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Joiner leads Iona against Siena after 22-point outing
The Saints are 5-4 in home games. Siena has a 2-0 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Gaels are 11-1 against MAAC opponents. Iona ranks seventh in the MAAC shooting 33.3% from 3-point range.
The teams play for the second time in conference play this season. The Gaels won the last meeting 74-57 on Jan. 26. Ryan Myers scored 13 points to help lead the Gaels to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Colby Rogers is scoring 14.6 points per game and averaging 1.9 rebounds for the Saints. Anthony Gaines is averaging 12.1 points and 8.1 rebounds over the last 10 games for Siena.
Tyson Jolly is scoring 14.6 points per game with 5.0 rebounds and 2.3 assists for the Gaels. Nelly Junior Joseph is averaging 11.8 points, 6.5 rebounds and 1.6 blocks over the past 10 games for Iona. | null | null | null | null | null |
Kent State visits Akron following Freeman's 21-point game
Kent State Golden Flashes (14-9, 9-4 MAC) at Akron Zips (16-6, 9-3 MAC)
Akron, Ohio; Friday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Akron plays the Kent State Golden Flashes after Enrique Freeman scored 21 points in Akron’s 70-64 victory over the Northern Illinois Huskies.
The Zips have gone 10-1 at home. Akron has a 5-4 record against teams above .500.
The Golden Flashes are 9-4 in MAC play. Kent State has a 2-3 record in games decided by less than 4 points.
The teams play for the 10th time this season in MAC play. The Golden Flashes won the last meeting 67-55 on Jan. 15. Sincere Carry scored 32 points to help lead the Golden Flashes to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Ali Ali is averaging 13.7 points for the Zips. Xavier Castaneda is averaging 12.3 points over the last 10 games for Akron.
Carry averages 2.2 made 3-pointers per game for the Golden Flashes, scoring 17.6 points while shooting 33.1% from beyond the arc. Malique Jacobs is averaging nine points and 6.2 rebounds over the past 10 games for Kent State. | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: Saint Bonaventure visits the Saint Louis Billikens after Dominick Welch scored 21 points in Saint Bonaventure’s 76-51 victory over the Fordham Rams.
The Billikens are 11-3 in home games. Saint Louis is 2-0 in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Bonnies are 5-4 against A-10 opponents. Saint Bonaventure ranks seventh in the A-10 with 23.7 defensive rebounds per game led by Jalen Adaway averaging 5.2.
The Billikens and Bonnies match up Friday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Gibson Jimerson is shooting 42.6% from beyond the arc with 2.4 made 3-pointers per game for the Billikens, while averaging 17.2 points. Francis Okoro is averaging 8.1 points and 5.8 rebounds over the last 10 games for Saint Louis.
Adaway is averaging 14.6 points and 6.4 rebounds for the Bonnies. Welch is averaging 7.6 points over the past 10 games for Saint Bonaventure. | null | null | null | null | null |
UNLV visits Boise State following Degenhart's 23-point game
BOTTOM LINE: Boise State hosts the UNLV Rebels after Tyson Degenhart scored 23 points in Boise State’s 76-60 win against the San Jose State Spartans.
The Broncos are 9-2 on their home court. Boise State is seventh in the MWC with 29.0 points per game in the paint led by Abu Kigab averaging 7.9.
The Rebels are 6-5 against MWC opponents. UNLV has a 2-1 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Broncos and Rebels square off Friday for the first time in MWC play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Emmanuel Akot is averaging 10.5 points for the Broncos. Marcus Shaver Jr. is averaging 8.4 points and 2.0 rebounds while shooting 43.2% over the past 10 games for Boise State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Supply chain issues won’t improve quickly, Maersk chief says
Clogs in the global supply chain are unlikely to improve in the near future, according to the chief executive of Maersk, the Danish shipping company that has the most container ships in the world.
A combination of high demand for goods and a shortage of logistics labor had resulted in supply chain bottlenecks, particularly in Los Angeles, Søren Skou told CNN Business on Wednesday.
“Right now, we have close to 90 ships, lying, waiting outside Los Angeles and Long Beach to get discharged. They wait for three to four weeks, because we can’t get enough labor in the port,” he said.
“I wish I could say that things are getting better,” he said, “but right now there’s nothing in our numbers to suggest so.”
The labor shortage is not only at the ports, Skou added. “It’s also trucking. It’s in warehousing, and so on,” he said. “Hopefully, with the covid-19 restrictions lifting, and fewer and fewer people getting seriously ill,” supply chains will improve, he said.
The White House has said the worst supply chain issues may be in the past, but companies have complained of continuing problems.
In the latest in the spate of recent demonstrations against vaccination rules, Canadian protesters have partially blocked two major crossings on the border with the United States, including the busiest, as a show of dissent against Canada’s vaccine rules for cross-border truckers. American truckers could be planning to block roads into major cities to protest vaccine mandates, The Washington Post reported, citing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The protests come as the U.S. trucking industry, which is responsible for 70 percent of the nation’s freight, struggles with a labor shortage. The industry is 80,000 drivers short, according to the American Trucking Associations, due to factors including an aging workforce.
As global orders from consumers stuck at home rose during the pandemic, shipping companies such as Maersk have reaped huge earnings. Maersk said supply chain bottlenecks that led to higher freight rates contributed $1.5 billion to its 2020 revenue, which totaled $39.7 billion. In 2021, Maersk saw revenue jump by 55 percent to $61.8 billion. | null | null | null | null | null |
Actor, writer and producer Pamela Adlon in Los Angeles. (Alyson Aliano)
“Sometimes, I look at my show, look at the script, stand on the set and I’m like, ‘Wait a second; we’re not doing that,’” she says. “This is not a f---ing Nickelodeon show. This is ‘Better Things.’ We talk about uncomfortable s---, we say things that are like, shocking or whatever, because we need to figure it out.”
This blurring of reality and fiction can be a point of contention with Adlon’s real daughters, Gideon, 24; Odessa, 21; and Rocky, 18. They have watched as their lives, whether an awkward graduation or a friend whose mother allowed them to smoke pot, are adapted for TV by on-camera daughters Max (Mikey Madison), Frankie (Hannah Alligood) and Duke (Olivia Howard).
“As an artist, I get that and that’s why I’m not angry,” says Gideon, who is an actress. “And that’s why I’m happy that this show exists because it’s such an honest portrayal of a family. But within that, of course, we’ve all been a little bit hurt. I think I’m the only one of my sisters that hasn’t watched fully every season. There’s just some s--- I don’t want to relive.”
At Beverly Hills High School, Pam Segall stood out in a student body that included musician Lenny Kravitz, future Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash and actor Nicholas Cage.
“Do you want to buy her the earrings?” Sam asked the onlooker. “’Cause that’s why she’s crying. Because of six-dollar earrings. She has them at home already. But she wants them right now so … you should go right into that store and buy them for her, ’cause I’m not doing it. … Or stop looking.”
“We were like, ‘You did it already and you’ve got to keep going, you’ve got to keep telling these stories,’” says Susie Balaban, a longtime friend who has worked as an assistant director in television. “In a way, I think it was a kind of blessing.”
“I was in my closet trying on my clothes and I was like, ‘This just fit me; I literally just wore this,’” she says. “And I couldn’t believe it. I had a big pile of clothes to give to Goodwill and I said, no, I’m keeping these and I’m going to do this on my show.”
Monica Corbin, who spent time with Adlon as part of a mentorship program, remembers visiting a shoot at a supermarket last year. Corbin was standing in the front of the store when she heard, from somewhere, Adlon screaming out, “Monica, where are you.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The end of the pandemic won’t come from biology or medicine — it will come from us
History indicates it is social behavior, not some epidemiological data point, that ends respiratory pandemics
Respiratory therapist Joanna Bielski checks on a covid-19 patient in the ICU at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center on Jan. 31, 2022. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
By Peter Doshi
It feels as though we’ve been fighting about the end of the coronavirus pandemic almost since the day it began. In March 2020, President Donald Trump wanted to lift the lockdowns. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, countered, “You don’t make the timeline. The virus makes the timeline.”
According to Fauci’s logic, the answer is only when the numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths come down and stay down. But as appealing as this notion is in its simple clarity, it clashes with history: Over the past century, the end of respiratory pandemics has never been clear-cut.
Instead, in four cases — the 1918, 1957, 1968 and 2009 flu pandemics — hospitalizations and deaths ascribed to the pandemic pathogen continued for years after the sense of emergency had passed. This reality reveals that the “end” to a pandemic can’t be determined by some sort of epidemiological milestone or acquiring a magic-bullet treatment that removes all risk from the virus. Rather, historically, the resumption of regular life — if it was even interrupted in the first place — guides the end of a pandemic.
Yet, while the 1918 pandemic may have been years-long on paper — killing three times as many people as covid-19 when adjusted for population — in real life, countermeasures were rarely sustained for longer than six weeks. Cities varied widely in how they confronted the virus. For instance, while many major cities closed schools for an average of four weeks during 1918, New York and Chicago — then the nation’s two largest cities — kept schools open throughout the pandemic. And as historian John Barry notes, many places experienced “several months of relative normalcy between waves.”
Over the course of nine months in 1957-1958, an estimated 66,000 excess deaths associated with influenza occurred in the United States and about “80 million Americans were bedridden with respiratory disease,” according to one report.
Even so, there were no nationwide shutdowns or stay-at-home measures, and school closures lasted only weeks, if they happened at all. People got sick but society continued churning. That occurred even though 60 percent of schoolchildren experienced illness, with schools averaging absence rates between 20 and 30 percent, and teachers and health-care workers logged unusually high rates of absenteeism. But even in New York, where 40 percent of students were absent in some schools, administrators advised that there was “no cause for alarm.” On the advice of the health department, they also curtailed no activities.
Public health officials made the deliberate decision, in fact, not to cancel large meetings and gatherings for the purpose of stopping or slowing viral transmission. They saw the epidemic as spreading too quickly for such measures to be effective. Instead, officials emphasized providing medical care to those who were afflicted, not “getting ahead” of the virus.
The 1957 pandemic came and went, but as with the 1918 flu, the epidemiological impact of the virus continued long after life returned to normal. As Newsweek reported in 1960, two years after the “end” of the 1957 pandemic, the same virus was “quietly picking off almost everyone it missed the first time around.” One estimate put the excess death toll that season at 12,000.
By the end of the 1960s, a new pandemic virus had arrived: the H3N2 influenza, which officials estimated claimed 1 million lives globally over several seasons. Again, however, officials put few countermeasures in place, and disruptions to social life hovered somewhere between minimal and nonexistent — reflecting a society largely unaware of the deadly pandemic. While in December 1968 the New York Times called the outbreak “one of the worst in the nation’s history,” according to historian Mark Honigsbaum, “there were few school closures and businesses, for the most part, continued to operate as normal.”
Something similar happened with the “swine flu” in 2009. While the media devoted enormous airtime to the outbreak, disruptions to life were transient, and the epidemic largely receded from the public conversation within months. When the World Health Organization officially announced the transition to a “post-pandemic period” in August 2010, few people noticed, for social life had long returned to normal. Yet, as in previous pandemics, the virus continued to circulate. According to estimates of the CDC, most post-pandemic seasons saw influenza-related death tolls exceeding those of the pandemic itself.
Yet, while life either wasn’t interrupted or returned to normal quickly in these four pandemics, we’ve treated covid-19 very differently. While medicine has progressed over time, hope for a silver-bullet vaccine or therapeutic does not fully explain our different response. Indeed, a vaccine was produced in record time in 1968, with a total of 22 million doses distributed in the United States by the end of January 1969. But social life never paused while waiting for that vaccine.
But despite our unprecedented capacity to surveil the spread of SARS-CoV-2, history tells us there won’t come a moment when the data signal the end of the pandemic. If history is any indication, cases, hospitalizations and deaths from covid will be here for decades to come.
The key to ending the pandemic, therefore, isn’t biological. It is social. Today the public is profoundly divided on how to move forward, with some long ago entering a post-pandemic state, while others recently restarted virtual education and enhanced mask mandates in response to the omicron variant. But a state of emergency cannot last forever, especially since interventions have divided families and caused harm to children and young people, who are at the lowest risk from the coronavirus.
And for those embracing stricter mitigation methods, it is crucial to understand that there won’t be a clearly definable biological endpoint to the pandemic. Only when they integrate the risk from covid into their lives and resume normal social interactions will the pandemic end. Much as they hope for a clean, neat endpoint, history indicates such a thing doesn’t exist.
At the end of the day, it is not the virus that makes the timeline — it is us. The pandemic will be over when we say it’s over. | null | null | null | null | null |
The history of seat-belt laws shows public health doesn’t have to be partisan
Tennessee’s surprising role in the adoption of life-saving seat belt laws.
Karen Kuehl, an emergency physician, displays equipment she wears while treating covid-19 patients as she urges the Roanoke County, Va., School Board to retain a mask mandate on Jan. 27, 2022. (Scott P. Yates/AP)
By Erica Westly
Erica Westly is a journalist and author specializing in science and American history. She is currently at work on a book about the history of drowning as a public health issue.
Mask mandates have generated intense fights throughout the pandemic, sparking comparisons to early battles over seat-belt laws, which were similarly divisive when they were introduced in the United States in the 1980s. As they have with masks, opponents initially derided seat belts as uncomfortable and constricting, and they portrayed state laws requiring the restraints as government overreach. “Seat-belt laws steal our freedom,” proclaimed a 1989 editorial. “This has nothing to do with public safety,” another seat-belt law opponent argued in 1986. “It’s personal safety, and people should have the right to choose for themselves.”
Yet, there are key differences between seat-belt laws and mask mandates. While the mask requirements started with adults, the first passenger restraint laws in the United States targeted children. And although both seat-belt laws and mask mandates became highly politicized, the state that paved the way for seat-belt requirements in the United States was a relatively conservative state in the South — Tennessee — rather than a more liberal one in the Northeast or the West, where the first mask mandates were passed. Understanding and learning from this history could help make public health measures less polarizing.
By the 1970s, most developed countries had adult seat-belt laws, but, despite numerous attempts, no U.S. state had managed to pass similar measures, in large part because car manufacturers had lobbied against them.
Everything changed, however, when children became the focus of passenger restraint laws. The efforts of Robert Sanders, a pediatrician in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and his wife, Pat, precipitated this shift. The two were so persistent in meeting with state politicians, including a young Al Gore, about child safety seats that they became known as “Dr. and Mrs. Seat Belt.”
Robert Sanders didn’t set out to become involved with public health or politics, but in the 1970s, he was asked to join a state automobile accident prevention committee, and his traffic safety advocacy arose from that work. As a pediatrician, Sanders already knew that car accidents were a leading cause of death among young children in the United States, killing hundreds of toddlers and infants each year. But through the accident prevention committee, he learned about studies that showed child safety seats, which represented new technology at the time, could reduce childhood traffic deaths by up to 90 percent. He became convinced that every child passenger deserved the protection of a car seat, which meant requiring them by law rather than merely encouraging parents to use them.
Crucially, the auto industry didn’t oppose child safety seats as vigorously as it did adult seat-belt laws because requiring drivers to use child safety seats — a car accessory — didn’t require anything of auto manufacturers. Politicians and the public also generally accepted laws designed to protect young children more readily than those aimed at adults.
Still, although they avoided an auto industry campaign to torpedo their bill, Robert and Pat Sanders encountered plenty of resistance. In an oral history conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2004, the couple recalled one state representative who refused to support the legislation unless a “babes in arms” amendment — allowing parents to hold infants in their laps — was added. The representative had fond memories of watching his son and daughter-in-law drive up to his house with their newborn child in the front seat and didn’t want to deprive other families of that experience. It took the deaths of several infants in accidents while sitting in their caretakers’ laps to get the amendment removed.
The Sanderses also remembered that Tennessee Gov. Ray Blanton (D) expressed hesitation about signing the bill until his grandchildren’s pediatrician persuaded him to do so. Other clinicians attended legislative committee meetings about the bill, and Robert Sanders made sure they sat in the front row so they could make eye contact with lawmakers. “That busy physicians would appeal to legislators in regard to a political issue that wasn’t self-serving, except for the safety of little children, was considered refreshing by many Tennessee lawmakers,” he later wrote.
The Tennessee child safety seat law went into effect in 1978 and was effective almost immediately, more than doubling car seat usage within the first few years and reducing childhood traffic fatalities by 70 percent. Other states, starting with Rhode Island, passed similar laws shortly thereafter, and by the mid-1980s, every state had some form of child passenger restraint legislation on the books.
Adult seat-belt laws followed, starting with New York in 1984. Although a vocal minority objected to them, most Americans accepted the new rules, perhaps because they had already become used to buckling up their children. Car manufacturers also accepted the laws, refocusing their opposition on air bag requirements.
The resulting laws have been overwhelmingly successful. In 2022, about 90 percent of American drivers use seat belts, compared to only about 14 percent in the early 1980s, when the first seat-belt laws were passed. Most Americans today instinctively put on a seat belt when they get into a car, and the idea of not wearing one as a political statement, a common occurrence in the 1980s, now seems absurd. Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that seat belts save roughly 15,000 lives per year.
Tennessee helped the nation achieve this goal, and the state sees its pioneering role in the history of seat-belt legislation as a point of pride. At a 2008 event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the landmark legislation, then-Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) said: “Tennessee has always been a visionary place, and the people of Tennessee have always known that nothing is more important than the safety and well-being of our children.” Still, while Tennessee continues to have some of the strongest seat belt and child safety seat laws in the country, its leadership in traffic safety has not translated to other areas of public health.
For example, Tennessee has some of the highest gun death rates in the country, but it recently passed a permitless carry law, despite objections by local physicians. This past Christmas, a stray bullet killed a 12-year-old boy who, only weeks earlier, had written to Gov. Bill Lee (R) opposing the new law. Further, during the coronavirus pandemic, the state has passed laws that deprived health officials of their authority to close schools and banned most mask mandates. The state’s Department of Health also fired its vaccine director, pediatrician Michelle Fiscus, after she faced political backlash for acknowledging the existence of a 1987 doctrine that allows teenagers to get vaccinated without parental consent. Tennessee has experienced high rates of hospitalizations and deaths because of covid-19 this winter, which experts have attributed to the state’s low vaccination rates.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to assume that Tennessee or other conservative states cannot enact groundbreaking public health policies. After all, support for and opposition to public health measures often span the political spectrum. Massachusetts in the 1980s was one of the first states to mandate seat belts, but voters repealed the law in 1986, and it wasn’t reinstated until 1994. In the 2010s, Mississippi had the highest childhood immunization rates in the United States while vaccine hesitancy caused measles and whooping cough outbreaks in more-liberal states, such as California. Ultimately, public health victories and failures can happen in any state, no matter how progressive or conservative they may seem. Recognizing this and focusing on strategies that broaden support for public health policies could help to depoliticize mask mandates and similar measures in the future. | null | null | null | null | null |
Banning ‘Maus’ is just the latest case of sanitizing history for kids’ comfort
Shielding children from ugly truths isn’t good for anyone
Art Spiegelman's graphic novel about the Holocaust, “Maus.” (Maro Siranosian/AFP/Getty Images)
By Gwen C. Katz
A.R. Vishny
The McMinn County, Tenn., Board of Education voted to remove Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking graphic novel “Maus” from their eighth-grade language arts curriculum last month, citing its nudity, violence and strong language and promising to replace it with a more “age-appropriate” book about the Holocaust. This decision was met with widespread and well-deserved denunciation; people were stunned both by the choice to remove a book about the Holocaust and the flimsiness of the justification.
Within the children’s literature world, though, the move just looked like the latest in a broad trend of “pajamafication”: softening the literature we use to introduce students to difficult historical topics. Challenging nonfiction accounts that give a voice to actual survivors, like “Maus,” are replaced with sanitized fictional tales, such as John Boyne’s popular novel “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” Far from protecting children, these changes do them a disservice, teaching them a false and distorted version of history.
Pajamafication, as embodied by Boyne’s novel, is above all concerned with comfort. The book follows a young German boy who, completely unaware that his father runs Auschwitz and has moved the family to the camp for that very purpose, befriends a young Jewish boy on the other side of the fence. The novel makes structural choices seen across the genre of Holocaust-set fiction designed to reassure: The hero is a relatable non-Jew. The Jewish boy is the story’s object, not its subject. He is principally a tragic plot device who exists to teach the non-Jewish hero, and the reader, a trite lesson about friendship. The novel’s ending is predictably tragic. The fictional conceit still lets the reader sleep easy, knowing it’s not true.
And it isn’t just one book — these trends are found throughout much of Holocaust literature. “There’s a lot of books about righteous gentiles, especially in the picture book arena,” says Rebecca Levitan, a librarian in Baltimore County, Md. “Also, it seems to me that there are a lot of books about escaping the Holocaust or hiding from it, lots of protagonists that can ‘pass’ as Aryan. Hiding and running away are far more palatable to people than standing in the freezing cold for hours on end while starving and hoping you don’t get shot because of the whim of a Nazi guard.”
As part of their supposed relatability, the non-Jewish heroes are minimally prejudiced. The Nazi fixation on Jews becomes an implied anomaly rather than an inevitability emerging from European history. If these fictions are to be taken for historical truths, average Europeans were so ready to reach out to and rescue their Jewish neighbors that their stories can dominate shelves and screens. The fact that Jews had been a marginalized minority who were not equal citizens of the countries they resided in for the vast majority of European history is unimportant. The substance of antisemitism, what exactly the Nazis used to justify the deportation and mass murder of Jews, is not addressed — nor is the fact that antisemitism still exists today. There’s a reason for that, Levitan says: “I think that it’s not about adults protecting kids from difficult topics. It’s about adults wanting to avoid difficult discussions, wanting to avoid being called out for things that they might do that are incongruous to what kids are learning.”
In books like these, the Holocaust becomes a parable about good and evil instead of a specific event that happened to a real group of people. Any depictions of bigotry are reduced to the kind of generic “they’re not like us” conflict that can serve as a metaphor for any kind of oppression; it is overcome easily through the power of friendship and childhood innocence, rather than the real, difficult work of dismantling oppressive power structures. The Jewish characters are designed to be relatable to non-Jews while minimizing their religion. “The Jews are not a symbol,” says Dara Horn, author of “People Love Dead Jews.” “The Holocaust was not a fable, right? We’re not learning a take-home fortune-cookie message about humanity from this.”
After all, it is uncomfortable to think that the vast majority of Europeans did nothing to stop the slaughter of neighbors, or that antisemitism is an integral piece of European culture. It is uncomfortable to think that these delusions of Jewish power and the belief in the inhumanity of Jewish people that so animated Nazism continue to animate extremism across the political spectrum, with deadly consequences.
Ultimately, shielding students from the ugly parts of history is neither possible nor desirable. And for Jewish students, it was never an option. “Teaching the Holocaust is a given in Jewish schools,” says Sheila Barbach, general studies principal of Gerrard Berman Day School. “It is our history; it has touched all of our lives. … I feel that it is imperative that it is taught in public schools, particularly where there are few to no Jewish students.”
Far from harming children, a truthful teaching of history through eyewitness accounts like “Maus” is an important foundation that can help children recognize bigotry in themselves and in the world around them. As for the challenge of introducing children to such difficult material, Barbach says: “Sensitive teachers can teach sensitive topics. It’s what we do.”
In the wake of the controversy, print runs of “Maus” are selling out, and countless copies have been donated to schools and public libraries. But while more people discovering this seminal work is a positive development, simply reading books about the Holocaust is not enough on its own. After all, most antisemitism will not look like the Holocaust. Communities need to be proactive on the local level and confront antisemitism when it arises, wherever it arises, before it becomes violent. It will be uncomfortable, but the consequences of complacency will undoubtedly be worse. | null | null | null | null | null |
Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) listen during a meeting in October of the House select committee tasked with investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Republicans have voted to punish Cheney and Kinzinger for taking part in the investigation. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
As a Democratic president’s popularity sagged, a Republican gubernatorial victory in Virginia (and, in 2010, New Jersey, whose election for 2022 was much closer than widely predicted) signaled that the Democratic lock on Washington was in trouble. Republican voter enthusiasm began to rise, as did confidence of big GOP gains in Congress.
If we were in normal political times, it should be easy for Republicans all to sing from the same hymn book, focusing the party’s energy on President Biden and his congressional allies, seeking to pick apart the Democratic majority seat by seat and, with it, effectively end the Biden legislative agenda.
These are no ordinary times, though. And as a House committee continues to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection, the investigation — essentially asking, “What did the president do, and when did he do it?” — has led Republicans to expose their own cracks between those who remain enthusiastic backers of all things Trump and those willing to be critical of the former president (or those who just hope to avoid Trump as a topic).
Which made the decision of the Republican National Committee to censure Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) at last week’s winter meeting in Salt Lake City for the crime of merely participating in the investigation both obvious and curious.
Obvious, because the RNC is eager to do all it can to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces — as demonstrated by the committee footing the bill for his legal expenses, even though the former president controls a $120 million war chest of his own. Curious, because by taking the unprecedented step against two sitting Republican members of Congress, the committee ensured that this would bring the GOP’s internal divisions to the surface. And these divisions were guaranteed to bring significant media coverage.
Today’s tension between the RNC and Capitol Hill GOP is somewhat reminiscent of the 2010 election cycle. In 2010, the RNC was hit by wave after wave of controversy, including, most infamously, a scandal in which a staffer spent nearly $2,000 of the party’s money at a risqué Los Angeles nightclub and a leaked internal fundraising memo critical of party donors. Republican congressional leaders vented their frustration publicly and privately because the party committee should not be a front-page story.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comment on the censure this week — “That’s not the job of the RNC” — sounded awfully similar to comments Capitol Hill Republicans directed at the RNC in 2010.
I was the committee’s communications director at the time, and dealing with these kinds of stories constituted my worst days on the job. Whenever we became the center of national news, self-inflicted crises caused us to retreat into a bunker mentality. Instead of focusing solely on pressing Democratic weaknesses — the then-unpopular Obamacare bill, the lack of a coherent response to the long-running BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, rising taxes and deficits — precious time was lost trying to take care of avoidable blunders. Each time, it was as if the RNC had made an in-kind contribution to the Democratic National Committee.
That’s surely what last weekend’s vote was, too. The move to censure Cheney and Kinzinger was an internal RNC process, which is to say, it was a self-inflicted injury that made the committee a dominant news story, complete with party infighting among committee members and several vocal Capitol Hill Republicans, including McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah).
That the RNC has now labeled those senators as part of “the D.C. bubble” will not do anything to quell the back and forth. Indeed, the unheard of and, until now, unfathomable move by the RNC to throw shade at its own top Senate Republicans will keep the issue alive for several more days. This was already going to be fodder for the Sunday shows, even before Trump released the inevitable statement Wednesday attacking McConnell and continuing to push the lie that his 2020 election loss was fraudulent.
That means the focus for people paying attention to political news now is not on what Republicans should want: an unpopular president, a majority of voters believing the country is moving in the wrong direction, inflation, rising violent crime and the growing number of Democratic governors coming to embrace the removal of mask mandates for which they’d long criticized Republicans. Instead, it’s on Republican infighting.
The good news for Republicans is that the political ground remains fertile for them, and narrow Democratic majorities mean even modest Republican gains in November could easily lead to GOP control of the House and the Senate.
Come November, perhaps this fight will be little remembered, the kind of political inside baseball that doesn’t register with voters more broadly, in the way that I can barely remember some RNC imbroglios that consumed my life in 2010. Certainly voters then didn’t punish the GOP: Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate, though Democrats retained control of the upper chamber.
But Republicans should not take that risk. The RNC controversies of 2010 were trivial. The stakes here are much higher: The RNC is targeting its own members of Congress and changing rules so that committee funds may be spent on a Republican primary (which might draw funds away from targeting Democratic seats). And the troubling language that those storming the Capitol — people seeking to lynch then-Vice President Mike Pence — were “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” is serious. And, as we’ve seen in the past and are seeing this week, Trump is willing to exploit divides however and whenever he sees fit.
This is happening at a time when much of the political incentive structure rewards political “fighting” over actual results and encourages intraparty fights. Trump, in his effort to salve his wounds from losing to Biden, has shown his willingness to exploit party divisions, even with the House and Senate in the balance — as Republicans learned last year in Georgia.
McConnell is mindful of this, which is why, while being clear and consistent on Jan. 6, he has otherwise trodden carefully around Trump. | null | null | null | null | null |
What ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ tells us about American hegemony
Do not underestimate the power of legacy IP
Boba Fett waits for tributes in the season premiere of “The Book of Boba Fett.” (Disney Plus)
Full disclosure: I have never liked Boba Fett. I hold him responsible for my first moment of cynicism at a young age.
I am old enough to have watched the original “Star Wars” trilogy in the theater and young enough to have wanted all the Star Wars toys. I remember being very excited as “Empire Strikes Back” approached its release date. And one of the things that 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm kept hyping about that film was Boba Fett. He was supposed to be this supercool new character who evoked the menacing mystique of Darth Vader.
So I went to see “Empire” all pumped up about Boba Fett, and … he had like five lines of dialogue and played a minor role in the film. I wondered why he had been hyped so much, and that was when youngling Dan first encountered the dark side of cynicism. I realized that the hype was designed to get nerds like me to buy as much merchandise as humanly possible. As my podcast partner Ana Marie Cox would have told me, it was Adorno in action.
All of this is to say that I was … let’s say “underwhelmed” with the return of Boba Fett in season two of “The Mandalorian” and only mildly intrigued by the prospect of a new show centered on that character. If the folks at Disney were gonna ruin the satisfaction that youngling Dan felt about Boba’s fate in “Return of the Jedi,” they would have to deliver some quality content.
To put it generously, the first half of the season did not deliver. It focused on two stories: how Boba escaped the pit of Sarlacc (beyond that it happened exactly how Patton Oswalt predicted) and his subsequent efforts with Fennic Shand to take over Jabba the Hutt’s territory on Tatooine.
The earlier plot was kinda sorta okay, with Boba Fett learning the ways of the Tusken raiders. The latter plot was galactically stupid across a whole array of dimensions. There were a lot of mistakes ranging from bad special effects to a criminal underuse of Ming-Na Wen. The strangest move was to make Boba Fett, previously thought of as a pretty cunning and crafty guy, the most naive, least-informed protagonist in science fiction. The most puzzling move was having the viewer try to present Boba Fett taking Jabba the Hutt’s place as some kind of blow for order and justice.
The point is, very little of this made any sense in terms of either plot or character development. And yet, it almost did not matter, because this is how intellectual property works in the 21st century. Disney took the risk-averse, profit-maximizing step of strip-mining elements of a beloved franchise, turning previously animated characters into real-life productions, and generally trying to engage in as much fan service as possible.
The truth is that this can work far better than most critics would care to admit. The most recent Spider-Man film did this to perfection, making viewers enjoy iterations of the character that had been previously panned. Star Wars has just as awesome a back catalogue of characters as the MCU. Sure enough, the second half of “Book of Boba Fett” barely featured Boba Fett, shifting its focus to characters from the original trilogy, animated shows and “The Mandalorian.” The episodes that were the most entertaining featured the least amount of Boba Fett.
After an absurd season finale, viewers are left pondering again how Disney and the “Star Wars” franchise can coast on the reputation of what used to be groundbreaking and offer occasional hints of promise about the future to keep its audience. Legacy intellectual property is tough to dislodge in 2022.
This conclusion applies to international politics, as well. The United States has had an awful half-decade filled with immature leadership, gyrating grand strategy, policy foul-ups and a dysfunctional polity. It is frustrating to watch. Despite all this, the legacy and potency of American ideals persists. The tendency of democracies in precarious security situations to look to the United States endures. Even if Washington policymakers seem devoid of fresh ideas, an awful lot of people are still intrigued by traditional ideas.
Like “The Book of Boba Fett,” America’s current standing is tarnished. In a world in which legacy IP still carries some sway, however, so does U.S. soft power. | null | null | null | null | null |
For centuries, Moscow has worried that foreign powers are scheming to separate Ukraine from Russia.
A mural representing World War II in an underground pedestrian crossroad in Rostov on Don, a Russian city near the eastern border with Ukraine. (Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
By Jeffrey Mankoff
When Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” He has often repeated this claim. Western analysts are inclined to dismiss Putin’s depiction of Russo-Ukrainian unity as cheap propaganda or deliberate disinformation.
Yet the belief that Russians and Ukrainians share a common identity has deep roots in Russia — and in certain quarters, in Ukraine, too — though Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine helped consolidate a shared civic identity among even Russian-speaking Ukrainians. My research suggests how Moscow is consequently prepared to pay a high cost to fulfill its ambition to restore control over its southern neighbor.
Russia and Ukraine have a complex history
In the medieval era, Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, was the center of the Orthodox, East Slavic world that gave birth to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. After Kyiv was razed by Mongol conquerors in 1240, many smaller princedoms competed for primacy in the East Slavic world. By the late 15th century, Moscow had replaced Kyiv as the most prominent East Slavic city and the nucleus of a new empire. Meanwhile, Kyiv and its environs came under Polish-Lithuanian rule.
Much of Ukraine had become a depopulated borderland (in Slavic languages, Ukraina means “borderland”). Like many frontiers, it attracted migrants, the Cossacks, who set up self-governing communities. During the 17th century, the Cossacks became pawns in a geopolitical struggle between Poland, Moscow and the Ottoman Empire — a struggle that Moscow eventually won. Between 1654 and 1795, Moscow/Russia absorbed the bulk of the Ukrainian lands, apart from the westernmost regions of Galicia and Transcarpathia.
Russia saw Ukrainian nationalism as a foreign plot
As the historian Zenon Kohut notes, Moscow’s rulers made “no assertion of ethnic affinity [with Kyiv], nor [was] Kyiv treated as territory lost to Muscovy/Russia” when these lands were under Polish-Lithuanian rule. Later, though, Russian publicists seeking to justify imperial expansion portrayed the absorption of Ukraine as the historic reunification of the East Slavic world, now centered on Moscow. They depicted Ukraine’s inhabitants as “Little Russians,” part of a tripartite “all-Russian” people that also included “Great Russians” and “White Russians” (Belarusians). This view originated in the Russian Orthodox Church, but found its way into the Russian Empire’s educational curriculum thanks to Nikolay Ustryalov, author of the leading history textbook in 19th-century Russia.
The claim that Ukrainians and Russians were one went hand-in-hand with the belief that Ukrainian nationhood was a foreign invention created to redivide the Russian Empire. Russian officials blamed Poland and Austria — which annexed Galicia and Transcarpathia in the late 18th century — for fomenting Ukrainian nationalism to pull the region’s inhabitants away from their “natural” alignment with Orthodox Moscow.
They pointed to the creation in the Ukrainian lands of a Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, which was subordinate to the pope in Rome, as a tool for undermining Orthodox, and, hence, Russian influence. The emergence of a 19th-century intelligentsia in Galicia calling for the unification and independence of all the Ukrainian lands was depicted as a product of the geopolitical struggle with Austria-Hungary that culminated in World War I.
Fear that foreign powers would use the idea of Ukraine as a weapon persisted after the fall of the Russian Empire. During World War II, German occupation forces aligned with Ukrainian nationalist factions to set up a puppet state in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, where these factions participated in ethnic cleansing and provided guards for German concentration camps.
The Kremlin now argues that the West is trying to woo Ukraine away
This long history helps explain why contemporary Russian leaders are so sensitive about Ukraine, which regained its independence in 1991 — at Moscow’s weakest moment, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The European Union and NATO have replaced Poland, the Catholic Church and Austria-Hungary as the villainous schemers who are supposedly trying to separate Ukraine from Russia.
Putin draws a direct historical line from Poland and Austria’s supposed “anti-Russia project,” through the Nazi occupiers who set up a puppet state, to recent efforts to expand NATO and the E.U. He draws on the work of the Nobel Prize-winning author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who argued that because “our people came to be divided into three branches [i.e. Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian] by the terrible calamity of the Mongol invasion, and by Polish colonization … the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century … is a recently invented falsehood.”
Moscow portrayed Ukraine’s 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests, which led to the ouster of the Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych, as part of the West’s “hybrid” offensive to roll back Russian influence. Putin argued that in seeking the incorporation of Ukraine, the E.U. and NATO employed “the old groundwork of the Polish-Austrian ideologists to create an ‘anti-Moscow Russia.’” Russia has cracked down on Ukrainian cultural organizations and the Greek Catholic Church in occupied regions of Ukraine.
Most Ukrainians do not share Putin’s belief in Russo-Ukrainian unity. Still, understanding how and why that belief has endured in Russia is critical to making sense of Moscow’s desire to restore control over Ukraine. Behind the short-term focus on geopolitical issues — such as the role of NATO — lie long-standing beliefs in the common identity of Russians and Ukrainians (and Belarusians), beliefs that will outlast the current crisis.
Jeffrey Mankoff (@DrJMankoff) is a distinguished research fellow at the U.S. National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies, and the author of “Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security” (Yale University Press, 2022). The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not an official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Defense Department or the U.S. government. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nick Baumgartner, center, races between Hagen Kearney of the United States and Takahara Yoshiki of Japan. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters)
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Nick Baumgartner was doing it for all the people back in Iron River, Mich. who supported him all these years in this lunatic pursuit of his. He was doing it for all the guys back in the States who aren’t afraid to break their backs and build things for a living. He was doing it for all the middle-aged dads out there who wake up wondering what hurts today and whether it’ll take two Advil or three. He was doing it most of all for 17-year-old Landon Baumgartner, the kid who could barely remember his dad’s first Olympics and who was home in Iron River, surrounded by his buddies in the middle of the night, watching his old man make history at his fourth.
Baumgartner was bombing down the snowboard cross course at Genting Snow Park, leading a quarterfinal heat, taking another step toward an Olympic medal that had eluded him for 12 years. He was racing against a field of Europeans who could train in the offseason while he poured concrete to put food on the table — and he was beating them. Baumgartner has been hurtling down mountains for long enough to know when he has it and when he doesn’t. Wednesday afternoon, he had it.
Vedder blasted out of the gate, his best asset, and felt Baumgartner close the gap and whoosh past him. Baumgartner felt himself riding fast, fast enough to advance and eventually win a medal. And then an Austrian sped from behind and attempted to pass him around the penultimate turn, and he made a split-second calculation. He had had planned to jump over two rolling bumps, but he thought he would crash if he did with the Austrian there. He rode over the rollers instead. He caught an edge and lost his speed. | null | null | null | null | null |
Who could have seen another Russian doping issue coming? Everyone but the IOC.
A picture taken on February 10, 2022 shows the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) logo at the entrance of the organization's headquarters in Moscow. (Natalia KOLESNIKOVA / AFP) (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images)
BEIJING — We ended up here, with yet another Russia doping scandal at yet another Olympics, because Russia was never properly punished for its original sins. The Russians were so set upon success at the 2014 Winter Games, hosted at their own Black Sea resort of Sochi, that they ran a state-sponsored doping system. Olympics missed by Russian athletes since the scheme was exposed: Zero.
That’s not on Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old figure skater who was part of the Russian team that won a gold medal here — but has yet to receive it. To this point, the specifics of this case — Russian media reports that Valieva tested positive for a banned substance in December — are murky at best. They always are.
About that system: Go back to July 2016, with the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics at hand. By that point, there were independent documentaries and independent commissions and independent reporting that laid bare evidence that Russia had, among other things, systematically swapped out dirty urine samples for clean ones to cover up doping. The International Olympic Committee took that evidence, and decided not to ban Russia from those Games. In a move that fits with what’s playing out here, the IOC merely abdicated responsibility by asking the 28 federations that oversee individual sports internationally.
Never mind that those federations were ill-equipped to make such decisions. Put aside the ridiculous notion that dirty sports were charged with willfully cleaning themselves up. What mattered was that the IOC could kick the can down the road. It’s elite at that.
That was the opportunity, right there: Ban Russian athletes for four years — a full Olympic cycle, covering one summer and one winter Games — and maybe we wouldn’t be here. Instead, the can has dropped here, in Beijing, all these years later. Valieva’s potential positive and the clamor around it stem from the fact that the IOC has scrutinized athletes and raked over individual cases, but has never held the system accountable.
Instead we got meaningless wardrobe cleansing, mandating that competitors wear “Olympic Athlete from Russia” on their uniforms in PyeongChang and the Russian Olympic Committee logo since. And we got new music when a Russian wins gold, exchanging the Russian national anthem for Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
What was needed — to serve Valieva, to serve her teammates, to serve the athletes she competes against — was sweeping change forced from the outside. The easy view is to paint Valieva’s competitors as the victims, because if a “dirty” athlete beats a “clean” one, there’s obvious injustice. Indeed, the IOC has put off the medals ceremony for the team competition, citing the controversy’s status as a “legal case.” Should Russia be disqualified because of Valieva’s violation, the United States team could be declared gold medalists.
It all has so many people here wringing their hands with righteous indignation. In an interview with the publication “Inside the Games,” Susanne Lyons, the chair of the board of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said her “great fear” is that doping violations are not handled evenly across countries and national Olympic committees.
“Really, the whole credibility of the Olympic movement and the Paralympic movement stands teetering on the edge of us saying that we really believe and live the values that we say we stand for,” Lyons said, according to “Inside the Games.” “And I just hope that’s what we’ll see in this specific situation that’s happening today.”
Lyons’s organization, it’s worth pointing out, oversaw a system that allowed for widespread sexual assault of teenage girls over years. When it comes to preaching morality, tread lightly.
This is an athletic crisis, though, a crisis of confidence. Experts in athlete advocacy contend that the aggrieved parties here aren’t just those who compete against Russians. They’re the Russians themselves, because for too long the attitude there has been: You’re either in the system or you won’t be competing. That cries for a full-blown overhaul, not the semantic four-year ban WADA issued in 2019, a ban that the Court for Arbitration for Sport reduced to two years in 2020.
What difference did any of it make? Cleared Russian athletes were in Tokyo last summer, and indeed are here now, competing under the moniker “Russian Olympic Committee.” Some of those athletes, on skates, won figure skating gold Monday. The IOC has not commented — indeed, has deflected questions — about the status of those medals, not to mention the sanctity of the competition.
“We don’t want to hear about the other stuff, but it arises,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said at a media briefing Thursday. “It’s life, and so has to be dealt with, has to be dealt with properly, has to be dealt with in a proper and transparent way, a legal way. And we will deal with it, and we will deal with it as quickly as possible. But I think it doesn’t — it shouldn’t and it doesn’t take away from the magic of the Games.”
What a wonderful world in which to live, this magical place in which Adams can speak with a straight face about transparency but provide zero information about what’s going on.
Whatever the outcome, whatever the timing, withhold judgment on Valieva, a teenage girl. Russian athletes are only products of the system that produces them. The IOC has let that system, um, skate. Until it demands overhaul, why would we think the next Olympics — or the one after that, or the one after that — wouldn’t be consumed by a new version of the same old story? | null | null | null | null | null |
Why? State are reacting to falling cases and hospitalizations, but the CDC still recommends caution. (Deaths are high because they lag infections.)
Next steps: States have until Aug. 1 to submit plans for using the money.
Other U.S. news: Chloe Kim won gold for a second straight Olympics in the women’s snowboard halfpipe.
What’s next: U.S. skier Mikaela Shiffrin competes today (10 p.m. Eastern time) in the super-G, the fastest downhill event. | null | null | null | null | null |
The warning comes as law enforcement officials are under pressure to use tougher measures to disperse demonstrations, including those that continue to clog traffic arteries between the United States and Canada. So far, two major ports of entry — the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, and the Coutts crossing linking Montana to Alberta — have been closed or partially blocked.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has been widely targeted by protesters denouncing his response to the pandemic, called the obstruction of border crossings an economic crisis, tweeting that the blockades in Windsor and the capital, Ottawa, where a state of emergency was declared over the weekend, “must stop” — but didn’t elaborate on how this could be achieved.
The blockades, he said, “are endangering jobs, impeding trade, threatening the economy, and obstructing our communities.” Trudeau’s remarks came as business groups and experts reported that the recent bridge blockades were hurting supply chains. Approximately $300 million in goods crosses the Ambassador Bridge every day.
“You can’t arrest your way out of the choices that people are making … the best thing is for them to make the decision to leave,” a Royal Canadian Mounted Police superintendent in Alberta, Roberta McKale, told reporters Wednesday at one of the protest sites near Coutts. “And they’ve got to go.”
And Windsor’s mayor, Drew Dilkens, warned that arresting people could lead to violence, telling local outlets that Windsor police must be “calculated and appropriately balanced” in how they handle protesters. “At this time, our focus is on maintaining security and de-escalating the situation as much as possible,” he said during a press briefing.
Dilkens noted that some protesters believe “they are fighting for a cause that is worth dying for,” adding that “that type of sentiment translates into different behaviors than any normal protests.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Shortly before 1:30 p.m. on Feb. 1, authorities said, Painter and Jefferson were responding to a call about a suspicious man on the grounds of Bridgewater’s Memorial Hall. “After a brief interaction … the subject opened fire and shot both officers,” a Virginia State Police spokeswoman said. The alleged gunman, identified as a former Bridgewater student, Alexander Wyatt Campbell, 27, of Ashland, Va., has been charged with multiple murder counts and is being held in the Rockingham County Jail. | null | null | null | null | null |
Pre-deadline deal: Pacers continue teardown by trading Domantas Sabonis to Kings for Tyrese Haliburton
Pre-deadline deal: Trail Blazers ship CJ McCollum to Pelicans as rebuilding effort deepens
The Wizards find themselves in a particularly tricky situation. The team is faltering, and star Bradley Beal was just lost for the season because of upcoming wrist surgery. Both of those can affect how General Manager Tommy Sheppard approaches the trade deadline, considering Beal can opt out of his contract after this season and has not yet signed the max extension he was offered.
The Wizards are in the midst of an ugly stretch that includes nine losses in the past 11 games and a brutal falloff after a 10-3 start. Coronavirus absences and a run of elite opponents of late have been an issue, but questions remain regarding whether this is a playoff team as constructed. And that was before Beal went down.
“It’s not something I want to harp on, and they’re aware of it, of course,” Unseld said. “They understand it’s a side of the business. It’s awkward and uncomfortable. But every year, this time of year, it is what it is. So our area of concentration is the next game.”
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.
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.
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 has averaged 18.9 points, 12.1 rebounds and 5.0 assists this season, joining Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic as the only players to hit all three of those statistical benchmarks.
Haliburton, 21, has averaged 14.3 points, 3.9 rebounds and 7.4 assists this season after 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.
To acquire McCollum, Larry Nance Jr. and Tony Snell, New Orleans traded Josh Hart, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Tomas Satoransky, Didi Louzada, a protected 2022 first-round pick and two second-round picks to Portland.
The 30-year-old McCollum spent nine seasons with the Blazers, who selected him in the 2013 draft. He averaged 20.5 points, 4.3 rebounds and 4.5 assists this season despite missing six weeks in December and January with a lung injury.
Although he never made an all-star team as Lillard’s wingman, McCollum scored at least 20 points per game for seven straight seasons and helped the Blazers reach the playoffs in each of the past eight years. | null | null | null | null | null |
Chicago rapper Saba. (Dawit N.M.)
But the curtains have been replaced with tattered plastic. The house sits vacant, another sign of a bygone era.
Gentrification, financial stability and survivor’s guilt are at the heart of Saba’s new album, his first since the critically acclaimed “CARE FOR ME” almost four years ago. But where that album found him processing grief in the wake of his cousin’s slaying, “Few Good Things” finds him taking stock of the life he’s amassed and the pressures that come along with it. Yet he doesn’t just celebrate the fame and padded bank account; he’s thankful but circumspect, remembering those who didn’t make it to this point.
“I think losing people early, people who are close to you, you always wonder what you could have done differently to change that,” says the 27-year-old rapper over Zoom from his Los Angeles home. “You can feel survivor's guilt and it doesn't even require death. It's based on the grief of like, ‘Everybody’s not going to experience what I'm experiencing.’ It ends up sticking with you in a way that is damn near unhealthy.”
The album arrives following the death of yet another friend in his inner circle. In August, Squeak — a DJ, producer and member of the Pivot Gang rap collective with Saba — was gunned down on a neighborhood street in Chicago’s West Side. He was 26.
“I lose somebody close to me with every release,” Saba says woefully. “And I know that's a part of aging in general, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth when it's not natural.”
Born Tahj Malik Chandler, Saba was raised on Chicago’s West Side by his grandparents; his parents were around and active in his life. When he was 5, his father, an R&B singer and producer named Chandlar, moved to New York City to pursue his music full time. In 2004, he released the album “Strong Emotion” to little fanfare, but it led to performance opportunities with Jaheim and Missy Elliott on the road. “So that’s where the idea of music was introduced to me, really,” Saba says. “And I think that’s also where the idea of the fearlessness that comes with being a musician was introduced to me, because I watched my dad give up everything that he had in Chicago.”
Saba grew up in a musical family. His younger brother made beats; his grandmother and paternal relatives were singers. He listened to rap artists like Pharrell and Dipset as a 6-year-old, and became a fan of the rap group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony after hearing “Notorious Thugs,” their 1997 song with the Notorious B.I.G., on a burned CD. “I listened to this song back to back … like nonstop,” he says. “And then I thought, ‘Oh, I need to hear more of their music. That’s who I need to be listening to.’ ”
That’s when Saba realized rap music could be anything; it didn’t have to sound one way. “It’s a canvas,” he says. “You can make it whatever you want. When I heard that song, it was like, … ‘Oh, okay, now I can do this.’ ”
Saba took piano classes soon after. “My mom taught me how to play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ on a toy piano,” he says with a laugh. “I went to my great-grandma’s house, where she had a real piano. I played it and she was so impressed that she ended up giving me that piano.” He lasted three years with the instrument. Though he could play back what he heard, he couldn’t read music: “It got so overwhelming that I just wanted to stop.” He took what he’d learned playing piano and started making beats. “I was playing classical recitals, but I didn't desire to do that,” Saba says. “I was just trying to learn how to play an instrument so that I can use what I learned in a studio setting.”
Rapper MFnMelo met Saba as a precocious 13-year-old who already had a keen ear for arranging music. He would hang out in the budding musician’s basement and rap over the instrumentals being created. The seeds of what would be Pivot Gang were being planted.
And Melo knew Saba would be special. “He’s just very sure of himself,” he says. “Even when he’s uncertain about something musically, he’s sure he can figure it out.”
Pivot Gang performed at open-mics throughout the West Side and quickly became popular. “We would yell out Pivot and everybody would say that s--- back,” Saba recalls. “Hearing that? It does something. We’re teenagers, so hearing the power and the name of our collective, we knew we had something.”
Over the next three years, Saba released two well-received mix tapes (“GETCOMFORTable” and “ComfortZone”), was featured on Chance the Rapper’s breakthrough mix tape, “Acid Rap,” and released his debut album, “Bucket List Project,” to widespread acclaim. It dropped in 2016 amid a wave of noted releases from the city’s emerging talent: Noname, Smino, Jamila Woods, Ravyn Lenae and Mick Jenkins. Then “CARE FOR ME” came out and the raves were nearly universal. Suddenly, Saba was an ascendant star. “How everyone sees him now is how I saw him at 13,” Melo says.
On “Few Good Things,” Saba looks back with a slight grin and not a furrowed brow. By his own admission, “CARE FOR ME” was dark (“You had to be in the right head space on a Sunday night with headphones,” he jokes). Here, he wanted a lively record that made the subject matter more palatable. While tracks “Come My Way” and “If I Had a Dollar” actually predate the previous album’s release, much of “Few Good Things” was created in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. Initially, Saba was going to put out a mix tape — “just a collection of some fun songs,” he says. But when the world shut down because of the coronavirus, the music he’d planned to release didn’t fit the mood. It was much more festive and didn’t tell a story, so he reworked the album, recorded the song “Fearmonger” over Zoom last year, and came back with a more honest project that represents the time.
Family is also a dominant theme on “Few Good Things.” On the cover is his grandfather, Carl, sitting against a chain-link fence in front of his mother’s house, with his face peering through pastel-colored flowers. Saba name-checks his granddad on the opening track, “Free Samples,” and includes a phone call with him for the promotional film.
In the short film, against a slow blend of abstract scenes, Carl and Saba discuss the house in question, and why they sold the house in the first place. “I had those savings to fix it up,” Carl tells his grandson. “I wanted to keep it … for 40 years or 50 years, everybody would go into the house.” It wasn’t just his mother’s house; it was a respite for people in the neighborhood who needed safe haven.
The house becomes a character on “Few Good Things” and an asylum for Saba himself. It’s why he looks so fondly at it: It raised the people who raised him.
“I want people to go away with something,” Saba says of the album. “What you feel is up to you, but feel something. It’s a lot of emotions. There were a lot of worlds we went in and out of. It’s a culmination of everything.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Happy 50th anniversary, women’s legislative caucuses! Here’s how to be even more effective.
Black women legislators can point out policy blind spots others might overlook
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) speaks at the National Council for Incarcerated Women and Girls “100 Women for 100 Women” rally at Black Lives Matter Plaza on March 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
By Nadia E. Brown
Christopher J. Clark
Anna Mitchell Mahoney
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Women Legislators of Maryland, the oldest women’s state legislative caucus. That’s a milestone to celebrate. We examined how such single-identity caucuses might benefit from a more intersectional approach to policymaking, considering that policies affect citizens with more than one marginalized identity that involve mutually reinforcing inequalities.
We find that Black women understand politics differently, not only because they are Black and because they are women, but because they are both at once. Scholars and advocates use the term “intersectionality” to explain how this may give them a unique perspective on politics and policy consequences, allowing them to see forms of discrimination and policy blind spots that may be invisible to others.
Black caucus or women’s caucus?
Legislative caucuses are groups in which legislators work together on a shared mission, outside committees. While Republicans and Democrats have their own caucuses, smaller caucuses can be formed within a party of legislators who share an ideological approach, or across party lines based on shared identities such as race and gender. For example, in 2014, the cross-party Hawaii Women’s Legislative Caucus advocated for a bill to restore funding for domestic violence services and met with a Honolulu police chief about domestic abusers on his staff.
Legislative caucuses may also work to change the informal norms that may make some groups feel unwelcome in government. For example, in 2018, the Women Legislators of Maryland produced a report about sexual harassment within state government. Members of the Black Caucus in Mississippi worked to have statues of white supremacists removed from their Capitol.
Our research finds that Black women lawmakers can be highly influential in identity-based caucuses. They draw from their raced and gendered identities to push single-axis caucuses such as the Black Caucus or the Women’s Caucus to think more holistically and intersectionally about politics.
What lies behind mistrust of government and doubts about the election? White racial bias.
Doing it for themselves
Black congresswomen, for example, created the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls (CCBWG) to focus on issues of importance to that group. The caucus tackles issues that could fit under the work of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) or the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues (CCWI). But the CCBWG was created from the feeling that the CBC and CCWI are not fully addressing the needs of Black women. The CCBWG advocates for issues of importance to Black women, such as calling attention to the high rates of maternal and infant mortality rates in Black communities — working with community stakeholders, public health organizations and health-care providers to raise awareness of these gendered and racialized differences in health outcomes. As a result, Congress passed and President Biden signed into law the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021.
In a forthcoming essay, we analyze tweets from all 26 Black women lawmakers during the 117th Congress (Jan. 3, 2021, to the present). We used Twitter’s application programming interface (API) and the statistical software rtweet to examine how and with whom Black congresswomen have worked to advance health equity during that period. Of 10,073 tweets, we found that Black women legislators overwhelmingly drew on their lived experiences to publicly promote this issue and form coalitions with others. Congresswomen included @CBWGCAUCUS in their public discussions of policies and tagged other lawmakers.
We found that, through the CCBWG, Black congresswomen discussed the increasing U.S. mortality and morbidity rates for all women — and especially for Black women. They appealed to both the congressional women’s caucus and the Black caucus, urging them to remedy this public health issue. Using personal examples about their birthing experiences or the first moments of life for their newborns, these lawmakers showed how this mattered, especially for Black women who are mothers.
Revealing blind spots
Nadia E. Brown’s book “Sisters in the Statehouse” demonstrates that sometimes a legislative women’s caucus may not include the perspective of marginalized women. For instance, when working on domestic violence legislation introduced in 2009, the Maryland women’s legislative caucus endorsed a bill that would have listed anyone accused of domestic violence on a statewide database. Maryland’s Black women state legislators argued that this could harm people wrongly accused by denying them their chance to show they were not guilty of the charges. The Black women state legislators pointed out that unsubstantiated claims could seriously harm Black communities; in particularly, Black men who had been wrongly accused could be denied housing or jobs simply if their names were found on that list.
The Black women lawmakers made their arguments in several ways. Some shared personal stories about how domestic violence had hurt families, friends or themselves. They also told stories about how, when lower-income Black women seek state protection from domestic violence, they face the possibility of eviction and unemployment — while police may respond with disproportionate force and excess surveillance. Both consequences can hurt the community as a whole, increasing instability and distrust.
The Black women legislators’ objections resulted in the bill’s defeat. Further, the Maryland women’s legislative caucus vowed to listen more to Black women legislators to better understand their perspective.
Black History Month and Women’s History Month
When Maryland formed its women’s caucus in 1972, few women and few Blacks served in elected office. In the third decade of the 21st century, many key public institutions still include no Black women. No Black woman has served on the U.S. Supreme Court or as a governor in any of the 50 states.
February is Black History Month; March is Women’s History Month. While each group deserves its due, these separate celebrations lose sight of the individuals who occupy both identities: Black women.
Black women in politics will continue to point out how many public policy challenges look different from the intersection of those two marginalized identities. If our governing institutions are to effectively address these problems without creating new ones, policymakers may want to listen and join Black women in taking a comprehensive approach to solutions.
Nadia E. Brown (@BrownPhDGirl) is a professor of government and director of women’s and gender studies at Georgetown University. She is the co-author of “Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites” (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Christopher J. Clark is an associate professor in the department of political science at the University of North Carolina and author of “Gaining Voice: The Causes and Consequences of Black Representation in the American States” (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Anna Mitchell Mahoney (@Annammahoney) is an administrative associate professor of women’s political leadership and director of research at the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University, and author of “Women Take Their Place in State Legislatures: The Creation of Women’s Caucuses” (Temple University Press, 2018) | null | null | null | null | null |
The research suggests this rarely works. But countries keep trying anyway.
One of three Russian ships, the Ivan Gren class large landing ship "Pyotr Morgunov," sails through the Bosphorus Strait en route to the Black Sea past Istanbul on Feb. 9, 2022. (Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images)
By Alexander B. Downes
As the world watches and wonders if Russian forces will roll into Ukraine, the British government recently released intelligence indicating that Russian President Vladimir Putin is contemplating regime change in Ukraine.
Recent research suggests Putin might want to think again. The costs of regime change frequently outweigh the benefits — often by a large margin. Political scientist Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s book on covert regime changes conducted by the United States during the Cold War and my recent book on regime changes worldwide over the past two centuries both find that these operations generally don’t improve relations between interveners and their targets. Moreover, regime change tends to provoke violent resistance against foreign occupiers or their puppets, leading to civil war, violent removal of imposed leaders and mass killings of civilians.
If regime change so frequently fails to advance the interests of the intervening nation, and leads to further violence, why do countries keep doing it?
Short-term thinking shapes these decisions
One important reason is that interveners tend to focus on the short-term goal — achieving regime change — but neglect to plan for the aftermath. Months of careful planning and preparation, for example, went into the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but the United States was largely unprepared for what came after Saddam Hussein’s demise. Bush administration officials instead offered rosy predictions that Iraqis would welcome Americans as liberators and rejected any suggestion that prolonged occupation by large forces would be necessary.
Countries have a long history of making optimistic assumptions about their interventions. Consider the 1839 British invasion of Afghanistan, which aimed to replace that country’s leader. Despite knowing little about the country, London’s viceroy Lord Auckland wrote that he “confidently hopes that the Shah will be speedily replaced on his throne by his own subjects and adherents; and once he shall be secured in power, the British Army will be withdrawn.”
When countries engage in regime change, the most important thing they fail to anticipate is that the leader they install may not be able to accomplish what they want. Rather, interveners assume that the leader or government they empower will dutifully follow their preferences.
This view, however, ignores the target’s domestic population, which typically does not share the intervener’s preferences. This means that a foreign-installed leader can easily get caught in a tug-of-war between the foreign patrons and the domestic public — both of which can remove them from power violently. This interest asymmetry is what leads imposed leaders to either break with their patrons or face domestic unrest.
In short, trouble is baked into regime change from the start. But regime changers, focused myopically on getting the job done, don’t see it coming.
The intervening country may lack critical information
A second reason that regime change persists despite poor outcomes is that interveners often have little — or biased — intelligence about the situation inside the target country. In some cases, interveners’ only sources of information are individuals with vested interests in seeing regime change happen, such as the regime’s opposition or exiles who haven’t been in the country for years.
One example that leaps to mind is exiled Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who worked assiduously to promote regime change in Iraq and hoped to place himself in power. Again, however, this is not solely a recent phenomenon.
In the 1860s, Mexican conservatives hoped to persuade France’s Napoleon III to get rid of Benito Juarez’s Liberal Party government. They assured him that “upon the landing of European troops, their compatriots would rise as one and support the establishment of a monarchy.” Needless to say, that didn’t happen; Mexico’s new emperor ruled for a mere three years before he was overthrown and executed by Juarez’s army.
Do leaders consider past outcomes?
A third reason that policymakers keep trying regime change despite the dismal record is that leaders aren’t adept learners — they typically fail to give full weight to the experiences of others. U.S. leaders learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan that going in “heavy” would backfire, for example. In 2001, they relied instead on CIA operatives and Special Operations forces to defeat the Taliban — but at the cost of letting Osama bin Laden slip away along with Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and many Taliban fighters. The Taliban would later return to resist the NATO-supported Afghan government.
Governments may have better luck learning from their own experiences, but often are loath to admit that something they want to do won’t work. As political scientist Melissa Willard-Foster puts it, “previous failed attempts at regime change may simply prompt policymakers to adopt a different approach to regime change rather than to abandon it altogether.”
One “lesson” of Iraq, for example, was to avoid a lengthy occupation and nation-building effort. The U.S. government thus hailed the reliance on airpower in Libya as a clever way to effect regime change on the cheap — until it blew up in everyone’s faces.
Finally, in the U.S. case, leaders tend to focus on highly idiosyncratic successes, such as the democratic transformations of West Germany and Japan after World War II, without understanding how different the circumstances in those cases were from other regime changes, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
Given all the pervasive illusions surrounding regime change, it becomes more obvious why Putin might be drawn to this strategy in Ukraine. Regime change appears to promise control at low cost. But is the Kremlin thinking through all of the potential pitfalls — particularly whether ordinary Ukrainians would support a pro-Russian leader?
Russia probably has ample sources of intelligence in Ukraine, but it’s less clear whether Putin has considered what might come after regime change. The Soviet Union, of course, had its own disastrous experience in Afghanistan, where regime change spawned an unbeatable insurgency that drove out the Red Army. Ukraine is a bigger country with a larger population and, just as was the case in Afghanistan, other countries would be eager to support Ukrainian resistance. What could possibly go wrong?
Alexander B. Downes is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of the recently published “Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong” (Cornell University Press). | null | null | null | null | null |
The end of the combined? Alpine officials contemplate the future of the event
Norway's Aleksander Aamodt Kilde passes a gate during the slalom part of the men's combined. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
YANQING, China — Norwegian skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde arrived at the National Alpine Skiing Centre on Thursday morning still unsure whether he would compete in that day’s Alpine combined event. A speed specialist who hadn’t attempted a slalom race in two years, he strapped on the shorter slalom skis for a practice run, skied out five separate times and asked himself, “What am I doing here?”
“But hey, we’re in the Olympics,” he finally decided. “I needed to just go for it.”
It was a sentiment that wasn’t shared by many of his peers, as just 27 skiers — none from the United States — entered an event that appears to be nearing extinction as an Olympic competition, at least in its current form.
But for Kilde, the quick shot of carpe diem paid off. After taking a narrow lead following the downhill run, he not only survived his slalom run — he skied well enough to hang on for a silver medal, his second medal of the Beijing Olympics. His combined time of 2 minutes 32.02 seconds was .59 off that of gold medalist Johannes Strolz of Austria (2:31.43), with Canada’s James Crawford (2:32.11) taking bronze.
For Strolz, the victory completed both a great circle of life — his father, Hubert, won gold in the same event in Calgary in 1988 — and a personal redemption arc: Last year, he lost his place on Austria’s elite national team because of his poor performance, only to earn his way back on the roster this winter in time to compete in Beijing.
“When I think about the pictures and the gold medal of my father, it’s hard for me not to cry,” Strolz, 29, said. “Finally all the sacrifices and the hard work paid off. I think I’m a good example of never giving up.”
Kilde, meantime, deployed his not-so-secret weapon for assistance with tackling the uncomfortable contours of the slalom: his girlfriend, U.S. Alpine superstar Mikaela Shiffrin. Though Shiffrin has had a painfully disappointing Olympics thus far, failing to complete either of her first runs in giant slalom and slalom, she remains the most decorated slalom skier in history, with 47 World Cup wins and an Olympic gold in 2014 in the event — not to mention a silver in women’s Alpine combined in PyeongChang in 2018.
“I’ve looked at her videos skiing slalom, and it’s something I kept in my head,” Kilde, 29, said. “The cleverness of her skiing is also something I’ve learned from. I’m far from her level, and I won’t ever be at her level in slalom … She hasn’t seen much of my slalom skiing obviously, but together we’ve been able to figure out a good plan. Thanks to her, I was able to just have fun today.”
It seems possible, if not likely, that the medals handed Thursday could be the last ever for an Olympic men’s Alpine combined. It was the original Olympic Alpine event, debuting at the 1936 Garmisch Partenkirchen Winter Games, disappearing after St. Moritz 1948, then returning as a medal event in Calgary.
But the staggering low number of entries on Thursday’s start list — down precipitously from the 65 who started in PyeongChang — was the latest reflection of a trend a decade or more in the making, as fewer skiers train or compete in both the speed (downhill and super-G) and technical (slalom and giant slalom) disciplines, and fewer international events offer Alpine combined. This year’s World Cup season hasn’t featured a single one.
Team USA’s absence from the combined on Thursday marked the first time in the program’s history it has failed to enter a single skier in an Olympic Alpine event. And of the top 10 skiers in the men’s overall World Cup points list entering Beijing, only two, Kilde (ranked second) and France’s Alexis Pinturault (ninth) attempted the combined.
Asked Thursday if the small entry list for Alpine combined worried him, Johan Eliasch, president of the International Ski Federation (FIS), answered bluntly: “Yes.”
“That is why we need to look at formats which will make more athletes competitive in the race,” Eliasch said. “ … As you saw here today, there are very few who have mastered the two disciplines together. That goes with the territory. We’re getting more specialized when it comes to disciplines. It’s not like the old days when [top skiers] could do any race and win anything.”
Eliasch mentioned some possibilities for tweaking the format: perhaps switching the events to super-G and giant slalom, the less extreme cousins of downhill or slalom, or perhaps holding one “speed combined” (downhill and super-G) and one “technical combined” (slalom and giant slalom).
“We’re working on that,” he said. “You will see a lot of changes in the near future.”
Canada’s Trevor Philp, who finished 19th Thursday, voiced the ambivalence many modern skiers feel toward the combined, saying, “I can’t say I’ve ever been the biggest fan of this event. Some crazy things happen. Sometimes it feels like it’s just a bit of mess. Back in the day when there were so many more well-rounded skiers, it was a really cool thing to see who could put it together in both disciplines on the same day. But the way the sport has been going the last decade, getting more and more specialized, it seems like this event has been getting a little bit strange.”
Kilde, Thursday’s silver medalist, provided the opposing view. A traditionalist by nature, he has become a speed specialist by necessity, as the sport increasingly separates World Cup events and skiers into one category or the other. He hasn’t entered a slalom race since 2017, and before Thursday, hadn’t skied an Alpine combined since 2020. But he said he might ski more combined events if they were offered.
“They need to put it in the World Cup circuit again, because it will get more people doing it. It’s fun. I always enjoy it when I do it,” he said. “I wish it would stay on [the Olympic] program. It’s another chance for us to get medals in an Olympics, so it would be a pity if they remove it.”
Would he be in favor of one of the altered formats suggested by Eliasch, the FIS present? No, Kilde said: “Downhill and slalom. That’s how it should be.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Images from a remote-controlled submersible robot show damaged areas inside the Fukushima nuclear power plant damaged in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022, in Fukushima, Japan. The robot captured images of what appears be mounds of damaged fuel that had melted and fell to the bottom of the hardest-hit reactor at the nuclear plant for the first time since the 2011 disaster. (IRID/Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, Ltd. via AP) (Uncredited/IRID/Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, Ltd.) | null | null | null | null | null |
Compared to 2021, the energy index rose 27 percent, and food rose 7 percent. The cost of food rose in January compared to December, with cereals and baked goods increasing the most. . Fruits and vegetables also edged up.
Several categories posted their largest price increases ever, including frozen and freeze dried prepared foods, cakes, cupcakes and cookies. Prices for vending machines, household furnishings and supplies, tools, household cleaning products, tires, medical services and video and audio services were also costlier than ever.
Rent costs rose from December to January, climbing at a slightly faster pace than the previous two months. Economists have been especially worried about rising home and rent costs, which can get locked in through long-term contracts and may not improve after supply chains clear up.
A drop in gasoline prices over the past month was offset by a sharp jump in monthly electricity prices. It’s the fastest pace that electric bills have risen in 16 years.
“Joe Biden’s economy has Americans drowning in record-high inflation,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). “People in Wyoming are now paying sky-high prices for gas, groceries, heating bills and rent. As a result, they are having to change how they live while Democrat-driven inflation keeps eating away at their paychecks." | null | null | null | null | null |
Congress Actually Seems to Be Working Again
I hate to shock you, but Congress is currently … legislating?Item: A bipartisan group of senators has agreed to a new version of the Violence Against Women Act. The 1994 law was one of President Joe Biden’s biggest achievements as a senator, but it had lapsed after the parties couldn’t agree on reauthorization language. Negotiations have been continuing for years, but now the bill has 10 Republican cosponsors in the Senate — enough to defeat a filibuster. It’s not expected to have difficulties in the House. The bill’s original supporters (including a few Republicans) secured the larger agreement by dropping a provision that would’ve prevented those convicted of violence against partners from owning guns. Item: The House passed a major Postal Service reform, with almost half of Republicans joining all the Democrats. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O’Brien has all the details. This one, too, is something that has been kicking around for years but now appears to finally be moving toward the president’s desk.Item: The badly needed restoration of the Voting Rights Act and another big Democratic elections-reform bill may be about as dead as bills can be for this Congress, but one narrower measure appears to have a pretty good chance in the Senate. That bill would update the poorly written Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute that governs what happens in presidential elections after the polls close, when Congress needs to formally declare a winner. With any luck, the reform will also incorporate prohibitions against maladministration in the states, as well as protections for election workers and administrators. This one has a ways to go, but I suspect it has at least a 50-50 chance of passage.Item: The House has passed its version of what’s now billed as the “Competes Act,” an effort to help the U.S. gain advantages over China in trade and, in particular, to boost the domestic semiconductor industry. The Senate passed its version last year, easily defeating a Republican filibuster, but the bill had stalled in the House; a new version finally succeeded on a mostly party-line vote. Now there are two different bills heading to a conference committee. There’s no guarantee that a deal can be reached that qill get a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate. Still, this is how legislating is supposed to work: Both chambers act, and then try to compromise.That’s not all. A long-overdue appropriations bills may finally be moving forward. So far, Congress has only been able to pass temporary spending bills, rather than proper appropriations bills. But now the parties have agreed to a “framework” for completing their work. It’s still not clear how close they are to final deals. But it’s progress.If all these bills actually pass, on top of the major relief and infrastructure bills that were signed into law last year, this will wind up being an unusually productive Congress. Still, Democrats won’t be happy unless they can pass at least some of the provisions in their biggest bill, which combined health care, climate measures, child care and more. That legislation, known as “Build Back Better,” has been declared dead plenty of times, but unlike the election reforms — which would require changes to Senate procedures that clearly don’t have the votes at the moment — Build Back Better may be only mostly or nearly dead. It’s still the case that Democrats are one vote short, while Senator Joe Manchin says that he is open to at least some aspects of the proposal.As for the rest of these bills? Each would require bipartisan support, and each has gotten some already. Granted, it doesn’t count unless there’s a final deal that passes and leads to a White House signing ceremony. But this progress has already complicated the notion that I and others have pushed that Republicans are simply rejecting everything. It’s certainly true that Republicans are filibustering everything, forcing a threshold of 60 votes in the Senate rather than a simple majority. And Republican alternatives in many policy areas are vanishingly rare. At the same time, a rump group of Republicans — not always the same ones — have been willing to negotiate in good faith on many topics with the majority Democrats. So rejectionism, yes, but it’s a little more complicated. As for the Democrats? Yes, they’d surely pass everything on a party-line basis if they could, but as a party they’ve shown that Biden’s claims to be pragmatic and willing to work with any Republicans who come to the table isn’t empty talk. | null | null | null | null | null |
As The Post first reported earlier this week, he and other military leaders involved in the effort also told investigators that senior White House and State Department officials had failed to grasp the Taliban’s steady advance on Afghanistan’s capital and resisted efforts by the Pentagon to prepare the evacuation of embassy personnel and Afghan allies weeks before Kabul’s fall. | null | null | null | null | null |
Irene Schouten of the Netherlands reacts after winning the gold medal and setting an Olympic record in the women’s speedskating 5,000-meter race at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
BEIJING — Irene Schouten already had a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics, so she was nice and relaxed for her next race.
“When I saw the time of Isabelle, I was like ‘Oh (expletive), that’s really fast,’” Schouten said. “But then I skated and I felt really good. I could go every lap faster and faster.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Stephen Hawking’s doodle-filled blackboard goes on display, a window into the theoretical physicist’s mind
Hawking, who lived with a debilitating motor neuron disease for decades, helped bring advanced science into popular culture and met with world leaders, becoming a household name internationally before he died in 2018 at age 76.
Hawking had suffered since the age of 21 from a degenerative disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, that left him unable to move nearly any of his muscles or speak. Initially given two years to live, a diagnosis that threw him into a profound depression, he completed his doctorate and rose to the position of Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge — the same post held by Isaac Newton 300 years earlier.
Britain’s Culture Minister, Nadine Dorries, welcomed the exhibition and called it an “exciting new display … honouring one of the greatest British scientists ever to have lived.” She added that she hoped the items would “inspire a new generation of thinkers and scientists.”
After London, the exhibition will go on tour to other cities in the United Kingdom including Manchester, Bradford and York. Global audiences will be able to explore the items from Hawking’s working life in an online collection later this year, the museum said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Former president Donald Trump says it was an “a great honor” to give back documents to the National Archives (AP Photo/Michael Kunzelman)
The Washington Post reported this week that the National Archives had to go down to Florida and recover 15 boxes worth of documents, emails and mementos that it said belong to the archives and that the president shouldn’t have taken out of the White House.
That White House staff occasionally found paper clogging a toilet in the White House residence and believed Trump had tried to flush it down, according to reporting from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s book.
That’s not how the National Archives sees it. Officials there have asked the Justice Department to examine how he handled White House records, The Post reported, raising the possibility he could be investigated for a possible crime. “Adhering to laws and regulations concerning records management is necessary to support our democracy and to maintain the confidence of the American people,” said one person familiar with the agency who only spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Records matter.”
Congress is starting to investigate, too. House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), as she launches her committee’s investigation, notes that what Trump is accused of doing is punishable by up to three years in prison.
Historians say every president has violated the law on preserving records — most commonly by using personal devices that don’t have to be preserved to communicate. But none have been as egregious as Trump. “Since Nixon, there is no example of a president just pretending the law doesn’t exist,” presidential historian Robert David Johnson said. | null | null | null | null | null |
About a year after mostly wealthy nations began rolling out coronavirus vaccines, more than half of the world’s population has been fully vaccinated — a logistical feat without precedent in human history.
But the global rollout remains uneven, with poor countries reporting much lower vaccination rates than rich countries. Public health experts have been warning that vaccine inequity is helping prolong the pandemic, as the focus of those seeking to speed up global vaccine coverage begins to shift from filling a shortfall of supply to distributing doses and persuading people to receive them.
The United States, countries of the European Union and others were criticized for buying up most of the early global supply of coronavirus vaccines. Covax, a U.N.-backed global vaccine-sharing initiative, was created in April 2020 as a way of ensuring that the rest of the world could access the vaccines it needed. It initially struggled to secure enough doses because supplies were limited and went to the highest bidder. | null | null | null | null | null |
It found that 10.4 percent of Canadians surveyed felt they had “a great deal” of freedom of choice and control. Meanwhile, almost 14 percent of Canadians expressed a preference for military rule, while more than half felt that “rule by experts or a technocratic government” was “very good” or “fairly good.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Todd Howard Ezrin is the principal of TOBE DesignGroup, a boutique interior architecture and design studio in Bethesda, Md. In his 25 years in the business, Ezrin’s projects have included designing small urban condos and houses, as well as remodeling and furnishing homes where he had to make the most of every inch of space. TOBE DesignGroup specializes in contemporary and environmentally-responsive design and has clients throughout the country and in Vienna, Lisbon and Tel Aviv. | null | null | null | null | null |
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is now supporting a measure on banning members from trading individual stocks. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was asked about whether she’d support a bill banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks at all, she was dismissive. “We’re a free-market economy,” she said."They should be able to participate in that.”
But now, perhaps responding to strongly-worded opinion pieces criticizing her position, Pelosi has come around. According to Punchbowl News, she’s working with other House Democrats to fashion a bill that would ban members from trading individual stocks.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) agrees, and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has already written a bill banning the practice. Even some Republicans support the idea.
So why not just say that as long as you serve in Congress, you must either keep the stocks you have and see how they do until you leave office, or put your holdings into mutual funds, which is what smart people do anyway? Why would that be some kind of hardship?
Let’s ask Tuberville. “I think it’s ridiculous. They might as well start sending robots up here,” he told a reporter when asked about these proposals. “I think it would really cut back on the amount of people that would want to come up here and serve.”
Now let’s consider the unionization question. Poor treatment of congressional staffers is notorious: underpaid, overworked and subject to the whims of bosses for whom a gigantic ego is practically its own job requirement. If you interviewed in any other sector and saw every wall covered with pictures of the boss, you’d probably run. But that’s what a congressional office looks like, and Capitol Hill is full of stories of tyrannical members creating toxic workplaces.
But if you had to guess which Democrat isn’t so enthusiastic, what name would you pick? That’s right, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.
When asked about it, Manchin offered up a word salad that appeared to indicate skepticism. He implied in a vague way that serving the people of West Virginia and having the best staff he can might not be compatible with unionization.
A different Democrat would say the opposite is true: Unions ensure good pay and fair treatment, and when staff members are paid adequately and treated with respect, they perform better. Perhaps Manchin will come to a different opinion once he has had a chance to think about it, much like Pelosi did on stock trading. | null | null | null | null | null |
Not long afterward, the mayor of Brussels, where several groups planned to converge on Feb. 14, announced that a procession modeled on Canada’s so-called “Freedom Convoy” would not be allowed in. Vehicles arriving to protest will be “diverted,” the mayor said.
Though it is not clear whether authorities in either city will succeed in identifying, let alone stopping, motorists bound for rallies, the attempt to preempt their arrival underscores the nerves in Western capitals as officials watch a small but radical group wreak havoc in Canada.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is warning that U.S. blockades could affect the Super Bowl in Los Angeles this Sunday, or President Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1. The department has distributed a bulletin to law enforcement agencies warning that a convoy could begin in California as early as mid-February and arrive in D.C. as late as mid-March.
The Canadian crisis has led to a rush of online organizing, particularly in Europe, where a range of anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown, far-right and conspiratorial groups have begun to rally under the “Freedom Convoy” banner.
One French Facebook group for the convoy now lists more than 300,000 members and the European group is nearly 50,000 strong. Each directs joiners to other groups and events.
On Telegram, a messaging app popular with far-right groups, global and European convoy channels boast tens of thousands of members. Those who join are quickly directed to local channels for more than two dozen countries, from Luxembourg to Germany to Malta.
The European channels, like the Canadian protests, are animated by a mix of genuine frustration with public health measures, anti-vaccine sentiment and conspiratorial content. Local-language groups often include forwards of English-language content from America’s far-right media eco-system.
One question going forward it whether all this will translate into real world action beyond what Europe has already seen.
Protesting motorists and large anti-lockdown demonstrations are not new here. In 2018, social inequality and outrage over fuel prices helped launch the “yellow vest” movement, an anti-establishment uprising that caused disruption with convoys of slow-moving trucks. During yellow vest protests in Paris, police sometimes used vehicles to keep convoys from streets in central Paris.
During the pandemic, some yellow vest groups joined forces with the anti-lockdown movement, a catchall that includes a mix of anti-vaccine, anti-mandate and far-right groups.
In recent months, there have been large protests against coronavirus measures in several European capitals. On Jan. 23 tens of thousands gathered in Brussels, clashing with police. | null | null | null | null | null |
Kinzinger chided McCarthy as “a feckless, weak, tired man, who is doing the bidding of whatever Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks is going to raise her money that day,” referring to the congresswoman from Georgia. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), fresh from getting slammed by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson for describing Jan. 6 as a “violent terrorist attack,” said McConnell shouldn’t have used the word “insurrection” to describe the violence. RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who oversaw the censure debacle as it unfolded, shifted blame for the fiasco to Trump operative David Bossie, who spearheaded the resolution. McDaniel’s uncle, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), called the censure “stupid.”
The subject is toxic for suburban women, business interests and moderate voters who fear the Republican Party is still under the thumb of a dangerous former president. While voters understandably want relief from inflation and covid-19, they do not want to return to the chaos and violence of the Trump era. It behooves Democrats to remind them that by voting for candidates with an “R” next to their names, they would be inviting just such a result. | null | null | null | null | null |
Students, parents and critics have blasted Huntington High and the district for what they say was a violation of religious freedoms. Those frustrations erupted Wednesday when students walked out of the school during their homeroom period, chanting “Separate the church and state” and “My faith, my choice.”
Jedd Flowers, a district spokesman for Cabell County Schools, did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday. He told local media that the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) and the school followed the rules in making the event voluntary, and that the issues stemmed from the two teachers who “made an error” in believing the Christian revival was mandatory.
“It’s unfortunate that it happened,” Flowers told the AP. “We don’t believe it will ever happen again.”
The sermon at the public high school of about 1,000 students was led by evangelical preacher Nik Walker of Nik Walker Ministries, who has performed other revivals in the area for weeks. Walker, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, told the Herald-Dispatch that students with FCA reached out to the ministry about speaking at the school.
“I told him I’d be contacting the principal about it, and he said ‘lol, the principal is here … ’ ” Herman L. Mays Jr. told the outlet. | null | null | null | null | null |
Much to Dr. Montagnier’s dismay, his findings also plunged him into a decade-long battle for scientific glory, national pride and millions of dollars in blood-test patent royalties, as he and an American team led by National Cancer Institute researcher Robert C. Gallo vied over who discovered what, and when.
But Dr. Montagnier’s reputation suffered as he threw his weight behind increasingly unlikely theories, surprising some colleagues when he asserted that HIV causes AIDS only by combining with another microbe, mycoplasma. He later backed ideas that were widely derided as pseudoscience, appearing at an autism conference alongside actress Jenny McCarthy to declare that the developmental disorder could be cured with antibiotics.
In 2010, he accepted a professorship at Shanghai Jiao Tong University to study “water memory,” claiming to have found evidence that DNA could be “teleported” through electromagnetic waves picked up by water.
More recently, he opposed mandatory vaccinations in France and claimed that the coronavirus was man-made, created as part of developing a potential HIV vaccine. He cited a paper that had not yet been peer-reviewed and has since been retracted, according to the Associated Press.
Former colleagues reacted to his assertions with dismay, calling his anti-vaccine message a threat to public health. But Dr. Montagnier remained defiant, saying that the skepticism of his peers had not stopped him before. | null | null | null | null | null |
Not to get too into the particulars — assuming that I probably don’t need to, since we are all adults here — but there is a reason that toilet paper breaks apart in water. Our sewer systems are not garbage disposals and our pipework isn’t a trash chute. Putting paper in a toilet yield a predictable outcome to anyone familiar with both toilets and paper.
And yet! The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reports that during the Trump administration White House staffers would occasionally discover that the toilets in the White House were clogged with “wads of clumped-up paper.” We’ve known for years that Donald Trump had a predilection for ripping up notes and other documents. The natural conclusion, then, is that some such scraps then wound up in the toilet.
Repeatedly. That’s really the part of this story that’s so odd. Clog the toilet with wads of paper once, okay, you could have anticipated that result but, lesson learned. But to do so more than once? Baffling, to understate it a bit. Mind you, Trump denied the story in a statement, as he has so often denied reporting from Haberman that was later validated. If you’re going to gamble on who will be proven to have been accurate, Maggie Haberman or Donald Trump, I’d recommend the former.
“People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,” he said. “They end up using more water. So, EPA is looking at that very strongly, at my suggestion.”
But what the anecdote does not do is offer new insights into the two questions that linger around Trump: how exposed is he to criminal prosecution and how robust might a 2024 reelection bid be? (These are admittedly not two questions that are generally paired for presidential candidates.)
This is part of a line of inquiry that’s been building this week with The Washington Post’s reporting about the federal government having secured from Trump 15 boxes of material that should have been left behind when he left office. That’s quite likely why Haberman’s story broke now; the subject is in the news.
But we unfortunately don’t know much about how far over the line this behavior might have been. It’s very safe to assume that the toilet story, while tantalizing (well, not tantalizing exactly) is likely a non-starter. After all, while one might assume that Trump was disposing of material that should have been retained during his presidency, we don’t know that for sure. We don’t know Trump placed the paper in the toilet or that it was anything subject to retention rules. And the nature of the incident means we’ll never know.
So we move up a level. Is the fact that the National Archives had to chase down this material indicative of a legal violation? Some of the material might have been classified, as The Post reported, but we don’t know exactly what that means. (The Archives have referred the matter to law enforcement for investigation.) It is not the case that those violating records laws normally face stiff sanction. When former Bill Clinton aide Sandy Berger was caught taking highly classified material out of the archives two decades ago, some of which were later destroyed, he was fined $50,000 and had to perform community service. And that was an aide to a president, not a former president himself. While justice should be blind, Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Biden are certainly aware that any effort to prosecute Trump would be fraught, particularly on something as relatively innocuous as taking papers from the White House.
There’s a political angle to this as well, of course. Trump repeatedly harangued Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign for her use of a private email server while she served in the Obama administration. He often misrepresented and exaggerated her actions, but some material on the server was determined to have been classified. The Justice Department determined that there was “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information” and Clinton — to Trump’s oft-performed chagrin — faced no criminal charges.
Would Trump pay a political price for retaining documents he should have turned over to the government? Well, I’d ask you to consider what voter might look at the broad arc of Trump’s actions since 2015 and find this to be the one that changes him to or from a Trump voter. Maybe a plumber? That’s about it.
The line of inquiry focused on those removed documents may yield nothing concrete. In fact, that’s probably the safe bet. But it sits alongside a large pile of other legal questions centered on Trump and his conduct. At the federal level, that includes the investigation into the pro-Trump riot at Jan. 6 and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. At the state level, it includes investigations into his private business by the state of New York and a probe considering his efforts to strong-arm state officials in Georgia to revoke Biden’s win in that state. He probably faces more risk at the state level, given that there’s less political cost for a state attorney general or local prosecutor to file charges than there would be for the Biden administration. But the timeline for any such thing to occur is murky.
It’s useful to consider why these stories are so gripping. One, certainly, is that Trump unquestionably spurred an unprecedented attack on American democracy after he lost in 2020 — an effort that so far has yielded no more serious consequences than the loss of his Twitter account. Since he won, there’s been an obvious thirst from his opponents for his actions to be held to account but, save losing his reelection bid, he’s generally avoided any negative blowback. The “he violated records retention laws” line feels wily in the manner of taking down Al Capone for tax evasion — but, then, when the feds arrested Capone, they weren’t worried about triggering a literal insurrection.
Ending the Trump era on some revelation that he’d been caught scrambling like Karen Hill to dump the evidence in the toilet has a poetry that has captured America’s imagination this morning. But the more likely story is the predictable one: Trump did something odd that he shouldn’t have and it, too, lands as a paragraph in a book documenting numerous other odd, inappropriate things he did. | null | null | null | null | null |
There’s no lack of cold for this year’s Olympics, but limited natural snow is an enduring challenge for the games.
A person works at a snow-making machine on a hill overlooking cross-country skiing practice before the 2022 Winter Olympics on Feb. 2 in Zhangjiakou, China. (Aaron Favila/AP)
While there’s been plenty of cold air, snowfall has been hard to come by.
Snow-making has become routine for the Winter Olympics, as the demand for a reliable snowscape at an ever-more-lucrative global event has increased side by side with the uncertainties of human-caused global warming.
At this year’s winter games, however, the lack of natural snow isn’t a shocker, or even necessarily a byproduct of climate change.
The monsoon-related flow contributes to the largest and most intense zones of high pressure on the planet, sourced from Siberia. These domes of frigid, sinking air typically block Pacific moisture from reaching northeast China during the winter. As a result, only 2 percent of Beijing’s annual average precipitation — a mere 0.40 inches — falls between December and February. Nearly all of that is in the form of snow.
Compare that with Washington, D.C., where winter brings 22 percent of the city’s annual average precipitation — or about 8.89 inches. True, most of that comes in the form of rain, but a single top-end D.C. snowstorm can produce more snow than Beijing typically gets in an entire winter.
Although the mountains near Beijing aren’t an obvious choice for the Winter Olympics in terms of snowfall, they’re among the most reliable of recent venues when it comes to cold weather. Even in the second week of February, as Beijing rose well above 40 degrees, temperatures at the higher elevations of Yanqing and Zhangjiakou stayed chillier.
Another blast of Siberian cold is expected to sweep across northeast China during the final week of competition. The cold surge may push temperatures 10 to 15 degrees below average, and some light snow is possible this weekend.
Both these venues can get their share of bountiful snow. However, they’re also both naturally prone to warm intrusions, even before taking the deck-stacking effects of climate change into account.
“I’ve noticed at the World Cup when it is man-made snow, it is scary because instead of sliding on snow you’re sliding on ice,” 2020-21 World Cup winner and Beijing bronze medalist Jesse Diggins told the Associated Press. “I think we’re seeing a higher percentage of falls. I feel it is a little more dangerous now.”
A study published in January, led by Daniel Scott of the University of Waterloo, includes a survey of more than 300 Olympic athletes and coaches from 20 countries on their views of weather-climate conditions, performance and safety. “The athletes and coaches … were almost unanimous (94%) in their fear that climate change will adversely impact the future development of their sport,” the study found. | null | null | null | null | null |
The world’s overall score fell to 5.28 out of 10, setting “another dismal record” with the lowest rating since the EIU started producing the index in 2006. It was also the biggest annual decline since 2010. The survey found that just 6.4 percent of the world lived in a “full democracy” last year, while more than a third lived under authoritarian rule — with a large share of those in China.
It found that just 10.4 percent of Canadians surveyed felt they had “a great deal” of freedom of choice and control. Meanwhile, almost 14 percent of Canadians expressed a preference for military rule, while more than half felt that “rule by experts or a technocratic government” was “very good” or “fairly good.”
Of all the countries, 21 were classified as “full democracies,” while 53 went into the “flawed democracies” category. At the top of the list were Norway, New Zealand and Finland. At the very bottom were Afghanistan, Myanmar, and North Korea. | null | null | null | null | null |
But is this the way a Boba Fett series should be handled? Sharing so much of the limelight with other prominent Star Wars characters? Since Star Wars arrived on Disney Plus there’s been nothing but high praise for story architects Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, but “The Book of Boba Fett” was met with some discontent fans who thought the titular character, arguably one of the most popular characters in the history of Star Wars, was being overshadowed by frequent guest stars. | null | null | null | null | null |
Not to get too into the particulars — assuming that I probably don’t need to, since we are all adults here — but there is a reason that toilet paper breaks apart in water. Our sewer systems are not garbage disposals, and our pipework isn’t a trash chute. Putting paper in a toilet yields a predictable outcome to anyone familiar with both toilets and paper.
And yet! The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reports that during the Trump administration, White House staffers would occasionally discover that the toilets in the White House were clogged with “wads of clumped-up paper.” We’ve known for years that Donald Trump had a predilection for ripping up notes and other documents. The natural conclusion, then, is that some such scraps then wound up in the toilet.
Repeatedly. That’s really the part of this story that’s so odd. Clog the toilet with wads of paper once, okay, you could have anticipated that result, but lesson learned. But to do so more than once? Baffling, to understate it a bit. Mind you, Trump denied the story in a statement, as he has so often denied reporting from Haberman that was later validated. If you’re going to gamble on who will be proved to have been accurate, Maggie Haberman or Donald Trump, I’d recommend the former.
“People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,” he said. “They end up using more water. So, EPA is looking at that very strongly, at my suggestion,” he said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency.
But what the anecdote does not do is offer new insights into the two questions that linger around Trump: How exposed is he to criminal prosecution, and how robust might a 2024 reelection bid be? (These are admittedly not two questions that are generally paired for presidential candidates.)
This is part of a line of inquiry that’s been building this week, with The Washington Post’s reporting about the federal government having secured from Trump 15 boxes of material that should have been left behind when he left office. That’s quite likely why Haberman’s story broke now; the subject is in the news.
But unfortunately we don’t know much about how far over the line this behavior might have been. It’s very safe to assume that the toilet story, while tantalizing (well, not tantalizing exactly) is probably a non-starter. After all, while one might assume that Trump was disposing of material that should have been retained during his presidency, we don’t know that for sure. We don’t know Trump placed the paper in the toilet or that it was anything subject to retention rules. And the nature of the incident means we’ll never know.
So we move up a level. Is the fact that the National Archives had to chase down this material indicative of a legal violation? Some of the material might have been classified, as The Post reported, but we don’t know exactly what that means. (The archives have referred the matter to law enforcement for investigation.) It is not the case that those violating records laws normally face stiff sanction. When a former aide to President Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, was caught taking highly classified material out of the archives two decades ago, some of which were later destroyed, he was fined $50,000 and had to perform community service. And that was an aide to a president, not a former president himself. While justice should be blind, Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Biden are certainly aware that any effort to prosecute Trump would be fraught, particularly on something as relatively innocuous as taking papers from the White House.
There’s a political angle to this as well, of course. Trump repeatedly harangued Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign for her use of a private email server while she served in the Obama administration. He often misrepresented and exaggerated her actions, but some material on the server was determined to have been classified. The Justice Department determined that there was “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information,” and Clinton — to Trump’s oft-performed chagrin — faced no criminal charges.
Would Trump pay a political price for retaining documents he should have turned over to the government? Well, I would ask you to consider what voter might look at the broad arc of Trump’s actions since 2015 and find this to be the one that changes him to or from a Trump voter. Maybe a plumber? That’s about it.
The line of inquiry focused on those removed documents may yield nothing concrete. In fact, that’s probably the safe bet. But it sits alongside a large pile of other legal questions centered on Trump and his conduct. At the federal level, that includes the investigation into the pro-Trump riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. At the state level, it includes investigations into his private business by the state of New York and a probe considering his efforts to strong-arm state officials in Georgia to revoke Biden’s win in that state. He probably faces more risk at the state level, given that there’s less political cost for a state attorney general or local prosecutor to file charges than there would be for the Biden administration. But the timeline for any such thing to occur is murky.
It’s useful to consider why these stories are so gripping. One, certainly, is that Trump unquestionably spurred an unprecedented attack on U.S. democracy after he lost in 2020 — an effort that so far has yielded no more serious consequences than the loss of his Twitter account. Since he won, there’s been an obvious thirst from his opponents for his actions to be held to account, but save losing his reelection bid he’s generally avoided any negative blowback. The “he violated records-retention laws” line feels wily in the manner of taking down Al Capone for tax evasion — but then, when the feds arrested Capone, they weren’t worried about triggering a literal insurrection.
Ending the Trump era on some revelation that he had been caught scrambling like Karen Hill to dump the evidence in the toilet has a poetry that has captured America’s imagination this morning. But the more likely story is the predictable one: Trump did something odd that he shouldn’t have, and it, too, lands as a paragraph in a book documenting numerous other odd, inappropriate things he did. | null | null | null | null | null |
Former president Donald Trump says it was an “a great honor” to give back documents to the National Archives (Michael Kunzelman/AP)
The Washington Post reported this week that National Archives officials had to go to Florida and recover 15 boxes worth of documents, emails and mementos that it said belong to the archives and that the president shouldn’t have taken out of the White House.
That White House staff occasionally found paper clogging a toilet in the White House residence and believed that Trump had tried to flush it down, according to reporting from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s book.
That’s not how the National Archives sees it. Officials there have asked the Justice Department to examine how he handled White House records, The Post reported, raising the possibility he could be investigated for a possible crime. “Adhering to laws and regulations concerning records management is necessary to support our democracy and to maintain the confidence of the American people,” said one person familiar with the agency who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the topic publicly. “Records matter.”
Congress is starting to investigate, too. House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), as she launches her committee’s investigation, notes that what Trump is accused of doing is punishable by as many as three years in prison.
Historians say every president has violated the law on preserving records — most commonly by using personal devices that don’t have to be preserved to communicate. But none has been as egregious as Trump. “Since Nixon, there is no example of a president just pretending the law doesn’t exist,” presidential historian Robert David Johnson said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Prince Charles, who tested positive for coronavirus, recently met with Queen Elizabeth II
Prince Charles speaks at a reception to celebrate the British Asian Trust at the British Museum in London, Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022. (Tristan Fewings/Pool Photo/AP)
LONDON — Prince Charles, who has tested positive fo the coronavirus, recently met with his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, but she is not showing any symptoms, a palace official said Thursday.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did not say whether the queen had tested positive or negative for the virus but said her health would continue to be monitored closely.
It was also not clear exactly when the two met. But Charles was at Windsor Castle on Tuesday when he hosted an investiture ceremony and handed out awards.
Charles’s office, Clarence House, said in a tweet Thursday that the 73-year-old heir to the throne was self-quarantining and disappointed that he was not able to attend a scheduled event. According to England’s current rules, the prince will have to isolate for 10 days, unless he tests positive on day five and six.
This is the second time that Charles has tested positive for the coronavirus. In many ways, this time it seems less urgent than when he was infected in March 2020 — before vaccines, when the virus tended to be more severe.
Prince Charles, heir to the throne, has tested positive for coronavirus
Unlike the first time Charles was infected, Clarence House did not mention any symptoms but simply said that he looked forward to rescheduling his events as soon as possible.
Clarence House said Charles has received three vaccinations.
But his contact with the 95-year-old queen obviously raises concerns. The queen recently reached her platinum jubilee — or 70 years on the throne — and was filmed meeting charity workers at her Sandringham House residence last Saturday.
The queen returned to Windsor Castle, her main residence, on Monday, the palace said.
She has had at least one dose of a vaccine. The palace does not normally comment on private medical matters about the monarch, but in an unusual move in January 2021, it did confirm that she had received her first shot. | null | null | null | null | null |
Dr. Montagnier’s reputation later plummeted as colleagues accused him of spreading pseudoscience and threatening public health through his opposition to vaccine mandates. But for decades, he remained best known for his HIV research and his work to prevent AIDS. Much to his dismay, his early findings plunged him into a decade-long battle for scientific glory, national pride and millions of dollars in blood-test patent royalties, as he and an American team led by National Cancer Institute researcher Robert C. Gallo vied over who discovered what, and when.
But Dr. Montagnier drew growing criticism as he threw his weight behind unlikely theories, surprising some colleagues when he asserted that HIV causes AIDS only by combining with another microbe, mycoplasma. He later backed ideas that were widely derided as pseudoscience, appearing at an autism conference alongside actress Jenny McCarthy to declare that the developmental disorder could be cured with antibiotics.
In 2010, he accepted a professorship at Shanghai Jiao Tong University to study “water memory,” claiming to have found evidence that DNA could be “teleported” through electromagnetic waves picked up by water. More recently, he claimed that the coronavirus was man-made, created as part of HIV vaccine research. He cited a paper that had not yet been peer-reviewed and has since been retracted, according to the Associated Press.
Former colleagues reacted to his assertions with anger and dismay. In response to speeches and interviews he gave condemning mandatory vaccinations for children, more than 100 academics denounced him in a 2017 statement. Dr. Montagnier remained defiant, saying that the criticism of his peers had not stopped him before. | null | null | null | null | null |
Lawmakers on Thursday advanced the Earn It Act, a controversial bill purporting to hold tech companies responsible for posts exploiting children
Lawmakers on Thursday advanced a controversial bill that aims to hold tech companies responsible for the spread of posts exploiting children, the latest bipartisan salvo targeting Silicon Valley.
But unlike some recent antitrust bills that have won the backing of some technologists, the bill’s revival has reignited a battle over the future of Internet regulation and online speech. Prominent technologists, industry groups, civil liberties advocates and LGBTQ interest groups have aggressively campaigned against it, warning that the proposal threatens to erode consumers’ privacy and could have a chilling effect on free expression online.
No senators on the Judiciary Committee objected to the bill’s passage to the floor. But multiple lawmakers, including Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), echoed those concerns, and called on the bill’s leading co-sponsors to address them before it sees a vote from the full Senate.
“We must do something,” Booker said. “I’m just looking forward to doing the work between now and the floor to see if we can mediate against some of the legitimate concerns that I hear from the privacy committee.”
“Proponents want to frame this as protecting children versus the Internet,” said India McKinney, director of federal affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties. “The way we see it as this bill still won’t protect children against really horrible things, and will hurt additional groups of people.”
Some advocates have launched a campaign to stop the passage of the bill, calling on people to contact their lawmakers and express their opposition. They also started an online petition, which has garnered nearly 600,000 signatures.
The bill could discourage companies from deploying encryption or even allow for prosecutors to use an offer of encryption as evidence that a company is negligent in addressing child safety, said Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Blumenthal said in an interview that lawmakers incorporated these concerns into revisions, which prevent the implementation of encryption from being the sole evidence of a company’s liability for child porn. But he said lawmakers wouldn’t offer a blanket exemption to using encryption as evidence, arguing companies might use it as a “get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Opponents of the legislation also warn that in attempting to stamp out posts exploiting children, companies may go too far and also take down speech that is legal. They point to FOSTA-SESTA, a previous carve out of Section 230 targeting sex trafficking, which led to companies taking down broad swaths of sexual content, with negative impacts on both sex workers and the LGBTQ community. Companies may remove posts from marginalized groups like transgender youths to bolster themselves against the Earn It Act, Pfefferkorn said.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will weigh the Earn It Act after moving two competition bills targeting the tech sector on bipartisan votes. Lawmakers on the committee are increasingly seeking to move legislation that can appeal to members of both parties that are worried about the power and influence of tech giants.
Though the parties are largely polarized when it comes to online speech, child safety has emerged as an area on which they’ve been willing to work together. In 2020, the Earn It Act advanced through the same committee but was never passed by the full Senate. It remains unclear whether the legislation has the support needed to become law, as Democrats have a flurry of competing priorities they want to advance before the midterm elections. Blumenthal said he plans to seek support from the Justice Department and White House once it clears the committee. | null | null | null | null | null |
Race in America: Giving Voice with Aasif Mandvi
Judge Constance Baker Motley was the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary and the only woman on the NAACP legal team who won the landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, discusses her new book, “Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality,” in our continuing series about the role of Black women in the country’s history.
Provided by Penguin Random House.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin is Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and Professor of History at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, she was appointed chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and of the American Law Institute, and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her previous book, Courage to Dissent won the Bancroft Prize in 2011. She frequently appears as a commentator in media. She lives in Boston with her family. | null | null | null | null | null |
There’s no lack of cold for this year’s Olympics, but limited natural snow is an enduring challenge for the games
A worker monitors a snow-making machine on a hill overlooking cross-country skiing practice on Feb. 2 in Zhangjiakou, China. (Aaron Favila/AP)
The monsoon-related flow contributes to the largest and most intense zones of high pressure on the planet, sourced from Siberia. These domes of frigid, sinking air typically block Pacific moisture from reaching northeast China during the winter. As a result, 2 percent of Beijing’s annual average precipitation — a mere 0.40 inches — falls between December and February. Nearly all of that is in the form of snow.
Compare that with Washington, D.C., where winter brings 22 percent of the city’s annual average precipitation — or about 8.89 inches. Most of that comes in the form of rain, but a single top-end D.C. snowstorm can produce more snow than Beijing typically gets in an entire winter.
Although the mountains near Beijing are not an obvious choice for the Winter Olympics in terms of snowfall, they are among the most reliable of recent venues when it comes to cold weather. Even in the second week of February, as Beijing rose well above 40 degrees, temperatures at the higher elevations of Yanqing and Zhangjiakou stayed lower.
Another blast of Siberian cold is expected to sweep across northeast China during the final week of competition. The cold surge may push temperatures 10 to 15 degrees below average, and light snow is possible this weekend.
Both these venues can get their share of bountiful snow. However, they are also both naturally prone to warm intrusions, even before taking the deck-stacking effects of climate change into account.
“I’ve noticed at the World Cup when it is man-made snow, it is scary because instead of sliding on snow you’re sliding on ice,” 2020-21 World Cup winner and Beijing bronze medalist Jessie Diggins told the Associated Press. “I think we’re seeing a higher percentage of falls. I feel it is a little more dangerous now.”
A study published in January, led by Daniel Scott of the University of Waterloo, includes a survey of more than 300 Olympic athletes and coaches from 20 countries on their views of weather-climate conditions, performance and safety. “The athletes and coaches … were almost unanimous (94 percent) in their fear that climate change will adversely impact the future development of their sport,” the study found. | null | null | null | null | null |
Russia begins military exercises in Black Sea and Belarus, stoking fears of...
Members of the Ukrainian military take part in drills in the Kherson region, in the south of the country, on Feb. 10. (Ukrainian Armed Forces Press Ser/Via Reuters)
Tensions between NATO and Russia have risen to their highest level in years, as Washington and its European allies try to deter a potential invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces massed at the border.
Russia on Thursday began a 10-day joint military exercise with its ally Belarus, a move Western officials fear could become a cover for Moscow to invade Ukraine. Kyiv is holding its own tit-for-tat drills, making use of weapons supplied by NATO.
Both Moscow and Minsk say Russian troops will leave Belarus when the drills are done.; U.S. and European security officials worry that they will remain near the Ukrainian border.
Alongside Moscow’s deployment of troops to Belarus, six Russian warships have reached Crimea and docked in a strategic port on the Black Sea. Russia said the ships are part of a naval exercise, while Ukrainian officials blasted the move as “unprecedented,” saying it cuts off access to crucial waterways.
In the meantime, Lithuania, a NATO member and former Soviet republic, on Wednesday said it would request that U.S. troops be stationed there permanently.
The Biden administration on Wednesday readied plans, in the event of a Russian attack, for U.S. military forces to help evacuate Americans once they have crossed into Poland. About 7,500 Americans are registered with the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.
The drums of war continue to dominate much of daily life in Ukraine, even as an eight-year conflict with Russian separatists in the eastern Donbas region continues unabated.
What is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and why is Biden vowing to stop it if Russia invades Ukraine?
The Russian view: Kremlin officials have focused on the 2015 Minsk peace deal, which was designed to end a conflict between Kyiv and Moscow-backed separatists in the contested Donbas region of eastern Ukraine after the Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. The Kremlin has accused Ukrainian officials of not fulfilling their side of the agreement.
Moscow also has sought assurances that Ukraine, a former Soviet state, will never be allowed to join the NATO military alliance. In a Dec. 17 ultimatum presented to the United States, Russia said it wanted commitments that NATO would withdraw troops from countries that joined the alliance after 1997.
Putin said Monday that Russia was opposed to any eastward NATO expansion “because it poses a common threat to us.”
The Ukrainian view: Officials in Kyiv have criticized the Minsk deal, which was brokered after a string of military losses. They have said they will support the agreement only if it is restructured.
Still, officials say they are open to talks with Russia — provided that they take place in a third country.
“Ukraine stands ready for negotiations in Istanbul, as well as in Geneva, Vienna or any other place that is impartial and doesn’t depend on one of the sides, namely Russia,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said last week, according to Russia’s Interfax news agency. (The 2015 agreement was negotiated in Belarus, whose leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is an ally of Putin’s.)
In the meantime, more Ukrainians are starting to pack emergency bags, plan escape routes and learn basic survival and self-defense skills. And women have formed volunteer groups to craft camouflage nets for the military.
The Western view: The United States and other allies have said they support the 2015 Minsk deal but have called on all parties to the agreement — including Russia — to live up to their parts of the bargain.
The Biden administration has rejected Russia’s demands on NATO and instead has called for Moscow to pull its forces back from the Ukrainian border and to stop supporting separatists in Donbas.
A grim U.S. assessment reported Saturday concludes that Russia soon may complete preparations for what appears to be a large-scale invasion. The review predicted that a war could cause Ukraine’s government to collapse within two days, kill or wound up to 50,000 civilians and displace up to 5 million people.
These countries are withdrawing embassy staffers from Ukraine
Russian troops: Moscow began moving troops to regions bordering Ukraine last year. Western officials say more than 100,000 Russian troops are in the region and Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula occupied by Russia since 2014. Russian military drills with its ally Belarus, which also borders Ukraine, are set to begin Thursday. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said Tuesday that Russian forces massed in Belarus would depart later this month.
The Biden administration believes that Russia is planning to invade, possibly after Moscow creates a pretext by broadcasting staged images of civilian casualties to drum up anger against Kyiv.
The most recent U.S. assessment concluded that Russia has massed about 70 percent of the combat forces it would need to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and attack Kyiv. If executed, the assault probably would be the largest land offensive in Europe since World War II.
NATO forces: The United States has responded by sending more troops to Eastern Europe, with about 3,000 U.S. personnel moving to NATO’s eastern flank in Romania and Poland from their posts in Germany and Fort Bragg, N.C. Previously, the Pentagon put 8,500 U.S. troops on heightened alert.
NATO allies also have repositioned military hardware, with Denmark and Belgium sending F-15 and F-16 fighter jets to the Baltics last month. Britain has offered to send jets, warships and military specialists as well.
NATO allies have said so far that they would not send troops to Ukraine in the event of an invasion. Even though Ukraine is at the center of the dispute between Russia and the West, it is not a NATO member and therefore is not covered by the alliance’s collective defense clause.
What about Ukraine? Ukraine’s political leadership has largely downplayed the risk of conflict, with Zelensky telling Ukrainians to “take a breath” and “calm down.”
But he also signed into law in February plans to strengthen the country’s armed forces, bringing them from 250,000 active troops up to about 361,000. That is only about a third or so of Russia’s 900,000-strong armed forces.
On Sunday, a former defense minister of Ukraine, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, called the situation “pretty dire.” He assessed that Russia had massed enough troops to occupy Kyiv or another city but not enough to seize the entire country.
All sides say that they are willing to talk. Macron this week embarked on a diplomatic push that saw him meet with Putin and Zelensky, as well as the leaders of Germany and Poland. The French president appeared determined to strike a mediating tone, at one point referring to Russia as a “neighbor and friend.”
Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered to mediate talks between Ukraine and Russia. His offer was greeted warmly by Zelensky, who was hosting the Turkish leader in Kyiv. Turkey is a member of NATO but has maintained relations with Russia — even, controversially, buying Russian-made missile defense systems.
Scholz, the German chancellor, is to travel to Kyiv on Feb. 14 and to Moscow the next day.
One potential U.S. concession: Officials confirmed last week that they offered to let Russia inspect missile defense systems in Romania and Poland to verify that there are no Tomahawk cruise missiles there. In return, the United States would seek inspections of similar sites in Russia. The United States has long maintained that no Tomahawk missiles are deployed in Europe, despite Russian claims.
Sanctions? Western nations have warned of retaliatory sanctions against Russia if aggression continues, potentially targeting even Putin himself. The Biden administration has discussed everything from blocking Russia’s access to electronic supplies made with U.S. technology to cutting Moscow off from the SWIFT banking system that handles the flow of money worldwide.
Energy? Russia is a major supplier of natural gas to Europe, raising significant questions about what would happen if a conflict led Moscow to cut off the supply. At the heart of the debate is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a major infrastructure project that, if completed, would transport natural gas from Siberia to Germany.
The United States views the pipeline as a geostrategic threat. At a news conference with the German chancellor Monday, Biden said that “there will no longer be Nord Stream 2” if Russia invades Ukraine.
Robyn Dixon in Moscow, Rick Noack in Paris and Rachel Pannett in Sydney contributed to this report, which has been updated. | null | null | null | null | null |
Flag bearers for Team Belarus carry their flag during the Opening Ceremonies of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing on Feb. 4. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
Darya Dolidovich was not a contender to compete in the 2022 Beijing Olympics, which kicked off last week. But another Belarusian cross-country skier, Sviatlana Andryiuk, told Reuters last month that she was also blocked from competing internationally. Andryiuk said sports officials accused her of supporting the opposition, even though she said she had never publicly expressed her political views.
Dolidovich is one of Belarus’s top junior cross-country skiers, according to Reuters, which first reported on her flight to Poland.
Her father told The Post that Belarusian sports authorities cited what they described as unsportsmanlike conduct by his daughter. But the two say the real motivation was political. Sergei Dolidovich previously had received reprimands for speaking out against the government.
The move is “their way of showing they can do whatever they want,” he said. “There were no threats, but I understood that there is no life for us there — Darya won’t be able to run there, and her career basically ended on Dec. 27.”
Pavel Latushka, head of the Belarusian opposition organization National Anti-Crisis Management, said in a statement to The Post that the ban was “absolutely” politically motivated.
International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams said at a briefing at the Beijing Games that it was up to the International Ski Federation to decide whether to take action in Darya’s case, Reuters reported.
The Belarus Ski Union and the International Ski Federation did not respond to requests for comment.
“Today we see that in many aspects people are de-motivated to sport, interested in and worried about Belarusian athletes,” Latushka said. “On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine the moral state of sportsmen performing on the international scene, when there is a lawlessness in your country, when you can be arrested or criminally punished for any word or post.”
Lukashenko, who has ruled the Eastern European country for nearly three decades, has taken increasingly bold steps to quash challenges to his rule. He provoked international outrage in May when he sent a fighter jet to ground a commercial plane carrying a prominent dissident journalist. And European Union officials accused Lukashenko of weaponizing migrants over the summer as relations between the E.U. and Belarus deteriorated.
The International Olympic Committee said in September it was investigating two Belarusian coaches accused of trying to force Tsimanouskaya to fly home. That investigation is still ongoing. But the IOC has so far opted not to suspend Belarus’s Olympic committee from participating in the Games. Tsimanouskaya has called for stronger action from international sports authorities.
This report has been updated. | null | null | null | null | null |
What all this means is that the markets increasingly see the only way for the Fed to get inflation under control is to engineer a sharp slowdown in the economy, and perhaps even force a recession. This would be the hard landing that policy makers have wanted to avoid. As recently as Wednesday, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Loretta Mester, who votes on monetary policy this year, said she didn’t see a “compelling case” for a half-percentage-point increase. | null | null | null | null | null |
Protestors against Covid-19 vaccine mandates sit on a couch as the group blocks the roadway at the Ambassador Bridge border crossing in Windsor, Ontario, Canada on February 9, 2022. (Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images)
The “Freedom Convoy” protest of Canadian truckers angry over a requirement that they be vaccinated in order to cross back and forth over the American border has taken a consequential turn. It has become nothing less than an attack on the economies of two countries.
And while you might have thought this was a mildly interesting story of the ordinarily polite world of Canadian politics becoming momentarily more contentious, in truth, this is fundamentally a story about America.
That’s because the primary base of support for the protesters — who themselves are different from what you’ve been told — is the American right. We’re seeing an attempt by Fox News, other conservative media outlets, Republican politicians, and conservative activists to call attention to the Canadian protests — and build, expand, and spread those protests as far as possible.
In the last couple of days, the protest has increased its focus on the border, in an attempt to sabotage the flow of trade between the U.S. and Canada. They have essentially shut down the Ambassador Bridge that links Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, where 25 percent of all trade between the two countries travels, as well as other border crossings. Auto plants are already closing because they can’t obtain the parts that normally go back and forth across the border.
It’s hard to exaggerate how much of a cause célèbre this has become on the right, as conservatives use every megaphone at their disposal to promote and cheer on the protest. Fox News has devoted hours of airtime to the protesters, who, in the words of Sean Hannity, “are taking a stand for freedom, human dignity and autonomy.”
While some participants just want to drive across the border without getting vaccinated, the protest is a hodgepodge of ordinary truckers, antivax crazies, and a bunch of far-right organizations fantasizing about implanted microchips and secret concentration camps. It includes Holocaust deniers, Islamophobes, and people demanding the arrest of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Rather than a spontaneous upsurge of anger at current policy, this is more about Canadian far-right activists who suddenly found the right vehicle to promote fringe anti-government views that have not gotten a foothold before.
What those activists now have that they didn’t before is a full-court press of promotion from the American right, especially its powerful media outlets.
Embracing far-right activists who are extreme in both their views and their tactics is nothing new for Fox and the rest of the conservative media. They regularly make heroes out people like Cliven Bundy, who gained fame for his refusal to pay for his use of government resources. Wherever there’s an armed standoff involving a handful of right-wing extremists, it’s a good bet that conservative media will lionize the lawbreakers.
But they have a particular interest at moments like this one. Conservative media are an incubator, promoter, and participant in right-wing social movements that emerge in response to the election of a Democratic president.
When there’s a Democrat in the White House, chaos becomes the order of the day in conservative media. They hype angry protests, outbreaks of violence, shutdowns of economic activity —whatever contributes to the sense that noble champions of freedom are rising up against the government, which is portrayed as simultaneously brutal in its tyranny and too weak to maintain order.
With the Canadian rightists, Fox and the other conservative media are creating the same kind of feedback loop they did with the Tea Party when Barack Obama was president: The protesters are encouraged by those outlets to believe their cause is righteous and the people are behind them, so they ramp up the extremism of their demands and their tactics, an acceleration that is in turn cheered in the right-wing media, and the cycle continues.
The next phase is to bring the same tactics here to the U.S. A collection of anti-government activists is now trying to organize a similar convoy to drive to Washington to protest vaccine and mask mandates. Likewise, it’s being promoted on Fox. | null | null | null | null | null |
Edmonton Oilers’ Duncan Keith (2) is helped off the ice after being injured during the first period of the team’s NHL hockey game against the Chicago Blackhawks on Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022, in Edmonton, Alberta. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press via AP)
EDMONTON, Alberta — The struggling Edmonton Oilers have fired coach Dave Tippett, according to two people with direct knowledge of the decision. | null | null | null | null | null |
It is February, and love is in the air this month — or, at least, probably in your inbox. It seems like brands are leaning hard into Valentine’s Day this year. In the time it took me to write this, I received two emails reminding me to act fast and secure a gift because February 14th is right around the corner.
“Shortly before my marriage, almost 37 years ago, my grandmother gave me advice that I have passed along to my young nieces, as they entered into long-term relationships. My grandmother told me, ‘Always remember that marriage is not 50/50. Some days, it will be 80/20, other days maybe 30/70. There will be times that you need to give 80, and other days your husband will be the one to give 80. Learn to recognize what the balance needs to be, on any given day, throughout the life of your marriage.’ ” — Diane Henriques, 61, Charleston S.C. | null | null | null | null | null |
When schools went virtual, online bullying declined
Researchers used Google search trends to track bullying — both in-person and online — during the pandemic
(ljubaphoto/iStock)
By Christopher Shea
Christopher Shea is an assistant editor for Outlook and PostEverything. Before joining The Washington Post, he ran the Perspectives section at Vox.com.
As schools made the switch to remote teaching in 2020, Andrew Bacher-Hicks, an assistant professor of education at Boston University, kept hearing an alarming prediction: Cyberbullying would spike. With students living more of their lives online, wouldn’t this pernicious form of harassment — which some researchers have found is even more closely correlated with suicidal ideation than in-person bullying — take off? (According to one 2019 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 20 percent of American high school students reported being bullied in person in the previous year; 16 percent reported being bullied online.) Bacher-Hicks and four colleagues at B.U. — associate professors Joshua Goodman, Jennifer G. Green and Melissa Holt — tackled the question using an unusual approach: They first established, by examining past data, that Google searches for such terms as “bullying” and “cyberbullying” closely track real-world trends, as measured in surveys. They then looked at what happened to search trends during the pandemic. The results, which appeared in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper in December, weren’t what many people expected. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Online is a space where people bully one another, so some people predicted things would go off the rails when schools went remote.
A: Exactly. Those predictions were based on research that was done before the pandemic. It shows when schooling is constant — when there’s not a major disruption to schooling — there’s a correlation between students who spend more time online and the amount of cyberbullying that they experience. That evidence did suggest that there was some cause for concern when nearly all K-12 students were spending a lot more time online.
Q: You end up establishing that, at least in the pre-pandemic world, Google Trends data — on searches related to bullying — tracks pretty well with real-world, state-level survey answers regarding bullying behavior. Just to quickly summarize what you found: Google searches for topics related to bullying drop off markedly during the summer. They are especially high at the start of a school year, then fade a bit. Most remarkably, you’ve got biannual surveys of students by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — state-by-state data on self-reported bullying. The Google Trends data tracks variation in those survey answers — state by state and over time — which is pretty remarkable.
A: Yeah. We did think, when we first saw it, that the tracking of the school calendar was pretty amazing. There’s a very clear spike in searches in the beginning of the school year, a dip over periods when school was not in session, to some degree — over the winter recess, for example. Then a large drop-off over the summer. And this pattern happens year after year after year. So there’s a clear connection between Internet searches for bullying and the school calendar. And we did connect these biennial surveys from the CDC and found a strong correlation between areas where students self-reported more bullying and searches for bullying that happened in that area. And the same thing for cyberbullying. So we were able to validate the link between Internet searches and self-reported survey information — for both those topics — in the time period before covid.
Q: Some schools went all virtual. Some schools were hybrid. Some schools stayed open. You’ve got data on where those schools are. When schools went all virtual, how much did searches for school bullying and cyberbullying drop?
A: The first analysis that we conducted looked at the period directly following March 2020, when schools across the entire country abruptly switched from in-person instruction to remote instruction. And during that time, we found that searches related to school bullying and cyberbullying both dropped by 30 to 35 percent.
Q: You also looked at the next school year, where approaches to schooling were a little more mixed, and had similar findings, right?
A: We found similar findings overall. But we had a nice opportunity in the fall of 2020 because there was a lot of variation across different types of schools. Some were quick to open back up for in-person instruction, where others remained remote. And what we saw is that bullying dropped no matter what: In both forms of instruction, school bullying and cyberbullying remained lower than in prior years. However, the drop in both forms of bullying was much larger in the areas that remained remote.
Q: If I understand it right, in your interpretation online bullying is largely an outgrowth of in-school bullying.
A: Absolutely. I think that bullying that occurs online may in many cases just be an extension of bullying that started in person. We know from prior research that many of the same individuals — that is, both the victims and the aggressors — are involved in in-person and in cyberbullying. So there are clear links between the two. And I think an important contribution of our paper is to show that when you disrupt one form of bullying, there is a clear reduction in both forms.
Q: Your paper suggests there might be lessons for this and for the post-pandemic world. What might those be? Because kids eventually will be all back in these chaotic physical environments again.
A: The lessons might come out of this question: Why do we think that even when schools reopened in fall 2020 during the pandemic, bullying was lower in those schools than we would have predicted? One reason is that schools put additional structures in place to prevent the spread of covid-19. And many of those structures likely helped to reduce bullying when students were back in person. We know from prior studies that a lot of bullying occurs during unstructured time — that is, time spent passing other students in the hallway, time at lunch, etc. During the pandemic, there has been a lot less flexibility in offering that type of unstructured time. And there is a lot more supervision during the school day. I don’t think that we should necessarily maintain all of these new structures moving forward, but I think it does suggest there’s something that we can learn about how providing additional structured time might reduce bullying.
Q: All of this really complicates the whole mental health picture for students. Because what we hear is that students are isolated. Students are depressed. All of that’s true. On the other hand, you can’t help but think that the 20 percent of students who are bullied might have found some relief during the pandemic.
A: I think that’s fair. I will say, you know, nearly all of the educational research that I see to date has focused on the negative consequences that you just mentioned. This study suggests that at least some aspects of the educational experience have improved for some set of students. This does not mean that we should maintain this crazy system that we have right now, but it does suggest that there might be a small subset of students who really suffered from bullying in the past, for whom reducing in-person time could be beneficial.
Q: What else should we take away from this study?
A: If you look over time in that biennial survey by the CDC — at the national numbers showing how prevalent bullying is — it’s been fairly static over time. And so to see a large shift [down] in bullying, I think, is a good sign. It suggests that it’s not some static concept. It’s not something that we have to accept. It shows that changes can occur. That suggests that there is room and scope for really making a dent in what I think is a serious challenge that clearly affects a lot of students. | null | null | null | null | null |
Liz Sly to take on a new role as a correspondent-at-large covering global affairs, based in London
WASHINGTON DC-NOVEMBER 01 Washington Post staff writer Liz Sly photographed in Washington Post studio Washington, DC on November 01, 2017. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Announcement from Foreign Editor Douglas Jehl, Deputy Foreign Editor Eva Rodriguez and Middle East Editor Alan Sipress:
We are delighted to announce that Liz Sly will take on a new role as a correspondent-at-large covering global affairs, based in London.
In a career that has included stops in Africa, China, the Middle East, Europe and the United States, Liz brings the on-the-ground expertise and the high-altitude perspective needed to write clearly about complicated subjects. She has spent the last decade as The Post’s Beirut bureau chief, where her courageous reporting from Syria and crystalline analysis earned her a reputation as a highly skilled and savvy interpreter of an unraveling Middle East.
In her new global affairs role, Liz will cover international relations and rivalries, with a focus on the United States’ shifting role in the world and the impact of American foreign policy.
This position is part of a multi-year expansion of The Post’s international staff that has created greater capacity for deep and ambitious coverage of what matters most, including the intersection between Washington and the world. The job will allow Liz to partner frequently with other Post correspondents based in 25 locations around the world.
Liz began her journalism career as a stringer in Beirut in the early 1980s as that country was collapsing into civil war. She moved on to successive postings in Chicago, Washington D.C., Johannesburg, Beijing, Kabul, Delhi, Rome and Beirut/Baghdad, all for the Chicago Tribune, then joined the Los Angeles Times as Baghdad correspondent. She joined The Post as Baghdad bureau chief in 2010 but made Beirut her primary base, covering the Arab Spring.
Among her multiple awards, Liz was recognized in 2019 for her “courage in journalism” by the International Women’s Media Foundation, which hailed her as the “dean of Middle East correspondents.” In 2017, she won The Post’s inaugural Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism for her “relentless pursuit of the truth” particularly through her conflict-zone reporting. Liz is a graduate of Cambridge University, with a B.A. and M.A. in history.
After living outside her native England for most of four decades, Liz has already relocated to London as she steps into her new role. | null | null | null | null | null |
First Look with The Post’s Jonathan Capehart, Ashley Parker, Hugh Hewitt & Eugene Robinson
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart has been a member of The Washington Post editorial board since 2007. He writes about politics and social issues, hosts the podcast “Capehart” (formerly named “Cape Up”) and anchors the weekly Washington Post Live show “First Look,” which is also streamed on “The Choice MSNBC” on Comcast’s Peacock streaming service. Capehart is also an MSNBC contributor and the anchor of “The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart.” His MSNBC special “A Promised Land: A Conversation with Barack Obama” was nominated in 2021 for an Emmy for Outstanding News Discussion & Analysis. At PBS, Capehart serves as a commentator on “The PBS NewsHour” and is featured on the popular Friday segment “Brooks and Capehart.” Capehart is a regular moderator of panels at the Aspen Ideas Festival and for the Aspen Institute, the Center for American Progress and at the Atlantic Dialogues conference and the Brussels Forum of the German Marshall Fund. He has also moderated sessions at the Atlantic’s Washington Ideas Forum and for the Connecticut Forum. Capehart was deputy editorial page editor of the New York Daily News from 2002 to 2004, and served on that paper’s editorial board from 1993 to 2000. In 1999, his 16-month editorial campaign to save the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem earned him and the board the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. Capehart left the Daily News in July 2000 to become the national affairs columnist at Bloomberg News, and took a leave from this position in February 2001 to serve as a policy adviser to Michael Bloomberg in his first successful campaign for New York City mayor.
Ashley Parker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. She covered all four years of the Trump presidency, as well as his 2016 campaign. She was part of The Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2018, for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In 2019, Parker served as one of the moderators for the Democratic presidential primary debate in Atlanta, hosted by The Post and MSNBC. She joined The Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress, among other things. Parker is also an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.
Hugh Hewitt, a Post contributing columnist, hosts a nationally syndicated radio show on the Salem Network. The author of 14 books about politics, history and faith, he is also a political analyst for NBC, president of the Nixon Foundation and a professor of law at Chapman University Law School, where he has taught constitutional law since 1996.
Eugene Robinson writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section. He started writing a column for the Op-Ed page in 2005. In 2009, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for “his eloquent columns on the 2008 presidential campaign that focus on the election of the first African-American president, showcasing graceful writing and grasp of the larger historic picture.” Robinson is the author of “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America” (2010), “Last Dance in Havana” (2004), and “Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race” (1999). He lives with his wife and two sons in Arlington. | null | null | null | null | null |
It is February, and love is in the air this month — or, at least, probably in your inbox. It seems like brands are leaning hard into Valentine’s Day this year. In the time it took me to write this, I received two emails reminding me to act fast and secure a gift because Feb. 14 is right around the corner.
“Shortly before my marriage, almost 37 years ago, my grandmother gave me advice that I have passed along to my young nieces, as they entered into long-term relationships. My grandmother told me, ‘Always remember that marriage is not 50/50. Some days, it will be 80/20, other days maybe 30/70. There will be times that you need to give 80, and other days your husband will be the one to give 80. Learn to recognize what the balance needs to be, on any given day, throughout the life of your marriage.’ ” — Diane Henriques, 61, Charleston, S.C. | null | null | null | null | null |
What all this means is that the markets increasingly see the only way for the Fed to get inflation under control is to engineer a sharp slowdown in the economy, and perhaps even force a recession. This would be the hard landing that policy makers have wanted to avoid. As recently as Wednesday, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Loretta Mester, who votes on monetary policy this year, said she didn’t see a “compelling case” for a half-percentage-point increase. In a sign of what may come if the Fed decides to do what Mester said was unlikely, the S&P 500 Index quickly fell 1% and bond yields soared after Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard, who is also a voter this year, told Bloomberg News on Thursday that he supports raising interest rates by a full percentage point by the start of July. That implies at least a half-percentage-point increase at one of the three meetings between now and then.
(Updates with comments from St. Louis Fed President James Bullard in the third paragraph.) | null | null | null | null | null |
Children look on as President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cavalcade is expected at the City Hall in Cape Town, South African, Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022 Ramaphosa will deliver his State of the Nation address at the City Hall instead of at the Parliament building which was gutted by fire last month. (AP Photo/Nardus Engelbrecht,Pool) | null | null | null | null | null |
Contee said they found a female passenger inside a vehicle who had been struck by gunfire and was gravely injured. She died a short time later at a hospital. Authorities later identified the woman as Pamela Thomas, 54, of Northeast.
Police said there was at least one other person inside the vehicle at the time. They “were not the intended targets of the shooting,” Contee said. “Someone was shooting at someone else, and as this car passed through this location, a stray round apparently went through this vehicle.”
It was not immediately clear whether the vehicle was moving when it was struck.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) tweeted: “A precious life gone in an instant because someone decided to use a gun in our community. We are heartbroken and infuriated.
“We must come together to bring the person or people responsible for this murder to justice. And we must get guns out of our community. Enough is enough.”
At least four other shootings were reported in the District on Wednesday morning and afternoon. They appeared to be unrelated, police said, and those victims all were expected to survive. A 16-year-old boy was shot and critically wounded Tuesday night in Southeast Washington.
Dana Hedgpeth contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nick Baumgartner, center, races between Hagen Kearney of the United States and Yoshiki Takahara of Japan. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters)
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Nick Baumgartner was doing it for all the people back in Iron River, Mich., who supported him all these years in this lunatic pursuit of his. He was doing it for all the guys back in the States who aren’t afraid to break their backs and build things for a living. He was doing it for all the middle-aged dads out there who wake up wondering what hurts today and whether it’ll take two Advil or three. He was doing it most of all for 17-year-old Landon, the kid who could barely remember his dad’s first Olympics and who was home in Iron River, surrounded by his buddies in the middle of the night, watching his old man make history at his fourth.
Vedder blasted out of the gate, his best asset, and felt Baumgartner close the gap and whoosh past him. Baumgartner felt himself riding fast, fast enough to advance and eventually win a medal. And then an Austrian sped from behind and attempted to pass him around the penultimate turn, and he made a split-second calculation. He had planned to jump over two rolling bumps, but he thought he would crash if he did with the Austrian there. He rode over the rollers instead. He caught an edge and lost his speed. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Expectations about inflation are settling in. That’s a big problem.
A customer shops in the dairy section of a grocery store in San Francisco on Nov. 11. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)
Consumers and businesses tend to shrug off even rapid price rises if they believe they are temporary. That’s why dramatic increases in energy prices in the past two decades have not triggered broader inflation. Taxi companies and airlines may have added fuel surcharges to their prices, but these price hikes did not set off larger, across-the-board adjustments.
The events of the past year, however, are proving to be different. Past assurances that price rises were temporary have proved to be false, and all the evidence suggests that the factors plaguing the global economy aren’t going away soon.
Friday at 1 p.m.: Henry Olsen and other columnists answer your inflation questions
Labor markets are tight, giving workers the power to quit and seek better pay and working conditions elsewhere. Demand for goods remains historically high, leaving producers struggling to meet demand. They are swamping the market with more things than truckers, shippers and railroads can deliver. As a result, producers are holding out for higher prices to deliver scarce goods to people and businesses who are willing to pay them. And because U.S. consumers are still sitting on more than $2 trillion in excess savings built up over the pandemic, many of them can afford them.
These facts now mean many businesses are planning to raise prices, both because they can and because many have to. A recent survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics found that more than half of surveyed companies expect to raise prices this year. Among goods-producing firms, that number is 83 percent.
Companies believe they can do this because they have seen no negative effect from prior price hikes. Consumers can afford to pay more because of their cash stocks, and other businesses want a piece of the action, too. This creates a vicious inflationary circle that will only gain steam until consumers signal they can’t or won’t pay more for the same thing.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta reports that wage growth has skyrocketed over the past eight months. Wages in January were 5.1 percent higher than the year before, the highest rate increase since 2001. But even that level lags behind inflation, suggesting that people will continue to leverage their bargaining power to demand even higher pay. Businesses, in turn, will factor that into their costs and planning, which drives even more inflationary expectations.
Raising interest rates is historically the best way to shut down inflationary expectations. Higher interest rates tend to dampen consumer spending in two ways: First, they make borrowing more expensive, dampening consumer activity. Second, they make saving money in interest-bearing accounts more attractive, further dampening spending. The Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates later this year is thus a step in the right direction.
The danger is that the planned hikes may be inadequate to meet the challenge. A poll of economists last month showed they expect the Fed to raise rates to only around 1 percent by the end of the year. That’s a pittance and would likely not significantly alter the expectations that are settling in. The economists for Bank of America project the Fed will raise rates 11 times in the next two years, including seven times in 2022 alone. If that happens, interest rates would rise to between 2 and 3 percent by the end of the year, as the Fed normally hikes rates by a quarter or half percent each time. But even that might be too little, too late to catch up with galloping inflation.
Paul Volcker, the legendary Federal Reserve chair of the 1980s, stopped double-digit inflation in its tracks by hiking interest rates by nearly 9 points in a little over a year. Today’s inflation problem isn’t as deep or as long-standing, so such tactics would be an overreaction. But the Fed might need to increase rates by five or more points over the next year to end the expectations cycle.
The economic errors of the past two years will likely mean we’ll have to take stiff medicine to break the inflationary fever. The sooner we take it, the better off we’ll be. | null | null | null | null | null |
Following her second stumble, Shiffrin’s response was a memorable image of solitary suffering. For 20 minutes she sat beside the track, head down, waiting for nonexistent solace. Anyone untouched was working extra hard to be a cynic.
These are important considerations for a country where, in 2020, about 30 percent of Americans aged 18 to 25 years old reported a diagnosis of mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health — and where suicide is the second leading cause of death among those 10 to 34 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Shiffrin’s example of instinctive public honesty is valuable. Her openness may help rescue people from feeling isolated in their own despair.
Public honestly about mental challenges helps defeat stigma. When I have talked in public about depression, I have often found people who are seeking permission for their own suffering. It is a form of liberation to acknowledge their own humanity. Stigma can leave potentially deadly mental challenges inadequately explored. Openness allows us to learn from failure, in the company of other fallible people. | null | null | null | null | null |
GENEVA — A senior Swiss diplomat who met Thursday with a visiting delegation from Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders in Switzerland said they showed an interest in dialogue with the international community. He also noted that they realize “that they must take the first step” to unblock more aid desperately needed in the war-battered country. | null | null | null | null | null |
ORLANDO — Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred calls it optimism, that with less than a week until pitchers and catchers are due to report, and baseball still mired in a lockout, he has yet to formally announce that spring training will be delayed. MLB plans to make an offer to the players union Saturday, he said in a news conference here in Orlando on Thursday. Maybe, just maybe, after months of staring each other down and posturing for public sympathy, that offer could help the league and its players make progress.
The league and its players not only need to agree to a deal in time to start the regular season, but also to give the sides time to ratify the agreement, squeeze in months of offseason transactions, and play enough spring training to avoid the injury concerns. Manfred suggested a deal would take a few days to ratify and that four weeks of spring training might be enough. But four weeks of spring training would require an agreement within the next two weeks. It has taken the two sides two months to slide a few inches toward each other, and mistrust has only grown in the process.
The sides agreed to implement a bonus pool to disperse among young, high-achieving players who have not yet hit arbitration, but the owners proposed that pool consist of $10 million dollars, while the players want $100 million. | null | null | null | null | null |
After scrambling to field a team, U.S. men’s hockey dominates China in Olympics opener
Less than two weeks later on Thursday night, they were halfway across the world in an unfamiliar arena in Beijing, celebrating together after each had played a hand in Team USA’s 8-0 win over China to open the Olympics. There was Brisson scoring the game’s first goal on a dish from Knies. There was Beniers showing off his speed and cleaning up his team’s seventh score of the night. There was Farrell scoring three goals and assisting on two others, the star on a night devoid of the sport’s biggest stars, who were back home with their teams in the NHL, forced to watch from afar after the league opted in late December not to send its players to the Winter Games due to coronavirus concerns.
“It definitely helps to play in a real game,” said Farrell, who knows the effort to field a team for Beijing has been frantic. Team USA has had three general managers serve in the role over the past several months. It has replaced its head coach and, exactly four weeks before the puck was dropped Thursday night, announced a mishmash roster featuring NHL castoffs, European league veterans and 15 college kids. The Americans didn’t have any NHL players at the PyeongChang Winter Games in 2018, either, but at least then the team had 10 months notice of the league’s plans to not participate. Four years later, a gold medal pursuit in Beijing hinges on a group of players who have a had a matter of days to prepare.
After the NHL withdrew from the Games in December, Team USA turned to Quinn to take over head coaching duties from Pittsburgh Penguins Coach Mike Sullivan. The team also appointed John Vanbiesbrouck as the third general manager to handle the role leading into Beijing. In December, Minnesota Wild General Manager Bill Guerin took over for former Chicago Blackhawks General Manager Stan Bowman, who resigned after an investigation determined Bowman failed to take sufficient action after he was informed of a sexual assault allegation in 2010. Guerin stepped down after the NHL’s withdrawal from the Games, and amid that attrition in the front office, there was still a roster to build in less than a month.
“One of the things we did as an organization is we identified players that we thought were team players first and foremost,” said Quinn, whose team opted to bring back just one player with Olympic experience: Brian O’Neill, who was part of Team USA’s seventh place finish in PyeongChang.
The U.S. opted to lean heavily on NCAA stars, some of whom missed a chance to represent their country at the World Junior Championship when the tournament was canceled for covid-19 reasons last year. Most had prepared to watch the U.S. compete with NHL players in Beijing while they stayed with their college teams. But once they received the call for Beijing — the United States. did not announce its roster until Jan. 13 — they were told to report at the end of January for a training camp in Los Angeles for a few days. They would have to learn how to gel with their teammates on the fly.
There were signs Thursday night that this group is still a work in progress. The U.S. players were shaky offensively and had to adjust to the physicality of China in the first period, leading 1-0 off a goal from Brisson after 20 minutes. But the talent, especially from a core of younger players, was also undeniable: Noah Cates, a forward from NCAA powerhouse Minnesota-Duluth, opened the second period with a goal off a slick backhanded feed from Farrell.
After O’Neill added a goal, Farrell scored two more to push the score to 5-0, then added another in the third period. And Beniers, who was the No. 2 overall pick by the Seattle Kraken in last year’s NHL draft and is one of Team USA’s headliners, had settled in by that point and scored his first Olympic goal with eight minutes left. He said later the performance underscored the team’s process of building chemistry in a such a short span.
“I think everyone saw that in the game … we were playing hard, but things weren’t connecting like they normally would,” Beniers said. “Later in the game, you start seeing passes connect, people making nice plays and line mates starting to feed off each other.”
Team USA’s path in the tournament will get more difficult on Saturday when it meets Canada, and of course, there are still tweaks to the roster being made: Jake Sanderson, a budding young defenseman from the University of North Dakota, is expected to join the team by Friday after clearing coronavirus protocols. He’ll be the latest young prospect to experience the stark difference between playing in college games and on the international stage in the matter of two weeks. Knies could relate. He called the transition to competing in Beijing “pretty crazy,” and he was still trying to wrap his head around it after the win on Thursday night.
“It was pretty surreal,” Knies said, “playing in that kind of game, that kind of atmosphere.” | null | null | null | null | null |
But is this the way a Boba Fett series should be handled? Sharing so much of the limelight with other prominent Star Wars characters? Since Star Wars arrived on Disney Plus, there’s been nothing but high praise for story architects Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, but “The Book of Boba Fett” was met with some discontent fans who thought the titular character, arguably one of the most popular characters in the history of Star Wars, was being overshadowed by frequent guest stars. | null | null | null | null | null |
ORLANDO — Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred calls it optimism, that with less than a week until pitchers and catchers are due to report, and baseball still mired in a lockout, he has yet to formally announce that spring training will be delayed. MLB plans to make an offer to the players union Saturday, he said in a news conference Thursday here in Orlando. Maybe, just maybe, after months of staring each other down and posturing for public sympathy, that offer could help the league and its players make progress.
The league and its players not only need to agree to a deal in time to start the regular season, but also to give the sides time to ratify the agreement, squeeze in months of offseason transactions, and play enough spring training to avoid injury concerns. Manfred suggested a deal would take a few days to ratify and that four weeks of spring training might be enough. But four weeks of spring training would require an agreement within the next two weeks. It has taken the two sides two months to slide a few inches toward each other, and mistrust has only grown in the process.
The sides agreed to implement a bonus pool to disburse among young, high-achieving players who have not yet hit arbitration, but the owners proposed that pool consist of $10 million dollars, while the players want $100 million. | null | null | null | null | null |
London Metropolitan Police commissioner resigns after scandals
LONDON — London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said she was leaving her job as head of the force after it became clear that London Mayor Sadiq Khan no longer had confidence in her leadership.
In a statement, Dick said that it was with “huge sadness” that she was quitting her post, but following a meeting with the London mayor, it was clear that he “no longer has sufficient confidence in my leadership to continue.”
Dick is leaving the post after a string of scandals, ranging from the police force’s handling of “Partygate” — allegations that parties were being held at Downing Street during coronavirus lockdowns — to the death of Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive who was raped and killed by a serving London police officer.
“The murder of Sarah Everard and many other awful cases recently have, I know, damaged confidence in this fantastic police service,” Dick said.
Dick will stay on for a “short period,” she said, while a new commissioner is found.
Khan said in a statement that Dick had offered her resignation, which he accepted. The mayor said that he had made it clear to her the “scale of the change I believe is urgently required to rebuild the trust and confidence of Londoners in the Met and to root out the racism, sexism, homophobia, bullying, discrimination and misogyny that still exists.”
Dick was appointed to the job in 2017 and is the first woman to lead the force. | null | null | null | null | null |
Attacking books has been an American tradition since 1650, when Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony seized William Pynchon’s “The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption,” labeling it blasphemous for saying obedience, and not suffering, led to atonement. In 1885, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was banned for “coarse language” (and much later for the use of the n-word). “On the Origin of Species,” probably the most influential book ever banned, was censored in 1895 for violating Christian beliefs. From 2000-2009, the Harry Potter books were the most challenged, accused of promoting the occult and Satanism. From 2010-2019, it was Sherman Alexi’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” A key objection: The main character, Junior, masturbates.
Now we are seeing a new wave of book bans, marked by an unprecedented number of challenges and intense polarization. Its focus: narrowing the universe of information in schools and public libraries that might challenge young people on race and gender — the same issues at the center of the political and cultural wars ripping through the country. Glenn Youngkin (R), for instance, won the governorship of Virginia in November after highlighting concerns about the teaching of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”; some parents held that the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel portrayed the horrors of slavery with overly explicit depictions of sex, violence and bestiality.
“This is certainly a reflection of what is going on right now in this country,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, which monitors book bans and issues annual lists of the most challenged. “There is dispute and debate over what kind of government and society we want to be. Book bannings are part of that.”
Advocacy groups are working to nationalize book challenges, this time with the help of conservative TV and talk shows, that for the past few decades have been mostly local events. Some state legislators are threatening punitive action against anyone in schools or libraries who spreads material deemed obscene or harmful to minors. And now students, parents, librarians and school boards are fighting back, calling the push censorship.
The current book banning crusade has its roots in the social justice movement that arose after the 2020 murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Caldwell-Stone said. The “rising awareness of racism in society” sparked pushback. President Donald Trump’s October 2020 executive order banning diversity training in federally funded agencies — to stop, he said, “efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex- and race-based ideologies” — ignited assaults on the teaching of systemic racism in U.S. history and society, as well as portrayals of the lives of members of the LGBTQ community.
“We see these efforts to narrow what is available to young people in an effect to preserve a status quo that valorizes the Founding Fathers and that is theoretically colorblind, but that seems not to include the actual voices of the people who have been impacted by racism or discrimination in our society,” Caldwell-Stone said.
George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir-manifesto that follows the author’s path as a queer Black man in New Jersey and Virginia, is one of the many LGBTQ books being challenged in school districts and libraries, this one in more than a dozen states, for sexually explicit material. The fight over teaching systemic racism has seen bans of tomes such as Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” as well as a version for young people co-authored with Jason Reynolds. The complaints include Kendi’s public statements about racism and accusations that the book does not discuss racism against all people.
The books that are often the first to come off bookshelves after challenges are those involving sexual material and gender issues. Those calling for their removal say explicit sexual material is inappropriate for children and can leave them confused about their gender.
At an Oct. 21 school board meeting in Pennsylvania’s North Penn School District, for example, Vicki Flannery, a member of the conservative advocacy group Moms for Liberty, read a scene from Johnson’s book, which includes two detailed sex scenes and a rape. She said to the school board members: “Do any of you — any of you — find this book that depicts a sexual encounter and rape acceptable for any minor regardless of gender or sexual orientation? Because I do not find this at all acceptable. A child is a child and if you do you belong on a national registry and not a school board.”
Authors and educators say it is important for young people to have books that introduce them to sexual, gender and racial issues that many confront daily. “Books and media are essential portals that enable kids to learn about people beyond themselves,” said Schuyler Bailar, an author who, while attending Harvard University, became the first openly transgender NCAA Men’s Division 1 swimmer. “Books and media also provide easy access for minority and marginalized children to connect with people like themselves, allowing them to feel like they to belong in the world.”
According to the American Library Association, the most challenged books of 2020 — the last year for which there are definitive numbers — was “George,” by Alex Gino, about a transgender girl in fourth grade who everybody sees as a boy named George. The 2015 book was renamed this year and is now titled “Melissa,” because the heroine is a trans girl, not a boy. (Gino announced that he had “made a mistake” with the original title and said it is not “okay” to ever use the old name of someone who has transitioned.)
Caldwell-Stone said that in terms of numbers, book challenges/bans in the past six months have been at their highest since the American Library Association began collecting information in 1990. More than 330 unique cases were reported from Sept. 1 to Nov. 20 more than in any other three-month period. They have continued at a strong pace so far this year, too, she said, but the numbers represent only a fraction of what is really happening. The ALA estimates that between 82 percent and 97 percent of these challenges goes unreported — or, in some cases, she said, are covered up by schools when some information about them becomes known. (About a dozen years ago, a student in Missouri sent Freedom of Information Act requests to every school district in the state and unearthed 83 challenges that year. The ALA had heard about only 12 percent of those, she said.)
This isn’t the first time America has seen large-scale efforts to keep books from the hands of young people. In the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, advocacy groups such as the Moral Majority, which was founded by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. and had ties to the Republican Party, made lists of books it found objectionable, many with sexual themes, and prompted local challenges and book bans. The country was less polarized, the battles unfolded more slowly and the messaging was analog; Fox News hadn’t even been founded. But like today, conservatives also pushed for the removal of books about abortion, evolution and politics. A big target at the time was “Forever,” a Judy Blume novel about teenage sexuality. The American Library Association reported that in 1981 saw nearly 1,000 book challenges — with most, but not all, coming from conservative groups.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1982 delivered its decision in the most important case involving school libraries and the First Amendment, ruling in Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School v. Pico that “[l]ocal school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.”
People trying to ban books say they aren’t trying to censor material but rather to protect children from seeing things they can’t handle. Although judges have largely ruled against them, the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, has become more conservative in recent years. Meanwhile, Republicans may see the issue as a winner in the midterm elections after Youngkin spent the last part of his campaign talking about parental opposition to “Beloved.”
In fall 2021, as the “parental rights” movement in public schools gained steam and Republican-led states were passing legislation to limit what teachers could introduce about systemic racism, conservative advocacy groups began nationally circulating lists of books they deemed dangerous to young people, Caldwell-Stone said. The group No Left Turn in Education’s bad books list is divided into three sections: critical race theory, anti-police and comprehensive sexuality education. The list includes a book titled “Sea Horse: The Shyest Fish in the Sea,” which, among other behaviors, describes their mating dance and explains how the male sea horses give birth.
A cascade of activity aimed at limiting book selections in schools and libraries followed. Prosecutors in Campbell County, Wyo., last October weighed — but decided not to file — obscenity charges against librarians who allowed books about LGBTQ people on the shelves. The next month, the library voted to keep three challenged books on the shelves, including “This Book Is Gay” for teens.
Also last October, a key Republican state legislator in Texas called for school districts to review whether they held any of some 850 books he listed as making kids uncomfortable or guilty. Hundreds of titles have been removed since then.
This month in Iowa, legislators went further; some Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would make it illegal for anyone connected to a K-12 public school or library to spread “material the person knows or reasonably should know, is obscene or harmful to minors.” The penalty could be up to two years in jail and a fine. And in Florida, the state Senate education committee has approved legislation that critics say is aimed at keeping LGBTQ resources off school shelves and supporters say is about providing transparency to parents about what their children are reading.
“It is unusual for legislators to threaten direct action,” said Ada Palmer, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
Why 'parental rights' in schools is untenable
Banning books from libraries and schools can’t prevent children from finding them. That’s why some see the new book banning wave as being aimed not so much at children but at punishing teachers and librarians — and at trying to narrow curriculum and classroom debates about controversial topics. Some also see it as part of a movement by some school reformers to delegitimize public schools.
“The more we look at censorship regimes in the past — from the Inquisition to the USSR [the former Soviet Union] — the clearer it is that the main goal isn’t to silence or destroy books or works that already exist,” Palmer said. “It’s to frighten people and discourage them from reading, buying and creating similar works in future,” she argues, pointing out that Galileo’s trial “frightened Descartes into withdrawing a radical treatise he was about to publish and editing it to make it much more orthodox.”
In late January, a Tennessee school board voted to ban “Maus,” a graphic novel in which the author relates how his father survived the Holocaust. The board’s discussion mentioned, among other things, rough language and a nude drawing of a woman, according to a meeting transcript. One board member, Tony Allman, said: “It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy.”
James Blasingame, an expert on young adult literature at Arizona State University, said that the disturbing nature of “Maus” is exactly what students should learn about the Holocaust — and that students are cheated from learning about the world when books like this are banned.
“It is a disturbing and shameful event in the history of the human race, and any book that purports to tell accurately what happened must also be disturbing,” he said.
As the number of challenges and bans rises, so, too, does resistance from parents and students and school board members.
Black students in Texas and other states are forming groups to read books on racism that others seek to ban. An organization of suburban mothers who partnered with other groups launched a campaign called “Book Ban Busters,” offering resources and support to fight books bans. Its website includes a map of places where book challenges have occurred, showing them in most states.
In January, an effort in the Kutztown Area School District in Pennsylvania to keep a book called “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe out of the high school library was defeated when the school board voted 5-4 in favor of including it.
In her speech to the North Penn school board, Flannery referenced — and rejected — criticism that book banners were “snowflakes,” people who have a hard time dealing with opinions they don’t agree with. But proponents may open themselves up to charges of hypocrisy. Moms for Liberty favors “parental choice,” but not for parents who want to expose children to the ideas in these books.
More broadly, conservatives have lamented what they see as “cancel culture” on the left, such as in March , when the publisher of the famed Dr. Seuss books announced that six titles with racist imagery would stop being printed. “The cancel culture is canceling Dr. Seuss,” Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade said. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson went further, saying that “if we lose this battle” to preserve the Seuss books, “America is lost.” But conservatives don’t seem to mind other books being canceled from schools and libraries.
Recruited by Harvard for the women’s swim team, he’ll jump into the pool as a man
Meanwhile, the argument is playing out in classrooms. In November, eighth-grade reading teacher Alecia Feckers resigned from the Charles City Community Schools district after being put on administrative leave for reading Bailar’s short story “Catch, Pull, Drive” from the “Fresh Ink” anthology to her students.
The short story — not on the approved list of resources for the subject, social issues — reflects experiences of its author, who was recruited at Harvard to play on the women’s swim team but transitioned and swam on the men’s team.
After some parents complained, Feckers was investigated by the district. She decided to resign because, she said in an email, she felt it was her only option: “I didn’t think I could stay there when they didn’t support me or have my back.”
(Correction: Fixing spelling of Caldwell-Stone’s name) | null | null | null | null | null |
James Mernin, Marine Corps sergeant
James Mernin, 94, a retired Marine Corps staff sergeant who worked as a standardization specialist for the General Services Administration from 1968 to 1995, died Jan. 12 at a hospital in Falls Church, Va. The cause was pneumonia, said a son, Michael Mernin.
Sgt. Mernin, who lived in Vienna, Va., was born in New York City. He served from 1945 to 1967 in the Marine Corps. At GSA, he oversaw quality standards on goods and services acquired by the government.
Francis Devereux, government contractor
Francis Devereux, 68, a Navy lieutenant commander who left active service in 1992 and spent the next 30 years as a government contractor who worked on classified military planning and defense planning strategies for Metron and other firms, died Oct. 31 at his home in Fredericksburg, Va. The cause was heart ailments, said his wife, Colleen Devereux.
Cmdr. Devereux was born in Brooklyn and was a 1976 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. He served aboard combat vessels and was a specialist in operations research and operational logistics. A former resident of Woodbridge, Va., he moved to Fredericksburg last summer.
Ulyses St. Arnold, Interior Dept. officer
Ulyses St. Arnold, 92, an officer of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs who retired in 1991 after 30 years of federal service, died Dec. 28 at a hospital in Alexandria, Va. The cause was complications of covid-19 and pneumonia, said a son, Daniel St. Arnold.
Mr. St. Arnold, a resident of Fort Washington, Md., was born in Assinins, Mich. He was a member of the Ojibwe Tribe of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Michigan. His work at the Bureau of Indian Affairs included Native American hunting, fishing and water rights. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: A highly qualified Black female Fed nominee opens a spigot of GOP vitriol
Economist Lisa D. Cook is a leader in her field. She has a PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and is a tenured professor of economics at Michigan State University. She served as a senior adviser to the Treasury Department under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. She played a major role in managing the euro-zone debt crisis when she served on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economics Advisers. She’s currently a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and on the executive committee of the American Economic Association.
This extensive experience — in academia and in crisis situations — is why President Biden nominated her to be on the Federal Reserve Board. And it’s why many prominent economists, including former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke (appointed by Mr. Bush), strongly support her.
Yet Republicans keep attacking her. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) called her “fundamentally not qualified,” and Fox News host Tucker Carlson went as far as to judge her “economically illiterate” and “unqualified to teach junior college econ 101."
In the case of Ms. Cook, some Republicans have claimed she knows little about the Fed and macroeconomics. That could not be further from the truth. She is an expert on financial crises, developing countries, and the role patents and innovation play in growth.
She made it clear at her confirmation hearing that she would prioritize fighting the current inflation problem. She described seeing the devastating impact of high inflation firsthand in developing nations. Last June she told The Post she was already concerned about how inflation would impact retirees, among others.
Some Republicans have zeroed in on her research on long-standing racial disparities in the economy, which they characterize as unrelated to the macroeconomy. That criticism reveals their own ignorance. The fact that some Americans are not able to reach their full potential, even today, because of discrimination and other barriers, harms the economy. One of those who encouraged Ms. Cook to keep studying this interrelationship was Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, the avatar of free-market economics.
Another GOP gripe is that Ms. Cook voiced support this past year for a bill in Congress that would form a commission to study the possibility of reparations to African Americans. Note that she was advocating for more research. And Congress, not the Fed, will decide these issues.
We reiterate our support for Ms. Cook. She’s qualified and brings much needed expertise on hyperinflation and inequality. The Senate should approve her soon. | null | null | null | null | null |
The biggest news, however, may have been the move the Wizards didn’t make as franchise cornerstone Bradley Beal was not traded. His situation is complicated as he is out for the rest of the season due to upcoming wrist surgery and has the right to become an unrestricted free agent after the season. He has yet to sign a a four-year, $181.5 million extension that had been on the table since Oct. 1.
Bertans has been a disappointment since singing a five-year, $80 million deal before the 2020 season. Known as a sharp-shooting big man, Bertans has shot just 31.9 percent from behind the arc this season.
Porzingis was the No. 4 overall pick in 2015 and earned the nickname “the unicorn” for his offensive versatility in a 7-foot-3 frame. He missed the 2018-19 season with a torn ACL and hasn’t played more than 57 games in the two following seasons and has dealt with nagging injuries this season. Porzingis is averaging 19.2 points in the games he has played this season to go along with 7.7 rebound and 1.7 blocks. His 28.3 three-point percentage, however, is a career low as he’s consistently shot about 35 to 39 percent from behind the arc in his five pervious seasons.
Smith has played for 12 different organizations and this will be his second stint with the Wizards after playing with the team from 2019-21. He averaged 4.5 points and 2.6 assists while shooting just 39.5 percent in 13.8 minutes per game. Smith is signed through the 2022-23 season, but his contract is non-guaranteed if waived before July 1, 2022. | null | null | null | null | null |
London Metropolitan Police commissioner resigns amid scandals
In a statement, Dick said it was with “huge sadness” that she was quitting the commissioner post she has held since 2017, but that London Mayor Sadiq Khan made it clear he “no longer has sufficient confidence in my leadership” and “left me no choice but to step aside.”
But the scandal has been simmering since November, and critics say the police should have gotten involved much sooner. A late January survey by Ipsos found the less than half of Britons had confidence that the police would conduct a thorough and independent investigation that would result in any penalties.
London police were also heavily-criticized for acting in a heavy-handed manner at a vigil for Everard, but the force was later cleared by a police watchdog. One of the defining images from the vigil was of Patsy Stevenson, a women’s right activist who was pinned to the ground by male police officers. She tweeted on Thursday evening: “Seeya.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Tunisia’s democracy can be saved with U.S. help
Tunisian President Kais Saied at the new government's swearing-in ceremony at the Carthage Palace outside the capital Tunis, on Feb. 27, 2020. (Fethi Belaid/Pool via Associated Press)
In his Feb. 4 Friday Opinion column, “Tunisia’s democracy is disappearing before our eyes,” Josh Rogin correctly underscored that as democracy goes in Tunisia, so goes democracy throughout the Arab world.
Tunisia sports an optimal political history and civic infrastructure for democracy. If democracy shipwrecks there, it will crush all democratic stirrings in Egypt, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Algeria and elsewhere in the Arab Middle East. To prevent this calamity, the United States should consider revoking Tunisia’s status as a non-NATO ally and declare President Kais Saied’s seizure of limitless power, with military force, last July a coup, triggering a withholding of any U.S. assistance, economic or military, pursuant to Section 7008 of Public Law 116-260.
This past weekend, Mr. Saied announced the dissolution of the Supreme Judicial Council, a body of 45 judges, elected to supervise the judicial system. Mr. Saied, who has controlled the executive and legislative branches of government since July 25, now wants to also control the judicial system. This is a major threat to the democratic process in Tunisia.
Lifting the sanctions should be conditioned on Tunisia’s reopening of the elected parliament, to prevent the president from further legislating by decree, and on organizing early (presidential and parliamentary) elections within 90 days, as mandated by Tunisia’s constitution. Mr. Saied’s plan to write a new constitution, by a committee of his own choosing, aims at entrenching tyranny indefinitely and will further destroy democracy and convulse the Arab world.
Radwan A. Masmoudi, Washington
The writer is president of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy. | null | null | null | null | null |
Protesters block the roadway at the Ambassador Bridge border crossing in Windsor, Ontario, on Feb. 9. (Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images)
The “Freedom Convoy” protest of Canadian truckers angry over a requirement that they be vaccinated to cross the U.S. border has taken a consequential turn. It has become nothing less than an attack on the economies of two countries.
And while you might have thought this was a mildly interesting story of the ordinarily polite world of Canadian politics becoming momentarily more contentious, in truth, this is fundamentally a story about the United States.
That’s because the primary base of support for the protesters — who themselves are different from what you’ve been told — is the American right. We’re seeing an attempt by Fox News, other conservative media outlets, Republican politicians, and conservative activists to call attention to the Canadian protests — and build, expand and spread those protests as far as possible.
In the past couple of days, the protest has increased its focus on the border, in an attempt to sabotage the flow of trade between the U.S. and Canada. Protesters have essentially shut down the Ambassador Bridge, which links Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, over which 25 percent of all trade between the two countries travels, as well as other border crossings. Auto plants are already closing because they can’t obtain the parts that normally come from across the border.
It’s hard to exaggerate how much of a cause celebre this has become on the right, as conservatives use every megaphone at their disposal to promote and cheer on the protest. Fox News has devoted hours of airtime to the protesters, who, in the words of Sean Hannity, “are taking a stand for freedom, human dignity and autonomy.”
While some participants just want to drive across the border without being vaccinated, the protest is a hodgepodge of ordinary truckers, anti-vax crazies, and a bunch of far-right organizations imagining about implanted microchips and secret concentration camps. It includes Holocaust deniers, Islamophobes, and people demanding the arrest of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Rather than a spontaneous upsurge of anger at policy, this is more about Canadian far-right activists who suddenly found the right vehicle to promote fringe anti-governmental views that had not gotten a foothold before.
What those activists now have that they didn’t have before is a full-court press of promotion from the American right, especially its powerful media outlets.
Embracing far-right activists who are extreme in both their views and their tactics is nothing new for Fox News and the rest of the conservative media. They regularly make heroes out people like Cliven Bundy, who gained fame for his refusal to pay for his use of government resources. Wherever there’s an armed standoff involving a handful of right-wing extremists, it’s a good bet that conservative media will lionize the lawbreakers.
But they have a particular interest at moments such as this one. Conservative media are an incubator, promoter and participant in right-wing social movements that emerge in response to the election of a Democratic president.
When there’s a Democrat in the White House, chaos becomes the order of the day in conservative media. They hype angry protests, outbreaks of violence, shutdowns of economic activity — whatever contributes to the sense that noble champions of freedom are rising up against the government, which is portrayed as simultaneously brutal in its tyranny and too weak to maintain order.
With the Canadian rightists, Fox News and the other conservative media are creating the same kind of feedback loop they did with the tea party when Barack Obama was president: The protesters are encouraged by those outlets to believe their cause is righteous and the people are behind them, so they ramp up the extremism of their demands and their tactics, an acceleration that is in turn cheered in the right-wing media, and the cycle continues.
The next phase is to bring the same tactics here to the United States. A collection of anti-governmental activists is now trying to organize a similar convoy to drive to Washington to protest vaccine and mask mandates. Likewise, it’s being promoted on Fox News. | null | null | null | null | null |
Kinzinger chided McCarthy as “a feckless, weak, tired man, who is doing the bidding of whatever Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks is going to raise her money that day,” referring to the congresswoman from Georgia. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), fresh from getting slammed by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson for describing Jan. 6 as a “violent terrorist attack,” said McConnell shouldn’t have used the word “insurrection” to describe the violence. RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who oversaw the censure debacle as it unfolded, shifted blame for the fiasco to Trump operative David Bossie, who spearheaded the resolution. McDaniel’s uncle, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), called the censure “stupid.” Other Republicans called it “absurd” or “embarrassing.”
The subject is toxic for suburban women, business interests and moderate voters who fear the Republican Party is still under the thumb of a dangerous former president and too easily goaded into violence and contempt for elections. While voters understandably want relief from inflation and covid-19, they do not want to return to the chaos and violence of the Trump era. It behooves Democrats to remind them that by voting for candidates with an “R” next to their names, they would be inviting just such a result. | null | null | null | null | null |
The biggest news, however, may have been the move the Wizards didn’t make as franchise cornerstone Bradley Beal was not traded. His situation is complicated as he is out for the rest of the season due to upcoming wrist surgery and has the right to become an unrestricted free agent after the season. He has yet to sign a four-year, $181.5 million extension that had been on the table since Oct. 1.
Porzingis, 26, was the No. 4 overall pick in 2015 and earned the nickname “the unicorn” for his offensive versatility in a 7-foot-3 frame. He missed the 2018-19 season with a torn ACL and hasn’t played more than 57 games in the two following seasons and has dealt with nagging injuries this season. Porzingis is averaging 19.2 points in the games he has played this season to go along with 7.7 rebound and 1.7 blocks. His 28.3 three-point percentage, however, is a career low as he’s consistently shot about 35 to 39 percent from behind the arc in his five pervious seasons.
Smith has played for 12 different organizations and this will be his second stint with the Wizards after playing with the team from 2019-21. He averaged 4.5 points and 2.6 assists this season while shooting just 39.5 percent in 13.8 minutes per game. Smith is signed through the 2022-23 season, but his contract is non-guaranteed if waived before July 1, 2022. | null | null | null | null | null |
London Metropolitan Police’s first female commissioner resigns amid scandals
In a statement, Dick said it was with “huge sadness” that she was quitting the commissioner post she has held since 2017 but that London Mayor Sadiq Khan made it clear he “no longer has sufficient confidence in my leadership” and “left me no choice but to step aside.”
But the scandal has been simmering since November, and critics say the police should have gotten involved much sooner. A late January survey by Ipsos found that less than half of Britons had confidence that the police would conduct a thorough and independent investigation that would result in any penalties.
London police were also heavily criticized for acting in a heavy-handed manner at a vigil for Everard, but the force was later cleared by a police watchdog. One of the defining images from the vigil was of Patsy Stevenson, a women’s rights activist who was pinned to the ground by male police officers. She tweeted on Thursday evening: “Seeya.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Sutter Health in California faces class-action lawsuit alleging abuse of market power
Calif. company faces lawsuit over high bills
A lawsuit over high health-care bills filed on behalf of more than 3 million employers and people seeks as much as $1.2 billion from a large Northern California health system in an antitrust class-action trial getting underway Thursday.
That allowed Sutter to overcharge for its own services, the lawsuit alleges, and caused nearly $400 million in insurance premium overcharges to the plaintiffs between 2011 and 2017. Five companies provided the health insurance: Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California, Aetna, UnitedHealthcare, and Health Net.
Nearly 60,000 bees have been stolen from a grocery store company's field in Pennsylvania, the company said. The bees were said to be stolen in Carlisle between Jan. 28 and Jan. 30, Pennlive.com reported. The Giant Company's community impact manager, Jessica Groves, said that the bees were an essential part of the local food chain that has a declining bee population. In 2021, beekeepers in the state reported a loss of 41 percent of their populations, which was less than the national average loss of 45.5 percent.
PG&E Corp. wants to bury about 3,600 miles of power lines over the next five years in areas at high risk of wildfires, part of an ambitious plan to reduce the threat of its equipment starting catastrophic blazes. The California utility giant aims to put 175 miles of lines underground this year at a cost of $3.75 million per mile. | null | null | null | null | null |
This combo of images show Rene Sanchez, left and Peter Kovacs. Sanchez, a Louisiana native and award-winning journalist, will be the next editor of The Times-Picayune, The Advocate and NOLA.com, the media outlet announced, Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022. Kovacs, the current editor, who led the paper to an unprecedented expansion throughout southeast Louisiana and its first Pulitzer Prize, is retiring after nine years at the helm. Sanchez, 56, is currently the editor of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. (/The Advocate via AP) (Uncredited/The Advocate)
NEW ORLEANS — The editor of Louisiana’s largest newspaper is retiring, and the new editor is a returning New Orleans native who comes to the job after heading the biggest newspaper in Minnesota. | null | null | null | null | null |
Federal judge restores protections for gray wolves in much of the U.S., reversing a Trump policy
The decision doesn’t restore protections to wolves in the northern Rockies, where they are being aggressively hunted
A male Gray Wolf in fresh falling snow in Montana. (Dennis Fast/VWPics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
A federal judge on Thursday restored protections to gray wolves in much of the country, reversing a decision by the Trump administration that stripped Endangered Species Act protections and exposed the animals to aggressive hunting in areas where they were nearly killed off years ago.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White in Northern California immediately restores federal protections for wolf populations in the Lower 48 states outside of northern Rocky Mountain states — one of the hotbeds of wolf hunting — and means the federal government is now in charge of managing wolf populations in places such as the Great Lakes Region, the Pacific Coast, and other parts of their range.
During the Trump administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had taken gray wolves off the Endangered Species List and given control back to states. In his ruling, White challenged the rationale for doing so and said the Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t rely on the best available science or fully address what’s happening to wolves outside of their main population clusters.
Environmental groups hailed the decision but warned that intense hunting pressure in states such as Montana, Idaho and Wyoming — which were not part of this court case — remains a grave threat to the country’s gray wolves. Wolves were nearly wiped out a century ago by hunting in much of the country, but federal protections have helped reestablish their populations in recent decades.
“This is huge for wolves throughout much of the Lower 48,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and chief executive of Defenders of Wildlife, one of the environmental groups that sued the Interior Department over the Trump-era rule change. “Hopefully today’s ruling kind of stops the hemorrhage.”
The controversy over wolf hunting this year has been particularly intense in Montana and the area around Yellowstone National Park, where gray wolves were reintroduced in 1995 after being eliminated by hunters in the 1920s. Last year, after new state laws backed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte eased rules on hunting, state fish and game commissioners removed wolf hunting quotas in areas north of Yellowstone that are popular with wolf packs, which wander in and out of the park.
In recent months, more than 20 of these wolves have been killed leaving Yellowstone, primarily in Montana, causing an outcry among wildlife advocates, tourists who come to observe wolves, and wildlife-guiding businesses that rely on those tourists.
The Interior Department this year has been reviewing whether to put gray wolves back on the Endangered Species List, including in these states.
Interior Department spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said the department was reviewing the court’s decision.
“Today is a monumental victory for wolves who will now be protected from state-sponsored bloodbaths,” Kitty Block, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. | null | null | null | null | null |
“I was caught off-guard because we’re in 2022 and still facing the same problems as our grandparents and their grandparents,” Marian Turner, an international studies major at Spelman College in Atlanta told The Guardian after her school was targeted by bomb threats this year. “It just really brings to light everything that’s happening, because we’re actually experiencing it.”
Though prominent schools like Howard University in D.C. began getting the calls in January — there have been at least three so far in 2022 — most of the calls flooded the schools at the start of Black History Month this February. These campuses were created as safe spaces for African American students to learn and achieve with freedom and without fear. No coincidence that the timing of the bomb threats come this month, as parts of White America resist learning the full story of Black America.
“This group from what we can tell, it is a neo-Nazi organization going by the name of Atomwaffen,” Daytona Beach Police Chief Jakari Young said in a news conference.
This is the damage being done today. Rather than rip through bodies and buildings, the faux bombers are tearing at security and safety of a community fabric.
Police have arrested a 16-year-old from Southeast D.C. for the calls. No Attomwaffen involved. Seems as though it was one of those old-fashioned, pull the fire drill to get out of school thing a kid did for his friends.
“I’ve always subscribed to the theory that bombers bomb and threateners threaten,” Robert Mueck, director of public safety at St. John’s College in Maryland and a member of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators’ Domestic Preparedness Committee, told The Washington Post. Calling in a bomb threat is “more of a nuisance crime,” he said, “like back in high school, kids pulling a fire alarm to get out of an exam.”
My son texted me from his private Jesuit school in D.C. as I was writing this. The boys were huddled in the music room’s vault during an active shooter drill. When they were little, the repeated drills and banging on doors and reminders to stay silent made them cry. Today, they all did the Wordle puzzle.
As the threat of last century’s racial violence revisits them, today’s generation living in an era of active shooter drills may never be “all clear.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Iran nuclear talks head toward finish line, but outcome is unclear
Negotiations are both ‘closer than we have been to a deal,’ in that some progress has been made, and ‘closer than we have been to breakdown,’ as time for agreement runs out, a U.S. official said
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in Tehran on Feb. 7. (Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Talks between Iran and world powers over revitalizing the Iran nuclear agreement have reached their final stage and are expected to conclude one way or the other by the end of this month, according to participants.
A senior U.S. official, however, noted that major issues on the table remain unresolved. Negotiations are both “closer than we have been to a deal,” in that some progress has been made, and “closer than we have been to breakdown,” as time for agreement runs out, the official said. “Both outcomes are still very possible,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to comment on the sensitive diplomacy.
But “based on where we are, it is more likely than not that we don’t succeed,” the official said. The Biden administration has said that only a “handful” of weeks remain before ongoing advances in Iran’s nuclear program will make agreement impossible.
In recent days, media outlets associated with hard-line Iranian factions have conveyed a sense that Tehran is committed to returning to the deal and that the decision has the blessing of the country’s highest leaders.
In a report Monday, Tasnim, a daily associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, quoted an anonymous source “close to the Iranian negotiating team” as saying that the government had made its “political decision” on a return to the deal but that the obstacle was “decision-making by the United States.”
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, was agreed upon in 2015 by Iran and the “P5+1,” the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — and Germany. The E.U. participated as coordinator of the negotiations that led to agreement.
Under its terms, the P5+1 agreed to lift U.S. and international sanctions imposed as a brake on Iran’s nuclear development program. For it’s part, Iran agreed to sharp limits on the program — which it has consistently said is intended only for peaceful purposes and not to produce nuclear weapons — and to international monitoring and verification of compliance.
The Trump administration withdrew the United States from the agreement in 2018, reimposing the lifted U.S. sanctions along with around 1,500 new ones designed to cripple the Iranian economy. In response, Iran has advanced its nuclear program far beyond the JCPOA limits, installing sophisticated new centrifuges that enrich uranium ever closer to that required to fuel a nuclear weapon.
President Biden campaigned on a promise to restore U.S. participation in the deal, pledging “compliance for compliance” in eliminating all nuclear-related sanctions in return for Iran returning to the original JCPOA limits. Negotiations, again coordinated by the E.U., began last spring but were interrupted for months by July elections in Iran. Its new government adopted a much tougher stance when talks resumed in November.
“So far, we haven’t heard from Iran positions we believe are consistent” with full compliance, the U.S. official said. “They are still making demands that go beyond [U.S. positions] on the sanctions side and not reaching what we believe we need to reach on the nuclear side.” The administration has said that nonnuclear sanctions, imposed for human rights violations and to curb Iran’s development of ballistic missiles, are not eligible for lifting, because they were not part of the original JCPOA.
Biden’s first year brought a cascade of foreign policy challenges, undermining his goal of projecting calm competence
The official rejected reports that a group of technical sanctions waived by the administration last week constituted a U.S. concession. “They were necessary in order for Iran to take the steps it would need to take” to achieve compliance, the official said, allowing them to begin discussions with third parties to arrange for the removal from the country of uranium enriched beyond the JCPOA limits, the official said. Under the original agreement, such material was transferred to Russia.
U.S. officials have also denied reports that an interim agreement, with partial compliance on both sides, was possible. Ulyanov, speaking in the Kommersant interview, said that while an “intermediate solution” might have been possible last year, that is now “completely irrelevant. It is not considered.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Workers load boxes of newspapers and other items into a truck outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
While it was unclear how many classified documents were among those received by the Archives, some bore markings that the information was extremely sensitive — sometimes colloquially referred to as being “above top secret" — and would be limited to a small group of officials with authority to view such highly classified information, the two people familiar with the matter said.
It remained unclear if the Justice Department would launch a full-fledged investigation. The files were being stored in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as a SCIF, while Justice Department officials debated how to proceed, the two people familiar with the matter said.
Trump’s years-long defiance of the Presidential Records Act, which requires the preservation of memos, letters, notes, emails, faxes and other written communications related to a president’s official duties, and other unusual record keeping practices have long drawn scrutiny. In 2018, for example, Politico reported on his penchant for ripping up official documents. But in recent weeks, Trump’s activities have generated new attention — in large part because of the House select committee’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
A “top secret” classification is applied to information where unauthorized disclosure “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security” according to the Archives’s Information Security Oversight Office.
But — regardless of whether a criminal case could be substantiated — Van Grack said: “the FBI would want and need to review the information and conduct an investigation to determine what occurred and whether any sources and methods were compromised.”
While that is not in itself necessarily unusual, the documents would pile up. One White House staffer said it became a problem that eventually led records staff to search for materials in classified burn bags, which are used to dispose of documents.
Officials had to the scramble to pack up before Joe Biden took office, and one person familiar with the events surmised that some of the documents from the residence likely made their way into boxes destined for Mar-a-Lago rather than being turned over as they should have been. One adviser said Trump began reviewing materials in December after staff received the requests from Gary Stern, a longtime Archives lawyer.
Laufman, who was involved in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, said a Justice Department investigation would not focus just on Trump but also those who packed up the classified materials and moved them to Mar-a-Lago, and whether they knew what they were doing. He said the next step would be for the FBI to go to the secure facility where the documents were being stored, review the markings for themselves, and then “to broaden its investigation to learn how these documents came to be taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and whether anybody associated with that bears potential criminal liability.”
Investigators found 110 emails that contained classified information at the time they were sent or received in the group of 30,000 that Clinton later turned over for review, including eight email chains that contained information that was “top secret” at the time they were sent. But the Justice Department ultimately decided not to charge Clinton, after the FBI determined they could not prove she intended to mishandle sensitive material. | null | null | null | null | null |
This image from U.S. Capitol Police body-worn video that was in government sentencing memorandum in the case, shows Mark Leffingwell inside the U.S. Capitol near the Senate Wing Doors on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. Leffingwell, a 52-year-old military veteran who served in Iraq, who punched two police officers during the riot, was sentenced on Feb. 10, 2022, to six months imprisonment. Leffingwell is the fifth rioter to be sentenced for assaulting police at the Capitol. (U.S. Capitol Police via AP) (Uncredited/U.S. Capitol Police) | null | null | null | null | null |
Race in America: History Matters with Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) & Janai S....
Race in America: History Matters with Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) & Janai S. Nelson
Throughout American history, Black women have played a central role in the fight for civil and women’s rights. Their work paved the way for future generations to ascend to new heights across all facets of society. On Wednesday, Feb. 16 at 10:30 a.m. ET, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Janai S. Nelson, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, each reflect on the women who inspired them, the continued structural barriers Black women face today and the forces that are pushing change in our continuing series about the role of Black women in the country’s history.
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio)
Janai S. Nelson
Associate Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Content from National Women’s Law Center
Fatima Goss Graves
President & CEO, National Women’s Law Center
Dani Ayers
Chief Executive Officer, me too. International
Editor-in-Chief, The Filament | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. forces had been monitoring Qurayshi’s house since the fall, including the “the pattern of life of all the occupants there,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the operation remains highly sensitive.
[U.S. military admits ‘horrible mistake’ in Kabul drone strike that killed 10 Afghans] | null | null | null | null | null |
Federal judge restores protections for gray wolves in much of U.S., reversing Trump policy
The decision doesn’t restore protections for wolves in the northern Rockies, where they are being hunted aggressively
A gray wolf in Montana. (Dennis Fast/VWPics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
A federal judge on Thursday restored protections for gray wolves in much of the country, reversing a decision by the Trump administration that stripped Endangered Species Act protections and exposed the animals to aggressive hunting in areas where they were nearly killed off years ago.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White in Northern California immediately reimposes safeguards for wolf populations in the Lower 48 outside of northern Rocky Mountain states — one of the hotbeds of wolf hunting — and puts federal officials in charge of managing wolf populations in places such as the Great Lakes region, the Pacific coast, and other parts of their range.
During the Trump administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had taken gray wolves off the list of endangered species and given control back to states. In his ruling, White challenged the rationale for doing so, saying the agency didn’t rely on the best available science or fully address threats to wolves outside of their main populations.
Environmental groups hailed the decision but warned that intense hunting pressure in states such as Montana, Idaho and Wyoming — which were not part of this court case — remains a serious threat to the country’s gray wolves. Hunters nearly wiped them out a century ago in much of the country, but federal protections have helped reestablish many packs in recent decades.
“This is huge for wolves throughout much of the Lower 48,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and chief executive of Defenders of Wildlife, one of the organizations that sued the Interior Department over the Trump-era policy. “Hopefully today’s ruling kind of stops the hemorrhage.”
The controversy over wolf hunting this year has been particularly intense in Montana and the area around Yellowstone National Park, where gray wolves were reintroduced in 1995 after being eliminated by hunters in the 1920s. Last year, after new state laws backed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte eased rules on hunting, state fish and game commissioners removed wolf-hunting quotas in areas north of Yellowstone that are popular with wolf packs, which wander in and out of the park.
In recent months, more than 20 of these wolves have been killed leaving Yellowstone, primarily in Montana, causing an outcry among wildlife advocates, tourists who come to observe the wolves, and wildlife-guiding businesses that rely on those tourists.
This year, Interior officials have been reviewing whether to list gray wolves again under the Endangered Species Act, including in these states.
Interior spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said the department was reviewing the court’s decision.
But pro-hunting groups criticized the decision.
“We are disappointed that an activist judge from California decided to tell farmers, ranchers, and anyone who supports a balanced ecosystem with common-sense predator management that he knows better than them,” Luke Hilgemann, president and CEO of Hunter Nation, a Kansas-based hunting advocacy group, said in a statement. | null | null | null | null | null |
In Boy Scouts bankruptcy case, lawyers for some alleged victims now urging them to accept settlement
A statue outside the Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Irving, Tex. (LM Otero/AP)
The lawyers represent some of the more than 84,000 people who allege they were sexually abused as children by Boy Scout leaders. In August, a U.S. bankruptcy judge approved an $850 million settlement proposed by the Boy Scouts to resolve claims from the alleged victims. The Boy Scouts’ proposal consists of settlements with three insurance companies, the BSA’s local councils and organizations that sponsored troops, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the United Methodist Church.
Boy Scouts reach agreement with Mormon Church, insurers in sex abuse case
Amala is among the attorneys who, court documents show, are now advising their clients to reverse their votes and approve the settlement. In a statement, he said: “Our goal was to try to fix the BSA’s proposed plan by making it more fair to survivors. We think we have done that in this new plan. We created a way for survivors to access the policies of insurance companies who haven’t yet settled. We also put in protections to ensure that settlements with insurance companies or entities who allowed our clients to be abused, including the charter organizations, reflect substantial payments based on the claims of the survivors.”
The revised terms are the product of mediation between the Boy Scouts and some of the victims’ attorneys. Both sides reached an agreement “in principle” on settlement terms, court documents show. Even if a greater share of victims support the settlement, the Boy Scouts’ bankruptcy plan may face challenges in court because it grants legal immunity to local councils, chartering organizations and other non-debtors. | null | null | null | null | null |
But aid groups believe that some of the dead — particularly children — may be going uncounted. On the day of the strike, UNICEF stated that at least six children had been killed in Atma on the night of the strike “due to heavy violence” and that “civilian-populated areas were severely damaged.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Victims’ attorneys back revised Boy Scouts settlement
Victims' lawyers back revised settlement
The lawyers represent some of more than 84,000 people who allege they were sexually abused as children by Boy Scout leaders. In August, a U.S. bankruptcy judge approved an $850 million settlement proposed by the Boy Scouts to resolve claims from the alleged victims. The Boy Scouts’ proposal consists of settlements with three insurance companies, the BSA’s local councils and organizations that sponsored groups including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the United Methodist Church.
Amala is among the attorneys who, court documents show, are now advising their clients to reverse their votes and approve the settlement.
— Casey Parks
Fighter jet flown by contractor crashes
A fighter jet operated by a military contractor crashed west of Phoenix on Thursday but the pilot ejected safely and no one on the ground was hurt, a spokesman for the contractor and U.S. Air Force officials said.
The French-made Mirage F1 crashed near Buckeye, a growing community about 30 miles west of Phoenix.
John Rupp, director of foreign military sales for Airborne Tactical Advantage Co., confirmed it was one of his company’s jets that went down. The pilot was taken to a hospital for evaluation and is being treated for only minor injuries.
Officials at Luke Air Force Base in nearby Glendale later confirmed the crash and said it occurred late Thursday morning about 15 miles west of the base in an unpopulated area. The plane had been operating out of Luke, the Air Force’s main base for training F-35 fighter pilots.
Another Mirage F1 operated by a different contractor crashed in Las Vegas in May last year as the pilot came in to land at nearby Nellis Air Force Base. The pilot was killed.
Fordham names first woman as president
Fordham’s outgoing president, the Rev. Joseph McShane, is stepping down after about two decades in office. | null | null | null | null | null |
Retail gas prices are determined primarily by crude oil prices set by a global market, which is not controlled the U.S. president or Congress or governors. President Biden can release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to show he’s Doing Something, such as the 50 million barrels announced in November. But that extra oil is a drop in the barrel — equivalent to less than three days’ worth of U.S. oil consumption.
But that ain’t gonna fix the fact that global energy demands are way up, and energy supply chains remain severely constrained by covid — and, more recently, by the threat of conflict involving Ukraine. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ex-NFL player Justin Bannan sentenced to 16 years for 2019 shooting
“I just want you to know I’m going to do everything I can to make things right,” Justin Bannan, shown in 2012, said in court, “no matter what that looks like.” (Harry How/Getty Images)
Former NFL player Justin Bannan was sentenced Thursday to 16 years in prison after being found guilty by a jury in September of attempted first-degree murder. He had been accused of shooting a woman in the shoulder in an Oct. 2019 incident in Boulder, Colo.
The sentence represented the minimum Bannan, 42, could have received under the law. The woman he shot, identified as then-36-year-old Ashley Marie, asked for him to receive a minimum sentence (via KUSA TV in Denver) but also asked that Bannan get maximum probation and be ordered to drug treatment.
Bannan apologized in court Thursday (via KMGH) for “all the pain and trauma” he inflicted on Marie. According to her statement to police, Bannan had also apologized immediately after shooting her and declared that “the Russian Mafia is after me.”
The incident took place in a building Bannan co-owned, which housed a business he co-founded. Marie, who worked as an acupuncturist at a different company located in the building, had a slight familiarity with him because they occasionally crossed paths there. While she was taken at the time to a hospital with what were described as non-life-threatening injuries, police said they found two .45-caliber handguns inside a backpack belonging to Bannan, as well as a rolled-up $20 bill coated with a white substance that tested positive for cocaine.
A standout defensive end at the University of Colorado, Bannen went on to a 12-year NFL career that included stints with the Denver Broncos and four other teams. Bannan said after the shooting, per police, that he suffered from hydrocephalus, a condition in which fluid builds within the brain that can cause pressure in the head and defects in cognitive ability.
Mitch Unrein, Bannan’s former Broncos teammate, testified at Thursday’s hearing (via KUSA) that Bannan could have suffered brain damage while playing football. Defense attorneys also pointed to the possibility that brain damage, as well as drug use, contributed to the shooting. Judge Norma A. Sierra, who sentenced Bannan, noted the references during the trial to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease that has been linked to repeated concussive and subconcussive impacts.
Prosecutors reportedly asked for Bannan to receive 26 years in prison.
“There are consequences for one’s actions, particularly when it involves trying to kill someone by shooting them at close range,” Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said in a statement (via KDVR). “Although our office and the pre-sentence report recommended a longer prison sentence because of the defendant’s deliberate actions in his attempt to murder Dr. Marie, the victim wanted the minimum prison sentence to be imposed. I think that says a lot about her compassion and her values.”
“I feel absolutely horrible about what happened,” Bannan said Thursday. “I love this place and I love this town. It means everything to me. I love this state. And I hope someday you guys can give me a second chance. I just want you to know I’m going to do everything I can to make things right, no matter what that looks like.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The National Women’s Soccer League champions are almost two weeks into training camp at an indoor venue in Northern Virginia before operations move to Bradenton, Fla., this weekend. Veterans are regaining fitness and prospects are seeking to make their mark before roster cuts begin.
The players had publicly supported Kang in a saga that spilled into the public in August when then-coach Richie Burke was accused of verbally and emotionally abusing players.
“It’s not just a man’s world anymore,” McKeown said. “We’ve got a woman helping us.”
Aside from a statement Tuesday, Kang has not spoken publicly about her plans. The Spirit still doesn’t have a full-time training facility. Since Feb. 1, it’s been using the St. James in Springfield. Upon its return from Florida late this month, the Spirit plans to use fields at Episcopal High School in Alexandria — the same location it used late last season.
For more than two years, the long-term plan had been to move into D.C. United’s new training center in Leesburg, which opened last fall. But the Spirit is leaving options open.
Ben Olsen, the former United player and coach who Baldwin appointed president of club operations in September, is expected to retain his job. Olsen has also been serving as the de facto general manager, working with Ward on roster moves.
Ward is shorthanded for the next two weeks as 11 players report to five different national teams for tournaments. Kelley O’Hara, Andi Sullivan and Trinity Rodman were among seven named to the 23-strong U.S. squad for the SheBelieves Cup. … | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: Coronavirus: Impact on Hospitals with Shereef Elnahal, MD & Anne Zink, MD
MR. DIAMOND: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Dan Diamond, a national health reporter at the Post, and today we are looking at the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on hospitals.
My guests today are Dr. Anne Zink, chief medical officer for the state of Alaska, and Dr. Shereef Elnahal. He is the CEO of University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey. He's also New Jersey's former health commissioner. Thank you both for joining us.
DR. ZINK: Great to be here. Thank you.
DR. ELNAHAL: Thanks for having us.
MR. DIAMOND: And a quick reminder to our audience, you can chime in too. Just go on Twitter. Tweet your questions and comments to the handle, @PostLive. We will look for those and try and work them in throughout the conversation.
But, first, since I have the microphone, I've got a question or two for the doctors, and, Dr. Zink, let's start with you. Alaska has had one of the highest daily reported case counts of COVID‑19 in the past few weeks. Now, it appears things are getting better. Cases have fallen by about a third in the past week. Do you think your state is through the worst of it?
DR. ZINK: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me here and having a conversation about public health and health care.
I am hopeful that Alaska is starting to really come down after an Omicron surge. We had a really bad Delta wave as well. So both of those surges really stretched our hospital system as well as our health care capacity, and it's great to the see the numbers improving.
MR. DIAMOND: And, Dr. Elnahal, New Jersey is also seeing a decline in cases and hospitalizations. The state is also dropping mask requirements in March. Do you think that we're at a point that easing COVID restrictions is the best move?
DR. ELNAHAL: So thank you so much for having me again, Dan.
I think we are at that point, and I'll base my answer in a couple of foundational points here. The first is that we are, in fact, in pretty much a lull right now. We're very much on the downtrend with not only cases but hospitalizations, and the rate of transmission, which is a metric that essentially indicates how many additional people any given person with COVID‑19 will infect, is now well below 1.0. It's around 0.5, which is, in fact, among the lowest levels we've seen that metric in sometime.
So I think, objectively, we're in a much better place now, and most epidemiologists are predicting that because of the population level immunity that all of the Omicron infections have conferred in the population that we may be in a lull for many months. And so it's important with these restrictions to afford people the time of reprieve, to allow kids to take off their masks in the school, should parents choose that, to allow for indoor masking to have a reprieve as well. Those things are important because if we do end up surging again, for example, with a new variant, it will be important to at least have given people a break as we do that.
MR. DIAMOND: So, Dr. Zink, Dr. Elnahal is talking about the lull that we are entering as cases drop off and the mental health break that many of us are so eager for. At the same time, what happens if there is an upsurge again? Do you feel like we are in a position where the folks in Alaska will be receptive to that message? How would you be able to get them ready if we have to go back to more restrictions?
DR. ZINK: Yeah. Thanks for that question.
I think we are all exhausted from COVID, from public health professionals to the frontline health care workers to the public, and I think what we've really seen throughout this pandemic is that public health and health isn't just a subset of things that happen in the hospital. A healthy economy is built on healthy people. School healthy is built on healthy kids and healthy teachers being in place. Tribal health is public health. All of these things are connected and working together.
But, ultimately, mitigation efforts only work as well as people choosing to use them, so be that masking ventilation, distancing, making the choice to get vaccinated, and so I do think it is upon governments, it's upon leaders, it's upon scientists to make sure that we're explaining the information and empowering individual citizens with the resources and the tools to be able to have to keep themselves and their communities safe and healthy but also pulling those things off when it is time to pull off.
You know, Alaska is bigger than Montana, Texas, and‑‑excuse me‑‑Montana, Texas, and California combined, and so we've had certain communities that have really kept COVID out by doing a lot of testing prior to people coming in. We have some regions that are greater than 95 percent of those who were eligible who are vaccinated, and we have other regions which are less than 30 percent are vaccinated. So what this looks like in different places around just our state around the country look very different depending on those choices of mitigation efforts that those communities have embarked on, and we have a lot more tools now.
So we really need to use 2022 tools for 2022 challenges with COVID. We were a really different place two years ago, and it's fantastic that we've come so far with having such incredible efficacious and safe vaccines and so many more tools and better understanding of this virus than we ever had before.
MR. DIAMOND: Dr. Zink, just to stay with you for a second, you mentioned these other components of recovery, thinking about the economic case, reopening schools and so on. You're a health official. How do you take that information into account? Do you consult with economic experts, schooling experts and so on, or do you see your role as very narrowly focused around health care and you're letting other people make the distinction on those issues?
DR. ZINK: Yeah. So, you know, when I took this job, I took it personally because the mission of the department in health and social services, and that is the health and well‑being of COVID‑‑or excuse me‑‑the health and well‑being of Alaskans, not just COVID.
And so staying focused on that bigger picture has always been the goal, and so that is the physical health. that is the mental health, and that also has to fit into economic health. If people don't have housing, if they don't have running water or sewer, that has a direct impact on their physical health as well. So our mission from day one has been the health and well‑being of Alaskans, and we work with people all across the state.
I'm an emergency department physician as by training. I'm not the cardiologist. I'm not the orthopedic surgeon, and I see my role here as very similar. I'm not the virologist. I'm not the economist. I am not the epidemiologist. But I get the honor and privilege of working with them every single day for the challenge in front of us in promoting the health and well‑being of my patients, which are the people of the state that I serve, and so bringing those expertise together. And it looks really different in different states and in different regions at different times, and so we just try to create as much two‑way conversation and provide tools and resources to make sure that each community has the tools it needs to stay healthy and well.
MR. DIAMOND: Well, as we try to understand how COVID looks, New Jersey is a somewhat different place than Alaska, maybe just a bit, maybe just a little smaller.
Dr. Elnahal, I'm curious if you can take our viewers inside your hospital. What is life like right now in trying to fight the pandemic? What picture can you paint for people who are curious about the COVID situation where you are?
DR. ELNAHAL: Yeah. We certainly are smaller, but we have nine million people packed into our small land mass, so it gets interesting here.
What I'll say is we have a couple different interesting dynamics in our hospital right now. So we peaked at about 150 hospitalizations earlier this month with the end of last month, and right now, we're at about 30 people with COVID‑19 diagnosis in the hospital. That just means they had a positive test of COVID‑19 when they came in, but throughout the entire Omicron wave, about 60 percent of our patients were here with COVID but not for COVID, which really has a lot of implications on what hospitalization data actually tells you.
Arguably, many of the patients in the 60 percent category, we would have seen, anyway, the folks who simply tested positive incidentally when they came in, and so when you talk about how this informs policymakers when they say we have X number of hospitalizations or in many states X number of deaths because there isn't that much of a differentiation between somebody who dies and happens to have COVID‑19 or not, all those things have implications on what policies need to be done, especially around mandates, which really should only be instituted where a global risk of a population is under threat, unless you force people to do this or that, whether it's a mask mandate or a vaccination verification mandate or what have you.
The reality is for this specific wave, 60 percent of our patients only had an incidental diagnosis. On top of that, we've done other analyses in our hospital that actually narrowed down further the number of people who are still ill with COVID‑19 in our hospital. In other words, we have people recovering from COVID‑19. They're here for six, ten, fifteen days, and they're completely recovered from their COVID illness. And our clinicians have determined that they're not here for COVID, certainly, but also not here because of a complication related to COVID. And so all of this spells really important implications on hospitalization data, but certainly, the link between infections and cases and hospitalizations has also been disaggregated. In other words, using cases in and of themselves to make these really tough decisions on restrictions, I don't think is the right move anymore, and we really have to drill down and understand what hospitalization data really means, especially if it's going to inform our policymakers going forward.
MR. DIAMOND: So, to repeat back what I just heard from you, the case numbers are increasingly not helpful in understanding what the picture looks like on the ground, and even though the hospitalization numbers have gone up quite a bit, if you look closely, many of those patients are not presenting primarily for COVID.
But there has been debate over whether we're making too much, Doctor, of are patients with COVID, are they there for COVID because, ultimately, there are lots of hospital beds and hospital workers engaged in this fight.
DR. ELNAHAL: Well, certainly, the hospitalization data in that category of people with COVID is murky. Some of the patients are here because of a complication, let's say, dehydration or kidney failure. Because they had a COVID infection recently, I would, of course, consider those patients to be additive. In other words, COVID led them to go to the hospital, but for many of them, that's not the case, and so more nuance when it comes to informing how we interpret hospitalization data is going to be really important.
I would actually argue what has really strained hospitals and hospital systems throughout the Omicron wave, which is a very different dynamic than we've seen in earlier surges of COVID‑19, has been the impact on staff. The fact is our staffing shortage at the end of last month and the beginning of January‑‑or two months ago in the beginning of January has been the number of employees who had to be out due to COVID or a COVID‑related reason because of the rules. Of course, many of our employees were out because they were sick. Of course, anybody who is sick or feeling ill or has a fever needs to be out, but the fact was that when the CDC reduced the time frame out of work required for health care workers from ten days to five days, that may have been among the most helpful moves that the federal government made to allow us to withstand this surge.
The fact is we had many patients coming in with acute needs that were not COVID‑related throughout this entire time frame, and that one move allowed us to shore up our staffing in addition to the incredibly helpful members of the military that visited our hospital and are still here as a result of the Biden administration's help.
But I think as we look back at this in retrospect‑‑and this is not something that anybody expected or public health officials could even really expect‑‑that move really helped us actually survive because having enough staff, clinical staff especially, at the beside is absolutely important for patient care.
MR. DIAMOND: I'd like to encourage folks watching to submit questions on Twitter by replying to the @PostLive handle.
I would like to also stay on this issue of workforce in hospitals, Dr. Elnahal, you mentioned the help from the federal government, the military workers who came in to support your institution. Are you asking for an extension from the federal government to allow them to stay longer?
DR. ELNAHAL: We actually will not be. We have really benefitted from their help. They'll be here through the middle of February.
What I can tell you is that we are in a much better staffing situation right now, thankfully. We now have just under 200 people out of work for all reasons, and the worst throughout all of this, we were in the 350‑to‑400 range. And asymmetrically, the clinicians in our hospital were affected, and so what that means is we're in a much better place because infections are down. And the Omicron wave may have actually got us closer and closer to herd immunity in our population. We're not seeing anywhere near the case rates among our employees that we were seeing even just two to three weeks ago, and so, again, this portends for a good period of time, hopefully, where we will have a lull. But we should not be taking our eye off the ball in terms of preparation for the next wave. That means really establishing and recalibrating our metrics who understand when restrictions do need to be in place, making sure that we deliver oral therapeutics as widely as possible. These are blockbuster drugs that actually really reduce the severity of disease and again focusing on metrics that really indicate what hospital strain and health care system capacity strain really means.
MR. DIAMOND: Dr. Zink, how about you in the state of Alaska? Have your hospitals been affected just like Dr. Elnahal was discussing in New Jersey with the Omicron wave coming through sickening staff and leading to shortages?
DR. ZINK: Yeah, a similar story here in Alaska. I think one of the differences, particularly amongst the South and then again Alaska, was how hard the Delta wave hit us. With Delta, we saw patients being hospitalized for much longer lengths of stay. You know, our average hospitals were about 26, 25‑‑25, 26 percent of the people in the hospital were there because of COVID. Some hospitals were greater than 50 percent at that time, and that was really overwhelming staffing and staff capacity.
We weren't able to really pull in the National Guard because the National Guard was doing a lot of other medical work in the state, and so we worked with FEMA to have a series of GSA contractors, contracted health care professionals who were able to come into the state. We've had over 700 who have come in. Those contracts take a while to kind of get up and running but also continue to stay. We currently still have about 200 of those workers in state as we're slowly wearing those off.
Then when the Omicron surge hit, I think that we had a better way of our hospitals working with each other. Particularly our rural areas, we see a lot of inequities in health care distribution across America particularly when you think of rural and urban care and making sure that every hospital and every Alaskan, no matter where they were, were able to get and access care, and we were able to transfer the most critical patients to the resources they needed. We actually built up hospitals to have additional capacity like dialysis that were very short during the Omicron wave and so‑‑or excuse me‑‑during the Delta wave.
So this Omicron wave has been easier on the hospitals. Patients are less sick. They're in the hospital for shorter periods of time, and just as previously mentioned, our biggest surge was in just staff being out, but we had some of that additional capacity from these FEMA contractors that we had beforehand, and so this wave has not impacted our hospitals the same way as the Delta wave, which has been great. And it's great to see more people vaccinated, boosted, and more people who have had infection, which does provide some additional protection. So, hopefully, collectively, we are moving our way through this as these bumps in the pandemic continue, and we're able to get to a better place.
MR. DIAMOND: I appreciate the optimism. So I apologize for asking what may be a pessimistic question, but it's coming in from our audience. This is a question submitted earlier from Gregory Lanman of Georgia, who asks‑‑and we're not just talking about the Delta and Omicron waves, but have two years of the pandemic broken our hospitals? I have seen a negative impact on rural hospitals that lack the resources of their urban‑, suburban‑based peers.
Dr. Zink, based on what you were just saying, can you take this one?
DR. ZINK: Yeah. No, Gregory, I hear you. You know, I think that our rural hospitals have always been challenged. I think that the gaps and inequities within our current health care system have grown into chasms during this pandemic, and we see that in inequities that we see in both racial outcomes but also in what we see with rural versus urban divide.
We see a lot of people leaving the health care system as a whole, and we see many hospitals really being devastated by what has been now going on three years of just an incredibly challenging time. And so I think the more that we can approach this with understanding, with kindness, the more that we can really get back to that patient‑physician or patient‑health care provider relationship, the more that we can support health care workers, the mental health of health care workers. It has been strained prior to this pandemic. It has only been magnified during this pandemic, and I think that we really need to structurally look at the way that we address inequities, particularly rural and urban divide in our health care delivery system.
We have a very urban‑centric delivery care system as well as the way that we train health care providers, and we are working on that. You know, GME funding is now making it easier for people to train in rural areas, but we are all in this together, and what happens in a rural area does impact an urban area and vice versa.
So I really appreciate that question, and this is where I think we really need to focus how we rebuild out health care infrastructure and our public health infrastructure moving forward.
MR. DIAMOND: Dr. Zink, my colleague, Akilah Johnson, recently wrote a detailed story about the challenges of serving Alaska Natives who often live in tough‑to‑reach communities. They struggled with poor health outcomes before the pandemic, as I think you alluded to. Are you using this moment in any tangible way to try and improve the safety net for them? Is there any intervention you've overseen to make sure that that community is better equipped moving forward?
DR. ZINK: Yeah. Honestly, I cannot think of a better partner during this pandemic than our tribes. We have 226 independent sovereign tribes in the state of Alaska, and their leadership, their partnership, their history, the fact that they were really decimated by the 1918 pandemic, and every pandemic and epidemic that has came through this world that we have documented has, unfortunately, disproportionately impacted Alaska Native people. That oral history played a huge role in the way that we were able to respond to and continue to respond to this pandemic on a regular basis.
So, for example, early on, testing was coming in via different resources. We were manufacturing our own testing, and we found that if we were able to get communities the resources they needed, they were able to really mitigate and control the pandemic in new and unique ways. They were able to identify cases early. They were able to do housing and quarantine. If you look at our vaccine rates, they're actually highest amongst our communities that are high‑‑have the highest rate of Alaska Native people.
Our Eastern Aleutian tribes is greater than 90 percent right now vaccinated in that region, and we've built every aspect of our response in partnership with our tribes. So, for example, our vaccine task force at every single level had a tribal partner as well as a state partner so that we could really see what the other one was doing and be able to move forward.
And a lot of our success‑‑you know, we led the nation for about a month in the most people vaccinated per capita‑‑was because of the incredible ingenuity of our tribal health partners who were getting vaccine out by dogsled to elders in their house or man baskets between fishing vessels or snow machines on airplanes that were moving back and forth. They know their community. They know how to share information. They know what is a priority.
I love being on meetings with whaling captains where they are the ones who lead in the meeting, and I am just there to share the information about COVID, and they can make it apply to their community. So I really think we all need to lean into those trusted leaders in our community. What that looks like in New Jersey versus Utqiagvik are very different, but regardless, be it a church leader or a whaling captain, these are our leaders in our communities that we need to continue to partner with to make sure that we're all thinking about the health and well‑being of our communities.
MR. DIAMOND: I'd love to hear from Dr. Elnahal if he's tapped the whaling captains in Newark, but in the meantime, I have a question that just came in from Twitter from Wendy Cronin.
Dr. Elnahal, this is for you. You noted that there are therapeutics now to treat COVID, but Wendy says she's heard they're in very short supply. How available are those therapeutics?
DR. ELNAHAL: Thanks, Wendy, for the question. They're not available enough yet, and we did expect this. It does take‑‑does take some time to ramp up manufacturing and distribution.
What I can tell you is they really are a game changer. We have extraordinary vaccines that did help us, by the way, in New Jersey prevent a lot of hospitalizations, if not as much cases with the Omicron wave. It certainly did prevent a lot of hospitalizations, and that is the most important preventative factor.
But the fact is you're not going to be able to prevent every case of COVID‑19, especially if future variants are even more transmissible, and so Paxlovid, which is just one example‑‑it's Pfizer's product‑‑can reduce the combined endpoint of hospitalization and death, that risk by 80 percent in high‑risk people. And so getting this into every nursing home, into every pharmacy, and to every hospital will be extraordinarily important, and I think is going to be one of the criteria for us to really consider being in the endemic phase; in other words, being able to go back to almost every aspect of normal life while protecting the most vulnerable. These therapeutics will be a huge key to doing that.
MR. DIAMOND: We've talked about some of the optimism around falling case numbers and the therapeutics that Dr. Elnahal just mentioned. Of course, there are still obstacles, whether resistance to being vaccinated, disinformation that is spread around COVID.
Dr. Zink, I've read about some of the plights in Alaska. Some of your critics who are against vaccines have even called for your removal from office. You told the Anchorage Daily News that these critiques only make you, quote, "more committed to your job." How do you build public support for public health measures in the face of such resistance?
DR. ZINK: Yeah. No, it's a great question, and, you know, again, I'm a practicing emergency medicine physician. I usually see people on their worst day at their worst moment, and we all come to things with our own history and our own perspective. And I think that we need to continue to meet people with empathy and giving each other space and grace.
Everything that we do in life has risk, everything from vaccine to not getting vaccinated, and I think continuing to be honest, to be clear, to be transparent, and to be empathetic, I think we have so much more in common than we have apart, that those conversations are a part of what drives me in my job in emergency medicine and in my job in public health. It's about finding common ground between people and really sharing the fact that we have a united mission of trying to be as healthy and well as we possibly can be, and I am not here to force people to make their decisions. I'm here to share information and resources and mostly here to try to make the system better. So like those limited therapeutics that are coming out, that they're widely available across the state, and that people know where to get them and how to get them. So that's a lot of the time and effort that we do.
But I think that there's been too much divide between vaccinated and unvaccinated or which type of treatment. The reality is medicine in life is complex and nuanced and is a body of knowledge that continues to pivot and change, and I think that the more we find the commonality between each other, the more we're able to find that common space of health and wellness.
MR. DIAMOND: Given those challenges and the complexities of medicine, do you think it's still worthwhile to try and encourage unvaccinated people to get the shot, or have we moved beyond a point where that effort is paying off?
DR. ZINK: Yeah. I really love that you asked that question, Dan, because I get all the time, well, people have made up their mind. They're not making any difference.
I mean, Alaska is a much smaller state in population than New Jersey. You know, we only have about 730,000 people, but, you know, I get the report every day, and we've got about 2,000 people every single week who make the decision to get their very first COVID‑19 vaccine, and so we see people making that decision on a regular basis.
When I'm in the emergency department, I love asking people, "Do you have any questions about the vaccine?" I'm not here to judge their decision to get vaccinated. I'm there to be a resource to partner with them to make sure that they've got access to credible information about COVID and about vaccine, and it's amazing how many people, you know, even this far into the pandemic, will say, "Yeah, I actually do. I saw these questions on Facebook. I saw this really bad outcome on Twitter. I saw this on Instagram, and I'm really scared. And I don't know what this means." And it's really incredibly rewarding to sit down and talk through that fear and talk about the data, talk about what we know, what we don't know, and allow people to make an individual decision for them.
So I, as a physician, will never give up on helping to provide information and resources to make my patients as healthy and well as they possibly can be, and that includes sharing the just honestly miraculous vaccines that we have. Watching the science over vaccines has been a little bit like watching a man land on the Moon. I think we should be celebrating it in a totally wonderful way to watch what has happened in the scientific community coming together over these past two years. It has been remarkable to see the world coming together around science, and I hope that we can build on that collaboration and that partnership.
MR. DIAMOND: I've been reading Gregory Zuckerman's book about the development of the vaccines. He works for some other newspapers, so I probably shouldn't pump it up too much, but it's a fascinating tale of just exactly what you lay out, the science that came together so quickly.
We only have a few minutes left. So I'd like to think about where we're going from here, and, Dr. Elnahal, what are the takeaways for hospitals and health systems ahead of the next pandemic? What are the biggest lessons learned from the past few years, and how do we implement them?
DR. ELNAHAL: Well, I think the first lesson is just recognizing the most important systemic risk to the health care system, and I would argue even more broadly to public health right now, which is the shortages we're seeing in health care staffing of all types, not just workers in hospitals. You have people who are still coping with post‑traumatic stress from the earlier waves of COVID‑19 we had, especially in April of 2020 when the New York Metro Area was the epicenter of the entire pandemic globally.
We're still seeing folks with pathology from that time, you know, folks who have deep mental health issues because of that in our own staff.
We've also seen a record number of retirements from not only the age 45 to 60 nurses but flight from some of the younger nurses and other health care workers just entering the workforce to either other fields entirely or to staffing agencies that, of course, charge them back, you know, 2 to 3X to the health care institutions. And, of course, then that becomes an issue of affordability, especially to safety net and rural hospitals, and so I think that's going to be a major thing we have to start planning for now. The pandemic preparedness that we need to undertake really will depend on having the skilled folks available to treat our patients.
The second is just making sure that we transition from this idea of a just‑in‑time mentality for health care to a just‑in‑case mentality for health care. In other words, we were operating on razor‑thin inventory margins here for PPE. We were operating on razor‑thin medication inventory margins because that's what the economics required in running health care systems in hospitals. That just can't happen in the future. We can have future variants of COVID‑19 but any pathogen that will really strain us and make the richest country in the world experience what we did in 2020, which is really inexcusable when it comes to having the resources needed for care.
And then, finally, when it comes to enhancing the pipeline, making medical education and clinician education more widely available, loan forgiveness, all these things are needed to build the pipeline of the future and a much more diverse pipeline, by the way, to treat the majority and minority communities that exist but also again, as Dr. Zink mentioned, our rural providers and all the unique challenges there as well.
MR. DIAMOND: Dr. Zink, we have about 30 seconds, but I'd be curious for your perspective on strategies for next time.
DR. ZINK: Yes. Thank you. I would agree with all of those points. You know, the three points that I would usually hit on are the fact that health care really impacts all of us, as previously mentioned, from economics to safety to security to tribal health. These are all related to public and public health. It's going to take all of us to find solutions, to really emphasizing that science is a process, and the more that we understand that process, the more we can trust it and move on.
And then what I like to call the "four I's," the informatics is critical for us to understanding the process to making sure that we have timely and transparent information, that we all have different incentives in making sure that we understand those incentives and those reasons, and then continuing to address the inequities that we talked about. I think that thinking about those three buckets are how we rebuild our health care system and our public health system moving forward.
MR. DIAMOND: I like the "I" structure: informatics, information, inequities, and the one other that I am somewhat blanking on.
But, regardless, thank you both for making time today, Dr. Elnahal, Dr. Zink. Really appreciated the conversation.
DR. ZINK: Thank you so much.
DR. ELNAHAL: Thank you.
MR. DIAMOND: And thank all of you for joining us. Make sure to head to WashingtonPostLive.com‑‑that is WashingtonPostLive.com‑‑to register for upcoming programs.
I'm Dan Diamond, a health reporter here at the Post. Thank you so much for watching Washington Post Live. | null | null | null | null | null |
Democratic senators urged President Biden on Thursday to announce his Supreme Court nomination as soon as possible, and Biden signaled he was moving quickly, as the president and his party prepare for a potentially bitter confirmation battle that Democrats hope galvanizes their supporters.
“We encouraged him to do it the right way,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman. “We’re anxious to get started.” Biden, who has pledged to make his selection by the end of the month, told the senators he would begin interviewing the prospective candidates next week, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
Biden also told NBC News on Thursday that he has done a “deep dive” on “about four people” for the nomination, and predicted the nomination would get bipartisan support, something with little evidence in recent Supreme Court battles.
When Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) spoke with White House counsel Dana Remus two weeks ago about U.S. attorney and lower-court vacancies, she asked him to send any thoughts on the Supreme Court opening her way. Administration officials have also been in touch with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), telling him the White House wants to make the confirmation process bipartisan if possible.
“We’ve got to get off this Harvard-Yale track,” Graham said. “She’d be far more liberal than the person I would pick, but I expect that.” Every current Supreme Court justice except for Amy Coney Barrett attended Harvard or Yale.
Ann E. Marimow and Scott Wilson contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Kelly is the husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was shot in the head while greeting constituents outside a Tucson supermarket in 2011. Six people were killed in the shooting rampage and many others were injured.
Former president Donald Trump, whom Lamon supports, also frequently alluded to violence against his political opponents.
A Lamon campaign spokesperson did not directly address criticism that the ad shows the candidate shooting at Giffords’s husband. The spokesperson, who did not provide a name, said the ad “shows the D.C. Gang drawing on Lamon and he merely shoots the weapons out of their hands.”
The Lamon campaign is spending “multiples of six figures” on the aid, which it said will air in Tucson during the Super Bowl and in Phoenix and statewide on cable and online thereafter.
The ad also includes an appearance by Brandon Judd, a longtime Border Patrol agent. Judd has led the National Border Patrol Council since 2013, involving it more directly in electoral politics.
In 2016, the union endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time, backing Trump and praising him as someone who “doesn’t fear the media, doesn’t embrace political correctness and doesn’t need the money.” Judd has also been a sought-after surrogate for Republican campaigns, appearing in ads for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and for George P. Bush, a Texas railroad commissioner running for attorney general. | null | null | null | null | null |
“I was caught off-guard because we’re in 2022 and still facing the same problems as our grandparents and their grandparents,” Marian Turner, an international studies major at Spelman College in Atlanta, told The Guardian after her school was targeted by bomb threats this year. “It just really brings to light everything that’s happening, because we’re actually experiencing it.”
Though prominent schools such as Howard University in D.C. began getting the calls in January — there have been at least three so far in 2022 — most of the calls flooded the schools at the start of Black History Month this February. These campuses were created as safe spaces for African American students to learn and achieve with freedom and without fear. No coincidence that the timing of the bomb threats come this month, as parts of White America resist learning the full story of Black America.
“This group from what we can tell, it is a neo-Nazi organization going by the name of Atomwaffen,” Daytona Beach Police Chief Jakari Young said at a news conference.
This is the damage being done today. Rather than rip through bodies and buildings, the faux bombers are tearing at the security and safety of a community fabric.
Police have arrested a 16-year-old from Southeast D.C. for the calls. No Atomwaffen involved. Seems as though it was one of those old-fashioned, pull the fire drill to get out of school thing a kid did for his friends.
“I’ve always subscribed to the theory that bombers bomb and threateners threaten,” said Robert Mueck, director of public safety at St. John’s College in Maryland and a member of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators’ Domestic Preparedness Committee, told The Washington Post. Calling in a bomb threat is “more of a nuisance crime,” he said, “like back in high school, kids pulling a fire alarm to get out of an exam.”
My son texted me from his private Jesuit school in D.C. as I was writing this. The boys were huddled in the music room’s vault during an active-shooter drill. When they were little, the repeated drills and banging on doors and reminders to stay silent made them cry. Today, they all did the Wordle puzzle.
As the threat of last century’s racial violence revisits them, today’s generation, living in an era of active shooter drills, may never be “all clear.” | null | null | null | null | null |
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