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Va. Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit against Youngkin’s mask-optional order on technical grounds
A student boards a bus outside Washington-Liberty High School in Arlington, Va., last month. (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 filed by the school boards for those districts that also aims to reverse the Republican governor’s mask-optional order. The order will remain on hold until that case is decided.
The seven justices on the state Supreme Court dismissed the suit Monday, writing in a three-page opinion that it was impossible to request the relief the parent plaintiffs had sought — writs of mandamus and prohibition that would have prevented Youngkin and 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 S. Miyares (R) writing in a statement that the court’s ruling was “a victory for Virginia families.”
The attorney for the parents in Chesapeake 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 last month 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.
Three days after Youngkin debuted the order, 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.
And a group of parents in Loudoun County Public Schools — in a wealthy and politically divided suburb that has seen significant furor over education in recent years — sued the school board for not complying 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 agency originally had said that starting this summer all taxpayers would need to submit a “video selfie” to the company to be able to access their tax records and other services on the IRS website. But lawmakers and advocates slammed the idea of mandating the technology’s use nationwide, saying that it would unfairly burden Americans without smartphones or computer cameras and would risk leaking sensitive data to hackers. Facial recognition algorithms have also been shown to work less accurately on darker skin.
“The IRS takes taxpayer privacy and security seriously, and we understand the concerns that have been raised,” IRS commissioner Charles Rettig said in a statement announcing the IRS decision. “Everyone should feel comfortable with how their personal information is secured, and we are quickly pursuing short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”
The IRS said it would also continue to work with “cross-government partners” on additional methods of authentication.
In a letter to the IRS last week, the Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee pointedly asked what would happen to taxpayers’ personal information if the IRS ended its work with the company. The group has yet to receive a response, a committee aide said.
ID.me officials, who did not respond to requests for comment, tweeted on Monday that the company uses “numerous tools” to verify identities beyond facial recognition.
The reversal sparked questions of whether ID.me’s other clients across the country will follow suit. Roughly 70 million Americans have used its service to verify their identities while filing for unemployment insurance, pandemic assistance grants, child tax credit payments or other services, the company’s chief told The Post last month. On its client list: ten federal agencies, including Social Security, Labor and Veterans Affairs; 30 states, including California, Florida, New York and Texas; and 540 companies nationwide.
The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a digital rights advocacy group, celebrated the change and called on state governments to drop the technology’s use. “When government agencies use this technology, it’s question of when, not if, this biometric data is hacked, leaked or misused,” the group’s executive director Albert Fox Cahn said in a statement.
The option to create a new account using ID.me’s facial recognition service had been offered on the website for months, and some taxpayers who had proactively gone through the process expressed frustration following news of the IRS’ reversal.
Jamal Le Blanc, who lives in suburban Maryland, said he was told a month ago he’d need to create a facial scan to access his tax records. Because of a disability in his arm, he said, he required his daughter’s help to run through the process. Now, he worries over how the data will be used or secured in the years to come. | null | null | null | null | null |
This photo released by the Sierra County Sheriff’s Office shows rescue crews at the Stampede Reservoir in Downieville, Calif., Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022. One person drowned after a group of people fell through the ice while skating at the reservoir north of Lake Tahoe, authorities said. (Holly Bayly/Sierra County Sheriff’s Office via AP) | null | null | null | null | null |
Parliament to appoint
new premier this week
Libya’s parliament said Monday that it will name a new prime minister this week to head the transitional government, a move that is likely to lead to parallel administrations in the already chaotic nation.
Two candidates have submitted their bids to replace Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah. Parliament Speaker Aguila Saleh said a vote to name one of them as prime minister will take place Thursday, after consultations with the High Council of State, an advisory body based in the capital, Tripoli.
The effort to replace Dbeibah stems from Libya’s failure to hold its first presidential election during his watch. It has been a major blow to international efforts to end a decade of chaos in the oil-rich nation.
Originally scheduled for Dec. 24, the presidential vote was postponed over disputes among rival factions on laws governing the elections and controversial presidential hopefuls. Lawmakers have argued that the mandate of Dbeibah’s government ended Dec. 24.
Dbeibah has said he and his government will remain in power until “real elections” take place.
Saleh said lawmakers adopted a road map to hold the presidential election within 14 months after agreeing on constitutional amendments.
Libya has been wracked by conflict since a NATO-backed uprising toppled and then killed longtime dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Netanyahu's son target of spyware, report says
Israeli police illegally spied on the phones of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son and members of his inner circle, a local newspaper reported Monday. The report prompted a high-level probe and threw the former leader’s corruption trial into disarray.
Calcalist has published recent reports alleging that police used the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of protesters and other Israelis without a warrant. Pegasus has been tied to human rights abuses worldwide.
Monday’s report claimed that Pegasus had been used against Netanyahu’s close advisers and son. Like previous reports, the paper cited no sources but for the first time named people allegedly surveilled by police.
Public Security Minister Omer Barlev, who oversees the police force, announced the formation of a government commission of inquiry to investigate the matter.
Calcalist said the police used the spyware against a phone registered to Netanyahu’s son and two communications advisers and the wife of another defendant in one of three corruption cases against the former leader.
The allegations could undermine Netanyahu’s graft trial after reports that police used spyware to surveil a key witness.
Barlev’s investigation follows announcements by Israeli police and the attorney general’s office that they would investigate.
Lawmaker boycott foils bid to elect president
Iraqi lawmakers failed to elect a new head of state Monday as key factions boycotted the parliament session.
A two-thirds quorum of the legislature’s 329 members is required for an electoral session. Monday’s vote could not be held as lawmakers, many allied with powerful Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, stayed away. Only 58 lawmakers showed up.
The failure to elect a president reflects the deep divisions among Iraq’s political factions, which have only grown since the Oct. 10 parliament elections, whose results have been rejected by political groups supported by neighboring Iran.
Iraqi politicians have failed to agree on a compromise candidate for the nation’s top post.
With no quorum, the speaker of parliament kept the session open without scheduling a new date for a vote to elect a new president.
The boycott by Sadr was announced after Iraq’s Supreme Court temporarily suspended the nomination of front-runner Hoshyar Zebari, whose presidential bid is supported by Sadr. The court cited pending corruption charges against the veteran Kurdish politician and former foreign minister.
The 2016 charges against Zebari, for which he was never convicted, stem from his time as finance minister.
Azerbaijan releases 8 Armenian prisoners: Azerbaijan handed over eight Armenian service members, including several who it claims were involved in clashes with Azerbaijani forces in November, on what it called humanitarian grounds. The office of the French president said Azerbaijan's move came after mediation by France and the European Union. Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a six-week war in 2020 that ended with Azerbaijan regaining control of territory that had been held by Armenian forces for more than 25 years. | null | null | null | null | null |
WILMINGTON, DE ‐ January 16, 2021: Eric Lander, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
“If you’re ever working with me, and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot," Biden declared. "On the spot. No ifs, ands, or buts.”
It was refreshing to hear; in Washington as everywhere else, there are far too many abusive bosses, including throughout the federal government. Biden instituted this zero tolerance policy for workplace abuse because, as he put it: “Everybody is entitled to be treated with decency and dignity.”
Lander is a well-known mathematician and biologist who gained prominence for his work mapping the human genome. Perhaps not incidentally, he has a longstanding relationship with the president, having served on the board of the Biden Cancer Initiative, which Biden formed after he was vice president. Among other things, he’s now in charge of Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot.”
So rather than be fired on the spot, no ifs ands or buts, Lander will have to hold brown bag sessions with subordinates? And other people will have to be trained on workplace policy?
For instance, Biden said in a speech last May that greater competition for workers should be celebrated because “it gives them the power to demand to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace."
Most people who have been in the working world for any length of time have had at least one terrible boss — a sexual harasser, a screamer, a boss who blames underlings for their own mistakes. Anyone who has had a boss remotely like this knows that people respond not by putting out their best work but by organizing their efforts around avoiding their boss’ wrath.
That inevitably means lower quality work from everyone. Which is not a good thing if you’re trying to do something important. Like cure cancer.
It’s hard not to conclude that this is a case of Indispensable White Man Syndrome, in which some White man is considered so magnificently brilliant that everyone else must accommodate their atrocious behavior, lest the organization be deprived of their unique and irreplaceable talents (on occasion a woman or person of color is considered so indispensable that their abusiveness is similarly tolerated, but it seems to happen far less often).
But the president might want to consider whether Lander is worth turning his back on his promises to his staff. Not to mention calling into question his commitment to the larger changes he’s called for in the American workplace. | null | null | null | null | null |
Thiel, who supported Trump in his 2016 bid for the presidency, will support two former colleagues running for Senate.
Thiel, a right-leaning billionaire who has also been a close adviser to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and one of the company’s earliest investors, plans to focus his energies on the 2022 midterm elections, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Thiel is currently supporting two former colleagues, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, who are running for Senate seats in Ohio and Arizona, respectively. | null | null | null | null | null |
To be sure, China-Russia 2.0 is as ideologically brazen as the Stalinist version of the 1950s. The first joint statement begins by denouncing the democracy and human rights advocacy of the United States and other Western nations as a “one-size-fits-all template to guide countries in establishing democracy.” It argues — self-contradictorily — that human rights are universal but should be "protected in accordance with the specific situation in each country and the needs of its population.” Applying this flexible standard to China and Russia, the document concludes that these two one-party states actually practice democracy in keeping with their own “long-standing traditions.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Eric Lander, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in Wilmington, Del., on Jan. 16, 2021. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
“If you’re ever working with me, and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot,” Biden declared. “On the spot. No ifs, ands or buts.”
It was refreshing to hear; in Washington, as everywhere else, there are far too many abusive bosses, including throughout the federal government. Biden instituted this zero-tolerance policy for workplace abuse because, as he put it: “Everybody is entitled to be treated with decency and dignity.”
Lander is a well-known mathematician and biologist who gained prominence for his work mapping the human genome. Perhaps not incidentally, he has a long-standing relationship with the president, having served on the board of the Biden Cancer Initiative, which Biden formed after he was vice president. Among other things, he’s now in charge of Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot.”
So rather than be fired on the spot, no ifs, ands or buts, Lander will have to hold brown bag sessions with subordinates? And other people will have to be trained on workplace policy?
For instance, Biden said in a speech last May that greater competition for workers should be celebrated because “it gives them the power to demand to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace.”
Most people who have been in the working world for any length of time have had at least one terrible boss — a sexual harasser, a screamer, a boss who blames underlings for their own mistakes. Anyone who has had a boss remotely like this knows that people respond not by putting out their best work but by organizing their efforts around avoiding their boss’s wrath.
That inevitably means lower-quality work from everyone. Which is not a good thing if you’re trying to do something important. Such as cure cancer.
It’s hard not to conclude that this is a case of Indispensable White Man Syndrome, in which some White man is considered so magnificently brilliant that everyone else must accommodate their atrocious behavior, lest the organization be deprived of their unique and irreplaceable talents. (On occasion, a woman or person of color is considered so indispensable that their abusiveness is similarly tolerated, but that seems to happen far less often.)
But the president might want to consider whether Lander is worth turning his back on his promises to his staff. Not to mention calling into question his commitment to the larger changes he has called for in the American workplace. | null | null | null | null | null |
American Nathan Chen has won three of the past four world championships. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images)
And yet in the days before a Beijing Olympics in which he is heavily favored to win gold, Chen sits on a video call talking not about winning but about the fear he felt four years ago, the last time he came to an Olympics. Then, like now, he was expected to win gold but instead crashed, failing to complete any of his jumps in the short program and ultimately finishing fifth.
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 ready 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 he can say that he’s looking at the Olympics as just another competition.
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 Armenian American coach counts off the reasons in 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, matter as much as the desire.
“You know how people get gray when they are sick?” Arutyunyan 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?” Arutyunyan 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, puts 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, 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 Yale 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 |
(Asia Pietrzyk/Illustration for The Washington Post)
It all started with a news release. As a journalist, I get multiple pitches a day: “Best and Worst Cities for Healthy Dogs,” “Why the Buzz about Glutathione?” and, sit down for this one, the opportunity to talk to the founder of Parting Stone, a start-up that turns the ashes of loved ones into smooth rocks and pebbles (40 to 60 of them).
Being the 56-year-old mother of a 10-year-old named Leo and having a nightly habit of a glass or two of boxed red, I met the criteria and, to some degree, the “wine mom” stereotype. I do own a pair of socks that read “My Favorite Salad is Wine.” I once considered bringing a colossal wine glass — a gag gift capable of holding an entire bottle — to my book club. And I texted friends the link to that “Saturday Night Live” sketch where Aidy Bryant unwraps her birthday gifts, a series of increasingly barbed wooden signs reading, for example, “I like you better when I’m effed up.” (Scary Mommy wrote a piece entitled “ ‘SNL’ Wine Skit Is Hilarious Because It’s True.”)
According to a recent study, while Americans drank 14 percent more compared to before the pandemic, women increased their alcohol intake by 41 percent. I saw this play out in real time, not only in my own uptick (think three glasses of wine on “Bachelor” nights), but also in the renewed habit of a dear friend, an empty nester and recovered alcoholic who had been sober for 40 years.
“Once covid hit, and I was alone in my apartment, I started drinking a glass or two of Prosecco every night — just to ease the loneliness and fear,” she told me. She assured me that she has since stopped, adding: “The precipice is deep and always close.”
Unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, Dry Together, which has 40 members, does not ask anyone to identify as an alcoholic. It doesn’t even ask its members to quit drinking — during the month or forever. Abstinence is a choice and, as I learn the first night, a few of the women present were already planning to go back to drinking come February, while others weren’t sure what they would do. It’s a delicate dance, this come-here-go-back dalliance with booze.
As we went around the Zoom room, the 15 women — hailing from places including New York City, Marfa, Tex., and Birmingham, Ala. — talked about their drinking and, in Barnes Zesati’s words, “What our why is.” I’d never thought about the reason behind the wine. But after hearing other participants share their own whys — the social aspect; an opportunity to bond or celebrate; a need to be numb to endure — I began to see myself reflected in their stories.
Throughout the hour, I never once thought, “Well, at least I’m not that bad.” I thought instead, “I could be any one of these women.” And they could be me.
Sprague and Barnes Zesati, a therapist who will mark five years as a nondrinker in April, remained close after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. Then came a pivotal conversation. “We were in friend mode, just talking about being alcohol-free and how glad we were that we weren’t drinking to just ‘get through’ the day,” recalled Barnes Zesati, who is the mother of teenage twins and still lives in Austin.
By midmonth, the Dry Together ladies had traded recipes for mocktails, shared tips about where to find shrubs (which are not clippings from actual shrubbery, as I first thought, but flavored drinking vinegar), and agreed on the best place to find alcohol-free white wine (Whole Foods). But, as a group so far, we hadn’t really gone deeper. For example, we hadn’t discussed grieving for our former lives: mourning the loss of the party girl, missing the crutch a highball provides, longing for a nightcap with our partners.
Luckily, there was a lot more from which to choose. Thanks to the sober-curious movement, nonalcoholic beverage sales reached $331 million in 2021, up 33 percent from the year before. I stocked up on some NA IPAs from Athletic Brewing Co., because my cousin, a beer connoisseur in Maine, told me that’s what all her sober friends drank. Taking my first sip of Athletic’s Hazy IPA, I thought, “Now what am I going to do with all that tea?”
After limiting myself to one can, my next thought was: “Well, what if I had two? Or three?” Would pounding a six-pack of fake beer also signal a problem? It was hard to shake the guilt, and the worry that I was trading one habit for another — albeit a healthier and less caloric one.
I phoned Katie Witkiewitz, director of the Addictive Behaviors and Quantitative Research Lab at the University of New Mexico and a former president of the Society of Addiction Psychology. “Would you feel guilty pounding club soda?” asked Witkiewitz, who doesn’t see my worries as concerning. “We don’t need anymore shame or guilt in our lives.”
D.C.-based therapist Susan Berlin went a step further. Sober now for 33 years, Berlin strongly believes that taking a month off from drinking doesn’t really address what’s going on underneath and that, in general, Dry Januarys just peel away the outer layer of the onion. “Initially, you only know the ‘whys’ of drinking,” she explained, reminding me of the question we discussed at the first Zoom meeting. Deep down, Berlin said, resides the true reason we turn to alcohol.
I come away wondering what’s at the center of my own onion. Whatever it is — Berlin gently suggested it’s an attachment disorder, because “how we learn to self-soothe comes out of our attachments” — I know it will take longer than a single January to locate.
And that’s okay. We are all works in progress, after all. Giving up a few boozy “Bachelor” nights and comforting fingers of bourbon has led to insights that will take me far beyond this month. I got more out of Dry January than I ever expected.
At our last Dry Together meeting, we go around the Zoom room and voice our gratitude along with our goodbyes; we’re thankful for the experience, for the camaraderie and for creating a safe place where we all could land. I’m rooting for these women, many of whom no longer seem to be overwhelmed but instead seem to have found a state of grace.
Yes, it was an ending. But it was also a beginning.
Cathy Alter is a writer in D.C. Find her at cathyalter.com. | null | null | null | null | null |
Teva Pharmaceutical settles Texas opioid case for $225 million
Teva settles opioid case for $225 million
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries reached a $225 million settlement with Texas, the biggest settlement so far of claims that the generic-drug maker improperly marketed highly addictive opioid painkillers.
The deal comprises $150 million of cash payments over 15 years and $75 million of the overdose-fighting medication Narcan, according to a copy of the accord made public Monday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R). The settlement ends a state investigation and resolves lawsuits by counties in Texas over Israel-based Teva’s role in creating a public health crisis, he said.
Teva is among more than a dozen companies, including drugmakers, distributors and pharmacies, that face thousands of lawsuits by states and municipalities alleging they fueled a U.S. opioid epidemic that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
On Monday, Teva said it will continue to seek a global settlement to all the litigation.
The $150 million in cash for Texas is the largest of the five opioid accords Teva has reached with state and local governments. In 2019, the company agreed to pay Oklahoma $85 million to avoid a trial on claims it illegally marketed its Actiq and Fentora painkillers.
In December, after a nearly seven-month trial, a New York jury found Teva and some units created a “public nuisance” with their opioid marketing miscues.
Hyundai partner's tweet angers Indians
South Korea’s Hyundai Motor faced calls Monday for a boycott of its cars from Indians incensed over a tweet from the account of its Pakistan partner that expressed solidarity for the people of the disputed territory of Kashmir.
The row erupted Sunday, a day after Pakistan marked the annual Kashmir Solidarity Day and the posts on behalf of Hyundai’s partner Nishat Group appeared on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram commemorating the sacrifices of Kashmiris struggling for self-determination.
Hundreds of social media users in India, which considers the whole of Kashmir an integral part of the country, backed calls for a boycott, saying Hyundai must apologize for being insensitive to India’s position on the decades-old dispute.
Dozens of Indians posted their intention to cancel orders for Hyundai cars to punish the company while urging support for homegrown brands such as Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra.
Responding to the furor, Hyundai’s India unit said it has a “zero tolerance policy towards insensitive communication and we strongly condemn any such view.”
Hyundai is India’s second-largest car seller after Maruti Suzuki, selling close to half a million vehicles in the country last fiscal year and exporting over a million units, making it India’s largest car exporter.
Regulators are taking steps to shield U.S. aviation-industry engineers from the kind of company pressure that was revealed in investigations of the design flaw on the Boeing 737 Max linked to two fatal crashes. The Federal Aviation Administration on Monday proposed new policies that would shield employees at Boeing and other planemakers who act on behalf of the federal government to review safety, including would-be whistleblowers.
Alphabet's Google is being sued by Nordic price comparison provider PriceRunner for about $2.4 billion in Sweden's patent and market court. The lawsuit follows the conclusion of a legal ruling in the European Union that established Google has breached antitrust laws by manipulating search results in favor of its own comparison-shopping services, PriceRunner said in an emailed statement Monday.
Hasbro trounced analysts' estimates for quarterly revenue and profit Monday, bolstered by demand for toys based on the latest Spider-Man movie and a rebound in its television production business. The December release of "Spider-Man: No Way Home," which has grossed more than $1.1 billion worldwide, came after Hasbro had struggled with a dearth of major Marvel blockbusters. Toys based on the web slinger powered a 13 percent increase in Hasbro's partner brands segment, interim chief executive Richard Stoddart said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: On the inside of hospital crowding
Health-care workers check on a patient on Jan. 14 at Doctors Community Hospital in Lanham, Md. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Regarding the Feb. 1 Metro article “Hospitals still suffer as omicron surge eases”:
It’s one thing to read about how crowded the hospitals are and how overworked the staff is, and quite another to experience it. My neighbor and I were both injured last month. We both spent about seven hours on gurneys lined up head to toe along a corridor because there weren’t any rooms available for us. I fell again about 3 a.m. on Friday, breaking my foot, and so was hauled away to the hospital again. This time I got a room, probably because I came in so very early. Still, the staff was clearly overwhelmed. In the 14 hours I was there, each call for help to the bathroom took close to a half-hour to be answered, and they only had time to get me something to eat well after 5 p.m. After waiting three hours for an ambulance to be free to take me home again, the hospital finally gave up and hired private medical transport. Still, I was one of the lucky ones.
I wish it were only those who choose not to take a safe, effective vaccine who had to suffer the consequences of their actions, which are overwhelming our hospitals and pushing the staff to the breaking point. Unfortunately, it’s many others who have suffered and even died because of their selfish and stupid actions.
Coryn Weigle, Alexandria | null | null | null | null | null |
To be sure, China-Russia 2.0 is as ideologically brazen as the Stalinist version of the 1950s. The joint statement begins by denouncing the democracy and human rights advocacy of the United States and other Western nations as a “one-size-fits-all template to guide countries in establishing democracy.” It argues — self-contradictorily — that human rights are universal but should be "protected in accordance with the specific situation in each country and the needs of its population.” Applying this flexible standard to China and Russia, the document concludes that these two one-party states actually practice democracy in keeping with their own “long-standing traditions.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Wake up to the danger of stealing language
This unjust phenomenon has been observed several times in the erasure of immigrant culture or the overwriting of mistreatment of people of color in the United States. Not only do fast-paced social media platforms, such as TikTok, amplify these incorrect meanings, but they provide platforms for people to encourage others to use words wrongly and unfairly. Multiple aspects of culture, not only words, have been stolen from communities across the nation solely to be palatable to the American public, without regard for the harmful implications behind doing so.
If we continue to limit teaching proper meaning and intentions behind parts of culture, the melting pot that is the United States will slowly transform into a sea of uniformity.
Harini Ramaswamy, Arlington | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: Protecting Public Safety with Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle M. Outlaw
MR. JACKMAN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Tom Jackman, a criminal justice reporter here at the Post, and today our guest is Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw as part of our continuing conversations about protecting public safety and the role of policing.
Welcome to Washington Post Live, Commissioner Outlaw.
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
MR. JACKMAN: And we want to remind our audience that we want you to join our conversation. It doesn't just have to be the two of us up here. So please tweet your questions and comments to the handle @PostLive, one word, @PostLive.
All right, Commissioner. We're supposed to be talking about public safety, but there's a breaking news story happening in Philadelphia that I think you probably want to weigh in on. The Philadelphia Inquirer had a heck of a story yesterday about the large number of Philadelphia police officers who are on sick or injury leave, more than 10 percent of your department.
Former Commissioner Chuck Ramsey, well known here in this area, called it "the biggest scam going." Is this a problem, and is there anything you can do about it?
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: Absolutely, it's a problem, and I actually appreciate you asking me about that because I think there is a lot of interconnectedness in what we're trying to accomplish with lowering our crime rates here. You can have the best plan on the planet, but if you don't have the resources to implement it, I think we see what happens.
All of that to say, you know, this is the result of legislation here that's existed long before my arrival, long before my predecessor's arrival, but the reason why this legislation was even put on the books was to protect officers who legitimately were injured and to ensure that they had a pathway forward to either help themselves heal and then return to work or to, at some point, find other ways to be employed if it's deemed that they could no longer work here with the police department.
What we found is that there are a lot of people here that take advantage of that, and while they may be injured initially at some point, whether, you know, they say it's on duty, but they found ways to stretch it out. And then they also found ways because of maybe some delays in the process to find other ways to employ themselves while they were collecting a check from the City of Philadelphia.
The problem with that is--you know, I've been here for two years, and we've been through everything, you name it, for the last two years here, whether it's civil unrest, you know, the increases in violent crimes that we've seen, you name it, the pandemic, everything related to that. And there are still very strong-hearted, strong-willed men and women here in this department that show up every day. And because of the fact that there are individuals that choose to scam the system, these individuals that show up and show out every day are now taking the burden, taking on the burden of the additional work or the added hours or working overtime because of those individuals who choose to scam the system. So it's absolutely a problem. I think it's deplorable, and we will continue to work through our Internal Affairs Bureau, identify these issues or identify these individuals and investigate them or refer them to Risk Management who then takes the investigation on from there and determines if there is further investigation that needs to be done and/or criminal charges that need to be filed. But we will continue to do our part on that.
MR. JACKMAN: Okay. I saw that you had just issued a statement on that. So I'm glad you were able to touch on that.
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: Yeah.
MR. JACKMAN: And we can go back now to crime, which I'm sure you're looking forward to talking about, and we do need to point out--you pointed it out--that you've been the police chief there for only two years--police commissioner. You were the chief in Portland before that, and you were a deputy chief in Oakland before that.
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: Right.
MR. JACKMAN: There's been a surge in violent crime across the country, but particularly, Philadelphia has been particularly hard hit, and last year, you had an all-time record high of 562 homicides. And this came after years where most of the country was seeing sort of a steady decline. So what changed in terms of violent crime, either nationwide or in Philadelphia? Why is the spike going that way now?
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: You know, I think a lot of academic folks are still trying to figure it out, right? Here in Philadelphia, the violent crime has been steadily increasing since 2015, but no one has seen the type of spikes that we all have seen, you know, in recent history that began in 2020.
We're also seeing--I will tell you this. We got a record number of guns off the street last year, close to 6,000, and we're already trending in 2022 so far this year to even surpass that. So we know for a fact that accessibility to guns is clearly an issue, and I'm not talking about people that are purchasing guns legally, they're storing them. If they're lost or stolen, they report them. I'm not talking about those individuals. I'm talking about people that are carrying guns illegally, and then they are using said guns to commit crimes.
We're seeing guns fall into the hands of younger people, juveniles, far more readily. Our shooters are becoming younger, and as such, our victims, our shooting victims are becoming younger. We're seeing individuals that have either--say, for example, if they are a suspect or an offender, depending on where you are in the country--some people may say "perpetrator," but typically, these individuals have either been victims of a shooting before or they have had gun cases. They've been arrested for a violation--what we call here in Philadelphia, a violation of the Uniform Firearm Act, which is carrying a firearm illegally. So either they may have open cases, or they've been arrested for this before, and with the court closures in 2020--our courts were closed for an entire year--there are a lot of people that, quite frankly, should have been in custody that were not or they were pending court cases, and they were waiting for some sort of--for resolution to their case. So there are so many things that we think have impacted the violence crime that we saw here in the city.
I think it's also worth noting that, you know, we're the fourth largest police department in the country. We're a major city, but we're also probably the poorest major city in the country. So all of the issues that this city experienced prior to the pandemic around access to housing, access to education, access to wealth, all of the things that typically, if an individual had them, would--you know, would be less inclined to commit a crime, all of these things or the systemic inequities that we knew existed prior to the pandemic were exacerbated during the pandemic. So there's so many different things that we think lent to this spike that we saw over the last two years, but now we have to go back to what we know works to get these numbers to decrease.
MR. JACKMAN: Well, you answered about six different questions that I had lined up for you there in just that one answer.
Let's start with guns, right? An amazing number of crime guns seized by you guys last year, but does that make a difference? Will the flow of guns just keep coming? What's your frustration level with the easy availability of guns on the street in 2022?
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: It's very frustrating, very frustrating. I mean, we're in Pennsylvania. The gun laws are, you know, pretty loose here. Again, I don't have anything against people that are buying them legally and they're using them legally. I have an issue with those who are purchasing them legally, and then they're, in turn, putting them in the hands of those who shouldn't have them. So we're talking about straw purchasing.
I'm talking about people that don't properly store their guns, and now they're stolen or they're used in other crimes, right?
I think there can be some clear or some commonsense legislative fixes, but in the meantime, before that happens, if it ever happens, we just need to make sure that there are proportionate consequences for those who are illegally carrying guns and using them here in the City of Philadelphia because we know that there is a nexus between the shootings, the nonfatal shootings that we're seeing, and our homicides. And, you know, it's no secret that a nonfatal shooting could turn into a homicide, depending on the location, depending on to proximity of a hospital or, you know, just where the person was shot.
So, if we focus on the low-hanging fruit, if we make very clear that there will be very serious consequences for those who are committing very serious, violent crimes, I think that will get us a very, very long way.
MR. JACKMAN: You talked about the socioeconomic situation in Philadelphia. I would note that 80 percent of the victims of last year's homicides were African American, particularly Black men. The Brady Campaign says gun violence is a racial justice issue. Do you agree, and what's driving that?
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: I mean, when you look at--it just depends on, you know, context, right? It's absolutely disparities here. When you see the numbers, right, it's so sad. I respond--let me back up.
When I first got here, I said as the police commissioner, I am going to respond to the types of calls or critical incidences that are so in--far, few, and between that people know when the police commissioner show up, this is something really, really bad, right?
I had to come up with my team, had to come up with a--like a call-out roster because there were so many children being shot, whether through negligence, right, through their parents or their guardians leaving firearms in places that were easily accessible to young people. So now I have an eight-year-old that accidentally shot and killed themselves or an eight-year-old that accidentally shot a younger sibling or cousin or pregnant women being shot, and it was happening so much that I found myself not only losing sleep anyway, but I wasn't getting a decent night's sleep because I was responding so much.
I share this because when I arrived to these scenes, it's not like we can just completely block out that there's human beings behind these stats that we share. When you walk through these homes and you see photos, right, for me, I said, oh, my gosh, any one of these individuals could be a family member because there was--they look like me. And the more you think about it, this is potential--these are generation--we're losing an entire generation of young people or individuals that identify as Black or Brown. That is problem, and it's a crisis. And until everyone gets on the same page and recognizes that it's a crisis, we're going to continue the same thing in 2022, 2023, and so on and so forth.
So, yes, there are disparities. You know, there's, again, disparities across the system, but when we don't fix the low-hanging fruit, when we don't fix the drivers, for us on the enforcement end, we knew that domestic violence, narcotics sales, access to weapons, and beefs or social media beefs, arguments were driving a lot of the nonfatal shootings and homicides that we saw.
So what is it that we think we should do? Common sense tells us that we try to go upstream and nip it in the bud, right? What are we doing to address our narcotics sales? What are we doing to ensure that there's domestic violence awareness so that our victims or potential victims are getting the resources that they need? What are we doing--because we're behind in policing, what are we doing to ensure that we're on the up and up with technology to get behind some of these social media beefs or arguments that we're seeing? Obviously, we can't be social media police, but we have to do what we can.
So where does the data and intelligence take us? If the data and intelligence is taking us in the area or in the direction of Black and Brown people are losing their lives, I think that's only common sense in saying, yes, there's a disparity there and there's an equity issue there. And there's something that we have to address upstream to ensure that there's justice later on down the road.
MR. JACKMAN: You talked about going into folks' houses and seeing their pictures. What do you say at that moment to people? Do you talk about big issues, or are you just trying to be consoling, a shoulder? What do you say in that situation?
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: It's very--it's difficult. You know, I focus on the moment. I can recall hugging an eight-year-old who had seen her younger sibling accidentally shoot himself in the head, and she--I felt her shoulder shaking, and she was trembling. And she was crying so hard, I knew for sure that my uniform shirt would be drenched. By the time I let her go, I saw that she was all cried out. She couldn't even get a tear out. That's how traumatized she was. So, in that moment, all I could do was focus on the best way of being a human being.
And as a mother, my boys are 23 and 20, right? That's the first hat that I wear. I'm a mother first. I'm a family member first, and then all the--you know, the law enforcement comes after.
But all I focus on is the--in the moment is humanity. All of the small talk and the important things about the case or the investigation, you know, I leave that for our detectives here. When I show up, my intent is to not only show that I care but to let everyone know that, you know, all of the responding officers are also human beings, and this has an impact on us as well.
Typically, you know, our officers are the first ones that get there, and we're the ones scooping up victims and transporting them to the hospital. It's not an ambulance. So this has a really deep impact on all of us, and we all have a vested interest in wanting to see these numbers go down.
MR. JACKMAN: Well, I hadn't thought about that. That's yet another impact on police that they have to actually transport victims.
MR. JACKMAN: You put out a quarterly police reforms report last month, a PowerPoint, that talked about a lot of the challenges your department has faced the last two years, and you mention--and you mentioned them here earlier--budget cuts, social unrest, and social media--as sort of burdensome challenges. Have those factors made--specifically made policing harder?
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: I think it's made our work more challenging, not just here in Philadelphia but for all of my colleagues. You know, I meet with my colleagues regularly. We all speak about it. We exchange notes. We talk about what's driving crime, and then we talk about potential implications of our strategies but then also roadblocks or challenges or bottlenecks. And, you know, upon my arrival here, you know, I was almost immediately asked to identify budget cuts. It was the same for many of my colleagues around the country.
Specifically, here in Philadelphia, I had a corporal that was murdered, ambushed, and then within a month, the pandemic hit, and we had to identify new ways to police because, you know, we're very social beings as human beings, but the police as law enforcement, you know, the first responders, we're going into people's homes. We don't know who we're dealing with until we get there. We don't know what we have until we get there, and then all--again, all of the other social issues that were exacerbated by the pandemic, we were still dealing with that.
And then we were also dealing with a changing narrative. We found ourselves at the beginning of a new movement, and I say movement because I don't think it was a moment in time. There was an opportunity there to make some really meaningful changes related to reform and transformation, but we still found that there were a core group, a lot of people in the community, that said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait. We want reform, but we still want cops, and we want to see you." So it's almost as if we were being asked to do everything and nothing at the same time, meaning we want you to do more. We want to increase visibility. We want our response times to be quick and hasty. We want our clearance rate--and as we should, right? Everybody expects and should have these services. You know, clearance rates should improve, an area that we have to work on. Oh, but by the way, we don't want to give you the money to do that or give you additional funding.
And, you know, I think if there were more conversations with people like myself and my colleagues, I think people would have been surprised to learn that we don't disagree that additional funding needed to be placed into services but not at the expense of the police department. If you want more training, if you want more equipment, if you want us to be the best of the best and provide optimal service and ensure that, you know, we're keeping up with contemporary policing practices, that calls for investment, not divestment.
So there was a lot of competing interests in 2020 that continued on into 2021 with, okay, we know we want more, but we're still having this conversation around defund. And now we're starting to slowly hear more conversation about reinvestment, when myself and my colleagues have been saying for many, many years that it's not an either/or. It's an and. You can have reform and accountability and--and you can allow the police to be the police and allow us to have a visible presence, allow us to have the tools that we need, give us the technology, allow us to put a cop on every corner, meaning that we have to increase our funding by allowing for more recruitment, and then being creative in how we retain. How are we incentivizing our individuals to stay, given everything that we've gone through in the last two years? And I'm not just talking about police officers. It's dispatchers as well.
So it's still a conversation that's being had, but we're slowly starting to see the narrative change a little bit. But we're still left with the resources of 2020. So we're being asked to do more, but we have way less that I had a year ago or even two years ago. I have 10 percent less staffing than I had--or that this department had back in 2015. So it's real easy to try to compare apples to apples and say, "Well, back in this year, we knew this worked. Why don't we do this again?" We don't have nearly the amount of staffing that we had then.
So a lot of things in 2022 that not only has to be reassessed, but we really need to think about the conversations that's being had around public safety and how we can publicly support law enforcement but also at the same time hold us accountable and publicly acknowledging that the two are not mutually exclusive.
MR. JACKMAN: All right. We've got a question from the audience on Twitter from Carolina Goodman [phonetic] who asks, what is the current Philadelphia Police Department support for DA Krasner who--for those who don't know, Larry Krasner is a liberal prosecutor who has taken a different approach to prosecuting low-level crimes and bail, deemphasizing nonviolent arrests, so--and he's aggressively sought police files and prosecuted police officers. So what is your police department relationship with the district attorney?
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: I will tell you this. We are--we're all part of a criminal justice system, and it would behoove every facet of the criminal justice system to be in alignment.
I rolled out a strategic plan in June of 2020, and I made very clear in the action plan that there were some implications there, right? I can only pretty much control those who work for me.
The problem is--is that if there are key ideological differences amongst partners within the criminal justice system, it makes it very difficult to execute a plan. The reason why I say that is this. There are areas where we agree, but there are very key areas where we don't agree. And, you know, the public--it's important for the public to know that, you know, we're working together, which we do, but it also needs to be made very clear that there are some fundamental areas where we disagree.
One of those areas is what I talked about earlier, right? I believe that we have to go very hard after those who are carrying firearms illegally, and that's because we're seeing a lot of these illegal firearms at the root of a lot of these nonfatal shootings and homicides that we're seeing. There's a different principle or a different belief or a different philosophy in the DA's office.
But I will say this. It's 2022. Last year, we experienced 562 homicides, which is sickening. There are 562 mothers or fathers or both who will not be at the dinner table or not have the ability to see their loved ones this year. There is nothing more important to me in this police department in this day and age right now than making sure that we get these numbers down, we ensure everybody is safe. It's not too late. It's not too late to get on board. It's not too late to be aligned, and I think, you know, at some point, for those--and it's not just the DA. Whomever it is, if we're not on the same page, then okay, you continue to do what it is that you're doing over there, but for the Philadelphia Police Department, we will maintain our priorities, and we will be more focused and precise as ever to make sure that we're getting the most violent individuals off the street, we're doing what we can to arrest key individuals and get the right people off the street, and lower crime in these small pockets of the city that we know are driving the largest numbers of crime citywide.
MR. JACKMAN: That leads me into a question that your PowerPoint mentioned, which was Operation Pinpoint. I think that's what you might have just been referring to.
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: Yes, yes.
MR. JACKMAN: What is that? I mean, it sounds good. Tell us more.
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: Yeah. So it's, you know, depending on where you are in the country. I keep saying this because I recognize it might have a different name, depending on where you are. This is my third state that I've worked in, and, you know, in Oakland, it was Ceasefire. I brought it to Portland, and, you know, we called it something else. It was our gun violence initiative, and here, it's under the umbrella--so Operation Pinpoint, it's focused deterrence, right?
And what the principle states is that it's--we know that there is a small percentage of individuals that are responsible for committing to driving the largest percentage of crime here citywide. It's the same thing with places in the city. There are small pockets in the city that's driving the largest percentage of our violent crime here. So the whole concept under the city's Philadelphia Roadmap for Safer Communities is how do we as a police department operationalize that, and we do that through Operation Pinpoint, pinpoint being very precise.
And so, in each district throughout the city, there are pinpoint grids. Those are our areas that's driving crime. We flood those areas with resources, whether on the enforcement end, investigative end, it's working with our local, state, federal partners to ensure that every resource that's available are focusing on these particular grids or places, problematic areas within the city, and then even more so on the individuals within those areas. The whole point of doing that, again, is to focus on those small percentages of the population that's driving the numbers, and it's also making sure that we're not casting a wide net. We are spearfishing. We're being as precise as possible.
And so the whole point is ensuring alignment not just on the enforcement end, but then also ensuring that our enforcement efforts are sustained through the city's services, through the social services or human services end. So it's a hand-in-hand operation with the police department, our law enforcement, the federal agencies, prosecution, federal prosecutors, you name it and everyone in between, including the services realm to ensure that we are addressing again these small pockets, and then ultimately, if we're successful, it will drive down the citywide numbers because we're focusing on these small pinpoint grids within the city that are the drivers of the crime.
MR. JACKMAN: Well, unfortunately, we're out of time, and we'll have to leave it there.
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: Oh, heck.
MR. JACKMAN: I hope we were able to cover some of the things that you wanted to talk about today, Commissioner. Thank you so much for joining us.
COMMISSIONER OUTLAW: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me this afternoon.
MR. JACKMAN: It was great.
I’m Tom Jackman. As always, thanks for watching. To check out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com to register and find more information about all our upcoming programs. And remember we always want to hear from you, our audience, and you can share your thoughts and questions, our guests on Washington Post Live, by tweeting @PostLive. Thanks for watching. | null | null | null | null | null |
Johan Clarey of France won silver in the men's downhill Monday. (Mark Schiefelbein/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 and gained some fame in his native France. He has had a good run, even if it got no better than that.
Some 1 minute 42.79 seconds after Clarey launched himself out of the starting gate at National Alpine Ski 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 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 tenth of a second faster than Clarey, and Austria’s Matthias Mayer, 31, took bronze in 1:42.85.
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 coronavirus 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 mph at a downhill in Wengen, Switzerland — a record that still stands. Of course, Clarey was 31 then, seemingly on the downside of his career. He probably 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 that 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 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 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 of the old guys out there. | null | null | null | null | null |
Zhu Yi of China fell twice during Monday’s team competition free skate at the Beijing Olympics. (Natacha Pisarenko/AP)
Another U.S.-born female athlete representing China has drawn the spotlight. But unlike freestyle skier Eileen Gu, who has charmed Chinese audiences, the case of Zhu Yi has highlighted the fickleness of the nation’s fans.
Zhu, a 19-year-old figure skater who grew up in California, fell twice during Monday’s team competition free skate — after falling a day earlier in her short program. She broke down in tears both times. Zhu has since been the subject of harsh backlash from Chinese fans.
The response reflects the narrow path that athletes such as Zhu and Gu are trying to walk. On one side, they face blowback in the United States for having chosen to compete on behalf of China. On the other side, the Chinese public’s welcome is conditional on maintaining their stellar performance.
On Chinese social media, commentators questioned why an American-born athlete was representing China. Zhu was criticized for a lack of fluency in the language and for her “privileged” background; her father is a computer scientist whose career has straddled the United States and China.
After she fell to the ice 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 such as 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.
After Zhu’s first fall 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.
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 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 Monday, with two golds and two silvers, trailing Sweden, the Russian Olympic Committee and the Netherlands. | null | null | null | null | null |
Queen Elizabeth II marks 70 years as Britain’s head of state
Elizabeth II became queen upon her father’s death in 1952 and is the longest-reigning monarch in British history.
Queen Elizabeth II marks 70 years as Britain's monarch on February 6. She became queen at age 25 after her father, King George VI, died of cancer at 56. No other British king or queen has reigned as long as she has. (AP)
Gun salutes rang out in London, England, and Edinburgh, Scotland, on Monday to mark the official start of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee year, as the 95-year-old monarch prepared for a busy season of public duties.
Britain’s longest-serving monarch, Elizabeth became queen after the death of her father, King George VI, from lung cancer at age 56 on February 6, 1952. At the time, she was 25, married and the mother of two small children.
The queen made clear she intended to continue as head of state, renewing the pledge she made on her 21st birthday to devote her entire life to the service of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, a group of 54 nations most of which are former British colonies.
While Sunday’s anniversary was low-key, public celebrations of the Platinum Jubilee are scheduled for June, when the weather is usually sunnier. The festivities will include a military parade, a day of horse-racing and neighborhood parties. | null | null | null | null | null |
Many of Britain's traditional pubs were struggling to survive before the coronavirus pandemic, thanks to rising business rates. (Reuters)
Before the pandemic, “we weren’t exactly flush — but I don’t think anybody was,” Tofalli said. But he and his staff fought to make it a success. “It was a great, award-winning pub; it’s the oldest pub in the country. … I tried everything. I’m still trying.”
As he previously told The Post, when he took over, “it was a dump. … It stank.”
Tofalli said he has been humbled by an outpouring of messages of support from local patrons and others in recent days. “The first thing people do is they’re either crying — they’re gutted personally for me or the pub or the dream or the heritage or the history — then … there’s that little pause and they all say, ‘But do you remember that time … ?’ ”
But he said it needs a benefactor to invest in it for the long run, making it accessible for people with disabilities and upgrading the structure, for example, so that it survives “for the next thousand years.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Saints’ Alvin Kamara, in Las Vegas for Pro Bowl, arrested on battery charge
Police said Saints running back Alvin Kamara, shown during the Pro Bowl, acknowledged playing a role in an alleged assault the day before. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
New Orleans Saints running back Alvin Kamara was arrested Sunday by Las Vegas police and booked on a felony battery charge after playing in the Pro Bowl.
The arrest was related to an incident alleged to have taken place Saturday morning at a Las Vegas casino. Police were not notified by the alleged victim until early that evening, per a report released by the department, and did not conduct an interview with Kamara until after he played Sunday at Las Vegas’s Allegiant Stadium.
Per a police report, a recorded interview of Kamara was conducted at the stadium, where Kamara caught four passes for 23 yards as his NFC team lost to the AFC in the NFL’s annual all-star game.
Kamara, 26, was taken to Clark County Detention Center, where he was booked for battery resulting in substantial bodily harm. He was subsequently released after posting $5,000 bond (per KLAS-TV). Formal charges have yet to be filed against the five-time Pro Bowl selection. If tried and convicted of the charge, Kamara could face a prison sentence of one to five years and a fine of $10,000.
According to police, a man identified as Darnell Greene spoke to them at a hospital Saturday where he was getting treatment for injuries that included an orbital fracture on his right eye. Greene stated that he was leaving an after-hours nightclub at the casino when he struck up a conversation with a person who was among a group accompanying Kamara. They were waiting for an elevator, Greene stated, and when it arrived he began walking with them toward the open doors when someone put his hand on Greene and stopped him. Greene identified that person as Kamara, and claimed that after he pushed the player’s hand away, he was shoved and then violently attacked by multiple people.
Kamara told police, per a report, that Greene insulted one of his friends and made a threat. Kamara saw a fight break out and Greene get hit by others, he said, before he threw a couple of punches because he thought Greene was running away. Presented with photos taken of the incident, Kamara pointed out himself and a few companions.
Per ESPN, police stated that video of the episode counters Kamara’s claim that Greene was running away and instead shows Greene getting punched by a companion of Kamara’s and then “immediately” attacked by the Saints star. Surveillance video of the incident, which occurred at approximately 6:30 a.m. Saturday, shows Kamara punching Greene eight times, including three times after Greene fell to the ground. One of Kamara’s companions stomped on Greene approximately 16 times, per police.
Kamara, the AP’s offensive rookie of the year in 2017, is reportedly set to have a court appearance March 8. The NFL and the Saints have yet to issue public comment. | null | null | null | null | null |
Thiel, who backed Trump in his 2016 bid for the presidency, will support two close associates running for Senate
Billionaire Peter Thiel. (Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg News)
Longtime investor and board member Peter Thiel plans not to seek reelection to Facebook’s board this year, the company announced Monday, ending his tenure as one of the company’s longest-serving board members at a moment of tumult for the social media giant.
Thiel, a right-leaning billionaire and Trump supporter who has also been a close adviser to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, plans to focus his energies on the 2022 midterm elections, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Thiel is supporting two close associates, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, who are running for Senate seats in Ohio and Arizona, respectively. Thiel sees the midterms as a critical moment for the country, the person said, and he is backing a slate of candidates who are allies of former president Donald Trump.
Thiel, who joined Facebook parent company Meta’s board in April 2005, said in the release: “It has been a privilege to work with one of the great entrepreneurs of our time. Mark Zuckerberg’s intelligence, energy, and conscientiousness are tremendous. His talents will serve Meta well as he leads the company into a new era.”
Thiel will depart Facebook with the company at a crossroads and mired in crisis once again. It is being targeted by governments all over the world for amplifying misinformation and hate, and is facing a major antitrust case in the United States. It shut down a once-touted cryptocurrency project last month in the face of political resistance, and its stock has plummeted as a result of lower-revenue forecasts and a first-ever decline in user growth. Numerous senior executives left the company in 2021.
Last year the company changed its name to Meta in an attempt to refocus itself on virtual and augmented reality and gaming hardware. That new direction is going to be an uphill climb for the company, which has invested more than $10 billion in hiring talent and building out the division Facebook Reality Labs last year, according to its latest earnings reports.
Thiel’s departure, which likely won’t take place until May, leaves the job of overseeing Facebook through this period to the remaining board members, including venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox and a longtime friend of Zuckerberg.
But Facebook’s board has less power than other boards because Zuckerberg controls a majority of voting shares, giving him singular control over his company.
Thiel, a venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, has long been controversial for Facebook. He joined the board one year after the company was founded, and was one of the first investors to bet big on Zuckerberg’s nascent social media start-up.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Thiel became more involved in politics and became a vocal supporter of Trump. He helped the company make connections to leading conservative figures and manage a controversy over the alleged suppression of conservative publications. Facebook’s liberal employee base often criticized Zuckerberg’s relationship with Thiel and questioned his influence over the company’s direction, particularly Zuckerberg’s stances on free speech. Thiel has long been a libertarian-leaning conservative who has reportedly influenced Zuckerberg to take more hands-off positions on whether to police misinformation and other harmful content.
Facebook’s cryptocurrency failure came after internal conflict and regulatory pushback
Masters is the chief operating officer of Thiel Capital and the president of the Thiel Foundation. Vance is author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” who previously worked at Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management. Thiel recently backed his Midwest-focused venture fund, Narya Capital, based in Cincinnati.
Thiel has given $10 million to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC supporting Vance, joining hedge fund investor Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who have given an additional $150,000 to the effort, according to federal records.
But heavy spending on ads attacking Vance, including from the conservative Club for Growth, has prevented Vance from taking a clear advantage so far in the race, which includes at least three other serious contenders. In fact, a January poll of the race by Vance’s super PAC, which was recently obtained by Politico, found that Vance’s numbers had deteriorated at the end of 2021, putting him in need of a “course correction ASAP that will resolidify him as a true conservative.” The primary is May 3.
Thiel also gave $10 million to a super PAC, Saving Arizona, supporting his former adviser Masters, who is competing for the Aug. 2 Arizona primary. But after that group spent $2.4 million last year to introduce Masters and attack his better-known rival, state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, there is little public evidence that Masters is moving to pull ahead of Brnovich.
In both states, Republican candidates have been courting a Trump endorsement, which could shift the dynamics of the primary contests, but the former president has yet to pick favorites. Trump advisers have said Trump is likely to wait until a candidate emerges from public support in both states, though that plan could change. Trump is known to make decisions on endorsements suddenly, with little warning to those around him.
FAQ: What are the midterms?
In the meantime, Thiel has tried to lend his star power and social appeal to Vance and Masters, allowing their campaigns to raise money off opportunities to dine with the billionaire investor.
“Want to have dinner with me and Peter Thiel?” Masters tweeted in August. “Donate $5,800 to my campaign by the end of tomorrow.” For those with less money to donate, Masters offered to spend 20 minutes on the phone with people who sent him $500.
When Trump won the election in 2016, Thiel and Masters helped the Trump transition team scout Silicon Valley for potential hires for the incoming administration, The Washington Post reported at the time.
Last month Masters tweeted that he and Thiel would mint 99 NFTs of their book, “Zero to One,” and would sell them for contributions to Masters’s Senate campaign. The purchase would also come with “exclusive access to parties with me and Peter.”
Thiel and Vance have backed Rumble, a short-video start-up that aims to become a right-wing competitor for YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. Rumble also partnered with Trump Media and Technology Group, Trump’s newly formed social media company that aims to take on Big Tech.
Thiel also took on big fights with the media industry, famously financing numerous lawsuits against Gawker Media. The media company ultimately filed for bankruptcy. | null | null | null | null | null |
The General Services Administration rejects facial recognition for its popular Login.gov sign-on service even as the IRS planned to make it a requirement to access tax records online. On Monday, the IRS abandoned that plan.
Even as the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies pushed to require Americans to consent to facial recognition to sign on to government websites, the government’s central management office has refused to use the technology on its own secure log-in service, Login.gov.
The Treasury Department last year awarded a two-year, $86 million contract to a private contractor, ID.me, that would require taxpayers to send in video scans of their face before they can verify their identities and access their tax records online. The plan was scheduled to go into effect this summer.
But the IRS announced Monday it has abandoned that plan after news of the contract stirred a firestorm because facial recognition systems are unregulated in the United States and have been shown in federal tests to work less accurately for people with darker skin. Members of Congress and privacy advocates also voiced concern that the systems could undermine Americans’ privacy rights or unfairly disadvantage people without access to a smartphone, laptop camera or the Internet.
Two people familiar with the discussions told The Post that the IRS officials did not specify the alternative under consideration during a briefing Friday to a bipartisan group of senators. And the IRS statement abandoning the plan on Monday didn’t specify what would replace it.
In a letter sent Monday to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called on the IRS to reverse its decision, calling it “simply unacceptable to force Americans to submit to scans using facial recognition technology as a condition of interacting with the government online.”
Before Monday’s announcement, Treasury officials argued they had to look beyond Login.gov, which calls itself “the public’s one account for government,” on the basis that facial recognition is a gold standard for identity verification. | null | null | null | null | null |
The agency had planned to require taxpayers send video scans of their face to a private company starting this summer
The IRS sys it will stop using facial recognition technology to authenticate people who create online accounts after the practice came under criticism from privacy advocates and lawmakers. (Susan Walsh/AP)
The IRS said Monday it would “transition away” from using a face-scanning service offered by the company ID.me in the coming weeks and would develop an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition. The IRS said it would also continue to work with “cross-government partners” on additional methods of authentication, but it did not provide a precise time frame for the change or say what the additional authentication process might entail.
The agency originally had said that starting this summer all taxpayers would need to submit a “video selfie” to ID.me to access their tax records and other services on the IRS website. But lawmakers and advocates slammed the idea of mandating the technology’s use nationwide, saying it would unfairly burden Americans without smartphones or computer cameras, would make sensitive data vulnerable to hackers and would subject people of color to a system known to work less accurately on darker skin.
“The IRS takes taxpayer privacy and security seriously, and we understand the concerns that have been raised,” IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said in a statement announcing the decision. “Everyone should feel comfortable with how their personal information is secured, and we are quickly pursuing short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”
Earlier Monday, Wyden had urged the IRS in a letter to abandon working with ID.me, calling it “simply unacceptable to force Americans to submit to scans using facial recognition technology as a condition of interacting with the government online.”
“The infrastructure that powers digital identity, particularly when used to access government websites, should be run by the government,” he wrote.
In a letter to the IRS last week, 14 Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee pointedly asked what would happen to taxpayers’ personal information if the IRS ended its work with the company. The group has yet to receive a response, a committee aide said.
An ID.me spokesman on Monday redirected all questions to the IRS. The company tweeted Monday that it uses “numerous tools” beyond facial recognition to verify identities.
The reversal sparked questions of whether ID.me’s other clients across the country will follow suit. Roughly 70 million Americans have used its service to verify their identities while filing for unemployment insurance, pandemic assistance grants, child tax credit payments or other services, the company’s chief told The Post last month. On its client list: 10 federal agencies, including Social Security, Labor and Veterans Affairs; 30 states, including California, Florida, New York and Texas; and 540 companies nationwide.
The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a digital rights advocacy group, celebrated the change and called on state governments to drop the technology’s use.
“When government agencies use this technology, it’s question of when, not if, this biometric data is hacked, leaked or misused,” the group’s executive director, Albert Fox Cahn, said in a statement.
ID.me has said its system has stored tens of millions of people’s face scans in a database to look for identity theft. People can request to delete their information, but the company stores the data for at least seven years due to federal auditing rules, according to an IRS filing.
The controversy has highlighted a key tension within the U.S. government over facial recognition. Federal agencies are increasingly using the technology for security and investigative purposes, and 10 of them — the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Interior, Justice, State, Treasury and Veterans Affairs — told government auditors last year that they intended to expand their face-scanning capabilities in the coming months.
But the government’s central management office, the General Services Administration, has said face-scanning technology has too many problems to justify its use and has refused to include it in the Login.gov sign-in system.
Two hundred websites run by 28 federal agencies use the Login.gov service and more than 40 million people have opened accounts with it. It was built and is operated by government employees to accomplish the same tasks as ID.me by relying on more traditional methods of identity verification, such as scanning government records and credit reports.
A bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers have in the last week called on the government to make verifying the identities of its own citizens a federal priority, as opposed to a task managed by a private company.
In his letter Monday, Wyden urged the IRS and other agencies to use Login.gov, saying it was already piloting ways to verify a person’s identity without facial recognition through in-person partnerships with the U.S. Postal Service and Veterans Affairs. Wyden called on those government pilots to be expanded, alongside a call center operation for verifying people over video calls.
Wyden noted in the letter that Congress first required federal agencies to use a single sign-on service in 2015 and blamed limited adoption of Login.gov on agencies ignoring the congressional mandate and presidential administrations failing to pursue the issue.
Wyden’s letter followed three others in the last week sent from members of Congress to IRS leaders calling for an immediate halt to the facial recognition plan. Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee criticized the IRS for having “unilaterally decided to allow an outside contractor to stand as the gatekeeper between citizens and necessary government services.”
On Monday, shortly before the IRS’s announcement, four Democrats in the House — Reps. Ted Lieu (Calif.), Yvette D. Clarke (N.Y.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) and Anna G. Eshoo (Calif.) — sent the agency a letter calling it “simply wrong to compel millions of Americans to place trust in this new protocol.”
The option to create a new account using ID.me’s facial recognition service had been offered on the website for months, and some taxpayers who had proactively gone through the process expressed frustration following news of the IRS’s reversal.
Jamal Le Blanc, who lives in suburban Maryland, said he was told a month ago he’d need to create a facial scan to access his tax records. Because of a disability in his arm, he said, he required his daughter’s help to run through the process. Now, he worries how the data will be used or secured in the years to come.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that 15 Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee had signed a letter to the IRS. Each party has only 14 members on the committee. The 15th Republican who signed, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, is not a member of the committee. | null | null | null | null | null |
Tesla disclosed the SEC subpoena over Musk’s online posts in its annual report
Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, in front of a screen showing a Tesla Model 3 car in China. (Aly Song/Reuters)
SAN FRANCISCO — Government officials renewed pressure on Tesla over its handling of Elon Musk’s tweets and are probing allegations of racial discrimination at its facilities, according to the company’s annual financial filing.
It also detailed supply chain constraints and ongoing impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
The company disclosed in its annual report last week that federal officials issued a subpoena on Nov. 16 looking for information on the company’s compliance with a settlement governing the CEO tweets. Musk and Tesla were each fined $20 million, and Musk relinquished his chairmanship of Tesla’s board, after a 2018 tweet in which he said he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share.
Since the settlement, Musk has sent eyebrow-raising tweets, including one in 2020 that sent Tesla’s stock plunging when he wrote “Tesla stock price is too high imo,” shorthand for in my opinion. Musk also wrote, “SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon’s,” an apparent cloaked reference to a lewd act.
The SEC matter has hounded Musk since he sent the controversial tweet in 2018. It has also led to a contentious relationship with the financial regulator. Musk said in a “60 Minutes” TV interview in 2018, “I do not respect the SEC. I do not respect them.”
Tesla, meanwhile, has pushed against the allegations of racist treatment of workers — while acknowledging efforts to improve conditions more generally.
Valerie Capers Workman, then Tesla’s vice president of people, issued a statement to workers after the verdict, which was posted on the company’s website.
While the filing provided updates on legal challenges, the company also said it is still dealing with impacts of the coronavirus around the globe — and its effects on manufacturing.
“Our current production continues to be affected by the industry-wide semiconductor and other component shortages, requiring additional workaround manufacturing and production design solutions to be implemented which may be difficult to sustain,” Tesla said in its report.
“There has continued to be widespread impact from the coronavirus disease (“COVID-19”) pandemic,” Tesla added.
Tesla said on its earnings call late last month that it would not build a new vehicle model in 2022, choosing instead to focus on existing production and “scaling” its output. The financial statement shed light on efforts to improvise to meet production challenges.
“We have used alternative parts and programmed software to mitigate the challenges caused by these shortages, but there is no guarantee we may be able to continually do so as we scale production to meet our growth targets,” Tesla said in its report.
The company disclosed in its filing that its head count had swelled to nearly 100,000 workers — between Tesla and its subsidiaries. | null | null | null | null | null |
NEW YORK — Stocks ended another bumpy day with mixed results on Wall Street Monday. The S&P 500 went up, down, up, and then down again in the last hour of trading to wind up with a loss of 0.4%. Losses in several big tech companies left the Nasdaq down 0.6% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed essentially unchanged. Small-company stocks rose. The uncertain trading follows weeks of volatility for major indexes as traders try to figure out how stock valuations will be affected by the interest rate hikes looming on the horizon as the Federal Reserves moves to tame inflation.
MENLO PARK, Calif. — A Silicon Valley billionaire and advisor to former President Donald Trump is leaving the board of directors of Facebook parent company Meta. The company said Monday that Peter Thiel will stay on until the company’s next shareholder meeting later this year, where he will not stand for reelection. Thiel joined Facebook’s board in 2005, a year after the company was founded and seven years before its debut on Wall Street. But he has been an increasingly polarizing figure among the company’s directors due to his conservative politics. A representative for Thiel did not immediately return a message for comment.
WASHINGTON — The IRS sys it will stop using facial recognition technology to authenticate people who create online accounts after the practice came under criticism from privacy advocates and lawmakers. Critics of the software said the database could become a target for cyberthreats and voiced concern about how the information could be used by other government agencies. IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig says the IRS “takes taxpayer privacy and security seriously. He adds that ”everyone should feel comfortable with how their personal information is secured.” Rettig says the agency is pursuing other options “that do not involve facial recognition.”
WASHINGTON — A Biden administration task force has issued a set of recommendations that could make it easier for federal workers and contractors to unionize. The report released Monday includes 70 recommendations. The report argues that a decadeslong drop in union membership has coincided with a rising share of income going to the top 10% of earners. The report’s goal is to increase unionization in part through the heft of the federal government as an employer. The Labor Department reported last month that only 10.3% of workers belonged to a union in 2021, down from 20.1% in 1983. The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace business group calls the report “pro-union propaganda.”
LAS VEGAS — Add Allegiant Air to the list of airlines getting a new CEO this year. Parent company Allegiant Travel said Monday that Maurice Gallagher will step down as CEO on June 1 and be replaced by company president John Redmond. Gallagher has led Allegiant since 2001. He will remain chairman. The announcement comes on the same day that two of Allegiant’s low-cost-airline rivals, Spirit and Frontier, announce plans to merge into a bigger company. | null | null | null | null | null |
Kevin Curtis Coleman, 19, is charged with first- and- second degree murder and related charges in connection with the killing of Blake White, 20, of Accokeek, Md., Prince George’s police said. Coleman is being held without bond at the Prince George’s County Department of Corrections.
Police said officers responded to the intersection of Stoney Creek and Grayden lanes in the Brandywine area on Dec. 16, 2021, around 6:25 p.m. for a reported shooting. Upon arrival, officers found that a car had crashed into a home on Grayden Lane, police said, and the man in the driver’s seat, White, was found with a gunshot wound. | null | null | null | null | null |
French President Emmanuel Macron, right, meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday to discuss Ukraine and NATO. (Sputnik/AFP)
Russia is close to completing preparations for what appears to be a large-scale invasion of Ukraine that could lead to 50,000 civilian casualties and a humanitarian crisis with millions of refugees fleeing the chaos, according to U.S. military and intelligence assessments.
Intelligence reporter Shane Harris breaks down how the diplomatic efforts to de-escalate on the border are going –– and where the skepticism of all sides in the conflict comes from. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - This undated photo provided by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022, shows cleanup work at the site where more than 300,000 gallons of diesel spilled on Dec. 27, 2021, just outside New Orleans. A corroded pipeline that ruptured and spilled 350,000 gallons of diesel fuel into a New Orleans area wetland did not have a fully functioning leak detection system at the time, according to federal records that also show the spill was larger than previously reported. (Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality via AP, File) (Uncredited/Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality)
By Matthew Brown and Janet McConnaughey | AP | null | null | null | null | null |
Last month, a federal judge in Miami issued an arrest warrant for Crystal Symphony after a lawsuit alleged Crystal Cruises and a related operator had failed to pay fuel bills reaching about $3.4 million. Instead of returning to Miami as scheduled after a two-week voyage, the vessel high-tailed it to Bimini with about 700 crew and guests on board. | null | null | null | null | null |
The huge spending proposal could be challenged by inflation, enrollment declines and staffing shortages.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, right, and D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee make remarks before cutting the ribbon on the newly modernized Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan in Washington, D.C. in September. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
In all, the Bowser administration called on spending $2.2 billion in local taxpayer dollars on public education for the 2023 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, up from about $2 billion this year. That is based on a 5.9 percent increase in spending for each of the city’s more than 90,000 public school students — the biggest year-over-year funding in Bowser’s tenure that arrives as she is campaigning for a third term in office.
The proposed baseline funding, which the D.C. Council still has to approve, for each student is $12,419, up from $11,730 this year. Students who are considered at-risk for academic failure based on their families income levels — nearly half of the public school population — along with students who have special education needs and those who speak English as a second language would receive additional funding.
D.C. measure would require schools to tell parents about covid cases within 24 hours
On top of that, Bowser proposed allocating $27 million to the Department of Behavioral Health to hire more therapists in schools, a win for advocates who pushed for a bigger investment in youth mental health services. The city will also receive its typical allotment of federal dollars, plus unspent pandemic relief money that it can use the next academic year.
Still, the budget announcement highlighted just how complicated — and expensive — it is to fund schools during a pandemic, particularly in a city like D.C., where a large and growing charter sector means that many public school campuses are under-enrolled and more expensive to operate per student.
And, with soaring national inflation rates and worker shortages, it’s unclear how far this significant investment in the city’s public schools will stretch.
More charter schools want to open in D.C., but how many can the city handle?
“After two years of living through a pandemic, our young people have a wide range of needs,” Bowser said at a news conference Monday in the library of Columbia Heights Education Campus. “This increase will make sure that our schools will have the resources that they need to support the increased and individualized needs of students during this time.”
After experiencing a slight decline in enrollment during the first year of the pandemic, the District’s public school enrollment remained relatively stagnant this academic year, with the charter sector experiencing a small enrollment bump, and the traditional public school system seeing a small decrease, according to city data.
Even before the pandemic, many middle and high schools in low-income neighborhoods saw dwindling enrollment, prompting the city to give these campuses more money beyond the standard per-pupil funding allotment so they could hire enough staff needed to provide the same academic and extracurricular services in better enrolled schools. The city currently has a law that says every traditional public school must receive at least 95 percent of the funding it did the year prior, no matter how much its enrollment has dropped.
This year, Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn said, the pandemic caused a decrease in enrollment in younger grades. The mayor proposed $36 million in funds over two years that would be split among traditional public and charter schools facing declining enrollment.
District to hire more substitute teachers and contact tracers to help understaffed schools
“Our pre-K student enrollment was down overall, and our elementary enrollment was down overall,” Kihn said. “These are areas that we anticipate, as we move through the pandemic, our public school population to tick back up and increase.”
Many of the city’s big education spending announcements over the past year have yet to be realized because of hiring challenges. In October, for example, the school system announced that it would spend $22 million in federal funds to hire two new employees at each of the city’s 120 public school campuses: One person to handle covid-19 logistics and another to serve as a permanent substitute teacher. But D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee said Monday that just 20 people have been placed in schools, with another 100 or so in the hiring process.
And in February 2021, Ferebee announced a large intervention program that would provide individual and small group tutoring to around 10 percent of students over the summer and this academic year. On Monday, Ferebee described these plans as “ongoing” and “fluid” and said the city is still collecting data to determine how much money schools have spent on these programs. School districts across the country are competing for a limited number of qualified tutors, and many say they have struggled to hire enough extra staff.
The Department of Behavioral Health currently has licensed therapists or psychologists in 155 traditional public and charter schools. Under the budget proposal, the agency would have workers in each of the city’s 216 school campuses. This is in addition to the mental health workers that the school system and individual charters employ.
Barbara J. Bazron, the agency’s director, acknowledged that filling these new slots could be difficult, particularly as many districts in the region also plan to increase their school mental health staffs. She said the city is already recruiting for these new employees and, if the agency does not have enough licensed workers, it would hire people who are still training to become therapists under the supervision of the licensed workers.
“Everybody knows that around the country there are really not sufficient numbers of [licensed social workers] to serve in a various capacities,” Bazron said. “We are also working closely at getting more people in our pipeline through our internship programs and so forth. We are doing some of the same things that people around the country are doing.”
The budget would also, effective immediately, increase substitute teacher wages to a minimum of $20 per hour. The pandemic has created a greater demand for substitute teachers as more school staff members are out quarantining or taking care of their own children who have been quarantined. The District’s substitute teachers have been protesting for higher wages, including with a rally Monday afternoon. Last month, Bowser announced that she would increase substitute teacher pay from $15.20 to $17 per hour.
“We weren’t at the right place with our substitutes at the beginning of the year,” Bowser said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Last month, a federal judge in Miami issued an arrest warrant for Crystal Symphony after a lawsuit alleged Crystal Cruises and a related operator did not pay fuel bills reaching about $3.4 million. Instead of returning to Miami as scheduled after a two-week voyage, the vessel high-tailed it to Bimini with about 700 crew and guests on board. | null | null | null | null | null |
Saints set to hire Dennis Allen to succeed Sean Payton as coach
Dennis Allen is set to be promoted from defensive coordinator to head coach of the Saints. (Tyler Kaufman/AP File)
The New Orleans Saints chose Sean Payton’s head-coaching successor from Payton’s own staff.
The Saints settled on their own defensive coordinator, Dennis Allen, and are expected to name him their next coach. The team did not respond to a request for comment, but the decision was confirmed Monday by a person familiar with the situation after being first reported by ESPN.
Allen gets a second chance to be an NFL head coach and must hope that things go better this time. He had an 8-28 record as head coach of the Raiders, then based in Oakland, between he 2012 and 2014 seasons. He was fired four games into the 2014 season with the Raiders off to a winless start.
Allen next returned to the Saints, for whom he’d coached previously, in 2015 and had far better success overseeing the defense for the offensive-minded Payton.
The Saints ranked fourth in the NFL in scoring defense and seventh in total defense this season. Allen filled in as interim head coach, with Payton in isolation following a positive test for the coronavirus, in December for the Saints’ 9-0 win over the Buccaneers in Tampa. It was the only time that now-retired Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady was shut out in a home game during his NFL career.
The Saints’ other candidates included former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores, Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy and Detroit Lions defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn.
Payton stepped away late last month, saying he did not plan to coach during the 2022 season but leaving open the possibility of making a future return to the sideline. The Saints became the last of the nine NFL teams with head coaching vacancies this offseason to make a choice. | null | null | null | null | null |
He wrote nearly 20 books, including “The Sixties,” which reflected on his time with the protest group Students for a Democratic Society
Drawing on his immersion in the tumultuous student protest movement of the 1960s, Dr. Gitlin was a voice of the American left for more than half a century, writing cultural and political commentary, appearing as a talking head in a documentaries and championing pro-democracy and antiwar causes at picket lines and teach-ins. | null | null | null | null | null |
Autopsy is to be conducted, police say
A body was found in a car that burned Sunday night in Northeast Washington, authorities said.
The body was found in the driver’s seat in the 800 block of 26th Street NE, the police said.
Police had not released a name Monday.
The D.C. medical examiner will determine the cause and manner of death, the police said.
The fire department was called to the scene about 6:20 p.m., the police said. After the fire was extinguished, the body was found.
Fire department spokesman Vito Maggiolo said Sunday that the cause of the fire had not been determined. | 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. (Edgar Su/Reuters)
The Sweeneys wanted to challenge their children, so the park was a prize they had to earn, and only if they mastered the board: the dreaded plank that stood close to 10 feet high and took Emily’s 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 remains in Megan’s memory, because she has seen her little sister throw herself toward her ambitions ever since.
Nicknamed “Little Sweens” on the luge circuit after her older sister, who 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 during which 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 Sweeney’s debut during the last Winter Games, her 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 in PyeongChang.
Spectators at 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 of Vancouver in 2010, when she was at the track where Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili suffered a fatal training accident three days before his first run.
Lugers barrel around 80 mph, feet-first down an icy track. The experience is a rush, but crashes are common — as they were Monday at 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 such as cooking and running on the treadmill required periodic breaks to lie down.
Back injuries can be debilitating for anyone, and Sweeney’s injuries were significant enough to force permanent changes to her workout regimen.
“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. The following year, 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 injuries also forced her to eschew heavy lifting in favor of functional fitness — think Pilates — when she trains.
Sweeney pushed, pivoted and fought the nagging fear that has tailed her for four years to compete in Beijing.
But after two runs at Yanqing National Sliding Centre northwest of Beijing proper, Sweeney completed her runs in a total of 2 minutes 1.410 seconds, two seconds outside 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. When she moved off the track, she sat her sled against the wall and dropped her head on top of it.
And she’ll dive down the track again Tuesday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Men’s figure skating live updates Short program underway as Nathan Chen chases gold
Sleepers who could challenge for a medal
What’s the schedule for the men’s short program?
Jin Boyang hits two quads for best score so far
Vincent Zhou out of men’s event after testing positive for the coronavirus
A couple hundred spectators in attendance for men’s event
Nathan Chen of the United States is attempting to win figure skating gold in Beijing. (David J. Phillip/AP)
The most compelling rivalry in Olympics figure skating returns in Beijing as two of the sport’s biggest superstars attempt to stake their claim as the greatest of all time.
American Nathan Chen, who finished fifth in the 2018 Olympics, will try to secure that title by utilizing his unmatched arsenal of quadruple jumps. Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu, a transformational figure in the sport, is trying to become the first men’s skater to win three straight Olympic titles since 1928. Follow along for live updates.
Much of the event is expected to air live on USA Network or NBC. It can also be streamed on NBCOlympics.com or Peacock. The short program should end around 12:30 a.m. Eastern (1:30 p.m. in Beijing).
Hanyu is scheduled to skate at 11:19 p.m. Eastern on Monday (12:19 p.m Tuesday in Beijing). Chen is scheduled to skate at 12:11 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday (1:11 p.m. in Beijing). American Jason Brown is scheduled to be the final skater at 12:23 a.m. Eastern.
America’s second-best male skater, Vincent Zhou, pulled out of the competition because of a positive coronavirus test.
The competition will conclude Wednesday night Eastern (Thursday morning in Beijing) with the free skate.
Follow more Beijing Olympics coverage here. See the full event schedule here. And click here for the latest news and highlights.
The sleeper in this competition is Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama, who finished ahead of Yuzuru 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.
Others capable of making a splash at these Olympics are South Korea’s Cha Jun-hwan, Mark Kondratiuk from Russia and Latvia’s Deniss Vasiljevs. For each of these skaters, be sure to watch their feet when they land. If they have difficulty completing all their rotations in the air, the foot on which they land will be unsteady and shift a little bit. Those shifts generate big deductions.
Robert Samuels: Groups for the event are selected based on world rankings, meaning the most powerful skaters won’t come for the last two groups. Because the skills are a little more basic, it is a good chance to get practice recognizing and appreciating some of the jumps. One of the mandatory skills is a double or triple axel (virtually everyone does a triple). One of the best triple axels in the world is performed by a veteran skating in the group, the Czech Republic’s Michal Brezina. An axel is the only jump that goes forward. The skater will use the outside edge and a knee bend to float in the air and rotate three times. Because it launches forward, it requires an extra rotation to be landed cleanly, backward and on one foot. Brezina’s triple axel is usually a marvel for its height, ease and distance. This year, an axel is worth eight points if it is fully rotated. An average of the judges assessment of the jump, from -5 to 5, will then be added to total score.
Robert Samuels, National political enterprise reporter who focuses on the intersection of politics, policy and people
BEIJING — Twenty-nine skaters will perform in the men’s short program. (It would have been 30 if not for American Vincent Zhou’s withdrawal after testing positive for the coronavirus.) The competitors are separated into five groups of six, with a brief warm-up period before each group begins
Most of the top medal contenders will not skate until the final two groups. Japanese stars Yuzuru Hanyu and Shoma Uno are in the fourth group and will begin their skates just before 12:20 p.m. local time (11:20 p.m. Eastern). Americans Nathan Chen, who’s challenging two-time gold medalist Hanyu for the Olympic title, and Jason Brown, who could finish in the top 10 with clean skates, are in the final group. Chen is scheduled to perform at 1:11 p.m. (12:11 a.m. ET), with Brown closing the competition soon after.
Mark Kondratiuk, who skated twice for the gold medal-winning Russian Olympic Committee team in the team competition, will skate at 11:26 a.m. in Beijing (10:26 p.m. Eastern).
The top 24 skaters advance to the free skate on Thursday morning in Beijing (Wednesday night Eastern), and scores are cumulative.
BEIJING — Late Friday night, Donovan Carrillo, Mexico’s first Olympic figure skater in 30 years, walked into the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics beside a skier named Sarah Schleper. Together they carried their country’s flag.
Robert Samuels: For those who are watching on the Peacock streaming network, there is a new tool to keep track of what’s happening on the ice. For a split-second, you might notice a listing of the height of the jump, the distance it traveled and the speed in which the skater has gone into the jump. This technology is used frequently in Japanese feeds to help explain the science and difference between skaters, and has occasionally been used on broadcasts sponsored by the International Skating Union. One can only hope that NBC broadcast will use the tool, which helps to demystify how judges assess whether one move is better than the other.
BEIJING — China’s Jin Boyang, a two-time world medalist, started his short program by landing two quadruple jumps, first a Lutz performed in combination with a triple toe loop and then a quad toe loop. He stumbled on his final jump, a triple Axel, but was pleased with his performance and covered his face with his hands after he finished.
Jin scored a 90.98, the best mark after five competitors, and the Chinese fans in attendance let out an excited cheer when his score was announced in the arena.
Vincent Zhou, the United States’ second-best male skater, tested positive for the coronavirus on Sunday, missing the celebration when his teammates clinched silver in the team competition.
So while Karen Chen and the other skaters who had been part of the team event climbed the platform beside the Russian team, Zhou was elsewhere, awaiting the result of a confirmation test. If the second test were to come back negative, he would still be able to compete in the men’s individual event, but that glimmer of hope died late Monday night in Beijing when he announced on Instagram that he will be forced to withdraw.
“It’s pretty unreal that of all the people, it would happen to myself,” Zhou said during an emotional five-minute video “And that’s not just because I’m still processing this turn of events, but also because I have been doing everything in my power to stay free of covid since the start of the pandemic.”
BEIJING — For the start of the much-anticipated men’s individual figure skating competition, only about a couple hundred spectators are in the stands. That’s been the norm at the Capital Indoor Stadium through the past week of figure skating events. The Olympic organizing committee did not sell tickets to the general public, citing coronavirus concerns, but invited guests can attend. It’s not clear how those guests are selected.
The fans in attendance are separated from one another by empty seats. There’s still an in-arena host trying to engage the fans with songs, including “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” The fans have small flags with the Beijing 2022 mascot, and there are also a couple large Chinese flags in the stands. These spectators have given most Chinese athletes a warm reception, and Chinese figure skater Jin Boyang will be the fifth competitor to skate today.
During the team event that lasted three days of competition, fellow skaters from each participating country cheered for their teammates from decorated rink-side booths. Those are now gone as skaters prepare for these individual events. | null | null | null | null | null |
A staggering ISIS attack revealed the enduring strength of the group
Fighters with the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces search house to house for ISIS militants and weapons in the Ghwaryan neighborhood of Hasakah, Syria, on Jan 31. (Photos by Nicole Tung for The Washington Post)
The Islamic State’s assault on Ghwaryan prison in the northeastern Syrian town of Hasakah on Jan. 20 was the group’s most dramatic attack in years and triggered the longest and deadliest battle with ISIS since its so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq was defeated nearly three years ago. The goal, officials believe, was to break free ISIS leaders, who were imprisoned there among more than 3,000 suspected militants.
In Iraq, the overall pace of Islamic State attacks has slowed in recent months. But the group has still been able to exploit security gaps, especially in central Diyala province, to carry out a pair of dramatic and deadly attacks.
As the winter sun dipped below Hasakah’s sprawl on Jan. 20, Malak Maesh, 26, was stealing a nap between shifts. The thickset prison administrator, known as Bawar to his friends, had been keenly aware that the prison was vulnerable to assault. But dwelling on those worries would have made daily life feel untenable, he always said. The room he shared with other prison staff had just one gun, and that was for emergencies.
Earth was shaking
Within hours of the attack, forces from the U.S.-led military coalition joined the battle, Western military officials said, launching the longest sustained period of airstrikes in support of its SDF allies since the battle for the Islamic State’s final redoubt in Baghouz, Syria, nearly three years ago. In more than 20 strikes over the course of a week, coalition jets unleashed Hellfire missiles and other large munitions. Apache attack helicopters strafed targets inside a cordon hastily established by the Kurdish-led SDF fighters, drawn from across Hasakah and the wider region.
ISIS fighters launch brazen prison attack to free their comrades
When an SDF fighter nicknamed Partizan arrived near the prison with his unit, the battle was so loud that the ground was shaking, soldiers recalled. The 30-year-old father of two girls from Ras al-Ayn joined a line of reinforcements at a nearby traffic circle.
He cocked his gun and waited. Before long, the battle spilled into the surrounding streets. Residents were terrified. One mother tried to convince her young sons that the gunfire was celebratory. “I told them, don’t be scared, it’s just a wedding,” said Abir Abdullah, 20. When the excuse wore thin, she gathered the boys in her arms, held their hands and stroked their hair through the night.
Partizan’s unit was redeployed to comb the old Arab-style homes for ISIS fighters. They had low walls and wide open courtyards and the jihadists were slipping easily among them. Some of the militants wore prison clothes but others were in military fatigues. “You get confused because some of our members wear the same clothes,” said Kurdeau, 27, who is part of Partizan’s unit.
Sometime around midday, members of the unit later said, the sound of a sniper’s bullet sliced the air. At the top of the stairs, Partizan fell mortally wounded.
As the days passed, hundreds of ISIS fighters surrendered and hundreds more had been killed. The SDF reported capturing several prison blocks, but fighting was still fierce. The remaining militants, the SDF said, were holed up in the north wing. Mixed among them were at least 700 adolescent boys, brought to the so-called caliphate by their parents and now imprisoned for it. The SDF said the boys were being used as human shields.
Bawar was at a loss. The militants had tried to smoke him out, and so the flag he hoped to wave in surrender had turned the same black color as the Islamic State’s. He thought, at one point, he had caught the attention of some SDF soldiers driving past, but their vehicle kept going. “I couldn’t tell if they knew I was one of them,” Bawar recalled.
He stayed awake the whole night, wondering if they had seen him. They came back the following morning. And finally, he was rescued. “I never gave up hope,” Bawar said. But he didn’t recognize the soot-stained face he later saw in media photographs of himself. “It was like it wasn’t me,” he said.
By the time the fighting ended, nearly 400 prisoners and attackers were dead. According to officials, most of the survivors have been transferred from the shattered prison to a British-built facility close by. The battle also cost the lives of over 120 SDF members and at least five of the prison staff. The SDF is still burying its dead.
This week, thousands of Syrians gathered to watch as Partizan was laid to rest alongside other fallen soldiers in the northern city of Derik. The freshly dug graves sat at the far end of the cemetery. In front of them were hundreds more headstones for fighters killed in earlier battles against the Islamic State or other enemies.
Mazloum believes it all could have been worse. “They wanted to take Hasakah and expand,” he said. His forces had recovered a truck near the prison full of suicide belts and other weapons. It was proof, he said, that the Islamic State had been aiming to escalate its armed campaign once their imprisoned comrades were freed.
“This attack could have turned them into an army,” Mazloum said. “We warned the world of this many times.” Slumping backward on his office sofa, the general looked exhausted.
“We have a phrase in Arabic: ‘There is no life for he who calls,’” he said. It means no one was listening. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Supreme Court building in Washington. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News)
A divided Supreme Court on Monday restored an Alabama congressional map that creates only one district favorable to a Black candidate, and put on hold a lower court’s order that said a second district was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
Over the objections of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberals, its five most consistently conservative justices halted a decision last month by three federal judges. The panel threw out Alabama’s new congressional map, which included only one congressional district with a majority of Black voters even though they make up more than a quarter of the state’s population.
Supreme Court upholds Arizona voting laws found unfair to minorities
The majority — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — did not provide a reason for stopping the lower court’s decision, which is common when the Supreme Court considers an emergency petition. But Kavanaugh, joined by Alito, wrote separately to say the changes ordered by the lower court came too close to qualifying and primaries for the fall election and could create “chaos.”
He denied the court was making “new law” with the ruling, saying it would allow for an orderly examination of the challenge to Alabama’s redistricting. The state has seven congressional districts, six of them held by Republicans.
Dissenting Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, called the order “a disservice to Black Alabamians” who under Supreme Court precedent “have had their electoral power diminished — in violation of a law this Court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.”
“Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel wrote, finding challengers of the map were “substantially likely” to prevail on claims that the new maps violate the Voting Rights Act.
Supreme Court says judiciary has no role in gerrymandering claims
Roberts acknowledged the court’s precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But he said the panel had followed Supreme Court commands and produced “an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction.”
He would have allowed the lower court opinion to stand for the 2022 election, and set the case for argument next term.
Advocates say minorities are shortchanged in redistricting decisions
The case was part of a nationwide legal battle as states redraw districts after the 2020 Census. State supreme courts in Ohio and North Carolina struck down congressional maps drawn by Republican legislatures in those states, saying they violated their constitutions.
Ohio’s court ruled the legislature had violated a constitutional amendment banning partisan gerrymandering. The North Carolina judges said the map violated the state constitution’s free elections clause, the equal protection clause, the free speech clause and the freedom of assembly clause. In both cases, the maps must be redrawn.
The Justice Department has intervened in Texas, suing the state over its new congressional map over complaints that it violated the Voting Rights Act by not drawing any additional Latino-majority seats in a state where the population grew by 4 million people, half of whom were Latinos.
Challengers of the Alabama plan said they hoped the setback was temporary.
The judges in the Alabama case said they were applying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids practices that would mean racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”
The Supreme Court has previously dismantled Section 5 of the law, which required federal approval of changes to voting laws in states and localities with a history of discrimination. In the past term, it limited the availability of Section 2 to challenge voting restrictions.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) told the Supreme Court that the lower court got it wrong. “The court-ordered redraw marks a radical change from decades of Alabama’s congressional plans,” Marshall wrote. “It will result in a map that can be drawn only by placing race first above race-neutral districting criteria, sorting and splitting voters across the State on the basis of race alone.”
Alabama’s lone majority-Black district was also created by federal court order, decades ago, and has always been represented by Rep. Terri A. Sewell, a Black Democrat.
In their filing, they say they have fulfilled Supreme Court precedent by “showing that it is possible to draw an additional majority-Black district in Alabama consistent with traditional districting principles.” They said drawing such districts does not require race “to predominate over other factors. Alabama’s contrary argument seeks a wholesale revision” of Voting Rights Act precedent. | null | null | null | null | null |
President Biden vowed Monday that a major European energy pipeline would be abandoned if Russia sends forces into Ukraine, intensifying pressure on the Kremlin as Western leaders attempt to stave off a renewed assault on the continent’s eastern edge.
Biden issued the threat after talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose recently formed government has pledged to take part in Western retaliation should Russia seize more Ukrainian territory, as it did in the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
But Germany has stopped short of explicitly promising to halt the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 project, which would bring Russian gas to energy-hungry European consumers. On Monday, Scholz said only that his country was “absolutely united” with the United States and other NATO allies, “and we will not be taking different steps.”
Biden, in contrast, told reporters at the White House that “if Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, there will be no longer Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Asked how he could be sure, since it would be officials in Berlin, not Washington, who would make the decision, Biden told a journalist: “I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”
Biden’s meeting with Scholz came on the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron concluded five hours of talks in Moscow, another in a flurry of high-level encounters that reflect the stakes of a showdown officials are calling the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War.
Putin accused Western nations, rather than Russia, of aggression, saying the movement of U.S. and European troops and weaponry into Eastern Europe and the promise that former Soviet states such as Ukraine and Georgia can join the NATO military alliance poses a threat to Russian security.
“It’s not us moving toward NATO,” he said at a news conference. “It’s NATO moving toward us.”
Putin suggested there could be common ground between Russia and the West on security proposals that the United States and NATO hope could serve as an off-ramp to the current standoff. But he also reiterated Moscow’s insistence on what it sees as its core security demands.
The Ukraine-Russia crisis: What you need to know
NATO leaders have ruled out any changes to the alliance’s “open-door” policy, which could allow Ukraine to join, or any reversal of its deployments in Eastern Europe. In fact, France, the United States, Great Britain and Germany have vowed to dispatch additional troops.
If war breaks out between Russia and NATO, Putin warned, there would be “no winners.”
U.S. officials have made a grim assessment of the potential for up to 50,000 civilian casualties if Russia invades, raising the possibility of a fast seizure of the capital Kyiv. After a months-long buildup of Russian troops and weaponry, military analysts say that Moscow has moved units closer to Ukraine’s borders, and dispatched a flotilla of warships including six amphibious assault vessels to the Mediterranean Sea ahead of planned naval drills.
The continued maneuvers, and the lack of a diplomatic breakthrough, have fueled fears that the window for a peaceful resolution is narrowing. While U.S. and European officials have warned that Moscow will pay a massive cost in sanctions if it invades Ukraine, it is not clear how much the specter of economic reprisal could sway Russia’s calculus.
Speaking at a post-midnight news conference after his meeting with Putin, Macron called the coming days “decisive,” saying Russia and NATO nations would both benefit from joint measures on military exercises and other security issues that Moscow has labeled “secondary.”
The French leader appeared determined to strike a mediating tone, at one point referring to Russia as a “neighbor and friend.”
“We must consider what you have expressed,” Macron said, addressing Putin and citing “successive misunderstandings, the traumas that have certainly been built up over the last three decades.”
Macron is trying to revive the stalled 2015 Minsk peace agreement, a deal brokered by Berlin and Paris that has failed to end the eight-year war in eastern Ukraine between Kyiv’s forces and two Russian-backed separatist regions.
A French government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Moscow talks, said the two leaders agreed on some points, including on an “agreement for a structured dialogue on collective security” and “commitment to not take new military initiatives.” It was not clear what such a commitment might entail.
The French leader will travel to Kyiv on Tuesday to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Scholz is set to travel to Kyiv on Feb. 14 and to Moscow a day later.
U.S. assessments say Russia could quickly seize Kyiv, invasion could cause up to 50,000 casualties
While leaders in the United States and Europe have emphasized trans-Atlantic unity in responding to Russia’s buildup, the crisis has also exposed differences about how best to respond.
Germany in particular has appeared out of step with many allies as it holds back from supplying Ukraine with weapons and declines to make explicit promises about the Nord Stream project. The 764-mile pipeline would significantly increase Russian gas supplies to Europe, bringing consumers lower-priced energy.
Scholz, who is facing internal and external criticism over his muted response to the crisis, characterized the buildup around Ukraine as a “serious threat to European security.”
If Russia invades, he said, Germany and its allies “will do the same steps, and they will be very, very hard to Russia.”
In Kyiv, residents wonder: Where to hide if war rolls in?
Earlier Monday, Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, speaking at a news conference after meeting with his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, acknowledged significant differences between Germany and Ukraine but pledged “to find a common ground.”
Among other things, Ukraine has decried Germany’s refusal to supply lethal weapons to Kyiv and its decision to block other countries from transferring German arms and equipment to Ukraine, which is based on a policy barring the export of weapons of German origin to crisis regions. So far, Germany has offered Kyiv 5,000 protective helmets.
Kuleba said their conversation was not just about “what Germany cannot do for one reason or another,” but also about what Germany “can do and intends to do” to support Ukraine.
“I think that today we have found common ground and a draft solution,” he said. “Now I will wait for the steps of the German government.”
Baerbock acknowledged that economic sanctions against Russia could have financial repercussions in other countries, but said Berlin was prepared “to pay a high economic price” because Ukraine’s security “was at stake.”
Biden praised Germany during Scholz’s first visit to the White House, noting its military capability, its hosting of American troops, and its economic support for Ukraine.
“Germany is completely reliable, completely, totally, thoroughly reliable,” he said. “I have no doubt about Germany at all.”
The president urged American citizens to depart Ukraine ahead of a potential conflict. “I’d hate to see them get caught in the crossfire if, in fact, they did invade,” he said, referring to Russia. The State Department has already ordered diplomatic families to depart Ukraine and given nonessential staff the option to leave.
Russian officials have dismissed recent U.S. intelligence reports that Putin has in place about 70 percent of the combat forces needed for a full-scale attack on the Ukrainian capital, calling the reports “madness and scaremongering.”
U.S. officials are also concerned that a massive Russian-Belarusian military exercise, set to begin Thursday, could be used as part of a multipronged invasion of Ukraine. As part of the exercise, Russian troops and equipment have traveled more than 6,000 miles to Belarus and Russia has deployed advanced missile systems, fighter planes and bombers. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has been playing a key role in Russia’s saber-rattling against Ukraine.
The crisis has also revealed varying assessments of the threat that Russia may pose.
Echoing a more cautious Ukrainian message, Kuleba tweeted Sunday that people should not believe “apocalyptic predictions” but said the country was ready for any outcome. “Today, Ukraine has a strong army, unprecedented international support and Ukrainians’ faith in their country,” he said.
Former Ukraine defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk said Sunday the situation looked “pretty dire,” with sufficient Russian forces in place to seize Kyiv or another Ukrainian city, although not enough to occupy the entire country.
“Russia could now seize any city in Ukraine,” he told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “But we still don’t see the 200,000 troops needed for a full-scale invasion.”
British Deputy Foreign Secretary James Cleverly noted Monday that while the alliance was broadly united in its desire to deter a Russian invasion, there were some differences, which he said were understandable.
“We need to be realistic about the fact that different countries have different levels of exposure to or dependence on Russia economically,” he said. “The whole point of an alliance is you don’t just ignore or gloss over those differences.”
Pannett reported from Sydney. Ellen Nakashima, Karen DeYoung and Souad Mekhennet in Washington and David L. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
In this 1967 photo Associated Press staffers, from left, supervisor Harris Jackson, John Vinocur and Pat O’Keefe work on AP’s international desk in New York. Vinocur, a much-respected foreign correspondent for The New York Times and The Associated Press and later executive editor and columnist at the International Herald Tribune in Paris, has died. His son told The New York Times that Vinocur died in Amsterdam on Sunday, Feb. 6, 2022, from complications from sepsis. He was 81. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/ap)
By John Daniszewski | AP | null | null | null | null | null |
This wasn’t just one small, vocal section. The support for the visitors came from every corner of Capital One Arena, and moments later those fans erupted after Miami’s Jimmy Butler threw down an alley-oop.
“I think the biggest thing with us is ... our effort level and then our response,” Wizards forward Kyle Kuzma said. “It’s really tough when you get punched in the face and you don’t stand up. And I think that kind of just sums up what’s kind of been going on. As soon as we hit a little bit of adversity, it’s quite a challenge to get out of that. In order to be a winning team, you have to be a lot more mentally strong than that. It’s something that we’ve lacked.”
The Heat was efficient on offense throughout and finished the night shooting 56.6 percent. It added an 18-for-32 effort (56.3 percent) from the three-point line.
“Some of them were easy looks,” Wizards Coach Wes Unseld Jr. said. “I think we gave up six just kind of walk-in threes, and that was kind of a priority for us. ... That can’t happen.”
Kispert matched a career high with 20 points, and Montrezl Harrell had 13. Aaron Holiday put up 14 points, Kuzma finished with 12, and Rui Hachimura had 11.
“Just finding other ways to have an impact, whether that’s offensive rebounding or cutting or spreading the floor,” said Kispert, who was disappointed by his 1-for-6 shooting from long range. “I got one to go tonight, and that felt really good. So I’m going to try to build on that.”
Monday was the fourth straight game that Wizards guard Bradley Beal missed with an injury to the scapholunate ligament of his left wrist. Unseld didn’t have an update before the game but said Beal would be reevaluated before Thursday’s matchup with Brooklyn. Holiday again started in Beal’s place.
Center Daniel Gafford tested positive twice Sunday and entered the NBA’s coronavirus health and safety protocols. That left Thomas Bryant (eight points) and Harrell at center — and that actually made life easier for Unseld. Gafford had been pulled from the regular rotation as his coach focused on a two-man plan at the position.
The Wizards roster that takes the floor Thursday night against the Nets could look markedly different from the one that was on the floor Monday. The trade deadline is 3 p.m. Thursday, and the Wizards’ struggles after a 10-3 start have opened the door to more possibilities than were expected two months ago.
“It’s a very challenging time for a lot of different people,” Kuzma said. “We’ve got a bunch of guys that are fighting for their next contract. Mentally, the trade deadline’s right here. So that creeps into a lot of guys’ heads around this time.”
Fan issue
A kerfuffle between a member of the Wizards’ staff and a fan broke out behind the bench as time expired. Manager of player development Mike Batiste could be seen jumping up and heading toward someone in the stands as Harrell got in between, pulled Batiste away and walked him down the tunnel toward the locker room.
The game ended as the incident occurred, so no one was ejected. The Wizards are expected to review the video for more details of what happened.
“I turned around after I think it kind of began,” Unseld said. “To my understanding, the several fans said something that was out of line. Obviously, we had to take the high road — just can’t indulge in that. But I think it was a situation where something was said that was a bit over the line, and I think it got the best of one of our coaches. But, either way, have got to take the high road.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Chicago Bulls’ DeMar DeRozan gets Phoenix Suns’ Devin Booker off his feet during the first half of an NBA basketball game Monday, Feb. 7, 2022, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Bulls: G Coby White had 13 points after missing back-to-back games because of a strained right adductor. Paul, meanwhile, said he’s still not used to facing White, who played on the AAU team he sponsors — Team CP3. “Coby is my family,” he said. “Out there competing against him, I still don’t ever really get used to it.” ... The Bulls had 18 assists compared to 31 for Phoenix. | null | null | null | null | null |
An altercation between the man, identified later as Yu Shu-sang, and other bystanders ensued. Footage shows him later lunging at Bickett with his baton in his right hand, before he falls over a railing. Bickett then attempts to wrestle his baton away, pinning Yu and hitting him in what he said was an act of self defense. Yu never produced a warrant card and only identified himself as a police officer after arresting Bickett.
Toh dismissed the appeal and upheld Bickett’s initial sentence of four months and two weeks. Bickett, who was out on bail pending this appeal, will return to jail to serve the remainder of his sentence, which is six weeks. In a statement prepared before his detention, Bickett said he would appeal the decision to a higher court, and will “continue to fight to overturn the verdict.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Portnoy charged in the lawsuit that Insider “pursued a preconceived and biased agenda aimed at damaging [him]” to gin up business for the site, which, like many news publications, charges readers for online subscriptions. The site’s publication of “highly personal and private information” was a violation of privacy laws in Massachusetts, where Portnoy lives, the suit alleges. | null | null | null | null | null |
Air Force visits UNLV following Hamilton's 33-point showing
Air Force Falcons (10-11, 3-7 MWC) at UNLV Rebels (13-10, 5-5 MWC)
Las Vegas; Tuesday, 10 p.m. EST
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: UNLV -10.5; over/under is 128.5
BOTTOM LINE: UNLV faces the Air Force Falcons after Bryce Hamilton scored 33 points in UNLV’s 90-75 loss to the Utah State Aggies.
The Rebels have gone 9-3 at home. UNLV is fourth in the MWC with 14.4 assists per game led by Jordan McCabe averaging 4.5.
The Falcons are 3-7 in conference games. Air Force is fourth in the MWC shooting 35.4% from deep. Jake Murphy leads the Falcons shooting 100% from 3-point range.
The teams meet for the 10th time in conference play this season. The Falcons won 69-62 in the last matchup on Jan. 21. Ethan Taylor led the Falcons with 16 points, and Hamilton led the Rebels with 32 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: McCabe is averaging 6.9 points and 4.5 assists for the Rebels. Hamilton is averaging 16.5 points and 3.8 rebounds while shooting 44.1% over the past 10 games for UNLV.
Taylor is averaging 9.3 points, 5.1 rebounds, 3.6 assists and 1.5 steals for the Falcons. A.J. Walker is averaging 9.3 points over the last 10 games for Air Force. | null | null | null | null | null |
Fordham visits Saint Bonaventure on 4-game road skid
Fordham Rams (10-11, 3-6 A-10) at Saint Bonaventure Bonnies (12-7, 4-4 A-10)
BOTTOM LINE: Fordham travels to Saint Bonaventure looking to end its four-game road skid.
The Bonnies have gone 7-2 in home games. Saint Bonaventure is sixth in the A-10 scoring 70.4 points while shooting 44.5% from the field.
The Rams are 3-6 in A-10 play. Fordham is ninth in the A-10 scoring 68.8 points per game and is shooting 40.7%.
The Bonnies and Rams square off Tuesday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jaren Holmes is scoring 14.8 points per game and averaging 5.5 rebounds for the Bonnies. Dominick Welch is averaging 1.4 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Saint Bonaventure.
Darius Quisenberry is scoring 17.8 points per game and averaging 4.2 rebounds for the Rams. Chuba Ohams is averaging 8.4 points and 6.8 rebounds over the last 10 games for Fordham. | null | null | null | null | null |
George Washington visits UMass after Weeks' 30-point game
BOTTOM LINE: UMass takes on the George Washington Colonials after T.J. Weeks scored 30 points in UMass’ 78-67 victory over the Rhode Island Rams.
The Minutemen are 7-3 on their home court. UMass is sixth in the A-10 with 13.8 assists per game led by Noah Fernandes averaging 4.5.
The Minutemen and Colonials meet Wednesday for the first time in A-10 play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Fernandes is averaging 13.4 points and 4.5 assists for the Minutemen. Rich Kelly is averaging 1.6 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for UMass.
James Bishop is scoring 17.7 points per game and averaging 2.4 rebounds for the Colonials. Joe Bamisile is averaging 11.1 points and 2.7 rebounds over the last 10 games for George Washington. | null | null | null | null | null |
Holy Cross plays Loyola (MD) following Luc's 21-point game
BOTTOM LINE: Holy Cross takes on the Loyola (MD) Greyhounds after Kyrell Luc scored 21 points in Holy Cross’ 87-60 loss to the Colgate Raiders.
The Crusaders are 4-4 in home games. Holy Cross is 4-6 when it has fewer turnovers than its opponents and averages 12.5 turnovers per game.
The Greyhounds are 7-5 in Patriot play. Loyola (MD) is 4-7 against opponents over .500.
The teams meet for the second time in conference play this season. The Greyhounds won 79-70 in the last matchup on Jan. 5. Cam Spencer led the Greyhounds with 19 points, and DaJion Humphrey led the Crusaders with 19 points.
Golden Dike is averaging 5.1 points and 6.1 rebounds for the Greyhounds. Spencer is averaging 1.4 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Loyola (MD). | null | null | null | null | null |
Milwaukee faces Northern Kentucky, seeks to halt 5-game skid
BOTTOM LINE: Milwaukee aims to break its five-game losing streak when the Panthers play Northern Kentucky.
The Panthers are 4-6 in home games. Milwaukee gives up 71.8 points and has been outscored by 5.3 points per game.
The Norse are 8-5 against Horizon opponents. Northern Kentucky is 6-5 in games decided by at least 10 points.
The teams meet for the second time in conference play this season. The Panthers won 61-55 in the last matchup on Jan. 1. DeAndre Gholston led the Panthers with 14 points, and Sam Vinson led the Norse with 18 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jordan Lathon is averaging 7.8 points, 5.6 rebounds and 3.1 assists for the Panthers. Gholston is averaging 1.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Milwaukee.
Trevon Faulkner is shooting 40.2% from beyond the arc with 2.3 made 3-pointers per game for the Norse, while averaging 13.1 points. Marques Warrick is averaging 16.2 points over the past 10 games for Northern Kentucky. | null | null | null | null | null |
Murray leads Long Beach State against CSU Fullerton after 25-point outing
CSU Fullerton Titans (14-6, 7-1 Big West) at Long Beach State Beach (12-9, 7-1 Big West)
Long Beach, California; Tuesday, 10 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Long Beach State plays the CSU Fullerton Titans after Joel Murray scored 25 points in Long Beach State’s 78-65 win over the Cal Poly Mustangs.
The Beach have gone 7-3 in home games. Long Beach State ranks fifth in the Big West with 11.8 assists per game led by Murray averaging 2.7.
The Titans are 7-1 in Big West play. CSU Fullerton is third in the Big West scoring 71.8 points per game and is shooting 44.5%.
The Beach and Titans square off Tuesday for the first time in Big West play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Colin Slater is shooting 41.4% from beyond the arc with 2.2 made 3-pointers per game for the Beach, while averaging 13.6 points. Murray is shooting 40.9% and averaging 14.8 points over the last 10 games for Long Beach State.
E.J. Anosike is shooting 49.6% and averaging 17.0 points for the Titans. Damari Milstead is averaging 1.6 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for CSU Fullerton. | null | null | null | null | null |
South Florida hosts Cincinnati after Dejulius' 25-point outing
BOTTOM LINE: Cincinnati plays the South Florida Bulls after David Dejulius scored 25 points in Cincinnati’s 80-58 loss to the Houston Cougars.
The Bulls have gone 6-5 at home. South Florida is 2-12 in games decided by at least 10 points.
The Bearcats are 5-4 in AAC play. Cincinnati has a 2-2 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Bulls and Bearcats match up Wednesday for the first time in AAC play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Russel Tchewa is averaging 6.3 points and 5.2 rebounds for the Bulls. Javon Greene is averaging 1.0 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for South Florida.
Jeremiah Davenport is averaging 12.1 points for the Bearcats. Dejulius is averaging 10.6 points over the last 10 games for Cincinnati. | null | null | null | null | null |
UMBC Retrievers face the Hartford Hawks on 5-game win streak
BOTTOM LINE: UMBC aims to keep its five-game win streak intact when the Retrievers take on Hartford.
The Retrievers are 5-4 in home games. UMBC scores 72.6 points and has outscored opponents by 3.2 points per game.
The Hawks have gone 3-5 against America East opponents. Hartford has a 4-10 record in games decided by 10 or more points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Keondre Kennedy is scoring 14.4 points per game with 5.1 rebounds and 2.3 assists for the Retrievers. L.J. Owens is averaging 11.5 points and 2.7 rebounds while shooting 44.7% over the last 10 games for UMBC.
Austin Williams is averaging 15.4 points and 5.2 rebounds for the Hawks. Moses Flowers is averaging 15.5 points over the last 10 games for Hartford. | null | null | null | null | null |
Vermont hosts Binghamton after Shungu's 24-point game
BOTTOM LINE: Vermont takes on the Binghamton Bearcats after Ben Shungu scored 24 points in Vermont’s 78-67 victory over the UMass-Lowell River Hawks.
The Catamounts are 10-0 on their home court. Vermont ranks fourth in the America East with 24.0 defensive rebounds per game led by Isaiah Powell averaging 5.4.
The Bearcats are 7-4 against America East opponents. Binghamton is the America East leader with 34.1 rebounds per game led by Christian Hinckson averaging 6.2.
The Catamounts and Bearcats meet Wednesday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Ryan Davis is scoring 17.2 points per game and averaging 5.7 rebounds for the Catamounts. Shungu is averaging 18.6 points and 3.4 rebounds over the last 10 games for Vermont.
Jacob Falko is scoring 13.6 points per game with 4.5 rebounds and 3.4 assists for the Bearcats. Hinckson is averaging 10.3 points and 7.3 rebounds over the past 10 games for Binghamton. | null | null | null | null | null |
In this undated photo provided by Courtyard by Marriott, contest winners Chad Vincent, left, who was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy about 10 years earlier, and his wife, Jen, pose for a picture. The Vincents won the Courtyard by Marriott Super Bowl Sleepover contest, in which a Super Bowl stadium suite is transformed into a guest room. The couple will wake up on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 13, 2022, inside the home of the Rams and Chargers, and will be in attendance for the game. (Chad and Jen Vincent/Courtesy of Courtyard by Marriott via AP) (Uncredited/Courtyard by Marriott via Chad and Jen Vincent) | null | null | null | null | null |
He wrote nearly 20 books, including ‘The Sixties,’ which reflected on his time with the protest group Students for a Democratic Society
Drawing on his immersion in the tumultuous student protest movement of the 1960s, Dr. Gitlin was a voice of the American left for more than half a century, writing cultural and political commentary, appearing as a talking head in documentaries and championing pro-democracy and antiwar causes at picket lines and teach-ins. | null | null | null | null | null |
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Ester Ledecka of the Czech Republic defended her Olympic snowboard parallel giant slalom title with a quick final run on a sun-splashed course Tuesday.
“When I was a child ... I wrote on a sheet of paper that one day I would be world champion,” Karl said. “I will be the fastest racer in the world and I’ll be an Olympic champion.” | null | null | null | null | null |
In this Nov. 12, 2017 file photo, a memorial for the victims of the shooting at Sutherland Springs Baptist Church includes 26 white chairs, each painted with a cross and rose, in Sutherland Springs, Texas. (Eric Gay/AP)
U.S. district Judge Xavier Rodriguez described in his judgment how, in a span of seven minutes and 24 seconds, the gunman Devin Patrick Kelley, fired 450 rounds using an AR-556 rifle. Worshipers at the small First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., scrambled to take cover under pews during the routine Sunday service with the massacre leaving children among the dead and multigenerational gaps in some families.
“Ultimately, there is no satisfying way to determine the worth of these families’ pain” Rodriguez said in his judgment on Monday. He called the case “unprecedented in kind and scope.”
The compensation comes after a separate trial last year, in which the court concluded that the Air Force had failed to flag a conviction that may have prevented Kelley from legally buying the weapon used in the shooting. The court found in 2021 “that the Government failed to exercise reasonable care in its undertaking to submit Kelley’s criminal history to the FBI” and therefore held that it was “60% responsible” for the attack and injuries.
Kelley first opened fire outside the small community church; the casualties came after he sprayed bullets at the congregation inside before he fled the scene and later died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Investigators hunt for motive in Texas church shooting as the grieving spans generations | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Iggy Pop arrives at the 62nd annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center, Jan. 26, 2020, in Los Angeles. American rocker Iggy Pop, known as “the godfather of punk”, and Ensemble Intercontemporain, a contemporary music orchestra based in Paris, have won the 2022 Polar Music Prize, a Swedish music award. The award panel said Tuesday Feb. 8, 2022, that rock icon Iggy Pop has “created furious rock music by blending together blues and free jazz influences with the roar of the Michigan automotive industry.” (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
I’m flying missions to save Afghan allies. Why isn’t the government helping?
Suburban dads like me shouldn’t have to be doing this by ourselves
C17s parked on the tarmac of the Al Udeid military base in Qatar on Aug. 31. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)
By Nick Palmisciano
Nick Palmisciano is the CEO of Diesel Jack Media and the vice president of Save Our Allies. He is a former infantry officer and the co-author of the new book “Scars and Stripes.”
Late last month, I was supposed to be coaching my seventh-grade son in his league wrestling championship and my daughter in her first high school wrestling state championship. They’ve both worked so hard this year, and sharing these moments with them is one of the things I treasure most as a father.
But I couldn’t be there. Instead, I wrote this article while seated next to my two passed-out teammates on a dimly lit plane that was once again taking me to Asia to evacuate Afghan refugees. I am not in the military — I long ago hung up the Army infantry officer uniform. I am not an elite, top-secret “operator” type like you see in the movies. I never was that cool and certainly am not now.
But on the other side of the world are safe houses that our team at Save Our Allies has paid for over the past several months. They are full of hunted men, scared women and tired children. Women who don’t want to be second-class citizens. Children who don’t want to become brides or worse. Men who, if found, would be tortured and killed for the crime of fighting alongside America.
I know this because every once in a while, one of them is found, and the men who find them occasionally enjoy sending us images of their mutilated corpses via WhatsApp, after going through their phones to see who they’ve been working with.
Afghans were willing to fight. But we abandoned them on the battlefield.
These images, and the ones we saw in Kabul in August — when I joined 11 other middle-aged guys to help evacuate 12,000 refugees from Hamid Karzai International Airport — are seared into our memories. When I came home from that trip, exhausted to the core, I felt some satisfaction in the work we had done. We went there, as civilians, because the government had been caught flat-footed. It needed help, so we answered the call. I was proud that we were able to help evacuate thousands.
When I landed back in the United States, there was excitement about what all of us, and not just Save Our Allies, had accomplished. Veterans groups everywhere had contributed to the effort. Groups such as Task Force Pineapple and Allied Airlift 21 had been able to do great work from the United States, coordinating with the troops on the ground to efficiently help thousands of people get to safety. Smaller endeavors were everywhere. Some people managed to help dozens; others, one or two people. All efforts were welcome and appreciated. We all did the best we could with what we had available.
But the news cycle is fickle, and Afghanistan quickly faded from memory. The Signal and WhatsApp channels that once hummed with excitement about the great missions to come have become repositories of sadness. The calls once buzzing with evacuation news now focus more on policy ideas. We are sharper with one another than any of us deserve. We jump to conclusions about intentions out of frustration. But we stay in the chat rooms anyway, because we are all that any of us has left.
He spent his adult life helping U.S. soldiers. Now, he’s desperately fleeing Afghanistan.
And that’s how I ended up back on the plane where I wrote this. The safe houses where we have been moving high-risk women, children and men are almost full. Last week, we hit the number necessary to fill a charter plane, which triggered our mission. We’ll be collecting all these people from their hideouts, getting their visas complete, handling their coronavirus testing and vaccination, and flying them to a welcoming nation, where we will be paying for apartments and food while they find work. Thanks to the generosity of that nation, they will be given work visas and help seeking employment so they can rebuild their lives.
If only Washington was offering the same support.
There are people in the government who still care, but politically, maybe for both parties, it’s best if this Afghanistan mess just fades away. Sure, we all taste the occasional morsels of hope. A kind word from a senator. A rumor of a bill that will pass. A back-channel discussion that support is coming. But they are rarer. They are less sweet. The doors are closing. We hear them creaking as they are slowly pushed shut. Impending doom hangs over us and our mission. We all know it.
No one is coming. It’s up to us.
So here I am, halfway around the world, because there are scared children that need help, and if I don’t go, I just don’t know if anyone else will. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Beijing Olympics’ snow problem is more serious than you think
What it means to host the Winter Olympics in a place where all of the snow is artificial
Jaelin Kauf of Team United States wins the Olympic silver medal in the men's ski freestyle moguls on Feb. 6 in Zhangjiakou, China. (Christophe Pallot/Agence Zoom/Getty Images)
By Jesse Ritner
Jesse Ritner is a Ph.D. candidate in environmental history at the University of Texas, Austin working on a dissertation titled, “Eulogy for a Dying Sport: Weather, Technology, and the Rise of the North American Ski Industry.”
But what this year’s Games reveal is how intransigent key institutions are about facing up to the reality of climate change. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has refused to acknowledge that its recent choices, including the selection of Beijing to host its winter events, are absurd. For nearly a century, in fact, leaders in cities chosen to host the Winter Games have found it difficult to provide sufficient snow for Alpine and Nordic events. Snow replacements, snow management and snow-making innovations have provided solutions. But these efforts have also helped mask the climate crisis unfolding while simultaneously incentivizing the IOC to choose impractical host locations, exacerbating damage to the climate.
Luckily, the burgeoning ski industry was working to overcome weather’s fickle nature. The very first ski resorts were opening in the United States in the late 1930s, creating a profit motive for maintaining snow when the weather wouldn’t cooperate. Sun Valley in Idaho, considered the first Alpine ski resort in North America, opened in January of the 1937-38 season. To lure visitors, resort owner Averell Harriman had guaranteed that guests would not have to pay for their rooms until they could ski. When it first opened for Christmas week, there was no snow, and it did not snow for 10 days. The frustration and boredom among visitors sparked arguments, and even fights broke out. It was clear that resort operators would have to take steps to improve snow conditions or risk not only losing customers but the failures of their businesses.
No surprise then that snow was a looming problem leading up to the 1960 Squaw Valley Games. To guarantee sufficient snowfall for skiers, the Olympic committee hired the (in)famous “rain faker” Irving Krick to “cloud seed.” Cloud seeding involved either shooting silver iodide, potassium iodide or dry ice into the air or dropping it from a plane. The cloud seed chemicals caused water in clouds to form nuclei that would bind to small droplets of water. In theory, this set off a chain reaction that caused precipitation — and thus snowfall. That year, it did indeed snow over Palisades Tahoe where the races were held, probably because the weather cooperated and not because of Krick’s cloud seeding. Yet the state of California spent thousands on the dubious new technology.
After this experience, Olympics host cities invested in increasingly straightforward solutions to unreliable snowfall. Technologies like grooming, snow farming and wind fences played (and still play) an essential role in maintaining and preserving snowpack on ski hills. But the most important technological development in the ski industry was snow-making. Thanks to machines first invented in Connecticut in 1950, pressurized air could be blasted into water, breaking the steady stream into tinier particles of water that froze as they fell to the ground
By 1980, more than 80 percent of ski areas throughout North America were using snow machines. Whiteface Ski Area just outside Lake Placid in New York took the 1980 Olympics as an opportunity to supercharge its own snow-making tools. The state of New York (which owns and operates the mountain) invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to transform a small snowmaking system into one of the largest in the world.
The Olympics haven’t been the same since. From 1980 onward, every single Winter Olympics has used snow-making equipment. And the IOC has become increasingly reliant on the technology both because of location choices and climate change.
This should raise red flags about international organizations’ refusal to adapt to a world that is warming and will continue to warm. An alternative would be to shift away from the spectacle model of the Olympics and, instead, to run the Winter Games as a smaller competition, in smaller locations at higher altitudes with better snow conditions. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ensuring White children’s happiness has long involved racist double standards
What prioritizing white happiness tells us about race and K-12 education
By Jonna Perrillo
Jonna Perrillo is an education historian and associate professor of English education at the University of Texas at El Paso and the author of "Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity."
A Tennessee school board’s banning of “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir about the Holocaust, is the latest development in this school year’s exhausting battles over K-12 curriculum. Across the South, states have adopted legislation that prohibits the teaching of events or ideas that, to quote Oklahoma, Texas or, soon, Florida law, could make any student “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any form of psychological distress on account of his race or sex.” The legislation has been used to challenge hundreds of books.
The racially focused censorship campaigns prove that the students the legislation seeks to protect from guilt or discomfort are our nation’s most privileged: White children.
And while the banning of “Maus” has generated a response in scale with the book’s stature, it reveals anew a fundamental truth: This political project of creating happy White children depends on the silencing of other children’s histories and truths.
If these censorship campaigns can seem discordant with how democracies should think and perform, the political investment in happy White children as a symbol of a heathy democracy has a long history. Nothing emblematizes this history more poignantly than the case of children of Nazi scientists in Texas schools.
In 1945, in the waning days of World War II, the United States recruited 178 scientists who had created the V-2 missile for the Third Reich to build missiles for its military. The program was called Operation Paperclip. At the same time that Congress restricted the number of Jewish refugees the nation would receive, the War Department relocated the scientists and their families — including 144 children — to Fort Bliss in El Paso.
The scientists and their spouses warned their young children to expect hostility and to be seen as the “enemy” entering into American schools. But these fears went unrealized. Instead, the children were warmly welcomed by El Paso residents, teachers and the local press, which, in articles, emphasized the children’s self-discipline, high aptitude and delight at attending American schools.
Educators supported these depictions. One school principal testified, “I cannot concern myself about whatever [the parents] are or have been,” for the children, in her estimation, “have a happiness here they have never known.” Genocide, colonization and war, she suggested, could be erased by a typical American school experience.
This happiness was made possible by American law and custom.
At Fort Bliss, the scientists and their families were invited to eat at cafeteria tables, swim in pools and attend movie theaters that law prohibited Black soldiers, who themselves had just returned from the war, from using. Off base, the Paperclip children were assigned to “American” schools attended by White children, while the majority of the city’s Mexican American children were segregated in “Mexican” schools.
Over 60 percent of the El Paso student population were citizens of Mexican heritage. But the Paperclip children came to know almost none of them.
The terminology of “American” schools for White students and “Mexican” schools for Mexican Americans was common parlance in the mid-century American Southwest. It captured, as poignantly as anything could, both the project of racial school segregation and schools’ role in determining social citizenship. In being assigned to “American” schools, the scientists and their children received the message that they were more potentially American than actual U.S. citizens.
The Paperclip children’s treatment as White Americans-in-the-making meant that they were destined for a school experience in which they would be interpreted as happy and where they would have greater reason to feel happiness, in better resourced schools with teachers who often thought more of them than their Mexican American counterparts.
Take, for example, language instruction. Both the Paperclip children and many Mexican American students entered elementary school with little exposure to English. In the extracurricular crash courses that the Paperclip scientists hired El Paso teachers to offer to their children, the students were rewarded with ice cream and praised by the teachers for not speaking German.
By contrast, Mexican American students were slapped, put in closets and given demerits by teachers for speaking Spanish in school, even on the playground. Corporal punishment for speaking Spanish was public school policy across the Southwest. Served almost entirely by White teachers who spoke little Spanish, El Paso’s youngest Mexican American students were prohibited from speaking the only language they knew and then characterized in teachers’ reports as “anti-social,” “supersensitive” and “impossible to interest” for doing so.
In social studies, at “American” and “Mexican” elementary schools, students carved battle scenes out of soap, painted tableaus of Santa Anna’s surrender, crafted “Indian” jewelry out of macaroni and reenacted signal moments in White achievement. Through these exercises, children learned that democracy was inextricably bound to a history of White supremacy.
All along, journalists and educators such as Swann noted how happy the Paperclip children were.
For children who had only known war, there was a certain happiness in moving to the United States, even as they lived in military barracks surrounded by barbed wire. But, just as teachers’ characterizations of Mexican American students as un-American in demeanor justified their second-class treatment, the complex emotional reality of the Paperclip children’s experience mattered less than that observers interpreted them to be happy.
The insistence on the children’s happiness served a number of purposes. As a publicity tool, it worked to excuse military policy that made Nazi servants into allies and exonerated parents who — whatever their crimes — created happy and healthy children. Most of all, it served White Americans, children and adults alike, by justifying a concept of White belonging that came at the cost of other Americans’ well-being.
Schools shape the experience of being American for all of the nation’s children. The story of the Paperclip children is the story of how race is taught, by schools and by law. But this one-of-a-kind story encompasses a much wider truth. For this reason, it is an urgent one to return to today.
Happiness or emotional well-being has often served as political shorthand in America for safeguarding social and economic privileges, even when that privilege is as basic as recognition or social citizenship. The battles may change, but this fact remains the same. Today’s legislation and censorship campaigns tell us little about young people’s needs or experiences but a great deal about the anxieties and self-interests of the adults who crusade for them. | null | null | null | null | null |
A bare-bones Web page says that public school students are taught a “false narrative about America” and that the academy will promote a “reliable, honest, and quality America-first education.” A 2021 Turning Point USA investor prospectus, which was obtained and published by the watchdog group Documented, highlights the project, which it says is necessary because “the Left has permeated America’s educational institutions.” | null | null | null | null | null |
A new survey reveals support for the president — but also support for democracy.
A man stands outside the Supreme Judicial Council building in Tunis on Sunday. (Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters)
By Alexandra Domike Blackman
Elizabeth R. Nugent
These latest attempts by Saied to consolidate power come less than two weeks after the anniversary of the ratification of Tunisia’s post-uprising constitution, negotiated in the years following the country’s 2010-2011 Arab Spring uprising. While the new constitution was a momentous accomplishment for Tunisia, its future is uncertain at the moment.
Politicians who were instrumental to the constitution’s passage, including Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi, publicly celebrated the anniversary but now sit in awkward limbo with other members of Tunisia’s suspended parliament. Saied, a law professor by profession, declared his opposition to the constitution in September. He also called for public consultations and a committee of experts to draft a new constitution ahead of a July 2022 constitutional referendum.
Many Tunisians, increasingly frustrated with the political class, initially seemed to welcome Saied’s attacks on other politicians and political institutions. However, when Saied called on his supporters this weekend to rally after his announcement and demonstrate against the Supreme Judicial Council, only a few hundred supporters reportedly showed up, in the smallest demonstration since his July 2021 moves.
Tunisia’s president just gave himself unprecedented powers. He says he’ll rule by decree.
What happens now to Tunisia’s democracy? Despite their many disagreements, Tunisia’s major political parties are largely united in viewing Saied’s recent seizure of power as fundamentally undemocratic — or even a coup. Many legal and human rights non-governmental organizations in Tunisia warn against the resurgence of authoritarianism. But despite these concerns, Saied and his allies continue to claim high levels of popular support for both the president and his political agenda.
Do Tunisians support Saied’s actions? And do they support these actions at the expense of democracy? Over the past two months, we fielded a nationally representative, in-person household survey of Tunisian adults to find out.
What Tunisians really think
We asked Tunisians which statement is closer to their view of Saied’s July 25, 2021, actions: “The president’s actions hold corrupt politicians accountable and help ordinary Tunisians,” or “The president’s actions undermine democracy and threaten the rights of the Tunisian people.” Nearly 80 percent of the 1,200 respondents in our survey more closely identified with the first statement, while just under 15 percent agreed with the second statement.
Tunisia has its first-ever female prime minister. That’s not as good for democracy as it sounds.
This positive interpretation of Saied’s seizure of power was a surprise. From a political science perspective, the suspension of parliament and the dissolution of the Supreme Judicial Council look like autocratizing moves that concentrate power in the hands of the president. An overly strong executive was a defining feature of Tunisia’s political system prior to the 2010-2011 uprising, and one that the 2014 constitution sought to correct.
One explanation here is that Saied appears to have successfully fashioned himself as a political outsider, positioned to disrupt stalled politics and hold the political class accountable for the slow pace of economic and political changes since 2010.
Do Tunisians favor authoritarianism over democracy?
Or perhaps support for Saied was more concentrated among those who are less committed to democracy and democratic norms? We looked at how support for Saied’s power grab correlated with respondents’ general support for democracy. We asked respondents which of these statements came closest to their view: “For people like me, it doesn’t matter what kind of government we have”; “Under some circumstances, a non-democratic government can be preferable”; or “Democracy is always preferable to any other kind of government.”
We found that respondents are split nearly equally between the pro-democracy and democracy-skeptic camps. Among those who support Saied’s power grab, roughly 53 percent are committed to democracy, and agreed that democracy is always preferable — the other 47 percent of Saied supporters appear more skeptical of democracy, and either agreed that non-democratic government can be preferable or answered that that it does not matter what kind of government was in place.
What do the results mean?
These survey results paint a mixed picture of the Tunisian public’s response to recent political events in their country and underline the potential political risks facing politicians on both side of the constitutional crisis.
The public frustration with the political class that provided the pretext for Saied to suspend parliament last summer appears to persist. The survey results suggest that Tunisian political parties’ denunciation of Saied’s July moves may not resonate strongly with a public that overwhelmingly supports the president.
But the survey results also demonstrate many Tunisians remain committed to democracy in the country. Many of these pro-democracy Tunisians perhaps supported Saied’s early moves in the hopes he would improve the situation in the country — but may abandon their support for the president as he asserts greater autocratic power and increasingly governs through executive actions.
In January, anti-Saied protesters turned out on the anniversary of former dictator Ben Ali’s abdication of power in 2011, in one display of popular opposition to the current regime. Our survey was conducted prior to the anti-Saied demonstrations in which protester Rhida Bouziane was fatally injured. In addition to autocratizing moves, such as the dissolution of the Supreme Judicial Council, that have received high-profile condemnation, a prominent death as a result of police brutality is the type of event that could potentially galvanize the public and shift public opinion against Saied.
While Saied’s power grab appears to be a worrying sign for Tunisia’s democratic consolidation, the president’s current broad support does not necessarily mean that the appetite for democracy in the country is completely gone.
Alexandra Domike Blackman is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Follow her on Twitter @AlexDBlackman.
Elizabeth R. Nugent is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Follow her on Twitter @ernugent. | null | null | null | null | null |
Canada's Marie-Philip Poulin celebrates with teammates after scoring against the United States. (Mark Cristino/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
BEIJING — A silent Wukesong Sports Centre had turned into a crucible a few minutes after noon Tuesday, and by the 37th minute, the relentless, violent sounds of the hand-to-hand combat between the United States and Canada women’s hockey teams had not stopped. They grunted and howled and banged their sticks at each other as they went stride for stride on a heated power play, both teams desperate to not surrender an inch on an afternoon that reminded everyone why their rivalry is one of the best in sports.
But give an inch to Marie-Philip Poulin and she will make you pay, just as she has made generations of U.S. players pay at the Olympics. It didn’t matter that the Americans had a man-advantage at that point and were pressing to tie the game with another assault on the net: Canada’s captain came up with a steal near the blue line and blew past two U.S. defenders on her flanks, showing the top-end speed that has made the 30-year-old one of the world’s best players for the more than a decade.
By the time she reached the net on the shorthanded breakaway, Poulin had been slashed and earned a penalty shot. A few moments later, Poulin lasered the puck past U.S. goalie Maddie Rooney to give her team a rare two-goal cushion in this rivalry, lifting Canada to a 4-2 win in a preliminary round game many expect to stand as a preview of the gold medal game Feb. 17.
If that’s the case, buckle up, because Tuesday’s contest was a worthy addition to the pantheon of thrilling games these two teams have played over the years, and the heightened stakes of a gold medal promises to ratchet up the tension.
“Definitely a lot of hostility out there,” Canada forward Sarah Nurse said after Tuesday’s win, which served as the next step for her team to reclaim the gold medal after the Americans won it in a shootout over their rivals four years ago in PyeongChang.
“Obviously not the result wanted to get here today,” American captain Kendall Coyne-Schofield said. “Take the positives away, take the negatives and learn from it.”
Among the positives: Team USA finished with 53 shots on goal, generating offense at will and controlling the puck in their rivals zone for long stretches, matching Canada’s speed and physicality from the onset. But the negatives were also glaring. The Americans went 0-for-6 on the power play, including at a decisive moment in the game when Poulin came up with a breakaway and eventual penalty shot goal with just under three minutes remaining in the second period. Team USA couldn’t fully solve Canada goaltender Ann-Renee Desbiens, who finished with 51 saves in one of the best performances of her career.
“I got some great advice when I was younger: It’s 50-50 every time you shoot the puck,” American Hilary Knight said. “You just have to keep shooting it. There’s no such thing as a hot hand or a hot streak. It’s just numbers.”
The numbers for Canada weren’t as staggering; it finished with 27 shots on goal, but found its offensive rhythm after the Americans blitzed their rival with 12 of the game’s first 14 shots. Canada got on the board on just its third shot of the game. Sarah Fillier, who entered the game with five goals in the tournament, fed a puck into the crease for Brianne Jenner, who chipped the pass above Rooney into the top of the net.
“We really want to focus on quality shots versus quantity … I think we have a big focus on Grade A scoring chances,” Nurse said. “Yeah, the U.S. got a lot of perimeter shots, but we have a stellar goaltender. So if you’re going to shoot from the outside, you’re not going to score on her.”
One of Team USA’s best early chances coming after forward Abbey Murphy flipped a backhand off the post after a steal midway through the first period — the puck deflected off the back of Desbiens and bounced off the post again before being cleared — and Murphy screamed into her gloves after the missed opportunity.
“That sucked. It was close. That happens,” Murphy said. “It will come.”
Players from both teams had to adjust to a heightened speed and physicality they hadn’t seen in blowout wins in their three preliminary games earlier this week — Canada had outscored Switzerland, Finland and Russia by a combined 29-3, while the U.S. had beaten those teams by a combined 19-2 margin — but both teams had settled in by the second period.
The United States took a brief lead earlier in the second, as forward Dani Cameranesi scored off a rebound to tie the score and Alex Carpenter added the go-ahead goal a few minutes later to give the Americans a 2-1 lead. Less than a minute after that, Canada tied the score after Jenner scored her second goal of the game, and Jamie Lee Rattray beat Rooney for the go-ahead goal with 5:35 left in the second.
The United States had three power plays in the second period but came up empty-handed on each, watching as Desbiens came up several acrobatic saves and her teammates in front blocked a number of quality shots.
The dagger came as Poulin, a four-time Olympian who helped Canada win gold medals in 2010 and 2014 before 2018’s crushing silver against the Americans, blew past two Team USA defenders in the middle of the ice, including Cayla Barnes, who slashed Poulin at the end of the breakaway to try to disrupt a scoring chance. Rooney had stopped a Poulin shot at the point, but after an official called a penalty shot, Poulin glided in and deposited the puck into the lower left pocket of the net.
There were only the sounds of Canada’s players celebrating inside a mostly empty arena at that point, and after the Americans were unable to keep up the frantic pace in the third period, they returned to their locker room and vowed to stew over this loss only until midnight Tuesday. Then they will turn their attention to Saturday’s quarterfinal, which will be the first step in what many expect a path back to a rematch with their rival in the gold medal game next week.
“It’s a wonderful game to use as a measuring stick,” Knight said, “to figure out what works, and what doesn’t work.” | null | null | null | null | null |
She was speaking not from ego, but from a desire to be appreciated for her independence. Gu is on her way to becoming bigger than simplistic identity. She doesn’t have to pick a country. Her decision to straddle loyalties has clear financial and popularity benefits, but it doesn’t make her an insincere opportunist. It does open the door for Gu — and the ethereal unity she wants to represent — to be exploited. On cue, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach just happened to show up here with Peng Shuai on Tuesday in what came across as another lame and transparent attempt to whitewash the actions of the Chinese government.
As a transcendent talent, she is a citizen of celebrity. Her blend of interests and identities create a singular and growing icon. In a time in which it seems like society is trying to whittle us down to easy definitions, Gu is Gu. It’s refreshing to see a intersectional human being so comfortably at odds with the moment. | null | null | null | null | null |
Protesters gather at Parliament House on Feb. 8, 2022 in Canberra, Australia. (Brook Mitchell/Getty Images)
The protests in Canberra, which have been energized by the truck convoy causing havoc in Ottawa but feature few trucks, have lasted for eight days and are set to continue until at least the weekend amid fears that the so-far mostly peaceful atmosphere could deteriorate.
As protesters waved signs saying “GENOCIDE” and “FREEDOM” on the lawn in front of Parliament, center-left lawmaker Kristina Keneally warned that the motley crowd contained “individuals that our national security agencies are worried about.”
But the possibility of further unrest is real in Australia, where several anti-vaccine protests in Melbourne turned violent last year. Australian Federal Police already expelled protesters from one Canberra location last week and have said they soon will need to clear another one if demonstrators don’t leave. And during a related protest in late December, demonstrators set fire to Australia’s old parliament house, leading to serious damage and several arrests.
Police estimated Tuesday’s crowd at around 1,000 people, though protesters claimed their ranks were far higher. So far, the protests in the Australian capital have remained mostly peaceful, according to Kaz Ross, an independent researcher into far-right extremism and conspiracy theories who has been closely following the so-called “Convoy to Canberra.”
The demonstrations have drawn together followers of disparate ideologies, she said, though the one that has dominated is Australia’s sovereign citizen movement. According to the international conspiracy theory, governments have been co-opted by illegal corporations, so “sovereign citizens” or “freemen” should ignore their laws, oust the politicians and restore people’s republics.
Though the Canberra protests have drawn energy from the demonstrations in Canada, Australia’s anti-vaccine and sovereign citizen movements have been building for months under the pandemic, she said. And though some of the early organizers were truck drivers, few Australian truckers own their own vehicle, meaning the broad and leafy streets of Canberra were unlikely to be clogged with 18-wheelers any time soon.
“They are setting up for an occupation, whereas the Ottawa thing is a blockade,” she said, comparing the Canberra protest to the Occupy Movements that took over some American parks in 2011. “They are building something they see as sustainable, and they see themselves as there for the long haul.”
Ross said she expected the number of protesters to spike this weekend, and that there was a potential for violence in the coming weeks when they realized their list of demands was not going to be met.
On Monday, one protest organizer ended a video with an allusion to hanging the prime minister, while in another clip, a protester warned a far-right lawmaker to stay away from Parliament, adding that if he had his way he’d call in “bombers” to wipe it out.
“The longer things go on the more they can go astray,” said Sen. Gerard Rennick, a member of the ruling conservative coalition who has fallen out with the prime minister over the issue of vaccine mandates. “But hopefully they will get their message across this week and many people will have to return [home].”
“The right to protest doesn’t extend to stalking our city, harassing business owners and residents and aggressively flouting the law,” he said on Monday. “This is one of the most vaccinated cities on earth, so the anti-vaccine message from many protesters could not have a less receptive audience.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Some Republicans want to let parents sue schools and teachers over student ‘discomfort’
Students arrive for the first day of classes at a public school in Miami Lakes, Fla., on Aug. 23. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg News)
MIAMI — The school system in Florida’s most populous county includes students whose families moved here from 160 nations.
Its expansive cultural mix is represented in the district’s curriculum, which includes not only American history, but also the stories of violent government upheavals, such as the revolution of enslaved people who founded Haiti, and the more recent political trauma of protesters who fled or perished in Castro’s Cuba.
But as Florida lawmakers consider legislation to police what students are taught, Miami Beach Senior High School teacher Russell Rywell wonders if he will still be able to discuss how some of his students’ ancestors arrived in the United States.
“How do you teach slavery? The slave trade? The Holocaust?” asked Rywell, a speech and debate teacher who has taught in Miami-Dade County’s public schools for 11 years. “How do you teach these issues without talking about the participants and the roles they played?”
As part of the “stop-woke” agenda of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Florida lawmakers are now considering bills that would allow almost anyone to object to any instruction in public school classrooms. DeSantis wants to give people the right to sue schools and teachers over what they teach based on student “discomfort.” The proposed legislation is far-reaching and could affect even corporate human resources diversity training.
In recent days, advocates on both sides of Florida’s ideological divide have said they are girding for a divisive political fight in a state where more than 1 in 5 residents are foreign-born and nearly half the population is Latino, Black or Asian American.
Political analysts say the battle could have wide-ranging impacts that carry over into the 2022 midterms and DeSantis’s reelection campaign.
Florida voters have shifted to the right in recent elections. But many analysts remain skeptical that residents want to upend how cultural and ethnic histories are shared in classrooms and workplaces, raising questions about how far DeSantis can tug at the seams of Florida’s demographic makeup.
“A lot of people have been begging the Republican Party to be more inclusive, and if you look at the gains that were made in 2020, it was with Latino Republicans,” said Susan A. MacManus, a retired political science professor at the University of South Florida and a widely respected state political analyst. “But things change, and with the debate over [critical race theory] … we may see challenged doctrines with regards to party voting and ethnic voting, and the old tried-and-true explanations may no longer apply.”
In speeches, DeSantis has sought to frame his “anti-woke” agenda as pushback against “a form of cultural Marxism” that elevates some historical lessons while downplaying others.
“The goal is to delegitimize the founding of this country, the principles that the founders relied on, our institutions, our constitution, to tear basically at the fabric of our society,” DeSantis said in a recent speech at the Common Sense Society, an international research institute popular with conservatives. “And they want to replace it with effectively left-wing ideology as the founding ethos of America. That would be a disaster.”
Florida Democratic lawmakers, who have been in the minority for nearly a generation, argue that DeSantis is polarizing the state while positioning himself for a possible presidential campaign, where predominantly White, conservative voters will play a crucial role in deciding the GOP nominee.
“What is happening is our governor is competing with the governor of Texas over who will be the heir apparent to Donald Trump,” said Florida House Democratic Whip Ramon Alexander, who is Black. “It’s all about who can go to the farthest extremes of the Republican Party.”
Even some Florida Republicans lament DeSantis’s approach, which they describe as divisive and a step back from how past state GOP leaders have governed. “Our party has become mean, and driven by emotion on whom we dislike,” said Alex Patton, a Gainesville-based Republican consultant and pollster. “But that is the driving force in American politics right now.”
Florida legislators are debating two versions of DeSantis’s Stop Woke Act, known as SB148 in the state Senate and HB7 in the House. DeSantis uses “woke” as an acronym he devised for “Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees.”
Under the Senate bill, Florida businesses could not mandate that employees attend diversity trainings that cause any individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any form of psychological distress.” Employees who are distressed by a training could file a lawsuit against their employers.
The Senate bill also sets new standards for school curriculum, requiring districts to teach “the history and content” of the Declaration of Independence and proper forms of patriotism. Teachers and lesson plans may not imply that any “individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
“An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” the legislation states.
HB7 is even more expansive, giving parents and state regulators considerable authority to ban books or teachings that cause discomfort, including carefully reviewing lessons about “the Civil War, the expansion of the United States … the world wars, and the civil rights movement.”
A separate bill in the Senate, SB1300, would also appoint a state-trained reviewer in each school district to look over curriculums and textbooks, and establish procedures for any parents or resident to file objections to material they find offensive. Lawmakers are also considering bills that would bar teachers from discussing sexual orientation in primary school, giving parents the right to sue school districts that violate the policy.
Vonzell Agosto, a professor of curriculum studies at the University of South Florida, said the Stop Woke Act looks very similar to an executive order signed by then-President Donald Trump in 2020 that barred the use of “divisive concepts,” including the idea that the United States is “fundamentally racist or sexist.”
If it becomes law in Florida, she said, teachers will abandon lessons on issues ranging from the history of civil rights to the Holocaust.
“Part of the way you teach the Holocaust in the state of Florida is associating it with prejudice and racism,” Agosto said. “Once you make teaching racism taboo, you’ve made it very difficult to teach about antisemitism. … I don’t understand how you’d teach the civil rights movement without connecting it to economic injustice and racism.”
Rywell, the Miami Beach teacher, said if the legislation passes he suspects most teachers will become even more cautious with their words, denying students the benefit of freewheeling classroom discussions.
“Teaching is a constant set of judgment calls,” Rywell said. “To try to specify, ‘This is what you can say, this is what you can’t say,’ is very, very difficult. Every word can be interpreted differently.”
Other flash points in the legislation are provisions that give employees the right to file legal challenges if they are subjected to workplace diversity trainings that make them uncomfortable. Rosalie Ellis Payne, the interim dean of Florida Memorial University’s business school, said those provisions could gut corporate trainings in the state’s highly diverse tourism industry.
“You’ll have people in hiring positions who will go back to just dealing with folks who look like them, and they will see nothing wrong with that,” said Payne, who previously did human resources work for cruise lines.
But the push to crack down on what legislators view as critical race theory, an intellectual movement that examines how policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism, has galvanized conservative parents around the state.
For more than a year, angry parents — who began by protesting mask mandates — have been crowding into school board meetings objecting to lesson plans that touch on race, gender or sexual orientation.
In response to that pressure, Polk County Public Schools recently removed 16 books from the library including “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini and “Two Boys Kissing” by David Levithan.
Rick Stevens, a pastor who is co-founder and director of the Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative advocacy group, said parents are “horrified” to learn that some children are being taught explicit or potentially traumatic history lessons in classrooms. He is especially worried that lessons about slavery could make White children feel guilty over the actions of their ancestors.
“What we don’t want teachers to do is to take sides, and that’s the objectivity that I believe the governor is trying to solve,” Stevens said. “We want them to take sides that slavery was wrong, but they don’t need to take sides that one race purposefully did it, and so now that race is forever condemned, and another race is forever exalted. That just doesn’t add up. That’s just not right.”
Tina Descovich, a leader of Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based conservative group that advocates for “parental rights,” said DeSantis is merely responding to parents who have been “opening up backpacks” and finding history lessons or class assignments that are “divisive,” especially for students in elementary school.
“To say there were slaves is one thing, but to talk in detail about how slaves were treated, and with photos, is another,” said Descovich, 47.
Asked what age would be appropriate for detailed lessons about the treatment of enslaved people, Descovich said it should be up to parents to decide.
“Moms in each community need to have a voice in that discussion,” said Descovich, who has been trying to position Moms for Liberty as a nationwide political force in the 2022 midterm elections.
Other Florida parents have started organizing against Moms for Liberty and their allies in the Florida Legislature.
Lisa Schurr, an attorney who lives in Sarasota, and three other women recently founded Support Our Schools, a statewide group that advocates for what they describe as diverse, fact-based school curriculums and textbooks.
“We are all appalled about what is happening in Florida,” said Schurr, 62. “They don’t want our kids to be critical thinkers. … And to say [a student] can’t feel discomfort. What about the child of color? What about the gay child? You don’t think this legislation is making them feel discomfort? You don’t think they have felt discomfort for all of their lives?”
Kim Hough, a Melbourne mother aligned with another newly formed group, Families for Safe Schools, said she is alarmed at how quickly the conservative parental rights movement transitioned into a major, statewide political force.
“We are all trying to raise socially responsible human beings, in addition to well-educated human beings, so I don’t understand the purpose of withholding information from them,” said Hough, 48, a former Republican who recently became a Democrat and decided to run for the Brevard County School Board. “If DeSantis gets reelected in 2022, I really fear the rules will be so stringent that local school boards won’t even be able to function at that point, and the state will be the end-all-be-all of all rules.”
Moms for Liberty has turned ‘parental rights’ into a rallying cry for conservative parents
DeSantis, however, continues to highlight his “anti-woke” agenda at public events, suggesting he believes it’s a political winner. At a recent speech in Gainesville to distribute funding for workforce education programs, DeSantis said the concept of critical race theory is “denigrating our country.”
“We want to make sure people can go to school without being scapegoated or without being targeted,” DeSantis said. “And I think that’s where the vast, vast majority of people want to be.”
But Patton, the GOP strategist, said some of his clients in the Florida legislature are privately “exasperated” over having to consider DeSantis’s bills, believing the governor is trading short-term political support for the party’s long-term image among “young voters and college-educated voters.”
“How do you legislate someone feeling discomfort?” Patton asked. “To a lot of [GOP lawmakers], it doesn’t make intellectual sense.”
For now, MacManus, the political scientist, said DeSantis has clearly tapped into the skepticism many suburban White parents who “vote their kids” feel around these issues. Those voters traditionally turn out in higher numbers in a midterm election, she said.
In recent weeks, however, MacManus has seen Black mothers — who also tend to have robust turnout — become more galvanized in opposition to DeSantis’s efforts. What remains unclear, MacManus said, is how various segments of the state’s Latino community view the debate.
“[Critical race theory] means different things, to different people depending on their circumstances, their backgrounds and their country of origin,” said MacManus, adding that the debate over DeSantis’s proposal remains largely anchored in “Black or White” terms.
In Miami, some parents say they are starting to pay closer attention to how the proposals could affect their children’s education.
Liliana Vera, who has three children in Miami-Dade schools, is a first-generation American of Cuban and Argentine descent.
In an interview, Vera, 34, recalled a lesson her daughter received on voting rights, which she now worries will be prohibited if the legislation is enacted.
“The teacher gave them each a slip of paper and said they would vote on whether the class got recess. Then the teacher took away the papers from all the girls, and then from all the Black and Brown students, and that left only the White kids with the right to vote,” Vera said.
“I absolutely agreed with that lesson,” Vera said. “We don’t need to shield kids from the facts. They can handle the truth.”
Ted Melnik contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hamilton County is about 60 miles southwest of McMinn County, Tenn., where the school board last month unanimously banned “Maus,” the award-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about the Holocaust, from the eighth-grade curriculum. Board members said the text included inappropriate language, illustrations and subject matter. The move led to national outcry, with Holocaust survivors, advocacy groups and graphic novelists accusing the district of trying to overlook the horrors of the Holocaust.
“I thought, ‘This is not ideal,’” Russo said. But the class was the only option for her daughter, whose disabilities prevented her from taking other electives, she said.
But from the first homework assignment, Russo said she and her daughter felt the assignments and lesson plans resembled Christian proselytizing. In an “About You” worksheet reviewed by The Post, students were asked if they had read the Bible or were familiar with the text. Russo said her daughter didn’t turn in the assignment, earning her a zero, because she was worried about revealing she was Jewish.
“When I saw that I was like, ‘Is this real? Did somebody actually put this in a public school class?’” Russo said.
Russo said she hopes speaking out shows her children they should take a stand when they feel something is wrong, “even if it’s going to be scary.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Oscar nominations 2022: What to expect
(Jason DeCrow/AP)
Academy Award nominations will be announced Tuesday morning, likely proving what we already know: This was yet another strange year for the movies. Fluctuating coronavirus variants contributed to unpredictable theatergoing habits and a consequential boost in streaming releases. Those who did feel comfortable heading to their local multiplex turned out in droves for “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” somehow rendering films like Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story” an underdog at the box office.
Steven Spielberg! An underdog! What a world we live in.
But not to worry, Spielberg fans — the prolific director and his film are sure to receive multiple Oscar nominations when they are announced around 8:20 a.m. Eastern time (our sympathies, night-owl West Coasters). Award season conversation has seemed more subdued this year, often playing second fiddle among the pop culture savvy to whatever havoc is currently being wreaked on HBO (of which there has been a lot, between “And Just Like That …” and “Euphoria” alone). But some narratives have broken through, whether characterizing Adam McKay’s polarizing satire “Don’t Look Up” as this season’s villain or Nicole Kidman in “Being the Ricardos” as the classic academy pick.
Best picture seems a toss-up between Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical drama “Belfast” and Jane Campion’s slow-burning western “The Power of the Dog,” the latter — distributed by Netflix — just one of several streamable titles to attract awards buzz this year. Both films also earned several BAFTA nominations, a frequent indicator of Oscars success, and landed nods for the Producers Guild of America’s top awards category. Previous Oscar winners Kidman and Olivia Colman are neck and neck for best actress (having starred in “Being the Ricardos” and “The Lost Daughter,” respectively), while “The Power of the Dog” lead Benedict Cumberbatch and “King Richard” star Will Smith will probably face off in the best actor category.
The 94th Academy Awards air March 27 at 8 p.m. on ABC. The ceremony, which will take place at the Dolby Theatre, will feature a host for the first time since 2018, though they have not yet said who will take up the mantle. In the meantime, we prepare ourselves for cheerful banter between the presenters of Tuesday’s nominations, actors Leslie Jordan and Tracee Ellis Ross.
This post will be updated with nominees as are they are announced. | null | null | null | null | null |
That’s why Parker said he was taken aback when, hours after the robbery, his bosses pulled out a “repayment form” and gave him an ultimatum: sign it or lose his job, according to the lawsuit. Fearing termination, Parker agreed to allow regular $300 deductions from his paycheck until the full amount was reimbursed, the lawsuit adds. | null | null | null | null | null |
Why is the U.S. intelligence community so chatty about Russia?
Trying to understand the raft of leaked intelligence stories
President Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz after an Oval Office bilateral meeting on Monday. Biden hosted Scholz to discuss the buildup of Russian forces on the border of Ukraine and other concerns. (Michael Reynolds/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
As the crisis over Ukraine continues to worsen, we have shifted from the multilateral gatherings of January to the “high-stakes diplomacy” meetings of February. On Monday, for example, President Biden met with new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz while French President Emmanuel Macron met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Soon both Macron and Scholz will head to Ukraine.
With this flurry of activity, it can be difficult to pause for a second and attempt to detect patterns behind various foreign policy moves. The hardworking staff here at Spoiler Alerts, however, is very much in favor of taking pauses during crises to do that very thing. And here is what I am noticing: The U.S. intelligence community sure has been chatty as of late about what it thinks Russia is doing.
Late last week, senior administration officials told Julian Barnes of the New York Times that “the United States has acquired intelligence about a Russian plan to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine using a faked video that would build on recent disinformation campaigns.”
Over the weekend my Washington Post colleagues published an article about intelligence briefings concluding that “Russia is close to completing preparations for what appears to be a large-scale invasion of Ukraine that could leave up to 50,000 civilians killed or wounded, decapitate the government in Kyiv within two days, and launch a humanitarian crisis with up to 5 million refugees fleeing the resulting chaos.”
Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times followed up with a report noting that “US military and intelligence officials believe that Russia is planning to hold a big nuclear weapons exercise this month as a warning to Nato not to intervene if President Vladimir Putin decides to invade Ukraine.” Sevastapulo’s report was rich with details, including “the US believes that the optimum time for a Russian invasion would be from mid-February to the end of March.”
On Monday, CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, Jim Sciutto and Katie Bo Lillis reported on additional U.S. intelligence, saying that “intercepted communications obtained by the US have revealed that some Russian officials have worried that a large-scale invasion of Ukraine would be costlier and more difficult than Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Kremlin leaders realize, according to four people familiar with the intelligence.”
The CNN story further noted: “The [Russian] officials have also grumbled about their plans being discovered and exposed publicly by western nations, two of the sources said, citing the intercepted communications.”
These articles have had the rare effect of simultaneously annoying both Ukraine and Russia. Last month, the Ukrainian leadership publicly pushed back on U.S. warnings as excessively gloomy, and did so again Monday. The latest flurry of intelligence briefings also rankled Russia’s leadership. According to my Post colleagues, “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that those predictions were contributing to the ‘tense’ atmosphere over Moscow’s demands for security assurances regarding its neighbor.” Other Russian officials dismissed U.S. estimates as “madness and scaremongering.”
Part of the explanation for the flurry of reports is that intelligence analysts have to brief lawmakers from time to time, and information from those briefings tend to find their way to the press. That said, these warnings seem designed to ratchet up both tension and attention, which is not the Biden administration’s standard modus operandi. Is there a method to these reports — particularly given the U.S. intelligence community’s acknowledgment that it lacks any assets within Putin’s inner circle?
There are two possible explanations. The first is that by shining a light on Russian activity surrounding Ukraine, the United States is raising the costs of Putin taking aggressive military action. Every time the United States announces intelligence indicating that Russia is preparing for war, that is one more instance of Putin being deprived of the element of surprise (something he used to good effect back in 2014). Russian officials then have to deny any hostile intent toward Ukraine despite the massing of troops. Perhaps the public glare is designed to deter Putin just a wee bit.
While possible, ratcheting up tensions also increases the costs to Putin for backing down. Another possibility is simpler: The United States wants to signal to Russia that it is fully aware of its plans and can engage in some information operations of its own. The CNN report about reluctance within the Russian military about a full-scale invasion is a classic example of this.
It seems unlikely that any of this will affect Putin’s decision-making in the end — the combined effect of these stories are on the margins, and Ukraine is clearly central to Putin’s self-conception of Russia. Still, even effects on the margin might matter. | null | null | null | null | null |
Good morning, Early Birds. The composer John Williams of “Star Wars," “Jaws” and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" fame turns 90 today. Send tips, praise, complaints and secret recordings of White House meetings to earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us.
🚨: “Eric Lander, President Biden’s top science adviser, resigned Monday night after he acknowledged mistreating his subordinates and apologized for demeaning them, a pattern of behavior that put him at odds with one of Biden’s earliest promises — to run an administration marked by respect and professionalism,” our colleague Tyler Pager scooped.
Boxgate?: The chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee plans to “fully investigate” the appearance of 15 boxes of documents and other items at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, which should have been turned over as part of the Presidential Records Act.
“The reporting on former President Trump’s apparent removal of presidential records and his failure to turn the records over to the National Archives for over a year is deeply troubling — but not surprising,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) told Jackie in a statement Monday night.
“I sounded the alarm in December 2020 about the danger that the former President and senior Trump Administration officials were not properly transferring presidential records to the National Archives and unfortunately, we now know that was the case. I plan to fully investigate this incident to ensure the law is followed and records from the Trump Administration are with the National Archives where they belong, rather than stashed away in Trump’s golf resorts.”
That's the latest twist in the ongoing story of Trump's apparently sloppy record-keeping (too early to call it Boxgate? Maybe) during his time in the White House. Jackie and our Post colleagues scooped yesterday that Trump handed over 15 boxes to the National Archives and even more presidential records might be coming, according to a statement released by the National Archives and Records Administration.
Archives officials confirmed the transfer, which occurred in mid-January, and told us the records picked up from Mar-a-Lago “should have been transferred to NARA from the White House at the end of the Trump Administration in January 2021.”
“The Presidential Records Act is critical to our democracy, in which the government is held accountable by the people,” Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero said in a statement. “Whether through the creation of adequate and proper documentation, sound records management practices, the preservation of records, or the timely transfer of them to the National Archives at the end of an Administration, there should be no question as to need for both diligence and vigilance. Records matter.”
Trump officials are “continuing to search” for additional records, per the Archives, raising even more questions: What else might Trump have?
Ray Locker, journalist and author of ‘Nixon’s Gamble':
We've reported so far that the retrieved boxes included mementos, gifts, letters from world leaders and other correspondence.
More specifically, we know that missives from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which Trump once described as “love letters,” as well as a letter left for his successor by President Barack Obama, were also recovered, according to two people familiar with the contents. While we don't know the impetus for the Archives realizing that certain items were missing, these two letters in particular were extensively reported on in the media.
Also retrieved, per the New York Times's Mike Schmidt and Maggie Haberman: “…a map Mr. Trump famously drew on with a black Sharpie marker to demonstrate the track of Hurricane Dorian heading toward Alabama in 2019 to back up a declaration he had made on Twitter that contradicted weather forecasts.”
It's unclear whether the boxes contained gifts that Trump is prohibited from keeping under federal law; any foreign gift over $415 automatically becomes the property of the American people, unless Trump pays the government the appraised price for it.
It's not completely out of the ordinary for past presidents to return gifts, as our colleague Tom Hamburger pointed out: Bill and Hillary Clinton had to return thousands of dollars worth of gifts they took with them when they left the White House in 2001. Shortly after George W. Bush was sworn in as Bill Clinton’s successor, The Post reported the Clintons left the White House with $28,000 in furnishings that they said were personal gifts but were actually given to the National Park Service for the White House permanent collection.
There are several factors that may have exacerbated the chaotic transfer supposed to occur during a presidential transition. Two former Trump advisers described a frenzied packing process to our colleague Josh Dawsey in the final days of the administration because Trump did not want to pack or accept defeat.
Our Daily 202 colleague and presidential gift connoisseur Olivier Knox writes:
"There are few more gloriously ridiculous practices in diplomacy than foreign dignitaries presenting U.S. officials with lavish gifts the recipients can’t keep unless they buy them at a federally assessed fair-market value. Can’t buy off the servants of the people, goes the theory.
Presidents get a break: They can keep foreign offerings, but only to display or store them at their presidential libraries. The George W. Bush library showcases foreign gifts in its collection of 43,000 artifacts, viewable here.
The offerings can carry symbolic significance: In 2016, President Barack Obama and senior aides got the first-ever gifts from Cuba and Iran, while Russia, on the outs with Washington since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, gave nothing.
And they can be turned to political uses. During the 2016 campaign, candidate Donald Trump tried to turn the bizarre but legitimate practice of accepting foreign gifts into a weapon against Hillary Clinton, mischaracterizing the process in an effort to paint her as corrupt.
‘Hillary Clinton accepted $58,000 in jewelry from the government of Brunei when she was secretary of state,’ he thundered. But, again, she couldn’t keep it unless she paid fair-market value, which she didn’t.
The State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol reported the present ended up with the General Services Administration, which stores some foreign gifts.
It did sound nice, though: ‘Mouawad Larme D’Amour 18k gold, sapphire, and diamond earrings, necklace, and bracelet.’ Value? $58,000. From? Brunei’s Queen. Reason for accepting it? The same given for most foreign gifts: ‘Non-acceptance would cause embarrassment to donor and U.S. government.’"
Supreme Court stops lower court order on Alabama redistricting, allows GOP-drawn map
A redistricting setback for Democrats: “A divided Supreme Court on Monday restored an Alabama congressional map that creates only one district favorable to a Black candidate, and put on hold a lower court’s order that said a second district was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act," our colleague Robert Barnes reports.
Democrats had sued over Alabama's new congressional map and won a short-lived victory in federal court last month.
"The majority — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — did not provide a reason for stopping the lower court’s decision, which is common when the Supreme Court considers an emergency petition. But Kavanaugh, joined by Alito, wrote separately to say the changes ordered by the lower court came too close to qualifying and primaries for the fall election and could create “chaos.”
Investigative report details U.S. military’s frustration with White House, diplomats over Afghanistan evacuation
17 days in Kabul: “Senior White House and State Department officials failed to grasp the Taliban’s steady advance on Afghanistan’s capital and resisted efforts by U.S. military leaders to prepare the evacuation of embassy personnel and Afghan allies weeks before Kabul’s fall, placing American troops ordered to carry out the withdrawal in greater danger,” our colleagues Daniel Lamothe and Alex Horton report.
“An Army investigative report, numbering 2,000 pages and released to The Post through a Freedom of Information Act request, details the life-and-death decisions made daily by U.S. soldiers and Marines sent to secure Hamid Karzai International Airport as thousands converged on the airfield in a frantic bid to escape.”
“Beyond the bleak, blunt assessments of top military commanders, the documents contain previously unreported disclosures about the violence American personnel experienced, including one exchange of gunfire that left two Taliban fighters dead after they allegedly menaced a group of U.S. Marines and Afghan civilians, and a separate incident in which U.S. troops killed an elite Afghan strike unit member and wounded six others after they fired on the Americans.”
A tight job market, visualized: “Over the past year, the U.S. has added nearly 7 million jobs as the economy rebuilds from the early days of the pandemic,” our colleague Abha Bhattarai writes. “The economy is short just 3 million of the 22 million jobs that were lost in early 2020, a faster-paced recovery of jobs than after the Great Recession.”
House Democrats introduce legislation to keep federal government funded until March 11. By The Post’s Mariana Alfaro.
Democrats, experts warn Spanish-language disinformation is intensifying. By NBC News’s Carmen Sesin.
Senate GOP backlash smacks RNC after Cheney-Kinzinger censure. By Politico’s Burgess Everett, Marianne Levine and Olivia Beavers.
Amy Coney Barrett’s long game. By the New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot.
Post Opinion: I used to work on the Hill. The Dear White Staffers Instagram account is a long-overdue reckoning. By Melissa A. Sullivan.
“He never stopped ripping things up” | null | null | null | null | null |
A Super Bowl sign decorates the exterior of the Los Angeles Convention Center on Monday. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)
“I’ve described it — and others have — as like a tidal wave,” Sills said. “It just came in, and it just washed over everyone. It affected everyone. And we saw our case rates go up as much as tenfold in the course of a week. And so that really caused us to pivot and need to change our strategy.”
“We feel like this targeted testing was effective as a screening tool, particularly during this omicron era, and we feel like the five-day return has been able to be done safely within the parameters of our protocol,” Sills said. “And I think this has implications, obviously, for other sports at other levels but also society.”
NFL eliminates daily coronavirus testing of unvaccinated players
Even so, Sills did not rule out the possibility of a positive test for a member of the Bengals or Rams affecting Sunday’s game.
“I think it’s absolutely possible because if they have symptoms and we test them and they’re positive, then obviously they would miss the game,” Sills said. “And we’re continuing to screen everyone every day. We’ve done tests on playoff participants each week throughout the playoffs, and I don’t think that will change. That screening will continue, the same process that we’ve had in place.”
NFL officials said about 95 percent of players are vaccinated. According to Sills, the league’s latest data showed that approximately 10 percent of players eligible for vaccine boosters had received them. That figure was about 60 percent, he said, for all staffers, coaches and players leaguewide. Sills said that players may have been dissuaded from taking boosters by the possibility of experiencing side effects.
“The rollout of the boosters really came, I think, at a challenging time for players,” Sills said. “We all know that during the season players don’t want to do anything that might detract from their performance or cause them to miss time, even if that’s practice time.”
Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy, said the league’s data showed no increase in the injury rate during the NFL’s first 17-game regular season. The NFL also had its fewest number of concussions since it began compiling comprehensive data in 2015, Miller said. But injury rates on special teams plays were troublingly high, he said.
“That’s something that’s going to be a primary area of focus for us on the health and safety side,” Miller said.
About one in five injuries and approximately one in six concussions suffered by players occurs on special teams, according to the league. Sills referred to that as a “call to action” requiring further scrutiny.
“Simply put, the special teams plays have a disproportionate rate of injury compared to how frequently the play occurs,” Sills said. “And so we think that’s something that demands our attention. ... And the punt play, I think, is particularly the one that would be targeted by us.” | null | null | null | null | null |
A memorial for the victims of the shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., includes 26 white chairs, each painted with a cross and rose, in November 2017. (Eric Gay/AP)
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez described in his judgment how, in a span of seven minutes and 24 seconds, the gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, fired 450 rounds using an AR-556 rifle. Worshipers at the small First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., scrambled to take cover under pews during the routine Sunday service, and the massacre left children among the dead and multigenerational gaps in some families.
“Ultimately, there is no satisfying way to determine the worth of these families’ pain,” Rodriguez said in his judgment on Monday. He called the case “unprecedented in kind and scope.”
The compensation comes after a separate trial last year, in which the court concluded that the Air Force did not flag a conviction that may have prevented Kelley from legally buying the weapon used in the shooting. The court found in 2021 “that the Government failed to exercise reasonable care in its undertaking to submit Kelley’s criminal history to the FBI” and therefore held that it was “60% responsible” for the attack and injuries.
Kelley first opened fire outside the small community church; the casualties came after he sprayed bullets at the congregation inside before he fled the scene and later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Texas church gunman, able to buy guns due to Air Force mistake, was having ‘domestic dispute’ with family | null | null | null | null | null |
She was speaking not from ego, but from a desire to be appreciated for her independence. Gu is on her way to becoming bigger than some simplistic identity. She doesn’t have to pick a country. Her decision to straddle loyalties has clear financial and popularity benefits, but it doesn’t make her an insincere opportunist. It does open the door for Gu — and the ethereal unity she wants to represent — to be exploited. On cue, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach just happened to show up here with Peng Shuai on Tuesday in what came across as another lame and transparent attempt to whitewash the actions of the Chinese government.
As a transcendent talent, she is a citizen of celebrity. Her blend of interests and identities create a singular and growing icon. In a time in which it seems like society is trying to whittle us down to easy definitions, Gu is Gu. It’s refreshing to see an intersectional human being so comfortably at odds with the moment. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police officers seal off a residential building at the Kwai Chung Estate public housing complex in Hong Kong on Jan. 22. (Chan Long Hei/Bloomberg News)
HONG KONG — Ann Chan spent the last week of January locked down with her husband and two sons in their tiny 300-square-foot (28-square-meter) apartment.
Her public housing complex, Kwai Chung, had turned into a dystopian tableau. Locked down by the government over fears of a coronavirus outbreak, residents could leave only for daily tests administered by hazmat-suited health workers in blue pop-up tents. With all supplies cut off, meals — oily and barely edible — were distributed by authorities. Garbage piled up “like a mountain,” Chan, 37, said, with some of the bags leaking brown liquid all over the floor.
Hong Kong is instead fighting its most severe battle against the coronavirus since it was first detected more than two years ago, pushing the government’s pandemic strategy of “zero covid” to the breaking point. The approach of throttling the virus that has worked, so far, for mainland China is falling apart in Hong Kong, which lacks the ability to enforce the extremely strict lockdowns in cities like Wuhan and Xian — and is destroying the territory’s role as an open international city in the process.
By contrast, once-strict countries such as Singapore, Australia and New Zealand are moving to live with covid, within limits, reopening borders and easing social distancing restrictions.
Isolation centers are filling up, and lockdowns are proving ineffective as new coronavirus cases climb. More than 1,200 new infections were recorded over the past two days. Almost 4,000 people are quarantined in government-run centers across the city.
On Tuesday, Hong Kong authorities further tightened social distancing rules, limiting outdoor gatherings to two people and closing more venues, including religious sites and hair salons. For the first time, restrictions will now also cover private property, with a maximum of two families allowed to gather in a residence at one time.
Hong Kong first detected cases of the omicron coronavirus variant in two flight attendants just before the new year after months without community infections. Last month, a cross-infection at a quarantine hotel sparked a string of local cases. Cases have since mushroomed across the city, including some spread by a government official who held a birthday party attended by 170 guests.
Officials urged residents to stay home during the three-day Lunar New Year holiday last week to no avail. Families visited their relatives and gathered to celebrate the most important festival of the year. Social media swarmed with photos of families feasting over hot pot and poon choi, a festive Chinese casserole, without masks at their homes. Hiking trails and shopping malls were also crowded, as were markets and grocery stores, ahead of the holiday.
Now, mandatory testing sites across the city are the only packed venues amid the worry over soaring coronavirus cases.
Unlike much of the rest of the world, Hong Kong never saw covid overwhelm its hospitals because it was so successful in containing the virus over the past two years. Currently, only two of Hong Kong’s 1,668 active cases — both elderly and unvaccinated — are in critical condition. But that number is expected to rise because Hong Kong has not succeeded in the factor allowing many other countries to open up — vaccinations.
Only 22 percent of people over 80 in Hong Kong have two doses of a coronavirus vaccine and just half of those between the ages of 70 and 79 are vaccinated.
Authorities have struggled to incentivize shots, in part because life remains largely unchanged regardless of vaccination status. There are no restrictions on the unvaccinated and all covid cases are hospitalized in Hong Kong, whether vaccinated or not, severely ill or asymptomatic, a policy that holds even as isolation facilities are filling up.
“If we are saying, ‘Look the vaccine is going to protect you,’” but do not change procedures for the vaccinated, then “the interpretation is that the vaccine didn’t protect me at all, it failed, because I’m still being isolated, and quarantined, and treated like a patient,” said Ooi Eng Eong, an expert on emerging infectious diseases at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.
“We saw through the virus — it is not a dystopian virus that will destroy mankind,” said Albert Au-yeung, a 30-year-old Hong Kong resident who said he is not avoiding gatherings or crowds. “Each year, we are adapting more to the virus. Why should we walk such an extreme path?” | null | null | null | null | null |
MOSCOW — French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Kyiv on Tuesday to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, pushing a plan to de-escalate the “extreme tension” between Russia and NATO over potential Ukrainian membership in the alliance in his effort to pave the way for talks on a new security deal for Europe and Russia.
Zelensky tweeted a welcome message to Macron, saying it was the first time a French president had visited his country in 24 years.
“I’m convinced it will be fruitful for our states,” he said, adding that Ukraine and France are “interested in deepening cooperation in the security sphere and strengthening economic cooperation.”
“On the fundamental points, unfortunately, we did not receive a response. Therefore, this topic remains open in the full sense of the word and remains the most important for us,” Peskov told reporters Tuesday.
“But so far, of course, we can’t say that any real solutions are being probed. We do not feel or see the willingness of our Western partners to take our concerns into account.”
He denied a British press report that Macron and Putin had reached an agreement on Ukraine and accused the West of ramping up tensions by sending planeloads of arms and ammunition to Ukraine.
Putin, for the first time Monday, said some of Macron’s proposals might offer a joint path to de-escalation.
Macron said his talks with Putin had focused on their “willingness to work together on the security guarantees that will allow us to build a new order of security and stability in Europe.”
“There’s no security for the Europeans if there is no security for Russia,” Macron declared.
Europe, he said, faces an “extremely serious moment” in its history.
Putin said that Russia “would do everything possible to find compromises acceptable to everyone,” but he called on the United States and NATO to accept Russia’s demands.
Moscow has demanded sweeping security guarantees that would rewrite Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture, giving Russia a veto on NATO expansion and rolling back NATO forces and equipment from Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.
Putin on Monday repeated his demand for an end to NATO’s eastern expansion, calling it a key threat to Russian security. “It’s not us moving toward NATO,” he said, after meeting Macron. “It’s NATO moving toward us.” He said there would be “no winners” if war broke out between NATO and Russia.
NATO and the United States have offered Moscow compromises on arms control, but Putin said these were of secondary importance to Moscow.
Peskov said Russian forces massed in Belarus for a major joint military exercise beginning Thursday would leave that country later this month at the end of the event, echoing comments last month from Belarusian military commanders.
U.S. officials are concerned that the exercise could be used as part of a multipronged invasion of Ukraine. The maneuvers involve Russian troops and equipment that have traveled more than 6,000 miles to Belarus and the deployment of advanced missile systems, fighter planes and bombers.
Macron, who has long pushed for a European foreign policy that is more independent of Washington, has spoken regularly by phone with Putin in recent weeks. In a joint news conference following Monday’s Kremlin meeting, Macron called the coming days “decisive.”
Putin again called on Zelensky on Monday to implement the 2015 Minsk agreement that provided for a measure of autonomy in Ukraine’s east and an amnesty for Russian-backed insurgents there. The accord, viewed as generally favorable to Moscow, was brokered by Berlin and Paris after several Ukrainian military defeats following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have repeatedly called for revisions to the agreement.
“You may like it or may not like it, but my beauty, you’ve got to put up with it,” the Russian president said, using a crude Russian saying.
Meanwhile, an influential separatist commander in Ukraine’s contested eastern territories reportedly urged Russia to send 30,000 reinforcements to bolster rebel forces. Alexander Khodakovsky said the separatists have 30,000 fighters of their own but that only 10,000 are fit for front-line duties. “We need to have at least 40,000, but 40,000 with automatic rifles on the front line,” he told Reuters.
Noack reported from Paris and Pannett from Sydney. Missy Ryan in Washington contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
In a state that is staunchly supportive of abortion rights, legislators are preparing for a world post-Roe v. Wade
Sam Goldman of Refuse Fascism speaks at a rally organized by the “Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights” group in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 22, 2022, the 49th anniversary of the court's Roe v. Wade decision. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“We are hoping to be a model for other states to follow,” said Lucy Leriche, vice president of Vermont Public Policy at Planned Parenthood Northern New England. “In states all over the country, politicians are moving to take away reproductive rights, specifically abortion rights, and we could be an example of another way.”
When Leriche first raised the idea of a constitutional amendment for abortion rights in 2018, Leriche said, some in Vermont dismissed it as unnecessary. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Executive producer Serena Williams arrives at the premiere of “King Richard” during the American Film Fest at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Sunday, Nov. 14, 2021, in Los Angeles. Williams is normally the one participating in a major championship matchup, but the six-time Wimbledon winner is looking forward to watching the Super Bowl along with her commercial. The tennis superstar stars in a Michelob ULTRA commercial along with several other athletes such as Peyton Manning, Jimmy Butler and Nneka Ogwumike for a competitive game of bowling. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
What Can Anti-Trump Republicans Actually Do?
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 8: Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) looks on as Joseph Blount, Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer, Colonial Pipeline testifies during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing to examine threats to critical infrastructure, focusing on examining the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack at the U.S. Capitol on June 8, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images) (Photographer: Pool/Getty Images North America)
After the Republican National Committee censured Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and claimed that the Jan. 6 committee they’re serving on is persecuting people for “legitimate political discourse,” several Republican senators were quick to criticize their own party’s leadership. Most notably Utah’s Mitt Romney: “Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol. Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost.”
Romney and the others took some flack as usual for just talking, rather than doing something. To some extent that’s simply an inaccurate criticism. In politics, speech is action. And those who support the rule of law should accept allies where they can find them, and for whatever they’re able to contribute. Romney in particular voted to convict former President Donald Trump in both impeachment trials, and he supported a nonpartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attacks.
That said, if Romney really thought that the fate of the republic was on the line, what could he do in addition to speaking up?
The problem for Romney is that he doesn’t have much leverage. Unlike Senator Joe Manchin, Romney simply doesn’t have a key vote. Democrats know that Manchin could cross the aisle and give Republicans a 51-49 majority, and in doing so shut down not only any hope of passing legislation with only Democratic votes, but also endangering President Joe Biden’s judicial and executive-branch nominees.
Romney can’t do anything of that importance. Democrats don’t need his vote on nominations, and he isn’t going to give it to them on any mainstream liberal legislation that Manchin or Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema won’t support. Romney could flip to supporting for the Democrats’ voting-rights agenda. But he can’t deliver the 10 Republican votes needed to break a filibuster.
That doesn’t mean Romney has no leverage at all. Defecting from the party wouldn’t change much this year, but a pledge to help the Democrats organize the Senate next year would be a real threat to a Republican majority. It would be an even greater threat if Romney could persuade two or three other Republicans to caucus with him as independent conservatives — continuing to vote as they always have on substantive measures, but supporting the Democrats on procedural votes. To be sure, I’m highly skeptical that Romney could get even one Republican to join him. But if he could, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would have to at least consider taking them seriously.
Even so, while Romney could certainly endanger a future Republican majority, that’s something that punishes mainstream Republicans as much as or more than it punishes Trump and his allies. It’s hard to see how giving Democrats a Senate majority in 2023 would prevent Trump from winning the presidential nomination or the 2024 election or even make it more difficult for him. Nor would it make it more likely that Trump is indicted or convicted of anything. Meanwhile, if what Romney wants is to reform the party beyond just the influence of the former president, it’s hard to see how leaving would help.
All that said, Romney does have one weapon he could play or threaten to play: a third-party run for the presidency in 2024 if Trump is the Republican nominee. If Romney threatened not just to run, but to do his best to defeat the Republican candidate? I don’t know that he could guarantee a Democratic win, but he could certainly make one far more likely. (Just by, for example, staying off the ballot in Democratic-leaning states while qualifying and campaigning in Republican-leaning ones.) That may not do much to ultimately reform the Republican Party, but it would certainly decrease the chances of Trump’s winning a second term.
All this is fanciful, which is sort of the point; there are no obvious options for Romney and the small handful of openly anti-Trump Republicans in Congress. Realistically, they can continue working on an update of the Electoral Count Act. Perhaps there are other similar measures that might help. They can support anti-Trump Republicans in upcoming primary elections. And just plain speaking out isn’t nothing. But the truth is, the current dysfunctional Republican Party is a long way down the path they’ve chosen, and there’s no obvious way back. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Los Angeles Rams opened as a 3½-point favorite over the Cincinnati Bengals and the spread has since moved to 4½, an underwhelming number for any bettor looking to back the Rams because it is past the three-point mark, a key betting number for NFL wagering.
Since 2015 — when the NFL moved extra-point attempts back from what was essentially a 20-yard field goal to a 33-yard attempt — 24 out of 273 games (8.8 percent) with a spread of three points when betting closed ended with a margin of victory of exactly three. That’s the highest percentage of pushes for any point spread over that span. Teams that were favored by exactly four points pushed once in 94 games and have not done so since Week 11 of the 2018 season. Just three teams favored by 4½ points over the last seven seasons, playoffs included, have won by exactly five points.
Focusing on those exact results may seem unnecessary compared to focusing on how often favorites cover those numbers, but those specific results matter because they help establish the cost of a half point. The most critical half point is off the three, to -2.5 or +3.5, because those help turn the most likely margin of victory into a winning bet. By knowing how often those results occur, you know the value you need to either get back for giving more points, or pay to get points.
The best and worst Super Bowl squares to own
As you can see, betting the Rams at -4 or -4½ doesn’t significantly improve your chances of cashing, so you have two choices: back them at a lower spread and pay more “juice,” or commission, to the sportsbook or go for a bigger spread at plus-money odds. If you choose the former, you are looking for Rams -2½ at -179 or better. If you choose the latter, you want Rams -6.5 at a minimum of +114. Those two prices are a similar value to Rams -4½ when factoring in the cost of each half-point to get you there.
If you choose to back the Bengals +4½, you don’t need to overcomplicate your thinking. You are already through the key number of three and just need to find the best price.
You could, of course, forgo the point spread altogether and play the money line, just make sure you are getting fair value for the risk. Since 2002, the first year the league expanded to 32 teams, teams favored by 3½ to 4½ points on the spread have won 63 percent of their matchups, playoffs included. That equates to a fair-value money line of -170 for the Rams. Conversely, a fair-value money line for the Bengals would be +170.
In assessing bets on the game’s total, my projections show it could be a lower scoring game than the lines suggest. The total opened at 49½ and 50 in most areas and has slipped to as low as 48. I am not sure that’s low enough. The Rams are scoring 2.3 points per drive this postseason and the Bengals are chipping in 2.3 points per drive. After adjusting each team’s scoring rate for strength of schedule and accounting for 11 drives per team, we can estimate these two squads will score an average of 46 total points. The adjusted scoring rates also project the total to come under 49 points 57 percent of the time, a positive expectation for an under 49 wager at -110.
You could also look for an alternate line. Some suggestions include under 46 points at +136 or better, under 45 points at +151 or better and under 44 points at +176 or better. | null | null | null | null | null |
Walter Johnson senior Emma Kothari competes during a polar bear meet on Jan. 19 in Bethesda. (Zeke Ross)
Walter Johnson High had hoped to host its third outdoor meet of the indoor track season two weeks ago, but cold weather and renewed covid restrictions forced the team’s coaches to reschedule the event. Last week, amid similar challenges, the school canceled it altogether.
It’s another example of local teams reckoning with what they hoped would be a normal season but what has instead become one filled with obstacles in the way of competition.
“There’s nothing regular about this,” Walter Johnson assistant coach Tom Martin said. “This fall, you know, we got nearly what I would say is kind of a regular, almost a regular cross-country season. … But this whole [covid] resurgence, it’s just been really tough.”
Facing a scarcity of indoor track venues after the transition of Prince George’s Sports and Learning Complex into a vaccination site, Montgomery County schools implemented a slate of polar bear meets to provide athletes a chance to compete outside. But the county has temperature requirements that prevent runners from competing if conditions drop below 40 degrees at noon on competition days, causing many of those meets to be scrapped.
“It’s been a challenge, for sure,” Walter Johnson senior Emma Kothari said. “It’s kind of defeating because you’re working toward it, you’re excited, and then it gets taken away from you. And so you think like, ‘Oh, I don’t even have, like, a chance anymore.’ ”
While Virginia schools have long held similar outdoor events during the winter, Maryland teams have had to make drastic adaptations midway through the season.
Martin has been impressed by his athletes’ ability to stay motivated ahead of state championships later this month.
“There’s no real choice but to keep your head up for regions and states,” Kothari said. “It’s nice to be around a team that always stays positive. I think that’s one of the strengths of our team.”
After some doubt about whether a state championship would be possible without the Prince George’s facility available, the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association made plans to instead host the event at the Fifth Regiment Armory in Baltimore on Feb. 18.
Martin says the outdated venue isn’t ideal, primarily because of its military-grade floor coating that could be slippery for runners.
“It’s not the best place, but it is like everything else about these past two years — it’s better than nothing,” Martin said. “All these kids want is a chance to compete.”
After Landon wrestlers Nate Furgeson and Anthony Savoy won close matches to take the 160- and 170-pound titles at the Interstate Athletic Conference championship on Saturday, Bears 182-pounder Nico Schermer stepped to the mat with plans to add another win.
St. Stephen’s/St. Agnes senior Andrew Lavayen quickly stopped Landon’s momentum.
Lavayen, a 2020 IAC champion as a sophomore the last time this meet was held, defended his title with a dominant 15-3 victory and temporarily silenced the cheerful Landon wrestlers.
“I’m not just there to compete with them. I’m there to dominate,” Lavayen said. “I don’t care what school singlet I’m wearing. At the end of the day, it’s two people on the mat.”
While Lavayen’s wrestling resume also includes a third-place finish in the state in 2020 and a top-10 performance at the 2021 National Preps tournament, he didn’t wrestle until high school.
Lavayen played baseball throughout his life and added basketball as his winter sport in middle school before his brother’s friend, who was a senior captain of the wrestling team, encouraged him to shift his focus to the mat.
At a meet in West Virginia as a freshman, Lavayen had all but pinned his opponent — because he didn’t know how. Lavayen only knew a double and stand-up, so he just continued beating down his opponent — who was trying to roll to his back and quit — for the entire six minutes. Still, his dominance was promising.
“That’s when I realized he had a lot of potential,” Coach Trae Humphreys said.
Last week, for the first time in school history, the Broadneck boys’ and girls’ swimming teams swept the Anne Arundel County championships. Yet it’s almost a certainty the Bruins won’t show up on top at the regional and state meets — through no fault of their own.
At the state meets, many Anne Arundel teams fall short of their Montgomery County peers because their top swimmers are tied up with club team championships that conflict. (The club championships for many of Montgomery County’s top swimmers, meanwhile, are held different days.)
“I’m hoping that someday, Anne Arundel County will get to really show all their top-tier swimmers at those Maryland high school state championships,” Broadneck Coach Colleen Parr Winans said. “Counties are wonderful. For us, that’s our pinnacle.”
Broadneck senior Caitlin Deitch’s time (52.75) in the 100-yard freestyle won her the top time at the county championships and would probably put her on the podium at the state meet. Instead, she’ll race with her club team. Nevertheless, Deitch is happy that a lot of her teammates who don’t swim with a club team will be able to compete.
“I do think there are a lot of club swimmers who would like to participate in state championships, but we do have a lot of faster swimmers who did not get to go to counties but will get to go to regions and states because the club swimmers won’t be there,” Deitch said. “I feel like they definitely will make it to states. We have a lot of fast swimmers on our team, not just the club kids.”
Heading into its third regular season matchup against Washington Catholic Athletic Conference rival St. John’s on Friday night, Bishop O’Connell had something to prove. The Knights beat the Cadets in early December but had been dominated last time out, 5-0, and they knew that wasn’t sufficient.
“We did not play physical in the second game, and thus we got skated right out of the barn,” O’Connell Coach Flip Collins said. “Between the players and the coaching staff, we were embarrassed by that performance.”
The rubber match, a 5-5 tie, showed the teams are about equal.
With time winding down and the Knights trailing by one Friday, O’Connell pulled its goalie ahead of a faceoff. The Knights executed Collins’s play to get the puck into the corner, and Sam Segar netted the equalizer with 37 seconds remaining from the near slot after a scramble in front of the net left the puck loose.
Segar, a junior, is playing his first season at O’Connell. He initially enrolled at Culver Military Academy in Indiana, but a coaching change precipitated his transfer over the summer. He missed about a month early in the season because of injuries, but after returning, “he has made an immediate impact,” Collins said.
His lasting impact Friday came after the Knights lost a two-goal lead and had to come from behind. The teams will play again Feb. 15 in the WCAC tournament.
“We needed to push back and show them we’re not going anywhere, we’re going to be a tough team to play in the playoffs,” Collins said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Wishing for Canadian party leaders to be elected in any predictable way is probably pointless. Parties are outside the jurisdiction of the federal elections bureaucracy and jealously guard their freedom to play by their own rules, however erratic. They should, however, realize by now how useful it would be to have a rule that a party leader’s term only extends to the day after a general election, at which point he or she must seek a second mandate in a proper, open leadership race. | null | null | null | null | null |
Monifa McKnight was voted Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022 by the Montgomery County school board to be the district's next superintendent.(Montgomery County Public Schools) ( and Montgomery County Public Schools/Montgomery County Public Schools)
Montgomery County voted to hire its first woman as school superintendent — an African American educator who was a leader during the pandemic — a milestone in Maryland’s largest school system and another marker of its ever-increasing diversity.
McKnight is expected to become the second African American leader, following former Superintendent Paul Vance, at the helm from 1991 to 1999. Her appointment is contingent on successful negotiations on a four-year contract and support from the state superintendent.
Afterward the issue of race was raised by Black pastors who alleged in a sharply worded letter that McKnight was being vilified in a political attempt to destroy a professionally qualified woman of color. They said a string of county and union leaders appeared to be using back-door politics to publicly discredit her — a charge that they rejected.
“It has been a rough two years,” said Brenda Wolff, school board president, at the Tuesday meeting. “I say we have to let the healing begin, and it starts today.”
McKnight, who started in Montgomery as a teacher and principal, has led the school system since last June, following the retirement of former Superintendent Jack R. Smith. Smith, who announced he was stepping down less than a year into his second four-year contract, cited medical issues with a grandson that resulted in a move to be with his daughter’s family in Maine.
Byron Johns, education chair of the county branch of the NAACP, said he expects McKnight will continue to build on the work Smith did. “She understood it, she was a part of it, and she will build on it and accelerate the progress, versus somebody new who goes to the bottom of learning curve and now has to figure out what direction the district should take," she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Benedict Cumberbatch stars in "The Power of the Dog," which earned the most Oscar nominations Tuesday. (Kirsty Griffin/Netflix via AP)
“The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel set on a family ranch in 1920s Montana, triumphed at the 94th annual Academy Award nominations on Tuesday morning, earning 12 nods, the most of any film.
This was followed close behind with “Dune,” Denis Villeneuve’s epic based on Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel, which landed 10 nominations. “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s fictionalized glimpse into his family’s final year living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles of 1969, as well as “West Side Story,” Steven Spielberg’s revival of the Broadway musical, tied for seven.
Rounding out the best picture category included “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s celebrity-packed satire about how the modern world would react if a comet was on a path to destroy the Earth; “King Richard,” starring Will Smith as the tenacious father of tennis prodigies Venus and Serena Williams; and “CODA,” the story, based on a French film, of a hearing teenage girl who has a deaf mother, father and brother.
“Licorice Pizza,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1970s coming-of-age story set in his hometown of the San Fernando Valley; “Drive My Car,” the Japanese drama focused on an unexpected bond between a young driver tasked to chauffeur an actor; and “Nightmare Alley,” Guillermo del Toro’s thriller based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel about a carnival con man, round out the contenders for the most coveted prize.
The Oscars will air March 27 on ABC at 8 p.m. Eastern. The network has already confirmed that for the first time in three years, the ceremony will have a host; Variety reported that the producers are considering the idea of splitting the job among multiple people.
Read our analysis of the top categories below.
Analysis: There are no surprises here, really. Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical “Belfast” and Jane Campion’s calculated “The Power of the Dog” were each considered a front-runner for this category, the latter racking up the most nominations of any film. A few other contenders were also directed by academy favorites, including the “West Side Story” remake (Steven Spielberg), the Bradley Cooper-starring adaptation of “Nightmare Alley” (Guillermo del Toro) and the nostalgic coming-of-age film “Licorice Pizza” (Paul Thomas Anderson, who has landed twice as many screenplay nods in the past as he has best picture).
“CODA” landing a best picture nomination is a remarkable feat both for director Sian Heder and the deaf community, given that the intimate feature centers on the family dynamic of a teenager who is the only hearing person in her family. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car,” the sole international feature to land a nod here, was named last year’s best film by the National Society of Film Critics.
Reinaldo Marcus Green’s “King Richard” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune,” both well received and distributed by Warner Bros., boost the presence of streaming services on the Oscars stage; due to the pandemic, the films were released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. Adam McKay’s polarizing climate satire “Don’t Look Up” joined “The Power of the Dog” on Netflix, where it made quite a splash.
Analysis: This is a race to watch. It’s easy to take artists as established as Steven Spielberg for granted, but the lively direction of “West Side Story” served as a reminder of his immense talent. The academy’s love for “Belfast” extended not only to Kenneth Branagh as a screenwriter but also as a director (which will maybe overshadow the mixed reviews for his more recent release, “Death on the Nile”). This is Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s first best director nomination, Jane Campion’s second (after “The Piano” in 1994) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s third (after “There Will Be Blood” in 2007 and Phantom Thread in 2017). Campion’s nod for “The Power of the Dog” makes her the first woman in Oscars history to be nominated for best director more than once.
Analysis: Nicole Kidman as Hollywood icon Lucille Ball was a shoo-in — as was Olivia Colman, expertly unsettling in “The Lost Daughter” and an Oscar winner twice over since 2019. Critics were split on “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” but the academy loves a drastic physical transformation. The most notable inclusions here are Penelope Cruz, whose subtle performance in “Parallel Mothers” earned praise but still somehow feels underrated, and Kristen Stewart, whose tumultuous take on Princess Diana was snubbed by the BAFTAs and Screen Actors Guild awards.
Analysis: Tough luck to anyone running against Denzel Washington, particularly when he’s up for a Shakespearean showcase directed by a Coen brother. But the others in this category still pull their weight. After starring in some real duds in the past several years, Will Smith shone in “King Richard,” about the persistence of famed tennis coach (and father) Richard Williams. Javier Bardem wasn’t the most obvious choice to play Desi Arnaz — a knee-jerk reaction to the casting news was the lack of resemblance — but has played some of his most notable dramatic roles in the past with a touch of comedy. Andrew Garfield proved himself a reliable, moving performer as Jonathan Larson in “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” while Benedict Cumberbatch might have surprised audiences with the harsh exterior and buried trauma he brought to a 1920s rancher in “The Power of the Dog.”
Analysis: This is Dame Judi Dench’s eighth Oscar nomination, but it doesn’t feel like hers to win. She’s got stiff competition in Ariana DeBose, who follows Rita Moreno’s Oscar-winning Maria in the original adaptation of “West Side Story” but somehow managed to make the fiery character her own, and Jessie Buckley, whose star has quickly risen since her breakout role in 2018’s “Wild Rose.” Kirsten Dunst and Aunjanue Ellis both stole their movies — Dunst as the new wife of a rancher, crumbling under pressure, and Ellis as Brandi Williams, the loving, protective mother of tennis stars Venus and Serena.
Analysis: J.K. Simmons is the unexpected supporting actor contender here, nominated for his take on the “I Love Lucy” actor William Frawley; the more wishful among us might have hoped for Ben Affleck, arguably the most successful performer in Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel.” The other four actors in this category earned buzz throughout award season, whether Ciarán Hinds’s loving grandfather in “Belfast,” Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee’s stepfather-stepson duo in “The Power of the Dog,” or Troy Kotsur’s tenderhearted father in “CODA.” This nomination makes Kotsur the first deaf male actor to land an Oscar nod, according to Deadline. | null | null | null | null | null |
In a state that is staunchly supportive of abortion rights, legislators are preparing for a post-Roe v. Wade world
“We are hoping to be a model for other states to follow,” said Lucy Leriche, vice president of Vermont Public Policy at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. “In states all over the country, politicians are moving to take away reproductive rights, specifically abortion rights, and we could be an example of another way.” | null | null | null | null | null |
One lawmaker accused the British prime minister of drifting toward a ‘a Trumpian style of politics’
An image from a video released by the British Parliament shows Prime Minister Boris Johnson, left, addressing opposition Labour party leader Keir Starmer at the House of Commons on Feb. 2. (Uk Parliamentary Recording Unit Handout/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Johnson clarified his remarks about Starmer on Feb. 3, saying he had not meant to imply the opposition leader had personally failed to prosecute sex offender Savile. Despite this, the smear prompted senior cabinet ministers, among them finance secretary Rishi Sunak, to distance themselves from Johnson’s remarks. Johnson’s long-standing political aide Munira Mirza also quit over the Savile comments, calling them a “scurrilous accusation” in her resignation letter.
In 2018, when he was a backbench lawmaker and columnist, he compared Muslim women who wear face veils to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers.” He later gave a qualified apology stating that “in journalism you need to use language freely.” He previously also made comments about people from Africa having “watermelon smiles,” which he said were taken out of context, and as Mayor of London he caused offense by referring to President Barack Obama as “part-Kenyan” with an “ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Josh Neuman, an American skateboarder and influencer, was killed along with three other men after a sightseeing plane crashed into a lake in Iceland, his family confirmed — saying in a Monday night statement he died “doing what he loved.”
Icelandic officials said they used sonar technology and an autonomous submarine to find the bodies believed to be the men at a depth of up to 157 feet in the country’s second-largest lake, Thingvallavatn, after a 1,000-person search and rescue operation was launched when the Cessna 172 plane disappeared Thursday without sending a distress signal.
His family, describing him as a “doer,” a “dreamer” and “gentle soul,” said Neuman’s first sighting of the northern lights left him saying: “This is the happiest day of my life.” The photo they posted showed Neuman surrounded by green flashes dancing around him.
Police chief Oddur Arnason told the Associated Press that bad weather has prevented rescue teams from retrieving the bodies. “For the safety of divers we have to wait until the weather improves,” Arnason said. Calls to Icelandic police for comment were not returned by early Tuesday.
Neuman, who had been living in Los Angeles, was globally known for his daring skating videos, which showed him speeding through scenic routes around the world. His YouTube channel has almost 1.2 million subscribers.
According to his official website, Neuman had been recording longboarding videos since the age of 12 and had a passion for extreme sports. In recent years, Neuman had worked with brands including Prada, Sony, Lexus and GoPro.
Neuman, the AP reports, “was best known for creating one of the most-watched skateboarding videos on YouTube.”
One video titled “Raw Runn: The Cliffs of France” has been viewed on YouTube more than 1.6 million times since it was first shared in March 2019.
“Josh didn’t just live life, he was life,” the statement read, adding that the content creator had a “quest for adventure” and viewed “the world through an opportunistic lens.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Marion Napoli, volunteer
Marion Napoli, 93, a Montgomery County volunteer at polls on election days and with Meals on Wheels, died Dec. 17 at a health-care facility in Silver Spring, Md. The cause was pneumonia, said a son, Mark Napoli.
Mrs. Napoli, a resident of Bethesda, Md., was born Marion Schaefer in Bremen, Germany. She was a German-English translator immediately after World War II and assisted in postwar de-Nazification efforts in Germany, her family said.
She had lived in the Washington area since 1962 and was a real estate sales agent in the 1980s. As a young woman, she was an athlete in Germany and was a lifelong swimmer and tennis player.
Dominick Pampillonia, jeweler
Dominick Pampillonia, 93, who with his father and brother founded Pampillonia Jewelers in Bethesda, Md., in the early 1950s, died Dec. 30 at his home in Bethesda. The cause was respiratory failure, said a son, Dino Pampillonia.
Mr. Pampillonia was born in Washington. He was active in the operation of the family jewelry shop for more than 50 years.
Robert Faron, lawyer
Robert Faron, 74, a Washington lawyer who retired in 2016 from the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Information Services division, where he was acting chief of monitoring and compliance, died Dec. 22 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. The cause was multiple myeloma, said his wife, Mary Sue Faron.
Mr. Faron was born in New York City and moved to Washington in 1975. He had been with Homeland Security for nine years when he retired. Earlier, he had been deputy assistant general counsel with the Energy Department and a lawyer in private practice whose specialties included renewable energy.
Richard Dassing, D.C. police officer
Richard Dassing, 74, a Washington police officer for 24 years who retired in 1994 at the rank of sergeant, died Dec. 21 at his home in Elkridge, Md. The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Alyce Dassing.
Mr. Dassing was born in Newark, and grew up in Silver Spring, Md. As a teenager, he joined the Wheaton (Md.) Volunteer Rescue Squad and once helped to deliver a baby in the back of an ambulance, his wife said. For several years with the D.C. police, he was assigned to the Special Operations Division, which includes protecting visiting heads of state and government, and investigating terrorist threats. | null | null | null | null | null |
Vice President Mike Pence presides over a joint session of Congress as it convenes to count the electoral college votes cast in November's election, at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021. (Saul Loeb/Pool via AP)
Former vice president Mike Pence’s declaration on Friday that Donald Trump was “wrong” in claiming that Pence could simply reject cast electoral votes on Jan. 6 of last year was not a novel declaration, even from Pence. But it did crystallize a useful test for other Republicans: With whom did they side on the issue, Trump or Pence? Did they agree with the former president that one man can simply set aside electoral votes he didn’t like or did they agree with Pence that such an idea should be directly rejected.
In the days since Pence’s speech, we’ve seen a familiar pattern emerge: Most Republicans aren’t terribly eager to talk about it but those who do aren’t terribly eager to agree with Trump.
The first person to opine on Pence’s comments, quite predictably, was Trump himself. In a statement, he reiterated his assertion that an effort underway on Capitol Hill to clarify the rules surrounding the vote count prove that Pence did have the power to reject electoral votes.
Some Republicans are explicitly rejecting Trump’s assertion. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), for example, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that he disagreed with Trump’s loosely formed legal opinion — and noted that it creates a slippery slope.
“I just don’t think a vice president has that power because if the vice president has that power, Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden in four years or two years, and then Kamala Harris can decide not to overturn the election,” Rubio said. “I don’t want to wind up there.”
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, whose relationship with Trump has been the human equivalent of a ping-pong ball’s relationship with a net, took Trump’s side against Pence — but not while agreeing with the legal argument about the vice president’s capabilities.
“Mike Pence is a good man. He’s an honest man,” Haley said on Fox News on Monday night. “I think he did what he thought was right on that day.” And then the critique: “I will always say I’m not a fan of Republicans going after Republicans because the only ones that win when that happens are the Democrats and the media, and we have to keep our eyes on 2022.”
One Republican says that the results of a presidential election can be unilaterally rejected by one of that election’s losers. Another says they cannot. Why must there be all of this intraparty fighting with the midterm elections looming!
To Haley’s and Rubio’s credit, they at least offered an opinion. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose political ideology seems to hew most consistently to that of a host on “Fox & Friends,” declined to engage on the contentious question when asked Monday.
A reporter asked with whom he sided. “I’m not. I,” DeSantis began . . . before declining to continue. As with his refusal to state whether he’d gotten a booster shot, the governor would rather not take a firm position on an issue that’s splitting Republican opinion. DeSantis did then add that he’d worked well with Trump’s administration.
A few people did rise to Trump’s defense. People such as Stephen K. Bannon and Roger Stone. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Bannon that he’d been part of a group trying to convince Pence to reject the election results at a meeting in the White House before Jan. 6 and that he was “quite disappointed” that the effort didn’t yield results. Particularly given the source, the defense of the former president was not particularly rousing.
Appearing on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R) (who’s made one or two fewer trips over the ping-pong net than Haley) went after Trump, saying that the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 was “incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words last week: Overturn the election.” (Ping!) He later moderated that assertion a bit. (Pong!)
Since 2015, the pattern within the Republican Party has been to figure out how to make Trump’s more extreme positions morally, rhetorically or logically palatable. So we get the obviously untrue claims about rampant voter fraud repackaged as concerns about increased access to voting, for example. Here, though, there’s not really a compromise position. Either Pence could have simply rejected cast ballots or he couldn’t. And, presented with that yes-or-no question, it does not yet seem like Republicans are eager to flatly say “yes.” | null | null | null | null | null |
What counts as antisemitism? Biden nominee Deborah Lipstadt receives confirmation hearing.
American historian and author Deborah Lipstadt poses for a photo on the red carpet on the occasion of the screening of the movie “Denial” at the Rome Film Festival, Oct. 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
President Biden nominated Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, last July. If approved by the Senate, Lipstadt will have the rank of ambassador, unlike her predecessors. She would oversee the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, which was created by the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004 under President George W. Bush. The position of envoy was mostly vacant during President Donald Trump’s term.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of the rabbinical human rights organization T’ruah, said it’s important to call antisemitism what it is: “Antisemitism is hatred or prejudice of Jews as Jews.” Antisemitism regularly manifests as conspiracy theories that show up in tropes, such as how Jews supposedly control the world. For example, in the recent attack at the synagogue in Colleyville, Tex., the gunman believed he could have a rabbi call another rabbi to get a prisoner released. But many people still downplay the history of antisemitism across the globe. | null | null | null | null | null |
A spokesman for U.S. Soccer declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation of the NWSL. The organization did suspend Dames’s coaching license, it said in a statement, but Bogart said it occurred only after The Post contacted the federation with some of the allegations in this story.
She was only 14 and just getting started with Eclipse when she spoke to police in 1998, one player told The Post. She told them he was a good coach, and when her high school, St. Viator, brought him back the next year, she assumed it meant he had done nothing wrong, she said. She trusted him.
Dames “kept a watchful eye on his players between games, at the pool at the Marriott where they were staying,” the article said. “As the 14- and 15-year-old girls went down the water slide, he listed the colleges that had called him to express interest in each one.” | null | null | null | null | null |
He knew his sled, a piece of fine-tuned equipment that cost thousands of his own dollars, was the fastest in the United States. It was the second one Terdiman had built by Andre Florschutz, a retired German Olympic doubles medalist. The first helped Terdiman and his then-partner, Matt Mortensen, finish third in the 2016-17 World Cup standings, and finish fourth at the PyeongChang Olympics, at once a major accomplishment and a massive disappointment, just one spot off the podium. So when Terdiman decided to take one last shot at the Olympics — this time, with Mazdzer, who won a surprise singles silver in PyeongChang — he went back to Florshutz and commissioned a new sled at the cost of roughly $30,000. | null | null | null | null | null |
Monifa McKnight was approved by the Montgomery County school board to be the district's next superintendent. (Montgomery County Public Schools)
Montgomery County voted to hire its first woman as schools superintendent — an African American educator who was a leader during the pandemic — a milestone in Maryland’s largest school system and another marker of its ever-increasing diversity.
McKnight is expected to become the district’s second African American leader, following Superintendent Paul L. Vance, at the helm from 1991 to 1999. Her appointment is contingent on successful negotiations on a four-year contract and support from the state superintendent.
Brenda Wolff, president of the school board, called the appointment historic and pointed out that it comes during Black History Month, in a building that once served as the school system’s only high school for Black students.
She said that McKnight, who has worked in Montgomery County for two decades, has the experience and vision to meet challenges ahead and help all students reach their potential. Still, she acknowledged that the system of 160,000 students has struggled amid the intense strain of the pandemic.
“It has been a rough two years,” she said. “I say we have to let the healing begin, and it starts today.”
Afterward, the issue of race was raised by Black pastors who alleged in a sharply worded letter that McKnight was being vilified in a political attempt to destroy a professionally qualified woman of color. They said a string of county and union leaders appeared to be using backdoor politics to publicly discredit her — a charge that they rejected.
McKnight has led the school system since June, following the retirement of Superintendent Jack R. Smith. Smith, who announced he was stepping down less than a year into his second four-year contract, cited medical issues with a grandson that resulted in a move to be with his daughter’s family in Maine.
Byron Johns, education chair of the county branch of the NAACP, said he expects McKnight will continue to build on the work Smith did. “She understood it, she was a part of it, and she will build on it and accelerate the progress, versus somebody new who goes to the bottom of learning curve and now has to figure out what direction the district should take,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
In correspondence published in Current Biology on Monday, the researchers said they were reporting the first observations of chimpanzees self-medicating with insects. They said the behavior is further evidence that chimpanzees have the capacity for “prosocial behaviors,” or voluntary actions that serve the best interest of another.
“In the video, you can see that Suzee is first looking at the foot of her son, and then it’s as if she is thinking, ‘What could I do?’ and then she looks up, sees the insect and catches it for her son,’ ” said Alessandra Mascaro, a volunteer at the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project who first observed the behavior.
The chimpanzees work in the same sequence: First, they catch an insect; second, they immobilize it by squeezing it between their lips; third, they place the insect on the wound and move it around; and finally they remove the insect from the wound with their mouth or fingers. | null | null | null | null | null |
Marion Mattingly, juvenile justice advocate
Marion Mattingly, 92, an activist for juvenile justice who volunteered and served in salaried positions for its support, died Dec. 31 at a hospital in Rockville, Md. The cause was complications of pneumonia, said a granddaughter, Marion Steinfels.
Mrs. Mattingly, a Rockville resident, was born Marion Woolley in Los Angeles. Her father, Herbert, was a British navy officer in World War I who participated in the commando raid on Norway during World War II and later was assigned to the U.S. Office of Strategic Services to help train underwater demolition teams, or frogmen.
Mrs. Mattingly, who had lived in the Washington area for 83 years, wrote a column for an American Bar Association publication, served on panels for governors of Maryland, helped craft legislation for the Justice Department, testified before Congress, and was active in such groups as Strategies for Youth and Do the Write Thing.
Demetra Shuler, hospital assistant
Demetra Shuler, 54, a Washington native who had been an emergency room assistant at Inova Fairfax Hospital for about three years, died Dec. 24 at her home in the District. The cause was hypertension and cardiovascular disease, said a daughter, Talaya Shuler.
Charles 'Collie' Agle, nature advocate
Charles “Collie” Agle, 81, a supporter and participant in naturalist causes who was active in campaigns to clean up the Anacostia River in Washington, organized community fix-up and improvement trips to Honduras for Washington youths, and practiced forest conservation techniques and bird sanctuary policies at a West Virginia farm, died Dec. 22 at a hospital in Washington. The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Betsy Agle.
Mr. Agle was a resident and native of Washington. He was a founder and principal teacher at St. Mark’s Meditation Center on Capitol Hill. In the early years of the computer age, he ran classes to help secretaries gain operational skills. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru from 1963 to 1965.
He went mountaineering in the Alps and rode his bicycle around France.
Libby Halaby, women's rights advocate
Libby Halaby, 96, a women’s rights advocate who had been special assistant to first lady Lady Bird Johnson, an assistant to the president of the National Endowment for the Arts, and special assistant to the chair of President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Women, died Jan. 7 at the home of a daughter in San Rafael, Calif. The cause was complications of a fall, said the daughter, Morrow Cater.
Mrs. Halaby was born Libby Anderson in Birmingham, Ala. She was the widow of S. Douglass Cater Jr., a special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson and the president of Washington College in Chestertown, Md.; and of Najeeb Halaby, the former head of the Federal Aviation Administration and Pan American World Airways and the father of Jordan’s Queen Noor, Lisa Halaby. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Justice Department announced Tuesday it had seized more than $3.6 billion in bitcoin allegedly stolen as part of a 2016 hack of Bitfinex, saying authorities have also arrested and charged a husband and wife in New York for allegedly trying to launder the cryptocurrency fortune.
Officials said Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, were arrested on charges of conspiring to launder money. They are accused of trying to launder 119,754 bitcoin that were stolen after a hacker breached Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange, and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions. Prosecutors said the bitcoin was sent to a digital wallet controlled by Lichtenstein.
“Cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said in a written statement. In this case, she said, the defendants’ efforts were ultimately futile as they tried to launder the stolen bitcoin “through a labyrinth of cryptocurrency transactions. Thanks to the meticulous work of law enforcement, the department once again showed how it can and will follow the money, no matter the form it takes.”
Bitfinex had previously offered a reward potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars for information leading to the return of the stolen funds. It was not immediately clear if that reward offer played a role in the government’s case against Lichtenstein and Morgan. Federal officials said they were able to seize about 94,000 of the 119,754 stolen bitcoin, with an estimated value of $3.6 billion.
The value of a cryptocurrency is typically expressed in dollars and is set by public trading conducted by exchange houses; those values can fluctuate wildly. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police respond to dozens of crashes, ice closes bridges
RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia State Police responded to 65 crashes, including two fatal crashes, and icy conditions closed several bridges in central Virginia early Tuesday.
Spokesperson Sgt. Jessica Shehan said most of the crashes police responded to between midnight and 8 a.m. were not life-threatening, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
However, two people were killed in two separate single-vehicle crashes just after 7 a.m., police said. One crash happened on Interstate 295 in Henrico and the other on Interstate 64 in Goochland. Neither victim has been identified.
Icy conditions closed several roads and bridges Tuesday morning, but police cannot confirm ice as a factor in these crashes at this time, Shehan said.
In the Richmond area, the Willey and Huguenot bridges closed for a short time due to wet and icy conditions. Most bridges and overpasses were iced over, according to a statement from Henrico. | null | null | null | null | null |
Xi and Putin have declared a united front against the United States
A Feb. 4 joint statement reveals strong views about sovereignty and territorial integrity — and opposition to outside interference
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, Feb. 4, 2022, during the Winter Olympics. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo/AP)
By Stacie Goddard
On Friday, a joint statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping proclaimed that their strategic and diplomatic partnership has “no limits.” The lengthy declaration promised cooperation on issues ranging from climate change to cybersecurity to the exploration of space.
The two countries also declared a united front against the United States and its allies, if those countries continue to “intensify geopolitical rivalry, fuel antagonism and confrontation, and seriously undermine the international security order and global strategic stability.”
It’s tempting to dismiss these proclamations as mere rhetoric. Certainly, flamboyant statements are no substitute for concrete action. But the joint statement serves as a signal of Russia and China’s plan to cooperate on the current Ukraine crisis — although there is no actual mention of Ukraine. Perhaps more importantly, it’s an explicit salvo in the wider contention over the rules and norms of the global order.
A sign of solidarity on Ukraine?
Friday’s statement represents a marked departure from China’s behavior in previous global crises. When Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008 — at the opening of another Beijing Olympics — China resisted pressure to lend its support. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit held that year, for example, Chinese President Hu Jintao blocked Russia’s efforts to gain recognition for the Russian-occupied provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
In 2014, Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea and went on to support separatists in eastern Ukraine. Here again, China remained relatively silent. China did abstain from votes on two U.N. Security Council resolutions that would have discouraged countries from recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. But rather than framing the abstention as supporting Russia, officials in Beijing explained that the Crimean issue simply involved too many complex “historical and contemporary factors” to make a resolution possible. And while China refused to support U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, it did ultimately abide by them.
In contrast, in both last week’s statement and the meeting between Putin and Xi, China now appears to be making its support for Russia as visible as possible. And it’s doing so despite a strong warning by U.S. officials that Washington would use an “array of tools” against any country — including China — that helps Russia evade sanctions.
Lots of references to “core interests”
A key point to note are the numerous references in the joint statement to “core interests.” Here’s an example: “The sides reaffirm their strong mutual support for the protection of their core interests, state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and oppose interference by external forces in their internal affairs.”
Biden’s rhetoric on Ukraine has been quite moderate. Here’s what that means.
What are these core interests? References to “NATO expansion” and “color revolutions” suggest that Putin wants to make it clear that U.S. support for Ukraine threatens Russia’s core interests — despite any specific mention of “Ukraine” in the document. For China’s part, its core interests are more explicit. One section states that “the Russian side reaffirms its support for the one-China principle, confirms that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and opposes any forms of independence of Taiwan.”
This language of “core interests” is nothing new. China’s leaders have long appealed to core interests when referring to issues of national sovereignty. Up until the 2000s, Beijing limited such appeals to claims over Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang. In 2010, reports suggested Chinese officials were also referring to claims to the South China Sea as “core interests.”
The fact that Friday’s declaration uses the language of core interests in oblique references to the Ukraine crisis is significant. China uses this specific language to signal when there is little room, if any, for negotiation on a specific issue. By invoking core interests in the Feb. 4 joint declaration, China appears to be communicating that it will treat Russia’s territorial claims as if they were as nonnegotiable as its own claims to Taiwan.
The rhetoric of a liberal world order
The Xi-Putin statement suggests solidarity beyond the current Ukraine crisis. Throughout the declaration, the leaders articulate their commitment to work together to defend the stability of the world order. They jointly promise to defend international law, work to strengthen institutions such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization, and accept their responsibility as “world powers” to bring stability to international politics.
Rather than outwardly oppose the existing international order, Xi and Putin chose to purposefully appeal to liberal norms and principles to justify their position. In the first section of the statement, the two leaders commit themselves to supporting democratic principles, noting that they “share the understanding that democracy is a universal human value … and that its promotion and protection is a common responsibility of the entire world community.” Later on, the statement promises to uphold human rights, economic globalization and norms of nuclear nonproliferation.
Some research might say that appealing to liberal norms suggests Xi and Putin have limited ambitions. If Beijing and Moscow fail to advance an alternative vision of order, then they are not seriously challenging the legitimacy of U.S.-led liberal institutions.
Yet, far from following liberal norms, Xi and Putin are strategically qualifying liberal rhetoric with their own preferred norms of national sovereignty. Despite the proclaimed support for democracy and human rights, for example, they simultaneously insist that “every nation has its own unique national features, history, culture, social system” that shape how these rights play out in practice. Universal liberal principles are only so universal in practice.
And Xi and Putin’s rhetoric makes clear that the two countries no longer accept U.S. leadership within these global institutions. The declaration refers to Russia and China as “world powers” three times, and it calls for the “establishment of a new kind of relationships between world powers on the basis of mutual respect.” It declares Beijing and Moscow’s commitment to using their own power to shape “a polycentric world order.”
A joint statement is no substitute for joint action, of course. China and Russia have no formal alliance, and any partnership will come with challenges. But the Xi-Putin declaration represents a deepened commitment between the two countries to a shared view of the world, one with potential implications both for the current crisis in Ukraine and the broader international order.
Stacie Goddard is Mildred Lane Kemper professor of political science and the Paula Bernstein faculty director of the Madeleine K. Albright Institute at Wellesley College. She is the author of “When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order” (Cornell University Press, 2018). | null | null | null | null | null |
Since then, though, Powell has found herself vulnerable to both financial penalties (being sued by voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion) and legal penalties, possibly including disbarment. And she’s offered a very different take on the evidence she had.
In response to the voting-machine lawsuit, Powell’s legal team in March argued that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact” but rather merely as claims to be evaluated in court. She said she was merely serving as an advocate for Trump. She even said that her legal opponents calling her claims “wild accusations” and “outlandish” only reinforced that the claims were not to be taken at face value.
That latter statement is most certainly true. But as with the GOP push for rewriting such election laws, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question. Republicans have indeed often justified those new laws by pointing to the perception of voter fraud and other irregularities, rather than actual proof. But that perception itself owes in large part to the efforts of Powell and her ilk. Polls suggest such claims caught on with a majority of Republicans despite the utter lack of substantiation or wins in court.
Powell didn’t just file these lawsuits, after all; she assured that the Kraken was happening because this wasn’t just provable, but that she had the evidence to prove it. Trump supporters who believed those claims should probably be pretty upset that she’s not putting her money and her legal career where her mouth was.
She could actually try to prove these claims when given these opportunities, such as through the discovery process in the voting-machine case. Instead, she’s acknowledging “reasonable people” would understand she was just saying stuff, and that “perhaps” it was true — which, by implication, means “perhaps” it was not. (It was, in many cases, objectively not.) | null | null | null | null | null |
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