Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue in the rhythm dance. In the pair skating short program, U.S. duo Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier placed third, the best result they could have hoped for without major mistakes from the top-finishing Chinese and Russian pairs.
In the team event, which debuted in 2014, skaters earn points based on their finish, with 10 for first, nine for second and so on. A representative from each country performs each program, and the top five teams advance to the free skates. The eight segments (two programs in each discipline) are contested over three days of competition, and after the first, the U.S. team led with 28 points.
The Russian Olympic Committee, projected to win this event because of its strength in all disciplines, is in second with 26 points. The Russians could jump into the lead Sunday with Kamila Valieva, the gold medal favorite in the women’s individual event, performing her short program. The United States will be represented by Karen Chen, who skates just before Valieva, the final competitor in this segment.
While the United States and the ROC are nearly assured a spot in the free skate portion of this event, there could be a tight competition for the final three spots. Five countries enter Monday’s competition within six points of one another — China (21), Japan (20), Italy (18), Canada (16) and Georgia (15).
After the women’s short programs, the top five teams will compete in the men’s free skate. The final three segments will be held Monday. | null | null | null | null | null |
It took until past the halfway point in its ACC schedule, but the Virginia men’s basketball team finally has a conference winning streak after torrid shooting, particularly from Armaan Franklin, sparked a 71-58 win against Miami on Saturday night at John Paul Jones Arena.
“'Armaan, I said, you don’t have to worry about being defined if the shots not going down. You impact the game in as many ways as possible,' " Bennett said. “And then that’ll come. You’ll work at it. You’ll bang shots.”
Franklin also shot the only free throws of the game for either team, converting all three attempts in the second half, and missed matching his career-high scoring performance, which came this season against Georgia on Nov. 22, by one point.
The outcome, in front of an announced crowd of 14,089, crystallized when the Cavaliers went on an 18-8 binge bridging the halves. That run featured Gardner scoring six points, all in the second half, including a jumper off a pass from Clark that expanded the lead to 48-34 with 14:09 left in the second half.
The first half concluded with Franklin curling around a screen and sinking three-pointer at the buzzer from well beyond the top of the arc that staked the Cavaliers to their largest lead to that point, 35-26.
The Hurricanes, meantime, missed their first 10 three-point attempts of the game before Moore made their first with 1:57 to play in the first half.
Center Francisco Caffaro was in the starting lineup for a seventh straight game four days after absorbing a nasty blow to the head during a 67-55 win against Boston College. The 7-foot-1 Argentine ran into Eagles forward James Karnik and played just 14 minutes.
The collision left Caffaro with a cut below his right eye but no other damage. The redshirt junior played the first five and half minutes before coming out in favor of redshirt sophomore Kadin Shedrick, who started the first 16 games this season.
Caffaro finished with eight points, making all four of his field goal attempts, with five rebounds and an assist in 23 minutes.
Laranaga homecoming
Long before Bennett took over in Charlottesville, Miami Coach Jim Laranaga was on the bench for the Cavaliers when the program was ascending to national prominence in the 1980s with center Ralph Sampson, the three-time national player of the year.
Laranaga was an assistant to then-Virginia coach Terry Holland from 1979 to 1986 and helped the Cavaliers to Final Four appearances in 1981 and ’84 and the 1980 NIT championship. He later became the coach at George Mason, directing the upstart Patriots to the Final Four in 2006. | null | null | null | null | null |
Vanderbilt forward Terren Frank (15) is defended by LSU’s Darius Days (4) and Tari Eason (13) during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Zaleski)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Rodney Chatman scored a season-high 24 points, making 6 of 10 from 3-point range, and Vanderbilt beat No. 25 LSU 75-66 Saturday for the Commodores’ biggest win this season. | null | null | null | null | null |
The All-Star Game, the second of Kuznetsov’s career, was a reward for his strong bounce-back season with Washington. He has been an anchor for a Capitals group riddled with injuries and absences through the first half of the season and hopes to continue that productivity in the coming weeks.
But all-star weekend — an NHL event designed to be fun, creative and high-energy — was less about Kuznetsov’s personal game and more about his personality. It was about Kuznetsov simply being Kuznetsov, his cheerful disposition in the spotlight in Las Vegas.
“Nah, I just don’t give a f---,” Kuznetsov said in a recent interview with The Washington Post as he broke out into laughter again.
Kuznetsov’s lighthearted personality was exemplified on a national stage Friday night in the all-star skills competition, where he finished dead last in the fastest skater competition and knocked over a cone in the process. The Russian looked on cruise control during the event, just skating for fun. But when he reached the finish line, he raised his hands up in the air as if he won the entire thing. His fellow all-stars on the bench burst out laughing.
Kaprizov — who named his cat Kuzy, after Kuznetsov — did the rest. He threw on an Ovechkin all-star jersey, wore his signature yellow laces and did Ovechkin’s famous “hot stick” celebration.
Kuznetsov was there in Las Vegas to have a good time — and it showed. Winning, as Kuznetsov said, isn’t everything. Sometimes it’s about being happy for the others who do.
Kuznetsov’s philosophy is something he wants to instill in his two children, especially his 6-year-old daughter, Ecenia. His son, Fedor, turns 3 in June.
Kuznetsov’s parenting beliefs are also built around learning from past mistakes. He tested positive for cocaine while representing Russia at the world championships in 2019. His discipline and commitment were questioned last year during an up-and-down season that included two stints on the NHL’s coronavirus protocols list.
He admits he has had his fair share of issues but believes sharing his experiences can help others.
And as it has been for the majority of the season, all-star weekend in Las Vegas was a collection of “ups” for Kuznetsov. His voice carried in any room he was in, keeping the conversations light but serious when needed. On the ice, he put on a show. He let loose and had fun, his wide smile omnipresent. | null | null | null | null | null |
It took until past the halfway point in its ACC schedule, but the Virginia men’s basketball team finally has a conference winning streak after torrid shooting, particularly from Armaan Franklin, sparked a 71-58 win against Miami on Saturday night at John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville.
“ ‘Armaan, I said, you don’t have to worry about being defined if the shots not going down. You impact the game in as many ways as possible,’ ” Bennett said. “ ‘And then that’ll come. You’ll work at it. You’ll bang shots.’ ”
Franklin also shot the only free throws of the game for either team, converting all three attempts in the second half, and missed by one point matching his career-high scoring performance, which came this season against Georgia on Nov. 22.
The outcome, in front of an announced crowd of 14,089, crystallized when the Cavaliers went on an 18-8 binge bridging the halves. That surge featured Gardner scoring six points, all in the second half, including a jumper off a pass from Clark that expanded the lead to 48-34 with 14:09 left.
The first half concluded with Franklin curling around a screen and sinking a three-pointer at the buzzer from well beyond the top of the arc that staked the Cavaliers to their largest lead to that point at 35-26.
The Hurricanes, meanwhile, missed their first 10 three-point attempts of the game before Moore made their first with 1:57 to play in the first half.
Center Francisco Caffaro was in the starting lineup for a seventh straight game four days after he absorbed a nasty blow to the head during a 67-55 win against Boston College. The 7-foot-1 Argentine ran into Eagles forward James Karnik and played just 14 minutes.
The collision left Caffaro with a cut below his right eye but no other damage. The redshirt junior played the first 5½ minutes before coming out in favor of redshirt sophomore Kadin Shedrick, who started the first 16 games this season.
Caffaro finished with eight points, making all four of his field goal attempts, five rebounds and an assist in 23 minutes.
Larrañaga homecoming
Long before Bennett took over in Charlottesville, Miami Coach Jim Larrañaga was on the bench for the Cavaliers when the program was ascending to national prominence in the 1980s with center Ralph Sampson, the three-time national player of the year.
Larrañaga was an assistant to then-Virginia coach Terry Holland from 1979 to 1986 and helped the Cavaliers to Final Four appearances in 1981 and 1984 and the 1980 NIT championship. He later became the coach at George Mason, directing the upstart Patriots to the Final Four in 2006. | null | null | null | null | null |
Researcher Johan Lundstrom's cabin in Bjurstrask, which is about 60 miles from the Arctic Circle. He says the snow there smells “extremely clean.” But he says snow in a city has a different odor to it, whether it is exhaust from vehicles or the rubber from tires. (Jens Lundstrom)
Climate change is also affecting the amount of snow that the United States receives. Nationally, the contiguous United States has warmed 1.7 degrees since the 1901-1930 period, when climate normals were first calculated, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That means it’s getting wetter, but not snowier, with 80 percent of weather stations seeing a decrease in snow, according to an Environmental Protection Agency analysis. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - This photo provided by the North Korean government shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches what it says a test launch of a hypersonic missile on Jan. 11, 2022 in North Korea. 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) (Uncredited/KCNA via KNS) | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: Richmond hosts the George Mason Patriots after Tyler Burton scored 36 points in Richmond’s 71-61 victory over the Saint Bonaventure Bonnies.
Josh Oduro is averaging 17.7 points, 6.4 rebounds and 1.7 blocks for the Patriots. De’Von Cooper is averaging 2.0 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for George Mason. | null | null | null | null | null |
Julia Marino won silver in the women's slopestyle competition Sunday morning. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — That the United States’ first medal of the Beijing Olympics came in slopestyle snowboarding was no surprise at Genting Snow Park: Americans have dominated the sport since its introduction in the Winter Games in 2014. The surprising element was the medalist herself.
Julia Marino won the first Olympic medal of her career Sunday, a silver in the women’s slopestyle competition with a score of 87.68 in her second of three runs.
A 24-year-old whose 11th-place finish in a taxing competition in the PyeongChang Olympics four years ago fell far below her own expectations, Marino bested an American medal favorite in Jamie Anderson (eighth place) and an American with an arguably bigger reputation in Hailey Langland (11th place). Marino’s medal shows the depth of Team USA’s snowboarding prowess.
Marino fell on her first run, but in a competition in which the only the best single-run score out of three counts for each competitor, she posted a score on her second time through that led the field until the very last run of the day. That was by Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, the reigning X Games champion and gold-medal favorite, who landed her final trick to cap a soaring, monster performance. Sadowski-Synnott’s score of 92.88 made her New Zealand’s first Winter Olympic gold medalist.
All three women on the podium executed runs that included at least one 900 and one 1080. Sadowski-Synnott’s and Marino were followed by Australian Tess Coady, whose 84.15 earned bronze. She became her country’s first female Olympian to win a snowboarding medal.
When Sadowski-Synnott nailed her final jump with a resounding thwack and raised her hands in victory, Marino and Coady ran out and tackled her in a squishy dogpile of parka-clad riders.
“Just getting a medal here in general means so much; last Olympics was pretty tough,” Marino said. “ … I just took the last four years to kind of regroup and figure out what I wanted to do and work hard on gettin’ some new tricks dialed in. It just all prepared me for this moment, and it feels really good.”
Live updates: The latest results and news from the Beijing Olympics
The man-made snow at these Olympics made the course hard to read and contributed to countless falls throughout the final. Olympic courses are bigger and have jumps that snowboarders don’t see at any other courses on their circuit, and Marino spent the last minutes of the final cheering on her fellow riders.
“It was a really hard course and a technical course, and I was just happy that everyone made it through there,” Marino said. “Not only made it through, but put down their best run that they possibly could. For me, it was kind of just [enjoying] the rest of the show.”
It was quite a show to take in, thanks to Sadowski-Synnott. The 20-year-old Kiwi ended her final run with a signature double-cork 1080 — two off-axis flips and three full rotations — followed by a backside 1080. She is the first snowboarder to add an Olympic gold to a world and X Games title in less than a year.
“I did make a bit of a mistake on that run by taking too much speed into that last jump but in the air, I just knew that I had to land it with everything I had in me,” Sadowski-Synnott said. “And I’ve done that trick so many times that I knew that I could do it. Man, I was so stoked that I did.”
Sunday’s final featured all three medalists from the 2018 Winter Games, with Anderson (gold), Canada’s Laurie Blouin (silver) and Finland’s Enni Rukajarvi (bronze) having qualified with relatively little drama the day before.
Entering the race, most eyes in the snowboarding world were focused directly on Sadowski-Synnott and Anderson.
But Anderson’s quest to become the first snowboarder to win three consecutive gold medals in an event officially ended after a fall on her third run left her shaking her head. The 31-year-old was poised to break her tie with three-time medalist Shaun White, also a competitor in Beijing in men’s halfpipe, for the most become the most decorated Olympic snowboarder ever. Anderson entered the final with her two slopestyle gold medals and one silver in big air from the 2018 Games. Instead, she finished in ninth place out of 12 finalists with a 60.78
Langland wasn’t able to complete a clean run in her three tries and finished 11th.
“I feel of course so sad to not be able to put down a run,” Anderson said. “ … I genuinely feel so happy for the girls, I’m so happy for Jules, she laced her run and I know she really needed this — and I’m really happy for Zoi and Tess and just to see where and how far snowboarding has come for the girls. Even if I was a little bit of that inspiration for the girls, I feel so proud and so grateful.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Armored truck driver shot in robbery, police say
Incident occurs in Riverdale Park
The driver of an armored truck was shot Saturday while making a delivery in Riverdale Park, the city’s police said.
Several armed robbers approached the driver about 4 p.m. in the 6200 block of Baltimore Avenue, the police said.
The driver was shot at least twice and taken to a hospital in serious condition, according to the police.
It was not clear if any money was taken or exactly why the driver was shot.
Riverdale Park is a town of about 7,200 in Prince George’s County. | null | null | null | null | null |
Woman dies after being found on DC freeway, police said
It appeared that she had been stabbed, police say.
A woman who had apparently been stabbed was found Saturday outside a car on the Anacostia Freeway, the D.C. police said. She died at the scene, they said.
The woman was found about 11:15 p.m. after police received a call about an unconscious person on the roadway near East Capitol Street, said Officer Sean Hickman, a police spokesman.
No name was available Saturday evening, and few other details could be learned. | null | null | null | null | null |
Kamila Valieva helped the Russian team surge past the U.S. in the figure skating competition. (Manan Vatsyayana/AFP via Getty Images)
BEIJING — Vincent Zhou stood beneath the blazing lights in the Capital Indoor Stadium’s interview area late Sunday morning, dabbing sweat from his forehead. A few minutes before, the American had finished a solid but far-from-spectacular free skate in the team event that was only good for third place of the five competitors. A disappointment, yes.
“Some good things and some bad things,” he said.
He clutched a tissue and dabbed at the perspiration building above his mask. Then he looked down.
In less than three hours on Sunday, the U.S. lost its first-day lead in this event, falling to second, three points behind the team representing the Russian Olympic Committee. Zhou’s third-place finish came after Karen Chen finished fifth in the women’s short program. Each was far behind the brilliant performances skated by the top finishers, Russia’s Kamila Valieva and Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama.
(Teams receive points in reverse order of finish in each of eight segments. With three segments left, the Russians have 45 points, followed by the United States with 42 and Japan with 39. Canada, with 30, and China, with 29, are well behind.)
In many ways, Zhou and Chen were the U.S.'s best hopes to contend for a team gold, especially after Kagiyama beat Russian Mark Kondratiuk in the men’s free skate. Afterward, Zhou was directly asked how he felt about him and Chen perhaps costing the Americans a gold. For a moment he looked shocked by the question.
“I would say that’s a little harsh,” he replied. “I think all of us are great athletes and prepared to do our jobs here. It’s a team effort; let’s see what happens.”
But even if Zhou and Chen had skated better on Sunday, it would have been hard to imagine the U.S. holding off the Russian team and its brilliant women.
In the morning stillness of the Capital Indoor Arena, one of them — the 15-year-old Valieva — kept spinning in a perfect, tight spiral, a flash of purple and sequins trapped in a perpetual twirl with her leg above the air. She held the spin for so long you could hear the rat-a-tat-tat of the photographers’ cameras.
Valieva has sailed through the highest levels of skating. After giving up gymnastics for skating at 5, she has been dominant. Over the past three years she has won every major junior and senior competition except for last year’s Russian championships.
Chen, seven years older, knew she would need to dazzle to keep pace. Unlike Valieva, she has never medaled at a major international competition. Her best finishes before this Olympics were two fourth places at the world championships, four years apart. She has always said her best performances have come when she skates clean programs and outlasts others’ mistakes.
But she made too many of her own mistakes Sunday, looking tentative through her entire routine and never recovering from her fall.
She added that she was happy that she had stayed with her program after the fall “and didn’t chicken out.”
“I’m definitely disappointed about the loop because like I should have hit it and I know I can hit it and if I had a chance to go out there again I know I can hit it. I’m proud of the fight I had in my performance,” she added.
Later, Zhou stood in the same interview area, a few feet from where Chen had been, still dabbing sweat from his head. Someone pointed out that his program, with four quadruple jumps, is challenging, designed to earn huge scores if all goes right. He nodded.
He started to say that he had been practicing the program well in the weeks since being named to the Olympic team last month. But suddenly a huge cheer rose inside the room. Kondratiuk had appeared, and a group of about 15 Russian reporters roared in celebration of his second-place finish. Kondratiuk smiled and placed his hands on his chest.
Their cheers drowned out Zhou’s explanation of the risk-reward of his free skate program. His lips moved but his words disappeared into the Russian journalists’ shouts.
Somehow it seemed a fitting end to a morning in which the U.S. hopes all but vanished against a Russian team it dared believe it could beat. | null | null | null | null | null |
The music industry is thriving — but it’s not always trickling down to artists
Neil Young, on left, and UFC announcer and podcaster Joe Rogan. (AP)
By Sam Backer
Sam Backer is the cohost of "Money 4 Nothing," a podcast about music and capitalism. He is currently a PhD candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University.
If your 2022 bingo card didn’t include Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan, you weren’t alone. Over the past week, however, a conflict between the legendary songwriter and one of the world’s most popular podcasters has spilled over into a broader discussion about the modern music industry. Briefly: Rogan’s show has been a font of coronavirus misinformation. Young told Spotify (which purchased exclusive rights to Rogan for a reported $100 million) that it could either have the podcast or his music. The next day, he removed his catalogue.
While Young’s actions have been widely applauded, a handful of commentators noted that few artists are able to follow his example. To pull music off a service such as Spotify, you need to own rights to the recordings. For most musicians, those are held by the major labels — powerful corporations that dominate the contemporary music industry. Driven by the expansion of streaming services such as Spotify, and buoyed by the promise of future income from social media, advertising and NFTs, these firms see only blue skies (and vast riches) ahead. The clearest indication of this optimism comes via the stock market, where Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record label, went public to the tune of roughly $45 billion — a sum unthinkable only recently.
It’s a remarkable change given that less than 20 years ago, the Internet seemed poised to obliterate the industry. During the 2000s, the majors were viewed as slow-moving and old-fashioned, fatally anchored to physical releases in an era of rapidly expanding digital culture. File-sharing services such as Napster eroded the ability to restrict access to audio recordings, upending a long-standing profit model. Music, easily consumed free, seemed to have little or no commercial value online.
Yet, the emergence of digital media is far from the first large-scale technological shift the music business has survived. Indeed, the ability of companies such as Universal or Warner Music (Young’s label) to successfully adapt places them squarely within the 150-year history of modern commercial song. Examining the return of the major labels within a broader perspective not only allows us to better understand the contemporary industry, but also reveals some of the underlying social and economic dynamics that mark the evolution of American popular culture.
In the 1890s, long before records or films achieved commercial dominance, the business executives who founded Tin Pan Alley (the nation’s first major music industry) focused on the cutting-edge technology of the time — sheet music. Pianos had long been the status symbol for respectability among both middle-class Americans and those hoping to join their ranks. New production methods rendered the instrument increasingly affordable for a large swath of the population. A market explosion in sheet music followed behind.
For the previous century, Americans had purchased a wide variety of sheet music, everything from “classical” European composers or sentimental parlor ballads to Blackface-derived minstrel tunes. Tin Pan Alley, however, focused on producing what came to be known as “popular songs” — easy-to-play, novelty-driven compositions designed to catch the listener’s ear.
The commercial potential for such material was enormous. A success could circulate for years, working its way into daily life across the nation — and garnering hundreds of thousands of sales. Over time, these songs began to move with increasing speed, swiftly peaking in popularity before falling off. Instead of a handful of long-lasting tunes such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (which, even as late as the 1880s, was still referred to as the prototypical pop song by commentators), 20th-century music would be defined by shifting temporary favorites — each of which offered another opportunity for Tin Pan Alley to rake in cash.
Tin Pan Alley’s publishers had stables of songwriters, ready and willing to crank out hits. But, to convince people to buy popular songs, they first had to hear them. To solve this problem, publishers hired “pluggers” — performers paid to sing a composition everywhere from the era’s cabarets and concert saloons to department stores and amusement parks. The most successful pluggers worked in the nation’s booming theatrical circuits, introducing songs to audiences in cities and towns while touring on a Vaudeville chain or Burlesque “wheel.” Through such promotional methods, a sheet music publisher could help make a song popular. If the song became popular enough, people across the country would purchase its sheet music, generating profits for the firm.
For Tin Pan Alley, songs were fundamentally social. Instead of being restricted to closely guarded recordings, they were intentionally circulated — free — by the publishers via their pluggers, in the hopes that the public would be enticed to buy the sheet music. Only after such circulation could publishers hope to translate social engagement into dollars and cents. From this perspective, music wasn’t valuable because it was an item with innate value that a consumer could possess, like a chair or a car. Instead, music was valuable because listeners liked it and shared it. In this way, audiences transformed the cultural production of, for example, Irving Berlin banging away at his piano, into a desirable set of printed goods.
Even after Tin Pan Alley traded sheet music for shellac in the early 20th century, the social value of music remained crucial. Sponsored content dominated radio — which nearly killed the sales of phonographic records during the 1930s — as brands paid performers to mix testimonials and tunes. Similarly, the inclusion of popular songs (and performers) in a wide variety of films in the ‘40s and ‘50s reflected the continued importance of alternate avenues through which compositions could generate profits (just think of the financial importance of the song “Singin’ in the Rain” to the movie of the same name.) In subsequent decades, music videos, video game soundtracks and concert festivals all operated along similar lines.
While Tin Pan Alley set the stage for the industry we know today, in many ways, its operations were the inverse of those adopted by its mid-20th century successor. From the late 1940s onward, music was dominated by labels that sold physical products — LPs and 45s, cassette tapes and eventually CDs. Within this system, songs were defined by the media that contained them. Music became a tangible commodity reproduced and sold to American consumers, gaining social meaning (and earning profit) as it grew in popularity.
While the financial success (and cultural impact) of the mid-century record industry made the link it created between the sale of physical products and the value of commercial music appear natural, a longer time-frame reveals how contingent that connection was. Although labels struggled during the early 2000s, music-adjacent companies such as Apple (which introduced the iPod before the widespread availability of legal MP3s) and YouTube (which remains far and away the most popular way to listen to music online) saw years of incredible growth. Music never lost its worth in the digital environment. These companies thrived by translating the social power of recordings into profit — just not through direct sales. The rise of streaming has enabled labels to do the same. Much like pluggers inducing audiences in the early 20th century to purchase sheet music, the circulation of music online convinces today’s listeners to pay through advertising and subscriptions.
The enormous valuation of companies such as Universal is a ringing endorsement of music’s continued economic potential. It’s also a powerful argument against the exploitation of artist labor. Labels may be making big money again, but by most accounts, the same cannot be said for musicians. As sales of recorded music decreased, many performers turned to touring to make up the difference — a grinding lifestyle that the pandemic has made far more difficult. Similarly, although digital technologies can make it easier to cultivate a dedicated fan base, the last decade has seen the crystallization of a winner-take-all “superstar” model in which top artists reap an increasingly large percentage of the total rewards.
The austere dynamics of modern music emerged during a period in which the entire industry seemed on the brink of collapse. That is no longer true. Warner Music’s willingness to agree to Young’s demands reveals the power that labels still have — and their ability to shift in response to social concerns without much financial risk. This has shed light on who makes decisions about access to music and on the profits being made at the expense of artists. If the majors aren’t going under anytime soon, maybe they could try sharing some more of the pie. | null | null | null | null | null |
American Nathan Chen has won three of the past four world championships. (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
It’s a streak so overwhelming that Evan Lysacek, the last American male to win an individual gold medal, says “I don’t know if an athlete is ever made for a sport, but he’s made for this one.”
At the time Chen was 18 and everything had gotten too big. He was nervous, worried, uncertain of what to do, overwhelmed by the expectations. “A sense of dread,” he says of how he felt when he learned he was going to the Olympics that year.
He’s 22 now, so much more confident, so much more read
y for the Olympics and everything that comes with it. This time he can shrug when asked about the looming duel he should have with Japan’s two-time gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu. This time can say that he’s looking at the Olympics as just another competition.
“I think when you have that perspective, it really allows you to switch away from the narrative of being like, ‘Oh my god, this is like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,’ I think continuing to have that perspective just generally makes me more at ease with what I do and allows me to do whatever I do on the ice without regret.”
A few days after the Zoom call, Chen’s coach, Rafael Arutyunyan, stands in a hallway beneath the skating arena here, jabbing his fingers into the chilly air. Asked what has made Chen the most dominant skater of the past four years, the Russian native counts off the reasons in a broken English.
He does not mention Chen’s skating or ability to propel himself into soaring, spinning jumps, or the gentleness with which he returns to the ice. None of these physical attributes, he says, matters as much as the desire.
“You know how people get gray when they are sick?” Arutunyan recalls. “He was not gray; he was green.”
Arutyunyan suggested pulling out of the competition, but Chen refused. “
“We do like the game Lego — you know Lego?” Arutunyan asks. “You can always match pieces in Lego, so that’s what we do. We have pieces. We can always change it and build something else.”
Or as 2010 Olympic champion Lysacek, the last American male to win an individual Olympic gold in the past 33 years, put it, “You’re dealing with everybody saying you’re the best.”
Among the other changes from four years ago is that Chen is now a third-year student at Yale University, where three straight world championships and six consecutive U.S. titles don’t matter much in higher-level statistics classes.
When Chen goes back to New Haven, Conn., in August, he won’t even be sure what he wants to do with his life. He declared his major to be statistics and data science, because he always seemed to be better with math than writing while growing up. He figured data will be a part of whatever career he decides to pursue so he signed up for the classes.
He’s asked if he’s just musing or if this is something he’s truly considering. At first he says he’s just thinking out loud then adds, “but it’s also ingrained in truth.”
“I mean, I already, honestly, had a pretty great career,” he says. “I’ve been able to experience a lot in my career. Ultimately, after these Games, I think the most important thing is being able to maintain that passion and love for the sport. And I think if that becomes a point where I’m like ‘Hey, I want to do other things in my life, but I’m still going to stick to this because I’m afraid to let it go,’ [then] I think that becomes an issue, because then it’s like you’re not doing it for the right reasons.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The federal courts need to take note. While many states allow some electronic coverage of criminal, civil and appellate proceedings, the federal system has insisted on maintaining its absolute and antiquated ban of cameras. Federal civil rights charges against former Minneapolis police officers Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane raise critical questions about the role and responsibilities of police — issues that people should be able to learn about with their own eyes and ears. Similarly, there was great interest in the issues surrounding the trials of Ghislaine Maxwell and Elizabeth Holmes, but because they were in federal court there was no chance for broader public access.
Testifying before Congress in support of legislation that would open up the federal courts to more public access, Mickey H. Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, referenced the words more than a century ago of Justice John Marshall Harlan, who provided the deciding vote in the Supreme Court decision affirming the ban against cameras in the courtroom. “The day may come when television will have become so commonplace an affair in the daily life of the average person as to dissipate all reasonable likelihood that its use in courtrooms may disparage the judicial process.” That day, Mr. Osterreicher said in 2017, has not only come but has long since passed. More than ever in this time when misinformation is rampant and democratic principles are under attack, there is a need to let the public see how justice is done. | null | null | null | null | null |
Move over, Sven Kramer. Sweden’s Nils van der Poel is new Olympic champ in 5,000
Said Sweden's Nils Van Der Poel, “I wasn’t sure I was going to win today, but there’s always something to fight for.” (REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina)
BEIJING — Somewhere, sometime in the ancient history of humankind, someone drew a starting line, then drew a finish line a little ways down yonder. And someone challenged someone to a race, and the someone who won was the champion until someone else came along who was better. And because no one did, the champion was champion for a good, long while.
And then sometime much later, the young gun arrived.
The longest-running narrative in sports, cliched but eternally human, played out again Sunday across 5,000 meters of glimmering ice of the National Speed Skating Oval, where a vivid and definitive changing of the guard in the discipline of Olympic speedskating took place.
Out, and one step closer to retirement, went 35-year-old Dutchman Sven Kramer, the Olympic gold medalist at 5,000 meters in 2010, 2014 and 2018 and an icon across the skating-mad Netherlands, but on Sunday a distant ninth-place finisher in the final individual race of his storied career. All that remains for the most decorated male speed skater in history, a nine-time medalist, are the team pursuit and mass start races later in this meet.
In, and straight to the top of the podium, strode 25-year-old phenom Nils van der Poel of Sweden, skating in the final pairing of the day and reeling off a blistering final lap of 29.01 seconds to snatch the gold medal from Patrick Roest of the Netherlands. Van der Poel’s winning time of 6 minutes, 8.84 seconds broke an Olympic record Roest had set nearly an hour earlier.
When van der Poel crossed the finish line, he flexed his torso, let out a roar and pulled the hood of his racing suit off the top of his head, the grimace that had gripped his face for the second half of the race suddenly melting into an expression somewhere between rapture and relief.
“I wasn’t sure I was going to win today, but there’s always something to fight for,” van der Poel said. “ … There is a kid in me who would have thought 15 years ago, ‘This is possible.’ It happened, and it’s pretty cool.”
By the time the young champion waved the Swedish flag from atop the medal stand, Kramer long since had left the premises. His heat had taken place some 90 minutes earlier, as a subpar qualifying time relegated him to the first of the day’s 10 pairings.
It was 9:30 a.m. in the Netherlands when Kramer toed the starting line in Beijing, and while an entire nation prayed he could summon one last vintage performance out of the ether, he simply didn’t have one in him. At the end of his final lap, he pulled up a few meters shy of the finish line and glided with his hands on his hips, fully spent. His time of 6:17.04 was more than seven seconds slower than his gold medal time in PyeongChang in 2018, and nearly 14 seconds off the 6:03.32 in 2007, which stood as the world record for a decade.
“I am a bit ashamed,” Kramer told the Dutch media Sunday. “Maybe I played a little too much all-or-nothing. It wasn’t a good ride, but I did all that I could. It wasn’t good enough, which is a shame.”
He already had seen van der Poel seize the world records that were once his in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, and now the kid had taken his title of reigning Olympic champion. It was clear Kramer had been supplanted as the best distance speed skater on the planet, but true to the ancient lineage of great champions knocked from their perch, he ceded the title grudgingly. His praise of van der Poel, required in such a transitional moment, was tempered with notes of caution.
“I think he has a really good condition and a good mind-et, and he’s really living for it. He’s really going for it,” Kramer said in English. “I don’t really know him so well, but he’s the big favorite over here, and I’m looking forward to his races.”
Asked if van der Poel could enjoy the same sort of lengthy reign as himself, Kramer said, “It’s difficult to say after one half-year on that level. Getting there is a bit more easy than [staying at] that level. Hopefully, he has the same career that I had, but it’s going to be difficult.”
At the very least, van der Poel (who claims Dutch heritage by virtue of his paternal grandfather) seems to be a new breed of skater and new breed of champion than the sort churned out by the classic machinery of the Dutch program — which swept 39 of a possible 78 medals at the 2014 and 2018 Winter Games combined, and which boasts Kramer and Ireen Wust, like Kramer a five-time Olympian, as its most vivid distillations.
Van der Poel twice has taken lengthy breaks from the sport, once to join the Swedish military, and again to pursue ultramarathon running. On Sunday, he threatened to take a third, musing that perhaps this time it would stick.
“I did 20 ultras, 1,000 skydives, I served in the army for a year,” he said. “ … I went snowboarding a lot. I went ski mountaineering. I biked the whole of Sweden. I made it adventurous, because I knew there was a time when I would lock myself up, enduring it. I had to build up a mountain of motivation.”
His home oval in Trollhattan, about 50 miles north of Gothenburg, is only 250 meters around, as opposed to the 400 meters of a typical track. Its turns are similar in radius to those of a larger track, but its straightaways are shorter. In essence, he gets more work on his turns than anyone in the world. He has no teammates, preferring to train alone.
Jerry Brewer: As the torch is passed in slopestyle, the future is 'pretty sick'
For the past two months before Beijing, van der Poel moved his training base to the small Bavarian village of Inzell, isolating himself from friends and family, not even emerging for Christmas or New Year’s. He skated in the morning, biked through the Alps in the afternoon and switched his body clock to Beijing time to prepare it for the daily rhythms of the Olympic meet.
He was so concerned about avoiding covid-19 on the trip to Beijing, he showed up for his flight in a full-body hazmat-type suit, only to wriggle out of it when the contraption threatened to bake him.
“It felt like a sauna,” he told the Swedish media. “Then I was ashamed, because no one on the plane who was going to the Olympics had something similar.”
But it all paid off Sunday, and when you’re wearing a gold medal around your neck, your eccentricities don’t seem so weird anymore. They seem brilliant.
“When you’re a professional athlete in a sport that sucks as much as speed skating sucks, you’ve got to find a way to make it suck a little less,” van der Poel said of his unconventional pathway and methods. “Whatever you can get inspired by, you need to find. What do you have to bribe yourself with, to train more than that? If you can find that, perhaps you can win the Olympics.” | null | null | null | null | null |
By J. Kim Penberthy
He has regretted it ever since. That small company was Microsoft.
Regret is a real reaction to a disappointing event in your life, a choice you made that can’t be changed, something you said that you cannot take back. It’s one of those feelings you can’t seem to shake, a heavy and intrusive negative emotion that can last for minutes, days, years or even a lifetime. Imaging studies reveal that feelings of regret show increased activity in an area of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex.
Dealing with regret is even more difficult because of the other negative emotions connected to it: remorse, sorrow and helplessness. Regret can increase our stress, negatively affect physical health and throw off the balance of hormone and immune systems. Regret is not only unpleasant. It is unhealthy.
Need a quick stress-reliever? Try one of these surprising science-based strategies.
As a licensed clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, I conduct research on stressful emotions. Through this work, I help patients overcome regret, move on with their lives and grow. And that is the good news: Regret can be overcome through interventions such as therapy and evidence-based strategies.
Research suggests that action-related regrets, although painful, spur people to learn from their mistakes and move on. But regret related to the inaction path — the things undone, the opportunities lost — is harder to fix. This kind of regret is more likely to lead to depression, anxiety, a sense of “stuckness” and a feeling of longing over not knowing what could have been.
As with other negative emotions, it doesn’t work to avoid, deny or try to squash regret. In the long run, these tactics only increase negative feelings and prolong the time you suffer with them. Rather than stay stuck, people can manage these emotions in four steps: First, accept that you are feeling them; determine why you are feeling them; allow yourself to learn from them; and finally, release them and move forward.
You can help release these feelings of regret by practicing self-compassion. This means reminding yourself that you are human, you are doing the best you can, and you can learn from past decisions and grow. Showing this compassion to yourself can help you accept and move past the regret.
Accepting that you have feelings of regret does not mean that you like these feelings. It just means you know they are there. It also helps to identify the specific emotion you’re feeling. Instead of telling yourself, “I feel bad,” say “This is me, feeling regret.” Simple as it sounds, the semantic difference has a big emotional impact.
In this angry and stressed-out time, research says we can learn to be kinder
Acknowledging your thoughts and feelings can bring relief from strong negative emotions. In Jay’s case, he could remind himself that he had no crystal ball. Instead, he made the best decision he could, given the information he had at the time, and given the same circumstances, most of his contemporaries would have made the same decision.
Forgiving yourself for actions taken or not taken is a powerful step toward overcoming regret. This has been formalized into a commonly used cognitive psychological model called REACH, which asks people to recall the hurt (face it), empathize (be kind and compassionate), altruistically offer forgiveness (to oneself), commit publicly (share it) and then hold on to that forgiveness and stay true to the decision. Research shows that six hours of work with a trained professional using this model can have a positive impact.
Eventually, he accepted the pain of not knowing what might have happened, but also reminded himself of his rationale at the time, which was actually quite reasonable. He demonstrated compassion toward himself, and spoke to himself kindly, the way he would when talking to a loved one or close friend. Practicing this self-compassion allowed him to build resilience, move on from the negative emotions and ultimately forgive himself.
On making future decisions, Jay recognized the importance of obtaining as much information about opportunities as possible. He challenged himself to learn about the big players in the field. Doing so allowed him to overcome his regret and move forward. New opportunities came along. Jay, now employed by another giant computer engineering company, is doing quite well for himself, and has been able to move beyond the regret of his past decision.
J. Kim Penberthy is a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia. | null | null | null | null | null |
Vincent Van Gogh (b. 1853). Rain, 1889. In the collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
“Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (Ōhashi Atake no yūdachi)," from the series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)” (1857) by Utagawa Hiroshige. Woodblock print; ink and color on paper. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Why does the death penalty persist?
The execution chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Okla.
The Jan. 29 editorial “It’s time to end the death penalty” listed compelling reasons to abolish capital punishment. It neither keeps society safer nor deters violence better than long sentences. It revictimizes a murder victim’s family and friends, who wait an average of 17 years for an execution. It extinguishes any possibility of rehabilitation. (It’s called a “corrections” system, right?) And because state-approved killing drains more tax dollars than a life sentence, it depletes resources that could be used to heal victims’ families and underwrite crime prevention measures (education, housing, job training).
The death penalty persists because people don’t want to think about it. Executions are administered in the dark recesses of death houses, often tucked away in remote rural areas. Mostly, they’re missed by mainstream media, leaving underfunded nonprofits such as Death Penalty Action to shine a light on the barbaric affair.
In the words of Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking,” “The profound moral question about those we condemn to death is not, ‘Do they deserve to die?’ but ‘Do we deserve to kill them?’ ”
What kind of society do we want to be? One that kills because it can, compounding violence with violence? Or one that values mercy and compassion as it reimagines justice?
Rick Stack, Silver Spring
President Biden is keeping his promise to end federal executions. As long as he is president, there will be no federal executions. What The Post advocates is for the president to issue a blanket commutation of all federal death sentences, which would do the Republican Party a big favor. The GOP is forever accusing the Democratic Party of being “soft on crime.” Because a majority of Americans continue to support capital punishment, Mr. Biden would be helping the GOP were he to follow The Post’s admonition. Not a wise move.
Scott Wallace, Leesburg | null | null | null | null | null |
Kyle Honore points to a clipboard as his father, Coach Keith Honore, strategizes with his Potomac team during a game against Hylton. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post)
Potomac (Va.) senior point guard Kyle Honore is one of the most dynamic players in Prince William County, but when he was a preteen he was just trying to keep up with the Panthers.
The team, coached by Kyle’s father, Keith Honore, was running sprints one afternoon, and Kyle, who asked to participate in varsity drills, was consistently finishing last. The rule was if a single player finished after a set amount of time, the whole team would have to run again. One sprint after another, Keith Honore told his squad to line up again because Kyle didn’t make it.
“I thought to myself: ‘Kyle didn’t make it? Kyle is 11!’ ” Kyle remembers. “But they held me to a higher standard. And they would tell me ‘If you don’t think you can do this, you can sit off to the side.’ But I wasn’t going to do that. … Those days are a big reason for my success today.”
Today Kyle has no problem leading the pack. He is the third Honore to play for his father at Potomac, following brothers Brandon and Keijon. Keith Honore played at the Dumfries school in the 1990s before spending a decade as an assistant coach and then taking over as head coach in 2005. All three sons have worn the same number he did as a Panther: 11. The coach keeps a collage photo on his phone featuring all four of them in uniform.
“Potomac’s been in my blood since I was born,” said Keijon Honore, who joined his father’s staff as an assistant coach in 2019 after a college career at Virginia Wesleyan. “It’s hard to even think of my early days without thinking of the Potomac gym.”
Together, father and older brother have helped guide Kyle through a senior season in which the team has asked much of him. He was the only returning role player from a Potomac squad that went to last year’s Class 6 finals, and the program sets the bar high. In Honore’s 16 years at the helm, the Panthers have won 10 district championships, six region titles and two state championships.
The coach won his first district championship with Brandon and his first state championship with Keijon. On Friday night, he reached another milestone thanks in part to Kyle, who put up nine points and 10 assists as Potomac beat Gar-Field, 70-37 — Honore’s 300th career victory.
“To win all those games, it’s a blessing,” he said. “But God has also blessed me with the opportunity to coach not one, not two, but three of my sons. To be able to win and accomplish these things with all three of them? I’m so lucky and grateful and thankful.”
Before this season it became clear Kyle would have to do two things more often: speak and shoot the ball. Potomac (9-6) has a long history of playmaking seniors, and it was finally Kyle’s turn to inherit that role. He’s averaging 19.7 points through 15 games this winter, including a 35-point outing against Freedom (Woodbridge) last month.
His playing style is partly fueled by his early days at Potomac, when he was a freshman on varsity having to fight the assumption he was only there because of his dad. It’s something his brothers dealt with as well.
“I’ve had a conversation with all my kids that people are always going to tell them they’re here because I’m their father or that they’re allowed to do certain things because I’m their father,” Honore said. “That’s just the way of the world. … But all three of them have earned everything they’ve gotten.”
For Kyle, those whispers drove him to play with more passion.
“I go out there with a chip on my shoulder every day and try to prove why I’m on the court,” he said.
If Kyle is ever lacking in confidence, he always has his family nearby to provide some. Before every game, when he takes the court, he gets a special handshake and a few words of support from Keijon. The message is always the same.
“I tell him to do what he does,” Keijon said. “And that there isn’t anybody in this state, in this country, in this world that I’d take over him.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Police investigate fatal shooting in Columbia, Md.
Howard County police said they are investigating a fatal shooting Saturday night in Columbia.
Police said they responded at 8:11 p.m. to a report of a person shot in the 7300 block of Hickory Log Circle and found a male in a parking lot with gunshot wounds. He was taken to Howard County General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, they said.
A police spokesperson said there is no information on any suspects and that the investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information is asked to call 911. | null | null | null | null | null |
Jaelin Kauf won the United States’ second medal of the Games, another silver. (Lisi Niesner/Reuters)
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — The blue patches on Jaelin Kauf’s snow pants that sit just below her knees bobbed up and down like a buoy in a storm. The blocks of color lifted every time Kauf flew over a mogul, sometimes bucking so quickly and wildly that it looked like the skier might lose control and send a knee straight into her chin.
They helped illustrate what a time clock would later confirm: On Sunday night under the lights at Genting Snow Park, the American was moving fast.
Kauf, a 25-year-old from Colorado, rode her speedy skiing all the way to the podium and won the United States’ second medal of the Beijing Games in women’s moguls less than 12 hours after snowboarder Julia Marino won the first in slopestyle at the same venue, both silver. These freezing mountains may prove to be fruitful yet.
Kauf placed second in the final with a score of 80.28, skiing faster but coming up just short of Australian Jakara Anthony, who took gold with a slightly cleaner run with slightly more daring jumps that earned a score of 83.09. Anastasiia Smirnova of the Russian Olympic Committee won bronze with 77.72.
When Kauf saw the score on her final run, her jaw dropped in happy disbelief as she thrust her arms in the air.
“It wasn’t a flawless run, and I just didn’t know what the judges were going to do with that,” Kauf said. “I kind of had a little arm thing on the bottom air and I didn’t know if I had sold the landing. When it popped up with my score and I realized that I was getting an Olympic medal that was guaranteed, I just was — I don’t know. So proud and just in awe of it all.”
Awe had gotten Kauf into trouble before.
At her first Olympic Games in PyeongChang in 2018, the young American arrived as the top-ranked moguls skier in the world and felt the full crush of what it is to be a first-time Olympian — not just the pressure of representing your country, but the overwhelming nature of the Games themselves. Off the course, Kauf felt star-struck. On it, she was too much in her own head.
In moguls, skiers fly down a 250-meter-long course covered in bumps and perform two different jumps along the way, racking up points on the technical quality of their run, the performance on their acrobatic jumps and time.
There are three rounds of the final, with the top 12 skiers advancing after the first and the top six advancing after the second. In PyeongChang, Kauf’s strategy was survive and advance, preserving effort and skiing just well enough to make it to the next round.
It left her on the edge of the bubble, placing seventh and missing out at a chance to go for a medal. In her second Winter Games, she adjusted. Her plan was, essentially, to plan less. Ski fast. Be aggressive. Don’t think.
“For these Games, I was skiing to win every single round,” Kauf said. “I wanted to walk away with absolutely no regrets in my skiing and just put it all out there 100 percent every time. … I think it’s easier to me, skiing faster. Just being aggressive. I’ve always found the less thought goes into it, the faster I go.”
Skiing is second nature to Kauf in part because she grew up in a skiing household. Her mother, Patti, is a two-time champion on the Pro Mogul Tour and three-time bronze medalist in ski cross at the Winter X Games. Her father Scott is a five-time Pro Mogul Tour champion.
But neither has an Olympic medal.
“I was thinking about it going up the lift like, oh my God, I’m going up for the medal round. That was something that I missed out on at the last Olympics and kind of got emotional there at the bottom when I realized I qualified for that final round,” Kauf said. “I knew, definitely, what was at stake, but as I was getting closer to being in the gate I just told myself what I was telling myself every other run: ‘This is your day, leave it all out there, have fun and attack.’ And that’s just what I did.”
Of the four Americans who qualified for the finals, Olivia Giaccio was the only other one to make it to the last round; she finished sixth. Teenager Kai Owens qualified with a single run after missing the opening round of qualification earlier in the week after a crash in training left her with a swollen eye. She was eliminated after the first round.
It ended a significant journey for Owens, 17, who returned to her birth country for the Olympics. She was abandoned in a town square in China as an infant before being adopted at 16 months old by a couple from Colorado. | null | null | null | null | null |
This image made available by the the U.S. Coast Guard shows Cuban migrants on a sinking vessel spotted on Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022, about 40 miles off Key Largo, Fla. “They didn’t have lifejackets or safety equipment,” said Capt. Shawn Koch, commanding officer of Air Station Miami. “If the air crew hadn’t found them on the patrol, these people would not have survived the night.” The migrants were repatriated to Cuba, the Coast Guard said. (U.S. Coast Guard via AP) (Uncredited/U.S. Coast Guard) | null | null | null | null | null |
Two U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors fly over Syria in 2018. (Staff Sgt. Colton Elliott/380th Air Expeditionary Wing)
U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. is expected to meet with UAE leaders and offer a plan to enhance information-sharing on air defenses and to hear out requests for any additional assistance the UAE might need. Last week, the Pentagon said it would send the guided missile destroyer USS Cole and a squadron of advanced F-22 fighters to the UAE, where recent missile attacks have fueled alarm and triggered a response from U.S. troops who are stationed here.
Yemen’s Houthi militants launch new attack on UAE as conflict widens
U.S. troops stationed here at Al-Dhafra Air Base have fired Patriot missiles to intercept Houthi-launched missiles on at least two occasions in recent weeks. The attacks forced the Americans to scramble for cover in reinforced bunkers.
McKenzie, who moved up his trip to Abu Dhabi in light of the attacks, surmised that a “confluence” of factors had precipitated this turn of events — but that the key development was Iran’s loss of influence in Iraq and a need for new fronts in its bid for regional dominance.
“The Iranians have accused the UAE of being involved in the Iraqi election. Iran needs culprits because the election didn’t go well for them,” McKenzie said. “In Iraq in particular, Iran thought they had a political way forward to eject the United States from Iraq … now I think they’re grasping at alternatives, and some of those alternatives may be kinetic and violent.”
“My visit here, and to some degree repositioning, is all designed to send a very careful, calculated message that the United States is a reliable partner … we’re not going to forget this part of the world,” McKenzie said. “We’ve got a lot of ships, we’ve got a lot of problems. We’ve always got an ability to help our friends.” | null | null | null | null | null |
February 4, 2022|Updated yesterday at 5:26 p.m. EST
That is the plan, in four month’s time, and all good health to the queen — who appeared briefly on Saturday, with a cane, to cut a cake and greet a few of her neighbors.
But Feb. 6, the exact day Elizabeth became sovereign in 1952? For the monarch, this is traditionally a more muted anniversary, a day of quiet reflection.
Because for a princess to become a queen? A king must die. This date marks when her beloved father, King George VI, passed away, asleep in his bedroom on the ground floor of Sandringham Estate, the country retreat where a more frail, more cloistered and widowed Elizabeth, aged 95, is residing now, waiting for the pandemic to recede.
“It is a day that, even after 70 years, I still remember as much for the death of my father, King George VI, as for the start of my reign,” she wrote in an anniversary statement released Saturday.
The story of the day and hour of Elizabeth’s accession to the throne has been told many times, but it remains a captivating tale. It’s history with echoes of Arthurian romance.
“The King, a heavy smoker, underwent a left total pneumonectomy in September 1951 for what euphemistically was called ‘structural abnormalities’ of his left lung, but what in reality was a carcinoma,” wrote Rolf F. Barth of Ohio State University in a “pathologists’ reassessment” last year.
“His physicians withheld this diagnosis from him, the public, and the medical profession,” he and co-author L. Maximillian Buja wrote.
Too ill to travel, 56-year-old George tasked Elizabeth and her husband, Philip, with undertaking a months-long tour of the Commonwealth, in what was then the twilight of the British Empire.
“It was a dangerous time in the British colony. The Mau Mau campaign had just broken out across the White Highlands,” wrote historian Nicholas Best in the Observer. “The officials responsible for the princess’s tour of Kenya, Australia and New Zealand felt unable to guarantee her safety while she was in Kenya. It was only fear of ridicule that stopped them canceling the African leg of the trip.”
In an interview, Best told The Washington Post that Walker positioned local men with spears at the edge of the forest to deter journalists, out of concern for Elizabeth’s privacy and also because the smell of more humans would frighten the wildlife.
“Look, Philip, they’re pink!” Elizabeth told her husband, according to Smith’s account.
The elephants had been rolling in red dust.
That same day, King George had been shooting hares — he killed nine — at Sandringham Estate back in England.
The Birmingham Gazette reported that the king died in his sleep sometime in the early morning hours of Feb. 6, after a “perfectly happy day.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Kelly Pannek celebrates with teammates after scoring the United States' fourth goal against Switzerland. (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)
BEIJING — After Team USA’s Amanda Kessel rocketed a slap shot into the net in the final seconds of the first period Sunday night, some of the opposing Switzerland players glanced up at the video board to get another look. And if they peeked below the replay screen, the numbers on the scoreboard were jarring: The United States already led 5-0, with more goals than the Swiss had shots.
A few Switzerland players remained on the bench as the first intermission started, each quietly staring out onto the ice as the Zambonis hummed around the rink, as if they were processing how everything got away from them so quickly. The dominance of the sport’s best can have that effect: Three days ago, the Swiss, the fifth-ranked team in the world, lost by 11 goals to Canada. And on Sunday night, the United States showed no mercy in an 8-0 win, providing more proof that the gulf between the North American juggernauts and everyone else in women’s hockey remains wide.
It will be more fun for Stalder to watch the United States play Canada on Tuesday instead of admiring them up close as she did this week, when both crushed her team. Tuesday’s group play finale between the rivals will likely be a preview of the gold medal game, because if the first several days of the tournament have been any indicator, the other top teams in the world will need a miracle to pull off an upset. The U.S. and Canada are still simply playing on another level, and have been waiting for this moment to meet at the Olympics since the Americans won the gold medal over their rival in a shootout in PyeongChang in 2018, ending Canada’s run of four straight titles.
“It’s one of the best rivalries in sports. I would put it up against anything. Any sport. I’m telling you, for those who don’t have a familiarity with it, it’s absolutely must-watch,” U.S. Coach Joel Johnson said. “Anytime U.S. and Canada play, it could be on a pond — and you put two of those jerseys on, and certainly all of sudden the intensity ramps up.”
Canada has made it clear it is not in Beijing to do anything other than reclaim the gold medal — it opened with wins over Switzerland and Finland, a team many expected to challenge the North American hierarchy at these Olympics, by a combined score of 23-2. And the U.S., despite losing star center Brianna Decker to a tournament-ending injury early in its opener against the Finns, has now beaten three of the world’s top five teams by a combined score of 18-2. Each of those opponents had only 12 shots on goal, with no more than six in any one period.
Sunday marked Team USA’s most impressive offensive performance yet. Five different players scored, including two goals apiece from Hilary Knight, Kelly Pannek and Jesse Compher. Before the game, the entire coaching staff looked at one another and knew their team was ready, Johnson said, but now he and his players can only hope that is the case against Canada on Tuesday. The two teams have seen each other plenty over the past year, playing six games in an exhibition series; Canada won four of those games. Three went to overtime, and all but two were one-goal games.
Pannek, who is helping bolster the lineup at center with Decker out, had one of her best Olympic performances on Sunday night, giving the U.S. a 4-0 lead off a wrister in the first period. That came after Compher and Knight scored nine seconds apart. And by the time Pannek scored another goal in the second period, her team was up 6-0. Afterward, she tried to put her thumb on the lopsided results so far in Beijing and whether other teams are closing the gap to the Americans and Canadiens; it’s been clear that teams have been impacted by the pandemic over the past two years, she said, which has disrupted development programs and caused world championships to be canceled.
Said Johnson: “I think the scores are a little bit deceiving at the start of the tournament … what I see is the growth and development of women’s hockey that in the global pandemic has stalled just a touch, just as it has on the men’s side. So I think the more resources and more visibility that women’s hockey gets at the youngest levels in particular, for the grass roots federations to put money and support into their programs, you’re just going to see it continue. I just think we’re in a little bit of a pause right now.”
Canada and the U.S. have claimed every gold medal since women’s hockey debuted at the Winter Games in 1998, and only one other country — Sweden in 2006 — has ever appeared in the gold medal game. Both teams have also dominated world championships play, with Canada owning 11 titles and the U.S. 9. Only one other team — Finland — has ever earned a silver medal in world championships play, and it came during the 2019 tournament on their home ice. After defeating Canada in the semifinals, known as the “Miracle in Espoo” and considered one of the biggest upsets in the sport’s history, the Finns narrowly lost 2-1 to the U.S. in a shootout in the gold medal game.
Finland was expected to potentially challenge their North American counterparts in this tournament, but lost 5-2 to the U.S. in the opener and were blasted 11-1 by Canada two days later. The Russians didn’t fare much better in a 5-0 loss to the Americans; they’ll meet Canada on Monday, but are still missing six of their players because of a coronavirus outbreak after arriving in Beijing.
Some of those teams might get another crack at the U.S. or Canada once the quarterfinals begin this week, but it likely won’t matter. Barring a major upset, Tuesday night’s showdown will determine the top two seeds and set both on a collision course for a gold medal rematch.
“It’s not even about the seeding,” Johnson said. “It’s about the pride. For Canada wearing the maple leaf, and for us, wearing the red, white and blue. It just never gets old.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Police investigate homicides in Howard and Prince George’s counties
Police said they are investigating two separate homicides in Howard and Prince George’s counties.
Howard County police said they are investigating a fatal shooting Saturday night in Columbia. Police said they responded at 8:11 p.m. to a report of a person shot in the 7300 block of Hickory Log Circle and found a male in a parking lot with gunshot wounds. He was taken to Howard County General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, they said.
In Prince George’s County, police said officers discovered an unresponsive adult female lying on the ground with trauma to the body at about 1:40 p.m. Saturday in the 7900 block of Oxman Road in Landover. She was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.
Police said Sunday that there was no information on the victims’ or suspects’ identities or on motives.
Anyone with information in the Howard County case is asked to call 911.
Anyone with information in the Prince George’s case is asked to contact @PGCrimeSolvers at 866-411-TIPS or use the P3 Tips app; tipsters can remain anonymous, and there is a reward, police said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Woman dies after being found on D.C. freeway, police say
It appeared that she had been stabbed, they said
An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect time for when the victim was found. The woman was found at 11:16 a.m., not p.m. The story has been updated.
D.C. police said they have arrested a man in connection with a domestic-related homicide that occurred Saturday on southbound Route 295.
The woman was found at 11:16 a.m. Saturday after police received a call about an unconscious person on the roadway near East Capitol Street, police said, adding that they arrived to find an adult female with stab wounds lying on the ground near a vehicle. Police said DC Fire and EMS responders found no signs of life and the victim was transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Police on Sunday identified the victim as Passion Pleasant, 32, of Northeast D.C. and said that on Saturday, Gregory Johnson, 30, of Southeast D.C. was arrested and charged with second-degree murder while armed, adding that the offense was domestic in nature. | null | null | null | null | null |
My copy of “Ulysses,” acquired during a summer spent in Kansas City in 1974, has traveled the world with me during 40 years in diplomacy — the last four in Washington as the Irish ambassador to the United States — and I’ve always deployed it liberally as an instrument of soft power. This began when I became a head of mission and organized annual “Bloomsday” celebrations on June 16, the day of Bloom’s odyssey. For Irish diplomats, Bloomsday has become something of an ancillary to St. Patrick’s Day. In India in the 1980s, Joyce’s navigation of the “nets” of language, nationality and religion resonated locally. In Germany, interest in Joyce and other Irish writers helped broaden perceptions of Ireland at a time when our national reputation suffered from the fallout of the economic and financial crisis of 2009-2010. In 2012, I worked with two German radio stations who broadcast complete readings of “Ulysses” to coincide with the expiration of its copyright. Our literature draws people around the world to engage with Ireland who might otherwise have no affinity with our island nation.
For his three main characters, Joyce chose atypical Dubliners — Bloom with his Hungarian and Jewish background; his wife, Molly, half-Spanish and born in Gibraltar; and Stephen Dedalus, a young aesthete with an “absurd” Greek name. It’s as if he wanted to explore 20th-century experience through three individuals semidetached from the society around them. Throughout the novel, the Blooms are the butt of prejudice — misogyny in Molly’s case and anti-Semitism in Leopold’s. Molly, although we encounter her only at breakfast time and as she falls asleep that night, is presented as a gloriously feisty and instinctive individual, whereas her husband comes across as the soul of understated prudence and studied discretion. “Mr. Cautious Calmer” is how Bloom is described in one instance, “dissembling as was his wont.”
After keeping his views to himself for the first half of the novel, Bloom cuts loose in the “Cyclops” episode when he is goaded and his nationality is questioned. In response to “the Citizen,” Joyce’s personification of one-eyed nationalism, Bloom describes his nation in a straightforward way: “I was born here. Ireland.” In having Bloom take this stance, Joyce went against the grain in an era when national identity was seen primarily as a compound of homogeneities of race and creed, as many today continue to insist it ought to be. Joyce enjoyed the variegated character of early 20th-century Trieste and the “ramshackle empire” of which it was part. During assignments in Europe, I have repeatedly made the point that the horrors of the continent’s catastrophic 20th century might have been avoided had Bloom’s pragmatic definition of nationality prevailed. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: All of D.C.’s early-childhood workers deserve higher pay
The day care at Augustana Lutheran Church in D.C. in April 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Regarding the Feb. 2 Metro article “City to give D.C. day-care workers a cash injection”:
It is terrific news that the D.C. Council has voted to give cash payments to qualifying child-care workers to boost their salaries. Our infant and toddler caretakers deserve this and so much more for the vital role they play in child development and in keeping our economy going.
What about the caretakers of our 3- and 4-year-olds, though? Until D.C. has enough prekindergarten-3 and prekindergarten-4 classrooms in every neighborhood school to serve all of the city’s children, our claim to have “universal” Pre-K remains a myth. I could imagine that one unintended consequence of the council’s move will be that infant and toddler caretaker salaries go down a little as day cares try to equalize the pay among their staff, which includes teachers of 3- and 4-year-olds.
Jill Wiebe, Washington | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The Olympics can — and do — make the world a better place
Olympic athletes pose for photographs on Olympic rings at Yanqing Olympic Village on Feb. 2.
I have been immersed in sports since the 1950s, was a double Olympic finalist in swimming and am now the senior active member of the International Olympic Committee. I have been the president of my national Olympic committee, was responsible for Olympic television negotiations and marketing, and was the founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Though no organization is perfect, the Olympic Games have a positive effect as a result of the activities of the IOC. The Games are now gender-equal, which has resulted in more countries investing in women’s sports. The IOC has been fortunate to generate significant revenue from television and sponsorships, of which some 90 percent is redistributed to athletes, their international sports federations, their national Olympic committees and Olympic organizing committees.
The IOC is athlete-centered, with elected athletes having the same representation as international federations and national Olympic committees; 38 of its 101 members, including the IOC president, are former Olympians. Today’s athletes are just as excited about Olympic participation as those of my era; just look at their social media accounts. The Olympics can — and do — make the world a better place.
Readers deserve a balanced treatment of this worldwide phenomenon, not predominantly the negative aspects.
Richard W. Pound, Montreal | null | null | null | null | null |
In November, McEvoy, a 29-year-old with a melodic preaching cadence, took the high, white pulpit at Westmoreland and said she had “never felt more known and heard and loved by God than when I entered the doors of a Planned Parenthood.” Then last month she addressed a group of Christian abortion access activists meeting in a D.C. church: “Something holy is happening here, friends.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Figure skating live updates Americans start the final night behind the favored Russians
Vincent Zhou and the United States were in second place after the first two nights of team figure skating. (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
The United States sits second behind the Russian Olympic Committee entering the final day of competition in the team figure skating event. Follow along for live updates and results.
The event is scheduled to air live on NBC.
There are eight segments in team figure skating; the final three will be contested by the five remaining teams on Monday morning in Beijing (Sunday night Eastern). Pairs will skate beginning at 8:15 p.m. Eastern, followed by ice dancers (9:30) and women singles (10:35).
Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier will compete for the United States in the pairs skate, followed by Madison Chock and Evan Bates in the ice dance and Karen Chen in the women’s free skate.
Led by the dazzling Kamila Valieva, the team representing the Russian Olympic Committee took a three-point lead over the Americans on Sunday in Beijing. Japan sits three points behind the Americans, while Canada and China are further back.
Nathan Chen skated brilliantly in Friday’s start to the competition, helping land the Americans in first place after three segments. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Recording artist Travis Scott, left, and Kylie Jenner, right, attend the 72nd annual Parsons Benefit presented by The New School at The Rooftop at Pier 17 on Tuesday, June 15, 2021, in New York. Jenner gave birth to her second baby with Scott on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022, according to an announcement on social media on Sunday, Feb. 6. (Andy Kropa/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
Navy SEAL candidate dies after grueling test week
Navy SEAL trainee dies after grueling test
Seaman Kyle Mullen died at a San Diego-area hospital on Friday after he and another SEAL trainee reported experiencing symptoms of an unknown illness, the Navy said.
The Navy said neither one had experienced an accident or unusual incident during the
5½ -day Hell Week.
Rear Adm. H.W. Howard III, the commander of Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, Calif., offered his sympathies to Mullen’s family in a statement.
Mullen joined the Navy in March, according to his Navy biography. He reported to SEAL training in Coronado in July, the Union-Tribune said.
The Hell Week test is part of the BUD/S class, which involves basic underwater demolition, survival and other combat tactics. It comes in the fourth week as SEAL candidates are hoping to be selected for training within the Naval Special Warfare Basic Training Command.
The SEAL program tests physical and psychological strength along with water competence and leadership skills. The program is so grueling that at least 50 to 60 percent don’t make it through Hell Week.
His death was initially ruled a homicide by the San Diego County Medical Examiner. A year later, after an investigation, the Navy said it would not pursue criminal charges in Lovelace’s drowning. An autopsy revealed he had an enlarged heart that contributed to his death and an abnormal coronary artery, which has been associated with sudden cardiac death, especially in athletes.
In December, a Navy SEAL commander died of injuries he suffered during a training accident in Virginia.
10 Cuban migrants rescued off Florida coast: Ten Cuban migrants in a sinking vessel were rescued off the Florida coast, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. A Coast Guard boat spotted the vessel Thursday about 40 miles off Key Largo, the agency said in a tweet. "They didn't have lifejackets or safety equipment," said Capt. Shawn Koch, commanding officer of Air Station Miami. "If the air crew hadn't found them on the patrol, these people would not have survived the night." Six migrants were repatriated to Cuba, and four others were evacuated to Florida for medical treatment, the Coast Guard said. The rescue follows an incident two weeks ago in which a boat believed to be used for human smuggling capsized off Florida's coast on its way from the Bahamas. Only one of the 40 passengers survived. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man charged after woman found dead on Route 295
D.C. police said they have arrested a man in connection with a homicide that happened Saturday on southbound Route 295.
Police responded about 11:16 a.m. Saturday to a report of an unconscious person on 295 near East Capitol Street SE. They arrived to find a woman lying on the ground near a vehicle, police said, and responders from the D.C. fire department found no signs of life. The victim was transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which determined Sunday that she had been fatally shot.
Police identified the victim as Passion Pleasant, 32, of Northeast Washington. Gregory Johnson, 30, of Southeast Washington was arrested on Saturday and charged with second-degree murder while armed, police said, adding that the offense was domestic in nature. | null | null | null | null | null |
Kelly Pannek celebrates with teammates after scoring the United States' fourth goal against Switzerland. (Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images)
BEIJING — After Team USA’s Amanda Kessel rocketed a slap shot into the net in the final seconds of the first period Sunday night, some of the opposing Switzerland players glanced up at the video board to get another look. And if they peeked below the replay screen, the numbers on the scoreboard were jarring: The United States already led by five, with more goals than the Swiss had shots.
A few Switzerland players remained on the bench as the first intermission started, quietly staring toward the ice as the Zambonis hummed around the rink, as if they were processing how everything got away from them so quickly. The dominance of the sport’s best can have that effect: Three days ago, the Swiss, the fifth-ranked team in the world, lost by 11 goals to Canada. And on Sunday night, the United States showed no mercy in an 8-0 win, providing more proof that the gulf between the two North American juggernauts and everyone else in women’s hockey remains wide.
It will be more fun for Stalder to watch the United States play Canada on Tuesday instead of admiring them up close as she did this week, when both crushed her team. Tuesday’s group play finale between the rivals will probably be a preview of the gold medal game, because if the first several days of the tournament have been any indicator, the other top teams in the world will need a miracle to pull off an upset. The United States and Canada are still simply playing on another level and have been waiting for this moment to meet at the Olympics since the Americans won the gold medal over their rival in a shootout in PyeongChang in 2018, ending Canada’s run of four straight titles.
“It’s one of the best rivalries in sports. I would put it up against anything. Any sport. I’m telling you, for those who don’t have a familiarity with it, it’s absolutely must-watch,” U.S. Coach Joel Johnson said. “Anytime [the] U.S. and Canada play — it could be on a pond, and you put two of those jerseys on, and certainly all of a sudden the intensity ramps up.”
Canada has made it clear it is not in Beijing to do anything other than take back the gold medal — it opened with wins over Switzerland and Finland, a team many expected to challenge the North American hierarchy at these Olympics, by a combined score of 23-2. And the United States, despite losing star center Brianna Decker to a tournament-ending injury early in its opener against the Finns, has now beaten three of the world’s top five teams by a combined score of 18-2. Each of those opponents had only 12 shots on goal, with no more than six in any period.
Sunday brought Team USA’s most impressive offensive performance yet. Five different players scored, including two goals apiece from Hilary Knight, Kelly Pannek and Jesse Compher. Before the game, the members of the coaching staff looked at one another and knew their team was ready, Johnson said, but now he and his players can only hope that is the case against Canada on Tuesday. The two teams have seen each other plenty over the past year, playing six games in an exhibition series; Canada won four of those games. Three went to overtime, and all but two were one-goal games.
Pannek, who is helping bolster the lineup at center with Decker out, had one of her best Olympic performances Sunday night, giving the United States a 4-0 lead off a wrister in the first period. That came after Compher and Knight scored nine seconds apart. And by the time Pannek scored another goal in the second period, her team was up 6-0. Afterward, she tried to put her thumb on the lopsided results so far in Beijing and whether other teams are closing the gap to the Americans and Canadians; it has been clear that teams have been affected by the pandemic over the past two years, she said, which has disrupted development programs and caused world championships to be canceled.
Said Johnson: “I think the scores are a little bit deceiving at the start of the tournament. . . . What I see is the growth and development of women’s hockey that in the global pandemic has stalled just a touch, just as it has on the men’s side. So I think the more resources and more visibility that women’s hockey gets at the youngest levels in particular, for the grass-roots federations to put money and support into their programs, you’re just going to see it continue. I just think we’re in a little bit of a pause right now.”
Canada and the United States have claimed every gold medal since women’s hockey debuted at the Winter Games in 1998, and only one other country — Sweden in 2006 — has appeared in the gold medal game. Both teams have dominated world championship play, with Canada owning 11 titles and the United States nine. Only one other team — Finland — has earned a silver medal at the world championship, and it came during the 2019 tournament on its home ice. After defeating Canada in the semifinals, known as the “Miracle in Espoo” and considered one of the biggest upsets in the sport’s history, the Finns lost, 2-1, to the United States in a shootout in the gold medal game.
Finland was expected to challenge its North American counterparts in this tournament but lost, 5-2, to the United States in its opener and was blasted by Canada, 11-1, two days later. The Russian Olympic Committee didn’t fare much better in a 5-0 loss to the Americans; it’ll meet Canada on Monday but is still missing six of its players because of a coronavirus outbreak after arriving in Beijing.
Some of those teams might get another crack at the United States or Canada once the quarterfinals begin this week, but it probably won’t matter. Barring a major upset, Tuesday’s showdown will determine the top two seeds — and set both on a collision course for a gold medal rematch.
“It’s not even about the seeding,” Johnson said. “It’s about the pride. For Canada, wearing the maple leaf, and for us, wearing the red, white and blue, it just never gets old.” | null | null | null | null | null |
(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images illustration)
However, recommendations can change based on the temperature and the length of time the test sits outside before it is used.
The Food and Drug Administration and test manufacturers advise reading and following the instructions on the box or online, which includes recommended temperatures, to ensure safe storage.
“Since shipping conditions may vary, test developers perform stability testing to ensure that the test performance will remain stable when tests are stored at various temperatures,” the FDA said, “including shipping during the summer in very hot regions and in the winter in very cold regions.”
The FDA advises that people bring in the package of tests when it arrives. Leave it unopened inside until it reaches room temperature, for at least two hours. Tests should be performed in temperatures ranging from 59 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the agency.
Abbott Laboratories’ BinaxNow tests should be stored in a place that is between 35.6 and 86 degrees and be used at room temperature, Abbott spokeswoman Kim Modory told The Washington Post. Other tests have similar storage temperature recommendations, including Ellume, Flowflex and iHealth.
“But if the test is stored outside the temperature range for a relatively short period of time — for a couple of hours, up to a day or two — it will be fine to use,” Modory added.
High temperatures, on the other hand, can cause critical damage to a central component of the test, the reagent, experts say.
Amy J. Mathers, an associate professor of medicine and pathology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, offered an analogy: When cooking an egg, you cannot undo it. Tests that researchers heated to extreme temperatures were less sensitive to positive samples. But, Mathers added, in the case of freezing, evidence suggests the tests are still usable at room temperature.
To check if the test shouldn’t be used, look at the “control” indication. Aside from that and physical damage on the packaging or test, there is no way to tell whether a test won’t work, Mathers said.
Brands’ recommendations vary, so she suggested checking the instructions, comparing the process to preparing to bake an extravagant cake: “You’d kind of read through the whole recipe first and then do it.”
“These tests were designed to be run by trained professionals,” Mathers said. “And then we’re asking everybody to run them in their homes. Just make sure you follow all the instructions all the way through.”
If you have coronavirus symptoms or you were exposed and your test comes back negative, isolate and ask a doctor about further testing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.
L.A. school district, the nation’s second-largest, requires students to upgrade from cloth masks | null | null | null | null | null |
Sweden’s Sara Hector was leading the competition following a first run of 57.56 seconds, just ahead of Katharina Truppe of Austria (57.86). Nina O’Brien was the top American, sitting in sixth at 58.81, with the second run scheduled for later Monday afternoon. The champion is determined by the aggregate of the skiers’ times from the first and second runs.
“Any time you go on the side like that, it’s just like missed timing where you’re pressuring the turn,” she said. “I was pushing, or I felt that I was really pushing in those turns. … I think the thing about this surface [is] — I feel that it’s incredible, but [it’s] not forgiving. It is different than kind of what we normally ski, but it’s actually quite a beautiful surface to ski.
“I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with that. You have to connect the turns perfectly in order to be fast, but also in order not to make those mistakes that can cost a lot of time, or in my case, cost the entire race.”
Though coronavirus protocols have severely limited the number of spectators allowed in the stands, there was an audible groan from the small crowd and the assembled media and Beijing 2022 volunteers when Shiffrin went down — a scene visible both to the naked eye near the top of the course and in pixelated high definition on the huge video screen near the finish line.
“That heartbreak just builds up and it never goes away, and I think that’s what drives me to try to keep working and improving — so I can try to make it so that those things don’t happen. But sometimes they still do happen. And, unfortunately, it happened today. It felt like there’s a lot to look forward to. But, well, now we reset.” | null | null | null | null | null |
His claim referenced what he said were three “radical vicious, racist prosecutors” — one in Georgia, one in New York, one in Washington, and all of them Black — who are investigating his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection and examining his business organization’s finances. But his comments made him the latest in a line of conservatives claiming, loudly and frequently, that White men are victims of racism.
After years of being branded a racist for his inflammatory comments and actions, Trump and some of his allies are attempting to turn that label back on their critics. In the process, they have wielded their own definition of racism, one that disregards the country’s history of racial exclusion that gives White people a monopoly on power and wealth. To make America more equitable, they argue, everyone must be treated equally and, therefore, White men must not in any way be disadvantaged.
This diverging definition of racism — often coupled with imagery, symbolism and quotes from the civil rights and other movements — reflects deep and often partisan divisions about what, if anything, needs to be done to produce a more equitable nation.
White people think racism is getting worse against themselves
Bishop Talbert Swan, president of the Greater Springfield, Mass., chapter of the NAACP, said, “It is gaslighting on steroids for White men who have always been the most privileged segment of society to think that America offering to non-White males the privileges that they have always had from birth is somehow discriminating against them. For that demographic to be out in public, screaming racism and pretending to be victims is one of the most clownish disingenuous acts that I’ve ever seen.”
Experts in political speech and critics on the left say there is more at play than a disagreement over whether White people can be victims of racism or a slanted understanding of the role race plays in America. Some see the desire to identify racism and label opponents “racist” as an effort to wield grievance and stoke animus for political gain, a tactic Trump and others have used in campaigns to anger and animate voters. It’s a sentiment steeped in beliefs among some voters that attempts at equity have gone too far and are punishing people who happen to have been born White.
“I think what’s happened on the Republican side is that they’ve looked at that” and said Democrats have “overplayed their hand” and “now we can, in a kind of weird jujitsu way, we can use that against them. We can label them as racist. We can label President Biden’s whole decision to nominate a Black woman as just by definition racist.”
The decision to consider only Black women was deemed racist by many conservatives. For some, anything but a race-blind selection would reek of bias, and Biden’s parameters have been characterized as a political ploy to mollify a key constituency. Others have noted that narrowing the choices to Black women also excludes other historically disadvantaged groups, such as Hispanic women or women of Asian descent.
Hardaway and her sister Rochelle “Silk” Richardson, the Black live-stream hosts made famous for their profligate praise of Trump and appearances at his rallies, said Biden’s Supreme Court announcement was a play at “identity politics” that threatened to upend the institution.
“They did it with Kamala Harris, and now they’re about to do it with the Supreme Court,” Hardaway said, speaking of Biden’s choice to make a Black woman his running mate for the 2020 election. “When you’re gonna pick somebody, they need to be qualified. When we look at affirmative action, to me that is racist, it is racism, toward anybody whether you’re White or Black.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted at Tuesday’s news briefing that Cruz called Barrett an “amazing role model for little girls” during her confirmation hearing. “He said it symbolized the unique American opportunity,” Psaki said. “There is no outcry around that.”
Allegations of racism have marked the Trump presidency
The back and forth reflects deep schisms about what, if anything, needs to be done to ensure that everyone has access to opportunity in America, divisions that largely split on partisan grounds.
According to a Pew Research study last year on such divisions, 77 percent of Republicans believe little or nothing needs to be done to ensure equal rights for all Americans, regardless of their racial or ethnic backgrounds. Among Democrats, 74 percent said a lot more needs to be done to achieve racial equity.
Other Trump allies have wrapped themselves in the rhetoric and symbolism of equality movements to make political points, specifically when it comes to vaccine and mask mandates. Robert Kennedy Jr., a former Trump adviser who has spread misinformation about vaccines, recently invoked Anne Frank in suggesting that Jews had more freedoms during the Holocaust than unvaccinated Americans do now, comments for which he later apologized.
Lynne Patton, a Trump adviser, posted a picture on Instagram of a Black man sitting at a lunch counter, surrounded by jeering White men, one of whom says, “We don’t allow unvaccinated folk in here.” Patton, who is Black, wrote in the caption, “those who support racist and unconstitutional mandates in 2022 WILL BE JUDGED BY HISTORY just as those who supported them 60 YEARS AGO are judged today.”
The rhetoric around racism is likely to intensify as the midterm elections approach, said Michael Fauntroy, the founding director of the Race, Politics and Policy Center at George Mason University.
“Conservative political strategy at this time is really about … keeping flames fired up to keep their base sufficiently inflamed, so that when it comes time to vote, they’ll vote their anger rather than their hope,” Fauntroy said. “It was critical race theory last month … it will be something else next month.”
For some liberal activists, the time leading up to the midterm elections will be spent resisting the urge to engage in Twitter wars and public diatribes against people seeking to redefine what racism is, said Nsé Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project, a voter engagement and mobilization group.
“We need to remember that disinformation and fear that drives the other side, particularly around issues like critical race theory, do not equally drive Black voters,” Ufot said in an interview. “We have to stop being reactive to talking points that motivate other audiences while ignoring the issues that actually matter to Black voters.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“We have the most beautiful bunker in Ukraine,” said the elevator operator of the Penthouse Club, a small grandmotherly woman in a ringmaster’s costume. Some city functionary has taped a paper on the wall with the number to call for the key in off hours, which in this case is anytime before 8 p.m. | null | null | null | null | null |
Truckers and their supporters protest coronavirus vaccine mandates in Ottawa on Feb. 6. (Lars Hagberg/Reuters)
After being denied several million dollars raised on GoFundMe, organizers of a trucker-led protest disrupting life in Canada’s capital have found a new platform: a Christian crowdfunding site where they raised more than $3.5 million in two days to demonstrate against the country’s vaccine mandate.
The new fundraiser hosted by GiveSendGo, which describes itself as the “#1 free Christian crowdfunding site,” reported Sunday that the “Freedom Convoy” campaign had raised several million dollars two days after GoFundMe announced that it was freezing more than $8 million in donations to the cause, a move that led Republican officials in the United States to announce investigations.
The rapid influxes of donations have prompted questions about the origin of the funds and sparked concerns among analysts about the use of the online platforms for financing fringe organizations that could allow the interference of foreign entities.
The convoy began as a protest to U.S. and Canadian rules requiring that cross-border truckers be fully vaccinated to enter either country, and it turned into a movement against many public health measures. The demonstrations have drawn praise from Republican leaders in the United States and left residents on edge — with police saying some have been subject to racist vitriol.
On Sunday, Ottawa declared a state of emergency as protesters in big-rig trucks blocked streets, shot off fireworks and blared horns.
The convoy is benefiting from national and international logistical and financial support, including from a “significant element” in the United States, Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly said last week.
“They have converged in our city, and there are plans for more to come,” Sloly said, adding that the participants, who include locals and other Canadians, are “putting our city and our residents, our partners and our officers at great risk.”
As of mid-Saturday, the Ottawa Police Service reported a thousand vehicles, about 5,000 protesters and at least 300 counterprotesters in the city’s streets.
GoFundMe said Friday that it had removed a fundraiser for the convoy that had raised more than $8 million because it violated its terms of service. The company said it had released an initial $1 million in donations to Freedom Convoy organizers last week after they provided a clear distribution plan and confirmed that they would only be used for those participating in a peaceful protest.
But after receiving evidence from law enforcement that the “previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation,” the company said no additional funds would be distributed to its organizers and instead donors would have two weeks to submit a request for a refund, the company said. GoFundMe then would work with convoy organizers to send the remaining money to other charities.
GoFundMe’s decision aroused conservative ire on both sides of the border, drawing special scrutiny from several Republican attorneys general, who pledged to investigate the platform.
On Friday evening, minutes after West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) asked residents who have “been victimized by a deceptive act or practice” to report it, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that “All GOP Attorney Generals” should follow suit.
By Sunday, at least four other states — Florida, Louisiana, Ohio and Texas — had done just that, promising to investigate GoFundMe for allegedly deceptive practices.
The threats of an investigation continued even after the platform announced Saturday that it would refund all contributions automatically amid the donor backlash. The company did not respond to an inquiry Sunday from The Washington Post.
“What they publicly proposed to do is unfair and potentially a violation of Ohio law,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) said in an interview with The Post. “I’m glad that they didn’t go there, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve agreed in other instances to do the right thing. So we need to look in at the policy and practice of the company.”
Yost has directed his office to collect testimony from Ohioans to determine whether the company ran afoul of trade laws. After that process is complete, Yost will decide whether to file a lawsuit against GoFundMe. He said he wants to ensure that future donors won’t run the risk of having their money rerouted to a different cause.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said his office has “assembled a team to investigate” potential wrongdoing, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said he would direct his attorney general to do the same.
“I share the concerns of @WestVirginiaAG. My office will be looking into whether or not #GoFundMe violated our state law,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) tweeted.
The attorneys general variously accused GoFundMe of fraud, deception and of playing political favorites with the fundraising efforts it chooses to promote.
All five who have spoken out have also previously opposed federal vaccine mandates, suing the Biden administration over its inoculation rules. Paxton has cast the issue in political terms, calling GoFundMe a “BLM-backing company” that “went woke,” referring to the Black Lives Matter movement and echoing right-wing rhetoric about social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said Sunday that he has sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to investigate the platform. Other critics included SpaceX and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, who shared a meme calling GoFundMe “professional thieves.”
Back in Canada, security analysts warned of the unintended effects of using crowdfunding platforms, including allowing foreign state actors or individuals to interfere in domestic affairs.
“Starting with the size and scale of the campaign itself, it is unprecedented in Canadian history for campaigns of this nature to be able to raise so much money in the short period of time,” Jessica Davis, a financial crime analyst and president of Insight Threat Intelligence, said Sunday. “It raises a lot of questions of where is the influence of this campaign coming from and whether this crowdfunding activity is organic in nature or not.”
She said it was “unbelievable that this number of Canadians support the protest in this way.”
Polls show most Canadians support public health measures, including mandated vaccination, she said.
She added that a definitive analysis of who is financing the protests and whether there has been foreign interference are virtually impossible because all publicly available information on GoFundMe lacks identity verification.
If such interference were confirmed, it would indicate “a lack of available laws and the enforcement of existing laws in terms of preventing foreign interference” from individuals, states, political parties and other interest groups.
Davis underlined how the “sheer volume of the money being raised” will allow the protests to continue for “an indefinite amount of time,” because demonstrators have plenty of supplies, including lodging, food and fuel.
“To our fellow Canadians, the time for political overreach is over,” a post on the GiveSendGo campaign said. “We are taking our fight to the doorsteps of our Federal Government and demanding that they cease all mandates against its people.”
GiveSendGo did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.
The Post has reported how the website has become a refuge of sorts for outcasts and extremists, including conspiracy theorists and fringe groups such as the far-right Proud Boys, which Canada has designated a terrorist entity.
‘A place to fund hope’: How Proud Boys and other fringe groups found refuge on a Christian fundraising website
Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor of international relations at Carleton University in Ottawa, said Sunday that the support from anti-vaccine groups and GOP officials shows how the convoy could be used for political purposes in the United States.
“U.S. politicians probably don’t understand what is really happening here and see this as a way to show support for their base,” she said. “It’s foreign interference … and it should be viewed through the frame of culture wars.”
Carvin, a former national security analyst, added that the convoy “is exactly the kind of event that intelligence services have warned us for years that foreign governments would try to amplify.”
Like Davis, she said there is no definitive evidence of foreign interference directing the protests, and even if there were, “this is a Canadian movement, pushed by Canadians, participated in by Canadians.”
International social media support — including from the U.S. right — has amplified the convoy’s message and emboldened protesters, she said.
“Even when GoFundMe canceled [the payments], it built so much momentum and helped turn it into a symbol of resistance,” she said. “Crowdfunding tools can serve to extremists, and these platforms should be aware of this.”
Brittany Shammas and Amanda Coletta contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
With escalating worry that war could break out if Russia invades Ukraine, Germany has faced widespread criticism for not taking on a more active role with European allies in preparing a response.
“We expect them to talk significantly about the situation in Ukraine and Russia,” said a senior Biden administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview the White House meetings. “They’ll likely discuss their shared concerns about Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s border and their shared commitment to both ongoing diplomatic efforts to encourage Russia to de-escalate tensions, as well as ongoing efforts to ensure deterrence to further Russian aggression.”
They plan to discuss a sanctions package, the official said, and the United States also elevating a threat to cancel a major national gas pipeline connecting Germany and Russia. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is nearly complete, has long been a thorny issue between the two countries, with the United States expressing concern that it would give Russia potential leverage over Germany while harming Ukraine by weakening its status as a conduit for Russian natural gas.
While the potential conflict between Ukraine and Russia is expected to be among the most pressing issues, Biden and Scholz also plan to discuss the pandemic, climate change, stability in the Western Balkans, and China’s aggressive economic practices and human rights abuses.
German newspapers have dubbed it a “crisis mission” amid criticism over Berlin’s wavering response on financial measures, blocking weapons deliveries to Ukraine, and what some see as a lack of leadership amid the flurry of diplomacy to try to defuse war.
Washington sees Germany’s stance as being born out of a desire to maintain its gas supplies, the cable said.
But Kyiv has gone as far as accusing Germany of encouraging Russian President Vladimir Putin to attack through its statements on financial sanctions and weapons. And just two months after being sworn in, Scholz’s reputation has taken a hit, with support for his government among the public crumbling.
After winning elections in September, polls now put his party in second place for the first time, while 63 percent of Germans are dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the Ukraine crisis, according to a survey last week by the polling agency Forsa.
The trip to Washington is “too late,” Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democrats, told Germany’s Bild newspaper on Sunday. | null | null | null | null | null |
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — It took just one day after Texas enacted its controversial “heartbeat bill,” banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, for a top Florida Republican to endorse passing the same law in his state — with the leader of the state Senate declaring that a copycat measure was “something we’re already working on.”
Four months later, Florida Republicans have coalesced around a bill they have come to describe as “very reasonable” and “generous” — a 15-week ban modeled after the Mississippi law before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case that will determine the future of Roe v. Wade. It’s an approach, they say, that would prevent only a fraction of the more than 70,000 abortions performed in Florida each year, the vast majority of which take place in the first trimester.
The approach has introduced a surprising dynamic for Florida Republicans, who have long dominated the state capital, prompting rare denunciations of DeSantis from some corners of the party base.
“That’s, to me, because I believe life begins at conception, that’s, that’s — generous,” she said.
State Rep. Webster Barnaby (R), who introduced Florida’s version of the Texas law in September, said he consulted with Republican leadership only after he filed his bill. He filed his legislation “on the strength of [his] personal convictions,” he said. After learning more about Florida’s privacy law, and the various reasons a Texas-style ban might not work as well in Florida, he said, he decided to back the 15-week ban instead.
By mimicking the Mississippi law, he said, Florida Republicans would maximize their chances of passing a law that could get through the courts, which have become significantly more conservative in recent years but are still beholden to the privacy law that has protected abortion rights in the state for more than three decades. Even if the court rules narrowly — and upholds the Mississippi law without fully overturning Roe — Florida’s 15-week ban would almost certainly stand.
“Abortion bans like the one proposed here today are a direct assault on patient autonomy,” she said. “No one should have their most personal decisions controlled by anyone beyond themselves but especially not by politicians.”
Unlike abortion bans in several other states this legislative cycle, the Florida bill materialized without fanfare, introduced a few hours before the filing deadline, with no news conference to mark its introduction. DeSantis did not talk about the 15-week ban in his opening address to the legislature on Jan. 11, only mentioning the legislation when asked about it by reporters, a choice that angered some on the right. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sweden’s Sara Hector won the gold medal with a total time of 1:55.69 across her two runs, just ahead of Italy’s Federica Brignone (1:55.87). The second run was marred by a gruesome injury to the United States’ Nina O’Brien, who crashed near the finish line and appeared to suffer serious injuries to her lower leg. A spokesperson for U.S. Ski and Snowboard later described O’Brien as “alert and responsive,” but offered no immediate updates on her diagnosis. With no U.S. men finishing in the top 10 of Monday’s downhill, it was a disquieting day for the U.S. program in every way.
“Anytime you go on the side like that, it’s just like missed timing where you’re pressuring the turn,” she said. “I was pushing, or I felt that I was really pushing in those turns. … I think the thing about this surface [is] — I feel that it’s incredible, but [it’s] not forgiving. It is different than kind of what we normally ski, but it’s actually quite a beautiful surface to ski.
“I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with that. You have to connect the turns perfectly in order to be fast but also in order not to make those mistakes that can cost a lot of time or, in my case, cost the entire race.”
Though the coronavirus protocols have severely limited the number of spectators allowed in the stands, there was an audible groan from the small crowd and the assembled media and Beijing 2022 volunteers when Shiffrin went down — a scene visible both to the naked eye near the top of the course and in pixelated high definition on the huge video screen near the finish line.
“That heartbreak just builds up, and it never goes away, and I think that’s what drives me to try to keep working and improving — so I can try to make it so that those things don’t happen. But sometimes they still do happen. And, unfortunately, it happened today. It felt like there’s a lot to look forward to. But, well, now we reset.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Jason Brown isn’t pushing figure skating’s athletic limits. He’s defining its passion.
Jason Brown skates in the U.S. championships in Nashville last month. (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
BEIJING — The stress attached to the Olympic year grew as the season progressed four years ago, weighing on Jason Brown all the way through his most important figure skating competition of the year. Brown entered the U.S. nationals as a skater expected to make the Olympic team. But then he didn’t. And that started “three months of pain that you can’t even describe,” his father, Steve, said recently.
Brown took a break from skating, briefly unsure whether he would continue with the sport. The mental toll of the season, and ultimately falling short of his second Olympics, left him feeling burned out. It took a while to process what happened and figure out where to go next. When Brown returned home to his parents, his daily life included “a lot of moping,” his mom, Marla, said.
Brown declined an opportunity to compete at the world championships but skated on tour as he pieced together a plan for the future. He started to feel an urge to return to the competitive scene, he said, but, “I also knew that I had to change the way that I went about it completely.”
So he moved to Canada, leaving the coach with whom he had trained since he was a young boy. Initially, Brown focused on rekindling his love for the sport — abandoning anxiety and focusing on his emotion-filled performances that have captivated audiences for years. About six months into his training in Toronto under new coaches Brian Orser and Tracy Wilson, these Olympics reemerged as a crystallized ambition.
“So many people talk about their journey to the Olympics,” Brown said after a recent practice session in Beijing. “And for me, it was about my journey back to the Olympics.”
He competed in the 2014 Sochi Games as a teenager who had just jumped into senior international competition. Four years later, he became an Olympic alternate who realized he needed to upend his status quo. And now he’s a 27-year-old returning to the Games with maturity that offers perspective and a sense of fulfillment that isn’t contingent on results. Entering these Games off a seventh-place finish at the 2021 world championships, Brown is a long shot for a medal here, but that’s not the only measure of this experience — not after he “rebuilt his love for the sport in a lot of ways and what he was chasing,” his dad said.
Brown’s parents enrolled him in learn-to-skate classes when he was a kid in the Chicago area so he could glide in a circle at birthday parties. Figure skating was at first nothing more than another activity on a schedule that also included school plays, piano lessons, soccer and cross-country. But Brown got hooked on the performance aspect of figure skating, and that defined his programs as he ascended to the elite level.
“What he’s doing is what we all dreamed we could feel when we’re skating,” said Wilson, his coach and an Olympic bronze medalist in ice dance. “He personifies it.”
Brown doesn’t have all the quadruple jumps that the top skaters perform — he has landed only one, a quad Salchow — so he instead leans on his performance quality and emotional choreography. He wants to push the sport in that artistic realm.
“The challenge is you’ve got to play your own game,” Wilson said. “There is something in you that’s real, and it’s who you are. And if we don’t honor that, you can never be all that you could be.”
Brown long has been a crowd favorite, and his “Riverdance” program garnered millions of views in 2014. When he finished that free skate at U.S. nationals, he brought fans to their feet and earned his Olympic berth. Then a ponytail-wearing 19-year-old, Brown remembers feeling “young and invincible.”
The Winter Olympics are tests not only of athletic achievement but of design and engineering
By the time he prepared for nationals four years later, Brown had Olympic experience and a bronze medal from the team event. He became the national champion in 2015 and finished fourth at the world championships that year. In 2017, he won the bronze at nationals and placed seventh at worlds. He medaled three times at Skate America during the quadrennium leading up to the PyeongChang Games.
Brown lived at the Olympic training center in Colorado, so the ever-present rings constantly reminded him of the end goal. But then in his free skate at the 2018 U.S. championships, he fell on his opening jump, a quad toe loop, and stumbled out of multiple others. Brown slipped to sixth, dooming his Olympic chances.
“I think he had a lot of questions as the sport began to change with the quad [jumps] and whether or not he was doing what everyone expected him to do,” his dad said. “It really pulled him away from what made him special, to try to be what other people were trying to be. He struggled with it. He doubted himself and questioned the whole thing.”
The move to Toronto offered a fresh start. It helped him mature in the same way teenagers do when they move away to college, his mom said, and his confidence grew. Brown says his coaches now let him take ownership of his choices and their rewards or consequences.
Amending an Olympic heartbreak still requires a four-year wait. When Brown returned to nationals last month, this time in Nashville, he risked feeling that devastation all over again. With this long-awaited opportunity to make another Olympic team, Brown delivered. He placed fourth but earned the Olympic nod over second-place finisher Ilia Malinin, a 17-year-old rising star.
After Brown’s free skate, despite a fall on his opening quad Salchow, he experienced a feeling he said he hadn’t before: “I was just calm, and I was so proud of the work that I had done. There was this feeling of being satisfied with the career that I had and the decisions that I made.”
A few weeks later, when he stepped onto the Olympic ice for practice, a similar sense of peace outweighed the nervous energy that can fill this venue. It’s all different this time — not despite the past disappointment but because of it, his parents said.
“I think,” his mom said, “he knows it doesn’t define him the same way.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Johan Clarey, of France won silver in the men's downhill on Monday in Beijing. (Luca Bruno/AP)
YANQING, China — Johan Clarey first showed up on the World Cup skiing scene in 2003, a year when most of his rivals in Monday’s downhill race at the Beijing Olympics were still coasting down the bunny slope. In 19 years and 216 starts on the circuit, he has never won. But he has made the podium nine times and competed in four Olympics. He has seen the world, made some money, gained some fame in his native France. He has had a good run, even if it got no better than that.
Some one minute, 42.79 seconds after Clarey launched himself out of the starting gate at the National Alpine skiing Centre, his dashing gold helmet glimmering in the sun, he arrived at the finish line below. After taking a peek at the scoreboard, he raised his arms, tossed his head back and roared into the sky.
“I was pushing, pushing,” he told the French media. “I knew I only had one chance left in my career to get a medal in the Olympics. I’ve dreamed of this medal. It’s just incredible, the best day of my career.”
“Huge!” teammate Matthieu Bailet blurted to the French media. “Too happy for him — for our ‘Grandpa.’”
Bode Miller was 36 when he won bronze in the men’s super-G at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, becoming at the time the oldest Olympic Alpine medalist. But on Monday, thanks mostly to Clarey’s four decades and change, the average age on the podium was just over 35. Switzerland’s Beat Feuz, 34, won the gold medal in 1:42.69, just a 10th of a second faster than Clarey, while Austria’s Matthias Mayer, 31, took bronze.
And beyond that, no one had any idea what to expect from a course none of the competitors had seen with his own eyes, let alone skied, before arriving for these Olympics — as covid-19 restrictions wiped out planned test events and closed China’s borders. Any of a dozen or more skiers figured to have a chance Monday, given the circumstances.
So why not Clarey? It’s not as if he wasn’t a fast skier. In 2012, he set a world record for speed on skis, clocking in at 100.6 miles per hour at a downhill in Wengen, Switzerland — a record that still stands. Of course, Clarey was 31 when he set that record, seemingly on the downside of his career. He likely could not have imagined he would still be hurtling himself down mountains a decade later.
“Some days I am feeling like I am 30, maybe a little less,” he told Reuters a few days before the downhill. “But some days I am feeling 50 or 60 years old.” He credited his wife, Perrine, for keeping him young. “She keeps pushing me when I am saying, ‘Oh, I am too tired. I am too old for this s---.' She says, ‘Oh, you are not too old.’”
Clarey told the French media he had woken up exhausted on the morning of the downhill, which had been pushed from Sunday to Monday by weather concerns, as the toll of all that nervous waiting around, not to mention the 41 years of living, weighed him down. But then suddenly, just minutes before his run, he felt a strange and intense focus come over him.
“I felt great, very focused,” said Clarey, who also raced for France in the 2010, 2014 and 2018 Olympics. “I said to myself, ‘Man, these are your last Games — attack the track!’”
At the bottom of the hill, he saw the “2” next to his name and realized what he had just done. He skied the race of his life in the deepest winter of his career. He won an Olympic medal for himself, for France and for all the old guys out there. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Russians are talented across all disciplines of figure skating, but they shine brightest in the women’s competition. They swept the podium at the 2021 world championships, with Shcherbakova winning the gold and Trusova taking the silver. Elizaveta Tuktamysheva, who’s not at these Games, won the silver. But the attention gravitates mostly toward Valieva and her brilliance — because she’s the rising star whose young career has included hardly anything other than gold. | null | null | null | null | null |
Norway’s Jarl Magnus Riiber, who won the gold medal in the normal hill at the 2021 and 2019 world championships, will be among the favorites in Beijing. (Matthias Schrader/AP)
Nordic combined is a unique sport that requires athletes to summon the courage and aerodynamics of ski jumping along with the strength and endurance of cross-country skiing. A part of the inaugural Winter Olympics in 1924, it is the only Olympic sport — summer or winter — that does not offer women’s events.
Nordic combined features three events and will include a maximum of 55 athletes in Beijing, with competition set to take place at the Kuyangshu Nordic Center and Biathlon Center from Feb. 9 to Feb. 17.
Here’s what to know about Nordic combined at the Winter Olympics in Beijing:
The ski jumping portion of the competition takes place first, with athletes scoring based on distance and style points, in addition to gate and wind compensation points. Those scores determine where skiers begin in the staggered start of the cross-country competition.
Is Nordic combined a team sport?
There are two individual events — normal hill and large hill — as well as one team event, the large hill. The normal hill consists of skiers completing one jump (98 meters), followed by a 10-kilometer cross-country competition. In large hill, competitors attempt a larger jump (125 meters), followed by a 10-kilometer cross-country race. The team event involves four skiers per country attempting 125-meter jumps, followed by a 4x5-kilometer relay. The team with the highest combined score on the jump will begin first in the staggered relay.
Where did Nordic combined originate?
Nordic combined originated in Norway in the mid-1800s. The sport’s first major competition was held at the Holmenkollen Ski Festival in Oslo in 1892, and it was one of the events at the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix in 1924. Norway swept the podium in the first four Olympics and has won 31 medals overall, including 13 golds.
How is Nordic combined scored?
The ski jump and cross-country portions of the race are judged with different scales: points and time. The Gundersen method, derived from its creator and former Nordic athlete Gunder Gundersen of Norway, is used to score the two events.
In the individual events, the start order of the ski jumps are based on world rankings. The start order of the cross-country competition, a pursuit race, is determined by the scores in the ski jump; those scores are converted to time using the Gundersen method, in which one point equals four seconds. The first to cross the finish line wins.
In the team event, the start order of the jumps is determined by reversing the country’s place in Nation Cup standings. Each country decides which order the four skiers will jump in, and the competition cycles through each team four times.
The top combined score from the jump competition determines where teams will start the cross-country relay; using the Gundersen method, points on jumps are converted to time, in which four points equals three seconds. During the relay exchange, skiers must tap any part of a teammate’s body. The first team to cross the finish line wins.
Who are the previous medal winners?
Germany was dominant at the 2018 PyeongChang Games, winning gold medals in all three events and claiming five of the nine medals overall. Johannes Rydzek won gold in the individual large hill, followed by teammates Fabian Riessle and Eric Frenzel winning silver and bronze. Frenzel also won gold in the individual normal hill, and all three contributed to Germany’s gold medal in the team event.
Japan’s Akito Watabe, who won silver medals in the individual normal hill in each of the previous two Olympics, will compete again in Beijing.
Frenzel could further cement his status as one of the most accomplished Nordic combined athletes ever. He has won six medals in his career and is the two-time defending gold medalist in the individual normal hill. Frenzel finished fourth in the 2021 world championships in the normal and large hill competitions.
Norway’s Jarl Magnus Riiber is a gold medal favorite in both events. He took the gold medal in the normal hill at the 2021 and 2019 world championships.
The United States’ Taylor Fletcher, a 31-year-old who is considered one of the fastest cross-country skiers on the international circuit, won the U.S. trials in December to qualify for his fourth Olympics. The Americans have won four medals in Nordic combined — all at the 2010 Vancouver Games.
What is the schedule for Nordic combined?
Feb. 9, 2 a.m.: Individual normal hill, ski jumping trial round
Feb. 9, 3 a.m.: Individual normal hill, ski jumping competition round
Feb. 9, 6 a.m.: Individual normal hill, cross-country
Feb. 15, 2 a.m.: Individual large hill, ski jumping trial round
Feb. 15, 3 a.m.: Individual large hill, ski jumping competition round
Feb. 15, 6 a.m.: Individual large hill, cross-country
Feb. 17, 2 a.m.: Team large hill, ski jumping trial round
Feb. 17, 3 a.m.: Team large hill, ski jumping competition round
Feb. 17, 6 a.m.: Team large hill, cross-country | null | null | null | null | null |
Ireen Wust of the Netherlands reacts during a flower ceremony after winning the gold medal and setting an Olympic record in the women’s speedskating 1,500-meter race at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Monday, Feb. 7, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
BEIJING — Ireen Wüst added to her haul as the most decorated speedskater in Olympic history with another gold Monday at the Beijing Games. | null | null | null | null | null |
Canada police make arrests amid ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests and seize fuel, vehicles
Police officers walk past parked tractors, as truckers and supporters continue to protest coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine mandates, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, February 6, 2022. REUTERS/Lars Hagberg (Lars Hagberg/Reuters)
Police are clamping down on “Freedom Convoy” anti-vaccine-mandate demonstrations in Canada’s capital, making multiple arrests, issuing hundreds of tickets and seizing vehicles and fuel as Ottawa’s mayor declared a state of emergency.
The emergency declaration was designed to give officers more “flexibility” to respond to the hundreds and sometimes thousands of truckers and their supporters who are gathered in the streets to denounce coronavirus measures – and, as Mayor Jim Watson said Sunday, to reflect the “serious danger and threat to the safety and security of residents.”
Fireworks were shot off, drivers blared their horns and streets remained blocked for the second weekend in a row, with Watson admitting that authorities were “outnumbered” and “losing this battle” against groups who were “calling the shots.”
Ottawa Police said in a statement Sunday it had launched over 60 criminal investigations amid the ongoing protests – ranging from thefts and hate crimes to threats and property damage. At least seven arrests had been made as of 9 p.m. Sunday local time in relation to property damage and other acts of “mischief,” police said. “Multiple vehicles and fuel have been seized,” the statement said.
On Sunday morning, police said officers had issued more than 450 tickets since the day before, including to trucks with no insurance and obstructed license plates. A further 100 tickets were announced Sunday evening, including to people who were driving the wrong way or had alcohol readily available.
“How dare you do something like this when we are fighting for you?” shouted one protestor in footage shared by CBC News journalist Judy Trinh on Sunday evening.
Protests began in the city late January, when people gathered to protest rules implemented by the U.S. and Canadian governments that require foreign truck drivers to be fully vaccinated to enter their countries. Demonstrators have also denounced broader coronavirus measures such as lockdowns and mask-wearing while calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign.
Trudeau, who has condemned those gathered in the streets who had displayed “symbols of hatred and division," said last week that sending in the army to end the protests was “not in the cards.” Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly, under criticism for his response to the protest, had said that “there may not be a policing solution to this demonstration” and that he and other commanders were “looking at every single option, including military aid to civil power” to end it.
Protesters also disrupted the flow of goods and services through a blockade last weekend at a U.S.-Canada border crossing that officials had denounced the blockade as “unlawful.”
Police have repeatedly called on demonstrators not to enter the capital and “to go home,” while also advising locals to steer clear of the downtown area and to work from home where possible. | null | null | null | null | null |
What Is Harvard Business School’s Secret Sauce?
The Baker Library of the Harvard Business School stands on Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., on Tuesday, June 30, 2015. Harvard University, established in 1636, is the United States’ oldest institution of higher learning. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
Harvard Business School is in the middle of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the case study teaching method, and is doing so with the aplomb that you would expect from the world’s richest business school. The campus is festooned with banners. A website features video lectures by celebrated professors. Forthcoming events include an exhibition in the Baker Library later this month, a Centennial Celebration Day on March 30th, and a colloquium on the future of case studies on May 31st.
I say “in the middle” because the celebration is continuing throughout the 2021-2 academic year. The first case study — “General Shoe Company” — was published in 1921. (It dealt with the perennially fascinating subject of what to do about the decline in workers’ productivity toward the end of their shifts.) The method was properly institutionalized in 1922, when the faculty voted to give it a name and 93 other universities decided to adopt the method. By 1923, two-thirds of the school’s courses were taught through cases.
The method has evolved a bit over the years. The cases feature a wider range of countries and a more diverse cast of characters. Professors are experimenting with manga cartoons, audiovisual aids and even “simulations” and “immersion placements.” But the method is basically the same as the one that was settled upon in 1922: The instructor calls on a student to summarize the case and suggest ways of addressing the central business problem — the famous “cold call” that many business titans still remember with a shudder. A general discussion ensues in which students compete to gut the case and suggest solutions.
The case method is now both the cornerstone of the HBS experience and a lucrative business in its own right. Students study about 500 cases during their two years at the school — a significant exercise in time-management given that the cases average 11 pages in length plus several figures, compared with the sparse elegance of “General Shoe Company’s” single page. HBS faculty produce some 225 new cases a year and each one takes about 160 hours to research and write. The school sold 15.4 million cases globally in the 2021 financial year, mostly to other business schools, generating revenue of $59 million.
Other professional schools have also borrowed the case method from HBS, just as HBS originally borrowed it from the law school across the Charles River. Oxford University’s new (in Oxford terms) Blavatnik School of Government has made a big bet on applying the Harvard method to public administration. It has recruited case-study veterans from HBS such as Karthik Ramanna, a former professor, and Sarah McAra, a former associate director of the school’s case-study center. It is building up a collection of public-sector cases such as one dealing with the Vatican Bank’s financial management and another with the Metropolitan Police’s stop-and-search policy.
HBS’s penchant for self-congratulation can be infuriating. “If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today’s guillotine fodder,” Philip Delves Broughton, himself an HBS alumnus, wrote during the hoopla surrounding the school’s 100th anniversary in 2008, “he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA.” But in this instance it is justified. The case method is an antidote to the two biggest curses of business education.
The first curse is “scientism”: the idea that management is a science that can be derived from rigorous study and applied to all businesses in all circumstances. This was the approach championed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the so-called father of scientific management and a big noise when HBS was established in 1908. It is also the approach of many ivory tower academics today, from exponents of “evidence-based policy-making” to devotees of value-free economic models. The case method exposes this approach for the nonsense that it is by focusing students’ attention on a “chunk or reality” rather than on theories on the blackboard.
The second curse is “faddism”: the cycle of big ideas that are supposed to offer the secret to revolutionizing the business world, such as “business process re-engineering” in the 1990s (a Google Ngram search shows it rising steeply from 1987 to 1996 and then dissipating downward) or “purpose-driven leadership” today. These ideas sweep through the business world, generating dozens of conferences, articles and, these days, Zoom calls, before blowing themselves out, leaving their promises unfulfilled and the landscape flattened. True, HBS-based professors generate many of these fads and Harvard-branded products such as the “Harvard Business Review” disseminate them. But at least the school is good enough to produce the antidote as well as the venom.
The great virtue of the method is that it puts the humanity back at the heart of business thinking. It introduces students to the extraordinary variety of business organizations. It shows that choices are always open-ended. The objective facts of the business case — the structure of the industry or the flow of capital — may constrain the choices available, but it can never determine them entirely. And it demonstrates that half the battle lies in persuading your colleagues (or in this case fellow classmates) that you’ve made the right decision. Management is as much about telling a compelling story and crafting a persuasive argument as it is about establishing the facts.
The method does all this in conditions of relentless pressure: As soon as you have finished one case you have to start another. Powell Niland, a former HBS faculty member who went on to the Olin Business School at Washington University, said that “the case system puts the student into the habit of making decisions.” David Garvin, also of HBS, talked about developing “the courage to act.”
Isaiah Berlin once wrote an artful essay on political judgment. He argued that the best politicians don’t think like scientists who try to generate systematic principles from a welter of facts or like intellectuals who try to come up with exciting ideas. They are nevertheless engaged in a highly sophisticated intellectual activity — plucking what they see to be the salient facts from the whirling storm of daily events, processing them with extraordinary rapidity, and then deciding, on the basis of an almost animal instinct, how to make their next move. The British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was one day asked on what principle he decided whether to go to war. He replied that in order to decide whether or not to take an umbrella he looked at the sky. Political judgment is the art of looking at the sky and producing correct guesses about how the weather will turn out.
The same thing can be said about business judgment. What makes a successful businessperson is not their brain power or command of theory. It is their ability to size up ambiguous situations — emerging technologies, nascent markets, complex investment instruments — and then make a sensible judgment under pressure. This ability to produce sound judgments is becoming more important as politics intrudes even deeper into business life and managers are being obliged to make difficult trade-offs between commercial logic and political pressure and between various rival constituencies.
The obvious objection to this argument is that all too many business school products have lacked judgment: Look at the great business scandals of the past few years, from Enron Corp. to the global financial crisis, and you will probably find HBS graduates at the heart of them. HBS even wrote a number of case studies lauding Enron as an example of “asset light management” and the school’s alumnus, Enron president Jeffrey Skilling, as a magnificent manager.
High-profile lawbreakers like Skilling necessarily attract disproportionate attention. But for every Skilling there are thousands of managers who did the work of running their corner of the business world professionally and honestly. And Skilling was as much as anything an example of the evils of management theory — in this case the financialization of everything — particularly when that management theory seemed to justify the ancient vice of greed.
The case method arguably needs to be reinforced by other pedagogical techniques that are designed to teach judgement: I would advocate obliging MBA students to spend at least some of their time reading great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and studying the recent rise of populism (a good name for the course would be “Why Do They Hate Us?”). But for its part the case method has amply justified its place at the heart of business education. It deserves to remain there for at least another century.
• CEOs Learn Something in Business School: Matt Levine
• Modern CEOs Have to Go to Lots of Meetings, Too: Justin Fox
• No, My MBA Alma Mater’s Initiation Rite Isn’t Hazing: Leonid Bershidsky | null | null | null | null | null |
(Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
It was around midnight on Wednesday when Sgt. Matthew Jacobsen of the Portland Police Bureau in Oregon approached a man and woman standing near a silver Dodge Charger. The pair told the officer they were “feds,” but Jacobsen sensed something was amiss, an affidavit says.
There were red and blue lights inside the car and Jacobsen spotted a tactical vest with a “DEA POLICE” patch in the open trunk, court documents say. The man, identified as Robert Edward Golden, instructed the woman, who he said was his trainee, to show the officer her credentials, court documents add.
In a criminal complaint filed Thursday, federal prosecutors allege that Golden was impersonating a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration and, over the past year, duped an unsuspecting woman into thinking she was “in fact in training to be a DEA agent.”
“Golden said he and [the woman] were into ‘cosplay’ (costume play) and that is why they had the police tactical vests with DEA/Police patches” and other fake items, according to the affidavit.
Court documents do not indicate if the woman is facing charges. Golden’s lawyer did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment late Sunday.
Golden is the latest person accused of impersonating a federal agent. In 2020, a man from Orange County, Calif., pleaded guilty after pretending to work for the Department of Homeland Security on several occasions. For years, he joined agents on search warrants, wore body armor and openly carried weapons, prosecutors said.
In October, an Air Force veteran pleaded guilty to impersonating FBI and military special investigation agents. According to court documents, the man once pretended to be an undercover agent when he made a traffic stop at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia and another time persuaded someone to pay him $235 in fees to open a fraudulent investigation.
When Jacobsen approached Golden and the woman last week in Portland, he said he saw what appeared to be a gun holster under Golden’s jacket. Golden was also in possession of two more vests with DEA patches, badges, credentials, handcuffs and an AR-15-style rifle, the affidavit says.
Around 12:20 a.m., Jacobsen took the pair to the DEA Portland office, where investigators then arrested Golden. During questioning, Golden told law enforcement that he purchased the fake DEA badges and credentials online, court documents say, and “said the guns were not real and shot rubber balls.”
Golden told investigators the ruse was for “protection” in his apartment complex so people wouldn’t “bother him” and his trainee, according to the affidavit. He also used the red and blue lights “to get through traffic faster,” he told investigators, and once pretended to be an officer to break up a fight.
To help convince the woman that she was a DEA agent trainee, Golden gave her a badge, took her on nighttime surveillance ride-alongs and accompanied her to shooting practice, court documents say. He also allegedly brought her to meet homeless people so they could form relationships and be used as potential informants.
The woman told investigators Golden spoke of Portland DEA agents named Anderson, Luis, Garcia and Bennett, but there are no agents by those names in the district office, according to the affidavit, which adds that the agency does not do ride-alongs.
DEA Special Agent Morgan T. Barr said in the affidavit that he believed Golden was impersonating a federal agent to gain information from unsuspecting residents, and used police lights in his car to move through traffic.
Court documents show Golden was released to await trial after agreeing to several conditions, including counseling, mental health evaluations and random drug tests. If convicted, he faces a fine and up to three years in federal prison. | null | null | null | null | null |
Good morning, Early Birds. If you missed it this weekend: Read Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, Tom Hamburger and Jackie's definitive history of Donald Trump “ripping things up.” And send us your tips: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us.
Scoop: Boxes of presidential records found at Trump's Florida resort
Pandora's box(es)?: President Donald Trump improperly removed multiple boxes from the White House that were last month retrieved by the National Archives and Records Administration from his Mar-a-Lago residence because they contained documents and other items that should have been turned over to the office, Jackie, Josh Dawsey, Tom Hamburger, and Ashley Parker report in a scoop this morning.
The recovery of the boxes from Trump’s Florida resort raises new concerns about whether Trump preserved memos, letters, notes, emails, faxes and other written communications related to a president’s official duties, as the Presidential Records Act requires.
And it comes as our colleagues revealed that some records from the Archives delivered to the House committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection were torn apart and pieced back together, mirroring a Trump habit several of his former aides called troubling.
Responding to the discovery of the boxes at Mar-a-Lago, Trump advisers denied any nefarious intent and said the boxes contained mementos, gifts, letters from world leaders and other correspondence. The items included correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which Trump once described as “love letters,” as well as a letter left for him by former President Barack Obama, according to two people familiar with their contents.
Dropping the mic: “Things that are national security sensitive or very clearly government documents should have been a part of a first sweep — so the fact that it’s been this long doesn’t reflect well on [Trump],” said a member of the White House Counsel's Office under Obama. “Why has it taken for a year for these boxes to get there? And are there more boxes?”
Why this matters: The Archives has struggled to cope with a president who flouted document retention requirements and frequently ripped up official documents, leaving hundreds of pages taped back together — or some that arrived at the Archives still in pieces. The transfer of these boxes grew out of a discussions between the Archives and the former president’s lawyers that began last year, according to one person familiar with the conversations.
“Out of the ordinary”: All recent administrations have in some ways flouted the law requiring the preservation of presidential records, most often involving the use of unofficial email and telephone accounts. White House documents from multiple administrations also have been retrieved by the Archives after a president has left office.
But personnel familiar with recent administrations said the Trump era stands apart in the scale of the records retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. One person familiar with the transfer characterized it as “out of the ordinary. … [the Archives] has never had that kind of volume transfer after the fact like this.”
How does this affect the Jan. 6 investigation? Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee who did not have knowledge of the Mar-a-Lago find, said the overall records situation reflected the “unconventional nature of how this White House operated.”
Plus, the Archives has very limited enforcement capabilities. The Presidential Records Act operates on the basis of a “gentlemen’s agreement,” as one Archives official phrased it.
“There is a high bar for bringing such cases,” said Charles Tiefer, former House counsel who teaches at the University of Baltimore School of Law.
Typically, Tiefer said, records preservation proceeds by mutual agreement with the occupant of the White House, staff and archivists. “But if there is willful and unlawful intent” to violate the law, then the picture changes, he said, with penalties of up to three years in jail for willfully concealing or destroying public records.
Neither Trump nor the Archives responded to requests for comment on the Mar-a-Lago box haul.
Germany's Scholz comes to Washington
Happening today: President Biden will meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz this afternoon on Scholz’s first trip to Washington since he succeeded Angela Merkel in December.
Biden and Scholz are expected to discuss sanctions that the U.S., Germany and other NATO countries would impose on Russia if Russian President Vladimir Putin decides to invade Ukraine, as well as other matters such as China and the Balkans, according to a senior administration official.
Scholz’s views on Ukraine are considered broadly similar to Merkel’s, according to several experts on German-American relations. But he doesn’t have the years of experience dealing with Moscow and Washington that his predecessor did.
Over 16 years, Merkel dealt with every U.S. president since George W. Bush. She and Putin used to speak every week, without the need for translators; they each speak the other’s language.
One point of tension between Biden and Scholz: Nord Stream 2, the completed-but-not-operational natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany that Republicans — as well as a few Democrats — have pushed the administration to sanction. Biden has resisted the calls for immediate sanctions but has vowed to block its completion if Putin attacks Ukraine.
The senior administration official said on Sunday that “if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” but Scholz himself was much less emphatic in an interview on Friday with our colleague Souad Mekhennet.
“We are ready to take together with our allies all necessary steps,” Scholz said, adding that “all options are on the table.”
Scholz faces his own domestic political pressure on Nord Stream as his government moves to phase out coal, which provides more than a quarter of the Germany's electricity.
“You can't build solar and wind fast enough to replace that,” said Jeff Rathke, the president of Johns Hopkins University’s American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. “So there is the need in the medium term for more natural gas to generate electricity. That is what makes this a real crunch point for Germany, which has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe.”
But there’s also a deeper strain of empathy for Russia in Germany, rooted partly in the cultural ties between the former East Germany and the Soviet Union, said John Emerson, who served as U.S. ambassador to Germany during the Obama administration.
“There’s definitely a sense of some in Germany that it’s not in Germany’s national interest, being as close to Russia as they are, to create the contentious kind of relationship with Russia that perhaps has developed in the United States over the years,” he said.
Florida Republicans' new abortion law bill drawing criticism from advocates on both sides
All eyes on the Sunshine State: “It took just one day after Texas enacted its controversial ‘heartbeat bill,’ banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, for a top Florida Republican to endorse passing the same law in his state — with the leader of the state senate declaring that a copycat measure was ‘something we’re already working on,’” our colleague Caroline Kitchener reports. “But by the time the measure was introduced in September, drawing national headlines, Florida GOP leaders effectively shrugged it off.”
“Now, four months later, Florida Republicans have coalesced around a bill they have come to describe as ‘very reasonable’ and ‘generous’ — a 15-week ban modeled after the Mississippi law currently before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case that will determine the future of Roe v. Wade.”
“It’s an approach, they say, that would prevent only a fraction of the more than 70,000 abortions performed in Florida each year, the vast majority of which take place in the first trimester.”
“The momentum behind the 15-week ban in Florida offers a glimpse into what activists on both sides say is an emerging strategy in some GOP-led legislatures to acclimate voters to a post-Roe world.”
White House offers blueprint for growing unions as labor movement struggles to gain ground. By The Post’s Eli Rosenberg.
Heritage Foundation, former powerhouse of GOP policy, adjusts in face of new competition from Trump allies. By The Post’s Jeff Stein and Yeganeh Torbati.
The nation’s top health official has been a background player for much of his tenure. He says that's about to change. By CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere.
‘It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin’: Ron Johnson won’t try to land Oshkosh Corp. postal vehicle work. By the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Bill Glauber.
The crisis that defined Blinken’s first year. By the New York Times’s Lara Jakes and Michael Crowley.
Seventy years of Queen Elizabeth II | null | null | null | null | null |
Public Opinion? It’s Still All About the Virus.
Over the weekend, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams faced a bit of a flap in which she posed maskless for a photo with a bunch of masked students and teachers. Her opponents were quick to call her out for hypocrisy; she responded by slamming their behavior during the pandemic. Abrams, of course, isn’t the first candidate or elected official who has been caught doing something that seemed to violate pandemic guidelines they publicly supported.But here’s my guess: Most of this stuff isn’t going to matter in November.What will likely matter are the facts on the ground about the pandemic and its effects. Not how leaders act about it. Not even the policy choices they make. Just whether it’s (mostly) gone or not. If the omicron wave is followed by another major summer surge — the 2021 delta wave ran from July through October — then voters are going to be in very poor spirits, and they’re going to take it out on the incumbent party and elect a lot of Republicans. It will be even worse if supply-chain problems and worker shortages are still ongoing problems.On the other hand, if the pandemic actually does subside in 2022, then I’d be very surprised if anything virus-related winds up being what voters, or many candidates, are talking about in November.If the pandemic is still bad, it’s quite likely that Republican attacks will center on things like hypocrisy, and on their policy recommendations to declare the pandemic “over.” If so, that’s what Republican voters will say they’re supporting. But the truth is that most of us decide how to vote first and then figure out why, often adopting campaign rhetoric to explain decisions we’ve already made. That happens most obviously for strong partisans, who go into every campaign with their minds already made up to support their party’s candidates. But it happens for swing voters, too. For them, it’s about whether or not to throw the bums out, which winds up turning on how they feel things are going generally. But they, too, may adopt reasons for their decisions that come from candidate ads.In fact, general pessimism sparked by two years of the pandemic seems to me the likely answer to a lot of public-opinion puzzles. For one, there was an interesting discussion last week between Paul Krugman, David Leonhardt and Nate Cohn about why U.S. public opinion about the economy is so starkly negative despite the evidence (and, yes, that evidence includes a high inflation rate, but opinion is far more negative than that statistic and others should produce). For another, there’s survey information showing increasing partisan polarization over more and more aspects of the pandemic, to the extent that Democrats who are objectively at low risk believe they’re in considerably more danger than Republicans who are at relatively high risk. It seems to me that the most likely reason for both of these phenomena is the same: The pandemic has people generally unhappy, and that’s what’s driving all sorts of public opinion. When people are unhappy, they’re not likely to think the economy is very good. Meanwhile, it’s not surprising that people would look for anything that looks like a solution after the virus has been raging so long and hopes have been repeatedly dashed.If this is correct, the fading of the omicron wave and a period of good news about the pandemic will be a precondition for improved public opinion about the economy, about President Joe Biden, and pretty much anything else. How much good news will it take? I don’t think anyone has any idea. | null | null | null | null | null |
Fire officials: 2 killed, 3 critically hurt in blaze
LITTLE CREEK, Del. — A 9-year-old girl and a 42-year-old woman were killed and three others were critically injured in a house fire in Little Creek on Sunday, Delaware fire investigators said.
When firefighters arrived at the house on Main Street just before noon, flames were shooting from the two-story home and several people were trapped inside, the Office of the State Fire Marshal said in a news release.
Firefighters rescued several people and five people were taken to a hospital suffering from smoke inhalation and burns. The woman and girl died at the hospital and three other people remain in critical condition, officials said. Two were expected to be taken to the Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland, Pennsylvania.
State fire investigators, Delaware State Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating the blaze. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Capitals and the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association are partnering to host the only U.S. stop on the 2021-22 Dream Gap Tour. (Michael Dwyer/AP)
The Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association and the Washington Capitals will partner to host the 2021-22 Dream Gap Tour’s lone stop in the United States. Four games will be held at MedStar Capitals Iceplex, the team’s practice facility in Arlington, from March 4 to 6.
The Capitals also will offer local clinics with PWHPA athletes for players of all skill levels from March 3 to 5. The PWHPA, formed in 2019, features 125 players whose mission is to “promote, advance and support a single, viable professional women’s ice hockey league in North America.”
No players associated with the PWHPA are competing professionally in North America this season; they are waiting until a league is in place that they believe gives professional women’s hockey the resources it deserves. The PWHPA’s goal is to create a league that not only pays a living wage to its players but provides “appropriate elite-level resources.”
The Dream Gap Tour stop in Arlington is the sixth time the PWHPA has partnered with an NHL team for the showcase. Previous stops this season included Nova Scotia and Toronto, and a visit to Ottawa is planned for later this month. U.S. stops on last year’s tour included New York, Chicago and St. Louis.
“There is an incredible talent within the PWHPA, and we look forward to hosting the games and clinics at MedStar Capitals Iceplex,” Capitals team president Dick Patrick said in a statement. “... Helping to advance the game among women across all levels is incredibly important to us as an organization, and we are honored to be working with the PWHPA on this event.”
A complete schedule of events, including ticket information and registration for the clinics, will be available on the Capitals’ website.
“We’re excited to finally be able to share what has been in the works with the Washington Capitals for quite some time,” Jayna Hefford, PWHPA operations consultant, said in a statement. “… We’re excited to make our way back into the United States and continue working towards our ultimate goal.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Arianna Fontana of Italy, celebrates after winning the final of the women’s 500-meter during the short track speedskating competition at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Monday, Feb. 7, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
BEIJING — Arianna Fontana burnished her legacy as short track’s most decorated skater with her second Olympic medal in Beijing and 10th of her career. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ireen Wust of Team Netherlands celebrates after setting a new Olympic record time of 1:53.28 in the 1,500 meters. (Elsa/Getty Images)
BEIJING — Sixteen years ago, before Ireen Wust became a speedskating legend, she didn’t know all the Olympic experience entailed. So when she arrived in Turin for the 2006 Games as a wide-eyed teenager, she reveled in the entirety of this summit: the Athletes Village, her races and the gold medal that made her the youngest Winter Olympic champion from the Netherlands.
“I felt like a child in a candy shop,” she said, before adjusting to an analogy suited to her home country: “In the Netherlands, we have cows, and they go, in spring, for the first time outside. I felt like that.”
Now she’s 35 and at her fifth — and final — Olympics. So much has happened in that time, on and off the ice, which makes the winning feeling more emotional. Through these five trips to the Games — to Turin, Vancouver, Sochi, PyeongChang and now Beijing — Wust has grown accustomed to the pressure and the joy that becomes magnified on this stage. And she has never had to leave without a gold medal.
In her Beijing debut, Wust won the 1,500 meters in 1:53.28, an Olympic record time that gave her about a half-second edge over silver medalist Miho Takagi of Japan. She became the first athlete to earn individual gold medals at five different Olympics, adding to the laundry list of accolades she has compiled since that first medal in Turin.
She now has six Olympic golds — two from 2014 and one in each of her other Olympic appearances — and 12 medals total. Even before these Games, she had earned more Olympic medals than any other speedskater in history, and no Dutch athlete in any sport has won more. She has ascended to the level where only the all-time greats reside.
Yet as Wust chased that sixth gold at the National Speed Skating Oval in Beijing, she approached the start line to subdued applause. As she glided with her chest parallel to the ground and her arms moving rhythmically at her side, the arena was quiet enough to hear the clicking of her blades on the ice. The cheers from limited fans only intensified once it became apparent that an Olympic record was within reach. The atmosphere didn’t match the magnitude of the moment, but Wust still lifted her arms above her head after she crossed the finish and jumped with joy after stepping onto the first-place podium.
“I cannot say which Olympic gold medal is more important for me,” Wust said. “I always said I had five children, but now I have to say it’s like having six children and you have to pick which one is the most beautiful. They all mean a lot to me. And today was a special day.”
She later said this experience felt more emotional. Her close friend and fellow Dutch speedskater Paulien van Deutekom died three years ago of lung cancer. “In moments like this, I would call her before the race and right after the race,” Wust said, explaining her tears.
Wust won the 1,500 in PyeongChang, but she was too nervous to watch the final pair of skaters because she knew Takagi, the silver medalist in 2018, might challenge her time. Wust again held onto the top spot, making history with this gold medal. Wust praised Takagi’s skating technique afterward and said the friendship formed between competitors is “the most beautiful thing of sport.” Wust said she offered to pass along some of her blades to Takagi once she retires, but the two don’t have the same size. And Wust insisted that the 27-year-old from Japan will win this event in four years.
With the two speedskaters sitting next to one another at a news conference, Wust then quietly said to Takagi: “You’re welcome. I mean it.”
The dominance of the Dutch in speedskating has grown in recent years, with the Netherlands winning 39 of the 78 possible Olympic medals at the past two Games. The country already has won four of nine speedskating medals so far in Beijing, with Antoinette de Jong winning the bronze behind Wust and Takagi.
Just making it to the Olympics as a Dutch speedskater is difficult, so once qualified, “there’s this relief, and there’s this state of mind that you’re only going to enjoy your journey,” Wust said. “I always love being at the Olympics. It gives me something special, something magical, seeing the rings.”
Four past Olympics and five previous gold medals hasn’t dampened that appreciation. Wust has been skating at this level for nearly two decades, so she knows she’s ready to be done — even though, at 35, she is still adding to her gold medal haul. She said she wants to have a family so she decided before the season that this would be her last.
“I’m enjoying it even more,” Wust said. “It was a decision I made before this year, and I’m happy that I did and happy that I can quit on my highest level.” | null | null | null | null | null |
In this photo provided by Egypt’s presidency media office, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, right, greets the President of the Republic of Djibouti, Ismail Omar Guelleh, at Cairo International Airport, in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Feb. 6, 2022. Egypt’s president on Monday hosted his Djiboutian counterpart for talks on improving ties and a controversial dam that Ethiopia is building on the Nile River’s main tributary, which Egypt deems an existential threat. (Egyptian Presidency Media Office via AP) (Uncredited/Egyptian Presidency Media Office) | null | null | null | null | null |
The federal courts need to take note. While many states allow some electronic coverage of criminal, civil and appellate proceedings, the federal system has insisted on maintaining its absolute and antiquated ban of cameras. Federal civil rights charges against former Minneapolis police officers Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane raise critical questions about the role and responsibilities of police — issues that people should be able to learn about with their own eyes and ears. Similarly, there was great interest in the issues surrounding the trials of Ghislaine Maxwell and Elizabeth Holmes, but because they were in federal court there was no chance for broader public access.
Testifying before Congress in support of legislation that would open up the federal courts to more public access, Mickey H. Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, referenced the words of Justice John Marshall Harlan, who provided the deciding vote in the 1965 Supreme Court decision affirming the ban against cameras in the courtroom: “The day may come when television will have become so commonplace an affair in the daily life of the average person as to dissipate all reasonable likelihood that its use in courtrooms may disparage the judicial process.” That day, Mr. Osterreicher said in 2017, has not only come but has long since passed. More than ever in this time when misinformation is rampant and democratic principles are under attack, there is a need to let the public see how justice is done. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: What China won’t let you see amid the glitzy coverage of the Olympics
A Chinese television journalist works at the site of the Opening Ceremonies of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing on Feb. 4. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
The ongoing Winter Olympics in Beijing should shine a glaring light on a particularly atrocious moment in China’s history of human rights abuses. But the Chinese government’s relentless efforts to suppress anything resembling critical expression will promote a very different version of reality.
The internment and ongoing genocide of the country’s Muslim Uyghur population is an unconscionable crime that should have been reason enough to deny China the opportunity to host the Olympics. The unlawful detention of a growing number of Americans by Chinese authorities is another major cause for concern.
For these reasons and many others, the Biden administration was wise to announce a diplomatic boycott of these Olympics, meaning no U.S. government officials would attend. But what about those working for newspapers, wire services and television networks, who do have to attend and complete their work in a tense and compromised situation?
The ill treatment of journalists is by no means the worst of China’s sins — but it is a significant trend that appears to be worsening. When correspondents based in China are unable to perform their jobs without interference, intimidation and surveillance, readers around the world are denied a full picture of the internal dynamics of the world’s most populous country — one vying to be a model for other governments.
According to a recent report by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, 99 percent of foreign journalists polled said that reporting conditions “did not meet what they considered international standards.” The report found that 62 percent of respondents had been obstructed from reporting by police or other officials, and 47 percent had faced obstruction by unidentified individuals.
Many newsrooms in China have been understaffed because journalists were denied work visas or have seen lengthy delays in their processing. Coordinated attacks against reporters via social media are yet another hurdle — one that can spill into real life, as the growing climate of suspicion toward foreign journalists has led to some being harassed or confronted while reporting.
The harassment has increased so much that at least six journalists have recently decided to leave the country rather than face further threats. It’s a common occurrence in authoritarian societies, where journalists are often tailed, face threats of prosecution on bogus allegations and receive harassing phone calls from unknown numbers.
The situation can be even more challenging for reporters who have local or dual citizenship, or have roots in the closed societies they report on. I know that all too well. As a dual national of the United States and Iran, I was arrested by Iranian authorities, subjected to a sham trial and denied consular access for a year and a half.
counterpointThe Olympics can — and do — make the world a better place
In China, Haze Fan, a Bloomberg journalist and winner of the National Press Club’s 2021 John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award, has been behind bars since December 2020 on unfounded charges. Cheng Lei, an Australian citizen born in China and a former anchor for the state-owned China Global Television Network, has been detained since August 2020.
Domestic reporters with little institutional support behind them are particularly vulnerable: In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, several were targeted and arrested for their accountability journalism, including citizen reporter Zhang Zhan.
Press freedom watchdogs say there are dozens of journalists — an estimated 127, according to a December report by Reporters Without Borders — detained across China.
And as international media organizations send thousands of reporters to China to cover the Olympics this month, these trends will likely only get worse.
Journalists who have been based in authoritarian societies know the drill well: Whenever major events that garner international attention take place, the walls restricting access to information come down temporarily for a very few, creating a facade of openness for visiting reporters. It’s just one more symbol of the hypocrisy that underpins such states — and, in this case, a way to distract from the outrageous rights violations happening beyond the glitzy backdrop of the Olympics.
Unfortunately — despite the brave efforts of many journalists, who have still managed to break news and conduct investigations — China’s obstruction of the free press is irrevocably compromising the world’s ability to comprehend and judge its repression. And it’s time to talk about it.
International news organizations rarely publicize when their correspondents are harassed or otherwise stifled from reporting, preferring to maintain the sliver of access they have in a country rather than being forced to report on it from afar. This is a missed opportunity for media outlets to stand up for the free flow of information. There is no simple answer for how to handle these situations, but suffering these abuses in silence only aids the agenda of authoritarians.
Ultimately, no matter which country wins the most medals, these Olympics should be remembered as another defeat in press freedom’s current losing streak. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Russians are talented across all disciplines of figure skating, but they shine brightest in the women’s competition. They swept the podium at the 2021 world championships, with Shcherbakova winning the gold and Trusova taking the bronze. Elizaveta Tuktamysheva, who’s not at these Games, won the silver. But the attention gravitates mostly toward Valieva and her brilliance — because she’s the rising star whose young career has included hardly anything other than gold. | null | null | null | null | null |
Diplomacy Can Still Prevent War in Ukraine
By all appearances, the standoff over Ukraine remains dangerous. Although Russia continues to deny that it plans an attack, President Vladimir Putin has massed troops, hardware, weapons stockpiles and medical units on Ukraine’s borders, and continues to add to their number. The U.S. is sending 2,700 troops to bolster NATO’s eastern flank, with at least 8,500 more ready to deploy. Having previously downplayed the prospect of an imminent Russian attack, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has more recently warned that the crisis could lead to a full-fledged European war.
Even so, there are glimmers of a way out. Confronted with a surprisingly strong and united Western response to his moves, Putin has signaled some willingness to entertain talks on Russia’s security concerns in Europe. While not bowing to Putin’s more extreme demands, U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders should seize the opportunity to find some common ground with him. Doing so has the potential to avert a calamitous conflict and advance the West’s security interests as well.
Proposals made by the U.S. and NATO in recent weeks offer a starting point. Among other things, they aim to improve communication between the two sides by resuming mutual briefings on military exercises and nuclear policies. NATO’s proposal would reinvigorate the NATO-Russia Council, which has met only sporadically since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and reestablish representative offices.
The West should push for tangible agreements on key areas of dispute. These should include measures to avoid conflict between vessels in the Black Sea and greater transparency on military exercises, which Russia has skirted in the past. The U.S. can allay Russian anxieties by allowing Moscow to inspect missile-defense sites in Romania and Poland which the Kremlin claims are cover for offensive nuclear-armed missiles — so long as Putin agrees to offer access to missile bases in Russia, including those in the region of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland. Biden’s offer to discuss such an arrangement is a promising start. If talks move forward, the U.S. should ensure the Romanian and Polish governments are involved and protocols are in place to prevent Russian inspectors from obtaining classified information.
As a condition for broader dialogue, the U.S. and Europe should press Russia to abide by its obligations as a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and agree to update the OSCE agreement on confidence-building measures, like exchanges of military information and notifications of large-scale exercises. Both sides also have an interest in resuming dialogue on nuclear weapons, particularly on preserving the 1987 U.S.-Russian Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which the U.S. withdrew from in 2019. Though the U.S. had grounds to accuse Russia of violating the treaty, abandoning the pact without a replacement has done little to enhance U.S. security and made NATO allies more vulnerable to Russian intimidation. The Biden administration should use Russia’s proposed draft treaty from late last year, which hinted at greater Russian openness to disarmament-verification measures, as a foundation for resuming talks and restoring the treaty’s ban on intermediate-range missile deployments in Europe.
There’s no guarantee Putin will respond positively to such overtures. Discussions about military transparency and arms control don’t address Putin’s greatest obsession, the eastward expansion of NATO and the future of Ukraine. Even so, the Kremlin has not been explicit on its goals, leaving room for Putin to pull back from Ukraine’s borders and claim progress on broader security issues as an acceptable outcome.
Arms-control diplomacy has worked before. It could buy the world time once again. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Colin Jost, left, and Scarlett Johansson arrive at the Oscars in Los Angeles on Feb. 9, 2020. The married couple, who once made comedy skits on “Saturday Night Live,” are reuniting onscreen for a new Super Bowl commercial. The 60-second ad launches Monday, Feb. 7, 2022, and will be televised during Super Bowl 56 on Feb. 13. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
As the men’s short program looms, Nathan Chen is chasing gold (and Yuzuru Hanyu)
Nathan Chen has already starred in Beijing, but he's now after an Olympic gold medal. (Elsa/Getty Images)
American Nathan Chen, who finished fifth in the 2018 Olympics, will try to secure that title by utilizing his unmatched arsenal of quadruple jumps. Since his disappointing finish in PyeongChang, Chen has dominated the sport, winning the last three world championship. Chen has lost only once since the disappointment in South Korea,
Hanyu has not found a way to beat Chen since the last Olympics, but has vowed to do a Hail Mary of sorts by attempting to become the first person to land a quadruple axel — a feat that just four years ago seemed comically impossible.
But Hanyu has had a habit of making impossible things seem possible, which should make this two-part competition compelling to the very end.
However, it is unlikely that we will see the quad axel in the short program, which begins Tuesday morning in Beijing (Monday night Eastern). In this first phase of the competition, skaters will be assessed on the completion of seven required elements: a two-jump combination, two solo jumps (one using an axel take off, which is easy to spot because it’s the only jump going forward), three spins and a sequence of fancy footwork. A score of around 105 points would put skaters in the hunt for a medal.
The short program will help showcase Hanyu and Chen’s contrasting approaches. Chen’s performance to Charles Aznavour’s “La Boheme” is casual and breezy. His best jumps launch off a toe pick, which allows him to take off with a sense of precision, distance and control. He grips his body so quickly and so tightly that it blurs in the air, rotating faster than most of his competitors. His big point-getter will likely be the very last jumping pass in the program — a quadruple Lutz, in which he will take off by using the side of the blade that faces outward, followed by triple toe loop. It’s the hardest combination that will be performed in the short program — and Chen will receive bonus credits because he performs the skill in the second half of his program, when most skaters are exhausted.
Hanyu, who has shushed entire areas of cheering fans simply by pressing his index finger to his lips, will skate with a dramatic flair, utilizing the accents and runs of music by Camille Saint-Saens. His best jumps utilize his fluid knee bend and the edge of the blade, not the toe pick. And although his jumping passes in the short program are less difficult than Chen’s, they generate high marks for their airy quality and the difficult, spontaneous entrances Hanyu uses before blasting off. His most well-regarded jump — a triple axel so effortless that it makes the quadruple axel seem attainable — is Chen’s worst.
Hanyu’s best chance at securing the gold is to pull as far away from Chen in the short program as he possibly can. Even though Hanyu’s longevity, popularity and consistency have certainly made him a candidate to be the men’s figure skating GOAT, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time world champion is beatable. If Hanyu has problems, they tend to happen in the second phase of competition, which is more than a minute longer than the first. Without the quadruple axel, he cannot match Chen jump for jump. That, combined with occasional nervousness (the performances in which he won his two gold medals were far from perfect), makes him vulnerable in the free skate.
Chen capitalizes on that vulnerability. He is a tremendous free skater (despite some shakiness this year) and his ability to confidently land quadruple jumps from five different entrances offers up an array of point-getting options that could prove lethal. He does not have to win the short program to win the gold medal, but doing so would make his path considerably easier. To win the short program, Chen must not only concentrate on quadruple jumps, but focus on a smoother landing to his triple axel and faster, more secure spins than he showed in the team competition.
There are other skaters who will be ready to contend for the bronze medal — or even to snatch away the gold or silver in the event that Chen and/or Hanyu have an uncharacteristically poor showings.
The sleeper in this competition is Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama, who finished ahead of Hanyu in the last world championships, winning silver. Kagiyama, 18, is a young, springy jumper who is gaining strength, speed and confidence with each competition.
American Vincent Zhou is also in the mix, although his status is in doubt after a positive coronavirus test. He lacks the polish and the edge quality of the others in the upper echelon (How can you tell an edge? It is a lean of the body) but has a stunner of a quadruple Lutz-triple toe combination that will keep him competitive if he lands it. The trouble, as evidenced by his performance in the team competition in Beijing, is that Zhou becomes more inconsistent when he gets nervous. For casual fans, pay close attention to Zhou’s feet when he lands a jump. If he is not in the zone, he will have difficultly completing all his rotations in the air. If that happens, the foot on which he lands will be unsteady and shift a little bit. Those shifts generate big deductions that could doom his chances.
The most captivating program of the night might come from the final skater. The United States’ Jason Brown, whose program to a Riverdance medley went viral in 2014, has the most distinct short program of all the top men. Skating to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman,” Brown’s routine offers an homage to the influential Black dancer Alvin Ailey and is the truest transposition of modern dance ever performed in the men’s competition.
While the other top competitors are renowned for what they do in the air, Brown will try to pick up points by utilizing speed, intricate choreography and otherworldly footwork on the ice. Brown, who has only cleanly landed one quadruple jump in competition, has kept himself competitive with this strategy — even though he does not have the jumps that accrue big points. The jumpers tend to pull away from Brown in the final phase of competition, so his short program routine is his best hope to transcend the strictures of sport and enter the realm of pop culture sensation. | null | null | null | null | null |
These are the latest developments:
Here’s where things stand now:
One potential concession from the United States: Officials confirmed last week that they offered to allow Russia to inspect missile defense systems in Romania and Poland to verify there are no Tomahawk cruise missiles at those sites. In return, the United States would seek inspections of similar sights in the United States. | null | null | null | null | null |
In this photo provided by Egypt’s presidency media office, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, right, meets with the President of the Republic of Djibouti, Ismail Omar Guelleh, at the presidential palace, in Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Feb. 7, 2022. Egypt’s president on Monday hosted his Djiboutian counterpart for talks on improving ties and a controversial dam that Ethiopia is building on the Nile River’s main tributary, which Egypt deems an existential threat. (Egyptian Presidency Media Office via AP) (Uncredited/Egyptian Presidency Media Office) | null | null | null | null | null |
For the new study, researchers from France, Denmark and the United States analyzed 800,000 pairs of satellite images — including small glaciers in New Zealand and the southern cordilleras of South America that have never been studied, as well as large ones in Patagonia and the Arctic. The team tracked the movement of their physical features, like crevasses, over more than a year to assess their ice flow. Using the glacier’s velocity and slope, they were able to estimate the ice’s thickness and volume.
Mountain glaciers in other locations, researchers found, had more ice than previously estimated. The Himalayas’ glaciers have 37 percent more ice, they estimate, but some of these ice fields are under intense pressure as temperatures rise.
A new study published Thursday in the journal Nature Portfolio Journal Climate and Atmospheric Research shows the world’s highest glacier, on top of Mount Everest, is melting faster than ever. The Himalayas’ South Col Glacier is losing decades worth of ice every year because of climate change, according to researchers who retrieved an ice core there.
“We show that even a small increase in temperature can result in increased melting and significantly more sublimation particularly if the glacier surface is not covered with snow all year,” said study co-author Paul Andrew Mayewski, a professor at the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, in an email.
Researchers in different parts of the world have cautioned that mountain glaciers could disappear in the near future unless the world reduces greenhouse gas emissions faster. The United Nations climate agency says the last three mountain glaciers in eastern Africa are shrinking so fast they could vanish in two decades. And Austrian scientists studying ice caves in the eastern Alps say that at the current rate, those glaciers will be gone too. | null | null | null | null | null |
Dumped by her husband, an author dove into loneliness and resurfaced with lessons for a pandemic
Science writer Florence Williams, who has a new book out on loneliness, in her backyard writing studio in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 3, 2022. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
For generations of future researchers, the coronavirus pandemic will provide rich material on the social and physiological effects of isolation and loneliness. But science writer Florence Williams got a head start on the subject before the pandemic began, when her husband of 25 years abruptly left her in 2017. She almost immediately noticed changes in her body, and decided to explore what they meant.
Her investigation took her from her home in the District, across the United States and to Europe as she dug into the role intimate relationships play in human and animal health and longevity. Williams’s midlife dating misadventures, her discussions with neuroscientists and psychologists, and her therapist-assisted magic mushroom and ecstasy trip are all chronicled in “Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey,” published Feb. 1 by Norton.
“We’re not only social, we’re hypersocial, we find safety in numbers, and our brains are very much built to find strong attractions,” said Williams, now 54, in an interview. “We’re hypersensitive to social cues and very aware of how people treat us … so when your primary attraction figure tells you that he wants to go find his soul mate, it’s devastating.”
The split put Williams in a growing category of Americans who live on their own. The percentage of single-person households has steadily risen in recent decades, and a 2018 report found that a fifth of Americans always or often feel lonely or socially isolated. And a report in September found, worldwide, that participants’ reporting of severe loneliness had tripled compared with before the pandemic.
Her husband’s departure left Williams feeling unbalanced and unwell, like “a stateless exile from my former life.” She had trouble sleeping, lost 20 pounds and was diagnosed with diabetes. She soon learned what was going on: to the nervous system, being dumped is like being left alone in the wild, and it reacts accordingly.
“You’re about to be attacked by predators, you don’t have safety in numbers,” she said, “and so your body [produces] more white blood cells” — inflammation to deal with the wounds. That means the body must make less of the interferon proteins that help people combat viruses (the evolutionary trade-off being that contagion is less of an immediate threat to people on their own since viruses spread in groups).
Inflammation in the short term is helpful in healing from a wound inflicted by predators. But over the long term it is associated with heart disease, cancer, stroke, dementia and early death.
And, as it turns out, it also can predispose people to getting sicker from covid, said Steve Cole, a professor at UCLA School of Medicine whom Williams met during her book research.
Noting that hunter-gatherers spent roughly a third of their time around the fire, “gossiping and playing,” Cole said modern life “creates a big risk for people to get into this mode where they really feel alienated and not cared for and on their own.”
American culture has long romanticized loners. “The U.S. has a particular strain of self-reliance that dates back to people like [Ralph Waldo] Emerson,” Williams said. “We pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, it’s a phrase Americans love.”
But as traditional modes of gathering — such as barn raising, knitting circles and church attendance — have declined, loneliness has increased, Cole said. “That organic form of shared purpose has kind of dropped out of the American experience,” he said, adding that the digital culture that has replaced it “really works to amplify discord and social rejection.”
“This is a known cultural crisis in American society,” Cole said. “When I was in graduate school, nobody talked about loneliness … it wasn’t on the radar.”
The result, he said, is a “constant low-grade drizzle of stress biology — and now along comes covid and the interferon first line of defense fails to contain it, and it spreads throughout your lungs.” This results in a cascade of immune-response overreaction that can hamper covid patients’ lungs from allowing oxygen into the blood.
In the 1990s, Cole found that HIV-positive men who were closeted and did not have strong support networks died sooner than those who did; their interferon molecules, which help the antiviral response, were deeply suppressed. Subsequent research with monkeys infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) showed similar declines when they were isolated from their group; when they were paired back up with other monkeys, their immune systems rallied.
To see how Williams was faring after her breakup, Cole measured the activity of interferons and inflammation genes in her immune cells to see how they changed over time.
The first blood draw was nine months after her marriage ended, and the second was five months later, after an outdoor river adventure that Williams, whose previous book was about the healing powers of nature, had expected would help regulate her. But the results were similar: Cole told Williams that her cells “still look like those of a lonely person,” she wrote.
In researching her book, Williams talked with a woman whose romantic rejection triggered actual heart failure, a syndrome known as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy; in Britain, where the government recently created a new position for a Minister of Loneliness, she visited a “men’s shed” where men go to find community.
She learned about loneliness in voles, mice and chimpanzees; she talked with a psychology professor who told her that divorce ranks just under the death of a spouse in terms of stressful life events, and a biological anthropologist who warned her not to get dumped again anytime soon.
Two weeks boating down a river on her own failed to change Williams’s inflammation markers. But a therapist-guided MDMA and psilocybin mushroom trip was “surprisingly helpful,” she said, because it brought a different perspective to her concept of herself.
“I did experience a sense of collective awe, that I am part of a cosmos and that my own personal ego and my own personal problems are perhaps not as big as they sometimes feel … I felt less afraid of the future and I felt better able to move on.”
Williams also doubled down on other coping mechanisms such as tightening connections with friends and family, and communing with nature — remedies many in lockdown have also used to counteract the effects of social isolation — and she learned to be more flexible. “I became more comfortable with the idea of uncertainty and unpredictability,” she said.
By her third blood draw, two years after the breakup, her inflammation and anti-virus levels were down to a “charming” balance, Cole told her. And when the coronavirus hit shortly after that, she said, “I was sort of grateful that I’d had those two years under my belt, to inoculate me.”
During the pandemic, Williams found parallels between her personal trauma and a society that had loneliness and isolation suddenly thrust upon it.
“[There was] the sense that really our worlds had shrunk, we weren’t able to see the normal calm and comfort that we derive from our social network,” she said. And the fact that, pandemic or no, “We’re not as in control of our lives as we think we are.”
Williams will co-lead an “Unloneliness Walk” on March 5, open to the public, at the National Arboretum, at which she will talk about strategies and antidotes to loneliness and heartbreak. | null | null | null | null | null |
The protests represent a fringe viewpoint north of the border
Truckers refuel during the “Freedom Convoy” protest on Saturday in Ottawa. (Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images)
Jonathan Kay is an editor and podcast host with Quillette, a book author and a columnist for the National Post.
For the past week, Ottawa has played (mostly unwilling) host to a loosely organized group of motorized protesters who rolled into the city under the banner of “Freedom Convoy 2022.” The core members are cross-border truckers who oppose coronavirus vaccine requirements for reentry into Canada, but some also threw in broader demands aimed at eliminating pandemic public health rules altogether. Many are now on their way home, their slogans having predictably fallen on deaf ears within Justin Trudeau’s government. And the stunt’s failure speaks volumes about the state of right-wing politics in Canada, thereby providing a sobering backdrop to the Conservative Party leadership race triggered by Wednesday’s ouster of opposition leader Erin O’Toole.
Some Ottawa neighborhoods have understandably become enraged by the sheer cacophony emitted by the convoy. (“The honking will continue until freedom improves” was one popular protest meme.) And during the first, chaotic weekend of it late last month, there were boorish displays at several Ottawa landmarks. One or two (presumptive) protesters were pictured with swastikas (though these seem to have been aimed at accusing the government of fascist tendencies, not as signifiers of Nazi belief). The Confederate flag also made an appearance, which was seized upon by some as evidence that the Canadian version of the Capitol invasion was afoot.
But, in fact, there has been almost no real violence to speak of in Ottawa. And as the days wore on, the whole thing came to look more like a loosely organized street party than the bloody fracas “similar to Charlottesville or the January 6 insurrection” that one Liberal member of Parliament breathlessly anticipated as the convoy approached.
Even at its height, the size of the protest, about 8,000 people, was a rounding error compared with the big demonstrations that often play out in Washington. But unlike their American counterparts, Canadians aren’t accustomed to sustained mass protests on the conservative side of the political spectrum — a phenomenon we’re now all primed to associate with extremely angry men wearing camouflage or horned fur hats. And so the Freedom Convoy set off a wave of social panic among Canadian progressives no less unhinged than protesters’ claims that the Great White North had become a police state.
The U.S. vaccine rollout is prompting an unusual emotion for us Canadians: Envy
Barricades of Canadian rail lines and oil-and-gas projects occur regularly in Canada, as do large rallies championing Black and Indigenous rights. But these liberal protests tend to attract highly sympathetic treatment from the media — unlike the Freedom Convoy, which was cast as suspect, and even dangerous, from the moment it started moving eastward. The anti-vaccine movement has no real mainstream political constituency in Canada, where more than 88 percent of citizens older than 4 have received at least one dose. And once convoy participants arrived in Ottawa, none of their scattered bozo eruptions could be explained away as mere byproducts of righteous social justice fervor.
Not surprisingly, a national survey released Thursday indicated that a majority of respondents thought that the protesters’ actions were (in the oh-so-Canadian phrasing of the pollsters) “offensive and inappropriate.” And the longer the thing goes on, even in a vestigial capacity, the less popular it’s likely to get: One-off acts of protest are part of life in a democracy. The creation of lasting urban encampments that spew noise and diesel fumes is not.
There’s a certain tragic quality to the convoy, though, as it was never clear how the project would succeed politically, even theoretically. If this had been a similarly motivated American trucker convoy — say, one rolling toward D.C. from Utah and Colorado along Interstate 70 — the organizers might realistically hope to be greeted warmly by photo-opping elements of the Republican Party, not to mention the glossy propaganda apparatus of Fox News. Even if nothing concrete were achieved, such a pageant would at least help mark off a sizable and very real power base within the GOP. But in Canada, that kind of faction simply doesn’t exist within mainstream electoral politics. Even those few Conservative Party MPs who offered as much as a simple thumbs-up gesture on behalf of the convoy have generally backed off, on pain of being denounced as Nazi-adjacent by Canadian media.
For years now, democratic nations have been wrestling with what has been described as the “centrifugal forces of polarization and inequality” — with conservatives turning toward mob populism, while liberals are pressured to embrace esoteric theories of race and gender. In both respects, the United States, having given the world both Donald Trump and the “great awokening,” often is held out as the most shocking cautionary tale.
Happy Canada Day. Don’t get carried away with the celebration, please.
But the American political system was much better equipped to assimilate this centrifuge than Canada’s, since U.S. primary elections already had been acting for decades as a signal-booster for extremists on both sides. Canada’s political system is very different: At both the federal and provincial levels, parliamentary votes tend to be ruthlessly whipped by party leaders who exercise complete top-down control of their caucuses (until they’re ousted, that is). These same leaders also monopolize control of candidate lists in elections, and they rarely hesitate to turf any party member who becomes a public relations liability.
The result is that even though Canadian politics is conducted, for superficial public consumption, in a bizarrely apocalyptic vernacular adopted from America’s culture war, there actually isn’t that much space separating conservative and liberal politicians when it comes to important policy issues — which is why Ontario and Alberta, two large provinces run by conservative premiers, imposed stringent lockdown policies in response to the omicron variant, and why both now boast of vaccination rates that barely diverge from the national average (which is itself much higher than that of the United States).
This is the best part of Canadian politics: Yes, we lose our minds on Twitter and Reddit like everyone else. But this is typically just symbolic blood sport. When it comes to real-life decision-making, the fundamentally centripetal mechanics of our system encourage us to act like adults. In the United States, almost 0.3 percent of the population has died of covid-19. In Canada, the corresponding figure is less than 0.1 percent.
The downside is that the Canadian approach systematically alienates that small (but not insubstantial) portion of the population that doesn’t see itself represented, even symbolically, in electoral politics — except through the People’s Party of Canada, a 2018 conservative splinter party that won 5 percent of the vote last year despite a concerted media effort to present it as a haven for bigots. In the United States, even the most radicalized wing nut can entertain some faint hope of pushing a fringe candidate through a primary, and maybe even into the House of Representatives. In buttoned-up Canada, where a candidate risks ejection from his party just for standing too close to a colleague or getting into an argument, that isn’t the case.
What’s worse (from a conservative’s point of view), the situation in Canada is fundamentally asymmetrical: While conservative populist sentiment is largely taboo within Canadian institutional politics and mainstream media, radicalized liberal dogmas are not only tolerated but performatively embraced.
This includes the doctrinaire formulations of American social justice activism that have been imported wholesale into the Canadian political space, both by Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh, leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party that’s propping up the Liberals’ minority government. In recent years especially, Canadians have been greeted by the spectacle of Trudeau, a serial blackface enthusiast in days of yore, taking a knee to Black Lives Matter and denouncing his own country as a genocide state. He also has demanded that his subordinates enact public policies “informed and developed through an intersectional lens, including applying frameworks such as Gender-based Analysis Plus (GBA Plus)” — which would strike most ordinary Canadians, probably including his own supporters, as pretentious faculty-lounge gibberish. And in 2020, when a mob tore down a statue of Canada’s first prime minister, Trudeau and other Canadian liberal leaders stared silently at their feet, a fact not lost on the truckers now being excoriated for every stray act of rudeness in Ottawa. You don’t have to be a trucker, or even a vaccine mandate opponent, to see this double standard as hypocritical.
As I write this, various Conservatives are marshaling their forces for a leadership run, with the winner to face off against Trudeau in the next election. Each faces the same single existential decision in regard to the brand of outlying conservative populism that announces itself with a horn: (a) Let the outliers into the big tent, and watch the Conservatives be excoriated in the media as Canada’s answer to Trumpism, or (b) cast them out, and send them fleeing to the People’s Party, which will then siphon off support on the Conservatives’ right flank.
There’s no right answer. But either way, these big rigs will find a place to park. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mikaela Shiffrin said of the Olympics in a September interview, “honestly, it’s terrifying for the entire two weeks straight.” (Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
Most important will be those she asks of herself. Monday’s giant slalom, an event in which she won gold four years ago at the PyeongChang Olympics, “was finished basically before it even started,” Shiffrin said, and there is nothing short of shock in that development. But even if she simply made one poor turn on the course at Yanqing National Alpine Ski Centre — her in-the-moment-assessment of the calamity — she knows the consequences put in doubt her entire Olympics.
For an elite athlete, the 26-year-old Shiffrin has always been almost alarmingly candid. In saying Monday, “I won’t ever get over this,” that streak is alive and well. But in the course of all that endearing frankness are kernels of uncertainty that can seem surprising for someone so accomplished. She is among the best ever to do what she does. But that status does little to eradicate doubt.
“And to an extent, that can work. But at the Olympics, it really rarely does. Like, you cannot limit distractions 100 percent. You kind of can’t limit distractions at all.”
Yet combine what has happened this season with what happened Monday, and it’s hard to call Shiffrin the favorite for gold. Vlhova has skied in seven World Cup slaloms this season and won five. In the other two, she was second — to Shiffrin. Shiffrin is well-suited, too, to the Alpine combined — one run of downhill, one of slalom — an event in which she won silver in PyeongChang, one that will be contested Feb. 17. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
The IRS has faced a torrent of criticism from members of Congress and the general public since its plans became widely known. The IRS announced last week that it was ready to receive the first tax returns on 2021 income.
On Thursday, a group of Senate Republicans wrote a letter to Rettig that cited the government’s “unfortunate history of data breaches.” The IRS, the letter said, had “unilaterally decided to allow an outside contractor to stand as the gatekeeper between citizens and necessary government services. The decision millions of Americans are forced to make is to pay the toll of giving up their most personal information, biometric data, to an outside contractor or return to the era of a paper-driven bureaucracy.”
In a separate letter, Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) wrote Rettig that the IRS “requiring taxpayers to capture and deliver their most sensitive biometric data is an egregious accessibility and privacy concern.”
On Monday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and other members of Congress joined the critics, writing a letter calling it “simply wrong to compel millions of Americans to place trust in this new protocol” and urging the IRS to consult with “a wide variety of stakeholders before deciding on an alternative.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Cpl. Annette Goodyear saves a student from an oncoming car as it speeds through the crosswalk outside North East Middle School in North East, Md. (Courtesy of Cecil County)
Cpl. Annette Goodyear was outside of a middle school in Cecil County, Md. on Friday morning, guiding students across the street while wearing her neon orange crossing guard jacket.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I just see this blur,” said Goodyear, who has been an officer with the North East Police Department for 14 years and was working her regular crossing guard shift on Feb. 4. in the small town at the top of the Chesapeake Bay.
“It took me a few seconds to realize that this did just happen,” said Goodyear. “I just remember laying on the ground and looking up, and the first thing I thought was ‘where is the student?’”
“I could see that she was confused, and she came back to me just to make sure I was okay,” Goodyear said. “She was panicking. I felt horrible, because I couldn’t just jump up and grab a hold of her and say, ‘everything is okay.’”
Goodyear’s actions are a “clear representation of how our law enforcement officers really do ‘protect and serve,’” she continued. “They do it every day in small and large ways. It’s just not always this amazing or caught on video.”
Although Goodyear is “still a little sore,” she said on Monday, “I’m ready to get back to work tomorrow morning.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: World Stage: Crisis in Ukraine with Philippe Étienne
MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m David Ignatius, a columnist for the Post.
It's a special pleasure for me this morning to introduce our guest, Philippe Étienne, France's ambassador to the United States and a diplomat that I have known for many years. We're going to talk this morning about the crisis in the Ukraine, French‑American relations, and the future of Europe.
Ambassador Étienne is coming to us this morning from the State Department where he will be representing France and the European Union at 9:30, a half hour from now, at a meeting of the U.S.‑EU Energy Council.
I'm grateful to his staff and to the State Department for organizing the logistics for his appearance from State this morning. We've promised to end our conversation at 9:25 so Ambassador Étienne can get to that meeting.
Monsieur Ambassadeur, bonjour. Welcome to Washington Post Live.
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Thank you. Bonjour, David. Thank you. Thank you really for your invitation.
I join you also in your thanks to the Department of State for having me this morning in this building. Indeed, I will represent not France but the French presidency of the Council of the European Union at this very important meeting of the U.S.‑EU Energy Council at 9:30. Thank you for also your adaptation to this schedule. Thank you, David. It's good to be with you.
MR. IGNATIUS: So let's begin, Mr. Ambassador, with the Ukraine crisis. At this hour in Moscow, your president, Emmanuel Macron, is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin for urgent talks to see if there's a diplomatic path forward that can resolve this crisis without a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Give us a sense of President Macron's agenda as he goes into these crucial talks today and what the nature of his conversations has been in recent weeks with President Putin.
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Thank you. Well, first, he's not only visiting Moscow. He's also visiting Kiev, and this is really important to underline. And this visit has been prepared by many conversations with the two presidents of Russia and Ukraine‑‑President Macron has been knowing them for many years now‑‑and also by a very intense coordination with other leaders since the unity between allies here is absolutely essential to conversation with President Biden and many conversations with other leaders, including the prime minister, the British prime minister, the Secretary‑General of NATO, Baltic leaders.
Our foreign minister was in Romania recently, and you mentioned in your introduction what we're ready to do also with Romania, so a lot of coordination to preserve the unity, which is absolutely essential.
And then the topics, which will be discussed not only in Moscow but also in Kiev, you know France and Germany are mediators in the Donbas crisis and members of the so‑called Normandy format together with Ukraine and Russia, and we see a possibility here maybe, maybe to move forward based on the first meeting of the advisors, which took place in Paris two weeks ago. Of course, a path for de‑escalation, which we are looking for, and a conversation on the security in Europe, these would surely be the topics of those visits like of many conversations in those days based on our dual approach which is a deterrence of an invasion and dialogue, especially with Russia.
MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Ambassador, President Putin is said to have described your President Macron as a "quality interlocutor" is the way this has been translated. It's a phrase that came to the press from a French official describing their interaction, and this dialogue has been important during the crisis.
Some have criticized President Macron for speaking outside of the formal NATO process and have worried about divisions within NATO. How would France answer that concern, which is expressed here in Washington but in other capitals as well?
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Well, I don't really understand these statements. On the contrary, as I said, we act in a very close coordination with our allies and in the unity of our positions, and on top of that, we are not the only ones talking with President Putin. And, finally, we are also very closely in connection with the Ukrainian‑‑with Ukraine and the president of Ukraine. So I don't see any basis for such a suspicion.
And the fact that, indeed, I would not comment President Putin's supposed assessment about his dialogue and the quality of this dialogue with President Macron, but it is true that they have been meeting for four and a half years now, same with President Zelensky, by the way. I remember President Zelensky's visit to Paris, the first one. I was there, and it's rather, I would think, an asset for all of us, including for our allied nations and partners, to have this possibility of a dialogue. It shows also that the Europeans, since France is not only mediator with Germany in the Normandy format, but Minsk agreements implementation has been processed but also is president of the Council of the European Union right now. It all shows also that the Europeans stand actively side by side with their allies in this dual approach, which‑‑and everybody agrees with that, has among the two components of this approach, a dialogue to find‑‑to use all diplomatic instruments to find a political, diplomatic way out of this crisis.
MR. IGNATIUS: So one sign of the coordination that you were referring to a moment ago with other NATO allies was the phone call yesterday between President Macron and President Biden. Without asking you to go into the details of that, which I'm sure are confidential, give us a sense of the conversation that's been taking place between the American and French presidents as they together try to figure out a path forward.
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Our president, my president, wanted to discuss with the president of the United States about his visits to Moscow and Kiev, just a couple of days after another discussion with President Biden, and they exchanged the views, obviously, on their recent contacts and including with the two countries, which President Macron would now visit, and about the assessment they have of the situation and finally also about the way to go forward, especially in this research of a path for de‑escalation.
MR. IGNATIUS: I'd be interested to hear your evaluation, Mr. Ambassador, of how President Biden and his team at the NSC and the State Department and the Pentagon have been handling this crisis. How do you think they're doing?
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Well, I think they are doing pretty well, including in the‑‑in particular, it is the point I can judge from my corner that, in particular, in terms of coordination, and we appreciated very much the way we have coordinated our answers to the proposals made by Russia. You know, we had two answers, one from NATO, one from the United States. There was a huge number of coordination not only on the issue of how we proceed but on the substance, especially on the basic principles which we defined and on the prospects of European security arrangements, so a very good coordination and a coordination which is continuing, which is going on to‑‑not only to affirm but also to give substance to the unity between us and our positions because this crisis is evolving every day. And it's really important that we can coordinate both aspects of dialogue but also of deterrence, and this one is also very important, of course.
MR. IGNATIUS: Let me ask you about a particular chilling piece of news that emerged over the weekend. Biden administration officials briefed Congress late last week about their intelligence assessments of what might happen if Russia invades, and those estimates were then shared with the news media. And I'll just review them for our viewers. U.S. officials said that Kiev could be captured within a matter of days. The death toll of civilians could reach 25‑ to 50,000 Ukrainian civilians, 5,000 to 15,000 Ukrainian military, and 3,000 to 10,000 Russian troops, with as many as 5 million refugees.
Obviously, I don't want to ask you for a comment on the specific details of that U.S. estimate, but I'm interested in what France thinks might be the human cost of this invasion if it does go forward.
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Thank you, David, for not asking me to confirm the figures because I have no intelligence, but obviously, we are very much worried also in France and in Europe in general. It's a crisis of security, by the way, in Europe, in half of Europe. So we European nations are very much worried like the United States about the consequences of a possible Russian invasion. This is also the reasons why we have this very strong deterrence pillar in our attitude, and this is also the reason why France, as you recalled in your introduction, said that we were ready to participate concretely to the action of reassurance of our NATO allies who are on the eastern part of our alliance, announcing a deployment pending a NATO decision of troops in Romania.
So we know that there are those different scenarios. There is one which would be outright invasion. There are other ones which would be more hybrid actions. This information, we know all these possibilities, and we are all the more active on the diplomatic front and the political context. Then we are worried by the situation not only around Ukraine but, in particular, in Belarus where we see this really strong accumulation of military force, Russian force.
MR. IGNATIUS: Germany's new Chancellor Scholz told the Washington Post in an interview that we published this morning that Germany's response to a Russian invasion would be‑‑I'm quoting him‑‑"united and decisive," but he refused in this interview to say explicitly that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would be canceled in the event of an invasion. Would France favor cancellation of Nord Stream 2 if Russia invaded?
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Well, first, I mentioned the very close coordination we have with our partners. The first of them is Germany, of course, because we are together in this Normandy format and also because we are very‑‑we work closely together on all EU dossier. As you can imagine, the visit of our president to Moscow and Kiev has been also very closely coordinated with the German chancellor, all the more this‑‑the chancellor will‑‑is today in Washington but will also visit Ukraine and Russia later. So this is really important.
The security of a gas supply, this is also, to your question, will be, by the way, one‑‑the diversification of our suppliers. This will be one of the topics of the U.S.‑EU Energy Council.
And concerning our answer to deterrence measures to prevent an invasion, we are also consulting with the United States very closely. We don't give details on this for obvious reasons. We are considering the different possibilities, but we will‑‑we are preparing those massive consequences. We have already announced because it's an important part of our policy here, and finally, we think in France that, indeed, the diversification of an energy supply of, in particular, gas is a very important part of our autonomy, of our independence, and we discuss this very openly inside the EU, with Germany and with the other EU nations.
MR. IGNATIUS: Let me go to the heart of what I suspect President Macron is talking about with President Putin at this hour, which is the Russian argument that Putin has made now for really many years that the West has gone too far, that it has encroached on Russia's security, and that Russia now needs a guarantee that NATO won't go even further and make Ukraine a member. He's asked for a specific guarantee of that, which the United States and other NATO countries have said is unacceptable.
But I wonder, in your discussions with the Élysée, President Macron's advisors, if you see some way to speak to that Russian concern about security without making compromises that would be unacceptable. Is there a way to calibrate that, do you and your colleagues think?
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Well, this discussion is the reason why we wanted to answer seriously with proposals to the Russian proposals, which as such were not‑‑we could not accept, of course.
But here are two points. First, the principles of the European security, of the security on the European continent, which we have agreed on, including with Russia, in Helsinki, in the Paris Charter, but also in other documents which Russia has quoted, these are absolutely essential, and we want to preserve it. And we have‑‑on our side, we have kept them.
We are ready to have this discussion, but those principles, you cannot select some of them and not give the others. They constitute a series of principles which are the base of our security, and the respect of the sovereignty of our countries in Europe is one of this principle and which is for us a real, real important orientation now and which guides our policy. And I mean also, of course, and, in particular, the sovereignty of Ukraine. This is one thing.
The other thing is the question of the instruments for ensuring security in Europe, and there, unfortunately, we have seen an unraveling of those instruments. Without being too technical, we have seen very important treaties like Conventional Forces in Europe, Open Skies, or Intermediate‑Range Nuclear Forces, which particularly do not exist anymore. We have important documents, nontreaty, but very important political guidelines that support Vienna Document, which absolutely needs to be adopted. And this is--all of this and many other issues like maneuvers and information transparency are also the base of the proposals we have made with Russia through the two answers by NATO and the U.S. And we understand that Russia is preparing its answer to our answer.
So, indeed, there is a discussion here, and it is not only by the consonance of one party. It's by the consonance of all of us, and as I said, in particular, about the consonance of the European countries because it's our security.
MR. IGNATIUS: Thank you. That's a helpful summary of what's likely to be at the center of the discussions taking place this morning in Moscow.
I want to, in a moment, turn to French‑American relations but ask you first briefly about President Putin's visit to China. There were the photographs of Putin and Xi together, and it was kind of an opening ceremony for the Olympics, all its own.
We have a question that's been sent in to us by one of our viewers, a person named Columbus Leo who is writing us from Canada. This viewer says, "Russia is threatening to invade Ukraine, and China is threatening to invade Taiwan. How would reactions to Russia's threats or even invasion affect China's bullying of its neighbors?" It's a good question. What are France's thoughts about that?
AMB. ÉTIENNE: It's a very good question, and it's difficult to answer the question because to know the answer, you should be a little in the head of the leaders not only in Russia but also in China.
Probably, China is looking very carefully at what is happening now, but I guess the situations are different, although some of the principles I mentioned about the European security apply also worldwide. And this is also very important for us to remember.
MR. IGNATIUS: Let's turn to French‑American relations. They went through a rough patch after the so‑called AUKUS deal with Australia where the United States and Australia apparently didn't inform France of the cancelation of a submarine deal that France had with Australia. There were some difficult days, but from what I know, the Biden administration has been working hard to try to repair relations with France. And I want to ask, you, Mr. Ambassador, how that's going. How well is the Biden administration doing in making France understand that it regrets the difficulty and wants a strong alliance with France?
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Well, thank you for mentioning these difficult days because they were, in particular, difficult for other French ambassador back in September, but we have been working a lot, the two countries, France and the United States, since then to rebuild the trust, as we said, and there was a very important meeting in Rome when they were there for the G20 summit between President Biden and President Macron. And they adopted a declaration in Rome which is really, really important because, first, it gives a roadmap for very substantial work on many bilateral and multilateral issues where France and the U.S. want to cooperate, and one of these issues is Indo‑Pacific, which is the start of the problem and where we recognize and we have on the U.S. side a strong recognition of the importance of not only French but European policies in the Indo‑Pacific.
One other issue is really important, which is the recognition also by the United States, that stronger and more capable European defense can contribute positively not only to general but also to transatlantic security and in complementarity with NATO, and on this we have built a number of discussions and conversations, including in the framework of the French presidency of the Council of the European Union and of the preparation of the NATO summit next June.
So, in a nutshell, not only an improvement of the relation and a common will to rebuild the trust, which had been lost during this period, but also a very substantial cooperation on very, very important issues, including the fight against the terrorist threat in Africa and in other places, because in spite of all dangers to the international security, we have been discussing until now, we don't forget also that the terrorist threat is also still a threat. We don't forget the other big international security, nonproliferation issues which are there.
MR. IGNATIUS: So, Ambassador, we have just a minute left before you've got to get to your meeting on energy issues, and I want to just ask you if you'd briefly say to us how you hope this meeting and other discussions can contribute to greater energy security for Europe so that Europe is less vulnerable to pressure from Russia and perhaps from others on energy. How can you make progress on that?
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Well, energy is one domain where we think that a more stronger and more sovereign Europe is good for the United States and for our common security, and right now, energy is really an essential dimension because of these worries about gas supply.
So this meeting will be really important to show here too also in this strategic domain of energy and energy supply that there is a unity, a transatlantic unity, in the way we can cooperate to secure the supply of gas and particularly in Europe and to continue to secure it, but this meeting will be also on another very important topic, which is the clean, the energy and climate transition, and I would add a fair transition, which is now clearly the choice not only in the European Union, which has been always a leadership in the implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement but also with this administration on the U.S. But this will be the second very big topic on the agenda of the U.S.‑EU Energy Council, which is really an important convergence.
MR. IGNATIUS: So, with that, I want to thank Ambassador Étienne for an excellent discussion. You have a meeting to attend. We're grateful to you for taking time to be with us. Thank you so much.
AMB. ÉTIENNE: Thank you, David. Thank you for having me today. Thank you.
MR. IGNATIUS: So we’ll conclude our program there this morning. To check out what we have coming ahead, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com to see our agenda and also to register for those programs. Thank you so much for joining us this morning, and we’ll look forward to seeing you at Washington Post Live later this week. | null | null | null | null | null |
For two American short-track speedskaters, races lost before they started are a cruel blow
Maame Biney (No. 52) was clipped right at the start of her short-track speedskating quarterfinal heat Monday. (How Hwee Young/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
BEIJING — The end came right at the start, and U.S. short-track speedskater Maame Biney knew it. The light flashed to begin her 500-meter quarterfinal heat Monday night, and before she could even take a step she felt the blade of Hungary’s Petra Jaszapati’s right skate click against the blade of her own left one.
The brush of metal against metal damaged Biney’s blade, instantly rendering it useless for racing. Later, she tried to explain in non-technical terms what had happened, saying, “There’s a strip on the outside of the blade … and, oh, man, I don’t know how to describe it.
“It makes the blade super dull. I won’t have pressure on the ice.”
Basically, it meant she couldn’t skate fast. At all. In her signature event in her second Olympics, two rounds from the medal race, her skate had been rendered useless. She was left to plod around the rink, far behind the other racers in her heat, with no hope of moving on to the semifinals.
This is the cruel thing about short-track speedskating, a sport that sometimes more closely resembles Mario Kart on ice than a reasonable Olympic event. Skates get clipped. Racers crash into each other, sending medal dreams flying across the ice. Years of training disappear in a second.
But Monday night seemed especially mean for Biney and her American teammate Ryan Pivirotto, who tumbled out of his men’s 1,000-meter quarterfinal heat when the blade of his skate went straight into the ice during his first steps, knocking him down and knocking him out.
“Toe pick,” he said.
On an evening when Italy’s Arianna Fontana won her 10th Olympic medal by taking the 500-meter women’s final and China’s Ren Ziwei won the men’s 1,000 meters after the man who appeared to have beaten him was disqualified for two penalties, the strangest story might have been the two Americans who couldn’t get past their first couple of steps.
“Is what it is,” Pivirotto said.
From 2018: Fueled by joy, Maame Biney is on the fast track to stardom
It’s hard to say which skater had a sadder tale: Biney, who was wiped out by another skater’s stray blade, or Pivirotto, whose start was finished by the tip of his blade? In the end, it didn’t matter. They were done in the second that it took them to get going.
“It just really sucks because I knew I was capable of, like, doing well in that particular race because I’ve raced them and I’ve beaten them,” Biney said.
“Just unfortunate,” she added.
She said the worst part about the contact is that it came on the outside of her blade. Had it happened on the inside she might have had a chance to stay in the race. But the damage kept her from digging into the ice and generating speed.
“I was basically stepping on the ice,” she said.
Ultimately, she finished third in her heat because one skater crashed and another was disqualified because of penalties. But her speed was so slow she was almost two seconds behind the second-place finisher — an eternity in speed skating.
Pivirotto flopped to the ice when his skate stuck straight down, then tried to get back up, only to fall again. When he finally reentered the race, he was already a lap behind the others — again, too far behind to catch up.
All either of them could do was hope everyone in front of them crashed, opening the race for them to win, no matter how slowly they finished. Only one person in Pivirotto’s heat was disqualified. He finished fourth and was left with nothing else to do but put the covers on his skates and hobble off the ice, his night done.
“Disappointment is definitely there, because in hindsight I can say if I did that, I could have made it out [of the heat],” he said. “You learn a lot from your mistakes, and this is one you can’t learn from because you don’t train for it to happen, you don’t train to react to it. It happens.”
You only get so many chances at the Olympics, which is what made what happened to the two Americans even more heartbreaking. Pivirotto had finally made his first Olympic team after being an alternate in 2018. Biney, who was born in Ghana and grew up in Reston, Va., had hoped to get past the semifinals of the 500, where she had lost in 2018. Who knows whether either will ever get another chance at Olympic fame as good as theirs Monday? Who knows what might have happened if not for a stray blade or a toe pick?
All they could do was roll their eyes and say some form of “that’s speedskating.”
Pivirotto’s Olympics are over — he was already part of a mixed relay race over the weekend in which the United States finished eighth. Biney will still race in the women’s 1,000 meters and the women’s 3,000-meter relay. But the 500 was her best chance at winning a medal.
“I’m kind of meh about it because it is what it is and it’s already happened and I can’t change anything about it,” she said, standing in a room beneath the arena. “And I’ve been through lots of therapy to help me through lots of situations like this, and I think I’m handling it a lot better than I would have two years ago or even six months ago.”
She was asked how she would have reacted six months ago.
“I’d have been crying my eyes out right now,” she said, leaning down to pick up her equipment, including the skate that had failed her.
If she were crying, no one would have blamed her. | null | null | null | null | null |
Students line up to enter Christa McAuliffe School in Jersey City last spring. New Jersey is ending a statewide mask mandate in schools. (Seth Wenig/AP)
The Democratic governors of New Jersey and Delaware will lift mask requirements for schools beginning next month, reflecting a nationwide shift away from restrictions as coronavirus caseload numbers fall and political pressure for a return to normalcy rises.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) will announce Monday that the state’s school mask mandate will end as of March 7, a spokesperson said. Delaware Gov. John Carney (D) said that mask requirements in K-12 public and private schools, as well as child-care facilities, would expire at the end of March. And Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, another Democrat, plans to discuss school mask policies at a news conference Monday.
“We’re in a much better place than we were several weeks ago in the middle of the Omicron surge of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations,” Carney said in a statement.
His Monday announcement also noted the end of an indoor mask mandate in the state, beginning Friday morning.
The virus continues to circulate, Carney acknowledged, but said, “we have the tools to keep ourselves and each other safe.” He urged people to get vaccinated and boosted.
“For all the parents out there – the best way to keep your child in school learning, and to prevent them from getting sick, is to get them vaccinated,” he said. “It’s that simple.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Friday: “That’s something we get asked a lot about: When are masks coming off in schools? We’ll be making some announcements in the short term as we see these numbers progressing.”
Once the new rules are in effect, school districts will be able to decide for themselves whether to require masks.
The New Jersey governor has signaled in recent days that he and other leaders are evaluating ways to live with the virus. Murphy, the vice chairman of the National Governor’s Association, said at a briefing last week following a winter meeting of the group that the “the general consensus is we’re on the road from a pandemic to an endemic.”
“No one knows how straight the road is or how long it will take us,” he said: “The overwhelming sentiment on both sides of the aisle is we want to get to a place where we can live with this thing in as normal a fashion as possible.”
The New Jersey Education Association, which represents more than 167,000 teachers school staff, said in a statement that it hopes current trends continue, allowing for a safely lifting of the mandate but asked that the governor reassess and be prepared to reimpose the requirement if the situation worsens.
“We are encouraged by the data showing a rapid decline of COVID transmission in New Jersey. Because of that, we are cautiously optimistic that the current statewide school mask mandate can be safely relaxed in the near future, assuming current trends continue,” said a statement from the union’s officers. | null | null | null | null | null |
The best and worst numbers for Super Bowl squares
One of the highlights of a Super Bowl party, besides the food, is participating in box pools, better known as Super Bowl squares. What’s even more fun is winning that pool, and a few key indicators can tell you if the odds will be in your favor when the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams square off Feb. 13 in Super Bowl 56.
For the unfamiliar, Super Bowl squares require participants to place their name or initials in one or more of 100 squares for a 10-by-10 grid. Those initialed squares are then randomly assigned to cover the grid, with each column and row labeled with a number 0-9, each corresponding to one of the teams. To determine which box is a winner, take the last digit of each Super Bowl team’s score (traditionally done at the conclusion of each quarter, at each scoring change or at the final whistle) and find the corresponding square on the grid to identify the winner.
Your pairings may be random, but there are certain number combinations that are more likely to hit than others. As of 2015, when the league pushed back the line of scrimmage for extra-point kick attempts, the best square to have is 0 | 0, a score combination that was found at the end of 13 percent of quarters of all games over the past six seasons, including the playoffs. In a pool that awards $25 at the end of each quarter (and not counting overtime), that combination has an expected value of $2.33 per $1 bet. It’s by far the most lucrative square to own and one of only eight boxes with positive expected value throughout the whole game. The others are 7 | 0, 0 | 7, 0 | 3, 3 | 0, 7 | 7, 7 | 3 and 3 | 7.
But that’s only accounting for historical trends. We can determine more specific odds for Super Bowl 56 squares by incorporating a few other factors. The over/under is either 49 ½ or 50, depending on what sports books you have available in your area, and that projection will improve the value of a few combinations.
In games with an over/under total of 50 points or fewer, the frequency of the 0 | 0 square being the first-quarter winner increases to 17 percent of all games and the expected value also improves to $3.40 compared to $2.36 for games with higher totals. This makes sense since a lower-scoring game is more likely to be scoreless at the end of the first quarter, improving the value of that 0 | 0 box. Other first-quarter squares with more value in lower-scoring games compared to the higher-scoring matchups include scores ending in combinations of 0, 7 and 3, as well as 4 | 0, which results from one team going up by 14 early.
During the second quarter, the 0 | 0, 7 | 7 and 7 | 3 squares start to lose some value in games with a total of 50 points or fewer, while the 7 | 0, 0 | 7, 0 | 3 and 3 | 0 squares start to gain some value. In fact, the 7 | 0 square has a lot more value in games with a total of 50 or less (11 percent of occurrences) than it does in game with a higher total (eight percent), but that’s not the case with the 0 | 3 and 7 | 7 squares, which are more valuable in the third quarter of contests with a total of 51 or more.
In the fourth quarter, 0 | 0 still hits most frequently but the 3 | 0 square is almost twice as valuable in a game with a total of 50 or less. All the other squares hold comparable value in both sets of games.
In almost all cases, the squares with a zero, seven or three will generate the most profits over time, so if you find yourself with squares with one or more of those numbers, rejoice, because you will probably walk away with some money. If not, you are going to want to hope for a safety or two-point conversion to help make some of those other squares more valuable.
If you are in a pool that allows you to buy the squares you want, knowing the numbers beforehand, there are a few you should target quickly, as they are the only ones with a positive expectation in all quarters: 0 | 0, 0 | 3, 0 | 7, 3 | 0, 3 | 7, 7 | 0, 7 | 3 and 7 | 7. For every dollar you invest in those squares you should generate around 60 cents in expected profit.
Here are the 10 squares with the most value in a game with a betting total of 50 points or fewer. | null | null | null | null | null |
“It's the most challenging thing I've ever had to go through,” Emily Sweeney said of her recovery from the 2018 crash. (REUTERS/Edgar Su)
Although the Sweeney family left South Carolina for Maine when their youngest daughter, Emily, was around 5 years old, the local pool near Irmo, S.C., offered fond memories for the three siblings who spent summers there, pleading with their parents, Larry and Sue, to take them to Frankie’s Fun Park afterward.
The Sweeneys wanted to challenge their children, so the park was a prize they had to earn, and only if they conquered the board: the dreaded plank that stood close to 10 feet high and took her older siblings all summer to conquer.
The diving board was daunting, but Emily was unflinching. In a onesie with a donut around her waist, she climbed the ladder and jumped into the deep end with a poise that Megan and Ben, six and four years her senior, had yet to muster. The moment is ironed in Megan’s memory, because she’s seen her little sister throw herself toward her ambitions ever since.
Nicknamed “Little Sweens” on the luge circuit after her older sister finished 22nd in singles at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Sweeney entered Beijing looking to compete and finish after a 2018 crash violently ended her competition.
She was expected to contend for a medal, what would have been the first by an American woman since Erin Hamlin’s 2014 bronze and which could have eased the 2018 disappointment’s grip on her legacy. But after a rocky first two runs, including a second where she crashed and slid to the finish line, Sweeney will enter Tuesday’s final two runs ranked 28th of 34.
For the past four years since her debut during the last Winter Games, Sweeney’s story has been bound to one of the worst crashes in recent luge memory.
It happened after a strong start on the last of four runs.
Spectators at the Alpensia Sliding Center fell silent, and Sweeney’s mother cried out in the stands near the finish line. For Megan, who was with her mother, the crash provoked memories of the 2006 accident that left Samantha Retrosi limp and concussed, and needing to be airlifted to a hospital; and Vancouver in 2010, where she was at the track when Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili suffered a fatal training accident three days before her first run.
Lugers barrel around 80 miles per hour, feet-first down an icy track. The experience is a rush, but crashes are common — as they were Monday at the Yanqing National Sliding Centre — and sometimes horrific. Megan’s final race ended with a crash, but that fate unsettled Emily.
Sweeney has described herself as frail, lost and broken in the period following her crash. She woke up sore daily, her muscles spasmed and everyday activities like cooking and running on the treadmill required periodic breaks to lie down.
Back injuries can be debilitating for anyone, and Sweeney’s injury was significant enough to force permanent changes to her workout routines.
“For luge in particular, especially for the start, the bulk of the strength and power that we use comes from your back.,” said Hamlin, a close family friend who is working the Beijing Games as an analyst for NBC. “The way that the pressure hits you in curves as well, your upper back and your neck take the brunt of that. And so if you do have that weakness or underlying injury, it's something that would be very hard not to think about a lot because you're going to question, ‘I hope I can withstand the pressure on this track.”
Sweeney didn’t know if she could race again, but nine months removed from the injuries, she won a bronze medal at a World Cup race in British Columbia. A year later she won bronze in the women’s singles event at the World Championships in Winterberg, Germany.
International travel restrictions prevented Sweeney from seeing her longtime partner, Italian slider Dominik Fischnaller, for months during the pandemic. (Fischnaller won a bronze medal in the men’s singles event Sunday.) This season, military restrictions barred her from competing in Russia. The 2018 injury also forced her to eschew heavy lifting in favor functional fitness — think Pilates — when she trains.
Sweeney pushed, pivoted, and fought the nagging fear that’s tailed her for four years to compete in Beijing.
But after two runs at the Yanqing National Sliding Centre northwest of Beijing proper, Sweeney completed her runs in a total of 2 minutes and 1.410 seconds, two seconds outside of the top 10 and more than four seconds from four-time gold medalist Natalie Geisenberger, the current leader.
After her second run, Sweeney sat on the ice and gave a thumbs up to the camera. When she moved off the ice, she sat her sled against the wall and dropped her head on top of it.
And she’ll dive down the track again on Tuesday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Figure skater Zhu Yi of China reacts after the women's team free skate program at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Monday, Feb. 7, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
On Chinese social media, commentators questioned why an American-born athlete was representing China. Zhu was criticized for lack of fluency in speaking Chinese and for her “privileged” background; her father is a successful computer scientist whose career has straddled the United States and China.
After she fell to the ice on Sunday, the hashtag #ZhuYiFellDown was viewed more than 230 million times on the Weibo social media platform before censors stepped in. By Monday, the visible posts about her on Weibo were largely supportive ones. Prominent state-backed pundits weighed in urging positivity.
He added that fans would need to become accustomed to foreign-born athletes like Zhu, as China increasingly recruits talent from overseas. “This sports-driven reverse immigration is a new product of the times,” he wrote.
The hostility toward athletes who straddle the United States and China has been intensified by geopolitics. U.S.-China relations are at their worst in decades, as Beijing’s bid to become a world power has sparked broad clashes with Washington on issues ranging from defense to trade and cultural influence.
For Zhu, the pressure was on, as the sole entrant for China in women’s singles. China has not medaled in the women’s singles figure skating competition at the Olympics since 1998, when Chen Lu won bronze in Nagano, Japan.
After Zhu’s first fall on Sunday, a slew of online commentators compared her unfavorably to another Chinese female figure skater, Chen Hongyi, who had been passed over for the slot in favor of Zhu. Some angry fans took the opportunity to unleash anti-American vitriol.
Zhu’s latest post on her Instagram account, where she goes by her English-language name Beverly, is from late last month. She wrote that she was grateful to be representing China at the Olympics after several unsuccessful attempts to make the team.
In July 2018, Zhu wrote on Instagram that she had “stabbed my foot through my skate” in a rough fall, requiring five stitches. She wrote that three months earlier, she had injured her Achilles tendon and suffered an avulsion fracture in her foot.
After winning its bid for the 2022 Games, China embarked on a global effort to recruit promising winter sports athletes who could help it boost its medal count. Many winter sports, such as skiing and ice skating, are just beginning to become popular with the general public in China, and few children grew up training in them.
China was fourth in the medal table on Monday, with two golds and two silvers, trailing Sweden, the Russian Olympic Committee and the Netherlands. | null | null | null | null | null |
In the town of Nosy Varika, about 45 miles north of Mananjury and home to 20,000 people, up to 95 percent of homes and businesses were reportedly destroyed.
Batsirai was born from a cluster of showers and thunderstorms on Jan. 23. The U.S. military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center designated it “Invest 96S” on the 24th, writing “formation of a tropical cyclone is possible … within the next 12 to 24 hours.” The group made note of an emerging but “obscured low-level center,” ordinarily a precursor to a bout of organization.
While wind shear, a change of wind speed and/or direction with height, would have proved hostile to its development farther north, the fledgling disturbance was nestled within a pocket of comparatively-relaxed upper-level winds. It also had multiple “outflow channels,” or branches of wind at high altitude flowing away from the storm. That proves efficient in evacuating air away from the storm’s center, allowing for strengthening.
Batsirai pulsed up and down in strength over the following days before peaking at Category 4 intensity on the morning of Feb. 2. Thereafter, it underwent an eyewall replacement cycle — during which the eyewall, or annulus of buzzsaw-like winds wrapping around the eye, shrivels and disintegrates into the eye as a new eyewall forms around it — which induced weakening. That’s around the time the Mauritius Meteorological Services issued a level 4 cyclone warning, the most severe type of alert on its scale. | null | null | null | null | null |
The first lady addressed the status of the president’s sweeping social spending legislation during an appearance in Washington before the Community College National Legislative Summit, a gathering at which she delivered a more optimistic message a year ago.
“One year ago, I told this group that Joe was going to fight for community colleges,” Jill Biden told the group Monday. “But Joe has also had to make compromises. Congress hasn’t passed the Build Back Better agenda — yet. And free community college is no longer a part of that package.”
Jill Biden has for decades taught at community colleges and still does, at Northern Virginia Community College. She is the first first lady to work outside the White House in her professional career.
Jill Biden returns to the classroom, live and in person
The president said at a news conference last month that his Build Back Better legislation was not going to pass Congress intact, an acknowledgment of opposition to some provisions by two members of his party: Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
Biden sounded an optimistic note: “I think we can break the package up, get as much as we can now and come back and fight for the rest later.”
His roughly $2 trillion package includes provisions that overhaul the nation’s health-care, education, climate, immigration and tax laws.
There has been little sign of recent progress, with no active negotiations between the White House and Manchin or Sinema. For the time being, Democrats lack the votes to pass anything without the help of Republicans, given that Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) is not expected to return for weeks, after a recent stroke.
Community colleges, which offer two years of low-cost academic studies and skills training, have long been seen as gateways to higher education and an important part of the public education system in the United States. In fall of 2019, the most recent year for which the American Association of Community Colleges has data, community colleges enrolled 41 percent of all undergraduates nationally.
Enrollment has been declining in many of the country’s nearly 940 public community colleges in recent years, concerning educators and policymakers who fear that the career and education prospects for students, many of them from low- and moderate-income families, will be harmed.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported in January that enrollment has fallen 13.2 percent at the nation’s public two-year colleges since 2019. And it has fallen almost 30 percent since 2011, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, which monitors enrollment trends.
Community colleges, hit with enrollment drop, have an ally in first lady | null | null | null | null | null |
With escalating worry about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany has faced widespread criticism for not taking a more active role with European allies in preparing a response.
“We expect them to talk significantly about the situation in Ukraine and Russia,” said a senior Biden administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview the White House meeting between Biden and Scholz. “They’ll likely discuss their shared concerns about Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s border and their shared commitment to both ongoing diplomatic efforts to encourage Russia to de-escalate tensions, as well as ongoing efforts to ensure deterrence to further Russian aggression.”
They plan to discuss a sanctions package, the official said, as well as U.S. views about a major national gas pipeline connecting Germany and Russia. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is nearly complete, has long been a thorny issue between the two countries, with the United States expressing concern that it could give Russia leverage over Germany while harming Ukraine by weakening its status as a conduit for Russian natural gas.
While the potential conflict between Ukraine and Russia is expected to be among the most pressing issues, Biden and Scholz also plan to discuss the pandemic, climate change, stability in the Western Balkans and China’s aggressive economic practices and human rights abuses.
Some German newspapers have dubbed it a “crisis mission” amid criticism over Berlin’s wavering response on financial measures, blocking weapons deliveries to Ukraine, and what some see as a lack of leadership amid the flurry of diplomacy to try to defuse war.
Washington sees Germany’s stance as being born out of a desire to maintain its gas supplies, Der Spiegel reported the cable said.
But Kyiv has gone as far as accusing Germany of encouraging Russian President Vladimir Putin to attack through its statements on financial sanctions and weapons. And just two months after Scholz was sworn in, his reputation has taken a hit, with public support for his government crumbling.
After his party won elections in September, polls now put it in second place for the first time, while 63 percent of Germans are dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the Ukraine crisis, according to a survey last week by the polling agency Forsa.
The trip to Washington is “too late,” Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democrats, told the Bild newspaper on Sunday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Every president since the 1930s, after Calvin Coolidge, preserved a sizable chunk of their records, often to be displayed in their presidential libraries. But it wasn’t until 1978, after Nixon tried to keep many of his documents private, that Congress passed a law codifying the practice.
The law says the executive branch has to preserve these records and hand them over to the National Archives and Records Administration. That agency makes many of these documents publicly available 12 years after the president leaves office. (Before this law, Lyndon B. Johnson gifted tapes of his conversations with President John F. Kennedy, on the condition that they wouldn’t become public until 50 years after his death).
Without it, presidents were the ones deciding which records to share with the public. And, thus, they were shaping history in the way they wanted it to be told. Nixon’s library originally portrayed the Watergate scandal only as an attack on Nixon, rather than an abuse of power on his part. (The Nixon estate lost a 20-year litigation battle to keep the more damaging parts of Watergate out of his presidential library.)
The law also set up a system for people to appeal to the National Archives for a record that was redacted. Johnson says that he goes to battle with the National Archives regularly for documents and that he often loses.
What Trump did, though, is on a whole other level. According to Post reporting, he tore up hundreds of documents — perhaps more — indiscriminately. His aides used burn bags to destroy documents rather than hand them over. | null | null | null | null | null |
In the town of Nosy-Varika, about 45 miles north of Mananjary and home to 20,000 people, up to 95 percent of homes and businesses were reportedly destroyed.
Batsirai was born from a cluster of showers and thunderstorms on Jan. 23. The U.S. military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center designated it “Invest 96S” on the 24th, writing, “formation of a tropical cyclone is possible … within the next 12 to 24 hours.” The group made note of an emerging but “obscured low-level center,” ordinarily a precursor to a bout of organization.
While wind shear, a change of wind speed and/or direction with height, would have proved hostile to its development farther north, the fledgling disturbance was nestled within a pocket of comparatively relaxed upper-level winds. It also had multiple “outflow channels,” or branches of wind at high altitude flowing away from the storm. That proves efficient in evacuating air away from the storm’s center, allowing for strengthening.
Batsirai pulsed up and down in strength over the following days before peaking at Category 4 intensity on the morning of Feb. 2. Thereafter, it underwent an eyewall replacement cycle — during which the eyewall, or an annulus of buzzsaw-like winds wrapping around the eye, shrivels and disintegrates into the eye as a new eyewall forms around it — which induced weakening. That’s around the time the Mauritius Meteorological Services issued a level 4 cyclone warning, the most severe type of alert on its scale. | null | null | null | null | null |
Va. Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit against Youngkin’s mask-optional order
A student boards a school bus outside of Washington-Liberty High School in Arlington County which is one of several school districts which sued to stop the mask-optional order by Governor Glenn Youngkin (R), in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., January 25, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
A ruling by an Arlington judge last week has put the order on hold in at least seven school districts, as part of a separate lawsuit the school boards for those districts filed which also aims to reverse Youngkin’s mask-optional order. The mask-optional order will remain on hold until that case is decided.
The seven justices who serve on the court dismissed the suit Monday, writing in a three-page opinion that it was impossible to request the relief the parent plaintiffs had requested — writs of mandamus and prohibition which would have prevented Youngkin and the parents’ school board, the Chesapeake School Board, from declaring masks optional in school — because such writs were not applicable or issuable in this case.
The Youngkin administration celebrated the ruling Monday, with Attorney General Jason Miyares writing in a statement that the court’s ruling was “a victory for Virginia families.” Youngkin said in a statement that he was pleased by the dismissal.
The attorney for the parents in Chesapeake, though, wrote in an emailed statement that — as the seven justices had declared in their footnote — the court’s ruling was clearly not meant to decide the legality of Youngkin’s mask-optional order.
Youngkin announced his mask-optional order on his first day in office. It is designed to give parents the choice whether to mask their children in school, and is in keeping with Youngkin’s campaign promise to grant parents greater say over what and how their children learn in schools.
But almost immediately, the order drew a wealth of opposing lawsuits in state and district courts.
Three days after Youngkin debuted the order, the Chesapeake parents sued to stop it in the Virginia Supreme Court, arguing that the order violates the state constitution, which gives school boards the authority to oversee the school systems in their localities. The Chesapeake parents also contended that Youngkin’s order violates a state law, passed over the summer, that requires school districts to comply with federal health guidance — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current recommendation that everyone over the age of 2 inside schools wear masks, regardless of vaccination status.
In late January, seven school boards also sued Youngkin over his order in Arlington Circuit Court, making essentially the same argument as the Chesapeake parents. A
And finally, a group of parents in Loudoun County Public Schools — a wealthy and politically divided suburb that has seen significant furor over education in recent years — have sued their school board for failing to comply with Youngkin’s executive order. The Loudoun school district, which enrolls about 82,000 students, has decided to keep requiring masks — joining 69 other school districts in Virginia, out of a total of 131, that have also defied Youngkin’s order, according to a Washington Post analysis. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Broad Run girls' basketball team embraces Yvonne Lee (3). (King Lee)
Yvonne Lee decided to become a leader three years ago, when she was a freshman on the Broad Run girls’ basketball team. It was an unconventional choice: She was a freshman on a three-win squad and had ample opportunity to transfer to a better school.
But she wanted to show the virtue of sticking around and create a culture where future freshmen would want to stay with the Spartans, too. Three years later and with a 12-0 record in the Dulles District, Lee knows she made the right choice.
“I don’t really know what I had in my head,” the 5-foot-3 guard said. “But my goal was to change the program, because I wanted other younger girls, especially girls that look like me, to realize that anything is possible in the sense that it’s okay to lose three games and try to flip the whole team around.”
Lee said that the new environment in Broad Run is friendly. Players talk trash, but they do it with a smile. She invites other players to criticize her so that the underclassmen and upperclassmen feel on the same level — “no one is lower than anyone else,” she said. That includes the coaching staff.
In the second half of the team’s recent game against Loudoun Valley, the district’s second-place team, Coach Kate Culhane called timeout. In the past, she and her assistants have taken the lead on the adjustments. But when she got nary a word in, with Lee and the others running the show, she realized why the culture was working.
“What more could you ask for as a coach?” Culhane said. “We’ve gone through the trenches and battled and worked hard to be where we’re at right now. The darkest times, people don’t see that. But it’s been a long time coming.”
Episcopal earns a big win in the unpredictable IAC
The Interstate Athletic Conference tournament is right around the corner, as the private school league is consistently one of the first in the area to begin its postseason. This year, the championship game will be played Feb. 19.
With only a few regular season games remaining, it’s clear the conference is as competitive and unpredictable as ever. Last Tuesday, two IAC heavyweights faced off in Alexandria as St. Stephen’s/St. Agnes hosted Episcopal. The visiting Maroon, coming off a loss to Bullis, earned a momentous 83-74 victory over its neighboring rival.
“Our defensive effort, particularly in the second half, was a big factor,” Coach Jim Fitzpatrick said. “And we made shots. Basketball ends up being a simple game: You make shots on one end, you get stops on the other and you come out with a win.”
Episcopal was led by a 40-point performance from senior John Loughlin, who finished with eight made threes.
“I told him at halftime: ‘If you have to think about what you’re going to do next, just shoot it. If you’re open, let it fly,’ ” Fitzpatrick said. “It was a good moment for him to get hot.”
The win moved Episcopal into first place in the league for now. But Bullis and the Saints are still in the hunt for a regular season crown. With one week left before the conference tournament, the IAC feels wide open.
“It’s a very exciting time for the league,” Fitzpatrick said. “After taking a year off, I think there was a buildup of energy among the players and coaches. … Anything is possible right now, and especially in tournament play all these teams are good enough to beat each other.”
Leah Harmon, G, Sidwell Friends. The sophomore was one of the Quakers’ top scorers in three wins, including a 51-point performance against St. Andrew’s.
Jacory Wilkes, F, Thomas Stone. The senior posted double-doubles in four wins last week.
Elijah Easter, G, Independence. The senior poured in 25 points and added six assists as the Tigers earned a big home win over Stone Bridge.
Joel Walker, F, Banneker. The junior’s 19 points and 10 rebounds in the Bulldogs’ 60-8 win over Eastern helped secure a first-round bye in the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association playoffs.
Georgetown Visitation girls at Sidwell Friends, 5:45 p.m. Tuesday
John Champe boys at Patriot, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Bethesda-Chevy Chase boys at Churchill, 6 p.m. Thursday
Oxon Hill girls at Friendly, 7 p.m. Thursday
Players continue to develop at Surrattsville, despite a limited roster
With just six players on its roster, Surrattsville has grown accustomed to playing under adverse situations. But nothing has been as extreme as Thursday’s game against Friendly, when foul trouble forced the Hornets to play the final 5 minutes 43 seconds with just three players on the court.
Sophomore Nadia Simpson, who had scored 28 points in the game, was one of three players to foul out. Surrattsville fell, 61-55
“Watching that game from the bench was tough because I was having a great game [before fouling out] and I know that if I was out there the outcome would’ve been different,” Simpson said.
Despite a spirited effort from the remaining three players, Surrattsville (6-4) couldn’t overcome its 1-for-26 performance from the free throw line.
“Thursday’s game was an excellent teaching point for us,” Coach Jamar Hicks said. “We always preach the importance of playing a clean game and not beating ourselves. Unfortunately, we didn’t do that versus Friendly, but I think our team will take what happened and really apply it moving forward.”
While having six total players has been tough, Simpson said the Hornets have adjusted to maintain their stamina and the limited roster hasn’t presented many drawbacks outside of Thursday’s game. She feels like it has helped her development as a player.
“I’ve never played with so few players, but it has made me better,” Simpson said. “It helped me break out of my shell as a player and be more of a threat. I love the players we have because they show up every day and work to get better.”
Reservoir senior has efficient night
Near the beginning of the third quarter Wednesday, Reservoir forward Riley Malwitz received a long outlet pass as she sprinted down the court.
Normally, Malwitz would jump and gather the pass before resetting the offense. But in this instance, Malwitz surprised herself by jumping, catching the ball and finishing a layup in one motion.
That play provided Malwitz confidence she could sink almost any shot that night. In a 52-28 win over Long Reach, the senior posted a career-high 26 points and 14 rebounds while shooting 85 percent from the field.
“My confidence really goes up,” said Malwitz, whose squad won for the second time this season. “I just go to the basket way more aggressively because I feel like everything’s going in.”
Malwitz also plays midfield in field hockey, and using her speed and endurance, most of her points came in transition. She was surprised after the game when the scorekeeper informed her she had broken her previous career-high of 14 points.
But Malwitz was stunned when the team manager later texted her that she converted 11 of her 13 shots.
“It just felt like my team was getting me the ball and I was just finishing it,” Malwitz said. “It didn’t feel like my stats would be that high. It just didn’t seem like I had only missed two shots.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The new cap will be set at $350,000.
Amazon will increase its maximum base pay cap to $350,000. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon said it would increase the amount of base pay its corporate employees can make in the U.S. due to a tight labor market and competitors that sometimes pay better.
Corporate and tech employees can now make up to $350,000 in base pay, an increase from the previous $160,000 cap which has been in place for several years. Base pay is just one piece of how Amazon employees get paid — they also generally receive substantial payments in stock and bonuses.
Amazon made the change to bring in and keep employees, in a “particularly competitive labor market,” the company wrote in an internal blog post Monday. Amazon also said it was increasing overall compensation ranges for most jobs across the world. The bumps are “much more considerable than we’ve done in the past,” the company wrote.
Amazon confirmed the authenticity of the blog post, which was first reported by Seattle tech news site GeekWire. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post).
Employers across the country face an increasingly discerning labor pool, where workers are often in a position of power — particularly amid the backdrop of a movement dubbed the Great Resignation. Employees in many fields, including tech, are in high demand, and they can push for better pay, benefits or flexible work situations when weighing job offers.
Amazon is the second largest private employer in the U.S. It announced in a regulatory filing last week that it had 1,608,000 full-time and part-time workers at the end of the year. | null | null | null | null | null |
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