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Some Supreme Court analysts, however, think the court isn’t done with making it harder to sue based on racial gerrymandering. Later this year or next year when the court looks more closely at the Alabama case, the conservative justices could strike down a section of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that is designed to protect minority representation. This section of the law prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race. (In 2013, the Supreme Court led by Roberts struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act that required the federal government to sign off on maps in certain states.)
If the Supreme Court takes down other parts of the Voting Rights Act, the conservative argument that mapmakers should be “race-blind” prevails at the Supreme Court, as Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog wrote. And that would mean that mapmakers don’t have to consider growing Black and Latino populations in Southern and Western states when they draw electoral districts.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee is blasting maps in Tennessee and Kansas for similar reasons.
If the Supreme Court did knock down a key section of the Voting Rights Act and commanded mapmakers to draw maps without taking into account race, what would that look like?
But “race-blind” policies would probably still benefit Republicans by diluting minority voters. University of Michigan’s Jowei Chen and Harvard Law’s Nicholas Stephanopoulos did an analysis of “race-blind” redistricting in all of the nation’s state House districts. They found that there would be “substantially fewer” minority-majority districts, and those that remained would have smaller minority populations in them. In the South in particular, Republicans would benefit from this by picking up more districts.
“[M]aps produced without consideration of party or race typically include more Republican districts …” Chen and Stephanopoulos wrote in the Yale Law Journal.
That’s because they control the mapmaking process in key states which hand the process off to state legislatures. | null | null | null | null | null |
A Jamaican skier at the Olympics? Why a feel-good story has become a flashpoint.
Skier Benjamin Alexander, right, helps carry the flag of Jamaica during Friday's Opening Ceremonies in Beijing. (David J. Phillip/AP)
“I’m 32nd in the world right now, and I should have easily have gone to the Olympics,” said American Steven Nyman, who failed to qualify for his fourth Games. “The Alpine men, the field is so small, it’s going to be a joke. And it’s all taken up by these smaller nations that are pursuing those races. It was just a poorly thought-out system.”
Amid the changes to the qualification landscape, there also have been allegations of impropriety. Alexander’s qualification in giant slalom — which was secured in an event his country’s ski federation helped organize — has drawn scrutiny in the days leading up to competition in Beijing, as some stakeholders have questioned whether races in Liechtenstein and elsewhere were manipulated to help lower-ranked skiers earn bids to the Winter Games. The sport’s governing body, the International Ski Federation (FIS), is investigating at least three qualification races and, as a result, asked the IOC add four more quota spots. The IOC granted that request; Austria received two of the quota spots, while Germany and France each received one.
Since the last Winter Games, the IOC changed its qualification rules for Alpine skiing, trimming the field from 320 athletes in PyeongChang to 306 in Beijing and mandating gender equity, with 153 men and women in each field. Each ski team can have a maximum of 11 athletes per gender, down from 14 at the previous Olympics.
But three of those small events over the past three months, including two Alexander competed in, caught the eye of Federiga Bindi, a former competitive skier turned academic. The points list in slalom and giant slalom is calculated by taking the average of a skier’s five best finishes — determined by a formula involving the number of other racers and the quality of those racers’ handicaps — and in each of those events, Bindi noticed, four of the top-ranked skiers in the fields consistently and significantly underperformed.
“The thing that bugs me the most, is that this year there are [new] quotas … in previous years, these people would be the folklore of the Olympics,” Bindi said in an interview. “This time they’re still going to be that, but they’re stealing actual places from people who have worked over their life. It’s simply not fair.”
“ … I can assure you that if we are required to accept 10 Italy, 10 Austria, 10 Switzerland etc they will just cancel the race,” he wrote. “Impossible for us to go to the Olympics if that’s the situation.”
The races in Liechtenstein could hold up to 25 competitors; seven racers pulled out and just 10 competed. Alexander said some of those who did not compete in the event opted out because of coronavirus concerns, and that neither he nor his federation manipulated any competitors to underperform to help lower-ranked skiers qualify.
“It doesn’t make any sense. There were TV cameras all around. Everything is there,” Alexander said. “FIS investigated multiple times, at the request of some larger nations, and just said repeatedly: There is nothing wrong with these races.”
A FIS spokeswoman said there is no timeline for the investigation into the three events.
Nyman had held out hope that the United States would be granted additional quotas and that he would be able to go to his fourth Olympics. The 17-member U.S. team is the country’s smallest since 1984, and for the 39-year-old Nyman, missing out on these Games is particularly a “punch in the gut” after missing PyeongChang because of a knee injury. At his age, his Olympic window is likely closed.
Nyman has built a friendship with Alexander in recent years — “I’ve been helping guide him along the way and talking to him about this scenario,” Nyman said — and that mentorship included advice about everything from disciplines Alexander should compete in and the equipment he should use. The men trained together a few times as they pursued spots in Beijing.
“Where it gets sticky is where quotas had a massive haircut,” he said. “And a new entrant from some random country whatever, call it Jamaica — when a new entrant from Jamaica kind of replaces a guy who is ranked, I don’t know, 70th in the world — then people get really upset.” | null | null | null | null | null |
’Dangerously hot conditions’ prompt rare February heat alert in Los Angeles
The National Weather Service is warning that visitors from other states may be at risk for heat-related illnesses.
The National Weather Service's expected temperature anomalies on Thursday. Highs will range 15 to 20 degrees or more above average. (WeatherBell) (WeatherBell)
The Weather Service warns of “dangerously hot conditions with temperatures up to 90 degrees possible,” noting that visitors from other states unaccustomed to the toasty weather may be at a greater risk for heat-related illnesses.
Excessive heat watches are issued when “extremely dangerous” heat appears likely within one to three days, according to the National Weather Service. Sixteen million people reside within the alert areas.
Southern California is no stranger to hot weather — Los Angeles averages five days annually that hit 90 degrees or higher — but the time of year is particularly unusual. In fact, the city has only seen seven days that hit 90 degrees during the winter months of December, January or February dating back to 1948. That last time it happened was back on Jan. 31, 2003, when the high peaked at 91 degrees.
The actual excessive heat watch covers coastal Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, as well as the interior valleys. The San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys are included in the watch, as is downtown Los Angeles. Burbank, Anaheim, Santa Ana and Newport Beach are all within the watch area.
It’s the first time dating back to at least 2006, when software began tabulating weather alert issuance, that an excessive heat watch has been hoisted during the month of February in southern California. In fact, all other excessive heat watches issued by the Los Angeles Weather Service office have fallen between May and October; for the San Diego office, between April and October.
The setup isn’t exactly a classic one for extreme heat in southern California, but it does meet the requirements for warming offshore flow. Multiple areas of high pressure are banked to the north, one in southern British Columbia and the other over Saskatchewan and Manitoba. That, coupled with weak low pressure draped across the southern U.S., will funnel air westward over the Sierra Nevada.
As air slides downhill into the lowlands and Inland Empire and deserts of southern California, it will undergo a process called adiabatic compression — greater air pressure near sea level will squeeze and compress the air, which induces a warming and drying. By the time parcels of air make it to Los Angeles between Wednesday and Friday, they’ll be sitting in the upper 80s to near 90 degrees.
The dry atmosphere will be ineffective at trapping heat overnight, permitting temperatures to cool into the upper 50s and allowing some respite from the day’s anomalous warmth.
The Weather Service expects Los Angeles to snag highs of 87 degrees on Wednesday and Friday and perhaps make it up to 89 degrees on Thursday. That would flirt with record territory both Wednesday and Friday, and beat out Thursday’s current record of 85 set in 2016. Record-keeping dates back to 1944.
Average highs in L.A. for early to mid February range between 65 and 66 degrees. Afternoon temperatures late in the workweek will soar 15 to 25 degrees or more above average.
Los Angeles International Airport has never logged a reading above 92 degrees during the month of February. It’s improbable, but not impossible, that monthly records will be tied in a few areas.
Oxnard, Calif., farther northwest, will probably remain a few degrees below records. The predicted highs for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are 80, 82 and 77 degrees, respectively; 88, 84 and 87 are the numbers to beat.
While various records across southern California are in jeopardy, the issuance of an excessive heat watch is more uncharacteristic than the predicted temperatures that would not prompt an excessive heat watch in the hotter months of the year (in spring, summer and fall).
The Weather Service office in Los Angeles did note that the forecasts don’t necessarily meet the conventional requirements for pulling the trigger on an excessive heat warning (typically issued after a watch when dangerously hot conditions are imminent) in their online technical forecast discussion — but emphasized the hazard posed by the heat nonetheless.
The heat fits into a larger pattern of human-induced climate warming. Average winter temperatures in Los Angeles have increased 2 degrees since 1948 — a trend that’s been mirrored dramatically across all seasons in southern California and more broadly across the United States and much of the planet. | null | null | null | null | null |
Yet the allegations of a linguistic siege played a central role in Moscow’s justification of its 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, where the majority of the population is Russian speaking.
But in Ukraine, demographics do not appear to be on Russia’s side. Many young people in Ukraine — with no memory of the Soviet Union but steeped in Ukraine’s 2014 pro-Western revolution — are switching to primarily speak in Ukrainian.
Some of the most popular clubs and trendier sections of traditionally Russian-speaking Kyiv — where tattooed patrons sip craft beers — are now zones for Ukrainian speakers. Attempts to converse Russian can occasionally earn a withering look or sharp criticism not to “use the language of the occupier.”
Moscow’s claims that Russian speakers in Ukraine are being discriminated against as a group belie a multilayered linguistic reality. Various surveys indicate about half the population speaks mostly Ukrainian at home and about 30 percent speak mostly Russians in their households (with the rest speaking both or other languages such as Hungarian, Romanian and Crimean Tatar.) But firm data is hard to come by.
Geography also doesn’t help settle matters. Descriptions of Ukraine’s east as largely Russian speaking, and its west dominated by Ukrainian, are an oversimplification. Large parts of the countryside speak Ukrainian or a mix of Ukrainian and Russian known as Surzhyk.
Russian and Ukrainian languages are closely related and share many common words, but are nevertheless distinct. Russian speakers can have difficulty understanding Ukrainian, and vice versa.
Shymanovskiy supports the law, saying that the Kremlin would always “find a reason for propaganda” regardless of what the Ukrainians did. He thinks that the law helps unite the country. The conflict being fought in eastern Ukraine — a region with a high concentration of Russian speakers — proves his point, he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man fatally shot in Northeast Washington
A 52-year-old man was fatally shot Monday night in a residential neighborhood in Northeast Washington, according to D.C. police.
The shooting occurred about 9:15 p.m. in the 4200 block of Edson Place NE, south of the Deanwood community.
Police said they found the victim, Ernest Dorsey of Northeast Washington, in front of a residence. He died at a hospital later Monday night.
Authorities did not give a possible motive and said Tuesday that no arrest had been made. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rhoda Stevens, Wolf Trap volunteer
Rhoda Stevens, 91, a volunteer for 30 years at the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, died Dec. 6 at her home in Vienna, Va. The cause was a stroke, said a son, Curtis Stevens.
Mrs. Stevens was born Rhoda Pickwick in Lisbon, N.H., and had lived in the Washington area for 47 years. She was a swimming instructor.
Mario Casarella, Catholic U. teacher
Mario Casarella, 88, a teacher in the department of mechanical engineering at Catholic University from 1965 to 1999, died Dec. 22 at a hospital in Silver Spring, Md. The cause was cardiac arrest, pneumonia and renal failure, said a son, Peter Casarella.
Dr. Casarella, a resident of Laurel, Md., was born in Meriden, Conn. He came to live in the Washington area in the late 1950s, working for IBM in Bethesda, Md. While serving on the Catholic University faculty, he also worked as a civilian engineer for the Navy at the David Taylor Model Basin at Carderock, Md.
Stephanie O'Konek, real estate sales agent
Stephanie O’Konek, 69, a real estate sales agent with Pardoe Realty of Georgetown and later with the Washington office of Sotheby’s, died Dec. 24 at a hospital in Rockville, Md. The cause was complications from covid-19, said a friend, Joan Cromwell.
Ms. O’Konek, a resident of Gaithersburg, Md., was a native Washingtonian. She began her real estate career in the 1970s and remained in the business until shortly before her death.
Samo Lesjak, Army chief warrant officer
Samo Lesjak, 87, a retired Army chief warrant officer who lived in the Washington area since 1990, died Oct. 9 in home hospice care in Springfield, Va. The cause was congestive heart failure and terminal bile duct cancer, said his daughter Patricia Lesjak Davis.
A native of Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, what is now Slovenia, Mr. Lesjak fled communist rule in Eastern Europe in 1951 and joined the U.S. Army while living in Italy. In his 16-year active military career, his assignments included time with the 82nd Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne Division and two tours of duty in the Vietnam War. For about 10 years until the late 1990s, he taught college-level business and Serbo-Croat language courses to U.S. service members. | null | null | null | null | null |
As part of that effort, there have been campaigns to stop human trafficking: Last month, signs started popping up in hundreds of Los Angeles airport bathrooms, and solemn video messages from National Football League stars have been playing on loop in the terminals, warning that offenders will face prosecution.
In recent years, sex workers’ rights groups have more vocally criticized the idea that there’s increased sex trafficking during the Super Bowl. Although some anti-trafficking organizations have distanced themselves from the notion as well, it still persists — and continues to give law enforcement a reason to expand their budgets and make dozens of arrests, sex workers’ rights groups argue. These arrests are often a crackdown on sex workers who aren’t being trafficked but are trying to do their jobs, advocates say.
It’s an issue Los Angeles activists say they are particularly concerned about, given that the sporting event will be held in the city’s Inglewood neighborhood, which is predominantly Black and Latino but rapidly gentrifying. Advocates point to the recent clearing of homeless encampments in the neighborhood as a sign that the needs of the city’s most marginalized are not being prioritized as the city prepares for an event that is projected to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told The Washington Post that its Human Trafficking Task Force (HTTF) will be working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and several local police departments to respond to human trafficking during the Super Bowl.
“It doesn’t just get you a penalty, it gets you time behind bars,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said of human trafficking at a news conference in January. He appeared with the It’s a Penalty campaign, the anti-trafficking organization behind the signage at Los Angeles airport. This is the organization’s fifth Super Bowl campaign and its 12th during a global sporting event, said chief executive Sarah de Carvalho at the same press conference.
“People are going to be getting arrested at high rates, and those disruptions are going to continue the cycles of poverty that people are stuck in because of criminalization,” said Alex Makulit of US PROS, one of the advocacy groups organizing the Stop the Raids, an awareness campaign and online symposium focused on the risks they believe sex workers face ahead of the Super Bowl.
The U.S. government commits large amounts of money to combating human trafficking — in December 2021, the Department of Justice announced nearly $87 million “to combat human trafficking, provide supportive services to trafficking victims throughout the United States, and conduct research into the nature and causes of labor and sex trafficking.”
But the government’s approach has been criticized by some. A 2021 report by the USC Gould International Human Rights Clinic found that anti-trafficking efforts rely primarily on law enforcement “raids” or “sweeps.” These are “largely ineffective” at preventing trafficking or protecting survivors, the report found, despite the fact that law enforcement typically portrays them as successful.
DiAngelo alleged that she’s suffered violence at the hands of police. In her work at SWOP, she said, she regularly receives calls from sex workers with similar experiences. Research by the American Civil Liberties Union has found that sex workers “are often physically or sexually coerced by police through threat of detention, violence (including rape), or extortion.”
As it relates to increased police presence around the Super Bowl, it’s not that sex trafficking isn’t a concern, said DiAngelo — it’s that advocates like her don’t believe law enforcement is the right answer. What sex workers need, she said, is stable housing, access to basic resources, and the kind of safety she believes only decriminalizing sex work can bring. Research by the ACLU and Amnesty International have found that decriminalization would help reduce violence against sex workers, who face disproportionately high homicide rates. | null | null | null | null | null |
The case — the first libel suit against the Times to go to trial in the United States in nearly 20 years — holds the potential to upend decades of precedent that have offered broad protections to media organizations when writing about public figures.
In fact, investigators had found no indication that the mentally ill shooter was inspired by the map. The Times quickly published a correction. But Palin filed suit, alleging that her reputation had been sullied by the claim.
Bennet seemed especially well equipped to bring the Times’s editorial page up to the speed of a digital-media landscape proliferating with fast, click-worthy opinion pieces. At the Atlantic, he had promoted rising talents like Ta-Nehisi Coates and published provocative essays such as “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” and “The Case for Reparations” and a reported article on the paparazzi scramble around Britney Spears that generated Web traffic once unimaginable for an intellectual monthly journal. But his managing editor at the Atlantic, Jennifer Barnett, later went public with complaints that he could be hostile and abusive to his staff, undermining the editorial process on an article he had agreed to stay out of because of family connections.
After joining the Times, Benet moved to broaden the range of viewpoints by hiring conservative voices like Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss from the Wall Street Journal. Both triggered controversies, in part for their editorials — Stephens debuted with a column skeptical of climate change, Weiss frequently decried the left for “cancel culture” — but often for their social media activity, notably when Stephens complained to a university provost after one of its professors made a mild joke about him on Twitter. Bennet also enmeshed the op-ed page in controversy in 2018 when he hired technology writer Quinn Norton — and within a day cut her loose after Internet sleuths unearthed racist and homophobic slurs she had deployed online as well as her defense of a prominent neo-Nazi. (Norton said her detractors had taken her comments out of context.)
Amid those controversies, Bennet still enjoyed the support of Times leadership, even though he seemed to have few close allies on the editorial page, according to several people who worked under him and who requested anonymity to speak frankly about a former boss. | null | null | null | null | null |
But now that we know which teams are in, let’s get back in prognostication business and look at five bold predictions for this game.
Figure Mixon to get 19 to 21 carries against the Rams. He averages over four yards a carry, and while he could finish close to 90, the Rams are decent against the run. They allowed just two 100-yard rushers this year, and none since Week 4.
But if the Bengals concentrate on running the ball, Mixon will do well. They use more two- and three-tight end sets., which helps. He’ll be the game’s leading rusher because the Rams tend to spread their carries.
Nobody can block Donald. He has been the game’s most dominant defender since coming into the league. He has 1½ sacks in the Rams’ three playoff games. The Bengals have definitely shown throughout the regular season and in these playoffs an inability to keep great defensive tackles out of the backfield.
Donald is a next-level disruptor. He can move around, routinely beats double- and triple-teams, rushes against left and right tackles and destroys pass-blocking schemes. He is determined to win his first Super Bowl, so expect to see him at the top of his game.
Yards don’t mean the Rams will beat the Bengals, but you can see how the stats will line up. Stafford should get his 300 yards, as he did in the Rams’ last two playoff games. If the game is close, Burrow could finish around 240 yards. That’s because the Bengals’ best chance at protecting Burrow from getting destroyed is running the ball.
The Bengals ranked only No. 26 in the league in pass coverage this year, giving up 248.3 yards per game. The Rams have Cooper Kupp, who has been unstoppable, and Odell Beckham Jr. has been a great addition.
It will be interesting to see who gets picked on the most, as Stafford has excelled against both Cover-one and Cover-three defenses. Stafford would destroy man-to-man coverage, and he’s one of the best in the league against the blitz. Cover-three would give Cincinnati to a chance to get double-coverage on Kupp.
Ramsey is the best coverage corner in the league. He only had 49 of 83 pass attempts completed on him this year and deflected about 16 passes during the regular season. The Bengals’ hobbled tight end C.J. Uzomah probably doesn’t help matters. Uzomah wants to play, but if he’s not 100 percent, the Rams secondary will have more flexibility and limit Chase’s opportunities.
No quarterback has had to survive more than Burrow. He was sacked 51 times during the regular season. The Titans got to him nine times last month. Still, he’s been able to win three playoff games and has the Bengals in the Super Bowl. | null | null | null | null | null |
For U.S. cross country skiing, Jessie Diggins is helping the extraordinary become more routine
Jessie Diggins of the United States won the bronze medal in the women’s 15-kilometer skiathlon. (Lindsey Wasson/Reuters)
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Years ago in the first race of her Olympics debut, a sprightly young skier surpassed her own expectations and churned her way from 27th to an eighth-place finish in the women’s 15-kilometer skiathlon. At the time, it was a meaningful moment for Team USA: a newcomer named Jessie Diggins had tied the best performance by an American woman in an Olympic cross-country ski race. She had been aiming for top-20, at best.
The United States’ expectations are a little higher these days.
Exactly eight years to the day after Diggins announced herself on the Olympic scene in Sochi, Russia, the 30-year-old made history again by winning a bronze medal in the women’s sprint free final on a frostbitten Tuesday night at the National Cross-Country Centre. It is just the second individual cross-country medal for the United States in Olympic history, the first since Bill Koch took silver in the 1976 Innsbruck Games.
It is also the first cross-country medal in a sprint event for the United States, won in 3 minutes 12.84 seconds.
A pair of Swedes finished ahead of Diggins, with Jonna Sundling winning gold in 3:09.68 and Maja Dahlqvist earning silver with 3:12.56.
“I think it’s overwhelming, but in a good way,” said Diggins, who won gold in the team sprint with Kikkan Randall at the 2018 PyeongChang Games, also a U.S. first. “It’s just really emotional for me, because this really belongs to the whole team and I think it’s just taken so many years to get here, to have a U.S. woman have an individual medal.”
Diggins’s triumph would have been cause enough for celebration, had there not been more firsts to fete.
The women’s final was the first time a sprint final has featured more than one American — two-time Olympian Rosie Brennan, a skier who doesn’t consider sprinting her strongest discipline and fell at the start of her quarterfinal heat only to pull off an impressive recovery and advance to the final — finished just off the podium in fourth.
All four American men advanced past the qualifying rounds, with 21-year-old Ben Ogden earning the best ever U.S. men’s sprint result with a 12th-place finish.
“It shows the growing depth in our country, and I hope it [tells] a lot of people, like, have some patience,” Brennan said. “Keep training, keep going for it, and you never know where you’ll end up.”
Peggy Shinn, an in-house writer for Team USA who wrote a book on the making of the U.S. women’s team, said the men’s results were significant in that they echoed what was happening on the women’s side a decade ago.
Diggins and Randall’s breakthrough gold in PyeongChang was no fluke, but evidence of steady, sustained progress and adequate support from the U.S. federation.
“The guys are learning a lot from the women, and they’re starting to build momentum,” Shinn said in an interview. “I think we’re really going to see a lot from them in four years — these are a lot of young guys, and I think they’re just on the cusp of breaking though. The fact that there were four of them in the heats, that there is what the U.S. women were doing 10 years ago.”
The men’s team also played a crucial role Tuesday in delivering Brennan some much needed footwear. She showed up to the venue with two left ski boots.
More evidence, Diggins said, of a unified team.
“It makes me just so happy to see that because I think we really are a family on the road,” Diggins said of Team USA’s progression over the years. “I haven’t been home since November, so we really lean on each other and take care of each other and you really feel it when somebody does well on the team.”
Diggins was strong throughout the event Tuesday, a gantlet of four, roughly three-minute races spread out over four hours. She posted the second-fastest time of the quarterfinal round, maneuvering an inside track on the final turn and finishing with a powerful push that separated her on the final 100 meters of a race that commonly leaves skiers collapsed at the end, skis splayed, gasping for air.
“She will just put herself into the deepest pain cave you could imagine to get to the finish line,” Shinn said. “She’s got a lot of super powers, but that’s one of them.”
Highlights from Day 4 of the Beijing Winter Olympics
Last year, Diggins nabbed what was then the loftiest individual title of her career and became the first American to win the multistage Tour de Ski. She has not only honed her super powers but also worked to mentor younger skiers on Team USA while speaking out on issues near to her heart.
She wrote a book in which she disclosed an eating disorder earlier in life, and discussed handling the newfound pressure that came with being an Olympic gold medalist.
“I’m just so thankful for our team, it’s been a lot of people working really hard for a long time. I think back in PyeongChang I was also very, very grateful, and I’m still very grateful now,” Diggins said.
“The last four years I’ve really found my voice, I’ve really found a lot of my purpose, and I feel like I’ve grown a lot but also I’m exactly the same person in pretty much every other way.”
Diggins may feel the same, but expectations — for herself and for her country — have changed. | 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 they lose a general election, at which point he or she must seek a second mandate in a proper, open leadership race.
Canada’s Conservatives need a better way to pick their leaders | null | null | null | null | null |
Historian and authority on antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, pictured in 2016, was nominated by President Biden to oversee the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. (Gregorio Borgia/AP)
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 Antisemitism, 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. | null | null | null | null | null |
‘Dangerously hot conditions’ prompt rare February heat alert in Los Angeles
The National Weather Service is warning Super Bowl visitors from other states may be at risk for heat-related illnesses.
Temperature anomalies predicted by the National Weather Service for Thursday. Highs should range 15 to 20 degrees or more above average. (WeatherBell) (WeatherBell)
The Weather Service warns of “dangerously hot conditions with temperatures up to 90 degrees possible,” noting that visitors from other states unaccustomed to the toasty weather may be at a greater risk for heat-related illnesses. The area is hosting the Super Bowl on Sunday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams.
Excessive heat watches are issued when “extremely dangerous” heat appears likely within one to three days, according to the Weather Service. Sixteen million people reside within the alert areas.
Southern California is no stranger to hot weather — Los Angeles averages five days annually that hit 90 degrees or higher — but such temperatures are particularly unusual at this time of year. In fact, the city has recorded only seven 90-degree days during the winter months of December, January or February since 1948. That last time it happened was Jan. 31, 2003, when the high was 91 degrees.
The excessive heat watch covers coastal Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, as well as the interior valleys. The San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys are included in the watch, as is downtown Los Angeles. Burbank, Anaheim, Santa Ana and Newport Beach are all within the watch area.
It’s the first time since at least 2006, when software began tabulating weather alert issuance, that an excessive heat watch has been hoisted during February in Southern California. In fact, all other excessive heat watches issued by the Weather Service office in Los Angeles have fallen between May and October; for the San Diego office, between April and October.
The setup isn’t exactly a classic one for extreme heat in Southern California, but it does meet the requirements for warming offshore flow. Multiple areas of high pressure are banked to the north, one in southern British Columbia and the other over Saskatchewan and Manitoba. That, coupled with weak low pressure draped across the southern United States, will funnel air westward over the Sierra Nevada.
As air slides downhill into the lowlands and the Inland Empire and deserts of Southern California, it will undergo a process called adiabatic compression — greater air pressure near sea level will squeeze and compress the air, which induces a warming and drying. By the time parcels of air make it to Los Angeles between Wednesday and Friday, they’ll be sitting in the upper 80s to near 90 degrees.
The dry atmosphere will be ineffective at trapping heat overnight, permitting temperatures to fall into the upper 50s and allowing some respite from the day’s anomalous warmth.
The Weather Service expects Los Angeles to snag highs of 87 degrees on Wednesday and Friday and perhaps make it up to 89 degrees on Thursday. That would flirt with record territory both Wednesday and Friday, and beat out Thursday’s current record of 85, set in 2016. Record-keeping dates back to 1944.
Average highs in Los Angeles for early to mid-February range between 65 and 66 degrees. Afternoon temperatures late in the workweek will soar 15 to 25 degrees or more above average.
Los Angeles International Airport has never logged a reading above 92 degrees during February. It’s improbable, but not impossible, that monthly records will be tied in a few areas.
Oxnard, Calif., farther northwest, is likely to remain a few degrees below records. The predicted highs for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are 80, 82 and 77 degrees, respectively; 88, 84 and 87 are the numbers to beat.
The Weather Service office in Los Angeles did note that the forecasts do not necessarily meet the conventional requirements for pulling the trigger on an excessive heat warning (typically issued after a watch when dangerously hot conditions are imminent) in their online technical forecast discussion — but emphasized the hazard posed by the heat nonetheless.
The hot weather may persist into the weekend, with highs in the mid-to-upper 80s forecast in Southern California. The heat may well coincide with the Super Bowl, with kickoff set for 3:30 p.m. local time. However, SoFi Stadium features a state-of-the-art roof made up of multiple operable panels that can open or close to facilitate cooling.
The heat is occurring on the heels of California’s second driest January on record. Dry conditions tend to intensify hot weather as a land surface stripped of its moisture heats up more readily. Three of California’s 5 driest Januarys on record have occured in the last 8 years.
The hot weather fits into a larger pattern of human-induced climate warming. Average winter temperatures in Los Angeles have increased two degrees since 1948 — a trend that’s been mirrored dramatically across all seasons in Southern California and more broadly across the United States and much of the planet. | null | null | null | null | null |
Trucks are backed up Monday on both sides of the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit. (Daniel Mears/AP)
TORONTO — The busiest crossing on the U.S.-Canada border was obstructed on Tuesday morning as demonstrations against vaccine mandates and other coronavirus public health measures that have paralyzed Canada’s capital spread to a crucial trade artery.
The Canada Border Services Agency said Tuesday that the Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, was “temporarily closed” for passengers and commercial traffic. The Michigan Department of Transportation also said the border was closed. Windsor Police said earlier that U.S.-bound traffic was open.
The suspension bridge, which spans the Detroit River, is an important trade link, particularly for the auto industry on both sides of the border. In the tightly integrated border communities, it also connects families, friends and many essential workers, including Canadian nurses who work in Detroit-area hospitals.
The blockade of the bridge began Monday. It was unclear when it might end.
On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the raucous “Freedom Convoy” protest by truckers and their supporters across Ottawa “has to stop,” and a judge imposed a temporary ban on honking.
“Canadians have the right to protest, to disagree with their government, and to make their voices heard. We’ll always protect that right,” Trudeau tweeted Monday. But he added that protesters do not “have the right to blockade our economy, or our democracy, or our fellow citizens’ daily lives.”
“It has to stop,” he said, as officers worked to regain control of the capital, towing vehicles, seizing fuel and attempting to disband what Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly has called a “siege” and an “unlawful” blockade.
Big rigs and other vehicles continue to block downtown arteries in Ottawa in protest of vaccine mandates, coronavirus restrictions and Trudeau, snarling traffic and fraying residents’ nerves. Police have issued hundreds of tickets for “demonstration-related offenses,” including “excessive honking,” driving in the wrong direction and having alcohol “readily available.”
Police have launched at least 60 investigations into thefts, possible hate crimes and property damage, and have made arrests “for mischief.” Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson has declared a state of emergency.
Judge Hugh McLean of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Monday granted a temporary injunction to bar protesters from honking horns at all hours in a central area of Ottawa.
The injunction is part of a proposed class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 21-year-old local resident Zexi Li against organizers of the “Freedom Convoy” and participants who the suit claims are harming those who live near their protest by “using air horns and train horns on their vehicles in a concerted manner as a protest tactic.”
The suit alleges that the honking has caused “significant mental distress, suffering and torment.”
McLean said the apparent harm caused to residents by the honking outweighed the protesters’ right to air their grievances in that particular way, local media reported.
Videos posted on social media by locals and journalists showed a relatively quiet downtown Ottawa on Monday night.
The protests, which kicked off last month as truckers and their supporters denounced coronavirus restrictions and vaccine mandates, quickly snowballed, with roads blocked, national monuments defaced and angry calls for Trudeau to resign. Demonstrators also set up a blockade at a crossing between Alberta and Montana, disrupting the flow of traffic and goods.
Canada and the United States announced last year that they would require truck drivers entering their countries to be fully vaccinated. Canada implemented its measure Jan. 15; the U.S. requirement started Jan. 22. Most cross-border trade between the two countries occurs over land.
Australian lawmakers fear escalation of protests influenced by Canadian trucker convoy | null | null | null | null | null |
The best-picture Oscar nominees are, top row from left, “Belfast,” “CODA,” Don't Look Up,” Drive My Car” and “Dune,” and, bottom row from left, “King Richard,” Licorice Pizza,” “Nightmare Alley,” “The Power of the Dog” and “West Side Story.” (Focus Features/Apple TV Plus, Netflix, Janus Films & Sideshow, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, Searchlight Pictures, Netflix, 20th Century Films/AP) (AP)
The nominations for the 94th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning, but with the box office still recovering from a multiyear pandemic, you could be forgiven if you haven’t seen — or even heard of — the 10 best picture nominees.
We’ve got you covered on what to know about the honorees and how you can watch them.
Directed by Kenneth Branagh, "Belfast" is centered on a young boy's childhood in Northern Ireland at the beginning of the Troubles in 1969. (Focus Features)
Kenneth Branagh channels his own experience growing up amid the Troubles in late 1960s Ireland in this fictionalized coming-of-age drama, which views the conflict through the lens of its 9-year-old protagonist (Jude Hill).
Other nominations: Branagh is up for best director and best original screenplay for “Belfast,” which earned seven nominations including best sound, best original song (Van Morrison’s “Down to Joy”), and best supporting nods for Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench.
Where to watch: “Belfast” is still playing in select theaters following its November release date, but it isn’t streaming anywhere just yet. It is available to purchase on Amazon Prime, Vudu, Apple TV Plus, Redbox and Google Play. The film will be available to rent on various platforms starting March 1.
Jane Campion’s psychological Western, an adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, follows the changing family dynamic between two brothers — Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons) — after George’s marriage to Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who brings her lanky and sensitive son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) along with her to the brothers’ Montana ranch.
Other nominations: “The Power of the Dog” is the most Oscar-nominated film of the year, with nods for best director — a historic second nomination for Campion, who was first nominated in 1994 for “The Piano” — and best adapted screenplay, best actor (Cumberbatch), best supporting actress (Dunst), best supporting actor (Plemons and Smit-McPhee) and best original score, in addition to recognition in the cinematography, editing and production design categories.
Where to watch: Netflix, where it was released in December following a limited theatrical run.
Oscar nominations 2022: 'The Power of the Dog' leads with 12 nods, complete list
A revival of the love story between Tony and Maria, whose romance adds fuel to the dueling gangs — the Jets and the Sharks — in 1957 New York City. (20th Century Studios)
Steven Spielberg helmed this adaptation of the 1961 New York City-set classic about Tony (Ansel Elgort), Maria (Rachel Zegler) and the intercultural divides that threaten their burgeoning romance.
Other nominations: Ariana DeBose stands to replicate Rita Moreno’s 1962 win for playing Anita, the girlfriend of Sharks leader Bernardo (played here by David Alvarez). Spielberg, meanwhile, earned his eighth best director nomination. The remake also earned honors in the sound, production design and cinematography categories.
Where to watch: You’ll have to see it in ye olde theater.
Paul Thomas Anderson's coming-of-age film is set in the San Fernando Valley in 1973. (MGM)
“Licorice Pizza,” which follows the relationship between the teenage Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana (Alana Haim), a photographer in her mid-20s, is a coming-of-age dramedy as only Paul Thomas Anderson could show it: pretty, problematic, nostalgia-filled and set in the San Fernando Valley.
Other nominations: Anderson landed his third best director nomination and his fifth for a screenplay.
Where to watch: Theaters are your only chance to catch this film (for now).
Timothée Chalamet stars in “Dune,” the first film in a planned two-part adaptation of the 1965 novel of the same name by Frank Herbert. (Warner Bros.)
Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s beloved 1965 sci-fi novel follows the gifted Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) as the life he knew implodes and destiny leads him in a new direction.
Other nominations: Villenueve shares a best adapted screenplay nod with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth. The film also cleaned up in the craft categories, with nods for sound, editing, cinematography, production design, visual effects, makeup and hairstyling, in addition to best original score.
Where to watch: The film has dropped off HBO Max since its October premiere, but you can buy or rent it on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and other digital platforms. You can also still see it in some theaters.
Richard Williams trains his two daughters, Venus and Serena, on tennis courts in Compton, Calif., with determined commitment to their skills and future. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Best actor Oscar nominee Will Smith leaps into the role of Richard Williams — “King Richard” — in this sports drama about the man who made his dream of raising two of the greatest athletes in the world, Venus and Serena, come true.
Other nominations: In addition to nods for Smith and best picture, the powerful film also saw nominations for best supporting actress (Aunjanue Ellis), original screenplay, original song and editing.
Where to watch: The film, which premiered in November, left HBO Max at the end of its 31-day stint. But it is still in select theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and other platforms.
“CODA” is a coming-of-age story about a daughter who wants to sing — and whose entire immediate family happens to be deaf.
Other nominations: Adapted from the 2014 French film “La Famille Bélier,” the comedy-drama also received nods for best supporting actor (Troy Kotsur, who is the first deaf male actor to be nominated for an Oscar) and best adapted screenplay.
Where to watch: The film is available to watch on Apple TV Plus.
The phrase “sit tight and assess” is at the frustrating heart of this satire about the world ending and no one really caring.
Other nominations: With an Avengers-style cast of A-listers including previous Oscar winners Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, “Don’t Look Up” ironically earned three other Academy Award nominations (original screenplay, score, editing) but none for the acting categories.
Where to watch: The disaster movie is available to stream on Netflix, where it debuted Christmas Day.
A film that weaves a complex story but takes place mostly in the confines of a beloved red Saab, “Drive My Car” follows a widowed actor and his young chauffeur as they navigate grief.
Other nominations: Adapted from a short story of the same name by renowned Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, the movie also earned nods for best director (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), international feature film and adapted screenplay.
Where to watch: The Japanese film is not yet available outside of select theaters.
Based on the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, this is the second feature film adaptation of "Nightmare Alley," following the 1947 version. (Searchlight Pictures)
Written and directed by Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro, “Nightmare Alley” is a film noir tale of a 1940s con man played by Bradley Cooper.
Other nominations: “Nightmare Alley” also earned nods in the costume design, cinematography and production design categories.
Where to watch: The film is available to stream on HBO Max and Hulu. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Another wrongful death from a no-knock raid. It’s time for reform.
Protesters march in Minneapolis on Saturday, days after police killed 22-year-old Amir Locke there during a no-knock raid. (Christian Monterrosa/AP)
Amir Locke, a 22-year-old aspiring musician, was fatally shot last week after a SWAT team for the Minneapolis Police Department burst into an apartment to serve a no-knock warrant related to a homicide in nearby St. Paul. Mr. Locke was not named as a suspect in the warrant, had no criminal record, and was sleeping on the couch of a relative when he was killed. Body-camera footage showed a chaotic chain of events unfolding in mere seconds. Police quietly unlocked the door of the darkened apartment just before 7 a.m. and burst inside shouting “Police, search warrant!” Mr. Locke was wrapped in a blanket as police shined lights on him. He had a gun in his hand, but it is unclear whether he was pointing it, as police had initially reported along with the false claim that officers repeatedly announced their presence before entering the apartment. Mr. Locke’s family said he had a permit for his gun and had obtained it to protect himself from robbery while working for DoorDash.
That Mr. Locke seemingly reached for a gun — not unlike Taylor’s boyfriend, who used his weapon to fire a warning shot when he thought his home was being invaded — is understandable given the terrifying circumstances that no-knock police raids present. A “worst nightmare,” said police expert Barry Friedman of a scenario in which a person is asleep at home and armed peopleburst in with little or no warning. It is notable, as The Post’s Kim Bellware reported, that St. Paul police requested a no-knock search warrant only when Minneapolis police insisted it was the only way they would serve it. St. Paul rarely uses no-knock warrants — the last use was in 2016 — because, as a spokesman told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the department considers them to be high-risk.
Taylor’s death prompted calls to ban or better regulate no-knock raids. A dozen municipalities, including Louisville, passed laws prohibiting or limiting their use, and Minneapolis changed policy to require police to announce their presence. But the push for sensible reform lost steam; the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act failed to get the support needed to advance. With violent crime spiking, politicians don’t want to be seen as soft on crime. Mr. Locke’s death has finally prompted Minneapolis to announce a moratorium on the use of no-knock raids except in extreme circumstances, and the Biden administration said it is weighing whether to expand the curtailment of no-knock warrants it announced in September for the Justice Department to other federal agencies. We hope that means there will finally be meaningful action to restrict or regulate a practice that has caused wrongful deaths.. | null | null | null | null | null |
In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that it has no power to do anything about partisan gerrymandering, allowing states to gerrymander to their hearts’ content. But at the time, it clarified that it could still strike down racial gerrymanders, since drawing district lines to intentionally erode the power of minority groups would violate the Voting Rights Act.
But now the court may have cleared a path to potentially allowing racial gerrymanders to slip through, after all, though we can’t be sure how this will turn out.
In the Alabama case, the GOP-run state legislature created a congressional map that packs many of the state’s Black voters into a single district. Though they make up 27 percent of the state’s population, in only one of the 7 congressional districts will any Black candidate have a remote chance of winning. In Alabama, voters are highly divided by race; according to exit polls, 77 percent of Whites in Alabama voted for Donald Trump in 2020, compared to 55 percent in the country as a whole.
After a lengthy district court trial, a three-judge panel found that the map discriminated against the state’s Black voters in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state to produce a new map. That panel was made up of one judge appointed by Bill Clinton and two appointed by Donald Trump, suggesting the legal judgment was clear.
Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court, where five justices issued a stay nullifying the district court’s ruling, allowing a map that seems to clearly violate the VRA to remain in place. They also accepted the case for a full hearing and judgment later on, but the stay came through what is now known as the “shadow docket,” where increasingly consequential rulings are issued on an emergency basis.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said that it was too close to the election later this year, so the court simply had to intervene on Alabama’s behalf.
Even Chief Justice John Roberts, the architect of the court’s long assault on voting rights and author of its 2013 decision gutting other sections of the VRA, was unable to justify what his conservative colleagues did. In a brief dissent, he said that while agreed with the decision to take the case for a full consideration — signaling that he looks forward to driving another stake into the heart of the VRA — “the District Court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction.”
When it allows clearly unconstitutional or otherwise problematic state laws to remain in place, the court not only creates sweeping de facto change for temporary periods, it sends a message to Republican state legislatures that nothing is off the table.
To be clear, this isn’t a conspiracy — it’s not as though Kavanaugh or Samuel Alito is calling up Republican state legislators and saying “Hey, why don’t you pass a law doing this obviously unconstitutional thing so we can go to town on it?” And there have long been test cases filed with the intent of spurring the court to carve out new rights or overrule prior cases.
But we’re embarking on a new era, in which a radicalized Republican Party meets an unusually aggressive Supreme Court majority eager to reimagine the whole scope of American law. And with six conservatives, they have a margin of error that allows them to indulge their wildest policy ambitions. | null | null | null | null | null |
Maybe the time has come for this minimal ethics reform. As Ossoff puts it, “This is neither complicated nor controversial in the real world, and we should just get it done.” There is nothing like a midterm election and atrocious polling numbers for both parties to turn even the most cynical lawmakers into a starry-eyed advocates of good government. That’s exactly what Ossoff is banking on. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper was sentenced to a year in prison after she admitted to stealing more than $835,000 from a Southern California school to fund her gambling addiction. (Screenshot via YouTube/KC/Screenshot via YouTube/KCAL)
“I have sinned, I’ve broken the law and I have no excuses,” Kreuper said at the sentencing over Zoom. “My actions were in violation of my vows, my commandments, the law and, above all, the sacred trust that so many had placed in me. I was wrong and I’m profoundly sorry for the pain and suffering I’ve caused so many people.”
Mark Byrne, Kreuper’s attorney, told The Post that his client had accepted the judge’s one-year prison sentence, even if they were pushing for probation. He argued that while the money she stole might have affected the school’s funding, her actions “didn’t decrease the quality of education students received” at St. James.
Kumar said the nun’s instruction to the auditors sparked suspicion, and they reported the incident to Msgr. Michael Meyers, the pastor at St. James Church. Around the same time, a St. James parent asked question at a school meeting about an old tuition check that had an endorsement on the back of check that didn’t line up with the school’s primary account, the prosecutor said.
Annual tuition at the K-8 school is $83,000, according to prosecutors, meaning Kreuper had stolen the tuition for 14 students in funds that “were intended to further the students’ education, not fund [Kreuper’s] lifestyle.” | null | null | null | null | null |
In a state that is staunchly supportive of abortion rights, lawmakers are preparing for a post-Roe v. Wade world
Vermont lawmakers voted Tuesday to move forward on a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right to abortion and contraception, the first amendment of its kind in the United States.
The proposal is part of a wave of abortion rights legislation to emerge in Democratic states this year, ahead of a key Supreme Court ruling on abortion expected in the summer. The Supreme Court case, which involves a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks, could overturn or significantly weaken Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that has guaranteed a woman’s right to abortion for almost 50 years.
Fifteen states have passed laws protecting the right to abortion, including, most recently, New Jersey, where Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act in January. Other states such as Florida have privacy laws in their state constitutions, which courts have interpreted to protect the right to abortion. But no other state has enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution.
Before the vote, state Rep. Ann Pugh (D) stressed the urgency of the moment.
“We can no longer rely on federal courts to uphold the protections for fundamental reproductive rights based on the federal constitution,” Pugh said.
State Rep. Anne Donahue (R) argued against the measure during the debate Tuesday morning.
“Individuals inherently do control their reproductive decisions,” Donahue said. But that control ends “once biological reproduction has occurred,” she added. “Simply because the embryo’s survival depends upon the protection of the womb does not make it the property of or merely an appendage of the person bearing it.”
Abortion rights activists hope Vermont will 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,” she said.
Republican lawmakers and lobbyists in Vermont have called the amendment “extreme.” By adding this amendment to the state constitution, Donahue has said, lawmakers are making the assumption that public opinion on abortion won’t change.
The amendment, which passed both the House and Senate in 2019 and was approved again in the Senate in 2021, has been “a lot of work and a long haul,” Leriche said. Proposition 5 gained more momentum, she said, when the Supreme Court indicated its willingness to reconsider Roe v. Wade in oral arguments in December. | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden highlights decision of Australian vehicle charging company to build plant in Tenn.
President Biden delivers remarks on his administration’s work to rebuild manufacturing in the South Court Auditorium at the White House on Feb. 8, 2022. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
President Biden on Tuesday highlighted the decision of an Australian electric vehicle charging company to build its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Tennessee as he held a White House event focused on his vision for “electrifying” transportation and supporting manufacturing jobs.
The facility, to be built by Tritium, is expected to eventually produce as many as 30,000 electric vehicle chargers a year and create 500 local jobs, Biden said, appearing alongside the company’s chief executive, Jane Hunter.
The administration released a federal strategy in December to build 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles across the country and bring down the cost of electric cars. He has also announced as a target that half of the vehicles sold in the United States by 2030 be battery electric, fuel-cell electric or plug-in hybrid.
At Tuesday’s event, Biden touted Tritium’s announcement as “more than just great news for Tennessee," saying it would “ripple thousands of miles in every direction” as his administration moves forward with plans to facilitate a nationwide network of charging stations.
Biden said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will soon announce $5 billion in funding to spur the placement of charging stations across the country, including in rural areas.
The president also sought to frame the announcement as part of a larger focus on reviving U.S. manufacturing jobs.
“We’re seeing the beginnings of an American manufacturing comeback. This is not hyperbole. This is real," Biden said, urging bipartisan support for the objective.
In remarks before Biden, Hunter credited last year’s passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, championed by the president, in explaining the company’s decision to invest in a Tennessee plant.
“Nations that are the forefront of this electric future will benefit economically, she said. "And that’s what America will achieve with President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law. ... President Biden’s transport electrification policies have contributed to enormous demand for Tritium’s products right here in the U.S., and that directly led us to pivot and change our global manufacturing strategy.”
Earlier Tuesday, Mitch Landrieu, who is overseeing Biden’s infrastructure plans, said the announcement is also significant because it highlights the administration’s desire to see charging stations manufactured in the United States.
“When we talk about electric vehicles coming, somebody has to make the electric vehicle charging stations, and we want those made here in America,” Landrieu said during an appearance on CNN. “So this particular announcement is really groundbreaking.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The photo caption in a previous version of this article incorrectly said the photo was from November 2019. The photo was taken in November 2020. The article has been corrected.
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 has 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 also 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 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 |
Some Supreme Court analysts, however, think the court isn’t done with making it harder to sue based on racial gerrymandering. Later this year or next year when the court looks more closely at the Alabama case, the conservative justices could strike down a section of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that is designed to protect minority representation. This section of the law prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race. (In 2013, the Supreme Court led by Roberts struck down a key section of the VRA that required the federal government to sign off on maps in certain states.)
If the Supreme Court takes down other parts of the VRA, the conservative argument that mapmakers should be “race-blind” prevails at the Supreme Court, as Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog wrote. And that would mean that mapmakers don’t have to consider growing Black and Latino populations in Southern and Western states when they draw electoral districts.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee is blasting maps in Tennessee and Kansas for similar reasons. It’s leader, former attorney general Eric Holder under President Obama, issued a heated statement criticizing the Supreme Court for its decision in Alabama. “The Supreme Court’s decision to stand in the way of legislatively mandated opportunity for black voters in Alabama is an ideological abuse of the Court’s power. ... The majority on the Court have aligned themselves with a past that the nation was thought to be beyond."
If the Supreme Court did knock down a key section of the VRA and commanded mapmakers to draw maps without taking into account race, what would that look like?
But “race-blind” policies would probably still benefit Republicans by diluting minority voters. The University of Michigan’s Jowei Chen and Harvard Law’s Nicholas Stephanopoulos did an analysis of “race-blind” redistricting in all of the nation’s state House districts. They found that there would be “substantially fewer” minority-majority districts, and those that remained would have smaller minority populations in them. In the South in particular, Republicans would benefit from this by picking up more districts.
“Maps produced without consideration of party or race typically include more Republican districts,” Chen and Stephanopoulos wrote in the Yale Law Journal.
That’s because they control the mapmaking process in key states that hand the process off to state legislatures. | null | null | null | null | null |
Historian and authority on antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, pictured in 2016, was nominated by President Biden to oversee the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. (Gregorio Borgia/AP)
Prominent Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt appeared Tuesday before the Senate for her confirmation hearing to lead the State Department’s office that aims to monitor and combat antisemitism. Her hearings were expected to shed light on how U.S. leaders should understand antisemitism in light of attacks in the United States and around the globe.
As Lipstadt appeared before the Senate, she made the case that antisemitism is alive and well today. “Increasingly, Jews have been singled out for slander, violence and terrorism,” she said. “Today’s rise in antisemitism is staggering.”
Lipstadt’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was delayed over some of her past criticism of conservative politicians. But in recent weeks, dozens of Jewish groups have put pressure on the Senate to fill the role, especially in the wake of a recent attack on a synagogue in Colleyville, Tex. Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, who was held hostage during that attack, testified on Tuesday before the House Committee on Homeland Security at the same time as Lipstadt’s hearing.
In March 2021, Lipstadt tweeted an article about a statement by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who said he would have been more concerned by the Jan. 6, 2021, mayhem at the Capitol if the rioters had been “Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters” instead of Trump supporters. Lipstadt tweeted: “This is white supremacy/nationalism. Pure and simple.”
During Tuesday’s hearing, Johnson said Lipstadt engaged in “malicious poison” when she criticized his comments. She said her comments were not nuanced and she would not do diplomacy by tweets. She said that while she disagreed with what Johnson said, she was sorry if it seemed like a personal attack. She noted she has criticized Democrats as well, describing herself as “an equal-opportunity foe of antisemitism.”
She has also criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for characterizing pro-Israel Americans as making it “okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Allegations of dual loyalties are “part of the textbook accusations against Jews,” Lipstadt told Jewish Insider.
President Biden nominated Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, in July. If approved by the Senate, Lipstadt will have the rank of ambassador, unlike her predecessors. She would oversee the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, 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.
Lipstadt’s role would focus on reporting on antisemitism globally and pressing governments to adopt measures to mitigate antisemitism, but she will be seen as the administration’s voice on the issue domestically, as well.
He said he agrees with an “imperfect” definition adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The IHRA definition includes examples, some of which have been criticized by people on the left as attempts to shut down free speech. Among the IHRA’s examples of antisemitism are “applying double standards” to Israel and “claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
Lipstadt said during her hearing that she, too, appreciates the IHRA definition and that a lot depends on context when people are criticizing Israel.
“I think it’s very important to be nuanced there because, you know, it’s sort of Chicken Little ‘The sky is falling,’ ” she said, “If you call everything antisemitism, when you have a real act of antisemitism, people aren’t paying attention.”
The topic of Israel comes up frequently around discussions of antisemitism, Susskind said. The rights group Amnesty International recently said Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is a crime against humanity and is illegal under international law, and that the country’s “oppression and domination” of Palestinians amounts to apartheid. In response, Israel’s foreign minister decried the statement as antisemitic.
In her remarks on Tuesday, Lipstadt agreed with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in criticizing Amnesty International’s statement. She said its description of Israel as “an apartheid state” was “unhistorical.” She also said that criticism of Israeli policy is not antisemitism.
“A lot of people think antisemitism has gone away or is not serious,” Jacobs said. If their example of antisemitism is the Holocaust, they might say of conspiracy theories, vandalism or physical attacks on Jews, “It’s not that serious or it’s not a trend,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. Deputy Marshals escort 6-year-old Ruby Bridges from William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in November 1960. (AP)
I’d often wondered how Ruby Bridges felt in the moment that she first arrived at William Frantz Elementary School in November 1960. If the name isn’t familiar, the image above probably is — as may be the Norman Rockwell painting of a small Black girl walking with an entourage of faceless protectors, passing a wall on which is scrawled a racial slur. Bridges’s arrival at the school on that day marked its integration — a transition that was poorly received by many in the surrounding community.
“I knew that I was going to go to a new school,” Bridges (now Ruby Bridges Hall) explained. “I really did not know who the four very tall White men were. They did say U.S. marshals, but that really meant nothing to a 6-year-old.” In another interview, she said that she’d thought the furious crowd that awaited her that first day was somehow related to Mardi Gras. In the interview from last year, she also recalled that some in the crowd brought a child-sized coffin in which had been placed a small Black doll.
What’s most remarkable about this now is that this was a recent interview with Bridges. She was born in 1954 and is only 67 years old, still younger than about 50 million Americans.
I only realized that Bridges was still so young a few weeks ago, as I was researching a story about the spate of book bans across the country. In December, for example, a group calling itself “Moms for Liberty” petitioned the Tennessee Department of Education to withdraw a number of books from the school systems’ second-grade curriculum. Among those books were “The Story of Ruby Bridges” by Robert Coles, and Bridges’s own book about her experience: “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story.”
Bridges was in kindergarten when she experienced furious racist crowds firsthand. Moms for Liberty is worried that her story is “not age appropriate” for kids two years older.
It is more complex to acknowledge that Ruby Bridges is still alive than to imagine her as that kid in the black-and-white photo. It is more reassuring to distill Martin Luther King Jr.'s message to a warning about being overly attentive to the color of someone’s skin than it is to recognize the way in which skin color still affects both White and Black Americans. It is nicer to assume that intentional efforts to limit Black political power have been eliminated than that they often remain embedded. | null | null | null | null | null |
Two-time all-star Domantas Sabonis is headed to the Sacramento Kings. (Ron Schwane/AP)
With their postseason hopes dwindling and attendance woes mounting, the Indiana Pacers continued their midseason overhaul by agreeing to trade Domantas Sabonis to the Sacramento Kings for a package centered around second-year guard Tyrese Haliburton, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.
In addition to Sabonis, the Pacers will send Jeremy Lamb, Justin Holiday and a future second-round pick to the Kings in exchange for Haliburton, Buddy Hield and Tristan Thompson. ESPN.com first reported the deal’s framework.
Sabonis, 25, blossomed into a two-time all-star with the Pacers thanks to his high-efficiency scoring, high-volume rebounding and skilled passing, but the son of Lithuanian great Arvydas Sabonis never found an ideal frontcourt fit alongside shot-blocking specialist Myles Turner. He averaged 18.9 points, 12.1 rebounds and 5 assists per game this season, joining Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic as the only players to hit all three of those statistical benchmarks.
Despite those gaudy numbers, Pacers President Kevin Pritchard hinted in December that big moves could be coming for the small-market franchise, which has ranked 30th in home attendance this season. In an interview with The Athletic, Pritchard said that Indiana was “trying to manufacture that real star” as it looked ahead, a comment that Sabonis said “caught me off guard.” Pritchard later clarified that he felt the Pacers “have multiple stars on our team but we all know we need more.” The Pacers’ trade of Sabonis comes just two days after they sent forward Caris LeVert to the Cleveland Cavaliers for a collection of draft picks.
Haliburton, 21, has averaged 14.3 points, 3.9 rebounds and 7.4 assists per game this season after immediately establishing himself as a trustworthy and unselfish guard as a rookie. While the 2020 lottery pick might not boast star potential as a lead scoring option, he is a reliable outside shooter and should serve as one of the new faces of Indiana’s burgeoning youth movement.
The 29-year-old Hield is one of the NBA’s most prolific three-point shooters, but his one-dimensional offensive game and inattentive defense helped cost him his starting spot this season. A frequent subject of trade rumors in recent years, Hield’s hefty contract — he’s making $22.5 million this season and owed an additional $39 million over the next two seasons — has diminished his return value. Thompson, meanwhile, is a veteran center on an expiring contract.
Sacramento General Manager Monte McNair had pursued a patient approach since arriving in September 2020, but the Kings’ wayward effort and losing record forced his hand this week. Acquiring Sabonis gives the Kings a proven interior scorer that they have lacked since the DeMarcus Cousins era, though it cost them a promising and fan-friendly young piece in Haliburton. Sacramento sits just two games out of the West’s play-in mix, and it’s possible that Sabonis could provide a short-term boost in the standings.
If not, Sabonis will serve as a tentpole piece in planning efforts as he is under contract through 2023-24. Lamb is on an expiring contract, while Holiday is signed through next season and can offer rotation minutes to fill the gaps created by Haliburton’s departure. | null | null | null | null | null |
Pandemic Preparedness with Rick A. Bright, PhD & Helen Clark
Two years into a pandemic that may be the deadliest viral outbreak in more than a century, the world appears underprepared to respond to future health crises. Join Washington Post Live on Tuesday, Feb. 15 for conversations with public health officials and experts to discuss how the world can better prepare for the next pandemic and the role of global collaboration between the public and private sectors.
Rick A. Bright, PhD
Provided by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Rick Bright is currently the Chief Executive Officer of the Pandemic Prevention Institute (PPI) at The Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Bright leads the development of the Foundation’s pandemic data-to-action platform that integrates modern technology, data analytics and global partners to help the world detect, prevent, and mitigate pandemic threats to achieve containment as quickly as possible.
Prior to this role, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and the Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Bright has also gained extensive experience in the biotechnology industry where he served in senior leadership and executive management roles. He has held senior scientific leadership positions in non-governmental organizations where he championed innovative vaccine development and expanded vaccine manufacturing capacity to multiple developing countries. He also spent a decade in vaccine, therapeutics, and diagnostics development at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For this work, Dr. Bright received the Charles C. Shepard Science Award for Scientific Excellence.
Dr. Bright serves as an international subject matter expert in biodefense, emergency preparedness and response, pharmaceutical innovation, vaccine, drug and diagnostics development and served as an advisor to the Biden Administration, World Health Organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine Forum on Microbial Threats. Dr. Bright serves as a Sr. Fellow at the Foreign Policy Association.
Dr. Bright received a Ph.D. in Immunology and Molecular Pathogenesis from Emory University and a B.S. magna cum laude in Biology and Physical Sciences from Auburn University at Montgomery.
Provided by representatives with Helen Clark.
Helen Clark was Prime Minister of New Zealand for three successive terms from 1999–2008.
Throughout her tenure as Prime Minister and as a Member of Parliament over 27 years, Helen Clark engaged widely in policy development and advocacy across the international, economic, social, environmental, and cultural spheres. She advocated strongly for New Zealand’s comprehensive programme on sustainability and for tackling the problems of climate change. She was an active leader of her country’s foreign relations, engaging in a wide range of international issues.
In April 2009, Helen Clark became Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). She was the first woman to lead the organisation, and served two terms there. At the same time, she was also Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of all UN funds, programmes, agencies, and departments working on development issues. As Administrator, she led UNDP to be ranked the most transparent global development organisation. She completed her tenure in 2017.
Helen Clark came to the role of Prime Minister after an extensive parliamentary and ministerial career. Prior to being elected to the New Zealand Parliament in 1981, Helen Clark taught in the Political Studies Department of the University of Auckland, from which she earlier graduated with her BA and MA (Hons) degrees.
Helen continues to be a strong voice for sustainable development, climate action, gender equality and women’s leadership, peace and justice, and action on pressing global health issues. In July 2020, she was appointed by the Director-General of the World Health Organisation as a Co-Chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, called for by the World Health Assembly, which reported in May 2021. She chairs the boards of the Extractive Industries Transparency Organisation, the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, and other public good organisations and initiatives, and is a board member of others.
Content from Abbott
Global Collaboration: Key to Staying Ahead of the Next Pandemic
While we’ve faced enormous challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve entered into a new era of global collaboration that can help us be better prepared for other viral threats. One thing is very clear – we need more public-private partnerships to identify solutions. We cannot fight what we cannot see coming, and that’s why Abbott launched the Pandemic Defense Coalition. By establishing this global network of ‘eyes on the ground’ that are always looking for viral mutations and variants, we can help the global health community stay one step ahead of the next threat.
Gavin Cloherty, PhD
Provided by Abbott.
Gavin Cloherty is head of Infectious Disease Research for Abbott’s diagnostics business and leads Abbott’s Pandemic Defense Coalition. He provides scientific leadership in infectious disease diagnostics by conducting groundbreaking clinical studies on hepatitis and HIV and developing new tests. As one of the top experts in the field, his innovative research is changing the way infectious diseases are being diagnosed – including the introduction and use of COVID home testing – to help improve patient outcomes.
Ruth Umoh is the Editor-in-Chief of The Filament, the definitive news source for DEI leaders in tech. A veteran business journalist, she previously served as Forbes’ Diversity and Inclusion Editor and was a CNBC reporter covering leadership strategy, corporate management, and personal finance prior. She’s a graduate of the University of Maryland and received a master’s degree from Columbia University. | null | null | null | null | null |
Actor Brian Cox portrays ruthless media mogul Logan Roy on HBO’s hit series, “Succession.” Lauded for his career spanning theatre, film and television, Cox joins Washington Post staff writer Sarah Ellison to share his real-life, rags-to-riches story from his modest, troubled upbringing in Dundee, Scotland, to the highest heights of Hollywood as written in his new memoir, “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat.” Join Washington Post Live for this subscriber-only event on Monday, Feb. 14 at 12:00 p.m. ET.
Provided by Grand Central Publishing.
Brian Cox currently stars as ‘Logan Roy’ in the HBO series Succession, for which he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series – Drama and was nominated for the Best Actor – Drama Emmy, one of 18 nominations for the show. He most recently appeared on Broadway in Robert Shenkkan’s The Great Society, for which he received rave reviews for his towering portrayal of LBJ. He has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is also known for his roles in Super Troopers, The Bourne Identity, Braveheart, Rushmore, and more | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Pakistan’s past support for the Afghan Taliban isn’t paying off
A Pakistani security official stands guard outside a church on Jan. 31, a day after a priest was gunned down when driving back home after Sunday prayers, in Peshawar, Pakistan. (Arshad Arbab/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
When the Afghan Taliban returned to power in Kabul in August, Pakistanis celebrated. Among many others, Prime Minister Imran Khan clearly saw the Taliban’s victory as a triumph for his country.
For years, observers have accused Islamabad of covertly supporting the Taliban. And for years, Pakistan has rejected such allegations, invariably citing its role as a vital U.S. ally throughout the war on terrorism. Yet Khan himself effectively confirmed what the critics have been saying by openly supporting the Afghan Taliban when it seized power — even though doing so clearly violated the agreement that it had negotiated with the United States in talks in Doha, Qatar.
Khan’s government evidently expected that the Afghan Taliban would do two things in return for Islamabad’s support: surrender Afghan-based insurgents who are fighting inside Pakistan against the Pakistani military and settle a long-running border dispute.
So far neither one is happening. And that explains why Pakistan still hasn’t offered diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government in Kabul.
The biggest stumbling block is the status of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the offshoot of the Afghan Taliban that continues to wage war on Pakistani forces. Pakistan has been trying to get the Afghan Taliban to cut off its support for the group. After the fall of Kabul, top Pakistani officials expressed a willingness to announce an amnesty for the TTP if it laid down its arms and agreed to abide by Pakistan’s constitution. In November, the TTP agreed to secret talks and declared a one-month cease-fire. When Islamabad started its new round of negotiations with the group, I wrote that this was the seventh time the Pakistani state had tried talking with the TTP. Islamabad’s previous six agreements with the group had come to nothing.
The TTP presented a difficult list of conditions. Its leaders demanded the release of a long list of prisoners; it’s not clear whether the Pakistani government ever delivered. The TTP also declared that it wanted to open a political office in a third country (which would amount to a form of recognition for an organization that is banned in Pakistan). Most problematic of all, TTP negotiators demanded the implementation of Islamic sharia law in Pakistan — which meant they were not ready to accept the current constitution, which is based on democratic principles. What the TTP was demanding, in short, was the self-abolition of the state — a surrender agreement, in effect.
Yet government ministers claimed that the TTP had agreed on a cease-fire. Opposition parties in Parliament demanded that the government reveal details about the talks. A panel of judges publicly grilled Khan over his policy.
On Dec. 10, the TTP ended its cease-fire and resumed attacks against Pakistani forces. The Pakistani military tried to target TTP leaders in Afghanistan with drones. The TTP retaliated by attacking police in Islamabad. They were sending a message that they were willing to wage guerrilla war in Pakistani cities. The government, which is hard-pressed on other security issues, decided to restart talks. But so far there are no results. Notably, the Afghan Taliban has shown no willingness to intervene on Pakistan’s behalf.
And what about the border? The new Afghan government has shown zero willingness to acknowledge Islamabad’s concerns. The Afghan Taliban has explicitly refused to accept the current border between the two countries, which was drawn by the British empire during colonial days, effectively dividing the Pashtun ethnic group in two. Taliban soldiers have even tried to stop Pakistani troops from putting up fencing along the border. The Afghan Taliban has announced plans to build 30 extra outposts to prevent the movement of Pakistani troops along the frontier.
In short, the Afghan Taliban is now behaving like great liberators who broke the shackles of foreign occupation without help from anyone else. The Afghan Taliban refuses to acknowledge Pakistan’s many years of tacit and not-so-tacit support for the group’s fight. If Pakistani leaders were expecting some sign of gratitude, they’re still waiting.
The bottom line is that the Afghan Taliban doesn’t trust Pakistan. Both have played double games with each other in the past. Now the Taliban is opening channels with India and Iran. It wants official diplomatic recognition for its new state, and it wants other countries to unfreeze Afghan funds that are held in foreign banks — but it also doesn’t want to meet the international community’s conditions. It recently had a golden opportunity to earn some goodwill with the international community when it met with Western officials in Oslo for three days last month. But the Taliban blew it. It denied involvement in the disappearance of some female activists — whose families persuasively blame the Taliban. The Taliban government in Kabul will have little hope of bolstering its relations with the West until it changes course.
But the Taliban isn’t listening to anyone — including Pakistan, which has annoyed many friendly countries by blindly supporting the Taliban over the years. On Sunday, the TTP killed five Pakistani soldiers — and openly accepted responsibility. Pakistanis’ patience is running thin. The question is how long Islamabad can go on ignoring reality.
A new investigation in India reveals an old truth about silencing women | null | null | null | null | null |
Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Harris, is whisked out of an event at Dunbar High School by a Secret Service agent following an apparent security concern on Feb. 8 n Washington. On the far right is Nadine Smith, the school's principal. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Harris, was evacuated from a Washington D.C. public school Tuesday afternoon following a bomb threat, officials said.
A Secret Service agent told Emhoff “we have to go” as he participated in an event at Dunbar High School marking Black History Month. A schoolwide announcement followed saying teachers should evacuate everyone from the facility.
The building was evacuated and police began searching the school in the Truxton Circle neighborhood of Northwest Washington.
Students were sent home, but teachers remained on the football field as of 3:45 p.m. as police dogs searched the building.
A bomb threat was called into the school shortly after 2:30 p.m., but nothing had been found as of 3 p.m., according to Kristen Metzger, spokeswoman for D.C. police. | null | null | null | null | null |
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R). (Brian Witte/AP)
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has ruled out running for Senate in 2022, extinguishing Republicans’ hopes that he would help the party gain an upper hand in Washington.
For months, GOP power brokers and some moderate senators had courted Hogan, hoping to lure the popular, term-limited governor into challenging Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). A victory would help shift the balance of power in the Senate.
Hogan is the second Republican governor to rebuff recent overtures from national party leaders. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu announced in November he would seek a fourth term rather than challenge Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).
“Just because you can win a race doesn’t mean that’s the job you should do if your heart’s not in it,” Hogan said. “And I just didn’t see myself being a U.S. senator.”
Hogan, 65, has built a national profile over the past three years. He has weighed running for president — in 2020 and 2024 — written a memoir, traveled to campaign for congressional candidates, formed a political action committee, co-chaired the political advocacy group No Labels, met with donors and worked the national television circuit, often as a critic of Donald Trump.
Hogan unveils tax-cut proposal as he contemplates future
An array of powerful figures in the party bent Hogan’s ear about challenging Van Hollen in deeply Democratic Maryland, which has only one Republican in its congressional delegation, Rep. Andy Harris. The state has not elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate in four decades, since Charles “Mac” Mathias’s final term in 1981.
Hogan said he notified Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who runs the Senate’s election campaign arm, that he would not run. He also told Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), who had encouraged him.
“I also spoke with Senator Van Hollen, to let him know he can rest easy and get a good night’s sleep tonight,” Hogan said with a chuckle.
Democrats painted Hogan’s announcement as evidence of Republican weakness.
“Senate Republicans are suffering a series of humiliating recruitment failures because their potential candidates know they cannot defeat strong Senate Democrats,” Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman David Bergstein said in a statement.
Hogan continues to entertain running for president, though he has said he will not launch a campaign if he cannot see a path to winning the nomination. On Tuesday, he reiterated that his decision to seek the presidency would hinge on family and political considerations — and not on whether Trump was running.
“It would be based on whether I could make a difference,” he said. “I wouldn’t care whether the former president runs or not.”
Hogan said that as he worked on last week’s State of the State speech, “it drove home” how much he wanted to keep his promise to residents.
“When I pledged to the people of Maryland that I was to give this job as governor everything I’ve got, every single day that I have been given, I meant it. And that commitment is far more important to me than any political campaign,” Hogan said, adding that he will assess his political future after his term ends in January 2023. | null | null | null | null | null |
The early blueprint for Turning Point Academy — laid out in detail for the first time in documents and chat logs reviewed by The Washington Post — points to the growing market for education and media serving families disgruntled with public schools, a flash point in many communities and a key issue on the campaign trail. The quest to raise revenue by allowing families to bypass traditional schools and buy curriculum more aligned with their political worldview worried some experts and watchdogs. | null | null | null | null | null |
Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Harris, was evacuated from a D.C. public school on Tuesday afternoon after a bomb threat, officials said.
A Secret Service agent told Emhoff “we have to go” as he participated in an event at Dunbar High School marking Black History Month. A schoolwide announcement followed, saying teachers should evacuate everyone from the facility.
The building was evacuated, and police began searching the school in the Truxton Circle neighborhood of Northwest Washington.
Students were sent home, but teachers remained on the football field as of 3:45 p.m. as police dogs checked the building.
Police were informed shortly after 2:30 p.m. that a bomb threat had been called in to the school, but nothing had been found as of 3 p.m., according to Kristen Metzger, a D.C. police spokeswoman. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper was sentenced to a year in prison after she admitted to stealing more than $835,000 from a Southern California school to fund her gambling addiction. (Youtube/KCAL)
“I have sinned, I’ve broken the law and I have no excuses,” Kreuper said at the sentencing over Zoom. “My actions were in violation of my vows, my commandments, the law and, above all, the sacred trust that so many had placed in me. I was wrong, and I’m profoundly sorry for the pain and suffering I’ve caused so many people.”
Mark Byrne, Kreuper’s attorney, told The Post his client had accepted the judge’s one-year prison sentence, even if they were pushing for probation. He argued that while the money she stole might have affected the school’s funding, her actions “didn’t decrease the quality of education students received” at St. James.
Kumar said the nun’s instruction to the auditors sparked suspicion, and they reported the incident to Msgr. Michael Meyers, the pastor at St. James Church. Around the same time, a St. James parent asked question at a school meeting about an old tuition check that had an endorsement on the back of check that did not line up with the school’s primary account, the prosecutor said.
According to prosecutors, Kreuper had stolen what’s estimated to have been the tuition for 14 students at the K-8 school in funds that “were intended to further the students’ education, not fund [Kreuper’s] lifestyle.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Blackistone: The NWSL is a symptom. U.S. Soccer is the problem.
A spokesman for U.S. Soccer declined to comment on its past investigation of Dames or the allegations against him, 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.
Opinion: What will it take for allegations of abuse against women to be taken seriously?
Tough love or verbal abuse? For coaches and parents, the new lines are hard to define.
She was 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 waterslide, he listed the colleges that had called him to express interest in each one.”
What questions do you have about The Post's reporting? Ask us here. | null | null | null | null | null |
Chicago banker Stephen Calk, left, leaves federal court in New York in June. (Richard Drew/AP)
A Chicago banker will spend one year and one day in prison for approving $16 million worth of illegal loans to Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in exchange for a cushy job in the Trump administration, a federal judge ruled Monday.
Between July 2016 and January 2017, Manafort sought millions of dollars from the Federal Savings Bank.
Calk knew Manafort “urgently needed” the money to avoid foreclosure on multiple properties, and leveraged his position as head of the bank to ask him for help in getting a coveted position with the administration, the statement added.
In the weeks after Trump’s victory — after Manafort’s first loan for $9.5 million had been issued, and while a second set of loans were pending — Manafort’s efforts and influence in the administration came through and Calk was formally interviewed for the position of undersecretary of the Army in 2017. He was not hired.
According to the Daily News, Calk is appealing his conviction and has admitted to being “deeply humbled.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The child tax credits has too many benefits to be dismissed
The government website childtaxcredit.gov on a computer screen on Jan. 24 in Annapolis, Md. (Susan Walsh/AP)
The Jan. 30 editorial “A disaster for poor people” made commendable efforts to argue against deleting an expansion of the child tax credit from the revived Build Back Better Act. Notably, it justified its position solely on the tax credit’s social safety net nature.
However, we should vindicate the child tax credit on a broader basis. The credit enables parents to enter the workforce and create jobs, especially in the child-care industry. The women’s labor force, especially those suffering from poverty, has shrunk the most, compared with pre-pandemic levels. Many mothers cannot find nearby and reliable child-care facilities, many of which were closed because of the pandemic and labor shortages. As of this time last year, some 20,000 child-care providers were estimated to have permanently shut down.
The credit would create jobs, reduce labor shortages and relieve labor market tightness. It would also reduce current and future inflation, a concern of Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), the major Democratic opponent of the credit. The credit would help foster the labor force with productive bodies, knowledge and skills through nutrition and early-childhood education.
The income phaseout and cutoff points for credit and the size of its benefits should be the agenda for negotiations, not a reason for flatly rejecting it, as Mr. Manchin and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) did. Worrying about credit‘s role as a disincentive to work is beyond reasonableness.
Kye Lee, McLean | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Florida farmers have been working to protect the environment for decades
Wetlands in Everglades National Park, Fla. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
I share Lizette Alvarez’s nostalgia for the Florida we knew decades ago, as she described in her Jan. 26 op-ed, “Florida waters choke on Big Ag.” Florida’s water resources — saltwater and freshwater — are plagued with challenges. Ms. Alvarez is right about that. But she was wrong to point the finger at agriculture.
Florida’s farmers, growers and ranchers are among the most — if not the most — progressive in the nation when it comes to protecting and restoring the environment. For more than 20 years, Florida farmers have been using best management practices to mitigate their impact on the environment and reduce nutrient runoff. Best management practices are based on sound science and have proved effective at protecting Florida’s water resources.
Best management practices implemented in the Everglades Agricultural Area perform better than required by law. Farmers have prevented more than 3,000 metric tons of phosphorus from entering the Everglades, and the landowners have covered 100 percent of the cost.
A 2020 Florida law directs farmers to more effectively manage fertilizer, animal waste and other nutrients to reduce agriculture’s impact on the environment. The law also requires farmers to report nutrient application, and the Florida agriculture community, including the Florida Farm Bureau Federation, supported the legislation.
It seems as though environmental activists want to eliminate Florida agriculture. But their mission would do more harm than good. Wiping out Florida agriculture would force American families to turn to more foreign sources for their food.
Jeb. S. Smith, Gainesville, Fla.
The writer is president of the Florida Farm Bureau Federation and a farmer. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Preserving government records is of utmost importance to the American people
The National Archives of the United States. (Jonathan Newton /The Washington Post)
Regarding the Feb. 1 news article “A president on a tear leaves Archives, Jan. 6 committee with repair work”:
President Donald Trump’s practice of tearing up documents required to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act should be of concern to all Americans. Government records laws exist to ensure that our public servants are accountable to the people they serve. The White House Office of Records Management deserves great credit for ensuring that these documents were retained regardless of their condition. The National Archives deserves credit for making them usable for accountability and transparency.
This underscores the importance of maintaining the funding and independence of the National Archives. The archivist of the United States plays a critical role in ensuring that essential evidence of our democracy is preserved and made accessible according to federal law.
The current archivist is retiring soon. It is critical that the Biden administration select an appointee who is highly skilled and well versed in the nature and management of federal government records, particularly presidential records.
Courtney Chartier, Chicago
The writer is president of the Society of American Archivists.
Jacqualine Price Osafo, Chicago
The writer is executive director of the Society of American Archivists. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: A sobering defeat for end-of-life options in Virginia
George F. Will provided a great service by explaining and promoting medical-aid-in-dying legislation in his Jan. 20 op-ed, “Medical aid in dying should not be proscribed,” and his Jan. 23 op-ed, “For the terminally ill, a dignified death.” Still, last Thursday, the Virginia Senate Committee on Education and Health defeated a proposed Death With Dignity Act (S.B. 668) that would have provided the option of medical aid in dying for mentally capable terminally ill adults in Virginia.
Sharon Crowell, Sterling | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: Race in America: History Matters with Deborah Watts
MS. GIVHAN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Robin Givhan, senior critic‑at‑large for the Washington Post, and today we’re continuing our series of conversations about Black women in American history. And today we’re talking about Mamie Till‑Mobley, and I’m joined by Deborah Watts, who is the co‑founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
MS. WATTS: Thank you for having me.
MS. GIVHAN: I'd like to tell our audience that they can join the conversation by tweeting comments and questions to our Twitter handle, @PostLive, and hopefully, I'll be able to get to a couple of your questions.
I wanted to start just by underscoring the trivial nature of the alleged crime, the alleged offense that Emmett Till committed, which was to whistle at a White woman. I am so struck by that and, as so many people have also been struck, by the decision that Mamie Till‑Mobley made to present her son in an open casket. I'm curious. Can you just talk a little bit about whether or not she understood the magnitude of that decision and the way that it would affect people? I mean, what made her decide to do that?
MS. WATTS: That's a very good question, Robin. I think it was a moment in time that Mamie took advantage of, and I think with the death of her son, the magnitude of that, the horrific nature of his murder, the brutalized face, body that she witnessed, she wanted the world to bear witness as well. And, as she has such a strong spiritual foundation and tying it to‑‑back to Jesus, if you will, being that she was raised in the church of God and Christ, you know, we had to bear witness to the crucifixion and to the nature in which our country dealt with them, the nature in which others, nonbelievers brutalized Jesus, if you will. And I know that through her spiritual foundation, that was something that she knew that had to happen.
Now, did she orchestrate all of it? Did she think ahead of time about that? I don't believe so, but I think it was a moment that she took advantage of this opportunity and said, "I"‑‑you know, "No one would believe me if I told them about this. Others need to bear witness." So I think that's what happened, and it did galvanize many, you know. It gave birth to the Emmett Till generation. It gave birth to the Civil Rights movement and pushed things forward, of which I know she was very pleased that that happened.
And she had to stand in‑‑I guess in her grief and in her pain and also in her pursuit of justice for her son. All of those things came together for her, and I think her spiritual foundation gave a wonderful beginning for her to make those things happen. But that's a great question.
MS. GIVHAN: I mean, you are not just a keeper of this legacy, but you are also a cousin to Emmett and to his mother. Over the course of your life, I mean, you got to know her well. Can you give us a sense of what she was like? I mean, I'm wondering if she just had this extraordinary sense of purpose and dignity, or if that was something that was, you know, just part of growing up during the time that she did.
MS. WATTS: Well, you know, that's a great question also. She, you know, was a scholar. She was educated. She was the only child of her parents, and she was in a bubble, I would say‑‑I could say, as it relates to love support, her spiritual foundation. Those were things that fortified her, and those are things that run consistent in my family in terms of the women and men who had a lot of love surrounding them, a lot of structure, a lot of rules, the do's and don'ts, and then a purpose around achieving our education. She excelled at that at an early age, and so I think it prepared her to move forward and to do some of the things that she did.
Her resolve came from her mother. Just the stoic nature, the elegance that she dealt with things, the careful nature of her discussion and her language that she used to try to reach people was very purposeful, but it flowed. I think people understood that she had that gift and it flowed and it reached, which was so important for her. So she brought that with her, not knowing that she was going to have to stand in front of thousands of people, not knowing that she was going to have‑‑bear witness and have others bear witness to her only son's murder and lynching and his body when she opened the casket, but she rose to the occasion. But she was prepared but probably not in the way that mentors prepare someone for the role that she eventually played.
But I think her family, our family, with strong spiritual foundation and giving her those opportunities at an early age and her excelling in her education certainly prepared her.
MS. GIVHAN: One of the things that you just mentioned, you were talking about the Emmett Till generation and the fact that seeing what had happened to this young child made people stand up who had not stood up before. I mean, were there specific people that stood up, or was it simply groups of people, people from certain parts of society, people from different parts of the culture who decided that they needed to speak and to act?
MS. WATTS: I think it's a combination of those things, you know, the SCLC/SNCC organizations, NAACP, certainly rose to the occasion along with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks. There were a lot of things happening in our country at that time, you know, and I think that it just was that spark that actually caused people to bear witness again, to take a look at the horrific nature of what hate looked like in our country, and to stand up. I think they had enough. You know, it was like enough is enough, and so there were people. There were women, men who stood, you know, stood up for their rights. They actually spoke out. They marched. They experienced some horrific things that happened to them from violence, from state‑sponsored violence, and other things. So there was a cost that they paid as well, but their sacrifice helped to move things forward, right along with Mamie Till-Mobley. And so I always honor that Emmett Till generation who are now, like, in their eighties, late seventies and eighties right now because of the sacrifices that they made.
But there are a lot of women there that‑‑you know, there are a couple names of women right now. I just can't think of them right now, but I will. It will come back to me, but they're important in our history, and they have spoken out publicly. And they have claimed themselves as the Emmett Till generation as well. So we owe them a lot for moving face forward along with all the other ones that rose to the occasion, men and women and organizations.
I mean, Mamie Till‑Mobley helped to mobilize the‑‑oh, gosh‑‑the labor unions, the packinghouse workers, those that were in the sleeping car organization. NAACP, helped to raise money for those organizations as well, which helped to propel Martin Luther King in his push towards Civil Rights.
She joined other men and women, standing in their stead as it related to other lynchings that occurred in our country, standing against the death penalty. So she spread herself not only just speaking about her son, but she stood in solidarity with others as well. And she was a tool. She was useful to the movement, and a woman of that age and a woman of her stature, being a single mother grieving, if you will, I'm just so in awe of what she was able to do at that time.
But I have to say from a faith perspective, that had to come into play to give her that kind of strength and courage, along with her family and along with her loving, strong mother.
I do want to share something with you so that you understand too a little bit about what she was thinking at the time as well, because I don't want to paint this picture that she moved so far beyond her pain that there wasn't grief. Can I read something out of a book that she wanted people to understand what she was thinking about?
MS. GIVHAN: Oh, please.
MS. WATTS: Do you mind?
MS. GIVHAN: Please.
MS. WATTS: "So I was sitting in the dining room feeling sorry for myself. What am I going to do? Almost as soon as I asked that question, the answer came. End it all. Oh, I don't know what possessed me. I really don't have any idea at all. But I got up. I walked over to the window. Well, that window was painted shut, so I went to another window, and that led out to a gangway, a stairwell, where I figured no one would find me until my body started to smell. No, that wouldn't do. I looked at the front windows. One was a picture window that didn't open, but then I couldn't jump from those windows on the sides either because children played out front, and that would be so traumatic from them. Besides, after I thought about it a little more, I realized something else that was very important. I wasn't wearing any pants. I didn't wear pants back then. I was wearing a dress that Mama had made for me. Oh, I remember that dress. It was sleeveless, real tight in the waist, a long, flared skirt. It was a white dress, white with a floral pattern, some kind of design on it. That design was pink. This was one of my favorite dresses. I couldn't stand the thought of jumping in that dress. More important, I couldn't stand the thought that my skirt might fly up. Just then, as I was thinking about all of that, the phone rang, and it was a reporter. He was thinking about doing a follow‑up story on me, and he wanted to know what I was planning to do." And this is in her book, "The Death of Innocence."
And I'll just shorten this by saying that she shared with that reporter that she wanted to go back to school, and he was instrumental in helping her to get into Chicago Teachers College, where she ended up matriculating and getting her degree there.
But that's just a little bit about what her mindset was, and I'm sure there are other mothers and others who have experienced similar pain that Mamie has that had maybe those similar thoughts. But there was something that happened that brought her back. But, again, she was thinking about not having any pants on at that time.
MS. GIVHAN: Well, I mean, I think what you just read is really such a through line with so many women that we, you know, elevate and put on pedestals and point to as heroic, which is that, you know, they felt fear, they felt grief, they felt all the confusion, and they still pressed forward.
I mean, you brought up the reporter there. I mean, how important was the Black media specifically in mobilizing behind Mamie?
MS. WATTS: Yes. You know, I think that they were very important, from Jet magazine, Johnson Publishing, publishing that, the picture of Emmett and his remains in Jet, all the other reporters that ascended on, upon Mamie to carry her story forward. It was a media frenzy, if you will, and it was one of the first media events, I think, that was connected in with the movement that helped propel it forward. I mean, it was so strong that even Martin Luther King‑‑one of the photojournalists, Dr. Ernest Withers, ended up photographing that picture of Moses Wright in the courtroom when he pointed at J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Dr. Ernest Withers created a photojournalist book that shared the story of the trial, but he eventually also became the photographer for many but specifically the photographer for Martin Luther King because they saw how important it was that media could bear witness and could show and demonstrate to the American public what was happening, and not only the American public but also those across our globe as well. They could see what was happening in America, and it wasn't such a great America as we were claiming to be.
MS. GIVHAN: I mean, ultimately, the men who were tried for lynching Emmett Till were not found guilty, but this brings me to a question that came in a bit earlier from Keith Beauchamp who asks, "What would be justice for you and the Till family?" And before you answer that, I just also want to make note to the audience that Keith is a filmmaker and producer of the documentary "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" and the upcoming film "Till." What would justice look like?
MS. WATTS: Ooh. That's a great question, and you know, that's a challenging question for most families because, first, they want their loved ones back. And we know that with the many lynchings and the unjust murders that have occurred across our country, that's not going to happen, and so the next best thing is to make sure that their deaths are not in vain. And that's what Mamie wanted also. So we have to push forward with honoring that but also that truth, justice, and accountability takes place because it is really important that those perpetrators are brought to justice, that they are held accountable, culpable, whatever their roles were, that they pay a price for the pain that they've caused.
Our laws weren't on the books at that time that could, I'd say, usher in the kind of justice that was needed at that time, but we're still struggling with some of those laws today that can bring a full accounting and justice to many of those families, those families past and those families present. And, hopefully, with the work that we're doing, we can bring some sort of accountability and laws in place that will bring some healing and accountability, strengthen those laws.
But it's a tough question, and, Keith, thank you for asking that. But it is something that we struggle with, but I'm pretty clear that it is accountability. That's the number one thing that we're looking for, and that specifically in Emmett Till's case, it would be charging the known living accomplice, Carolyn Bryant Donham, culpable in Emmett's kidnapping and murder. And that is possible today, you know.
So it's a great question, and justice can be‑‑can prevail, and it's in the hands of Mississippi right now. And so sometimes we don't know who to point to or who to demand, make the proper demands of, and we tried that with the Department of Justice, and of course, the Department of Justice has said this is not in their jurisdiction. And they recently have closed their investigation.
But this is a murder case, and there is no statute of limitations on murder, and so justice for us is full‑‑a full accounting, truth, and‑‑I would say accountability. It just‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: Can we pause‑‑oh, sorry.
MS. WATTS: Robin, this is the sixty‑sixth year‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: I was going to share that we have a clip, a very powerful clip of Mamie herself talking about sort of that tension between her own grief and what her‑‑the larger story, the larger symbolism of her‑‑impact of her son's death.
MS. GIVHAN: I mean, Emmett would have been 81 years old this year, and as we think about his place in history, I'm curious how you have been able to sort of process the importance of that history, the fact that that is, in many ways, unfinished history and the tension that now exists for some people in not wanting to grapple with the difficult, uncomfortable history.
MS. WATTS: Yes. Well, I have to say, right along with many others, that that history is American history, and so we cannot leave out a significant piece of it in order to share the truth about what's happened in America. If we're going to move forward, we have to deal with the true nature of what we've done, and if we can't deal with that, we're not going to ever move forward.
And so I know that the clock is turning back in some instances, and I know that that is not where any African American wants to go or person of color wants to go. And so, with that, yes, that tension is going to exist because there is going to be resistance to that, and so I would say our country is changing. We better just pull up, grow up, and show up in places that‑‑and move over, if you will, where we can become better. We can become a better country by embracing everything that we are.
You know, I wrote a book in 1998 called "The 101 Ways to Know You're 'Black' in Corporate America," and one of those‑‑I guess the purpose of that was to try to remove the veil, you know, remove the sense that things are happening there that people weren't talking about. And so, just like with Mamie in opening that casket, it has opened the door for us to have these meaningful discussions around what's happening and the truth.
And so American history is something we need to embrace. We need to understand all of it. We need to understand the contributions of African Americans and other people of color to this country. We need to embrace it, and we need to understand how important it is for us to move forward instead of resisting that kind of progress, looking at it as this wonderful value proposition for us to be great and to move into those spaces that‑‑and those claims that we said we are. But there's a lot of pain. There is a lot that we need to own up to, and until we do that, I just don't see us moving forward.
I'm going to continue to remind us of particularly the story of Emmett and those that even came before Emmett, those presently with this through line that we currently see of other cases and modern‑day lynching that is occurring, and also looking at laws that need to be in place to strengthen the kind of, I would say, protection for people that are experiencing these things today. So we need to continue to teach. We need to continue to share our own stories, own our own legacy, and make sure that our children understand that.
So, if it's not taught in schools, make sure that our children embrace who they are and who America really is, and we shouldn't fear it. It should be a part of something that helps us to propel ourselves forward.
MS. GIVHAN: You've made a very conscious decision to highlight that through line from Emmett Till to the justice that the family of George Floyd was seeking, and I'm thinking that you're in Minneapolis now, and there's then, you know, another shooting. And I'm wondering why is it important to you to make sure that the thread isn't lost, that the connection continues to be made between 2022 and our history.
MS. WATTS: Ooh. I think it‑‑you know, I'm raw right now with emotions around the Amir Locke family because I know them, and they're from my hometown, Omaha, Nebraska, the mother is. And so we go way back, and so this is a very emotional time for many of us, not only in Minnesota, but across this country. And I use this term, and people, they kind of are offended by it, but I call Minnesota "Minnessippi," because we're not far removed from the kind of disparities, both economically and from an educational perspective, and then also these modern‑day lynchings that are occurring. And so it's important that we make those connections from the past to the present and the future so that we don't repeat the kind of ugly parts of our past history.
We, you know, created something called the "Never Again" movement and pledge. We try to honor Emmett's birthday on July 25th. We honor and remember his death on August 28th, and we try to make those connections standing in solidarity with the other families as well because it's important that our children and our future, that we don't experience what we've experienced in the past.
So I think it's important for all of us to figure out where we are in part of that through line and to do whatever we can, whether it's at home with our children and our schools, to resist the resistance and the changing of the narrative of our history, resist that, because that is a part of who we are. And I don't think we're very proud of it. That's why we want to hide it. But if we are not proud of it, we have the opportunity to change it. But it's so important for us to get in where we fit in, to make sure that whether we're politicians, whether in faith‑based communities, mothers, that we are doing our part. Enough is enough.
Mamie Till‑Mobley opened that casket so that we could make a change. That was a sacrifice, and these sacrifices are going on much too long. We waited 66 years for justice, and I think it's important for us to connect our story and our journey with the mothers that are beginning this journey. This is a club that no one wants to belong to. It's a journey that no one wants to take on, but we do take it on because we don't want a repeat of it.
MS. GIVHAN: Have we gotten any better at bearing witness?
MS. WATTS: At some point, I think we were. I think we are closing the opportunity to bear witness. We are resisting from an education perspective what the true nature of what America is. We're stumping our opportunity to achieve and to be better and to be greater. I think we are seeing the clock turn back, unfortunately, and many of us that have been in‑‑you know, whether it's in corporate America or working on diversity and inclusion or working in the Civil Rights movement, we're worried, you know, that things are not moving forward‑‑voting rights, you know, blocking a part of democracy that people sacrifice to participate in. So something is not right, and we need to call it. We need to say what it is, and we need to stand up.
You know, we ask for allies, but I ask for accomplices. You know, I ask for people to join in on this fight. Allyship, you know, you‑‑and some of us, even some of my family members, you know, they are so emotionally charged by just the recent women of the movement that they couldn't watch it, but we've got to bear witness in order to effect change.
So it's a great question. I wish I had a better answer for you, but I think we're seeing the wheels turn back on this clock, and I don't think we're going to like what happens as a result of it. We're not going back to slavery. Thank you. We're not. We're not going back to the kind of racism that we've experienced in the past. So there is going to be resistance. We're going to do it. Women are going to rise to the occasion. Youth are rising to the occasion. They're marching right now. They're walking out of schools right now because of the murder and the killing, the senseless killing of Amir Locke.
So you need to just join in. Join in to make America greater and to make America great because right now we're going backward.
MS. GIVHAN: Well, I'm afraid that we're going to have to leave it there, but I do want to share a very lovely tweet that says "So proud of you, Mom." So your daughter is watching.
MS. WATTS: I love them.
MS. WATTS: I love them. I needed that.
MS. GIVHAN: So thank you so much for being with us today, and thank you all for joining us. And for more information about upcoming events and conversations, particularly about the role of Black women in American history, you can go to WashingtonPostLive.com and register and get more information. Thanks so much. | null | null | null | null | null |
In a 2012 Alabama case, the Supreme Court said a sentence of life without parole for a youth is “excessive” and should be reserved for “the rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption.” In his argument Tuesday, Malvo’s lawyer Kiran Iyer said that Maryland Judge James L. Ryan, who imposed the life-without-parole sentences in 2006, acknowledged at the time that Malvo was not incorrigible — but that was before the Supreme Court made it a factor in sentencing. | null | null | null | null | null |
But now the court may have cleared a path to potentially harming African American voters in another way, by further diluting their prospects for electing preferred candidates, though we can’t be sure how this will turn out.
In the Alabama case, the GOP-run state legislature created a congressional map that packs many of the state’s Black voters into a single district. Though they make up 27 percent of the state’s population, African Americans have a remote chance of winning in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts. In Alabama, voters are highly divided by race; according to exit polls, 77 percent of Whites in Alabama voted for Donald Trump in 2020, compared with 55 percent in the country as a whole.
After a lengthy trial, a three-judge panel found that the map discriminated against the state’s Black voters in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state to produce a new map. That panel was made up of one judge appointed by Bill Clinton and two appointed by Trump, suggesting the legal judgment was clear.
Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court, where five justices issued a stay nullifying the lower court’s ruling, allowing a map that seems to clearly violate the Voting Rights Act to remain in place. They also accepted the case for a full hearing and judgment later on, but the stay came through what is now known as the “shadow docket,” where increasingly consequential rulings are issued on an emergency basis.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said that it was too close to the election later this year, so the court simply had to intervene on Alabama’s behalf.
Even Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the architect of the court’s long assault on voting rights and the author of its 2013 decision gutting other sections of the Voting Rights Act , was unable to justify what his conservative colleagues did. In a brief dissent, he wrote that while he agreed with the decision to take the case for a full consideration — signaling that he looks forward to driving another stake into the heart of the Voting Rights Act — “the District Court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction.”
When it allows clearly unconstitutional or otherwise problematic state laws to remain in place, the court not only creates sweeping de facto change for temporary periods, it also sends a message to Republican state legislatures that nothing is off the table.
To be clear, this isn’t a conspiracy — it’s not as though Kavanaugh or Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. is calling up Republican state legislators and saying, “Hey, why don’t you pass a law doing this obviously unconstitutional thing so we can go to town on it?” And there have long been test cases filed with the intent of spurring the court to carve out new rights or overrule prior cases.
But we’re embarking in a new era, in which a radicalized Republican Party meets an unusually aggressive Supreme Court majority eager to reimagine the whole scope of American law. And with six conservatives, conservatives have a margin of error that allows them to indulge their wildest policy ambitions. | null | null | null | null | null |
A spokesman who has represented the lawyers for his accuser said they did not yet have a comment. The Post does not name alleged victims of domestic violence unless they ask to be identified.
The decision, which has been before the DA’s office since prosecutors were referred the case by police in August, sets up potential legal fights between Bauer and Major League Baseball and the Los Angeles Dodgers, over the future of his career and millions owed. | 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 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 |
In a 2012 Alabama case, the Supreme Court said a sentence of life without parole for a youth is “excessive” and should be reserved for “the rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption.” In his argument Tuesday, Malvo’s lawyer Kiran Iyer said that Maryland Judge James L. Ryan, who imposed the life-without-parole sentences in 2006, acknowledged at the time that Mavlo was not incorrigible — but that was before the Supreme Court made it a factor in sentencing. | null | null | null | null | null |
As Gayle Kaufman, a professor of sociology and gender and sexuality studies at Davidson College, sees it, the gender divide reflected in last month’s jobs report reflects a bigger issue with the U.S. economy: “I still don’t think the labor market is built for anyone who wants to have a life outside of work,” she said.
Kaufman attributed January’s “disheartening, but not completely surprising” numbers to a lack of structural support. “This includes lack of paid leave and other family-friendly policies at the same time as there is inadequate child care and uncertainty with schools,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Governing party nearly obliterated in election
After two terms in power, Costa Rica’s Citizens’ Action Party has been practically erased from the country’s political map in national elections.
Outgoing President Carlos Alvarado Quesada’s party got less than 1 percent of the votes cast Sunday, according to the latest preliminary results from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. The party didn’t earn even one of the 57 seats in the Legislative Assembly.
The party’s presidential candidate, lawmaker Welmer Ramos, was never able to shake the unpopularity of Alvarado Quesada. Corruption scandals, approval of a controversial fiscal measure, unemployment and the handling of coronavirus pandemic curbs contributed to voters’ discontent.
Alvarado Quesada also faced blowback over his office’s collection of personal information on citizens. Costa Rica’s top prosecutor filed papers last week seeking to lift the president’s immunity so he can face charges.
Prosecutors allege Alvarado Quesada abused his authority by creating the Presidential Unit of Data Analysis with the supposed goals of using personal data to better tailor public policy. But the unit allegedly sought restricted information from government agencies, such as personal income and medical records.
Falling short of the needed 4 percent of the vote, the Citizens’ Action Party will not be eligible for state financing and faces a $350,000 punishment from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal for campaign finance violations.
The party will be reduced to a spectator in the presidential runoff, on April 3, pitting the top two finishers among the 25 candidates in Sunday’s election.
Israeli forces kill 3 suspected militants
Israel said security forces killed three Palestinian militants in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday who had been responsible for recent attacks.
The Shin Bet internal security agency initially said they were killed in a “clash,” but police later acknowledged that while the men had two assault rifles, they did not fire them. “During the arrest, they tried to open fire and were neutralized,” police said.
Photos of the three men circulating online show them posing with assault rifles, with one wearing a headband of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed group loosely tied to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party.
The Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank, condemned the shooting of the men.
Palestinians and rights groups often accuse Israel of using excessive force.
There have been a number of stabbing and shooting attacks by Palestinians in the West Bank in recent weeks. An Israeli settler was shot dead near a settlement outpost in December.
Settlers also have carried out attacks recently on Palestinians and Israeli activists, causing injuries and property damage.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war. Nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers reside in the territory, alongside more than 2.5 million Palestinians.
Spanish firm fined $6 million for deadly Ghana truck blast: The Spanish company in charge of a truck that exploded and killed 13 people last month en route to a gold mine in Ghana violated storage and transport laws and has been fined $6 million, Ghanaian authorities said. The truck was transporting explosives owned by Madrid-based Maxam to the Chirano gold mine, run by Toronto-based Kinross Gold Corp., when it collided with a motorbike, caught fire and exploded, leveling a village and injuring at least 100 people. Maxam denied responsibility, blaming a local contractor.
Avalanche kills 7 Indian soldiers near border with China: A Himalayan avalanche killed seven Indian soldiers in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh near the China border, a Defense Ministry spokesman said. The avalanche struck in the Kameng region, which is at an altitude of 14,500 feet and had seen heavy snowfall in the past few days, he said. After several border standoffs in the past few years soured ties with neighbor China, India has intensified patrols in Arunachal Pradesh, which shares a border with Tibet.
Mudslide kills at least 14 in Colombia: Heavy rains triggered a mudslide that swept into a residential area in western Colombia, killing at least 14 people and injuring 35, authorities said. Officials said one person was reported missing after the slide in Risaralda, in the municipality of Pereira. The mayor of Pereira warned of a continued risk of landslides and urged people to leave. | null | null | null | null | null |
On Monday, the Supreme Court stepped in, in a way that was doubly extraordinary. First, divided 5 to 4, it said the lower court had acted too close to the election — even though the primary is not until May and the general election is nine months away. Second, several conservative justices seemed open to Alabama’s radical claim that Section 2, whose goal is to improve minority representation, must be implemented in a way that’s “race-blind.”
Nevertheless, the court’s conservative majority may be poised to rewrite Section 2 in the way that Alabama proposes. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said that the outcome of the case was not “clearcut” in favor of those challenging Alabama’s map. That can only be true if the court is preparing to transform the law.
More ominously, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., while voting to leave the lower court order in place, flagged the only lower court decision to have embraced Alabama’s position, along with the article I co-authored examining the implications of that approach. The message is clear: The court’s conservatives are seriously considering a a race-blind interpretation of Section 2 that would neuter its effectiveness. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., alongside other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, speaks in front of the senate chambers about their support of voting rights legislation at the Capitol in Washington, on Jan. 19, 2022. The Supreme Court’s decision to halt efforts to create a second mostly Black congressional district in Alabama for the 2022 election has sparked fresh warnings that the court is eroding the Voting Rights Act and reviving the need for Congress to intervene. (AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
Moreover, because Black athletes account for the majority of Division I football and basketball players, Huma noted, they face disproportionate harm from the NCAA’s restraints on their compensation.
The National College Players Association cited USC and UCLA in its filing because it submitted the charges in the NLRB office serving Southern California. It also wanted to include a public and private university to expand the action’s reach, and it characterized the Pac-12 and the NCAA as “joint employers” with the goal of extending any NLRB ruling on the matter to encompass all Division I schools, both public and private. | null | null | null | null | null |
Baldwin and Kang met Tuesday morning and reached agreement on a $35 million deal — one that Baldwin had resisted for months while attempting to sell his share for $10 million less to billionaire Todd Boehly. They later addressed players together at the team’s indoor training facility in Springfield, Va.
Nonetheless, Baldwin continued to fight, arguing Kang was not fit to run the team. When it became clear, however, he no longer had many allies left, people close to the situation said, he and team founder Bill Lynch agreed to sell.
Having already received conditional approval by the league to run the Spirit, Kang now needs only to meet a set of standard conditions before officially taking full control. An NWSL spokesman said the league probably would not comment until final details are completed.
Baldwin had bought controlling interest from Lynch before the 2019 season, and Kang, the founder of a health information technology company, joined the group in 2020. Dozens of small-level investors were added early last year.
Devin Talbott — the team’s fourth-largest investor who had sold his interest to Kang — is expected to return to the fold. Others might do the same or cash out. The group includes former senator Tom Daschle, Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin, former World Cup standout Briana Scurry, as well as Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush Hager.
Kang has approached D.C. United chief executive Jason Levien about becoming a Spirit investor, people close to the situation said. The Spirit plays home games at United-owned venues, Audi Field in the District and Segra Field in Leesburg.
Ben Olsen — the former United player and coach whom Baldwin named president of club operations in September — seems likely to be retained. He and Kang have a good working relationship, people close to the team said, and this offseason, Olsen juggled both front office and team responsibilities.
Tuesday’s announcement put to rest a tumultuous stretch for the organization. The relationship between Baldwin and Kang was already frayed when, in August, coach Richie Burke was reassigned. The next day, The Washington Post detailed accusations against Burke of verbally and emotionally abusing players.
Kang repeatedly confronted Baldwin over the treatment of women at the club, which included a top executive and close ally, Larry Best, allegedly using degrading nicknames for female employees and players.
Baldwin, in turn, accused Kang of meddling in the team’s “day-to-day affairs” and “compromising” its messaging. A league investigation resulted in Burke’s firing. The team also was banned from league governance matters. | null | null | null | null | null |
Fred Thiagarajah, one of the woman’s attorneys, acknowledged that prosecutors had a “daunting task” in that that Bauer’s accuser had already been denied a restraining order against the pitcher in a civil hearing, but said the decision to not charge him was “not a declaration of innocence; it’s a declaration of, ‘I don’t have enough evidence to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt.' And there’s no doubt that Mr. Bauer just brutalized [the woman].'”
In response to Bauer’s specific denials of punching, scratching or sodomizing the woman, Thiagarajah noted that during the restraining order hearing last summer, the pitcher declined to take the stand, exercising his right against self-incrimination. “It’s easy to deny these things occurred when you’re not going to have a chance to be cross-examined about it,” Thiagarajah said. Because the evidence is overwhelming that these things occurred... That was established to 100% certainty. The issue was whether or not she consented to the abuse."
The Post does not name alleged victims of domestic violence unless they ask to be identified.
The prosecutorial decision, which has been before the DA’s office since it was referred the case by police in August, sets up potential legal fights between Bauer and Major League Baseball and the Los Angeles Dodgers, over the future of his career and millions owed. | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. officials say the threat posed by Mexican fisherman casting their nets illegally in U.S. waters has grown so acute that for the first time in years, they’ve banned Mexican fishing vessels from entering U.S. ports.
The fishermen cast mile-long gillnets in the Gulf of Mexico, targeting sharks whose fins are sliced off and shipped to China and red snapper consumed across North America. Frequently, protected sea turtles are also ensnared in their nets as bycatch. | null | null | null | null | null |
Chief Tom Manger said a Capitol Police officer entered Rep. Troy Nehls’s office in November because the door was left “open and unsecured.”
Capitol Police aim their weapons as a pro-Trump mob tries to break into the House of Representatives chamber on Jan. 6, 2021. Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.), right, in blue shirt, talks to one of the rioters. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
In a Twitter thread Tuesday, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) claimed without evidence that “The @CapitolPolice Intelligence Division investigated my office illegally and one of my staffers caught them in the act.”
Nehls accused Capitol Police leadership after one of the officers entered his office in the Longworth House Office Building with no prior notice Nov. 20, 2021, ahead of the Thanksgiving break, and took pictures of a whiteboard. The officer filed a report raising concerns about the contents of the whiteboard, which included mentions of “body armor” and a poorly-drawn map of the Rayburn House Office Building — which is also part of the Capitol complex — that had an X at one of the building’s entrances.
Manger said that on the Monday after the agent stepped into Nehls’s office, Capitol Police personnel followed up with Nehls’s staff about the issue and determined that no further action or investigation was needed.
In the police report, the Capitol officer who entered Nehls’s office said he found the door to Nehls’s office “wide open with no one in the area” and that he noticed a whiteboard “with suspicious writings mentioning body armor with an outline of the Rayburn Building next to the Longworth building with an 'x' marked at the C street entrance of the Rayburn.” The report says the officer locked the office’s door, but does not mention that the officer took a picture of the office.
Nehls, in an interview with The Washington Post, said he is not questioning Capitol Police protocol, or the officer’s decision to enter his office to conduct a security check, and that he’s “not against” the “rank and file” of the Capitol Police. He is, however, concerned about the photograph taken of his office and whiteboard, and how it triggered an investigation of his office.
Nehls explained that the writing on the board — which included reports of faulty Chinese-made body armor — was related to legislation his office was working on, while the map of the Rayburn Building, which Nehls said “looked like it was done by my nine-year-old,” was drawn for an intern who was sent on a mission to find the ice machine. The X marked the spot.
“I am very aware of January 6, I believe it was a law enforcement issue, a law enforcement failure,” Nehls said. “I’ve been a critic on that, and I’ve been a very vocal critic on Ashli Babbitt’s death … I find this more than just mere coincidence that pictures are going to be taken of my legislative priorities and shared with intelligence agents who then shared the picture with a supervisor in the intelligence shop.”
Babbitt was among a mob of Trump supporters who used a flagpole, a helmet and other items to batter the barricaded doors to the Speaker’s Lobby, the hallway outside the House Chamber where some lawmakers were sheltering on the afternoon of Jan. 6. A Capitol Police officer shot Babbitt as she was trying to climb through a broken glass panel in one of the doors, hitting her in the shoulder. She later died.
Nehls said he is now “very” concerned about the security within his office, and his “right to privacy.”
Manger has, in multiple letters, assured Nehls that his office is not under any type of investigation or surveillance by the Capitol Police. In a letter sent to Nehls on Jan. 31, Manger acknowledged that the officer had taken a photograph of the office Nov. 20 and also explained to Nehls that special agents in the Capitol Police’s Protective Services Bureau had received “a satisfactory explanation” for the writings on the whiteboard, and that the case was closed by USCP. | null | null | null | null | null |
Workers load mail into delivery vehicles outside a U.S. Postal Service distribution center in Chicago in October. (Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News)
The bill, which passed 342 to 92, marks a major breakthrough for the mail agency and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who made the legislation the centerpiece of his 10-year postal restructuring plan.
The Postal Service has implored Congress to help fix its balance sheet for nearly 15 years, and agency leaders are cautiously optimistic about prospects for the Postal Service Reform Act in the Senate. It has 27 co-sponsors in the upper chamber, including 14 Republicans, sufficient support to defeat a potential filibuster.
The Postal Service is required to prepay its retirees’ health-care costs, a mandate instituted in 2006 when mail volume was steady and the agency was profitable. But decades of falling mail use have turned it into a perpetual financial loser, and the pre-funding requirement has accounted for $152.8 billion of its $206.4 billion in liabilities.
Tuesday’s legislation, advanced by leaders of both parties, wipes clean $57 billion of that amount, and will save the agency another $50 billion over the next decade. The bill installs new timely delivery transparency requirements for the Postal Service, which has struggled with on-time service since DeJoy took office, and allows the agency to contract with local, state and Indigenous governments to offer basic nonpostal services, such as hunting and fishing licenses.
“Now we have Louis DeJoy. He came up with a reform plan. … As evidenced by the support for this bill from Democrats, these reforms are working. The employees have bought into these reforms, and this bill will codify a lot of those reforms and help make the post office sustainable into the future.”
The liberal wing of the House Democratic caucus had pushed Maloney (D-N.Y.) to pass a broader bill that included provisions to protect mail-in voting, funding for electric vehicles and restrictions on political campaign activities for the postmaster general and members of the agency’s governing board.
DeJoy in a statement thanked the House leadership for its work on the bill and said that if it was passed by the Senate, "this legislation will have the same operational and financial impacts as the self-help steps we are taking at the Postal Service to provide the American people with the delivery service they expect and deserve.”
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the sponsor of the Senate version of the bill and chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement that he expected “to move quickly” to advance the legislation in the upper chamber.
“I have worked hand in hand with the bipartisan leaders of my committee and the House Oversight and Reform Committee to craft this bipartisan bill that will help the Postal Service overcome unfair and burdensome financial requirements, provide more transparency and accountability to the American people, and continue its nearly 250-year tradition of service to every community in our nation,” Peters said.
The bill eliminates the Postal Service’s retiree health care pre-funding mandate and instead requires future postal retirees to enroll in Medicare, drawing some criticism that the legislation amounts to a congressional bailout.
“The truth is the post office isn’t lacking liquidity. It is bankrupt,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said on the House floor. “And nothing in this bill will make the post office truly solvent. It just wipes out and wipes away debt and shifts the burden on to taxpayers.” | null | null | null | null | null |
University of California agrees to $243.6 million settlement in UCLA sex-abuse scandal
It is also one of several massive settlements in recent years by universities to resolve sexual-abuse complaints against doctors, in many cases with plaintiffs claiming that university officials failed to take action over years. Allegations have rocked schools including the University of Michigan, Pennsylvania State University, Ohio State University, Michigan State University and the University of Southern California.
UCLA officials said in a statement that Heaps’ alleged conduct is “reprehensible and contrary to the University’s values,” and expressed the hope that the settlement would be a step toward healing and closure for the plaintiffs involved. “We admire the courage of the plaintiffs in coming forward and appreciate plaintiffs’ counsel’s commitment to resolving the claims,” UCLA said in its statement.
According to plaintiffs’ attorneys, there are more than 550 plaintiffs with state court cases against the UC regents and Heaps.
Despite UCLA’s failures, the university did ultimately investigate the complaints, Manly said. In a statement, he praised the regents for resolving the legal claims rather than “unnecessarily inflicting further damage,” and said the settlement should serve as a model for other universities facing similar claims.
UCLA officials said that UCLA Health, the Arthur Ashe Student Health & Wellness Center, and the UC system leadership have taken action to address issues alleged in the litigation, including enhanced policies to prevent, detect and respond to allegations of sexual misconduct by a clinician.
Heaps completed his internship, residency and fellowship in gynecologic oncology at UCLA in the 1980s, was a longtime faculty member at the School of Medicine, and served for many years as a consulting physician for UCLA Student Health. From 1990 to 2014 he had a private practice but had privileges at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, and from 2014 to 2018 he was employed by UCLA Health as an obstetrician-gynecologist.
In 2018 UCLA investigated allegations of sexual misconduct and improper billing practices by Heaps, according to the university, reported him to the Medical Board of California and law enforcement. University officials informed Heaps that his employment was being terminated, after which he announced he was retiring, the university said.
Manly called on Congress to hold academic institutions accountable. “This has got to stop,” he said. “I can’t tell you what it’s like to speak to a woman who’s got terminal ovarian cancer and the last weeks of her life are spent litigating with her oncologist who sexually assaulted her. | null | null | null | null | null |
Moreover, because Black athletes account for the majority of Division I football and basketball players, Huma said, they face disproportionate harm from the NCAA’s restraints on their compensation.
The National College Players Association cited UCLA and USC in its filing because it submitted the charges in the NLRB office serving Southern California. It also wanted to include a public and private university to expand the action’s reach, and it characterized the Pac-12 and the NCAA as “joint employers” with the goal of extending any NLRB ruling on the matter to encompass all Division I schools, both public and private. | null | null | null | null | null |
Baldwin and Kang met Tuesday morning and reached agreement on a $35 million deal — one that Baldwin had resisted for months while attempting to sell his share for $10 million less to billionaire Todd Boehly. They later addressed players together at the team’s indoor training facility in Springfield.
Nonetheless, Baldwin continued to fight, arguing Kang was not fit to run the team. When it became clear, however, that he no longer had many allies left, people close to the situation said, he and team founder Bill Lynch agreed to sell.
Having already received conditional approval by the league to run the Spirit, Kang now needs only to meet a set of standard conditions before officially taking full control. An NWSL spokesman said the league probably would not comment until final details are settled.
Baldwin purchased controlling interest from Lynch before the 2019 season, and Kang, the founder of a health information technology company, joined the group in 2020. Dozens of small-level investors were added early last year.
“I personally appreciate and want to publicly recognize Bill Lynch’s pivotal work as the founding owner of the Spirit bringing women’s professional soccer back to our nation’s capital, and also Steve Baldwin’s leadership, vision and formidable drive in building the Spirit and the outstanding roster that won the 2021 NWSL championship,” Kang said in a statement. “I can’t wait to begin work with our talented, resilient players and staff.”
Devin Talbott — the team’s fourth-largest investor who sold his interest to Kang — is expected to return to the fold. Others might do the same or cash out. The group includes former senator Tom Daschle, Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin, former World Cup standout Briana Scurry, Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush Hager.
Kang approached D.C. United chief executive Jason Levien about becoming a Spirit investor, people close to the situation said. The Spirit plays home games at United-owned venues: Audi Field in the District and Segra Field in Leesburg.
Ben Olsen — the former United player and coach whom Baldwin named president of club operations in September — will probably be retained. He and Kang have a good working relationship, people close to the team said, and this offseason, Olsen juggled front-office and team responsibilities.
Tuesday’s announcement ended a tumultuous stretch for the organization. The relationship between Baldwin and Kang was already frayed when, in August, coach Richie Burke was reassigned. The next day, The Washington Post detailed accusations against Burke of verbally and emotionally abusing players.
Kang repeatedly confronted Baldwin over the treatment of women at the club, which included a top executive and close ally, Larry Best, allegedly using degrading nicknames for female employees and players. Baldwin, in turn, accused Kang of meddling in the team’s “day-to-day affairs” and “compromising” its messaging. A league investigation resulted in Burke’s firing. The team also was banned from league governance matters. | null | null | null | null | null |
Our history is unsettled. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The past is not history. Not here. Not yet. Our history isn’t settled. It’s not something from which we seem to have taken any enduring lessons. And now, some citizens are working mightily to ensure that the actual facts of our history are so muddled, the edges of it so softened and blurred, that it will be nearly impossible for future generations to make sense of it.
The things once thought to be etched in stone are revealed to be merely scribbled on paper — readily erased if enough people are left feeling uncomfortable by unflattering truths. We keep trying to plaster over history’s fault lines with aphorisms and pablum, but the instability runs deep. The ground can shift suddenly and without warning. A few layers of blissful ignorance or patriotic gloss aren’t nearly enough to shore up a foundation that was never level and balanced to begin with.
The Supreme Court was once a place where history seemed to be venerated, where it was dealt with with some honesty and little emotion. The legal experts talk a lot about precedent and they quiz nominees to the high court to determine if they have respect for it. Stare decisis. One of the rare legal phrases that has seeped into the common vernacular and that’s uttered like a reassuring totem: Some things in this democracy are certain. History tells us so. Rest assured, fellow citizens, a few issues have been resolved and some arguments have been settled, perhaps not to everyone’s satisfaction, but they are no longer points of contention.
More than likely, the question of precedent will be posed in a multitude of ways to whomever President Biden ultimately selects to fill the seat that will be vacated by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who recently announced his intention to retire. During previous hearings, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were keen to know whether the nominee considered Roe v. Wade, which protected a person’s right to an abortion, to be settled law. They wanted to know about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. The nominees were nothing if not enamored with precedent. They spoke of their respect for it, the importance of it and their intellectual understanding of it. But none of that meant that all of the prickly discomfort, resentment, anger or intolerance that spewed out in the past as these issues were wrestled into submission had been put to rest.
We have learned again and again that the emotions aren’t in the past. They are constant and exhausting. And overtime, they’ve muffled history’s voice.
It seemed that we’d codified certain principles about democracy and access to voting in a nation that once denied suffrage to women and Black Americans: States that had behaved so egregiously in the past required federal review before they were allowed to change their voting laws. A state can’t carve out its districts in a manner that discriminates against Black voters. And yet here we are, some people still arguing about polling places, identification requirements, drop boxes and gerrymandering like petulant children trying to get around the clearly delineated rules. How many times will the question of affirmative action come before the Supreme Court? From Bakke to Bollinger, each case seemed to offer clarity and a sense that history was understood and acknowledged. This is how the country moves forward from Jim Crow laws and systemic discrimination.
Supreme Court stops use of key part of Voting Rights Act
We are mired in our ugly history. It leaves us lead-footed, making it impossible for us to sprint toward the future. It robs us of bright promise. It robs some of their dignity and others of their very breath. Perhaps we could be forgiven for failing to remember the sorrows from generations ago, for our inability to recall the ways in which Black women were dehumanized or Black men hunted. But we can’t even call to mind the failures of two years ago or a year ago. In 2019, Anjanette Young was forced to stand naked and handcuffed in her own Chicago living room when a phalanx of police officers battered down her door after obtaining a search warrant that did not require them to knock and identify themselves before entering what turned out to be the wrong home. One of the officers even had the audacity to reprimand Young for raising her voice at the invading men. In 2020, police in Louisville burst into the home of Breonna Taylor using a similar kind of search warrant. They fatally shot her. And this month, police shot and killed Amir Locke when they stormed into an apartment where he was sleeping.
After each case, police departments made small adjustments in tactics. Incremental change happened. Apologies were offered. A financial settlement signed. But history, both recent and distant, keeps slipping our mind. It’s the specter that rots the present. And eats away at the principles we once believed were blessedly settled. | null | null | null | null | null |
UCLA officials said in a statement that Heaps’s alleged conduct is “reprehensible and contrary to the University’s values,” and expressed the hope that the settlement would be a step toward healing and closure for the plaintiffs involved. “We admire the courage of the plaintiffs in coming forward and appreciate plaintiffs’ counsel’s commitment to resolving the claims,” UCLA said in its statement.
UCLA officials said UCLA Health, the Arthur Ashe Student Health & Wellness Center, and the UC system leadership have taken action to address issues alleged in the litigation. | null | null | null | null | null |
Appeals court allows abortion referrals
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati denied a request by the 12 states to pause rules for the federal government’s family planning program while their case is heard. The states were eager to stop implementation before the next round of federal grants starts rolling out in March.
At issue are new rules from President Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services that returned the federal family planning program, called Title X, to how it ran under the Obama administration, when clinics were able to refer women seeking abortions to a provider.
Rules that Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who brought the lawsuit, wants permanently reinstated were put into place in 2019 under President Donald Trump. One required federally funded family planning clinics to be physically and financially independent of abortion clinics. The other required them to refrain from referring patients for abortions.
U.S District Judge Timothy Black rejected that argument in a ruling last month, denying a preliminary injunction that would have paused the rules. The 12 states appealed his decision to the 6th Circuit, which said they failed to prove they’d be irreparably harmed by the rules going into effect.
City settles suit in shooting of Black man
The Colorado Springs City Council approved the $2.97 million settlement Tuesday, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported. The settlement also calls for anti-bias training for the department’s police officers, the department said.
Police body-camera footage showed officers talking to Bailey and another man about an armed robbery reported nearby in southeast Colorado Springs. Bailey ran as he was about to be searched. An officer could be heard yelling “Hands up!” three times before firing.
The city police department said in a statement that “we want to state unequivocally that this settlement is not, in any way, an admission or indication of wrongdoing by these officers. Rather, it was a decision made to mitigate financial risk to the City and taxpayers.”
Suspect arrested in grocery store shooting
A man suspected of opening fire inside a grocery store in Washington state, killing one person and injuring another, was a suspected shoplifter who appeared to be battling mental illness, according to court documents.
Aaron Christopher Kelly, 39, was arrested late Monday in a vehicle on Interstate 90 near Spokane and was charged with first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder, Richland police said.
Kelly was arrested on the freeway between the town of Sprague and Spokane, which is about two hours northeast of Richland, police said.
He was identified by police earlier Monday as the suspect in the shootings at a Fred Meyer grocery store in Richland.
He is accused of walking into the Richland Fred Meyer about 11 a.m. Monday and shooting customer Justin Krumbah multiple times in a grocery aisle. He then shot an employee, Mark A. Hill, had “some sort of conversation” with a shopper and wandered briefly in the store before leaving about 11:07 a.m., court documents said.
Mother sentenced in deaths of 4 children | null | null | null | null | null |
Why the feel-good story of a Jamaican skier at the Olympics has become a flashpoint
The IOC’s effort, and some of the controversy surrounding it, underscore a dilemma faced by Olympics officials, particularly those overseeing winter sports: How do you include the best athletes in the world while also promoting sports such as skiing to new countries in hopes of growing and diversifying them?
By Tatum Hunter and Geoffrey Fowler7:39 p.m.
But at a time when streaming services, social media sites and legacy networks are vying for eyeballs, finding the Olympic content you want when you want it still isn’t a no-brainer.
We studied NBC’s programming plan and the strict rules from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) about what can be put online and where, and answered some of the most burning questions about how to watch the Winter Olympics free or on a budget. | null | null | null | null | null |
But not so fast, some economic experts say. According to a National Women’s Law Center analysis, the report is far less rosy when gains are separated out by gender.
“There’s a lot of desire to say: It’s done now. We’re back to normal. And we are seeing real progress in job growth,” Martin said. But the persistent gender disparities are “cause for concern,” she added: They have “really demonstrated the need to address our caregiving infrastructure, which has been a huge drag on women’s recovery.”
Although women gained 188,000 jobs in January, to recoup all the jobs lost since the start of the pandemic, they would need to keep gaining jobs at this rate through the end of October.
Until January, women hadn’t seen such low labor force participation since the late 1980s or early ’90s, Martin said.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who did not support the spending package, cited the “mammoth” cost of the bill as well as inflation concerns. He also opposed 12 weeks of paid family leave (in the final version of the bill, this proposal was shaved down to four weeks) and an enhanced child tax credit that didn’t include work or education requirements.
Depending on the jobs they have, this could mean taking unpaid time off, Dixon added. While these workers may still have jobs, “losing money is just as crucial as losing a job,” she said.
While the labor market is friendlier to job seekers now than it has been in years past, NWLC’s Martin cautions that this alone can’t level gaps in employment, pay and working conditions.
Dixon says this is one key takeaway from the January jobs report: The enduring gender divide shaping both the pandemic’s economic fallout and its recovery is a deeply ingrained feature of the U.S. labor market. It is still based on a “male breadwinner model,” which she said “is not the model we say we want.” | null | null | null | null | null |
But now that we know which teams are in, let’s get back in prognostication business and look at five bold predictions.
Figure Mixon to get 19 to 21 carries against the Rams. He averages over four yards a carry, and while he could finish close to 90 yards, the Rams are decent against the run. They allowed just two 100-yard rushers this season, and none since Week 4.
But if the Bengals concentrate on running the ball, Mixon will do well. They use more two- and three-tight end sets, which helps. He’ll be the game’s leading rusher because the Rams tend to spread their carries.
Nobody can block Donald. He has been the game’s most dominant defender since coming into the league. He has 1½ sacks in the Rams’ three playoff games. The Bengals have definitely shown throughout the regular season and in these playoffs an inability to keep great defensive tackles out of the backfield, but Donald is a next-level disrupter.
He can move around, routinely beats double- and triple-teams, rushes against left and right tackles and destroys pass-blocking schemes. Donald is determined to win his first Super Bowl, so expect to see him at the top of his game.
Yards don’t mean the Rams will beat the Bengals, but you can see how the stats will line up. Stafford should get his 300 yards, as he did in the Rams’ past two playoff games. If the game is close, Burrow could finish around 240 yards. That’s because the Bengals’ best chance at protecting Burrow from getting destroyed is running the ball.
The Bengals ranked only No. 26 in the league in pass coverage this season, giving up 248.3 yards per game. The Rams have Cooper Kupp, who has been unstoppable, and Odell Beckham Jr. has been a great addition.
It will be interesting to see who gets picked on the most, as Stafford has excelled against both Cover-one and Cover-three defenses. Stafford would destroy man-to-man coverage, and he’s one of the best in the league against the blitz. Cover-three would give Cincinnati a chance to get double-coverage on Kupp.
Ramsey is the best coverage corner in the league. He only had 49 of 83 pass attempts completed on him this season and deflected about 16 passes during the regular season. The Bengals’ hobbled tight end C.J. Uzomah probably doesn’t help matters. Uzomah wants to play, but if he’s not 100 percent, the Rams’ secondary will have more flexibility and limit Chase’s opportunities.
No quarterback has had to survive more than Burrow. He was sacked 51 times during the regular season. The Titans got to him nine times last month. Still, he’s been able to win three playoff games. | null | null | null | null | null |
Jamaica's Benjamin Alexander (Savo Prelevic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
Benjamin Alexander was 32 when he received his first ski lesson in Whistler, B.C., in 2016. After a decade traveling the world as a disc jockey, which included a residency at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, Alexander grew obsessive about a new ambition: to become the first Alpine skier from Jamaica to compete in the Winter Olympics.
When Alexander finally accomplished that goal in January, celebrating his historic qualification in an event in Liechtenstein, he became exactly the kind of small-country skier the International Olympic Committee was hoping to attract as it lowered the threshold for qualification before the Beijing Games, and he viewed his berth as a crucial step to bring more diversity to the sport.
The IOC’s effort, and the controversy surrounding it, underscore a dilemma faced by Olympics officials, particularly those overseeing winter sports: How do you include the best athletes in the world while also promoting sports such as skiing to new countries in hopes of growing and diversifying them?
“I’m 32nd in the world right now, and I should have easily gone to the Olympics,” said American Steven Nyman, who failed to qualify for his fourth Games. “The Alpine men, the field is so small, it’s going to be a joke. And it’s all taken up by these smaller nations that are pursuing those races. It was just a poorly thought-out system.”
Amid the changes to the qualification landscape, there also have been allegations of impropriety. Alexander’s qualification in giant slalom — which was secured in an event his country’s ski federation helped organize — has drawn scrutiny in the days leading up to competition in Beijing, as some stakeholders have questioned whether races in Liechtenstein and elsewhere were manipulated to help lower-ranked skiers earn bids to the Winter Games. The sport’s governing body, the International Ski Federation (FIS), is investigating at least three qualification races and, as a result, asked the IOC to add four more quota spots. The IOC granted that request; Austria received two of the quota spots, while Germany and France each received one.
After the previous Winter Games, the IOC changed its qualification rules for Alpine skiing, trimming the field from 320 athletes in PyeongChang to 306 in Beijing and mandating gender equity, with 153 men and women in each field. Each ski team can have a maximum of 11 athletes per gender, down from 14 at the previous Olympics.
But three of those small events over the past three months, including two Alexander competed in, caught the eye of Federiga Bindi, a competitive skier turned academic. The points list in slalom and giant slalom is calculated by taking the average of a skier’s five best finishes — determined by a formula involving the number of other racers and the quality of those racers’ handicaps — and in each of those events, Bindi noticed, four of the top-ranked skiers in the fields consistently and significantly underperformed.
“The thing that bugs me the most is that this year there are [new] quotas. … In previous years, these people would be the folklore of the Olympics,” Bindi said in an interview. “This time they’re still going to be that, but they’re stealing actual places from people who have worked over their life. It’s simply not fair.”
“I can assure you that if we are required to accept 10 Italy, 10 Austria, 10 Switzerland etc they will just cancel the race,” he wrote. “Impossible for us to go to the Olympics if that’s the situation.”
The races in Liechtenstein could hold up to 25 competitors; seven racers pulled out, and just 10 competed. Alexander said that some of those who did not compete in the event opted out because of coronavirus concerns and that neither he nor his federation manipulated any competitors to underperform to help lower-ranked skiers qualify.
“It doesn’t make any sense. There were TV cameras all around. Everything is there,” Alexander said. “FIS investigated multiple times, at the request of some larger nations, and just said repeatedly, ‘There is nothing wrong with these races.’ ”
A FIS spokeswoman said there is no timeline for the investigation of the three events.
Nyman had held out hope that the United States would be granted additional quotas and he would be able to go to his fourth Olympics. The 17-member U.S. team is the country’s smallest since 1984, and for the 39-year-old Nyman, missing out on these Games is particularly a “punch in the gut” after he missed PyeongChang because of a knee injury. At his age, his Olympic window is probably closed.
Nyman has built a friendship with Alexander in recent years — “I’ve been helping guide him along the way and talking to him about this scenario,” Nyman said — and that mentorship included advice about everything from disciplines Alexander should compete in to the equipment he should use. The men trained together a few times as they pursued spots in Beijing.
“Where it gets sticky is where quotas had a massive haircut,” he said. “And a new entrant from some random country, whatever, call it Jamaica — when a new entrant from Jamaica kind of replaces a guy who is ranked, I don’t know, 70th in the world — then people get really upset.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Bitfinex had previously offered a reward potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars for information leading to the return of the stolen funds. U.S. officials would not say if that reward offer played a role in the government’s case against Lichtenstein and Morgan. But the court papers suggest the government may not have needed help. According to the papers, much of the stolen bitcoin was placed for a time in accounts at AlphaBay, a platform shut down by authorities in 2017 as an illicit marketplace for drugs, firearms, and fake documents.
Lichtenstein, a tech entrepreneur who goes by the nickname “Dutch” and holds both U.S. and Russian citizenship, according to court papers, describes himself online as an “angel investor.” Morgan, according to her online profile, is a part-time rapper who also ran an email marketing company called Salesfolk.
At a federal court hearing in New York late Tuesday, prosecutors initially sought to keep the couple behind bars while awaiting trial. But a judge ultimately ruled they could be released if they met certain conditions, including bonds of $5 million for Lichtenstein and $3 million for Morgan. Both were also ordered to remain at their home in New York with ankle bracelet monitors. During court arguments about the terms of their release, prosecutors said the couple have access to $330 million worth of bitcoin that hasn’t been recovered and that federal agents found what they called a bag of “burner” phones under the couple’s bed, suggesting they could be a flight risk.
Law enforcement officials have been increasingly concerned that the complex, quickly changing and often confusing world of cryptocurrencies is a boon to criminals of all stripes who are eager to both steal and hide stolen money from authorities. In particular, ransomware attacks — in which hackers demand money in exchange for not wrecking a company’s computer files — have become one area where criminals are known to favor cryptocurrency.
Shayna Jacobs in New York and Tory Newmeyer in Washington contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Delaney Thomas of St. John's gathers a rebound over Bishop Ireton's Abigail Cooch on Tuesday. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
The St. John’s Cadets swung the ball around the perimeter, each player looking for an opening or considering a risk.
Their opponent, No. 20 Bishop Ireton, had played a fierce zone defense all night, one that had helped the Cardinals hang with the No. 6 Cadets to this point. Now, with Bishop Ireton up by one at home with two minutes remaining, it seemed it might go the distance and pull off a Washington Catholic Athletic Conference upset.
With the shot clock winding down, Cadets sophomore Kyndal Walker got the ball, sized up her defender and decided to settle for a contested three-pointer. On a night when every basket had been laborious, it seemed wildly optimistic to think points could come that simply.
But they did. Walker’s shot swished through the net, giving the Cadets a late lead they would not relinquish during a 56-49 win in Alexandria.
“I just credit my teammates and coaches for making me feel comfortable taking a shot like that,” said Walker, who scored seven of her 17 points in the final two minutes. “I know, whether that shot is in or out, my team is going to be behind me.”
The gritty road win was a sign of growth and consistency for the Cadets. It has been a strange year for the program, which in recent seasons became accustomed to local dominance and national recognition. Beyond losing two-time All-Met Player of the Year Azzi Fudd to graduation, the young team was beset by myriad issues in the early days of the season: health issues, personal issues, coronavirus issues, scheduling issues. There were plenty of days when the Cadets had to practice with just seven or eight players.
“We’ve all been together and healthy and growing in rhythm for only about three weeks now,” Coach Jonathan Scribner said. “We’re approaching what we would normally be in mid-December.”
With a full roster, St. John’s (10-4) is hoping to hit its stride in the final few weeks of the regular season, before the three-day chaos that is the WCAC tournament. The Cadets entered this game on the back of an impressive win Saturday — a 58-33 rout of Georgetown Visitation, then ranked No. 4 in the area.
But the momentum of that victory was countered Tuesday by an Ireton team filled with energy. The Cardinals (14-9) threw multiple zones at the Cadets, rattling them with long arms and a spirited commitment to stops. Ireton quickly jumped to an 11-2 lead, and it took until halftime for the Cadets to look comfortable.
But Ireton refused to go away, matching St. John’s basket for basket and even threatening to put the game away in the fourth quarter. The Cadets kept the score close enough to set up Walker’s pivotal three.
“That was a big-time grow-up game for us,” Scribner said.
St. John’s has five regular season games remaining. By tournament time, it hopes to surprise anyone who might have forgotten what this program can do.
“I think we’re underrated, and we’ve kept that mentality this season,” junior forward Delaney Thomas said. “We’re ready to show people what we’ve got.” | null | null | null | null | null |
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Oscar Tshiebwe posted his sixth straight double-double with 18 points and 14 rebounds and TyTy Washington scored 12 of his 14 points in the second half to lead the Wildcats, who reached 20 victories in a season for the 13th time in 14 years.
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Johnny Davis had a game-high 25 points to lead Wisconsin to its second straight victory in East Lansing. | null | null | null | null | null |
YANQING, China — She shuffled off to the side all alone and lowered her body into the snow like a wounded animal. Mikaela Shiffrin’s pain was emotional, not physical — at least as far as anyone knew — but the effect was the same. She dropped her poles, wrapped her arms around her knees and buried her helmeted face in them, as another competitor skied past.
What was stunning the first time it happened had just become unfathomable: Shiffrin, arguably the greatest female skier in the world and one of the biggest stars of these Winter Olympics, skied out for the second straight time at National Alpine Ski Centre, failing to complete her first run in the women’s slalom.
When it happened Monday in the giant slalom, five gates into the race, it seemed an anomaly: Shiffrin’s first DNF since January 2018. When it happened again Wednesday, five gates into the slalom, it suddenly seemed to signal something more. These things happen in skiing, as Shiffrin was the first to point out Monday, but almost never in back-to-back races to someone at Shiffrin’s level. Could the twin stumbles be a shocking coincidence, or is something wrong with Shiffrin?
The answer may come later in the competition, beginning Friday in the women’s super-G, an event in which she won the world championship in 2019 but has never raced at an Olympics. After that: the downhill, followed by the Alpine combined, with the latter representing perhaps Shiffrin’s best remaining shot at a third career Olympic gold medal.
After she skied out Monday in the giant slalom, Shiffrin, 26, vowed to “keep the right mentality” and “keep pushing,” despite the obvious disappointment. “My best chance for the next races is to move forward, to refocus,” she said then, “and I feel like I’m in a good place to do that.”
Two days later came her first opportunity to do that. She shot out of the starting gate, wearing bib No. 7, for the first of two runs — on the course nicknamed the Ice River, built with man-made snow across an otherwise arid and browned-out stretch of the Xiaohaituo Mountains northwest of Beijing — that would determine the champion. But mere seconds into her first run, she began to falter going around the fourth gate, and while she technically made the fifth gate, she had drifted so far wide she was unable to recover.
The two events in which Shiffrin skied out, the giant slalom and slalom, were two of her best medal chances at these Olympics, where she was seeking, among other things, to become the first three-time Olympic gold medalist in U.S. Alpine skiing history. She had won a gold in each of those events — the slalom in Sochi in 2014, and the giant slalom in PyeongChang in 2018 — as well as a silver in the combined in 2018.
The slalom was typically where Shiffrin’s exceptional technical skills revealed themselves most strikingly. She has won 47 slalom races on the World Cup circuit, the most in history by one skier in one discipline.
But the past 24 months have been the most difficult of Shiffrin’s life and her career. Her father died in February 2020 following an accident at home, prompting Shiffrin to sit out the rest of that World Cup season. This season, she has dealt with a back injury that plagued her through October and November, as well as a positive test for coronavirus that forced her to miss the World Cup stop in Lienz, Austria in December order to isolate.
Still, she arrived in Beijing both as one of the women to beat in Alpine — where she was expected to enter in all five women’s events — and as one of the most prominent faces of NBC’s Olympics hype machine.
Her Olympics so far: two races, less than 20 seconds of competitive skiing, two DNFs and an immeasurable wave of shock across the sport. It would be another 48 hours until Shiffrin is at the starting gate again, her Olympics suddenly taking on a far different tone than anyone could have fathomed just days ago. | null | null | null | null | null |
Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Harris, was evacuated from a D.C. public school on Tuesday afternoon after a bomb threat was called in to the front desk, warning that people had 10 minutes to leave, authorities said.
Police evacuated and searched Dunbar High School in the Truxton Circle neighborhood of Northwest Washington and said they found nothing hazardous.
Ashan M. Benedict, executive assistant chief of D.C. police, told reporters the threat was called in about 2:15 p.m.
He said Emhoff’s Secret Service detail was notified immediately. Inside the school, an agent was heard telling Emhoff, “We have to go.” Benedict said Emhoff left the building at 2:18 p.m. A schoolwide announcement followed, directing staff members to evacuate everyone from the facility.
Students were sent home, but teachers remained on the football field as police dogs and bomb technicians checked the building. At 4:40 p.m., police tweeted an all-clear for the school and reopened surrounding roads.
“There is no ongoing threat to the Dunbar facility,” Benedict said.
The second gentleman was escorted from the school by Secret Service while participating in a Black History Month event on Feb. 8. (AP)
“Mr. Emhoff is safe and the school has been evacuated,” tweeted Katie Peters, Emhoff’s communications director. “We are grateful to Secret Service and D.C. Police for their work.”
The Secret Service issued a statement saying the agency had no information that the threat “was directed toward our protectee.” The agency declined to elaborate on “means and methods used to conduct our protective operations.”
Dunbar Principal Nadine Smith said administrators followed the necessary procedures upon learning of the security threat.
“Our protocol is to clear the building and move the kids away,” she said. “[D.C. Public Schools] just gave us directions to make sure, to go ahead and send the kids home.”
Benedict said investigators do not think the bomb threat to Dunbar is related to recent threats made to historically Black colleges and universities, which have caused significant disruptions on campuses in and around the District and across the country.
Benedict said investigators are working with the FBI to determine who is responsible. He said detectives are looking into the phone call and “the number that was used to call it in.”
He said no suspect or person of interest has been identified. | null | null | null | null | null |
Use of the phrase in connection with the Capitol insurrection has led to days of attempted political cleanup over a Republican Party resolution censuring Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger
Those three words have since sparked a massive backlash among GOP senators who fear the resolution could jeopardize the party’s fortunes in the midterm elections. The move has also led to days of attempted political cleanup by the Republican National Committee over the language and the accompanying censures of Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.).
While RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and party officials say they did not intend to defend violent insurrectionists in the resolution — which passed the committee of grass-roots members overwhelmingly — the words have been widely criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike.
On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) became the highest-ranking Republican elected official to criticize the RNC for the resolution censuring Cheney and Kinzinger for serving on the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
McConnell described the attack as a “violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, after a legitimately-certified election, from one administration to the next.”
Several other Senate Republicans similarly voiced disapproval of the censure resolution. Some, such as Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), said it was “absurd” for the RNC to defend the events of Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse.”
“Every moment that is spent re-litigating a lost election or defending those who have been convicted of criminal behavior moves us further away from the goal of victory this fall,” Collins told reporters at the Capitol.
Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday praised “my Republican colleagues who have been willing to speak the truth in the last few days,” but he said that “the vast majority of my Republican colleagues remained silent while the party leaders declared Jan. 6 legitimate.”
Members of the RNC voted overwhelmingly for the resolution by voice vote Friday, with only a smattering of “no” votes, highlighting the divide between the party’s elite and grass roots. Former president Donald Trump called McDaniel on Saturday to congratulate her on the resolution, a person familiar with the matter said.
“After the resolution was submitted, Chairwoman McDaniel and a number of other members believed censure was the most appropriate action the body to take,” Danielle Alvarez, a RNC spokeswoman, said. “ … Outside of the D.C. bubble, our grass roots are very supportive of the decision to hold Cheney and Kinzinger accountable.”
The resolution denounces the House committee’s investigation as “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” and states that the behavior of Cheney and Kinzinger “has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.” Violent pro-Trump supporters stormed the Capitol after months of the former president falsely saying the election was stolen, resulting in five deaths.
The phrase “legitimate political discourse” did not appear in an original draft of the resolution by top Trump ally David Bossie, according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post. Instead, Bossie’s version said the committee had a disregard for “minority rights” and “due process” and seemed “intent on advancing a political agenda to buoy the Democrat Party’s bleak electoral prospects.”
It is unclear how the words “legitimate political discourse” came to enter the document as it was edited in Salt Lake City by Bossie, McDaniel and others. Bossie did not respond to requests for comment.
Several RNC members said it was frustrating that, aside from a small number of resolution committee members on Thursday afternoon, no one else saw the text of the resolution until 1:38 a.m. Friday, when the document showed up in inboxes of the committee’s members. It was not read or presented aloud before it was voted on nine hours later.
In the packet, there were other resolutions, including one blaming China for the coronavirus, and another implicitly criticizing the party for creating an outreach program to target LGBTQ voters — a move McDaniel made last year.
The outreach program “created the impression among important elements of our coalition … that the RNC was undermining essential aspects of our platform, including our planks on marriage and religious liberty,” the resolution read, according to a copy reviewed by The Post.
All the resolutions were passed without any debate, public reading or presentation.
Bill Palatucci, a national committeeman from New Jersey, said he plans to push the committee to repeal the resolution censuring Cheney and Kinzinger. “At a minimum, they should remove the provision of ‘legitimate political discourse’ from the resolution,” Palatucci said. “But they should repeal the whole thing.”
“There weren’t enough eyes on the document,” Palatucci said.
Henry Barbour, a national committeeman from Mississippi, said there was “a lot of frustration with what happened” among members and other prominent Republicans. “With the strength of the environment, and the historical situation, the fundraising is good, we have the right nuts and bolts. … There are a lot of people who don’t understand why we had to do that. Resolutions shooting at other Republicans are never going to be helpful.”
McDaniel decided to get involved in editing the resolution after she learned Bossie was going to submit it, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who like some others requested anonymity to describe internal deliberations. “It was not her idea. The horse was already out of the barn,” this person said. But she did support it privately and spoke favorably about it in front of members, people at the meeting said.
In phone calls over the weekend, McDaniel told others that she was pushed by Bossie to support the resolution and that she did not intend to support violence, which she wanted Republican lawmakers appearing on TV to make clear. People she spoke to described her as “on the ropes and trying to do damage control,” in the words of one person.
A person who spoke to McConnell said he was frustrated that the party was focused on “the only liability we have” when he believes Republicans are otherwise well-positioned to win in the November midterms. The person, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said McConnell wanted to be clear he supported McDaniel because he viewed her as a “force for good” in handling a messy situation that she did not initiate.
Asked whether he has confidence in McDaniel, McConnell said Tuesday: “I do.”
In her weekend calls, McDaniel told the story of Kathy Berden, a friend of hers from Michigan, who was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee because she agreed to serve as a fake elector for Trump for the election, according to a person who spoke with the chairwoman this weekend.
In an interview with The Post before the resolution passed, McDaniel also told the story of Berden when asked why she was going after the Jan. 6 commission, but declined to name her.
McDaniel and some of her senior staff began trying to clean up what several allies and advisers viewed as a major blunder on Saturday morning. First, she sent out “talking points” to members who asked for them, according to a copy of her email obtained by The Post.
The talking points encouraged members to link Cheney and Kinzinger to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and to say that other investigations of the Capitol are ongoing, including by law enforcement.
“They are attacking ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse completely unrelated to the violence at the Capitol,” according to the talking points. “Political speech is the most protected form of speech under the First Amendment. The January 6th Commission has unchecked power with no regard for due process or the rights of Republicans.”
In calls with some allies, McDaniel said that she was in an impossible spot, because if she had not supported the resolution, she probably would have drawn the ire of Trump and his allies, according to people who spoke with her. And, she said, her members overwhelmingly supported it.
She also told others privately that she had taken a political bullet for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) by changing the resolution from an original draft that said McCarthy should expel Cheney and Kinzinger from the House GOP conference.
McCarthy has repeatedly declined to say whether he supports the censure resolution. On Tuesday, he told an ABC News reporter that “everybody knows there was” legitimate political discourse on Jan. 6. He later waved away the reporter when she sought to ask him follow-up questions in a Capitol hallway, telling her to instead make an appointment with his office.
In an exchange with a CNN reporter in another Capitol hallway, McCarthy claimed the RNC’s use of the phrase “legitimate political discourse” was a reference to the select committee’s move last month to subpoena individuals who cast bogus electoral votes for Trump in seven states won by Joe Biden in 2020. The text of the RNC resolution made no such distinction.
A person close to McDaniel said she had gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback from the members on the resolution and that “it actually strengthens her with them.” The person noted that McDaniel and the party had outraised other party committees, including its Democratic counterparts, even when Democrats control the White House, House and Senate.
“Listen, whatever you think about the RNC vote, it reflects the view of most Republican voters,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “So, I’m just telling you, in my state, it’s not helpful to have a bunch of D.C. Republicans commenting on what the RNC — and frankly, probably most Missouri Republicans — support. Super unhelpful, and super great way to get themselves inserted into that race, which I don’t want.”
Mike DeBonis and Amy B Wang contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Beatty has publicly called on Rogers to apologize.
In a statement, Rogers, 84, said he had met with Beatty to personally apologize.
Last year, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) said she was moving her office at the U.S. Capitol complex away from Greene’s for safety reasons, after claiming that Greene accosted her without a mask.
“Out of concern for the health of my staff, other members of Congress, and their congressional staff, I repeatedly called out to her to put on a mask,” Bush said. “Taylor Greene and her staff responded by berating me, with one staffer yelling, ‘Stop inciting violence with Black Lives Matter.’ ”
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus gathered Tuesday evening to condemn the incident between Beatty and Rogers, and called on Rogers to publicly apologize as well.
“Today what we saw was unacceptable,” said Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) “This was harassment of a woman, a Black woman and a woman in leadership because he put his hands on her. He told her to kiss his part of his body. And I can tell you, being the little Black girl from the east side of Detroit, I would not take that standing or sitting, and I’m not going to take a standing or city for one of our own to be disrespected.”
House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) said he knew that wearing masks could be uncomfortable at times but that it did not give anyone an excuse to insult or assault another member of Congress. He also reminded lawmakers to be mindful that their behaviors should set an example for others across the country.
Others cited the incident as yet another example of the erosion of civility in Congress.
“We should be applauding [Beatty] for trying to protect everybody’s health,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said. “We understand what frustration there is around a lot of issues. But in no way should any colleague go beyond the pale by doing what was done today. … The behavior and the words today were indescribably, unbelievably horrible.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Deputy U.S. marshals escort 6-year-old Ruby Bridges from William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in November 1960. (AP)
I had often wondered how Ruby Bridges felt in the moment that she first arrived at William Frantz Elementary School in November 1960. If the name isn’t familiar, the image above probably is — as may be the Norman Rockwell painting of a small Black girl walking with an entourage of faceless protectors, passing a wall on which is scrawled a racial slur. Bridges’s arrival at the school on that day marked its integration — a transition that was poorly received by many in the surrounding community.
“I knew that I was going to go to a new school,” Bridges, now Ruby Bridges Hall, explained. “I really did not know who the four very tall White men were. They did say U.S. marshals, but that really meant nothing to a 6-year-old.” In another interview, she said she had thought the furious crowd that awaited her that first day was somehow related to Mardi Gras. In the interview from last year, she also recalled that some in the crowd brought a child-sized coffin in which had been placed a small Black doll.
What’s most remarkable about this now is that this was a recent interview with Bridges. She was born in 1954 and is only 67 years old, younger than about 50 million Americans.
I only realized Bridges was still so young a few weeks ago, as I was researching a story about the spate of book bans across the country. In December, for example, a group calling itself “Moms for Liberty” petitioned the Tennessee Department of Education to withdraw a number of books from the school systems’ second-grade curriculum. Among those books were “The Story of Ruby Bridges” by Robert Coles, and Bridges’s own book about her experience: “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story.”
Bridges was in kindergarten when she experienced furious racist crowds firsthand. Moms for Liberty is worried her story is “not age appropriate” for children two years older.
It is more complex to acknowledge that Ruby Bridges is still alive than to imagine her as that kid in the black-and-white photo. It is more reassuring to distill the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s message to a warning about being overly attentive to the color of someone’s skin than it is to recognize the way in which skin color still affects both White and Black Americans. It is nicer to assume that intentional efforts to limit Black political power have been eliminated than that they often remain embedded. | null | null | null | null | null |
A previous version initially referred to the wrong U.S. senator from Maryland in an item about Gov. Larry Hogan (R). The Democrat running for reelection this year is Sen. Chris Van Hollen.
The nuances were lost in the room, and vanished outside of it. “To suggest that a violent attack on the seat of democracy is legitimate political discourse is so far from accurate,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), that it would “make people wonder what we’re thinking.” The RNC, by its explanation, hadn’t endorsed the attack. But it was at least endorsing the idea that nonviolent attempts to overturn the election, like posing as fake electors in the hopes of replacing the duly elected ones, were legitimate.
Maryland. Two-term Gov. Larry Hogan (R) closed the door on a 2022 U.S. Senate bid, ending months of encouragement from fellow Republicans who saw the popular, term-limited Hogan as their best candidate against Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).
“My current job as governor runs until January 2023, and then we’ll take a look and see what the future holds after that,” Hogan said in a statement Tuesday. Republicans haven’t come close to winning one of Maryland’s Senate seats since 2006, when then-Lt. Gov. Michael Steele lost by 11 points.
… seven days until school board recall elections in San Francisco … 21 days until the first 2022 primaries … 273 days until the midterm elections | null | null | null | null | null |
YANQING, China — She shuffled off to the side and lowered her body into the snow like a wounded animal. Mikaela Shiffrin’s pain was emotional, not physical — at least as far as anyone knows — but the effect was the same. She dropped her poles, wrapped her arms around her knees and buried her helmeted face in them, as another competitor skied past.
What was stunning the first time it happened had just become unfathomable: Shiffrin, arguably the greatest female skier in the world and one of the biggest stars of these Winter Olympics, skiing out for the second straight time at National Alpine skiing Centre, failing to complete her first run in the women’s slalom.
After two races in which she expected to compete for medals, perhaps golds, three letters appeared next to her name: DNF.
“My whole intention building up [to the Olympics] was to ski these races aggressively. And that’s what I was doing,” she said. “The problem is, I didn’t finish. That’s obviously my main issue right now. My goal was to push, and I did that. And maybe I pushed a little over the limit, because of the pressure.
“Obviously I’m at a loss. So it’s hard to really know what exactly what went wrong, except I slipped up a bit on one turn and didn’t have enough space to recover from it.”
When it happened Monday in the giant slalom, five gates into the race, it was an anomaly: Shiffrin’s first DNF in that event since January 2018. When it happened again Wednesday, five gates into the slalom, it seemed to be something more. These things happen in skiing, but almost never in back-to-back races to someone at Shiffrin’s level. Could the twin stumbles be a shocking coincidence, or is something wrong with Shiffrin?
She seemed as unable to answer that question as anyone. In an openhearted and emotional post-race interview session with reporters, which went on for 20 wrenching minutes, Shiffrin, halting occasionally to gather himself, seemed at times resolute and at times balanced, but at other times completely lost.
“You feel like this moment is building and building and building, and you feel a bit weighed down by it,” she said. “But I’m okay to feel that way. It’s taken a lot of years, and I’m not afraid to feel weighed down by some expectations anymore.”
A more definitive answer may come Friday, when Shiffrin is expected to compete in the women’s super-G, an event in which she won the world championship in 2019 but has never raced at an Olympics. After that: the downhill, followed by the Alpine combined, with the latter representing perhaps Shiffrin’s best remaining shot at a third career Olympic gold medal.
“I will try to reset again and maybe try to reset better this time,” she said. “But I also don’t know how to do it better, because I’ve never been in this position before and I don’t know how to handle it.”
Barry Svrluga: Mikaela Shiffrin’s inexplicable Olympic nightmare continues
After she skied out Monday in the giant slalom, Shiffrin vowed to “keep the right mentality” and “keep pushing,” despite the obvious disappointment. “My best chance for the next races is to move forward, to refocus,” she said then, “and I feel like I’m in a good place to do that.”
Two days later came her first opportunity to do that. She shot out of the starting gate, wearing bib No. 7, for the first of two runs — on the course nicknamed the Ice River, built with man-made snow across an otherwise arid and browned-out stretch of the Xiaohaituo Mountains northwest of Beijing — that would determine the champion. But mere seconds into her first run, she began to falter going around the fourth gate, and while she technically made the fifth, she had drifted so wide she was unable to recover.
At first she stood still in the spot where he her skis had come to rest, before finding a safe spot to the side to fold her body into itself. A television camera stayed trained on her there, even as the rest of the competition whizzed by. After some 10 minutes had passed, one of her coaches skied over to wrap an arm around her in consolation.
A race that was expected to be a duel between Shiffrin and her chief rival, Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova, thus never materialized.
The two events in which Shiffrin skied out, the giant slalom and slalom, were two of her best medal chances at these Olympics, where she was seeking, among other things, to become the first three-time Olympic gold medalist in U.S. Alpine skiing history. She had previously won a gold in each of those events — the slalom in Sochi in 2014, and the giant slalom in PyeongChang in 2018. The slalom was where Shiffrin’s exceptional skills typically revealed themselves most vividly. She has won 47 slalom races on the World Cup circuit, the most in history by one skier in one discipline.
But the past 24 months have been the most difficult of both Shiffrin’s life and her career. Her father, Jeff, died in February 2020 following an accident at home. This season, she has dealt with a back injury that plagued her through October and November, as well as a positive test for coronavirus that forced her to miss the World Cup stop in Lienz, Austria, in December order to isolate.
“As hard as it is right now, it’s not comparable to some of the worst things I’ve experienced,” Shiffrin said. Speaking of her father, Shiffrin choked up, then said, “Right now I would really like to call him, so that doesn’t make it easier.” Finally, she managed to chuckle through her tears: “He would probably tell me to just get over it.”
Despite her recent setbacks, Shiffrin arrived in Beijing both as one of the women to beat in Alpine — where she was expected to enter in all five women’s disciplines — and as one of the most prominent faces of NBC’s Olympics hype machine. She was having another stellar World Cup season, ranked first in the world in the overall standings and second in slalom and giant slalom, with multiple wins in each.
Her Olympics so far: two races, less than 20 seconds of competitive skiing, two DNFs and an immeasurable wave of shock across the sport. It would be another 48 hours until Shiffrin is at the starting gate again, her Olympics suddenly taking on a far different tone than anyone could have fathomed.
“My skiing has been really solid. My entire career has taught me to trust in my skiing. That’s all I have to rely on, on these race days,” she said. “Of course the pressure’s high, but that didn’t feel like the biggest issue today. When there is pressure and there’s some nerves and the feeling I want to do well, I always just go back to that fundamental idea that good skiing will be there for me.
“So it’s not the end of the world and its so stupid to care this much, but I feel like I have to question a lot now.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Baltimore officials try again to shut down longtime strip club
The facade of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club at 405 E. Baltimore St. Built in 1906 by J.B. Elfatrick & Sons, the Gayety was one of the most famous theaters on the Block during the heyday of burlesque theater. The Gayety closed in 1969 and was leased by the Hustler Club in 2003. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)
BALTIMORE — As hundreds of state troopers and a dozen or so members of the National Guard swarmed the Block on a blustery January evening in 1994, Gov. William Donald Schaefer emerged from one of the East Baltimore Street strip clubs to address the reporters summoned to witness the massive raid.
“The Block, as I knew it years ago, was an attraction,” the 72-year-old former mayor declared, nodding to the burlesque shows and vaudeville performances that made the Block a nationally renowned, if still risque, destination during his younger years. “But tonight, it is not an attraction. It is a detriment.”
But again, local and state leaders — saying crime on the one-block strip is a drain on the city’s beleaguered police force — have fixed their eyes on the Block. A cadre of area politicians, backed by Baltimore’s police commissioner, are rounding up support for state legislation to shut down the bars earlier in the evening. Club owners say the proposed 10 p.m. closing time could mean “last call” for their businesses, which rely heavily on the late-night crowd.
The latest battle between Baltimore officials and the Block, according to police and politicians, hinges on unruliness among crowds on the street outside the clubs that spills over into violence and ends up draining away officers badly needed to patrol other parts of the city. Politicians backing the effort contend that Block businesses haven’t proved helpful enough in tamping down the problems.
Some say the bill is an effort to get the attention of club owners. They counter that they’re more than willing to work with authorities but are limited in what they can do with troublemakers loitering on the sidewalks — especially when police themselves are increasingly reluctant to make arrests for low-level offenses like minor drug deals, rolling dice or drinking. Crime is escalating all across the city, club owners argue, and they question whether things are any worse on their block than outside rowdy bars in other parts of town.
“We desperately need real crime solutions, not scapegoating of vulnerable businesses that are easy to pick on,” Vignarajah said.
The early-closing-time legislation, sponsored by Senate President Bill Ferguson (Baltimore City) and House Judiciary Chairman Luke H. Clippinger (Baltimore City), both Democrats who count the Block as part of their districts, is expected to receive a vote later this month by senators representing the city.
“There had been all kinds of attempts over time to eliminate it. I just thought, coming in 1987, that its time had come and gone,” said Kurt L. Schmoke, a Democrat and former mayor, of his effort at the start of his tenure. “Clearly, there were some people who really were attracted to that one-block area — and I guess some of that attraction still remains.”
Thomas J. D’Alesandro III, Baltimore’s mayor in the late 1960s, spoke of some of that nostalgia for the Block in a 1997 interview but predicted eventual doom for the clubs amid redevelopment radiating outward from the city’s then-bustling Inner Harbor.
“There was a peculiar sense of glamour attached to the area,” said the Democrat who died in 2019. “We still had Red Skelton coming to the Gayety [theater] and burlesque stars like Sally Rand and Blaze Starr. It had a big clientele; it wasn’t unusual to see people in tuxedos coming through in that day. The beat to refine the Block wasn’t as heavy as later.”
The Block has endured by shifting technology and clientele — from striptease to pornography theaters, video rentals to Internet porn — and survived at least a half-century of periodic mayoral denouncements and police raids, occasional grand jury probes and beautification efforts. Politicians and liquor board leaders have repeatedly put the Block in their crosshairs, promising tougher regulations.
“It’s like a yo-yo — clean today, bad next month,” added Starr. She died in 2015.
Schaefer oversaw an effort to regulate it in the mid-1970s — bringing “adult entertainment” zoning to the city — and an effort by nervous bar and club owners to refurbish the area and spruce up the Block’s fading image. Several clubs were bulldozed to make way for police headquarters, which opened in 1972, and the neighboring central police district station that opened in 1977. A decade later, the Schaefer administration demolished a handful of Block mainstays to make way for a 14-story city office building.
“The Block was part of Baltimore, but it was getting very, very raunchy. Schaefer decided he wanted to see what he could do about it,” recalled Lainy LeBow-Sachs, a longtime Schaefer aide and confidant. “Nothing really came of it, and the Block stayed the Block.”
Schmoke arrived in the mayor’s office in 1987, convinced that the city should take steps to “eliminate” the Block and viewing the strip as a troublesome anachronism and a potential obstacle for development.
Downtown developers, who had pumped millions into the Inner Harbor and around downtown over the previous decade, helped add to the pressure to clean up what some viewed as an increasingly seedy eyesore. The 31-floor Commerce Place skyscraper was nearing completion right around the corner from the porno shops and peep shows. Crews were busy building a subway station.
Schmoke, now the president of the University of Baltimore, said his own mind started to shift about the Block. A piece by Sun cartoonist Kevin Kallaugher, which showed a caricature of Schmoke dynamiting the Block only for little Blocks to spring up all over the city, made a big impression. It suggested to Schmoke that trouble associated with the Block might be better kept concentrated in a place where officials could keep a closer eye on it.
So, too, did a closer look at crime statistics amid a bloody rise in killings in early-1990s Baltimore. At the time, Schmoke recalled, the figures didn’t support assumptions that the area was driving the kind of major crime he was focused on.
Democrat Martin O’Malley took a similar course when he took over as mayor in 1999, telling the Sun in 2002 that he wished the Block would simply “fade away,” but playing it down as a priority.
“I just think that the politicians are under the gun to ‘Do something,’ quote unquote, and for some, this is something,” Ambridge said. “I, for one, with my lifetime of experience, know that this something won’t accomplish much.” | null | null | null | null | null |
BEIJING — After he had landed a jump called the Switch Left Double 1800 Cuban, after the waiting had ended, Colby Stevenson removed his helmet and goggles and still kept the scar concealed behind a green headband. The world could not see the jagged and discolored “U” between his eyes, but it had shaped Stevenson’s path to the pinnacle of freestyle skiing.
In the first men’s big air skiing competition in Olympic history, Stevenson nailed his last two runs after failing to land his first to claim a silver medal in one of the best competitions in the sport’s history. His second jump — a stylish, spinning display with 4½ spins called the Nose Butter Left Triple 1620 Japan — scored 91.75 points, and his third, which included five spins, gave him 91.25, putting his best-two-of-three score at 183.
Eight more skiers remained, with only one of them already leading him. No one could pass him, leaving only Birk Ruud of Norway ahead of him. Ruud skied the final jump holding the Norwegian flag in his hand, already assured victory. American Alexander Hall tried a 2160 — the six-rotation feat of insanity that had won him an X Games title two weeks ago — but couldn’t land it.
On May 8, 2016, Stevenson was driving home late at night from Hood River, Ore., where he had won a freestyle skiing competition. On Interstate 86 in rural Idaho, Stevenson fell asleep at the wheel. He woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones, with no idea where he was or what had happened.
Stevenson’s truck had veered off the road and flipped eight times, caving in the roof. The crash nearly killed him. Stevenson fractured his skull in more than 30 places and broke bones in his jaw, ribs and neck. A gaping wound opened between his eyes, just above his nose. Doctors induced him into a coma for three days. If his brain had swelled even an imperceptibly small margin more, Stevenson probably would have suffered permanent brain damage.
A surgeon implanted a titanium plate in his skull. Doctors wondered whether he would walk out of the hospital and doubted he would ski again. Stevenson thought his career was over, but he was determined to recover. His parents had put him on skis when he was 14, and he had built his life around the sport. In the first days of his recovery, Stevenson could only hobble to the bathroom in intense pain. Eight months after the crash, he won his first World Cup.
“That’s when I unlocked the proper mind-set to give myself the best chance to make the Olympics,” Stevenson told NBC.
He arrived at Big Air Shougang with that mind-set. He left with a silver medal he will remember forever. | null | null | null | null | null |
The NSO Group logo is displayed on a building in the Arava Valley in southern Israel on Feb. 8. (Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)
Netanyahu’s lawyers had asked the court to postpone the testimony of prosecution witness Shlomo Filber after police acknowledged last week that they used spyware to access the contents of his cellphone. Filber, a longtime Netanyahu confidant, is suspected of involvement in a deal under which one of Israel’s largest telecommunications companies would reap regulatory benefits in return for helping to arrange favorable media coverage of the Netanyahu family.
According to a report Monday in the Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist detailing widespread police use of the surveillance technology, law enforcement authorities also used the Pegasus spyware without a court warrant against Netanyahu’s son Avner, as well as a co-defendant in Netanyahu’s trial named Iris Elovitch and the former prime minister’s media advisers. The newspaper said additional targets included the chief of Israel’s workers union, disability rights protesters, journalists at the Walla news website, business mogul Rami Levy, several mayors and senior officials in the Finance Ministry.
Speaking in parliament Monday, Netanyahu said: “It is a black day for the state of Israel. Something unthinkable happened here. Police officials have illegally spied, with the most aggressive tools in the world, on countless civilians.”
“Earthquake: Tonight it was revealed that police investigators hacked into phones illegally to overthrow a powerful right-wing prime minister,” said Yariv Levin, who heads Netanyahu’s Likud faction in parliament. “It’s the Israeli Watergate.”
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who replaced Netanyahu in June, also expressed concern. “The reports about Pegasus, if they are true, are very serious,” Bennett said. He said that newly appointed Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara would investigate the matter, with “the advantage of coming from outside the system.”
The police had originally asserted that all of its surveillance activities had been “done in accordance with the law, on the basis of court orders and strict work procedures.” But this month, the police said that additional findings from its internal probe “change in some ways” its earlier statement.
The Washington Post and 16 other media partners reported in the summer that NSO’s military-grade spyware was used to hack the phones of journalists, activists and other high-profile figures around the world, though Israel’s own use of the surveillance technology remained largely secret.
NSO has been required to receive approval from Israel’s Defense Ministry to export its cybertechnology. NSO was blacklisted by the U.S. government in November, and since then the ministry has barred cyber-companies from exporting to all but 37 countries, down from 102, Calcalist reported. | null | null | null | null | null |
BEIJING — Scott Hamilton and Brian Boitano have been waiting more than a decade for someone to join them in one of the most exclusive clubs in American figure skating: Olympic champions.
“A lot of it has to do with both men revolutionizing our sport, taking the sport to new heights and forcing everyone else to catch up,” Hamilton said. “Button did that in 1948 and ‘52. He change the sport forever. With Nathan‘s proficiency on these extremely difficult elements, and the quality that goes along with that proficiency, he is easily the best in the world.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces during military drills on Feb. 8. (Ukrainian Army General Staff via Reuters)
It remains unclear whether the two days of whirlwind diplomacy — involving leaders from France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the United States — yielded any firm commitment to de-escalation. The Kremlin wants NATO to promise it will never let Ukraine join the military alliance, and has called for the bloc to cease military activity in Eastern Europe.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in Kyiv on Tuesday, said it was the first time a French head of state had visited his country in 24 years, and he described the talks as “substantive and very productive.” He has projected an air of calm, denouncing what he and his advisers have characterized as a geopolitical fight between Russia and the West that has little to do with Ukraine itself.
Moscow, which has massed some 100,000 forces near Ukraine and backs separatists in that country’s eastern territories, pledged to remove troops from Belarus once the joint exercises are complete. Paris has said Putin agreed, after a Monday meeting with Macron, to not escalate the situation.
Macron, who has long called for France to be a leader of a foreign policy that is allied with but independent of Washington, has cast himself as the key European interlocutor as the Kremlin demands to rework the continent’s security architecture. | null | null | null | null | null |
Members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces during military drills on Feb. 8. (Ukrainian Army General Staff/Reuters)
It remains unclear whether the two days of whirlwind diplomacy — involving leaders from France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the United States — yielded any firm commitment to de-escalation. The Kremlin wants NATO to promise it will never let Ukraine join the military alliance and has called for the bloc to cease military activity in Eastern Europe.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in Kyiv on Tuesday, said it was the first time a French head of state had visited his country in 24 years, and he described the talks as “substantive and very productive.” He has projected an air of calm, denouncing what he and his advisers have characterized as a geopolitical fight between Russia and the West that has little to do with Ukraine itself.
Moscow, which has massed some 100,000 troops near Ukraine and backs separatists in that country’s eastern territories, pledged to remove its forces from Belarus once the joint exercises are complete. Paris has said Putin agreed, after a Monday meeting with Macron, to not escalate the situation.
Macron, who has long called for France to help lead a European foreign policy that is allied with but independent of Washington, has cast himself as a key interlocutor as the Kremlin demands to rework the continent’s security architecture.
Congressional leaders in the United States also joined Biden in downplaying any ambiguity about Germany’s support for ending a major natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany if Moscow attacks.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who had dinner with Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday alongside other lawmakers, said the German leader had assured them behind closed doors that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project would be abandoned — as promised by Biden — if Moscow again sends forces into Ukraine.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told Washington Post Live that he left the same dinner “convinced” that Berlin is in lockstep with Washington on potential actions in the event of a Russian attack on Ukraine. He also signaled there is strong support on both sides of U.S. politics for sanctions to severely punish Moscow if it launches a renewed invasion.
Lawmakers negotiating a bill that would allow for punitive measures against Russia are getting “closer and closer” to a deal, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Tuesday. One remaining point of difference is whether to impose sanctions before or after any renewed Russian invasion, he said.
In Ukraine, meanwhile, troops will Thursday begin drills using armed drones and antitank weapons provided by the United States and other NATO members. Ukrainian defense minister Oleksiy Reznikov has said the drills, scheduled to take place through Feb. 20, are a response to the Russian exercises near the border. | null | null | null | null | null |
Amey leads San Jose State against San Diego State after 24-point game
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: San Jose State -14.5; over/under is 124.5
The Spartans are 6-5 on their home court. San Jose State allows 72.3 points to opponents and has been outscored by 6.3 points per game.
The Aztecs are 5-3 against MWC opponents. San Diego State ranks sixth in the MWC with 32.5 rebounds per game led by Nathan Mensah averaging 6.9.
TOP PERFORMERS: Trey Smith is shooting 32.9% from beyond the arc with 2.1 made 3-pointers per game for the Spartans, while averaging 8.8 points. Omari Moore is averaging 8.1 points and 3.1 assists over the past 10 games for San Jose State.
Matt Bradley averages 1.7 made 3-pointers per game for the Aztecs, scoring 17.1 points while shooting 38.1% from beyond the arc. Keshad Johnson is averaging 5.1 points over the past 10 games for San Diego State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Calvin leads Wright State against Green Bay after 23-point game
BOTTOM LINE: Wright State plays the Green Bay Phoenix after Trey Calvin scored 23 points in Wright State’s 75-64 win over the Oakland Golden Grizzlies.
The Phoenix are 4-5 on their home court. Green Bay has a 1-13 record against opponents over .500.
The Raiders are 11-4 in conference play. Wright State is sixth in the Horizon shooting 32.3% from deep. Tanner Holden leads the Raiders shooting 39.3% from 3-point range.
The teams square off for the second time in conference play this season. The Raiders won the last matchup 72-69 on Jan. 1. Holden scored 22 points to help lead the Raiders to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Lucas Stieber is averaging 5.1 points and 3.8 assists for the Phoenix. Cade Meyer is averaging 11.9 points and 6.1 rebounds while shooting 52.3% over the last 10 games for Green Bay.
Holden is scoring 20.5 points per game with 6.8 rebounds and 2.8 assists for the Raiders. Grant Basile is averaging 17.2 points, 8.4 rebounds and 1.6 blocks over the last 10 games for Wright State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Celestine leads Cal against Oregon State after 20-point showing
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Oregon State -1; over/under is 134.5
BOTTOM LINE: Cal takes on the Oregon State Beavers after Jalen Celestine scored 20 points in Cal’s 68-64 loss to the Washington State Cougars.
The Beavers have gone 3-7 at home. Oregon State ranks ninth in the Pac-12 with 12.1 assists per game led by Dashawn Davis averaging 5.2.
The Golden Bears are 2-11 against Pac-12 opponents. Cal averages 10.4 turnovers per game and is 5-4 when committing fewer turnovers than opponents.
The teams square off for the 10th time this season in Pac-12 play. The Golden Bears won the last meeting 73-61 on Dec. 3. Jordan Shepherd scored 25 points to help lead the Golden Bears to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jarod Lucas is shooting 42.9% and averaging 13.7 points for the Beavers. Dexter Akanno is averaging 0.7 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Oregon State.
Andre Kelly is averaging 12.3 points and 7.7 rebounds for the Golden Bears. Celestine is averaging 1.1 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Cal. | null | null | null | null | null |
Coastal Carolina hosts Georgia State in conference showdown
Georgia State Panthers (9-10, 3-5 Sun Belt) at Coastal Carolina Chanticleers (12-10, 4-6 Sun Belt)
BOTTOM LINE: Essam Mostafa and the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers host Corey Allen and the Georgia State Panthers in Sun Belt action.
The Chanticleers are 9-4 in home games. Coastal Carolina leads the Sun Belt in rebounding, averaging 37.6 boards. Mostafa leads the Chanticleers with 9.9 rebounds.
The Panthers are 3-5 in conference play. Georgia State leads the Sun Belt with 11.8 offensive rebounds per game led by Eliel Nsoseme averaging 3.6.
The teams play for the second time this season in Sun Belt play. The Chanticleers won the last matchup 72-68 on Jan. 22. Vince Cole scored 23 points points to help lead the Chanticleers to the victory.
Allen is averaging 14.6 points and 1.8 steals for the Panthers. Kane Williams is averaging 8.8 points over the last 10 games for Georgia State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cohen leads Saint Francis (PA) against Fairleigh Dickinson after 26-point game
Saint Francis (PA) Red Flash (7-16, 3-9 NEC) at Fairleigh Dickinson Knights (3-19, 2-7 NEC)
BOTTOM LINE: Saint Francis (PA) takes on the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights after Josh Cohen scored 26 points in Saint Francis (PA)’s 65-64 overtime loss to the Merrimack Warriors.
The Knights are 1-4 in home games. Fairleigh Dickinson is 0-1 in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Red Flash are 3-9 against NEC opponents. Saint Francis (PA) has a 1-3 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
TOP PERFORMERS: Brandon Rush is averaging 14.6 points for the Knights. Devon Dunn is averaging 9.6 points over the last 10 games for Fairleigh Dickinson.
Ramiir Dixon-Conover is averaging 12.5 points, 3.4 assists and 2.2 steals for the Red Flash. Maxwell Land is averaging 11.9 points over the last 10 games for Saint Francis (PA). | null | null | null | null | null |
Indiana State takes on Evansville, aims to halt 4-game slide
Indiana State Sycamores (9-14, 2-9 MVC) at Evansville Purple Aces (6-16, 2-9 MVC)
Evansville, Indiana; Thursday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Indiana State looks to break its four-game losing streak with a win against Evansville.
The Purple Aces are 4-6 in home games. Evansville has a 3-9 record in games decided by at least 10 points.
The Sycamores are 2-9 in MVC play. Indiana State has a 1-1 record in one-possession games.
The teams meet for the 10th time in conference play this season. The Purple Aces won 65-56 in the last matchup on Feb. 9. Shamar Givance led the Purple Aces with 19 points, and Cameron Henry led the Sycamores with 15 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Givance is averaging 13.8 points, 3.7 assists and 1.5 steals for the Purple Aces. Jawaun Newton is averaging 8.2 points over the last 10 games for Evansville.
Henry is shooting 48.7% and averaging 13.8 points for the Sycamores. Zach Hobbs is averaging 1.2 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Indiana State. | null | null | null | null | null |
IUPUI faces Purdue Fort Wayne on 10-game road skid
IUPUI Jaguars (2-19, 0-10 Horizon) at Purdue Fort Wayne Mastodons (13-10, 8-6 Horizon)
Fort Wayne, Indiana; Thursday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: IUPUI will aim to stop its 10-game road losing streak when the Jaguars play Purdue Fort Wayne.
The Mastodons are 11-2 in home games. Purdue Fort Wayne ranks second in the Horizon shooting 35.2% from deep, led by RJ Ogom shooting 66.7% from 3-point range.
The Jaguars are 0-10 against conference opponents. IUPUI is 1-10 against opponents over .500.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jarred Godfrey is shooting 46.9% and averaging 14.9 points for the Mastodons. Bobby Planutis is averaging 1.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Purdue Fort Wayne.
B.J. Maxwell averages 1.3 made 3-pointers per game for the Jaguars, scoring 11.7 points while shooting 24.8% from beyond the arc. Bakari LaStrap is shooting 44.9% and averaging 10.3 points over the last 10 games for IUPUI.
Jaguars: 1-9, averaging 51.0 points, 25.1 rebounds, 9.8 assists, 5.9 steals and 1.8 blocks per game while shooting 37.9% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 72.0 points. | null | null | null | null | null |
Little Rock visits South Alabama after Chandler's 26-point game
Little Rock Trojans (7-13, 2-6 Sun Belt) at South Alabama Jaguars (15-8, 5-5 Sun Belt)
Mobile, Alabama; Thursday, 8 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: South Alabama hosts the Little Rock Trojans after Jay Jay Chandler scored 26 points in South Alabama’s 69-62 loss to the Georgia State Panthers.
The Jaguars have gone 10-1 at home. South Alabama leads the Sun Belt averaging 35.7 points in the paint. Javon Franklin leads the Jaguars with 1.2.
The Trojans are 2-6 against conference opponents. Little Rock is 5-9 against opponents over .500.
The Jaguars and Trojans meet Thursday for the first time in Sun Belt play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Charles Manning Jr. is scoring 16.8 points per game and averaging 4.1 rebounds for the Jaguars. Kayo Goncalves is averaging 2.5 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for South Alabama.
Isaiah Palermo is scoring 12.7 points per game with 4.8 rebounds and 1.7 assists for the Trojans. Nikola Maric is averaging 16.8 points and 6.2 rebounds over the last 10 games for Little Rock. | null | null | null | null | null |
McCoy, Boston University Terriers host the Army Black Knights
BOTTOM LINE: Javante McCoy and the Boston University Terriers host Jalen Rucker and the Army Black Knights.
The Terriers are 7-4 in home games. Boston University is third in the Patriot scoring 70.1 points while shooting 44.5% from the field.
The Black Knights are 7-5 in Patriot play. Army ranks second in the Patriot with 25.3 defensive rebounds per game led by Josh Caldwell averaging 4.0.
The teams play for the second time this season in Patriot play. The Black Knights won the last matchup 73-63 on Jan. 13. Caldwell scored 16 points to help lead the Black Knights to the victory.
Rucker is shooting 39.8% from beyond the arc with 2.8 made 3-pointers per game for the Black Knights, while averaging 15.9 points. Chris Mann is averaging 9.1 points over the past 10 games for Army. | null | null | null | null | null |
Central Connecticut State Blue Devils (6-18, 3-8 NEC) at Merrimack Warriors (10-14, 4-6 NEC)
BOTTOM LINE: Cent. Conn. St. plays the Merrimack Warriors after Nigel Scantlebury scored 27 points in Cent. Conn. St.’s 91-82 overtime win against the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights.
The Warriors have gone 5-6 at home. Merrimack is 2-12 against opponents over .500.
The Blue Devils have gone 3-8 against NEC opponents. Cent. Conn. St. is 4-7 when it wins the turnover battle and averages 13.0 turnovers per game.
The teams meet for the second time in conference play this season. The Warriors won 66-57 in the last matchup on Jan. 8. Ziggy Reid led the Warriors with 20 points, and Ian Krishnan led the Blue Devils with 18 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Mikey Watkins is averaging 9.7 points, 3.5 assists and 1.7 steals for the Warriors. Jordan Minor is averaging 12.0 points over the last 10 games for Merrimack.
Scantlebury is averaging 11.7 points and 3.2 assists for the Blue Devils. Krishnan is averaging 10.5 points over the last 10 games for Cent. Conn. St.. | null | null | null | null | null |
Old Dominion faces Middle Tennessee on 4-game road slide
Old Dominion Monarchs (9-14, 4-6 C-USA) at Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders (15-7, 6-3 C-USA)
BOTTOM LINE: Old Dominion will aim to stop its four-game road skid when the Monarchs take on Middle Tennessee.
The Blue Raiders are 10-0 in home games. Middle Tennessee is eighth in C-USA in rebounding averaging 32.2 rebounds. DeAndre Dishman paces the Blue Raiders with 4.5 boards.
The Monarchs are 4-6 in C-USA play. Old Dominion is 6-13 against opponents with a winning record.
TOP PERFORMERS: Josh Jefferson is scoring 14.1 points per game with 3.1 rebounds and 1.6 assists for the Blue Raiders. Donovan Sims is averaging 8.9 points and 3.8 rebounds while shooting 38.3% over the last 10 games for Middle Tennessee.
Jaylin Hunter is averaging 9.8 points, 4.4 assists and 1.5 steals for the Monarchs. Austin Trice is averaging 14.4 points and 9.5 rebounds while shooting 55.7% over the last 10 games for Old Dominion. | null | null | null | null | null |
SIU-Edwardsville hosts UT Martin following Simon's 21-point game
UT Martin Skyhawks (7-16, 4-8 OVC) at SIU-Edwardsville Cougars (7-17, 1-10 OVC)
Edwardsville, Illinois; Thursday, 12 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: UT Martin visits the SIU-Edwardsville Cougars after K.J. Simon scored 21 points in UT Martin’s 69-61 loss to the Tennessee State Tigers.
The Cougars have gone 4-4 at home. SIU-Edwardsville is 1-1 in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Skyhawks are 4-8 against OVC opponents. UT Martin is seventh in the OVC scoring 68.5 points per game and is shooting 41.5%.
The teams play for the second time in conference play this season. The Skyhawks won the last matchup 76-70 on Jan. 25. Simon scored 24 points to help lead the Skyhawks to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Courtney Carter is averaging 6.7 points and 3.2 assists for the Cougars. Shaun Doss is averaging 12.5 points and 5.3 rebounds while shooting 40.8% over the last 10 games for SIU-Edwardsville.
Bernie Andre is averaging 9.6 points and 6.5 rebounds for the Skyhawks. Mikel Henderson is averaging 1.4 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for UT Martin. | null | null | null | null | null |
Swenson leads Stetson against Jacksonville State after 20-point outing
The Hatters are 6-6 on their home court. Stetson has a 4-8 record in games decided by 10 points or more.
The Gamecocks have gone 9-1 against ASUN opponents. Jacksonville State scores 75.4 points while outscoring opponents by 7.5 points per game.
The Hatters and Gamecocks square off Wednesday for the first time in ASUN play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Chase Johnston is shooting 40.5% from beyond the arc with 3.3 made 3-pointers per game for the Hatters, while averaging 13.2 points. Christiaan Jones is averaging 14.4 points and 7.1 rebounds over the last 10 games for Stetson.
Jalen Finch is averaging 8.9 points and 4.5 assists for the Gamecocks. Darian Adams is averaging 15.4 points over the last 10 games for Jacksonville State. | null | null | null | null | null |
UNC Greensboro hosts Citadel after Brown's 35-point showing
Citadel Bulldogs (10-12, 4-7 SoCon) at UNC Greensboro Spartans (14-10, 6-6 SoCon)
Greensboro, North Carolina; Thursday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Citadel faces the UNC Greensboro Spartans after Hayden Brown scored 35 points in Citadel’s 107-93 win over the Samford Bulldogs.
The Spartans are 7-3 on their home court. UNC Greensboro ranks sixth in the SoCon with 27.6 points per game in the paint led by Mohammed Abdulsalam averaging 1.3.
The Bulldogs are 4-7 in conference matchups. Citadel has a 2-1 record in one-possession games.
The teams square off for the second time this season in SoCon play. The Bulldogs won the last meeting 74-69 on Jan. 14. Brown scored 24 points to help lead the Bulldogs to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: De’Monte Buckingham is scoring 13.6 points per game and averaging 6.5 rebounds for the Spartans. Kaleb Hunter is averaging 1.6 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for UNC Greensboro.
Tyler Moffe is averaging nine points and 3.8 assists for the Bulldogs. Brown is averaging 16.3 points over the last 10 games for Citadel. | null | null | null | null | null |
VMI takes on Mercer following Stephens' 20-point showing
Mercer Bears (13-12, 6-6 SoCon) at VMI Keydets (14-10, 7-5 SoCon)
Lexington, Virginia; Thursday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: VMI takes on the Mercer Bears after Jake Stephens scored 20 points in VMI’s 76-69 win against the Western Carolina Catamounts.
The Keydets have gone 8-2 at home. VMI is 5-2 in games decided by 10 points or more.
The Bears are 6-6 against conference opponents. Mercer has a 3-7 record in games decided by 10 or more points.
The teams meet for the second time in conference play this season. The Bears won 97-91 in the last matchup on Jan. 14. Jalen Johnson led the Bears with 30 points, and Stephens led the Keydets with 34 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Trey Bonham is averaging 11.2 points and four assists for the Keydets. Stephens is averaging 17.4 points over the last 10 games for VMI.
Johnson averages 2.8 made 3-pointers per game for the Bears, scoring 14.5 points while shooting 41.8% from beyond the arc. Felipe Haase is shooting 45.8% and averaging 10.8 points over the last 10 games for Mercer. | null | null | null | null | null |
Business leaders, academics warn of long-term economic impacts of Japan’s border closure
TOKYO — Business leaders and academics are urging Japan to reopen its borders to business travelers and students, arguing that the prolonged closure is creating an undue burden on the country’s economy and cultural influence that will outlast the pandemic.
Japan has banned nonresident foreigners from entering the country for nearly two years, which has left hundreds of thousands of students, families and business travelers in limbo as they wait for the country’s reopening. The restrictions are in place at least through February, and business lobbies and academics are increasingly sounding the alarm about long-term impacts of the country’s isolation.
During a news conference Wednesday, representatives of American and European business lobbies said the closure has deterred foreign investments in Japan and imposed significant burdens on foreign companies operating here. They argued that neighboring countries are gaining economic advantages as their groups’ member companies downsize operations in Japan because they are unable to bring in the workers they need. Last month, Japan’s largest business lobby called on the government to lift the entry ban.
“Quite frankly, the current travel restrictions on nonresidents can only create doubt about Japan as a reliable long-term partner for foreign business,” said Christopher LaFleur, special adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan.
About 150,000 international students have remained in limbo for two years or attended classes remotely during U.S. or European overnight hours. That number is shrinking, though, as students give up hope and desert their plans to enter Japan, said Matthew J. Wilson, dean and president of Temple University’s Japan campus. Many have decided to study in South Korea, Taiwan, Europe and now Australia and New Zealand, which have announced reopening plans after two years of closure, Wilson said.
“On a long-term basis, the continuing restrictions … [have] eliminated tens of thousands of future contributors, supporters and advocates of Japan, by deflecting international students to other destinations or causing them to simply give up,” Wilson said.
Japan’s omicron variant infections have been surging, but serious cases and deaths have remained low. The vast majority in the country have received two vaccine doses, though the rollout of boosters lags behind the government’s timeline. Polls show the border closure remains politically popular in Japan. | null | null | null | null | null |
The experiment to internationalize Chinese sports has not sat easily with fiercely nationalist fans who are watching the foreign-born athletes closely. When everything goes well, as it has with Gu, viewers accept them with pride. But one slip-up, in competition or elsewhere, and the attempt to straddle different nations can become perilous.
That balancing act has been worsened by a lack of official explanations of how the naturalized athletes fit within the Chinese legal system or the future of its national team. China does not recognize dual citizenship and conservatives strongly oppose any relaxation of the country’s strict immigration laws.
The search, Wang said, has focused primarily on athletes of Chinese descent, because “for the average Chinese, it might be too much to swallow if we had a national team entirely of non-Chinese-looking faces, especially during Winter Games on home soil.”
“When I realized it was happening, I was pretty shocked,” said Susan Brownell, an anthropologist and expert on Chinese sports at the University of Missouri-St Louis. “The reason it hadn’t happened before was, quite frankly, xenophobia.”
One of the country’s earliest naturalized athletes was London-born Alex Hua Tian who competed for China in equestrian triathlon in the Summer 2008 Olympics, as part of the Chinese Olympic Committee’s bid to be represented in every single event.
Until very recently Hua, whose father is Chinese, was an outlier in a sports system dominated by athletes trained in the state-run academies. For many individual summer sports, a nationwide effort to identify talented children at a young age and hot house them in a competitive environment delivered great results for China.
But winter sports presented a new set of challenges. The small communities of skaters and skiers were not enough of a pool for locally trained talent. In November 2018, China’s sports administration called on winter sports schools and associations to reform restrictions on nationality to encourage overseas Chinese and foreigners to take part in competitions.
But officials remained cautious of the all-out internationalization of development programs. For ice hockey, the inclusion of international talent has been stop-and-go with international coaches and players being brought in for short periods without a consistent approach, according to Mark Simon, a Canadian businessman who has worked with youth clubs in China for more than a decade.
“I don’t think it sends a good message. If you have a policy of no dual citizenship, but you are saying the only way to get a half decent result is to put a bunch of white guys on the team, I don’t think the public will understand it,” he said.
China’s uncertainty over how to handle naturalized players appears to have led to some odd moments like the Canadian-born goaltender of the women’s team, Zhou Jiaying, a Princeton University graduate who also goes by Kimberly Newell on Twitter, telling reporters she was not allowed to speak to them in English.
Sentiment among China’s outspoken nationalists is notoriously fickle and swings from adulation to attack are also common for ethnically Chinese competing for other nations. At a time when relations between Beijing and Washington are at their most tense in decades, American athletes with Chinese heritage at the Olympics like figure skaters Nathan Chen and Vincent Zhou, who might once have been celebrated for their Chinese roots, have been met with a blend of indifference and derision.
At the start of the Olympics, speed skater Shaolin Sándor Liu, who competes for Hungary but has a Chinese father, attracted widespread acclaim on Chinese social media for his authentic northeastern accent and his declaration that any medal he won would be half for China, half for Hungary. (Liu and his brother both trained in China for 18 months as teenagers.)
But Chinese social media turned on Liu on Monday after he and Chinese skater Ren Ziwei collided in the 1,000-meter short track final. Liu crossed the line first and was initially awarded gold, until a video replay revealed that he had made contact with Ren during a lane change.
She gave the example of Lang Ping, the former Chinese national team player who was coach of U.S. women’s volleyball team during the 2008 Summer Olympics. When Brownell was working with state broadcaster CCTV in 2008 as a commentator, the station discouraged reporting on Lang over fears of a vitriolic backlash in China for abandoning the nation.
Since then, Lang’s public image in China been rehabilitated, after she coached the Chinese women’s team to a gold medal in Rio. The story was then turned into “Leap,” a popular biopic, where Lang was played by Gong Li, one of China’s best-known actresses.
According to Brownell, officials will probably remain cautious about expanding use of naturalized athletes, as they wait to see the results of this year’s experiment, but there are growing signs of willingness to celebrate stories like Eileen Gu.
Lyric Li reported from Seoul. Pei Lin Wu contributed reporting from Taipei, Taiwan. | null | null | null | null | null |
Skeleton has been an Olympic fixture since its 2002 return in Salt Lake City. (Mayk Wendt/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Skeleton is one of the oldest sports on the Winter Olympics program, but it didn’t become a regular event until this century.
The sport debuted in 1928, was contested in 1948 and returned from a five-decade hiatus in 2002 — adding a women’s race that year, too. Competition in Beijing will take place at the National Sliding Centre located in Yanqing, which is northwest of the Chinese capital.
Here’s what to know about skeleton at the Winter Olympics in Beijing:
What are the skeleton events?
What country has won the most gold medals in skeleton?
What is the schedule for skeleton? | null | null | null | null | null |
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