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Few television shows, much less a foreign import, inspire as much devotion in China as “Friends,” which spans generations from nostalgic millennials who used it to learn English in the 1990s to young Chinese urbanites who see in the show their own struggles to make it in the big city. Fans had been anticipating its streaming on platforms like Tencent, Youku, iQiyi and Bilibili, which started airing the show on Feb. 11.
On Monday, discussion of the changes made to “Friends” appeared to have been censored. On Weibo, the hashtag #FriendsCensored was among the top trending discussion topics on Friday night before it was deleted by the next morning | null | null | null | null | null |
The East Wing landing as decorated for Valentine's Day on Feb. 11. (Erin Scott/White House)
That Valentine’s Day decoration/stunt from America’s new first lady was a splashy yet homespun way of demonstrating that the country was now in very different hands — pretty much the opposite of Melania Trump’s stark, blood-red rows of Christmas trees. Biden’s lawn decorations were not a sophisticated affair; one critic posited that they were meant to resemble candy hearts but “looked like they’d been built by a middle school stage crew.”
Now, Biden is repeating the gesture, with another display of giant White House-created hearts on the North Lawn, as well as decorations inside the White House’s East Wing from the second-grade classes of the District’s 2021 Teacher of the Year, Alejandro Diasgranados, of Aiton Elementary School. As with last year, the biggest hearts will be erected in an area in front of the row of cameras that TV reporters use for their live shots of the White House — which means they’ll be broadcast across the country all day.
She had put up the hearts during the end of former president Donald Trump’s impeachment trial and as New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was being accused of covering up a staggering number of coronavirus deaths in his state’s nursing homes and revelations were coming out about the media’s mistreatment of Britney Spears during her mental health crises and conservatorship. Even Justin Timberlake apologized.
This time, Biden’s Valentine’s decorations come at a particularly fraught time for her husband’s administration. His approval ratings have fallen despite a strong national economy in a midterm election year that has Democrats worried about losing control of the House. The hearts are among several soft-news efforts spurred by the first lady, which include the addition of a cat, Willow, to the White House and their German shepherd puppy, Commander, appearing during a special message at the top of Puppy Bowl XVIII, an annual Super Bowl-day tradition, on Sunday.
“Valentine’s Day is one of my favorite holidays because it’s all about love,” Jill Biden said in the video, while wearing a turtleneck sweater knitted with the word “Amour” on the front.
The 42 hearts the students created for Biden are based on templates and instructions provided by the first lady’s office, according to her spokesman Michael LaRosa. They were also asked to incorporate specific words provided by Biden, such as “compassion,” “healing,” “peace” and “family.” The students’ handwritten and hand-colored “heart-work,” as the White House calls it, hangs on strands of string in the windows of the East Landing — much like strings of blue and yellow “peace doves” hung in the windows of the East Colonnade for Biden’s Christmas decorations.
The first lady and President Biden will be marking Feb. 14 by welcoming 20 of those second-graders for a tour of the White House and the Valentine’s Day installation on the North Lawn. The teacher, Diasgranados, had previously visited the White House in October at a reception the first lady threw for the 2022 and 2021 state and national Teachers of the Year.
President Biden told reporters then that Valentine’s Day is his wife’s favorite holiday. During his first year as vice president during the Obama administration, he said, he walked into his office to see that Jill had painted every one of the panes in his window with a heart that read, “Joe loves Jill.”
Biden’s Christmas decorations had a similarly handmade feel to her Valentine’s hearts. She decorated the most important trees in the White House with ornaments featuring photographs of her family, as well as those of past presidents in quiet moments at home with their wives, children and pets. The decorations throughout the White House were dedicated to pandemic first responders.
If Valentine’s Day is Jill Biden’s favorite holiday, then April Fools’ Day is a close second. A notorious prankster, she was known during the Obama administration for disguising herself with wigs at parties held in the vice president’s residence and for once stuffing herself into an overhead bin of Air Force Two, popping out to surprise Secret Service agents as they boarded. As first lady, last April 1, she fooled both reporters and members of her staff by dressing up as a flight attendant on the way back from a trip to California. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Hogan’s crime plan isn’t a silver bullet, but it would stem the bloodshed
A Baltimore police cruiser. (Julio Cortez/Associated Press)
Jason Johnson was deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department from 2016 to 2018 and served with the Prince George’s County Police for more than two decades. He is the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
Last month in his final State of the State address, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) implored the state legislature to act on his crime bills, saying, “Baltimore City will not ever get control of the violence if they can’t arrest more, prosecute more and sentence more of the most violent criminals to get them off the streets.”
Hogan’s right. Holding criminals and public officials accountable matters. I saw it up close while serving in leadership of the Baltimore and Prince George’s County police departments. The governor’s plan may not be a panacea, but accountability is a necessary precondition for any strategy to be effective in combatting Maryland’s violent crime crisis
Though Charm City recorded 338 killings in 2021 — ranking among the world’s deadliest cities by population — it is not just Baltimore that is being ravaged by violence.
Prince George’s and Montgomery counties also saw violence skyrocket over the past two years. Last year, Prince George’s County saw its most homicides since 2007, and Montgomery County its highest figure in two decades. Murders in both counties more than doubled from 2019 totals.
Meanwhile, aggravated assaults (which include nonfatal shootings) jumped more than 20 percent in those two suburban counties. Carjackings and robberies are up as well.
This violence must stop. Our elected leaders have an obligation to make Marylanders safe in our homes and on our streets.
To fulfill their duty, Annapolis must pass Hogan’s “accountability” legislation to enhance penalties for gun offenders (the Violent Firearms Offenders Act) and bring prosecutorial and judicial decisions into public view (the Judicial Transparency Act).
It’s not the everyday residents of these violence-wracked communities (99.9 percent of them are of decent, hard-working people) who are dangerous but a tiny violent fraction of offenders who carry guns, deal drugs and fight over turf.
In Baltimore, almost every murder suspect has a long criminal history but managed to avoid serious consequences.
Over Baltimore’s past seven bloody years, 48 percent of known homicide suspects have prior violent crime arrests, and 42 percent faced previous gun charges, according to Baltimore police data.
Those gun crimes, which include the use of a weapon in a violent crime and illegal firearm possession by a felon, are strong predictors of future violence. Tomorrow’s killers are today’s gun-toting drug dealers and robbers.
But gun offenders rarely face consequences, and, when they do, see very little to no jail time.
While I served as deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police, the Baltimore Sun found in 2016 and 2017 that 43 percent of those convicted of a gun crime received less than a year in jail, and half had 50 percent or more of their sentence suspended. The average sentence, according to State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, was 16 months. Police data showed it to be less than six months.
According to a 2020 report by the Maryland Public Policy Institute, Mosby’s office dismissed more than a third of illegal gun cases in 2018 and lost, deferred or pleaded down the charges in another 50 percent of cases. Meanwhile, across Maryland, fewer than 10 percent of illegal gun charges in 2019 resulted in a prison sentence.
That lack of accountability for offenders is precisely why Hogan’s firearms bill is needed. Similarly, the public needs to know how courts and prosecutors are prosecuting these crimes. They deserve to see how justice is being done — if it is at all.
Appeals and criminal court judges stand for election after their initial appointment by the governor and can run again after their term expires. The public deserves to know how they are doing. If something is amiss in the courts, the public, the legislature and the governor can act, but they are paralyzed by the darkness shrouding the justice system’s performance.
If we want to stem the violence, getting violent, inveterate “trigger-pullers” off the streets immediately should be our highest priority. Hogan’s bill to expand the list of crimes that carry stiff sentences and make offenders ineligible for bail release will make offenders truly accountable and save lives. As important, we need to hold those charged with enforcing those laws accountable as well through court and prosecutorial transparency.
These bills won’t save Maryland’s crime-ravaged communities overnight, but they will save lives on our streets.
A more connected Maryland would improve inclusivity and equity | null | null | null | null | null |
Diana Garcia Martinez was 24 and a busy single mom whose sister had set up her profile without her knowing. She was intelligent, empathetic, and upfront, and by the third date, he was in love. “It was just a feeling. … I felt like I knew her my whole life,” he recalls explaining to his cousin Gilbert, knowing it was cliche but also true.
As the pandemic enters its third year, untold numbers of Americans have agonized over such treatment questions that may mean life or death for their loved ones. Confronting the possible loss of a spouse or life partner is invariably painful, but with covid-19, the severity and suddenness of the illness and the isolation from friends and family has compounded the torment.
Diana Crouch was 18 weeks pregnant when she tested positive for the coronavirus, ultimately spending 139 days in the ICU fighting for her and her baby's lives. (Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post)
They had a boy, Cain, and Chris was promoted to sergeant at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, a job that provided a steady enough income that she could stay home and take care of their blended family. He had two boys from his previous marriage, she had a girl from hers.
The family was young, healthy and happy, and when the pandemic hit, they were worried like everyone else. Before long, though, they started feeling like the dangers of the virus had been exaggerated and they wanted to get back to their lives.
When the vaccines came along, Chris became outspoken against them, espousing views that were common in his workplace and much of Texas, but that put him at odds with his mother, sister and the close friends who had grown up with him in the Heights, a liberal bastion in Houston. Despite pleading from his family, Chris and Diana were adamant they did not need to be vaccinated. They did wear masks, but only when required.
Chris felt vaccine mandates infringed on personal liberties, a perspective promoted by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other prominent Republicans. And both of them also worried the shots had been developed too quickly. As Chris liked to say, “God gave us our immune system and we could fight the viruses with our own immune system.” Diana, meanwhile, was leery of anything that might hurt the developing baby she carried. She knew early stories linking the vaccines to miscarriage and infertility were false, but thought avoiding them was the prudent thing to do, like skipping wine, raw fish and unpasteurized cheese — especially given some of the medical community’s early hesitation. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommend all pregnant individuals get vaccinated.
As soon as they returned, however, she developed a low-grade fever and exhaustion unlike anything she had known. Late on Aug. 6, she cried out that she was having trouble breathing. Chris called 911, reminding himself that in his line of work, he’d seen a lot of people go to the hospital for covid — with most recovering fine after a little oxygen.
The emergency doctors at the local hospital immediately transferred her to Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, which had created a special unit for pregnant people with covid. Chris remembers Diana screaming when doctors told them she needed a ventilator: “I have kids. I can’t die.” He held her and made a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep: “You are not going to die,” he vowed.
Most of his other patients had preexisting conditions such as obesity and were close to full-term at 36 to 40 weeks. Diana had been healthy, about 110 pounds, and at 18 weeks when she first arrived at the hospital, still in the second trimester of her pregnancy. She had at least a month before the fetus would be considered viable — a situation that complicated treatment options.
Doctors are still baffled about why they get so sick. It could be that pregnancy causes a person’s immune system to be in a heightened state of alert to protect the baby, so when exposed to a virus, it may overreact. Another theory suggests the opposite — that pregnant people are immunosuppressed so that their bodies don’t reject the developing fetuses. Fetuses also pull oxygen and blood to the placenta. When combined with a virus like covid that can cause lung damage and blood clotting, the body’s balance may be upset.
For Chris, the next 10 days blurred together. He wasn’t allowed to leave the room because he was also assumed to have coronavirus. He’d joke to the doctors and nurses every morning, “I bet you’re tired of seeing me …”
Dezfulian’s team had hoped that the oxygen they were pumping into Diana’s lungs through a ventilator would enable her to fight off the virus. Instead, things were going in the opposite direction. “Every day we were losing a little bit of ground,” he said.
At the beginning of the pandemic many people were worried about rationing ventilators, but instead it’s been ECMO that has been in limited supply nationwide. “That is the tough part nobody wants to talk about,” Dezfulian said. “There are a limited number of pumps and you make some decisions on the likelihood they will have a long life and a good life.”
Chris was worried about putting Diana on the new machine. When he Googled ECMO, he said, he found “it’s a bad, bad deal.”
He remembers asking a ton of “what if” questions that no one could answer. He kept coming back to something Diana had told him as they shared their childhood dreams. “All I ever wanted to do was be a mom. As a kid, that’s all I ever wanted,” she had said.
The happy moment was all too brief. It wasn’t long before Diana started seeming confused. Soon, she could no longer see even though she was still talking to Chris. An hour later, she slipped into a coma, and the somber three walked to the room again.
Now, the doctors told Chris that even if Diana woke up, she might “not be the same,” that she might not remember him or the children. Chris crumpled into the chair next to her and wept. Dezfulian came by and prayed with him.
“That’s when I prayed the most,” Chris said, “because at that point, even the doctors were like, ‘We don’t really know what to do next.’”
Diana went back on ECMO and as the days slowly passed, Chris could see her belly growing. Through everything, the baby’s heart rate held steady and was growing nicely. On Nov. 10, when Diana had been in the hospital more than three months and the baby was 31 weeks along, doctors delivered a baby boy by C-section. He was 4 pounds and 12 ounces.
The infant was healthy. But Diana’s body seemed exhausted from the ordeal: She developed an infection, an air leak in her lungs, and one eventually collapsed. Doctors began preparing for a lung transplant.
It was in this dark moment that things began to shift. Without the added stress of carrying the baby, Diana’s body began to repair itself, and by the end of November, doctors were able to wake her up. She was tremendously weak and at first, didn’t know Chris. His heart felt like it was disintegrating. But then, when a nurse told Diana he was her husband, she pointed to a picture of them on the beach that Chris had posted on the wall and said, “No, that’s my husband.”
Slowly, against all odds, Diana’s memories came back and she began asking about her two other children and wondering how it could be that she was no longer pregnant. She asked Chris, “Why didn’t anybody tell me I was going to have a C-section?”
Shortly before Christmas, on Dec. 23, Diana was able to return home. Chris rattled off the numbers to her: 139 days at the hospital, 101 on a ventilator, 51 of those also on ECMO. She was still attached to an oxygen tank and had three chest tubes in her lungs to keep them inflated, which were pretty painful. But she couldn’t wait to be home.
As soon as they arrived, Chris scooped her up and put her in a bed he and Diana’s father had set up downstairs and Cain, 1, and their daughter, Miranda, 7, piled onto the blankets. Chris cradled their newborn Cameron, plump and healthy, whom they had named after Dezfulian, Diana’s doctor.
She replied that even if things had not worked out the way they did, “I wouldn’t change anything.” He felt relief, but also sadness for all the others who had been in the same spot as him — or would be in the future.
Physically, doctors are optimistic Diana will make a full recovery, but it will take time, and she’s still weak on her left side because of the strokes. Emotionally, she’s struggling. She has anxiety about seeing people and leaving her home for fear of her or her loved ones being infected with the virus.
Most of their extended family who had resisted vaccines has now gotten them after learning of Diana’s ordeal, but a few remained reluctant. In January, they got word that Gilbert, one of Diana’s favorite relatives on Chris’s side who was also unvaccinated, had covid. He was one of the first people Chris had told about Diana, and he was always joking to Chris that he had done well for himself in finding her. | null | null | null | null | null |
They did make one exception. After several months of dating, Bryan decided to propose. But he couldn’t imagine doing so without first taking Allison to Puerto Rico to meet his family. They took a flight to the island, where she met the relatives she had heard about from afar. Soon after, the couple got engaged and planned a wedding for April. | null | null | null | null | null |
Skaggs was found dead from a drug overdose in his upscale hotel room on July 1, 2019, not far from the stadium where the Angels were to play the Texas Rangers. The accused is Eric Kay, the Angels communications director at the time, who allegedly gave Skaggs the drugs that ultimately killed him. Kay and Skaggs were both in the grips of opioid addictions when Skaggs died, according to testimony.
A key piece of evidence found in Skaggs’ hotel room is a little blue pill, marked “M30,” falsely labeled as a “therapeutic” dose of oxycodone. In fact, it was fentanyl, a drug that can be 100 times more potent, according to the DEA.
Skaggs, at age 27, fell victim to an epidemic that is growing even faster than when he died. In a one-year period ending in April 2021, drug overdose deaths nationally totaled 100,306, a 28.5 percent increase from the 78,056 who died the year before, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. | null | null | null | null | null |
Manuel Oliver, father of Parkland shooting victim Joaquin Oliver, displays a banner on Feb. 14 calling on government officials to prioritize gun violence prevention from a construction crane near the White House. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
D.C. police said they received a call at about 5:40 a.m. reporting two people in the crane at 700 15th Street NW. A police tactical unit and negotiators are on the scene, and one person has been arrested so far, police said.
In 2017, activists affiliated with Greenpeace climbed atop a 270-foot construction crane in downtown D.C. and unfurled a large banner with a message to President Donald Trump. It took 18 hours for police to talk the seven activist down, snarling traffic for the day. | null | null | null | null | null |
Since November, Aleena, a seventh-grader in D.C., has moderated a weekly Sunday online book club — around author Annie Barrows’s popular Ivy and Bean children’s book series — for a growing number of Afghan kids, who log in from Rwanda, Virginia, California and other areas touched by the massive airlift out of Kabul that began when the Taliban gained control in August.
The group helped train dozens of Afghan professionals who went on to play key roles in their country’s U.S.-backed government and its civil society.
Among the first families to benefit from the NASEM effort was that of Naeem Salarzai, Hina’s father, who had overseen water management affairs in Afghanistan under President Ashraf Ghani.
“I just felt so upset that she wasn’t able to have the same privilege of education that I am able to have,” said Aleena, whose extracurricular schedule includes fencing, track and field, and French lessons. “So we decided to do a book club together to read and to help her with her English.”
Some of the members who don’t know much English are content to let the others read. One boy who knows English whispers the words into the ear of his younger brother, who then repeats them out loud.
Hamid Asady — a former engineer on Afghan National Army projects whose daughter Maliha, 7, participates in the group from their home in Rwanda — described leading his family of five through a canal flooded with human waste that ran parallel to the Kabul airport grounds to reach U.S. service members stationed at the entrance gate. | null | null | null | null | null |
Skaggs was found dead from a drug overdose in his upscale hotel room on July 1, 2019, not far from the stadium where the Angels were scheduled to play the Texas Rangers. The accused is Eric Kay, the Angels communications director at the time, who allegedly gave Skaggs the drugs that killed him. Kay and Skaggs were both in the grips of opioid addictions when Skaggs died, according to testimony.
A key piece of evidence found in Skaggs’s hotel room is a little blue pill, marked “M30,” falsely labeled as a “therapeutic” dose of oxycodone. In fact, it was fentanyl, a drug that can be 100 times more potent, according to the DEA.
Skaggs, at age 27, fell victim to an epidemic that is now growing even faster than when he died. In a one-year period ending in April 2021, drug overdose deaths nationally totaled 100,306, a 28.5 percent increase from the 78,056 who died the year before, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. | null | null | null | null | null |
Heavy snow will fall on the storm’s cold side, with flooding, damaging winds and tornado potential on the warm side.
After a week of relatively quiet weather across the Lower 48, the atmosphere is about to reload as a powerful new storm system develops this week and tracks across the country. Its effects will be most pronounced Wednesday and Thursday when it sweeps through the central and eastern U.S.
As the powerful system draws warm air north out ahead of it, damaging winds and a few tornadoes are likely from thunderstorms rolling east from Texas through the Deep South on Wednesday and Thursday. The Southeast and Mid-Atlantic could see some strong thunderstorms too.
Low pressure spins counterclockwise; picture an enormous mixing bowl swirling through the atmosphere. Southerly winds ahead of the system will advect, or tug, warm, moisture-rich air from the Gulf of Mexico northward. In the system’s wake, bone-chilling air from Canada will slosh into the central U.S.
It’s likely that many areas will wind up with 4 to 8 inches of snow when all is said and done, with the greatest probabilities of heavy snowfall in northwest Missouri, southeast Iowa, northern Illinois and central Michigan. A few spots may pick up 12 to 18 inches. Chicago could be in line for a heavy snowfall depending on where the swath of heavy snow sets up. | null | null | null | null | null |
Chinese fans planning to binge-watch “Friends” over the weekend after it was relaunched on domestic streaming platforms on Friday were disappointed to find the show was not quite what they remembered.
Today, its charm as an apolitical depiction of utopian urban life continues to comfort many of China’s exhausted young professionals. On Douban, two “Friends”-dedicated fan clubs have more than 100,000 members, while its fan page on Weibo has more than 100,000 fans and over 570 million views.
The creative editing of the show, which had previously been broadcast uncensored on the platforms Sohu and iQiyi before the streaming agreements expired, comes as Chinese regulators ramp up their policing of media, including censoring LGBTQ content and banning depictions of effeminate men.
Last month, the ending of the movie “Fight Club” was changed on Tencent’s streaming site. In that version, viewers were told that Chinese law enforcement successfully stopped character Tyler Durden’s plan to blow up several buildings. The original ending was restored after complaints. | null | null | null | null | null |
Prime Minister Mark Brown said in a Sunday briefing that the individual who tested positive arrived in Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, on Feb. 10. The individual got tested on Sunday because they learned they were a close contact of a family member who had tested positive in New Zealand the day before. The individual is asymptomatic and is now isolating and under observation at private holiday accommodations, Brown said.
The individual who was confirmed positive on Sunday is “traveling with two others, and they will all remain in isolation until they no longer test positive for covid-19,” Brown said. Officials did not explicitly say if the two others had been tested. It was “helpful,” he added, that the individual had been staying in private accommodations rather than at a resort or motel.
The individual who tested positive is vaccinated, the prime minister said, and had tested negative before boarding a flight from New Zealand. Officials have begun contact tracing efforts to track the person’s movements since arriving in Rarotonga and determine potential close contacts.
“Every step we have taken has led us to the point today where we remain covid-19 free,” Brown said at the time. He said the closure had taken a mental and financial toll, and “keeping our borders closed indefinitely was no longer a viable option.”
The government has hailed its vaccination rate, with the prime minister calling it a “factor that is in our favor as it slows the spread of transmission.” According to the nation’s health ministry, 98 percent of the population age 12 and older has received at least a first vaccine dose, with 96 percent receiving two doses and 67 percent getting a booster shot. | null | null | null | null | null |
Trump posters cover the ground during a protest outside a convention center in Philadelphia of Nov. 6, 2020. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post)
With Trump now on the sidelines — in the unsubtle manner of Spike Lee at a Knicks game, anyway — the Republican Party is trying to figure out what its next phase looks like. The tension at the heart of that effort, though, is that Trump coalesced a powerful anti-elite strain of political thought within the base that first gained significant traction with Sarah Palin’s ascendance in the 2008 presidential campaign and blossomed in the tea party era. How does the party establishment keep that energy engaged in Republican politics without also being centered around Trump?
As The Post’s Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey reported on Sunday, the 2022 midterms will be a significant test of how the party moves forward. Many in the party, particularly those who were muted or drowned out in the Trump era, are looking to re-exert influence. Meanwhile, the angry, anti-establishment arm of the right has splintered. That’s in part because of Trump has been pushed closer to the margin and in part because the ways in which being anti-establishment can manifest have metastasized. | null | null | null | null | null |
(Lily Qian/For The Washington Post)
Yamaguchi faced a different landscape. Back then, an Olympic figure skating title usually guaranteed certain spoils: gushing media coverage, endorsements deals, the moniker of “America’s sweetheart.”
But when she returned home from the games in Albertville, France, advertisers questioned whether Yamaguchi — the daughter of second- and third-generation Japanese Americans — could fill that role.
“To Marketers, Kristi Yamaguchi isn’t as good as gold,” read one headline. A sports advertising executive put it this way in a 1992 Associated Press story: Yamaguchi “is definitely suffering because of her Japanese race and her Japanese name.”
“Right now there is a negative connected with anything Japanese,” the executive said. “It’s wrong, wrong, wrong, but that’s the way it is.”
Yamaguchi had become the first Asian American woman to win gold at the Winter Olympics, and she wasn’t deterred, saying in a recent interview that she “just felt like any other California girl representing her country.” She starred in a handful of commercials, mesmerized audiences on tour, won on “Dancing with the Stars” and started a foundation focusing on early childhood literacy. She reconciled her own questions of identity and found a place on the world stage, having provided a road map both for Asian American talent and for the modern incarnation of her sport.
Asked how she helped find a path, Yamaguchi, now 50, had a simple answer:
“I didn’t go away.”
‘Can someone tell them I’m an American?’
She grew up fascinated by Dorothy Hamill, the spunky 1976 Olympic champion with the trendy wedge haircut who later headlined the Ice Capades. There was something elegant and accessible about the sport of figure skating to a tiny child with club feet and dreams of stardom.
“I was a small, scrawny, skinny, uncoordinated little kid and tried a lot of different sports, but skating just clicked with me,” Yamaguchi recalled. “I didn’t have to keep up with anyone else. I could go at my own pace.”
Her parents, Carole and Jim, weren’t sure she had what it took to be an Olympian. Other girls had an easier time picking up the basic skills. But Kristi never stopped trying.
And at home, there was another skater the Yamaguchis loved to watch. Nine years after Hamill won her gold medal, a fellow Californian named Tiffany Chin became the nation’s first Asian American figure skating champion, capable of long balletic lines and big triple jumps.
Injuries prevented Chin — who last month was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame — from reaching her full potential. But a young Yamaguchi had an affinity for Chin that Yamaguchi’s mother said she did not fully expect. When Kristi was young, Carole Yamaguchi joked, “I don’t think she knew she was Asian.” Sure, they went to a Japanese church and celebrated Children’s Day, a Japanese national holiday, but she lived in the diverse Bay Area, where there was not just one way to think about being an American. Nothing about her identity made her feel distinct.
Her family history, though, encompassed both patriotism and the indignities that can come with being a person of color in the United States. Carole’s father, George Doi, served in World War II, earning a bronze star as the only Japanese member of his troop. As Doi fought for his country, his wife, Kathleen, received a special clearance to leave Heart Mountain internment camp. But she could not find work in an environment distrusting of Japanese Americans and eventually went back into internment, where Carole Yamaguchi was born.
When George Doi came home, the family tried to assimilate, and the past was rarely discussed.
“I think much of that first generation that had gone through World War II tried so hard to just put it behind them and move forward and not talk about it,” Kristi Yamaguchi said. “They wanted to really establish themselves as American and living the American life.”
Carole married Jim Yamaguchi and had three children, all of whom loved sports. Brett played basketball. Lori twirled batons. And Kristi’s persistence in skating soon paid off, as she became one of the United States’ best young skaters in two disciplines. In 1988, skating with a Mexican American named Rudy Galindo, Yamaguchi won the world junior championships in pairs. She also won the ladies event. The accomplishment remains singular. It was at the competition that Kristi began to realize that not everyone in the skating world processed her identity.
Yamaguchi had finished ahead of two Japanese skaters that year. She was eager to stand atop on the podium and hear the national anthem, but there was an unusual delay backstage. She did not understand why until she heard an organizer say, “We can’t find three Japanese flags.”
“I’m like, ‘Can someone tell them I’m American?’ ” she recalled.
Svrluga: Breezy Johnson, a missed Olympics, and the consequences of a beautiful, brutal sport
‘The new face of the American dream’
She was 20 years old when she came to the Albertville Games, the reigning national and world champion. Even so, she was not expected to win after recent rule changes placed more of an emphasis on power and jumping. Yamaguchi’s technical arsenal was nothing to shirk at, but compatriot Tonya Harding was a better jumper and Japan’s Midori Ito was the finest technician in the world. Both of those women were capable of landing the treacherous triple axel. .
Without the triple axel, Yamaguchi tried to match her arsenal of triple jumps and difficult combination spins with detailed programs in which every beat — from the turn of her head to a flirtatious lifting of her skirt — was choreographed.
Harding and Ito both crashed on their triple axel attempts in the first phase of the event, clearing Yamaguchi’s path to the victory, and a strong (if flawed) program in the final was good enough.
Yamaguchi’s visage landed on a Special K box and the cover of “Sports Illustrated,” and she sat on the couch with talk show host Arsenio Hall. Those appearances were a far fry from the cultural ubiquity that came when her role model, Hamill, won gold.
“I didn’t skate, and try to win, for endorsements,” Yamaguchi told herself. “If I get something, awesome. That’s cool.”
But as skaters and other Japanese Americans posited whether race was limiting her exposure, she wrestled with questions that are familiar to many minorities: Was it me? Was it some broader culture bias? Was it something else?
“It was a hard time,” Yamaguchi said, noting that her Olympic win came a few weeks after the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. “At the time, with the auto industry, there was a lot of tension with Japanese American relations. I think that’s what led people to think well … that may be why she’s not getting endorsements.
“I thought maybe that could be a little bit of it,” Yamaguchi said. “Who knows? I’m 20. I’m shy. I was not well spoken. You’re just so young, and so naive.”
But those experiences also drove home a new awareness of what she had achieved — and a new feeling of responsibility to speak about her heritage. She was flattered when she received letters from little girls who said they looked up to her, that they wanted to be like her. Japanese American groups reached out to her family to offer support.
Yamaguchi was struck when she saw a family friend interviewed on television, talking about the special pride she felt when she saw that “Sports Illustrated” cover with the headline, “American Dream.”
“I feel like this is the new face of the American dream: an Asian-American,” her family friend said.
Less than two years into her pro career, the infamous clubbing of Kerrigan, her former teammate, set off a media frenzy. Kerrigan had the “look” of an America’s sweetheart that advertisers had grown used to: She was brown-haired and blue-eyed, with a signature move in which she’d glide along the ice with her hand on her heart. The fanfare and endorsement deals that eluded Yamaguchi came easily to Kerrigan, even before she won silver at the 1994 Olympics.
The controversy created a surge of interest in figure skating, leading to huge ratings and weekly made-for-TV competitions. Yamaguchi didn’t go away. And although audiences might have tuned in because of the bizarre incident, they kept watching — and fell for Yamaguchi.
She continued to do the intricate steps and many of the jumps that she did while she was competing. She made audiences dance while skating to En Vogue, made them cry while skating to Chopin, brought them to their feet while skating to Simon & Garfunkel.
“Stars on Ice, when we founded it, it was a 30-city tour,” Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic men’s champion said. “When Kristi joined it, it became a 60-city tour overnight. And so she had a great, incredible capacity to draw. People adored her.”
That silenced doubts about whether an Asian American could capture American hearts. Paul Wylie, a silver medalist in the 1992 Games who later toured with Yamaguchi, said she had the ability to mesmerize audiences every night.
“Wow, look at Kristi go,” Wylie recalled thinking. “She’s a star.”
And her arrival was the vanguard for a wave of Asian American talent in the sport. In the 30 national championships held since her gold medal, only three have not included an Asian American woman on the podium. She provided mentorship and sponsorship to many of the women who followed her, including Liu and Chen, the 2022 Olympians.
There is “an intrinsic value with seeing someone who looks like you and in the national spotlight,” said Kadari Taylor-Watson, the director of diversity, equity and inclusion at US Figure Skating. “You start believing you can achieve that, too.”
Four years after Yamaguchi won her gold medal, a 15-year-old American named Michelle Kwan won the world championship. Kwan would go on to win silver and bronze medals at the Olympics and five world championships in all, becoming one of the most decorated skaters of all time. Her performances in Salt Lake City inspired a young man from Utah to take up skating. That boy was Nathan Chen.
“You don’t get a Nathan Chen without a Michelle Kwan, and you don’t get a Michelle Kwan without Kristi,” said Barbara Reichert, a spokeswoman with US Figure Skating. “[Kristi] helped to open the door.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Ashley Caldwell couldn't land her final jump in women's aerials Monday night, but she already had a gold medal from the mixed team event. (Diego Azubel/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Ashley Caldwell knew she had lost her shot at the podium as soon as her back hit the snow. The freestyle skier from Virginia possessed the two highest scores of the night entering the third of three rounds in the women’s aerials final. But on her last performance of the Beijing Games, she went into the jump a little too fast, caught a small draft and fell backward upon landing.
She leaves Beijing with the first medal of her career — gold, to boot — which she won with the U.S. team last week when freestyle skiing’s mixed team aerials event made its Olympic debut.
“Having a second opportunity for a medal is huge,” Caldwell, 28, said. “It draws attention to what an incredible sport this is, and for our country, the United States — I would love for these two medals now, the team medal and Megan Nick’s bronze to help encourage the sport in our country.”
Mixed team aerials is one of seven events that debuted during the Beijing Games, five of which were part of the International Olympic Committee’s continued push toward gender parity at the Olympics. In addition to mixed team aerials, mixed team snowboard cross, mixed team short-track relay, mixed team ski jumping and women’s monobob had their inaugural runs here.
Men’s and women’s big air freestyle skiing is also new this year.
Four-man bobsled has been a part of the Olympic program since the first Winter Games in 1924 and two-man bobsled was added in 1932, but two-woman bobsled wasn’t added until 2002.
Like female aerials skiers, until this year, female bobsledders had just one choice of event at the Olympics despite that four-woman bobsled debuted at the world championships five years ago.
Humphries and Meyers Taylor were critical in getting the discipline added to the Games.
“To be able to have two opportunities to medal now, that’s a game-changer,” Meyers Taylor said. “Now we’re more on-par with the men, with the two medals. We’d still like to have more numbers for women, and to have that comparability to medal for all the women, brakemen included, but you know, getting the monobob added was a start. It’s really cool to see all the girls out there, see all the different nations represented and see how well they did, like, this was a tough track for these monobob sleds, this is not easy. And to see from top to bottom how well the girls did and how well they represented, it’s really amazing.”
Because of the new events in Beijing, Games organizers are touting these Olympics as the most gender-balanced Winter Games to date, with women making up 45 percent of athletes and women’s events tallying 46, up two from four years ago in PeyongChang.
But as Meyers Taylor pointed out Monday, gender parity can be measured in myriad ways. The number of events available to women — which is still fewer compared to men — is just one.
Men can jump off the normal hill, the target landing distance for which is 90 meters, and the large hill, the target landing distance for which is 120 meters. The discrepancy means male ski jumpers have four events open to them: individual normal hill, individual large hill, the men’s team event and the mixed team event. Women have just two.
“My hope is that women will continue to have options. Of course, if I had it my way, there would be women’s four-man, and breakmen would have multiple medal opportunities,” Meyers Taylor said. “ … I really want the younger pilots to have the choice. If they decide that monobob is what they want to do, then yes, I’ll support them wholeheartedly. But if they decide they want four-woman, then yes, I’m going to support that too. Now it’s up to the next generation to decide where the sport goes, and I think it’s in good hands.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Heavy snow will fall on the storm’s cold side, with flooding, damaging winds and tornado potential on the warm side
As the system draws warm air north out ahead of it, damaging winds and a few tornadoes are likely from thunderstorms rolling east from Texas through the Deep South on Wednesday and Thursday. The Southeast and Mid-Atlantic could see some strong thunderstorms too.
Low pressure spins counterclockwise; picture an enormous mixing bowl swirling through the atmosphere. Southerly winds ahead of the system will advect, or tug, warm, moisture-rich air from the Gulf of Mexico northward. In the system’s wake, bone-chilling air from Canada will slosh into the central United States.
It is likely that many areas will wind up with 4 to 8 inches of snow when all is said and done, with the greatest probabilities of heavy snowfall in northwest Missouri, southeast Iowa, northern Illinois and central Michigan. A few spots may pick up 12 to 18 inches. Chicago could be in line for a heavy snowfall depending on where the swath of heavy snow sets up. | null | null | null | null | null |
Chief Medical Examiner Victor Weedn, who expects the backlog to hit 300 later this month, recently asked the federal government to deploy its disaster mortuary operational response team — a group that includes medical examiners and forensic specialists who handle mass fatalities connected to terrorists attacks such as Sept. 11, 2001, pandemics or natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. A spokesperson at U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) said that a team of five fatality management experts from the National Disaster Medical System will be deployed Monday to provide support to the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The federal government has also offered help to medical examiner officers in New Mexico.
“The situation is tragic,” said Del. Kirill Reznik (D-Montgomery), who serves as the health subcommittee chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who recently grilled state health officials about the backlog and understaffing. “Up to a few weeks ago, they didn’t have storage for the decedents. … There were bodies in the halls. That means they weren’t stored properly, which can ruin the pathology and render the autopsy useless.” | null | null | null | null | null |
On Wall Street, stocks wavered in morning trading before turning negative. Around 10:45 a.m., the Dow Jones industrial average had slipped more than 300 points, around .9 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index declined roughly .6 percent, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq oscillated between positive and negative territory. All three indices are down 4 percent or more year-to-date, according to MarketWatch.
Gold, an investor safe haven in times of turmoil, continued its upward march, buffetted by the maelstrom of tensions. It climbed 1.43 percent to trade around $1868.60 per troy ounce. | null | null | null | null | null |
February 11, 2022|Updated today at 9:21 a.m. EST
A pair of peregrine falcons have returned to nest in Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia, and park officials said they’re going to give them space by closing parts of the park that are near the birds for several months starting this week.
Note: The National Park Service moved the closure period up by one day, from Feb. 17 to Feb. 16, since this story was first published. The story has been updated. | null | null | null | null | null |
Chief Medical Examiner Victor Weedn, who expects the backlog to hit 300 later this month, recently asked the federal government to deploy its disaster mortuary operational response team — a group that includes medical examiners and forensic specialists who handle mass fatalities connected to terrorists attacks such as Sept. 11, 2001, pandemics or natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. A spokesperson at U.S. Health and Human Services said a team of five fatality management experts from the National Disaster Medical System will be deployed Monday to provide support to the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The federal government has also offered help to medical examiner officers in New Mexico.
“The situation is tragic,” said Del. Kirill Reznik (D-Montgomery), who serves as the health subcommittee chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and recently grilled state health officials about the backlog and understaffing. “Up to a few weeks ago, they didn’t have storage for the decedents. … There were bodies in the halls. That means they weren’t stored properly, which can ruin the pathology and render the autopsy useless.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Manuel Oliver, father of Parkland shooting victim Joaquin Oliver, displays a banner from a construction crane near the White House calling on government officials to prioritize gun violence prevention. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
The demonstration ended by midmorning with three people in custody and facing charges of unlawful entry, according to D.C. police.
D.C. police said they received a call at about 5:40 a.m. reporting two people in the crane at 700 15th Street NW. A police tactical unit and negotiators were on the scene.
One person had been arrested near the beginning of the demonstration. A D.C. police spokesman said the remaining two demonstrators later came down on their own. Police could not immediately confirm that Oliver was among them; identities will be released when charges are filed.
Police said a lock and chain had been cut to gain access to the crane, which was being used by the Grunley construction company.
A spokeswoman for Grunley, based in Rockville, Md., said their officials were aware of the demonstration. She declined to comment further or describe the nature of the construction project at that location.
According to its website, Grunley has restored and modernized dozens of major building in and around the District, from luxury condos to embassies and government offices.
In 2017, activists affiliated with Greenpeace climbed atop a 270-foot construction crane in downtown D.C. and unfurled a large banner with a message to President Donald Trump. It took 18 hours for police to talk the seven activists down, snarling traffic for the day. | null | null | null | null | null |
“There is no reason,” he remembers thinking. Because he assumed Bell probably wouldn’t have more than a few years left in her skating career, he didn’t think he could help much in that short window. But she called again, then asked to meet in person when she was in town for a competition — persistence that he compared to a monk sitting through the wind and snow outside a chosen monastery.
“They can sit for months and months and months,” Arutyunyan said. “They say: ‘No, we want [to be] here. We want this one. We don’t want the other one.’ That’s [how] she convinced me to take her.”
Bell remembers “kind of feeling like I wasn’t going to take no for an answer,” because she wholeheartedly believed she could go further in this sport. After starting to work with Arutyunyan, she won the bronze medal at the U.S. nationals the following year and made the world championships team for the first time. She gradually climbed closer to the top of women’s figure skating in the United States, but entering her ninth season as a senior skater, Bell had no national titles, world championship medals or Olympic berths.
Bell trains with Nathan Chen, and she knew entering the Games how their Olympic outlooks differed. For Chen, the gold medal favorite who rose to the occasion last week, the pressure of the season centered on that moment, when two performances secured the Olympic title. For Bell, the beginning part of the season involved the most stress and being at the Games “is like the celebration,” she said.
She had no idea what to expect in Beijing, and that has made each piece of the experience more enjoyable. While packing, she realized she had never needed to plan for a trip this long. Bell felt competition-like excitement for the Opening Ceremonies, which she called “the most amazing moment of my life probably.” She waved and screamed to the camera, and her family members back home sent a similar picture of her eyes-closed-with-joy appearance on the television broadcast.
Through the years leading into the Beijing Games, Bell seemed poised to have a strong chance of earning a spot on the U.S. team. She competed at the world championships in 2017, 2018 and 2019, then had a standout free skate at the U.S. nationals in 2020 that left her in tears and offered reassurance that she was on the path toward the Olympics.
“I had a tough time for a little bit,” Bell said. “And then I was like: ‘Nope. Time to turn the page.’ ”
So a few weeks later, she got a puppy named Nala, who lately has posed with an American flag for pictures sent to Bell on the other side of the world. Bell’s apartment wouldn’t allow a German shepherd, but she relished the chance to move to a new place, adding to the fresh start she needed. | null | null | null | null | null |
From left, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President François Hollande, then German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, talk in Minsk, Belarus, Feb. 11, 2015. (Mykola Lazarenko/Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/AP)
KYIV — Amid the global effort to deter Russia from possibly invading Ukraine, France has dusted off a stalled peace agreement that could offer a way out.
Why diplomats think the peace deal can work now? | null | null | null | null | null |
New documentary highlights unsolved murder of Civil Rights era
‘American Reckoning’ focuses on the car bomb murder of Wharlest Jackson
Poster for the film “American Reckoning.” (PBS)
By Rachel Hatzipanagos
The grainy black-and-white footage shows a meeting of local Black leaders in Natchez, Miss., on Aug. 13, 1965.
The purpose of the meeting: “For the protection of our Negro citizens against the Ku Klux Klan.”
It was the first gathering of a group that aimed to protect local civil rights activists from the racial terror of local Klansmen.
“You know the risk that we finna [are going] to take, right?” James Jackson, a local barber and one of the group’s organizers, asked the room. “Get out now because once you’re in there ain’t no out, see?”
Two years later, group member Wharlest Jackson was killed by a car bomb on his drive home from work at Armstrong Tire and Rubber. Jackson worked as a chemical mixer and was the first Black man to hold that role. No one was ever found responsible for his killing.
A new documentary from PBS “Frontline” called “American Reckoning” highlights Jackson’s murder. His killing is one of more than 100 cases reopened after the 2008 passing of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which seeks to bring justice to the unsolved murders of the civil rights era. Since starting the program, there have been three successful state prosecutions, according to a 2021 Justice Department report. However, 61 cases have been closed due to the deaths of all people involved, 38 were reviewed but not reopened due to lack of evidence, and some were not reopened because of other legal reasons such as double jeopardy. The show premieres Feb. 15 at 10 p.m. Eastern time on PBS.
About US spoke with directors of the project Brad Lichtenstein and Yoruba Richen. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How did you become familiar the Wharlest Jackson story, and what struck you about this case?
Lichtenstein: It actually goes back to John Lewis. I had had a lifelong friendship with him that began when I worked with him when I was 15, when he was running for Congress in Atlanta where I grew up. And I had been talking with him about a possible film about forgiveness, which was sparked by a moment when a former clan member who had beaten John Lewis during the civil rights movement had come forward and asked for forgiveness.
I was in his office talking about that with him and with his press secretary, and she shifted my focus over to the Emmett Till act, which they had introduced and the cases, what were called the cold cases at the time. And that’s really where it started.
I got interested in the Wharlest Jackson story in particular because I discovered that there was a treasure trove of archival footage filmed by Ed Pincus back in 1965 and in 1967, right after his murder. And you know, with any historical story, you want images to be able to tell that story. So there were obviously over a 120 cases or people who were included in the Emmett Till act. But this felt like an opportunity to really be able to tell a story and bring it to life because this footage existed.
Unsolved and overlooked murders: Investigating cold cases of the civil rights era
Richen: I was really struck by the incredible archive footage. That’s really what got me and what’s so unusual about the project. And then also the fact that the film told the story of the Deacons for Defense in Natchez, Mississippi. And I had been a bit obsessed with the Deacons for a few years at that time, having just heard about them and had read the book about them. And so when I found out that this story told part of the Deacons for Defense Story, it was an immediate yes for me.
What about the Deacons really interested you?
Richen: The fact that this is a part of Black history and of the Black freedom struggle that hasn’t been told‚ that it’s really been underreported. And so uncovering that was really important and exciting to me. And the fact that these men in the South, all through the South, Louisiana and Mississippi defended their communities against white terrorism and Klan violence. And you don’t hear that part of our story.
And you mentioned the archival footage. How many hours of footage did you have and how did you find it?
Lichtenstein: Well, the finding of it was not terribly hard. Once I heard about it, there were people in the community that knew that this footage existed. But people knew about the footage because they knew the movie “Black Natchez,” and they knew it was Ed Pincus. They knew that his estate had recently donated the footage to the Amistad Research Center. But, you know, finding it was relatively easy. It was a process to get it catalogued. We started working with it before it was really fully catalogued. And there’s a lot of it. I don’t remember exactly how many hours.
In the film, you also talk with family members of some of the KKK. Were they open to participating from the beginning and if so why?
Richen: Well, I’ll just start by saying it was always important for us to find and talk to the White Klans people and or their descendants. That was part of our mission in telling the story because it wasn’t just the Black people who resisted or who were killed, but the White Klan people who did it. And … until as a nation we start talking to those people, and finding their stories, I don’t think we will reckon with our history of terrorism in this country.
Lichtenstein: Yeah, and I have to really give a lot of credit to our consulting producer Stanley Nelson, who is based in Ferriday, Louisiana, where he was the editor, he just retired, of the Concordia Sentinel. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist who’s been writing about these cases. He came across them really through the Emmett Till act. So he started to get curious and started investigating. He eventually wrote a book, which is called “Devils Walking,” and a lot of our research really stands on the shoulders of Stanley’s research.
So he had already been in touch with both Debra Taylor and with Leland Boyd [descendants of two members of the Klan]. And he was instrumental in making those introductions for us. And then I spent some time on the phone with both of them. I think for Debra especially, it was hard for her to go on camera, partially just because it takes a lot out of her. It comes across a little bit in the film, and she shared this publicly. So I’m not really sharing anything new. Her father was very abusive. She had been through a lot as a girl and talking about it can be re-traumatizing in a lot of ways.
I’d say what’s interesting, just in the experience of talking to both of them is I think there’s different kinds of White responses when you’ve inherited this legacy of terror. For Leland, we’ve noticed the way that he has kind of processed the story of his father to try to balance a kind of genuine affection he had for his dad with the horrible terroristic acts that his dad was involved with. Whereas I think with Debra, it’s a little bit different. It’s what I explain, it’s having to relive a trauma. She doesn’t have any motivation to try to explain his actions.
In terms of Wharlest Jackson’s family, how open were they to talking with you?
Lichtenstein: As a filmmaker and particularly a White filmmaker in this space, I think that it’s important to try to really figure out how to create a space for people who’ve been through such painful experiences to share on their own terms.
I think a lot of people assume that you have to tell these stories because that’s a way to try to correct the harm of the past and not repeat it again. There’s probably an element of that that’s true, but I also think that we have to be careful not to be extractive, not to take stories without full of nuanced permission. And so starting off that process where I went down to Natchez, I met Wharlest Jr. and basically said to him, this is what I would like to do. I would go to a park and just sit there, and if he was interested, please come and see me. And I did.
I went, I mean, I remember it really well because I listened to the Milwaukee Brewers baseball game to pass the time. And he eventually came over and took me on a drive. And I just asked him to show me Natchez from his point of view. And he sort of pointed out things that had to do with his dad, things that had to do with history, things that had to do with the Black community. And even then, I think that that kind of relationship ebbs and flows and depends on permission being a kind of consistently renewed relationship.
Does the family at this point still have faith that something will be done about the case?
Richen: There is not really anything that could be done in terms of solving the case. Everyone, all the suspects, are dead. I mean, I think that going back to the other question about their willingness to be interviewed, I think that’s part of something to be done. That is, telling the story of what happened, who their father was and how and why he died, why he was murdered and memorializing that. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The woeful inadequacy and neglect of sex ed in Virginia
A sex education class in Texas. (Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Washington Post)
By Pablo Moulden
Pablo Moulden is co-Founder and director of the Virginia Coalition for Sex Ed Reform, where he co-authored the Virginia Healthy Youth Act, a bill to make Virginia’s Family Life Education medically accurate, comprehensive and inclusive.
At 15, I learned the meaning of betrayal when my boyfriend raped me and learned that he cheated on me with multiple partners despite our explicit agreement to remain exclusive. When I was 17, I was diagnosed with HIV. Through all the trauma, the shame and the self-loathing, I cannot — and will not — ignore the question that has been on my mind for more than a decade: Why didn’t my school give me the tools that I needed to protect myself?
In my sophomore health class at a Fairfax County public school, my teacher put on a VHS movie in which a young woman was compared to a piece of chewed gum for having sex before marriage. Nowhere did the film address consent or safety.
Although my health teachers were well-intended, I was not given the support that I needed to address the trauma I had faced; instead, I felt isolated and shamed for being gay and assaulted. It wasn’t until I found community HIV education and prevention nonprofits that I finally got the support that I needed. Unfortunately, no matter how honest and inclusive the help I received from those nonprofits was, they still could not fill the toxic gap left by my classroom experience.
Though I do not hold Virginia’s public schools directly responsible for what happened to me, I do hold them responsible for not taking all opportunities to provide every student with an education that teaches respect, empowerment, self-love, relationship-building skills and all means of protection, whether that be with a condom or information on how to handle intimate partner violence (IPV).
When I looked into why Virginia’s students aren’t getting the education they deserve, I found that the woeful inadequacies of Virginia’s sex education are layered amid a web of nonsensical guidelines, policy, local decision-making and in-classroom pronouncements. The Standards of Learning, which set the requirements for the curriculum, withhold information by focusing on abstinence rather than providing honest and complete information on how to protect yourself and have healthy relationships.
Family Life Education (FLE), which provides essential, age-appropriate education to students, is not mandatory, so local school districts can opt out. Paired with the content being developed at the local level, instruction is patchwork and inconsistent across districts. According to the Virginia Department of Education’s FLE report, out of all 132 school districts, 19 do not provide any FLE. Among the districts that do, only 68 percent have systems in place to verify medical accuracy, and only 24 percent evaluate efficacy of their curriculums. On top of that, 19 districts do not provide any FLE instruction, 29 percent are abstinence-only, only 42 percent address sexual orientation and just 36 percent discuss gender identity and expression.
With hundreds of youths ages 15 to 29 getting infected with HIV annually, a steady increase in chlamydia and gonorrhea cases from 2016 to 2019 and with young people at the highest risk for sexual assault, we cannot afford to continue allowing a curriculum that hurts our youths.
Virginia needs legislative reform to provide the necessary policy and resources for comprehensive, medically accurate and inclusive sex education implementation in Virginia. This is also needed nationwide. The Real Education and Access for Healthy Youth Act (REAHYA) in the U.S. Senate would ensure that federal dollars are only allocated to comprehensive sex education programs and give youths equitable access to sexual health services. REAHYA, statewide policy reform and action at the local school board level can make a real impact on our teens’ sex education experience, which will affect how they live their lives going forward. Through these changes, we can teach today’s young the sex education we should have been taught.
Living with HIV has taught me many lessons throughout my adult life and, oddly enough, it has also shown me how lucky I am: that I have people who love me, that I have access to health care, that I am strong and that I am worthy of love. To have and know these things about myself should not be privileges but human rights so that everyone can live happy, live healthy and overcome life’s many challenges. We can teach our youths to love themselves and others, we can empower them to take care of themselves, and we can provide them with the tools they need to make responsible decisions. To ensure that all students receives the education they deserve, we need to come together. Now more than ever, we need to show up at our local school board meetings because the other side is already there, and they are not holding back.
We can and must provide our youths with comprehensive, medically accurate and inclusive sex education by passing REAHYA and strengthening Virginia’s sex education standards. If we do not take action now, we may never be able to ensure the health and safety of our youths. | null | null | null | null | null |
This image from video shows Hudson (Ohio) Mayor Craig Shubert in a City Council meeting, Feb. 8, 2022 in Hudson, Ohio. Shubert, who had suggested allowing ice fishing shanties on a lake could lead to prostitution, has resigned after a week of being mocked and drawing national attention to the city. Hudson Mayor Shubert said he was stepping down Monday, Feb. 14, 2022. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP) | null | null | null | null | null |
“That’s kind of how we play,” leading scorer Drew Timme said after Saturday's win against Saint Mary's. “You look at the scoreboard and it’s, ‘Oh, he had 20, he had 20.’ It’s just how we play the game. I think that’s the beauty of this program and what (Few) has built here.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Her days had been spent at home, she said, the hours divided up between cooking for her three children, cleaning up their messes and doing their laundry while her husband did his paid work upstairs.
Her stress has been acute since the start of the pandemic: Burke, 35, and her whole family — including her older two kids, now 7 and 4 — had coronavirus symptoms in March 2020, before tests were available, when they were just a few days into what was supposed to be a week-long Florida vacation. Burke, who lives in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, was seven months pregnant at the time, so “we stayed for six months and had a baby in Florida,” she said.
So when her friend, Sarah Harmon, a 39-year-old therapist who also lives in Charlestown, invited her to join a group of local moms that planned to scream their pandemic-induced frustrations into the frigid evening air last month, Burke reluctantly agreed to join.
Experts say the proliferation of primal scream events highlight the paradoxical position mothers occupy in American society, particularly during the pandemic: They’re overburdened and undersupported when it comes to domestic and care work, but left without many models of how to express their anger about those inequities. When they do express anger, they’re often seen as reinforcing sexist and racist stereotypes — particularly if they’re women of color, experts say.
“I have always seen anger as a negative, and I’ve learned that it’s not a negative, it’s healthy, and it’s how you respond and how you react [to it],” said Jessica Kline, 38, publisher of the family-focused website Macaroni Kid Clifton-Montclair. Kline organized a Feb. 6 #MomScream event in Verona, N.J., that drew a dozen moms.
In Anchorage 43-year-old Calisa Kastning, co-founder of Moms Matter Now, an online community focusing on maternal mental health, screamed alone in her yard for a few days before she and more than a dozen other local moms gathered in a parking lot to scream together on Jan. 22, surrounded by the flashing lights of their minivans, she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The case marks the federal market regulator’s first against a crypto lending platform, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said in a statement. The agency’s $50 million share of the fine — the other $50 million will be divided among the states — is its largest yet against a crypto company. BlockFi neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing but agreed to stop selling its lending product and to try to bring its business into compliance with SEC rules within 60 days.
For the last three years, the Jersey City, New Jersey-based company has offered customers as much as 9 percent interest on their crypto deposits. The company says it can afford to pay such a premium, while the average interest rate on a savings account at a bank sits at 0.06 percent, in part because institutional investors pay even higher rates to borrow the crypto in order to execute trades.
By March 31 of last year, the company held $14.7 billion in deposits through the lending program, according to the SEC. The agency said BlockFi promoted the interest-bearing accounts as investments and therefore should have registered them with the SEC as securities, which it did not do.
And the SEC said BlockFi mislead customers about the safety of the loans the company was making with their digital assets by claiming institutional borrowers typically posted collateral worth more than their loans. In fact, most did not, the SEC said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The campus in the District issued a shelter-in-place order Monday morning; an all-clear was announced after 1 p.m.
An all-clear was issued at Howard University on Monday afternoon following another bomb threat — the fourth since early January.
Students and employees had been instructed to stay indoors until officials determined the campus was safe.
The university tweeted around 1:15 p.m. that D.C. and campus police had issued an all-clear. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Margaret Coker
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Federal prosecutors began their opening statements Monday in the hate-crimes prosecution of three White men convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery, after the seating of a jury consisting of eight White people, three Black people and one Hispanic person.
The high-stakes case that hinges on whether Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan were motivated by racial animus when they chased and confronted Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, in a suburban Georgia neighborhood on Feb. 23, 2020.
In her opening statement, federal prosecutor Bobbi S. Bernstein told jurors that the case “does not require proof of hate. What it requires is proof the defendants acted because of race… meaning in this case, the defendants made assumptions about Ahmaud based on the color of his skin, chased him down and threaten and try to catch him themselves and that wouldn’t have happened if he was White. That’s exactly what the evidence shows.”
She cited texts and social media posts in which Travis McMichael allegedly used racial epithets about Black people and also referred to them as “animals, criminals, monkeys, sub-human savages.”
The federal prosecution is the first time defendants in one of the three high-profile 2020 killings that sparked nationwide demonstrations have been accused directly of committing a crime because of race. Georgia prosecutors did not make Arbery’s race a central aspect of the state murder case, which was argued before a a jury of 11 White people and one Black person.
The federal charges against the McMichaels and Bryan include intimidating Arbery and interfering with his right to use a public street because of his race, which qualifies as a hate crime. The defendants also are charged with kidnapping, and the McMichaels are facing a separate federal count of using firearms during a crime of violence.
Bryan, who recorded the incident on a cellphone, told investigators that Travis McMichael used a racial epithet after the shooting — an allegation the younger McMichael has denied.
On Monday morning, jurors identified themselves by their town of residence. The majority of White jurors said they were from relatively affluent suburban communities, including the seaside community of Tybee Island, outside of Savannah, and an affluent bedroom community south of Savannah called Richmond Hill. At least four jurors said they were from Augusta, home to the PGA Masters golf tournament. Two of the White jurors live in Statesboro, home to Georgia Southern University.
The three Black jurors said they hail from smaller towns, and two of them identified as working-class.
There are two truck drivers in the jury, one man and one woman, both of whom are White. The majority of jurors said they have some college education; at least two have master’s degrees and one has a doctorate.
Nakamura reported from Washington. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Karnataka government has blamed the student wing of the Popular Front of India (PFI), an Islamist organization, for instigating the protests. As the conflict spread like fire across the state and pitted students from right-wing Hindu groups against young Muslim girls, what should have been an issue for individual institutions to resolve amicably between parents, teachers and students got an official stamp: The state government issued an order banning clothing that “disturb equality, integrity and public law and order.”
Muskan Khan, a college student in Karnataka, was heckled by a jeering mob of Hindu protesters — some students, some outsiders — wearing saffron scarves. She turned around and shouted “Allahu akbar” to their chants of “Jai Shri Ram” (“Glory to Lord Ram”). As her video went viral, she told my media organization Mojo Story: “All of India stands with me.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Unregulated crowdfunding sites can fuel international crises
The Ottawa protests and border shutdowns were funded in part by anonymous donations from the U.S. Should sites that enable such payments be held accountable?
Demonstrators and vehicles block downtown streets in front of Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Feb. 14 as truckers and supporters continue to protest coronavirus vaccine mandates. (Blair Gable/Reuters)
By Jeremy Snyder
Jeremy Snyder is a professor in the health-sciences department of Simon Fraser University and author of "Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us — and Makes Us Vulnerable."
The truckers who paralyzed Ottawa and blocked U.S.-Canada border crossings while protesting coronavirus-related restrictions have been supported through crowdfunding platforms, a situation that is producing its own series of controversies.
On Feb. 4, GoFundMe announced it was closing a campaign backing the “Freedom Convoy,” which had raised more than $7.5 million on the site. GoFundMe said that what was billed as a peaceful protest had become an “occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity,” violating the company’s terms of service. GoFundMe first said it would refund donations to anyone requesting them, distributing leftover money to charities chosen by the Freedom Convoy organizers, but after that plan came under fire, it made the refunds automatic.
Soon after GoFundMe’s announcement, figures including Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) pledged to investigate the platform for not distributing the money as promised. Organizers promptly switched to GiveSendGo — a site that brands itself as “the leader in Christian fundraising” — where they’ve raised over $9 million and counting. GiveSendGo has made a niche for itself as a host for causes that GoFundMe won’t touch or has shut down. People arrested in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, police officers accused of misconduct and homicide, QAnon conspiracists and proponents of vaccine misinformation all eagerly appeal for money on the site. The episode, in short, seemed to be mirroring controversies in which right-wing voices say they have been “censored” by social media companies such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook — inspiring conservatives to criticize these platforms. (On Monday, hackers disabled the GiveSendGo website and publicized what appeared to be the names and addresses of some of the donors.)
Crowdfunding sites are different in important ways from other social media sites, as the truckers’ successful fundraising on GiveSendGo demonstrates. When extremist voices are kicked off mainstream social media platforms because they are spreading medical misinformation, using discriminatory and abusive language or making threats, they often find homes on alternative platforms such as Gab and Gettr (Twitter substitutes) and Rumble (YouTube). Those platforms often become unsatisfying echo chambers, however, because scale is key to a successful social media site. But with crowdfunding sites — where people only have to visit once to funnel money to the cause of their choice — any site willing to fund unsavory or unlawful activities can do so effectively.
The episode raises the question of whether GiveSendGo, GoFundMe and similar sites should be regulated more heavily than they now are (and more heavily than other tech platforms), given that they can be used to raise and send money anonymously across an international border to fuel protests tinged with violence. (Even before the hack, comments on the donation pages showed that a substantial number of contributors were Americans.) Such regulations might include requiring disclosure of donations to financial regulators in some cases, particularly for large international donations. Crowdfunding platforms might also be held criminally liable when they materially facilitate criminal activities.
Of course, it’s not always clear which protests will turn violent or include illegal acts. But in the case of the protests in Canada, local officials had clearly communicated that the bridge and street blockades contravened local laws — yet the money continued to flow. On Thursday, an Ottawa court blocked GiveSendGo from distributing donations, agreeing with city officials that the money was underwriting violence and harassment. Even so, at least until it was hacked, GiveSendGo continued to collect donations and to claim it would send them abroad to aid the protesters. If the truckers who ignored court orders to disperse can be arrested, surely it also makes sense to hold accountable the companies facilitating their actions.
It’s important to draw a line between unpopular or controversial causes — such as the legal defense of police officers accused of violence — and illegal ones. But as the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection continues its work, those concerned about avoiding a repeat performance in Washington should pay careful attention to what’s going on in Canada and how it’s being supported. So should law enforcement officials preparing to deal with a potential American version of the trucker demonstration.
Facebook hides data showing it harms users. Outside scholars need access.
Crowdsourced fundraising for political protest can be problematic even when illegal actions are not an issue. As the trucker protest began, for instance, the massive success of the GoFundMe fundraiser was held up as evidence that the truckers had significant grass-roots support in Canada. But the discovery that many significant donations came from anonymous U.S. donors (urged on by right-wing figures like Fox News host Tucker Carlson) threw the breadth and depth of support into question.
We’ve already seen — notably in the 2016 presidential election — how domestic populist and far-right groups and foreign actors can use social media platforms to further their agendas and disrupt domestic politics. Crowdfunding sites provide additional cause for concern. The success of the protests in Canada shows how crowdfunding campaigns can help to capture the attention of the media in the lead-up to an event, increase the apparent clout of fringe groups, and even put pressure on political leaders to respond to and compromise with these protesters. Contrary to the impression created by the fundraising and the protests, polls and health data in Canada show overwhelming support for vaccination, and strong support for government-led efforts to fight the pandemic.
In response to this crowdfunded protest, Canada’s House of Commons is now exploring tracking how crowdfunding campaigns channel foreign funding into domestic extremist groups, a move that U.S. lawmakers might want to emulate.
Governments, of course, should always be hesitant to restrict free speech — in the tech sector and elsewhere — and the proper regulation of crowdfunding sites demands careful study. It is certainly possible that requiring donations in some cases to be disclosed would be a better course than more-aggressive bans on supporting certain protests. But restricting the funding of illegal acts, it should be clear, is not the same thing as restricting speech. | null | null | null | null | null |
Damascus boys' basketball guard Peter Mangan has recorded two triple-doubles this season. (Denis Dunathan)
In 2017, Russell Westbrook inspired Damascus resident Peter Mangan as the NBA star broke the single-season triple-double record. After watching Westbrook, Mangan aimed to post triple-doubles in his Damascus Sports Association games, but he never achieved the milestone.
This season, Mangan has realized his preteen goal. The junior has posted two triple-doubles, including in an 83-64 win over Richard Montgomery on Tuesday, when Mangan recorded 13 points, 13 assists and 11 rebounds.
The feat is especially impressive because high school games last 32 minutes.
“You see it with college players and NBA players,” said the 6-foot-2, 185-pound Mangan. “You’re like: ‘Oh, that’s crazy. How do they do that?’ But then when you do it, it’s kind of like, ‘Oh wow, I guess I just did that.’ ”
Mangan was a spot-up shooter growing up, but he moved to point guard last year with his AAU team, Germantown Basketball Club. Mangan said accumulating double-digit assists can be difficult, but he and many of his teammates have developed together since they were in fourth grade.
Mangan has helped Damascus (15-2) enjoy its best season in recent history. On Friday, Mangan didn’t quite get a triple-double, but his 30 points, seven rebounds and seven assists powered the Hornets’ 80-70 win over Paint Branch.
“It’s a lot easier for me because I’ve been playing with these guys for so long,” Mangan said. “I know their tendencies. I know what type of players they are. So I can tell when they’re on, tell when they’re off and need a pickup.”
New Hope’s national aspirations
In the winter of 2018-19, in their second year as a program, the New Hope Academy girls’ team lost its third game of the year at the annual Nike Tournament of Champions and then didn’t lose again. The Tigers went on a 25-game winning streak then ended with New Hope as the Geico National Champions.
Coach Sam Caldwell said that this season has reminded him of that one. The program’s most recent loss came Dec. 20 at the Nike Tournament of Champions. Since then, the Tigers have won 14 straight and now enter the postseason aiming to keep that streak alive.
They will travel to the National Association of Christian Athletes championship, a 12-team national event in Tennessee this month. After that, Caldwell hopes his team will have another chance to compete in the Geico Nationals in Fort Myers, Fla.
“All we can do is focus on staying sharp and hope for that opportunity,” Caldwell said.
One of the things the coach admires most about this particular group is their practice style. With so many scheduling changes this season, practice has become the most consistent and central part of the team’s existence. It is there that they have forged their identity for the winter.
“When we get into competitive drills or scrimmaging, it can get intense,” Caldwell said. “We have to pump the breaks sometimes because this is a team with people who want to win.”
Khani Rooths, F, Georgetown Prep. The Hoyas put the Interstate Athletic Conference on notice this week when they earned a one-point win over Episcopal to end the regular season. Rooths did a little bit of everything in the victory, finishing with 19 points, seven rebounds, five assists, five blocks and three steals.
Chelsea Calkins, G, Churchill. The junior had 27 points, six rebounds and five assists in the Bulldogs’ 80-21 win over Einstein.
Ty Bevins, G, Gwynn Park. The sophomore had 14 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists in the Yellowjackets 65-46 win over Fairmont Heights.
Alayna Arnolie, G, Madison. The senior guard knocked down nine three-pointers and averaged 26.5 points in her team’s two wins, each by 40-plus points, as the Warhawks remain favorites to retain the Class 6 state title.
DCIAA girls’ championship, 5 p.m. Wednesday at Coolidge
DCIAA boys’ championship, 7 p.m. Wednesday at Coolidge
Metro Private School Conference championship, time TBD, Friday
Interstate Athletic Conference championship, time TBD, Saturday
Led by five senior starters, South Lakes turns to playoffs
The morning after his team’s regular season ended, South Lakes boys’ coach Mike Desmond reflected a bit on the past few months. They had been difficult, sure. But that was mostly by design.
“It’s been a long, long regular season,” Desmond said. “I think we had one of the toughest nondistrict schedules in the area. And we went out of our way to get it. … We wanted to make sure that our seniors were as good as they could be but we were also baptizing our young guys by fire.”
The Seahawks are fortunate enough to have five senior starters, all of whom have been involved with the varsity team since their sophomore year: Kyle Tang, Colin Luongo, E.J. Finney, Samuel Cooley and Nathan Owen.
“They’re on the same page,” Desmond said. “There’s times where they joke and kid but they’re also willing to get in each other’s face. They’re friends who have that brother-type relationship.”
South Lakes finished the regular season 19-2, with one of those losses coming against Concorde District rival Madison in early January. The Seahawks got another shot at the Warhawks last week and thumped them by 39 points.
Desmond views the game as a sign of growth for the group, especially the seniors. He recognizes they have a natural chemistry that is sometimes best to let alone.
“This group of seniors share the ball. And they move well without it,” he said. “If we have good energy and we’re communicating and these kids are just out there playing for one another, it can be really fun to watch. Sometimes I have to be toned down just so I don’t get in the way of what they’re already doing.”
Parkdale picks up where it left off
When Prince George’s County announced high school sports would be postponed through mid-January because of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, it stopped the momentum the Parkdale girls’ team had quickly built.
Despite returning just one player from the team that reached the Maryland state playoffs in 2020, the last time the school competed, the Panthers had jumped out to a 4-0 record and were outscoring opponents 271-88.
“Obviously you understand the reasoning for the pause, but in the moment it just felt like the worst timing for us because our young team was playing at a level that was ahead of schedule,” Coach Lawrence Watson said. “So I really just wanted to keep getting them in the gym so I could continue to mold and help them build good habits. But with the shutdown, we lost all sense of structure. I had no idea what the team would look like when or if we ever returned to the court.”
Watson quickly realized his team would be just fine when they earned a resounding 57-41 win over Eleanor Roosevelt on Jan. 21.
Last week, the No. 19 Panthers fell for the first time, 49-48, at Duval, but they avenged the loss the next night with a 43-41 win in a rematch. Parkdale enters its final week of the regular season with a 13-1 record.
“I think it really says a lot about our girls that they were able to come back the next night and get that win after losing,” Watson said. “I truly believe that it’s a testament to the work that they put in individually during the shutdown.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Alex Carpenter had an assist in the U.S. win over Finland in the semifinals. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
BEIJING — On the February night the U.S. women’s hockey team celebrated its Olympic gold medal win over Canada in PyeongChang four years ago, Alex Carpenter was not watching. She was with her new professional hockey team in China, an unlikely destination for one of the world’s best players. A few months before, she had been one of Team USA’s final cuts, a stunning move considering she had helped the team win four world championships and a silver at the Sochi Olympics in 2014.
But that move to China had helped Carpenter rediscover her joy for the game, a pursuit aided by her former teammate Megan Bozek, who had also played on the 2014 Olympic team but had been cut before 2018 — and who decided to join Carpenter to play overseas.
Four years later, in a country that had helped rejuvenate their careers, Carpenter and Bozek were both again playing in the Olympics Monday night, helping Team USA to a 4-1 win over Finland in the semifinals to earn a chance at what they missed out on: a gold medal against rival Canada.
“It feels like it has come full circle, from a heartbreak four years ago. But watching our best friends win an Olympic gold medal is something special,” said Bozek, whose team will meet the Canadians in a gold medal rematch on Thursday. “And then having the opportunity to play in China … and continuing to play, and now being back here to fight for a gold medal — is something really special in our hockey journey together.”
Their journey continued Monday night in one of the tournament’s most competitive games, as the United States needed everyone on its roster to stave off the upset-minded Finns. It needed second-period goals from Cayla Barnes and Hilary Knight to build a lead; it needed a late third-period goal from Hayley Scamurra to secure some insurance with a 3-0 advantage; and it needed every one of the 25 saves made by goalie Alex Cavallini, who made a string of acrobatic stops throughout the night to deny Finland any chance to climb back into the game.
But the United States also needed Bozek to again help anchor the defense as she has all tournament, and it needed Carpenter to use her speed and skill to create numerous scoring opportunities, including an assist on an empty-net goal by Abby Roque in the final seconds.
“They’ve been incredibly important. [Bozek] is carrying a lot of minutes, and playing really, really well defensively … And [Carpenter], if I look back over the course of four months, Alex Carpenter might have been our best overall player,” U.S. Coach Joel Johnson said. “For both of them, I don’t think they’re worried about what happened four years ago. I think they’re excited about what is in front of them.”
For this run to happen in China has made it all the more special for Carpenter, 27, who has scored four goals with two assists over the tournament. In the months after she was cut, she threw herself into competing for professional clubs in China, where her father, former NHL player Bobby Carpenter, also coached a professional team. She played three seasons with the Vanke Rays, which now competes in the Women’s Hockey League, becoming a star in the league while enjoying some of the resources and benefits that weren’t available to professional players in North America.
“This is like a second home to me, honestly. I’ve spent so much time here and made so many great friends here. These people really helped me love the game again after what I went through. I owe a lot to the organization that I played with here. In a way it seems like it came full circle to get cut, play here for four years and then end up here four years later,” Carpenter said. “It’s something that we can look back on now — obviously it was a tough time but I think to be able to go through it with someone else made it a little bit easier in a sense. To end up here with [Bozek] is pretty special.”
Carpenter had grown even closer to Bozek after both were cut by Team USA in the months before PyeongChang, and by 2019, Bozek had moved to China to also compete professionally. She never thought her professional career would take her there — “It was great to have new teammates, new friends, and make memories,” the 30-year-old Bozek said — but it was also important to simply keep playing. And as they did, both Carpenter and Bozek remained two of the best players in the world as they worked their way back onto Team USA’s roster for Beijing.
“This group has been so special for me and coming back. I’m looking forward to doing it with this group of 23,” said Carpenter, who scored one of the team’s two goals in a loss to Canada in the preliminary round. Both her and Bozek were rising stars when they had to settle for a silver medal against Canada in Sochi in 2014 — only to watch their best friends on the team conquer their rivals in 2018, which was only the second U.S. Olympic gold medal and ended a run of four straight golds for Canada. After leaning on each other in the years since, Carpenter and Bozek now have a chance to help their country defend that title on Thursday — in a country that helped keep their careers afloat.
“Just knowing what we’ve gone through and fighting our way back,” Bozek said, “and wearing that USA jersey here at the Olympics … it’s great having her by my side.” | null | null | null | null | null |
A view of the main entrance to Trump Tower in New York, Jan. 19, 2022. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
On Monday morning, Trump claimed that he’d at last been vindicated.
It’s a useful parallel, in fact, comparing his claims about having been spied on with his claims about fraud in the 2020 election. In neither case has any such thing been proven, despite, as always, the robust effort by his allies to provide some foundation to Trump’s unfounded claims.
When that allegation was first reported in October 2016, it was pretty obviously unfounded. I wrote about the various ways in which the idea didn’t pass the smell test, from the theoretical — why leave any trail at all if you’re trying to secretly communicate with Russia? — to the technical, given that the Trump server wasn’t controlled by Trump at all. Others, like technologist Rob Graham, reached a similar conclusion: that this was probably just a glitchy side effect of marketing emails.
Last year, Durham unveiled an indictment against an attorney named Michael Sussman centered on the Alfa Bank rumor. Durham claimed that Sussman had lied to an FBI official in September 2016 when trying to get the Bureau to investigate the connection, saying that he was not working for a specific client as he offered the tip. The allegation is that this was a false statement of the sort that tripped up various Trump allies during the Russia probe: that Sussman was, in fact, working for the campaign of Hillary Clinton. As journalist Marcy Wheeler has written, the criminal case is not terribly strong.
The theory behind the Alfa Bank rumor is complicated. Sussman’s law firm, Perkins Coie, had been retained by Clinton’s campaign (leading it, separately, to engage the investigative firm Fusion GPS that later generated the infamous dossier of reports alleging a more robust connection between Russia and Trump’s team). An unidentified individual first noticed traffic between the Trump server and the Russian bank and brought it to an executive at a technology firm who had retained Perkins Coie and was working with Sussman. (Wheeler has an excellent timeline of all of this.) That triggered an effort to examine the scope of those connections, one that at least some of those involved in the research apparently understood to be an effort to create a jumping off point for further research that could bolster a Trump-Russia narrative. (The tech executive, I’ll note, wasn’t sold on the Alfa-Trump link even back in August 2016.) Durham’s filing ties the campaign to Sussman and Sussman to the executive but it’s not explicitly argued that the probe flowed down from Clinton’s team — or up to it.
Now the technical stuff. At issue here are what are called domain name server (DNS) look-ups. Traffic on the Internet is pushed around between points identified with Internet protocol (IP) addresses, strings of numbers that might be thought of like latitude and longitude in real-world positioning. In the real world, we don’t generally point people to latitude and longitude coordinates but to street addresses. On the Internet, we don’t generally go to IP addresses but domains. A DNS look-up converts a domain like washingtonpost.com to this newspaper’s actual webserver IP address.
It’s important here to know why those records might have been collected. An expert on the technology with whom I spoke on Monday explained that Internet service providers often allow third parties to collect domain name lookups because the information is useful for tracking bad actors on the Internet. If, for example, there are suddenly a number of lookups to we11sfargo.com, with ones replacing the Ls in the domain name, that might suggest some effort to redirect traffic away from the bank to some spoof site. Or organizations might similarly have a passive DNS collection process in place, so that they might know if there’s a sudden spike in lookups for unusual servers in, say, Russia — an early indication that maybe someone is trying to run a scam targeting employees.
The “particular healthcare provider” is apparently Spectrum Health which, when the story first emerged in 2016, was identified as similarly linked to the Trump email server but which also provided reporters with the marketing spam emails that explained that connection.
It’s useful to note that Durham’s claim about data being “exploited” emerged early. Both Wheeler and Graham elevated questions about the ethics of digging through collected DNS records to investigate something that was likely outside of any agreement governing what the data was being collected for. But that doesn’t mean 1) that any laws were violated or 2) that this constitutes “hacking.” If I give you a key to my house and you use it to come in and read my diary, I will certainly be angry with you but it’s not like you committed burglary.
Yet that’s how the paragraph above has at times been conveyed. On Fox News, for example, a story about the Durham filing ran with the headline “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia: Durham.” There are a few problems with this, including that the connection between Clinton’s team and the Perkins Coie Alfa Bank investigation is not direct. Nor did Durham use the word “infiltrate,” a word that suggests illicit access to data.
Instead, both of those claims come not from Durham but, as the article makes clear, from former Trump staffer Kash Patel. It’s a statement from Patel that makes the Clinton claim and uses the word infiltrate. It’s Patel — whose recent career has often centered on backstopping Trump’s claims of being unfairly investigated — who drew the line that Fox is attributing to the special counsel.
Durham describes an effort to impugn Trump by claiming that, during a meeting with a government agency in February 2017, Sussman alleged that DNS lookups “demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.” This doesn’t support a throughline back to Clinton, of course, since Trump wasn’t spending much time at the White House while Clinton was still a presidential candidate. Durham’s filing asserts that the lookups centered on those phones went back to 2014, when Trump wasn’t even yet a candidate.
There are legitimate questions about the effort to link Trump back to Russia using this data that was not only sketchy at the outset but which had been debunked by the time the election was over. But there is no question that this is not proof that Trump Tower was “wiretapped.” It is not proof that Mark Levin’s claims in early 2017 were accurate, since they weren’t. (He’s tried to take credit for his foresight in recent days.) If it’s evidence of Trump being “spied on,” as Trump has also claimed in recent days, it’s a very broad sort of spying — collecting all of the domain-name lookups from a physical location or a network — being conducted not by the Obama administration or by Hillary Clinton but by an anti-Trump lawyer.
“In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death,” Trump said over the weekend, the sort of escalation of rhetoric that is not lessened by our being so accustomed to Trump doing it. It is also not, as he said at another point, “a bigger scandal than Watergate.”
This is precisely the same claim he made back in March 2017 — “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” — well before this particular justification of his claims had been generated in the first place. | null | null | null | null | null |
SpaceX's Inspiration4 flight was launched on Sept. 15 from Kennedy Space Center. It was the first flight to reach orbit with an all-civilian astronaut crew. (SpaceX)
In addition to the first commercial spacewalk, Isaacman said the first Polaris mission would endeavor “to go farther than anyone’s gone since we last walked on the moon — in the highest Earth orbit that anyone’s ever flown.” The record was set in 1966 by the Gemini 11 crew, which flew to 853 miles, the highest altitude for any non-lunar crewed mission, according to NASA. | null | null | null | null | null |
The company, which went public last year, now employs more than 3,000 workers at 160 bricks-and-mortar stores in the United States and Canada, and two manufacturing facilities. Revenue for its fiscal third quarter ended Sept. 30 rose 32 percent from a year earlier to $137.4 million. Its active customers grew 23 percent from the same period in 2020 to 2.15 million. But its stock price has dropped about 40 percent since the company’s direct listing, and its quarterly net loss has more than doubled year-over-year, some of which is due to listing-related expenses. | null | null | null | null | null |
Norton ‘extremely concerned’ about potential Republican bill to repeal D.C.'s home rule
Del. Eleanor Holmes-Norton (D-D.C.), center, joined from left by Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), on Capitol Hill in April 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
While D.C. won’t have any federal voting representatives on the ballot in November, the outcome of the midterm elections could be consequential for the city’s local government, and not just in its pursuit of statehood.
House Republicans recently described plans to restrict the District’s autonomy if they gain control of the House after the November elections, particularly on matters relating to crime, policing and homelessness. And some could go as far as seeking to eliminate D.C.'s autonomy altogether by repealing the 1973 District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which created D.C.'s government as it’s known today.
Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which has oversight of the District, told the Daily Caller that he was putting together legislation to return exclusive control of D.C. to Congress by repealing the act, which allows D.C. to have limited self-government.
That would represent the most aggressive attempt to restrict D.C. officials’ authority in decades, not since Republicans made similar threats in the 1990s while the District was on the brink of bankruptcy.
“It’s something to be extremely concerned about, because the District may well find itself in the minority next term,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), the District’s nonvoting delegate in the House. “This is very radical, and I must say very unexpected. It will take every bit of energy I have to make sure it does not happen."
Since D.C. is not a state, Congress still retains oversight of the city’s budget and laws, authority granted to Congress in the Constitution. But the Home Rule Act of 1973 dramatically expanded D.C.'s autonomy by creating a local government; for roughly 100 years before that, Congress functioned as its sole legislative body and D.C. residents had no local elected officials, due largely to notorious segregationists’ control of the committee overseeing D.C. affairs and their opposition to home rule for a city with a large population of Black residents.
Even if Republicans win control of Congress, though, a proposal as drastic as repealing D.C. home rule would be unlikely to succeed in the Senate. The Senate filibuster — which advocates for D.C. statehood have supported eliminating — would likely prevent such a bill from passing.
At a coronavirus news conference Monday, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) appeared untroubled when asked about House Republicans’ plans to try to limit D.C.'s autonomy should they win the majority in November.
“I’m focused on Washington D.C., and my job as mayor is to work with whoever’s in the Congress," Bowser said. "We’ve worked with Democrats and Republicans on a number of issues. That will be our approach regardless of who’s in charge.”
Republicans lately have been aggressively targeting Bowser over homelessness and rising homicides and carjackings, along with Bowser’s mandate requiring proof of vaccines to enter certain businesses and venues. Bowser said at the Monday news conference that the city is ending the vaccine requirement for businesses Tuesday — though that only prompted more attacks from Republicans, not to mention from some in her party who disagreed with the decision.
“.@MayorBowser suddenly lifting DC’s vaccine & mask mandates proves that Dem leaders were never following the science—they were following political science,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who also sits on the Oversight Committee, said on Twitter. “No longer are the American people going to be used as pawns in their political theatre. It’s time to end the madness.”
“Oversight Committee Republicans have called on the D.C. mayor repeatedly to address the surge of homelessness and violent crime and to withdraw her unfair vaccine passport," Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), top Republican on the committee, said in a statement to The Washington Post. "When Republicans are back in power in 2023, we will hold the D.C. mayor accountable for implementing policies that are destroying Americans’ capital city.”
Clyde’s office did not immediately respond to a request for more information Monday about the legislation he said he was planning to bring forth to repeal the Home Rule Act. Clyde had told the Daily Caller that D.C.'s leaders “are unfit to properly maintain our nation’s capital" and said it was time for Congress to “repeal the District of Columbia Home Rule Act and reclaim its duty … to manage the affairs of our nation’s capital.” | null | null | null | null | null |
When she left softball, she joined the world of bobsledding, where she had some breathtaking victories and met her husband, fellow bobsledder Nic Taylor. When the sport opened up the possibility for co-ed sleds, she qualified for national competition as the female driver of three men. (Again, sounds like my carpool.) | null | null | null | null | null |
The couple argues that they have no criminal history or extended family in the United States, and that they have not attempted to flee since learning of the government investigation into them in November. That includes a Jan. 5 FBI search of their properties and the Jan. 31 seizure of 94,000 of 119,754 bitcoin stolen after a 2016 hack of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and sent to a digital wallet controlled by Lichtenstein. In addition, Morgan’s lawyers said she underwent breast surgery that tested negative for cancer on Jan. 31, and is still recovering. | null | null | null | null | null |
Judge Jed S. Rakoff told the lawyers involved in the case that he will formally issue his ruling after a jury returns a verdict.
Rakoff did not spare the Times criticism for its error, a sentence in the opinion-section piece that inaccurately suggested a link between rhetoric from her political action committee and a 2011 mass shooting. “This is an example of very unfortunate editorializing on the part of the Times,” he said, adding he was “not at all happy to make this decision” in its favor.
However, he told the parties gathered in his federal courtroom in Manhattan, “my job is to apply the law. ... The law sets a very high standard for actual malice, and in this case the court finds that that standard has not been met.”
The case — the first libel lawsuit to go to trial against the Times in the U.S. in nearly two decades — has been closely watched for its First Amendment implications. Two conservative Supreme Court justices have signaled an openness to reassess a landmark 1964 ruling that has set the current high bar for prominent people pursuing libel claims.
Rakoff said the case will likely go to a court of appeals, which will “have the benefit" of his ruling on the legal underpinnings of the case, and the jury’s verdict. | null | null | null | null | null |
This booking photo released Oct. 9, 2021, by the West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority shows Jonathan Toebbe. Toebbe has pleaded guilty to trying to pass information about American nuclear-powered warships to a foreign country. Toebbe pleaded guilty in federal court in Martinsburg, W.Va., to a single count of conspiracy to communicate restricted data. (West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority via AP) (Uncredited/West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority) | null | null | null | null | null |
The winter of 1931-32 was the warmest on record for much of the Mid-Atlantic, Ohio Valley, Great Lakes and Northeast.
A stroll along the Georgetown Waterfront on Christmas Eve. (Jeannie in D.C./Flickr)
Winters are warming faster than any other season and most of the mildest cases have occurred in recent years. But for many locations east of the Mississippi Rivers, including Washington, the 1931-32 winter is still the gold medalist for winter warmth.
That winter ranks as the warmest on record in at least a century for much of the Mid-Atlantic region, Ohio Valley, Great Lakes and parts of the Northeast.
It was so mild that for the Winter Olympics held in Lake Placid, N.Y., which has a much snowier climate than this year’s games in Beijing, organizers struggled to keep conditions supportive for winter events. A bobsled run was washed out by heavy rain. Snow had to be transported to event venues.
The intensity of the warmth that winter is particularly remarkable considering the current era of warming winters.
Since the turn of the millennium, Washington has experienced four of its top 10 warmest winters on record. 1997-98 holds another top 10 spot in the 148 years of existing weather records.
But the peak that still hasn’t been conquered happened 90 years ago, in a winter that stubbornly refused to ever get cold for more than a couple of days. The winter of 1931-32 averaged 44.7 degrees, just ahead of the second warmest winter in 1889-90, and almost a full degree above the warmest recent winter, 2016-17.
In some locations outside of Washington, other winters haven’t come close to dethroning the top spot. In Lynchburg, Va., the 1931-32 winter is more than 4 degrees warmer than the second warmest winter, a gaping canyon when it comes to long-term seasonal climate statistics.
A look back at the records for the 1931-32 winter reveals one that refused to get really cold for very long, with occasional warm spurts pushing into the 60s and 70s.
The coldest it got in Washington between Dec. 1 and Feb. 29 was 22 degrees, a mark that was tied just last year and in 2019-2020 for the warmest minimum temperature during the December through February winter months
Periods of warmth — peaking with three days of mid-70s in Washington and some lower 80s not far to the south Jan. 13-15 — were interspersed with cool-downs that lacked air from core Arctic regions.
The prolonged warmth was primarily due to what warm spells and heat waves are almost always driven by — dominant high pressure, extending over much of the U.S., especially the eastern half, extending unusually far north through much of the winter.
The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) began the winter neutral but then rose to a moderately positive state in January, according to National Center for Atmospheric Research data, implying stronger westerly winds keeping much of the Arctic air over higher latitudes.
It doesn’t appear the NAO was extreme enough to explain the exceptional, widespread warmth in the record winter by itself, but it certainly didn’t help drive cold air southward. The NAO plunged in February, perhaps foretelling what was to come in early March.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation was in an exceptionally long El Niño period, with warm equatorial Pacific waters, from 1929 to 1932, according to NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory. El Niño reached its peak the year before in 1931, one of the five strongest on record up to 2015, according to NOAA data.
Depending on its strength, positioning and interplay with other climatic oscillations, El Niño has an almost Jekyll-and-Hyde quality for Washington and Mid-Atlantic winters, linked to some of the coldest and snowiest, like 2009-10, and some of the warmest and least snowy, like 1997-98.
1931-32 had its own trick to play, once meteorological winter ended and February flipped to March.
A powerful coastal low and burst of Arctic air struck the Eastern U.S. a few days into March, dumping several inches of snow on inland areas and causing temperatures to drop into the teens.
Washington picked up 4 inches of snow on March 6-7 and fell as low as 14 degrees by March 10.
Because that cold snap happened in March, it didn’t count as “winter” for weather statistics, and therefore didn’t stop the warmest winter on record from hitting the books. | null | null | null | null | null |
The reform worked, in a uniquely rapid and emphatic fashion. In the first post-reform cycle of national assessments, Indiana fourth graders jumped from 27th to 14th. Two years later, the state ranked ninth. The extra costs for summer tutoring, or the reputational bruise from too many youngsters having to repeat third grade, clearly got the system’s attention.
Turns out the idea of an education “warranty” flickered briefly, a couple of decades ago. A few isolated high schools around the country, and even the Los Angeles Unified School District, touted guarantees of proficiency in reading, writing and problem solving, with free retraining for graduates not meeting that standard. But all sank without a trace. | null | null | null | null | null |
Your average 18-wheel tractor-trailer is over 13 feet high and around 50 feet long, which makes it an extraordinarily useful tool for political protest. If, that is, your preferred means of protest involves blocking traffic, getting in people’s way, or interrupting the flow of commerce. The truck is a fantastic force multiplier; with just a few of them, you can create a lot of chaos no matter how small your numbers.
A key part of that coverage is not just to make heroes out of the small number of Canadian truckers who want to travel back and forth along the U.S. border without being vaccinated, but to try to create similar protests, using trucks, here in America.
I’m all for it. Civil disobedience — civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.
At the moment, the only national vaccine mandate in America is one for health care workers. The Biden administration tried to create a mandate for employees of large companies to either be vaccinated or tested frequently for covid, but the Supreme Court blocked it. Some state and local mandates for masks and vaccines are in place, but those are being eliminated by the day, in the apparent hope that once the omicron wave has receded, the pandemic will be pretty much over.
Which is where the trucks come in. Those like Paul and Carlson are desperately trying to create a truck-based protest movement in the U.S., but so far it doesn’t seem to be working. The Department of Homeland Security warned last week that there could be truck protests beginning around the Super Bowl. But it didn’t happen.
Whenever a significant protest movement begins, we wind up having a discussion about both the objectives of the protesters and the tactics they’re using. Oftentimes those who disagree with the former will couch their criticisms in terms of the latter. That’s always been true; when Martin Luther King was leading sit-ins and marches, he was condemned as a radical who might have more success if only he engaged in more polite forms of action (and if you think Sen. Paul would have been praising him were the senator around at the time, I have a bridge to sell you).
And people opposed to the substance of your demands can become outraged even by protests that aren’t disruptive. When Colin Kaepernick knelt silently during the national anthem to protest police brutality — just about the least disruptive protest imaginable — he was drummed out of the NFL as a result. (You may have noticed that conservatives who complain about “cancel culture” were unconcerned with this actual case of a famous person losing their livelihood because of their political beliefs.)
Disruptive protests are meant to get maximal attention, but they can also create a backlash; I’m sure more than a few conservatives got uneasy when the Canadian protesters shut down the Ambassador Bridge that links Detroit and Ontario and carries about a quarter of all trade between the two countries. Some on the right may wondering whether it’s such a hot idea to have truckers clogging traffic all over the country, especially when their political position is not exactly lacking a hearing or people in positions of power who embrace it.
On the other hand, for some the goal may just be chaos, creating a sense that events are spinning out of control and President Biden ought to be blamed. But if they’re going to shut down entire cities for extended periods, they might end up learning that using trucks as a weapon won’t win you many converts, no matter what they tell you on Fox. | null | null | null | null | null |
If you have spent the past 75 years wondering how that snake got there, Dan Mulville of Vienna, Va., is happy to tell you.
But then it rained. The cardboard box got wet, and Pretzel escaped. It caused quite a stir in the neighborhood, though apparently did not fluster the aforementioned Thomas Fitzgibbons, who continued to calmly read his newspaper as the snake dropped from above like a python from a jungle tree branch.
Richard Newkirk died in 2019 in Madison, Miss., at the age of 89. | null | null | null | null | null |
The couple argues that they have extensive family in the United States, no criminal history, and that they have not attempted to flee since learning of the government investigation into them in November. That includes a Jan. 5 FBI search of their properties and the Jan. 31 seizure of 94,000 of 119,754 bitcoin stolen after a 2016 hack of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and sent to a digital wallet controlled by Lichtenstein. In addition, Morgan’s lawyers said she underwent breast surgery that tested negative for cancer on Jan. 31, and is still recovering. | null | null | null | null | null |
Del. Eleanor Holmes-Norton (D-D.C.), with Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), on Capitol Hill in April. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Although D.C. won’t have any federal voting representatives on the ballot in November, the outcome of the midterm elections could be consequential for city government, and not just in the pursuit of statehood.
House Republicans recently described plans to restrict the District’s autonomy if they gain control of the House after the November elections, particularly on matters relating to crime, policing and homelessness. And some could go as far as seeking to eliminate D.C.'s autonomy altogether by repealing the 1973 District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which created D.C. government as it’s known today.
Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which oversees the District, told the Daily Caller that he was putting together legislation to return exclusive control of D.C. to Congress by repealing the act, which allows D.C. to have limited self-government.
That would represent the most aggressive attempt to restrict D.C. officials’ authority in decades. Republicans made similar threats in the 1990s while the District was on the brink of bankruptcy.
“It’s something to be extremely concerned about, because the District may well find itself in the minority next term,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), the District’s nonvoting delegate in the House. “This is very radical, and I must say very unexpected. It will take every bit of energy I have to make sure it does not happen.”
Since D.C. is not a state, Congress still oversees the city’s budget and laws, authority granted to Congress in the Constitution. But the Home Rule Act of 1973 dramatically expanded D.C.'s autonomy by creating a local government; for about 100 years before that, Congress functioned as its sole legislative body and D.C. residents had no local elected officials, due largely to notorious segregationists’ control of the committee overseeing D.C. affairs and their opposition to home rule for a city with a large population of Black residents.
Even if Republicans win control of Congress, though, a proposal as drastic as repealing D.C. home rule would be unlikely to succeed in the Senate. The Senate filibuster — which D.C. statehood advocates have supported eliminating — would probably prevent such a bill from passing.
At a coronavirus-related news conference Monday, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) appeared untroubled when asked about House Republicans’ plans to try to limit D.C.'s autonomy should they win the majority in November.
“I’m focused on Washington, D.C., and my job as mayor is to work with whoever’s in the Congress,” Bowser said. “We’ve worked with Democrats and Republicans on a number of issues. That will be our approach regardless of who’s in charge.”
Republicans lately have been aggressively targeting Bowser over homelessness and rising homicides and carjackings, along with Bowser’s mandate requiring proof of vaccination to enter certain businesses and venues. Bowser said at the Monday news conference that the city is ending the vaccine requirement for businesses Tuesday — though that only prompted more attacks from Republicans, not to mention from some in her party who disagreed with the decision.
“.@MayorBowser suddenly lifting DC’s vaccine & mask mandates proves that Dem leaders were never following the science — they were following political science,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who also sits on the Oversight Committee, said on Twitter. “No longer are the American people going to be used as pawns in their political theatre. It’s time to end the madness.”
“Oversight Committee Republicans have called on the D.C. mayor repeatedly to address the surge of homelessness and violent crime and to withdraw her unfair vaccine passport,” Rep. James Comer (Ky.), top Republican on the committee, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “When Republicans are back in power in 2023, we will hold the D.C. mayor accountable for implementing policies that are destroying Americans’ capital city.”
Clyde’s office did not immediately respond to a request for more information Monday about the legislation he said he was planning to pursue. Clyde had told the Daily Caller that D.C.'s leaders “are unfit to properly maintain our nation’s capital” and said it was time for Congress to “repeal the District of Columbia Home Rule Act and reclaim its duty … to manage the affairs of our nation’s capital.” | null | null | null | null | null |
But since the decision is likely to be appealed — a path that could result in rulings upending longstanding legal protections for journalists who write about public figures — Rakoff said he wanted future courts to have both his decision and the jury’s to consider.
Rakoff did not spare the Times criticism for its error, a sentence within a larger essay that inaccurately suggested a link between rhetoric from her political action committee and a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson.
“This is an example of very unfortunate editorializing on the part of the Times,” he said, adding he was “not at all happy to make this decision” in its favor.
While Palin’s attorneys argued that the paper’s then-editorial page editor James Bennet had acted recklessly in publishing assertions he should have known were false, a Times lawyer described a frantic, deadline editing session that resulted in “a mess-up... a goof” that he regretted immediately and corrected as quickly as possible.
The case — the first libel lawsuit against the Times to go to trial against in the U.S. in nearly two decades — has been closely watched for its First Amendment implications. Two conservative Supreme Court justices have signaled an openness to reassess a landmark 1964 ruling that set a high bar for prominent people pursuing libel claims.
Rakoff said he was letting the jury continue its deliberations so that if it returns a decision in Palin’s favor, the appeals court wouldn’t necessarily have to send it back for a new trial but rather reinstate the jury’s verdict.
It’s more typical for a judge to issue such a ruling either before a jury begins its deliberations or after they have reached a verdict, said David A. Logan, a Roger Williams University law professor and expert in First Amendment protections. “By doing it this way, it is somewhat efficient,” he said, since “another jury does not need to be impaneled when this goes to an appellate court.”
Rakoff told the court that while he considered waiting until the jury’s verdict before making his decision, “the more I thought about it over the weekend, the more I thought there was unfair to both sides. We've had very full argument on this. I know where I'm coming out and I want to therefore apprise the parties of that."
By dismissing a case in which the plaintiff didn’t satisfy her “burden of proof,” Rakoff did “what most judges would do,” said University of Richmond Law professor Carl Tobias. “Perhaps in an abundance of caution and to be as fair as possible to the plaintiff, the judge has allowed the case to go to the jury to see whether the jurors differ with his view that the plaintiff had not met the burden.”
When the jury entered his courtroom, Rakoff told them that "I didn’t think I should let the day expire when you know I love this jury without wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day.” Laughter ensued, and then he delivered some mundane scheduling announcement before reminding them:
“If you see anything in media about this case, just turn away,” he said. "Read about the traumatic results for the Cincinnati team instead.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Trucks block a road during a protest over pandemic health rules in Ottawa on Feb. 14. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
Your average 18-wheel tractor-trailer is over 13 feet high and around 50 feet long, which makes it an extraordinarily useful tool for political protest. If, that is, your preferred means of protest involves blocking traffic, getting in people’s way or interrupting the flow of commerce. The truck is a fantastic force multiplier; with just a few of them, you can create a lot of chaos no matter how small your numbers.
A key part of that coverage is not just to make heroes out of the small number of Canadian truckers who want to travel back and forth across the U.S. border without being vaccinated, but to try to create similar protests, using trucks, here in America.
I’m all for it. Civil disobedience — civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.
At the moment, the only national vaccine mandate in America is one for health-care workers. The Biden administration tried to create a mandate for employees of large companies to either be vaccinated or tested frequently for covid, but the Supreme Court blocked it. Some state and local mandates for masks and vaccines are in place, but those are being eliminated by the day, in the apparent hope that once the omicron wave has receded, the pandemic will be pretty much over.
Which is where the trucks come in. Those like Paul and Carlson are desperately trying to create a truck-based protest movement in the United States, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working. The Department of Homeland Security warned last week that there could be truck protests beginning around the Super Bowl. But it didn’t happen.
Whenever a significant protest movement begins, we wind up having a discussion about both the objectives of the protesters and the tactics they’re using. Oftentimes those who disagree with the former will couch their criticisms in terms of the latter. That has always been true; when Martin Luther King Jr. was leading sit-ins and marches, he was condemned as a radical who might have more success if only he engaged in more polite forms of action (and if you think Paul would have been praising him were the senator around at the time, I have a bridge to sell you).
And people opposed to the substance of your demands can become outraged even by protests that aren’t disruptive. When Colin Kaepernick knelt silently during the national anthem to protest police brutality — just about the least disruptive protest imaginable — he was drummed out of the NFL as a result. (You might have noticed that conservatives who complain about “cancel culture” were unconcerned with this actual case of a famous person losing his livelihood because of his political beliefs.)
Disruptive protests are meant to get maximal attention, but they can also create a backlash; I’m sure more than a few conservatives got uneasy when the Canadian protesters shut down the Ambassador Bridge that links Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, and carries about a quarter of all trade between the United States and Canada. Some on the right might be wondering whether it’s such a hot idea to have truckers clogging traffic all over the country, especially when their political position is not exactly lacking a hearing or people in positions of power who embrace it.
On the other hand, for some the goal might just be chaos, creating a sense that events are spinning out of control and President Biden ought to be blamed. But if they’re going to shut down entire cities for extended periods, they might end up learning that using trucks as a weapon won’t win you many converts, no matter what they tell you on Fox. | null | null | null | null | null |
Trial opens in priest's 2016 killing by militants
Four men went on trial on Monday over the killing of a priest at his altar in a militant attack that rocked France.
Father Jacques Hamel was leading morning Mass in the Normandy town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in July 2016 when two attackers stormed in, forced the 85-year-old to his knees and slit his throat. Police later fatally shot the attackers.
The four defendants in the case have been charged with complicity in the attack and “criminal terrorist association.” Prosecutors have said the men, all born in France, had been in contact with the attackers.
Three of the men appeared in the dock in a courthouse in Paris. The fourth, Rachid Kassim, who prosecutors say contacted the attackers from Syria and encouraged them to kill the priest, is being tried in absentia.
The U.S. military said it targeted Kassim, whom it described as a senior Islamic State militant, in a strike near the city of Mosul, Iraq, in February 2017, though it did not say whether he was killed.
Hamel’s murder was the first Islamist militant attack on a church in Western Europe and occurred 12 days after a Tunisian man pledging allegiance to the Islamic State drove his truck through Bastille Day revelers in Nice, killing 84.
More than 230 people were killed in Islamist-inspired attacks between 2015 and 2017 in France.
Ex-official detained again ahead of protest
Sudan’s military authorities have arrested a former senior government official for a second time, his party said, and at least two demonstrators were reportedly killed as thousands again took to the streets across the country on Monday to protest an October military coup.
The Unionist Alliance party said Mohammed al-Faki Suliman, a former member of the ruling Sovereign Council, was detained Sunday in the capital, Khartoum.
Suliman was also deputy head of a government-run agency tasked with dismantling the legacy of former autocrat Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s regime. Security forces arrested two former members of the agency on Sunday, as well, according to a security official
Suliman was earlier detained in the Oct. 25 coup and released a month later as part of a deal between the military and then-Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.
Several former government officials and activists have been detained in recent weeks as the military rulers have stepped up their crackdown on anti-coup groups.
The takeover upended Sudan’s transition to democratic rule, which began after three decades of international isolation under Bashir, who was ousted in 2019 after a popular uprising.
Protesters once again marched in Khartoum and its twin city, Omdurman, on Monday, demanding the establishment of a fully civilian government to lead the transition, according to the pro-democracy movement. There were protests in other cities, too.
Security forces violently broke up protests in multiple places in Khartoum and Omdurman, using live ammunition and tear gas, an activist said. At least two men were fatally shot, he said. The Sudan Doctors Committee, which tracks protester casualties, said the first was shot in his neck and chest in Khartoum and the second on his shoulder in Omdurman.
Fire erupts at military base in Iran: A fire erupted at a military base in western Iran, state-linked media reported, the latest accident affecting the country's infrastructure in recent months. The fire broke out at a warehouse full of engine oil and flammable materials at a base belonging to the powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard Corps in Kermanshah province, Nournews reported. The blaze damaged a shed but did not cause any casualties. The day before, there were unconfirmed reports about explosions in northern Kermanshah, where missile and military sites are located. Such sensitive sites have been the target of past attacks blamed on Israel.
Pakistani court acquits model's killer on parents' pardon: A Pakistani man sentenced to life in 2019 for strangling his sister, a model on social media, was acquitted of murder after his parents pardoned him under Islamic law, an attorney for the family said. Waseem Azeem was arrested in 2016 after he confessed to killing Qandeel Baloch, 26, for posting what he called "shameful" pictures on Facebook. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but his parents had sought his release. Islamic law in Pakistan allows a murder victim's family to pardon a convicted killer. | null | null | null | null | null |
A spokesman for Mazars did not immediately return a request for comment. An attorney for the Calamaris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s company allegedly provided statements to banks and insurers that included incorrect or misleading information on his Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, N.Y., his triplex in Trump Tower, his Scotland golf resort, his Westchester golf club, Trump Park Avenue in Manhattan, and his 40 Wall Street office building.
James also alleged that the Trump Organization provided statements including inaccurate statements to the Internal Revenue Service and the General Services Administration, which holds the federal lease to Trump’s D.C. hotel. James’s office also subpoenaed records from the GSA. | null | null | null | null | null |
Texas attorney general sues Facebook over user privacy issues
Texas sues Facebook over privacy issues
The Texas attorney general’s office sued Meta’s Facebook, alleging that the social media giant violated state privacy protections with facial recognition technology that collected the biometric data of millions of Texans without their consent.
“This is yet another example of Big Tech’s deceitful business practices and it must stop. I will continue to fight for Texans’ privacy and security,” Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said in a statement.
Facebook said in a blog post in November that it was shutting down a facial recognition system and would delete more than 1 billion people’s information. It cited concerns about use of the technology and uncertainty over what the rules are regarding its use.
It also agreed to pay $650 million in 2020 to settle an Illinois state lawsuit that dealt with similar concerns.
The new lawsuit, which was filed in a state court in Marshall, Tex., says 20.5 million Texans have a Facebook account.
Consumers bet on waning inflation
That’s the takeaway from the January consumer survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which showed that the median one-year-ahead inflation expectations fell for the first time since October 2020, to 5.8 percent. The outlook over three years dropped even more sharply, and the decline was broad-based across age, education and income.
All products and services surveyed by the New York Fed declined in January, including the year-ahead price changes for food, rent, gas, medical care, college education and gold. The survey also showed that the median households is expecting one-year-ahead earnings growth to rise by 3 percent, the same as last month. Last year, an average gain of 2.6 percent was expected.
The median three-year ahead inflation expectations decreased by 0.5 percentage point to 3.5 percent.
Noom reached a $62 million settlement of a lawsuit accusing the weight-loss app provider of tricking customers into signing up for “risk-free” trial periods only to force them into automatic, costly renewals that were difficult to cancel. The preliminary settlement filed Friday night in Manhattan federal court calls for Noom to pay $56 million in cash and offer $6 million of subscription credits. Noom was accused of extracting up to eight months of nonrefundable payments totaling as much as $199 once its trial periods expired, saddling some customers with weight-loss services they never intended to buy. The New York-based company denied wrongdoing, and said its disclosures and cancellation process complied with the law.
Microsoft told many U.S. employees to begin returning to their offices starting Feb. 28, making a fresh attempt to get the software maker’s operations back to normal as coronavirus cases abate. Unless they have a special arrangement, workers should begin a 30-day transition period on that date “to make adjustments to their routines and adopt the working preferences they’ve agreed upon with their managers,” chief marketing officer Chris Capossela said in a blog post. The company, which has said it will remain a flexible workplace, has told employees that they’ll be able to work from home up to half the week without discussing it with managers. Those who want to work remotely more often will have to seek approval. | null | null | null | null | null |
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden came into office with a plan to fix inflation but not the particular inflationary problem that the country now faces. His belief is that a cluster of companies control too many industries, which reduces competition for both customers and workers. That leads to higher prices and lower wages. The White House says that costs an average of $5,000 annually for U.S. families. Biden is now trying to remedy the situation with 72 distinct initiatives. But even administration officials acknowledge that the initiatives outlined by the president’s competition council won’t stop the 7.5% inflation that’s frustrating Americans and damaging Biden’s popularity.
NEW YORK — Stocks closed lower on Wall Street Monday as the U.S. moved to close its embassy in Ukraine amid heightened geopolitical tensions over the thousands of Russian troops that have been amassing on the border. The S&P 500 fell 0.4% after having been down as much as 1.2%. Financial, health care and energy companies were among the biggest weights dragging the market lower. The broader market took a sharp turn lower Friday after the White House warned that Russia could invade Ukraine soon. European markets fell sharply and crude oil prices rose. The yield on the 10-year note rose to 2%.
BOSTON — President Joe Biden said back in July that if the U.S. ends up in a war with a major power it would “be as a consequence of a cyber breach of great consequence.” Now tensions are soaring over Ukraine with Western officials warning about the danger of Russia launching damaging cyberattacks. While no one is suggesting that could lead to a full-blown war between nuclear-armed rivals, the risk of escalation is serious. The danger is in the uncertainty about what crosses a digital red line. Cyberattacks have been on the rise for years and often go unpunished. It’s unclear how grave a malicious cyber operation would have to be to cross the threshold to an act of war.
AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas Attorney General is suing Facebook parent Meta. The lawsuit claims the social media giant has been unlawfully collecting biometric data on Texans for commercial purposes, without their informed consent. Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday filed the lawsuit that claims Facebook has been storing millions of biometric identifiers from photos and videos people upload to its service. Biometric identifiers can be retina or iris scans, voice prints, or a record of hand and face geometry. Monday is also the first day of early voting in a primary election in Texas, where Paxton faces several GOP challengers in the wake of his top deputies reporting him to the FBI for alleged corruption.
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president says a U.S. suspension on avocado imports and recent environmental complaints are part of a conspiracy against his country by political or economic interests. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador put forward the conspiracy theory Monday after the U.S. suspended imports of Mexican avocados on the eve of the Super Bowl following a threat against a U.S. plant safety inspector in Mexico. The U.S. measure was due to years of worries that drug cartel violence and threats against growers in the western Mexico state of Michoacan has spilled over to threats against U.S. inspectors.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The billionaire who flew on his own SpaceX flight last year is headed back up, aiming for an even higher orbit and the chance to take part in a spacewalk. Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman announced Monday that he will make another private spaceflight It will be the first of three crew SpaceX flights to try out new tech, culminating in the first flight of the company’s new Starship with people on board. Plans call for Isaacman and three others, including two SpaceX engineers, to blast off aboard a Falcon rocket no earlier than November on a five-day trip. Isaacman said he and SpaceX are sharing the cost.
PORTLAND, Maine — Maine regulators say the state’s lobster industry bounced back in 2021 and set a record $725 million for the total value of lobsters at the docks. That’s over $300 million more than 2020. The state’s lobster fishing business dipped in 2020, bringing in around $412 million. The per-pound price of lobster soared in 2021, and that contributed to the record high value. Regulators also say fishermen caught about 108 million pounds in 2021, the most since 2018. Still, the Maine lobster industry is grappling with new whale conservation rules, as well as volatile trade markets and uncertainty caused by warming oceans. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Director Jason Reitman, right, and his father Ivan Reitman arrive at the Los Angeles premiere of “Tully” at Regal Cinemas L.A. Live on Wednesday, April 18, 2018. Ivan Reitman, the influential filmmaker and producer behind beloved comedies from “Animal House” to “Ghostbusters,” has died. Reitman passed away peacefully in his sleep Saturday night, Feb. 12, 2022, at his home in Montecito, Calif., his family told The Associated Press. He was 75. (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Carjackings are on the rise. D.C.'s two top officials should work together to stop them.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser delivers remarks at a news conference alongside District and Prince George's County officials in Washington on Feb. 2. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
The burgundy SUV pulled into the food mart and gas station in Northeast Washington on a Saturday afternoon. Two masked people jumped out, pointed guns at the owner of a BMW parked at a pump and demanded his keys, which he quickly tossed to them. “Just got carjacked at gunpoint … I am okay. But they got my car,” Nate Fleming tweeted shortly after the Jan. 15 incident. Mr. Fleming is a candidate for D.C. Council and that fact — along with the release of dramatic surveillance video showing the brazen carjacking — spotlighted a crime that has become all too common, both locally and nationally.
Cities across the country have experienced an alarming rise in carjackings over the past two years. Not only did the pandemic create new opportunities for carjacking — with more delivery people providing services to people who are homebound — but the closure of schools and loss of social supports had a damaging impact on young people who, authorities say, have helped fuel the increase.
In D.C. last year, there were 426 carjackings, an 18 percent increase from the 360 carjackings in 2020. So far this year, as of Feb. 10, there have been 86 carjackings. Most are unsolved with no one arrested. Of the 149 arrests in 2021, 100 involved youths. Three Maryland teenagers have been arrested in connection with Mr. Fleming’s case; two of them have been charged with multiple carjackings.
The unprecedented involvement of young people, many of them from families already facing economic hardships, is not unique to D.C. But it has set up a clash between Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and Attorney General Karl A. Racine, both Democrats. Ms. Bowser, running for a third term at a time when crime is sure to be an issue, pointedly noted the attorney general, not her office, is “solely responsible” for the prosecution of juveniles. Mr. Racine, not running for reelection but a persistent critic of the mayor, and who has endorsed one of her opponents, pushed back, faulting the administration’s failure to close hundreds of carjacking cases and challenging the suggestion that the crimes are being committed by repeat youthful offenders.
In truth, as The Post’s Colbert I. King pointed out, the District’s two top elected officials should be battling crime and not each other. They should be putting their heads together — not butting them — on better strategies. Some notable initiatives have been undertaken. A carjacking unit, formed last year, will be beefed up with more resources, D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III said. Mr. Racine has also partnered with Prince George’s prosecutors on a crime task force, and Ms. Bowser and Prince George’s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D) launched a new initiative for multijurisdictional cooperation.
Policing and prosecution, though, alone won’t solve the problem. It demands more attention to long-term issues such as education inequality, the lack of economic opportunities and the need for improved mental health services. D.C., according to a report by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, devotes considerable resources to numerous social and criminal justice reform programs, but there is duplication, lack of coordination and little evaluation about the efficacy of programs. It’s time that D.C. officials got on the same page. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Let’s not stifle teachers or students
Katie Paris, founder of “Red Wine and Blue," in Westerville, Ohio, on Jan. 31. (Maddie McGarvey for The Washington Post)
John Dewey, the father of progressive education, said in “Democracy and Education,” in 1916, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” There has never been a better time to consider troubling issues in the classroom and not to avoid them. For example, should we take down statues of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant? Let’s examine the books to be banned. Why do they make people uncomfortable? Is it okay to be uncomfortable? Doesn’t some discomfort necessarily accompany the search for truth?
Let’s not stifle teachers for attempting to expose kids to truth.
Sandra Dean, Philadelphia | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The NFL leaves destruction in its wake
It took weeks for a steady succession of moving vans to relocate the Rams from St. Louis to Los Angeles. Local 39 decorators Jack Dungey, left, and Jim McNeely are shown in January 2016, removing a banner honoring Hall of Fame running back Marshall Faulk, which hung inside Edward Jones Dome. (Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)
In her Feb. 11 Sports column, “The Rams might be winners, but a pair of communities know what has been lost,” Candace Buckner focused on the community harm behind the glitzy new SoFi Stadium that hosted the Super Bowl.
Ms. Buckner shared how those on the ground have been impacted, both in St. Louis, which lost the Rams to Los Angeles, and in Inglewood, Calif., where local businesses and residents had to move away from the new stadium development.
When the host Los Angeles Rams defeated the Arizona Cardinals in last month’s playoff game, the television crew failed to mention that both teams were wrenched from a supportive St. Louis community.
Ms. Buckner reminded us that, in addition to failed hiring objectives and obfuscated investigations of abuse, the National Football League leaves human and economic dislocation in its wake.
Stephen Melman, Washington | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Sen. Marsha Blackburn, D-Tenn., speaks during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security hearing to examine COVID-19 fraud and price gouging, on Feb. 1, 2022 on Capitol Hill in Washington. Two widely supported bills are encountering delays in the Senate. The House easily approved the measures last week with broad bipartisan support. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via AP, Pool) | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: WP Subscriber Exclusive: Brian Cox, Author, “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat” & Actor, “Succession”
MS. ELLISON: Hello, and welcome to this Washington Post Live subscriber event. My name is Sarah Ellison.
I'm thrilled to welcome Brian Cox as our guest today. Mr. Cox is, of course, known for his wide variety of roles that he has played over the years, most recently as the patriarch, Logan Roy, in the hit HBO series, "Succession." He joins us today, however, in his capacity as author, and he pulls no punches about Hollywood, politics, or his own success and failures in his new book, "Putting the Rabbit in the Hat."
Welcome, Brian. We're so happy to have you.
MR. COX: Nice to be here or there or everywhere.
MS. ELLISON: I want to start with your childhood, which is where you go early on in the book, and you talk about some of the difficulties of that time. For example, you lost your father when you were only eight years old. I'm wondering, writing the book, was it difficult to revisit those moments?
MR. COX: Not really. There are moments they're still with me, and they're always with me. And my sense of my father is still as strong as it was when I was eight, which I find extraordinary because a lot of people don't even--can't remember them, but I--it is such a vivid image for me.
And, also, the stuff that I went through, I mean, ostensibly, I had a very happy childhood up until that point. I mean really blissful. I was the youngest. I was probably spoiled.
My mum, unfortunately, was ill a lot of my childhood. She had a--well, she had a very difficult birth, and I was the reason for that difficult birth, you know. So she suffered a lot from that, and she wasn't in the best of health.
And I think there was a--I think my mother was very--she was very much like many, many women of that generation and that time and particularly the working class or, as you would say, blue collar background, and I think she was thwarted considerably. And I think that was what was so difficult.
I found this letter from her when I was--actually, after the event, I was going through some stuff, and we found this little old handbag. And there was a--it was actually a diary entry about my dad, and it was so beautifully written. And she understates this wonderful phrase when she said, "Well, we had our little differences." And, you know, they may seem little to her, but I don't think they were--when you look at it historically, it's not at all little.
My son was with me, my youngest son, and he was very affected by it. And she could write. You know, she really had a talent for putting thoughts and words together, and possibly, that's what I've inherited from her. But she--again, she had no outlet when she was--you know, she had five kids. She helped my dad initially run the shop because she--he was a little bit wary about giving up his job, you know, but he did. And it wasn't very long. I mean, it was after only about, I think, 18 months, and he gave up his job. And he'd actually become very good at it, but his problem was he was just immensely generous. And that was his soul. He was a real--the real meaning of the word. I know it's a dirty word in America, but the real world, what "socialist" means is care for the community, care for one's fellow man, you know, and being of a social being, you know, and that's what he was.
So he always said to my mum, you know, "I can't change who I am. That's who I am," and it was, you know--but he did suffer from it because he wasn't a great businessman. And he lost quite a bit of money on bad investments. So there was that, and then he got ill, and that was all very sudden. He died within three weeks of his diagnosis.
And my mother, she--because she had been on his case, I think, rightly so in many ways, but, you know, people thought my mom was a bit tough. But she was trying to keep our family together, and my father was this generous soul. And, you know, she had a complete breakdown. She felt very guilty, I think, of what had happened and the fact that she lost her husband at really a very young age. He was only 51, and she was 48, I think, and I think it was really--it really got her. I think it affected her greatly, you know, because she clearly loved him very dearly, but as always, it happens in relationships, sometimes you don't express that love. You take it for granted too much.
MS. ELLISON: His dad sort of plunged your family into what you describe as "the mouse wheel of poverty." I'm wondering if you could talk about how you coped through that time and what you did as a child to manage that.
MR. COX: Well, as a child, I sort of--I mean, I think really that's where I lived in my imagination, you know. I think that was my great surviving thing, the power of the imagination.
You see, when I put it down on paper, it looks terrible. It looks really--"Oh, God, this is terrible," but at the time, it wasn't--it didn't feel that terrible. It just felt this is what I was doing. I was surviving. You know, I was trying to--and my survival instincts were all intact and still are intact. Touch wood. And it was my--it was just the fact that I was really surviving, and it was tough.
You know, my mum, she was in the hospital for quite a bit, and she had electric shock treatment, which destroyed a lot of her short-term memory. So there was a lot of things she didn't remember, which was sad for her, and it was also quite crude a treatment in those days.
And then she had to work. My father left no money. So--and by then, by the time my mother was done, she--my brother had gone to the army. The shops were gone. We'd lost them, and she just--it was just too much for her, and she had this breakdown, and it was actually with--that my dad, and then she came out after the treatment, and she tried to get a job. She went as a cleaner in a school thing and, you know, just to keep body and soul together, but that was difficult for her. So she--it was quite a while she didn't work, and she just existed on a widow's pension. And that was for me and her. We lived off that, and it was a meager amount, and she paid the rent.
And sometimes, you know, not often, but we had three--maybe three and four times when I would--there was a local fish and chips shop across the road from where we lived, and I would have to--I wouldn't have to, but I did it on my own. I did it on my own volition. I went there, and I would say, "Look, have you got any batter bits?" And batter bits were the bits at the back of the chip pan, which was basically flour [audio distortion] you know, get covered [audio distortion] for dinner. You know, we went back and so then we ate it. And then Friday, it was okay because she got a pension. So, you know, it was really hand to mouth, that expression, "hand to mouth." And I don't know. It was also--yeah, it was not good.
I mean, the worst thing I--the worst thing about my childhood that made me unhappy was when I came home from school, and she'd gone wandering, and I didn't have a key. I wasn't a latchkey kid. I did eventually get a key because I got wise to it, but I didn't have a key. So I used to sit on the stairs and wait for her to come back, and she'd wandered. She said, "Oh, are you all right?" And I said, "Yeah. I've been here for about a couple of hours." "Oh, I'm sorry, son. I just got carried away," you know.
She was also very funny, my mum. She was quite a character. I mean, she really was, you know, things like when I finally started to act and I did my first couple television, she said, "Brian, I've had a word with the neighbors, and I've got a book," and she had this big book. And I said, "What's that book?" She said, "Well, I'm getting signatures, and we're going to send this book to the BBC and see if we can get you on television much more often," and I'm going, "Mother, it doesn't quite work like that."
MS. ELLISON: Well, you know--
MR. COX: I said, "There's a whole system, Mum, that you would never really understand." But she was--she was very dear, you know.
MS. ELLISON: Mothers around the world can relate to that sort of sentiment, I think.
MR. COX: Yeah.
MS. ELLISON: But you did find the theater at a relatively young age.
MS. ELLISON: You joined the Dundee Repertory Theater, and I'm wondering if you hadn't found that, if you hadn't found acting, have you ever thought of what your life would have been from coming from--
MR. COX: Oh, I shudder to think. I shudder to think.
I think--because I love traveling, I think I would have probably joined something like the merchant navy or something like that. You know, I would have joined the merchant navy and probably, you know, been an assistant cook or something and travel around the world.
I mean, I did actually think of the alternative, but then I put the alternative away because I knew I was going to do what I was going to do, come hell or high water.
MS. ELLISON: And something at some point made you leave the theater and move to Hollywood, not literally move to Hollywood, but move into movie acting. I'm wondering what was--
MS. ELLISON: --the catalyst for that.
MR. COX: [Audio distortion]--move to Hollywood. I was 50, and I'd done everything I can do. And my great--I was very attracted not just to America as--for the work. Of course, the work was something, but I was also attracted to the idea of what I was led to believe was an egalitarian culture and an egalitarian society where there was a sense of all men being equal. I found it not quite like that as I imagined it was going to be. So I was kind of--you know, even at the--I had this--and I--of course, I was--the world of the movies was a thing that sustained me throughout my childhood and really, you know--I mean, when my father died, I remember I was put in front of a television set, and there was a couple of movies on. I was watching that, and that always was a source of comfort to me. Still, I love watching television, you know. I do. I find it comfortable. I find it makes me comfortable.
But, no, I mean, I quickly realized I was--you know, that I would have to--just the theater was just like a wonderful kind of sort of opening of everything for me, you know, and I couldn't imagine anything else but it. You know, that was what it was. I had a taste of it as a child when I was very, very young, when I was very little. I had a taste of that, and I was reading about it today, actually. Somebody talked about it. It was--oh, it was Ruth Gordon talking to Edith Evans. She talked about it, and Edith Evans talked about harmony.
And I remember that sense of when I was a little boy when I--when my dad put me on our coal bunker, which was on our window recess, which was probably my first stage, and there were curtains, and he drew them. And I would do--would you believe it?--Al Jolson impersonations, and I just remember the audience, the people in the room. You know, we had a lot of friends, and, you know, it was a good, big working-class community. So there was a lot of people in the room, even though it was very small. But I remember the sense of harmony, a sense of community coming in, that feeling of people coming together to focus on something. And it's both exciting and, you know, thrilling, and yet--and also moving because when human beings--you know, when their egos go off and they're gone and they're just there focused on something that's not about them, but it's about who they are, you know. And I just thought that was a--as a little--I mean, I had this thing as a--as a three-year-old, I had this vision of something, and it was--it never left me.
So it was, in many ways, what sustained me into the theater now, which is why I knew that's what--it wasn't I wanted to be an actor. You know, I was a natural showoff, but it was the sensation that one got, you know?
MS. ELLISON: You said in other interviews that when you were writing this book, all sorts of strange emotions came up as a result of it. I'm wondering if you could describe one of those or the strangest one that you experienced and why.
MR. COX: Well, in many ways, one of the most--one of the strangest things I felt, that was the thing that kind of--it was actually about my brother. It was the fact that I--my brother and I had very little connection. You know, we weren't connected really, and what happened, I wanted--I remember him being ill, and I was very sad about him being ill, but I was--you know, when he was--he was terminally ill, and I saw him, and I was sad. And when he died, I didn't feel anything, and there was always this disconnect between my brother because he was not--much older than me, and he also ran off to the army when my dad died. And I realized--as I was doing the book, I realized he had it a lot worse than I had it because he went into the army, and he--you know, he became slightly brutalized by that experience. It's what happens in the army. It makes you wake up, you know, and you do get--you can get brutalized if you're not very--if you're not defensive, defensive in the right way of yourself.
And that was the thing that--genuinely, actually, it moved me and I tried to--made me cry that I didn't have that relationship with my brother, and I didn't really understand, because all the attention was on me. So I thought it was all about me. I didn't realize understand how lost he was.
And my sister tells this story about when he was crying, and to cover up his crying, he grabbed an orange. He grabbed an orange, and he started to peel this orange, and he was just crying into the orange so that nobody could see him. And she remembers seeing him, and she told me that only a couple years ago. And I just--I don't know. It was something that came to me in some kind of lost connection and mourning for something that was quite--it hit me quite strongly.
MS. ELLISON: I want to move, leap forward to "Succession," which is a role you came to--
MR. COX: Of course.
MS. ELLISON: --relatively late in your career, and you told Deadline that you believe that "Succession" is so popular because people love to hate.
MR. COX: [Laughs]
MS. ELLISON: And I'm wondering if that's particularly resonant now because the country is so politically divided or if you think that that's something that has ever been thus.
MR. COX: Well, I suspect it's ever been thus, but it's particularly amplified at the moment. And we've seen it with, you know, that ex-president's family, you know. I don't want to give any more discussion than that, but his family, we've seen it.
We've seen it with the Murdochs to a certain extent, you know, and we've seen it with people who are disconnected. You know, I mean, the thing about Logan, he's a self-made man, and therefore, all his attention has gone into that. And he's created his world, and he's grown--maybe he started with a quite a social conscience, and he's now eschewed all that, and he's become more right wing, and his beliefs more, you know, in his own--he believes in himself more than anything else.
But his children, of course, are--they are the benefit--they've had the--they are the beneficiaries, but also, they are the sufferers of it because they don't know what to do. They don't know how to cope, and they are selfish, avaricious, and it's--you can blame him and say it's all his fault, but it's not his fault altogether. It's a system that's at fault, a system that creates this, and it's all to do with money, you know, and how money distances you from people.
You know, when somebody doesn't have something, it means a lot more to them than people who have something. Some people who have something also are very careful and very considerate about how they do it, but money is a kind of--it's a tricky thing. It's a bit of a--it can be a plague. It can be a power for good. Don't get me wrong. It can be an absolutely power for good, but at the same time, it can be something which kind of gnaws away. It kind of eats away at you in one way and--or puts you in a false perspective to reality sometimes, and that's what's so interesting about the show, that the show deals with that and deals with it really in a satirical way and really almost like a document, a kind of satire, a satirical document of the times. And that's the strength of the genius that is Jesse Armstrong and his equally genius writers that he works with who are extraordinary and do incredible work. And we just--you know, we are the--we are the machines by which that work comes out.
So that's the power of it, and that's what's interesting about the show. And that's what's interesting about the dynamic of--and because Logan, who is actually older than me, and I have lived lives, we see the--we do see the humanness you've shown in your little preview on the screen there. We do see the fact that humans, people, human beings are disappointing, and yet they're not disappointing when they're audiences, which is ironic. They just [audio distortion] with their audience.
MS. ELLISON: How much of Brian Cox is Logan Roy and vice versa? How are you two--how similar are the two people?
MR. COX: Well, he's--you know, it would be wrong to say, oh, he's got nothing to do with me. I mean, when you play roles like Logan, you have to try and understand them, and you can't judge them. You must understand without judging. When you play any--I mean, I played Hermann Göring. I've played Winston Churchill, and I played Hannibal Lecter. So I've played a few kind of extreme characters, but you have to judge them from where they are, not from what you think you can do. And you can't give in, and the greater the writer, the greater the story. It's always that's how it plays out, and it's the audience to make whatever the audience make out of it.
So I think with Logan and I that, of course, there are similarities. One thing that Logan's had--one effect he's had on me is one of language. I swear a lot more now than I ever have before in my life. I mean, I swear a lot. I have to curb myself now, which, of course--and Logan is so free with his swearing, and I--you know, I used to swear but not like Logan Roy. But now he's affected me in that way. There's also something liberating about swearing, you know, and I think he uses that as a tool, a liberating tool. So there's that aspect.
And then there's this thing about the human experiment and where we're at with it and how failing it is, and as you reach the end of your life, you're beginning to think, "Well, to hell with it. That's the way it is, and we're well out of it, and too bad. And it's not going to get any better." Now, that's the difference between me and Logan because Logan is a true misanthrope--or misanthrope, and I am an optimist. I still--you know, I see a horrible day, and I still feel that man will get better [audio distortion] homo sapiens. And it's just interesting, and that's a great divide. That is a real divide, and that's the big difference between Logan and I, but I can't let, you know--and Logan is cunning. You know, he's more cunning than I am. He's much more clever. He's much more--he sees the way to things like that, and of course, I have to learn to do that in the role.
And, of course, it's also opened me up to certain things. I go, oh, that's what it's about. Oh, I see. I only understood that because I played Logan Roy, but before I didn't, you know, that kind of thing.
MS. ELLISON: As part of this event for subscribers, we allow subscribers to ask questions of you, and literally, one‑fifth to the questions that we received from them are about the relationship between Logan Roy and his children. And the biggest question is does he love his children, and I'd love to hear‑‑
MR. COX: Absolutely. Absolutely. He loves his children. I mean, that‑‑this was the thing because, you know, I mean‑‑and I have four kids myself, and I actually have three sons and a daughter like Logan, except my‑‑yeah, my daughter isn't the youngest. I have a‑‑my son, one of my sons is the youngest.
Yeah. And, I mean, I asked Jesse this way back right at the beginning. I said‑‑because, you know, in a way, there has to be‑‑in all our lives, there's always a counter‑tension. We're always being pushed. It's always push me, pull you. And I was wondering what push me, pull you‑‑what Logan's push me, pull you was. And I think that his push me, pull you is the fact that he does, indeed‑‑and I asked Jesse, "Does he love his children?" Yes, he loves his children, and once you've established that, it then actually takes on‑‑it then becomes ultimately quite tragic.
You know, it can also be kind of, oh, God, silly old man. What an idiot. But I see the dilemma in that. I see the counterpoint in that, the fact that he behaves the way he does, and yet he loves them. But he's also deeply, of course, distressed by them. He finds them really distressing and the fact that they've become so treacherous and so avaricious.
You know, when he says‑‑in the last episode and he says make your own F-pile, you know, it's so true. You go, "Yeah. That's what they need to do. That's what they need to understand," and of course, they don't understand. They want to have everything given to them. You know, it's that sense of entitlement, and that's, I think, what is really at the core of the show, actually, is that, that thing that is ludicrously funny and yet dramatically moving.
But it's also‑‑it also relates to the history of drama. You know, drama is all about that, that counter‑tension, recounter‑tension. I mean, I played‑‑I've played Titus Andronicus, and I've play King Lear. So I've been in that territory. I've been in that area before as an actor. So I kind of‑‑I kind of‑‑it's familiar territory to me, and of course, being a father, I know the counter‑tensions of that. I know that, yes, I love my children, certainly, but also, sometimes my children drive me absolutely crazy, you know, to the point of where I could be screaming. You know, they have done. It seems to be‑‑it seems to be quite quiet at the moment, but you know‑‑but that does happen.
MS. ELLISON: I want to go through‑‑because that relationship is such a fascination for people, do you think Logan Roy has a favorite child?
MR. COX: I think he did have a favorite child. I think we all‑‑you know, I think fathers are naturally drawn to their daughters, you know. I am, certainly, and I think that's‑‑there's something about that. There's something about the feminine that is, you know, the fact that you've participated in the creation of a feminine spirit and a feminine person. There's something extraordinary about that and mysterious.
You know, I mean, boys are boys, and so, you know, one of the problems you have as a father is, oh, you're not thinking about [audio distortion] actually before you ever went there, and that's always awful to do that, especially to your male children.
But, with your daughter, there's always a sense of wonder and mystery and ongoing conversation, you know, and I think that that's what he got, Siobhan‑‑Shiv clearly was his‑‑Shiv clearly was his favorite child. I think she is falling short considerably because he can see through her mercenary behavior because he's not a fool. Logan is not a fool, and he sees this behavior. And he goes‑‑it's very hard for him to‑‑he chokes on it a little bit, you know?
MS. ELLISON: You've referenced some of your wonderful roles that you've played over the years, and yet, arguably, you're enjoying your most famous moment now. You're 75.
MR. COX: Well, you know what‑‑sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you.
MS. ELLISON: No, please. Please go ahead.
MR. COX: Well, you see, I was always‑‑it's funny. I had this‑‑part of my‑‑part of my intuit self and part of the fact that I was told when I was really quite young, it was going to be the long haul for me, and I‑‑and, of course, I've seen actors come and go throughout my career, and I've seen actors blaze into fire and then end as creatures where they're sad sometimes. Some go gracefully. Some‑‑you know, I've seen ones go gracefully, but the ones that have been--that have flown very near the sun and do get burnt, when they are and when they're done, when their acting career‑‑there is something that is very, again, thwarted for them. And I‑‑even at early parts in their career when they reach a point.
So I've always got‑‑I've always done well. I can't complain. I mean, right from the age‑‑I mean, I'm in my West End debut when I was 21, which is pretty amazing really when you think about it, playing Orlando in "As You Like It," in a Shakespeare play. So that was pretty incredible.
But I always get to the point where I think, okay, I've got to rein back now, and I can't go‑‑and I did that throughout my career. I would, at certain points, you could mark a time where I decided to go in a different direction, just in where I joined the RSC, which nobody ever thought I'd do, and then worked that way. And then when I had done that leave it and then go with the National, and then when I'd done that, I thought I'm going to go back to television. Then I could see the difficulty in the '90s, and I thought, no, I‑‑this thing that I always had, which was the movies, because that was my culture when I was a child‑‑so I just thought no, no, I'm going to go to Hollywood. And that's what I decided upon.
And so that was‑‑that was part of‑‑and also because I didn't want to be that kind of actor that they‑‑that the British actor is. You know, that's sort of‑‑sort of received notion, even though I like all the‑‑I like all that, the kind of ritual side of it, The Garrick Club and all that stuff. I love all that stuff, but I didn't want to be into that thing, you know, and I didn't also want to become a drinker or what have you, you know, which is the other, you know, where actors who end up as drunks, you know, though that happens less and less nowadays than it used to. I mean, when I was young, there was a lot of that around.
So I wanted to‑‑I wanted to keep doing, and I knew if I timed it right, I could keep on. And I remember when this came up, "Succession" came up. I just knew this is it. Finally, this is the moment.
And, also, as you get older, the great thing is things start to‑‑tremendous things, weights come off your shoulders. So you're not worried, and this is a problem that actors always have is they worry. They do worry what people think of them, you know, and now I don't give a toss about what anybody thinks of me as long as I do my job and do it as well as I can. You know, that's my main concern.
But, you know, as a boy, I had a vision of that, and people kept saying, "You‑‑you know, it will come, but it will be a long time down"‑‑I didn't know it was going to be nearly 60 years. But, actually, I've had an amazingly great career. You know, right from the word "go," I've done everything of what I could do, in Repertory Theater in the UK. I mean, people look at my career and go, "Wow. That's incredible," but I was just getting on with it really.
MS. ELLISON: I want to get to some of our subscriber questions because there are a lot of them.
MR. COX: Okay.
MS. ELLISON: And the first one is from Simon Amey in the UK, and he asks, "What would Logan Roy think of you, Brian Cox?"
MR. COX: I think Logan Roy would think of me as, you know, not bad. He's a nice enough guy, but he does waffle on, you know. I wish he could use one word instead of seven. [Laughs]
I think he would be a bit intolerant of me. He might like my sense of humor. He would quite like that, but I think he would‑‑and also, he certainly wouldn't like my politics. He would hate my politics, hate my politics. You know, he would just go, "Why is he wasting his time in that way? What a stupid man," you know. I mean, people, doesn't he know? And I'd say politics are people. That's actually quote from the show that I love. You've just shown it.
But, you know, I think he would‑‑he wouldn't dislike me, but he would think I was an idiot basically. But that's okay by me.
MS. ELLISON: Kenneth Levinson asks, "Who is the most compelling actor or actress you have ever worked with?"
MR. COX: Oh. Well, there's a few, actually. Actresses, Miranda Richardson and Holly Hunter, two of the finest actresses. Cherry Jones. I didn't actually play with Cherry enough. She was pretty amazing. She's pretty amazing. Sarah Snook, she's really something. She's something else.
Men, Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay. The younger generation, I think in the younger, the younger theater generation, somebody who‑‑gone. [Laughs]
MS. ELLISON: You don't have to give any love to the younger generation if you're not feeling it.
MR. COX: No, I mean, there are a few actors I really‑‑my little, you know, young people like Benedict Cumberbatch, I have a lot of respect for as an actor.
MS. ELLISON: Mary Christen Czech from Minnesota asks, "How has playing Logan Roy affected your view of the media?" And don't consider my feelings when you answer this question.
MR. COX: I think journalism actually is the one thing I actually really do like about America. I think you've got some bloody good journalists here and some really‑‑and actually, I think sort of intellectual fervor is very much protected by because it used to be more you could see more of it around in the days of Gore Vidal and Buckley. You know, in those days, you could see that intellectual property.
But you see it‑‑you don't see it on television anymore. I mean, that was the great thing about‑‑oh, that guy who used to do the chat show, very intelligent little guy.
MS. ELLISON: Dick Cavett?
MR. COX: Dick, yeah, Cavett, absolutely. You got in one. Thank you. Cavett. You could see that then. It was vibrant.
Nowadays, it actually does belong to the writers and the journalists. There's a lot of that around, which is great. A great friend of mine is Frank Rich, who I have huge respect for, absolutely huge. I mean, he used‑‑Frank Rich used to be known as the Butcher of Broadway, but, I mean, there's nobody less like a butcher than Frank Rich, you know. He's wonderful, and his writings are wonderful too.
And, also, you know, what I feel about the American media is it's all one way or another, you know. There's a lot of‑‑there's a lot of soapbox stuff from both the left and the right in the American media, which I find really surprising.
I mean, of course, being too more to the left rather than the right, center left, I mean, I go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then I think wait a minute. This is too rich a diet. Come on, CNN. Just cool it a wee bit, you know. And then when I look at Fox, I go, "Ew," you know. But it's that. It's so weird in this country. Whereas, I have to say that's why I always watch the news‑‑the BBC news. I mean, the BBC‑‑and it comes down to a good old Scot called Lord Reith who started the whole thing, and he's put the stamp on it, and it hasn't shifted. It's balanced. It's all balanced. Whatever it is, it's balanced, you know. It's‑‑‑‑and it's great. We have great stuff. Our journalists can be really considerable, you know.
There are moments when there are dips, you know, but on the whole, they're pretty good.
MS. ELLISON: You're pretty unsparing about some of your fellow actors, and I'm wondering if you receive any pushback. This is coming from Brian Welch in Georgia: "Did you have any pushback from the editors or the legal staff at your publishing house about the content of the book because of your thoughts and opinions of some pretty famous people?"
MR. COX: No, no. I haven't had any legal stuff, but I have actually‑‑I mean, it's very funny when you write a book. You write it, and sometimes you're a bit quick. You go, oh, yeah, that guy or just that‑‑you know, like if I say somebody is overrated, for example‑‑and usually, what I mean is there's a very big burden in being overrated because it means that you have to bear the burden of everybody saying, oh, he's the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and sometimes strength is rated so‑‑you know, you back off. Just give‑‑you know, as Jesus said give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and give unto God what is God's, you know. You have to be a bit more like that about it.
In fact, I'm writing an addendum for the paperback, if we get a paperback. We're certainly having one in the UK, and I'm writing an addendum about exactly that subject linked, funny enough, to my own assessment of my own sons, which, you know, who have been teenagers and are now out of it now. And I realize‑‑because I never had that feeling, that sort of hormonal thing that happens to young men between the ages of‑‑well, really between the ages of 13 until they're 19, you know. So it's a kind of, you know‑‑it's a hormonal tunnel that they're in.
MS. ELLISON: We heard from John Kiley in Texas, and I think this is an excellent question, but he asks, "Does the range of characters you portray require a special gift? Born, read, Churchill. Please advise where it comes from and how you keep developing this exceptional skill." I would have asked this in a less fawning way, but I am interested in your‑‑in your range because it's obviously something you've developed.
MR. COX: Well, I mean, it's very, very hard because we're living in a time where range is not really wanted. You know, I want‑‑you know, because I came from the background I came from, I wasn't‑‑I mean, I like being Scottish now, but when I was younger, I didn't. I wasn't‑‑you know, I wanted to learn how to speak because I‑‑you know, I had a very‑‑[speaking with accent] "I thought, again, I always spoke right, and I wasn't--got remarks in there." That was said horrible. Charming but horrible.
And so I thought I really want to learn how to speak. I want to learn how to live in other people's skin. I want to learn about how other people are and where they're coming from and what their backgrounds are. So, in a way, that means that you're raised, developed, you know, and also, I wanted to understand the real‑‑what classical theater means and what particularly how you act Shakespeare.
And, you know, I've learned a lot from the tackling of Shakespeare and the fact that structure and sense go hand in hand, and also, musicality goes hand in hand with structure and sense. So a sense of musicality, a sense of how you make someone listen without kind of pushing it too hard is also the skill of the actor. So I've tried to do that, and it's not just‑‑it seems like a technique, but it's not. It's actually‑‑it's a more‑‑it's a finer thing about what you're presenting to the audience, in a way, and so that's been my drive as an actor.
You know, I'm so grateful for‑‑I'm so grateful for having acted, you know, William Shakespeare because he is extraordinary. He is the most extraordinary writer ever, and he's subtle and he's funny and he's witty and he's sharp. And the thing that you have to learn is the use of the verse, what does the iambic mean, what does that mean in terms of sense, and it all ties up if you give it the attention it deserves. And, also, which is more important, it serves you as an actor, and it serves you not just in classical work but also in work of a more modern nature.
MS. ELLISON: Aseem Akram asks, "Has anyone from the Murdoch family ever contacted you to comment on your show or role?"
MR. COX: No. The one thing that did happen to me was I was‑‑I was at my local café back in London in Primrose Hill, and I was having‑‑because I'd spend my time between London and Brooklyn, where I live. And I was just ordering my latte. You know, it was early in the morning, and suddenly, this voice behind me said, "Well, yes, we're liking it." I went, "But was he talking to me?" He said, "No, we're liking it. Oh, yeah, we're liking it very much," and then I realized he was talking to me. I said, "Sorry?" "'Successions.' We're liking it very much. It's difficult at times," and I said, "Oh, I'm sorry about that." He said, "No, no, no. I mean, it's fine. I mean, I'm fine. I think it's very funny, and I really‑‑but my wife does‑‑you know, it's hard for her sometimes." I said, "Oh, your wife, well, why is it hard for her sometimes?" He said, "Well, my wife is Elisabeth. My wife is Elisabeth Murdoch."
[Telephone rings]
MR. COX: Hang on. Sorry about that interruption. Life goes on.
So‑‑and he said‑‑and I said, "Oh, Elisabeth Murdoch." "Yeah." I said, "Well, you know, it's not about your‑‑that family." He said, "Well"‑‑he said, "Well, we‑‑everybody else thinks it is." I said, "Yeah, but it is about a family. But it's not them." I said, "The Roys." I said, "It's the Roys," and I said, "And, also"‑‑you know, I made the point that, you know, the differences that he never‑‑Logan Roy never inherited anything. Rupert Murdoch did. I said, "And that's a key difference in the show," and I said, "As far as your wife is concerned"‑‑I said, "I think Siobhan is okay." At that point, she was okay. That was way back when, you know.
And then his parting shot to me was "Can you be‑‑I hope you just continue to just try and be nice to her. Is that okay?" [Laughs] I mean, I'm paraphrasing what the guy actually said, but it was something along those lines.
MS. ELLISON: I'm wondering if you have any thoughts. The end of the third season of "Succession," it reinforced how Logan is always one step ahead of his children. I'm wondering what your hopes are for the fourth season. How would you like to see them come back at their father? I know you're not in the writer's room, but what are your hopes for that fourth season?
MR. COX: And that's the key. That is the key really. I mean, I‑‑I'm up for the mystery. I'm up for it to be revealed to me. I don't want to second guess.
You know, I've got my own thoughts about certain things. I certainly have, and I keep them to myself because that's part of maintaining the mystery of what you're doing, you know, the role you're playing. And whatever the writers decide, they will decide, but it's their‑‑it's their brief. It's their back. They get on with it. You know, I mean, Jesse has been doing it now for‑‑I don't know‑‑six‑‑yeah, it's nearly six years. Six years, it's been going on from the first pilot. Actually, the first pilot was the‑‑we recorded it on the day of the Trump election. We recorded it.
And I think that he's‑‑it's going to be how far he feels it can go and where it can go to. I think there are a lot of options now because I think since Episode 3 and the end of Episode 3, there's a whole new paradigm. It's just about to arise, and that‑‑I feel that paradigm should be examined perhaps over two more series, you know. But it may just finish now. I don't know.
And, actually, it's‑‑I don't really bother‑‑I don't concern myself with that. I'm more interested in the doing, you know, than that, and that's what I‑‑you give me what to do, and I'll do it. I will work it through from where I get it on the paper. So I'm not really concerned in that way.
And I also think you waste a lot of energy speculating: "It could be this. It could be that." I have my own thoughts. Naturally, you have your own thoughts because of the‑‑but it's also‑‑it's finally going to be up to Lucy Prebble, Georgia Pritchett, Tony Roche, Jon Brown, and finally, Jesse and two or three of the other writers as well. And that's what it should be.
MS. ELLISON: You told The Scotsman newspaper that you have issues‑‑you've had issues with poverty based on your childhood growing up poor, and you said you could probably start to, quote, "take your foot off the gas, but you won't." Why not? Why not do that at 75 when you've reached this level of success?
MR. COX: Well, my mother used to have a great expression: "You're a long time dead." You're a long time dead. And I think that one has to make the most of life.
You know, life is a gift, and you just don't want to be sitting on your back side most of the time. You want to get up there and do it, and people go‑‑and also, I follow the improviser rule, and the improviser's rule is never say no because the improvisation stops if you say no, but if you say "yes and," it means it's ongoing. And that's what I'm excited about. I'm excited about‑‑I'm enjoying my age. I'm enjoying this age more than I've ever enjoyed any other age. I love it. I love being older because there is something freeing about it. So, when you're free, you want to start, starting stuff out, doing things. So there's all kinds of possibilities now coming up, and it's very exciting.
So I'm not about to sit back and say, "Oh, yes. Now I've done my thing. I shall just go on quietly and sit on my ranch and smoke my pipe and watch the world go by." I'm not one of those. I don't‑‑I'm here. I'm taking part. I'm not about sitting back and going‑‑I mean, you know, I have my elements of disillusion, but I'm not about to bask in that and go, "Oh, you know..." Yeah, come on. Let's bring it on. Let's get it. Let's get it going.
MS. ELLISON: I wish it were otherwise, but that is all the time that we have. Thank you so much for joining us, Brian. It's been a pleasure.
MR. COX: My pleasure. Absolutely my pleasure, and it was lovely to talk to you.
MS. ELLISON: Thank you.
And to the rest of you, thank you for joining us. Please look at our program on WashingtonPostLive.com to register for upcoming programs and see what we have coming next. Thank you for joining us. I am Sarah Ellison. | null | null | null | null | null |
But since the decision is likely to be appealed — a path that could upend long-standing legal protections for journalists who write about public figures — Rakoff said he wanted future courts to have both his decision and the jury’s to consider.
Rakoff did not spare the Times criticism for its error, a collection of phrases within a larger essay that inaccurately suggested a link of “incitement” between the crosshairs that her political action committee imprinted on a congressional map and a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson.
“This is an example of very unfortunate editorializing on the part of the Times,” he said, adding that he was “not at all happy to make this decision” in its favor.
While Palin’s attorneys argued that the paper’s then-editorial page editor James Bennet had acted recklessly in publishing assertions he should have known were false, a Times lawyer described a frantic, deadline rewriting session that resulted in “a mess-up … a goof” that Bennet regretted immediately and corrected as quickly as possible.
Ultimately, Rakoff concluded that Palin’s team did not prove that Bennet knew the statements were false nor even that he suspected they might be false and then recklessly disregarded that possibility.
The case — the first libel lawsuit against the Times to go to trial against in the U.S. in nearly two decades — has taken a long and winding path that has left press freedom advocates concerned that it could open journalists to more legal threats from the powerful people they write about.
Two conservative Supreme Court justices — Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — have signaled an openness to reassess a landmark 1964 ruling that set a high bar for prominent people pursuing libel claims.
But the case has also served unofficially as a chance to interrogate the “hot take” culture of digital journalism, as well as the relative power of Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican nominee for vice president, who has seen her stature and visibility shrink in recent years.
Palin first filed suit in 2017, not long after the Times published its editorial, under the headline “America’s Lethal Politics.” Written in the hours after the June 2017 shooting attack of Republican lawmakers practicing baseball at an Alexandria field, the editorial decried rising levels of toxic political discourse and gun ownership. And it compared the Alexandria shooting with a 2011 attack at a Tucson shopping center that left then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) gravely wounded and six other people dead.
“The link to political incitement was clear,” the editorial stated. “Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”
In fact, investigators never found any indication that the mentally disturbed Tucson shooter was motivated by the Palin PAC map. The Times corrected the error the morning after it was published on the newspaper’s website.
Rakoff dismissed Palin’s suit not long after she field it, stating it was doubtful that Palin could demonstrate that the Times had shown the “actual malice” that public figures must prove in a libel case.
“Negligence this may be,” he wrote, “but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.”
But the case was sent back to him by an appellate court — a reversal that put many legal scholars on alert that a favorable climate for journalists may be changing.
For 50 years, “journalists have generally been able to count on the courts to have their backs,” said Sonja West, University of Georgia law professor. But “when you combine this trend with the drop in the public’s trust in the news media and the rise in high-profile defamation lawsuits like this case, many press freedom scholars see reasons to be concerned about where things are headed,” West said.
On Monday evening, a spokeswoman for the Times said the newspaper welcomed Rakoff’s ruling.
“It is a reaffirmation of a fundamental tenet of American law: public figures should not be permitted to use libel suits to punish or intimidate news organizations that make, acknowledge and swiftly correct unintentional errors,” said Danielle Rhoads-Ha.
Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Palin said: “This is a jury trial. We always thank jurors. We always appreciate the system. So whatever happened in there kind of usurps the system."
Rakoff said he was letting the jury continue its deliberations for the benefit of an appeals court that will inevitably take up the case; if it returns a decision in Palin’s favor, he offered as an example, the appeals court wouldn’t necessarily have to send it back for a new trial but rather reinstate the jury’s verdict.
It’s more typical for a judge to issue such a ruling either before a jury begins its deliberations or after they have reached a verdict, said David A. Logan, a Roger Williams University law professor and expert in First Amendment protections. “By doing it this way, it is somewhat efficient,” he said, since “another jury does not need to be impaneled” if it goes to the appellate court and is reversed.
Since Rakoff “has already been reversed in the case,” Logan said, “I expect he doesn’t want to preside on a retrial.”
Rakoff told the court Monday that while he considered waiting until the jury’s verdict before making his decision, “the more I thought about it over the weekend, the more I thought that was unfair to both sides. We’ve had very full argument on this. I know where I’m coming out and I want to therefore apprise the parties of that.”
By dismissing a case in which the plaintiff didn’t satisfy her “burden of proof,” Rakoff did “what most judges would do,” said University of Richmond Law professor Carl Tobias.
Jonathan Peters, a media law professor at the University of Georgia, argued that the Palin case is part of a growing effort by public figures “to weaponize libel law in order to generate publicity or score political points or exact revenge on critics," pointing to other recent lawsuits. Most have been dismissed, he said, but they “nevertheless advance the narrative, voiced by some lawyers and judges" that lower courts have given journalists too much leeway when it comes to libeling public figures, or that the actual malice standard “encourages bad journalism.”
When the jury entered his courtroom, Rakoff told them that “I didn’t think I should let the day expire when you know I love this jury without wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day.” Laughter ensued, and then he delivered some mundane scheduling announcement before reminding them:
“If you see anything in media about this case, just turn away,” he said. “Read about the traumatic results for the Cincinnati team instead.” | null | null | null | null | null |
But in its letter last week, the accounting firm also cut off its relationship with the former president’s company, joining other banks, law firms and consulting firms that have vowed to no longer do business with the Trump Organization. In the letter, Kelly said a “non-waivable conflict of interest” prevented the firm from continuing to work for Trump.
In the letter, Mazars said the Trump Organization did not, after repeated requests, provide information regarding Calamari’s apartment (and misspelled Calamari’s last name).
“We believe the only information left to complete those returns is the information regarding the Matt Calimari Jr. [sic] apartment,” Kelly wrote. “As you know, Donald Bender has been asking for this information for several months but has not received it.”
Mazars issued a statement saying that it was legally unable to discuss client relationships and that the firm remains “committed to fulfilling all of our professional and legal obligations.”
An attorney for the Calamaris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Read the Mazars letter to Trump's company | null | null | null | null | null |
Diana Garcia Martinez was 24 and a busy single mom whose sister had set up her profile without her knowing. She was intelligent, empathetic and upfront, and by the third date, he was in love. “It was just a feeling. … I felt like I knew her my whole life,” he recalled explaining to his cousin Gilbert, knowing it was a cliche but also true.
As the pandemic enters its third year, untold numbers of Americans have agonized over such treatment questions that could mean life or death for their loved ones. Confronting the possible loss of a spouse or life partner is invariably painful, but with covid-19, the severity and suddenness of the illness and the isolation from friends and family have compounded the torment.
Diana Crouch was 18 weeks pregnant when she tested positive for the coronavirus, ultimately spending 139 days in the ICU fighting for her and her baby’s lives. (Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post)
They had a boy, Cain, and Chris was promoted to sergeant at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, a job that provided a steady enough income that Diana could stay home and take care of their blended family. He had two boys from his previous marriage; she had a girl from hers.
The family was young, healthy and happy, and when the pandemic hit, they were worried like everyone else. Before long, though, they started feeling that the dangers of the virus had been exaggerated and that they wanted to get back to their lives.
When the vaccines came along, Chris became outspoken against them, espousing views that were common in his workplace and much of Texas but that put him at odds with his mother, sister and the close friends he had grown up with in the Heights, a liberal bastion in Houston. Despite his family’s pleading, Chris and Diana were adamant they did not need to be vaccinated. They did wear masks, but only when required.
Chris felt that vaccine mandates infringed on personal liberties, a perspective promoted by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other prominent Republicans. And Chris and Diana also worried that the shots had been developed too quickly. As he liked to say, “God gave us our immune system and we can fight the viruses with our own immune system.” Diana, meanwhile, was leery of anything that might hurt the developing baby she carried. She knew that early stories linking the vaccines to miscarriage and infertility were false, but thought avoiding them was the prudent thing to do, like skipping wine, raw fish and unpasteurized cheese — especially given some of the medical community’s early hesitation. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommend that all pregnant people get vaccinated.
As soon as they returned, however, she developed a low-grade fever and exhaustion unlike anything she had experienced. Late on Aug. 6, she cried out that she was having trouble breathing. Chris called 911, reminding himself that in his line of work, he’d seen a lot of people go to the hospital for covid — with most recovering after a little oxygen.
The emergency doctors at the hospital immediately transferred her to Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, which had created a special unit for pregnant people with covid. Chris remembers Diana screaming when doctors told them she needed a ventilator: “I have kids. I can’t die.” He held her and made a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep: “You are not going to die,” he vowed.
Most of his other patients had preexisting conditions such as obesity and were close to full term at 36 to 40 weeks. Diana had been healthy, about 110 pounds and at 18 weeks when she arrived at the hospital, still in the second trimester of her pregnancy. She had at least a month before the fetus would be considered viable — a situation that complicated treatment options.
Pregnancy does extraordinary things to the body, and the interaction of those changes with covid is something scientists are only beginning to understand. From the beginning of the pandemic until this month, 27,854 pregnant women with covid have been hospitalized out of 167,000 cases reported to the CDC. Many, like Diana, were young and unvaccinated. More than 267 of them have died, making covid-19 a top cause of maternal mortality.
Doctors are still baffled about why they get so sick. It could be that pregnancy causes a person’s immune system to be in a heightened state of alert to protect the baby and that when the system is exposed to a virus, it overreacts. Another theory suggests the opposite — that pregnant people are immunosuppressed so that their bodies don’t reject the developing fetus. Fetuses also pull oxygen and blood to the placenta. When combined with a virus like covid that can cause lung damage and blood clotting, the body’s balance may be upset.
For Chris, the next 10 days blurred together. He wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital room because he was also assumed to have the coronavirus. He’d joke to the doctors and nurses every morning, “I bet you’re tired of seeing me …”
Dezfulian’s team had hoped that the oxygen they were pumping into Diana’s lungs through a ventilator would enable her to fight off the virus. Instead, things were going in the opposite direction. “Every day we were losing a little bit of ground,” the doctor said.
At the beginning of the pandemic, many people were worried about rationing ventilators, but instead it’s been ECMO that has been in limited supply nationwide. “That is the tough part nobody wants to talk about,” Dezfulian said. “There are a limited number of pumps, and you make some decisions on the likelihood they will have a long life and a good life.”
Chris was worried about putting Diana on the new machine. When he googled ECMO, he said, he found that “it’s a bad, bad deal.”
Chris remembers asking a ton of “what if” questions that no one could answer. He kept coming back to something Diana had told him as they shared their childhood dreams. “All I ever wanted to do was be a mom. As a kid, that’s all I ever wanted,” she had said.
On day 30, it seemed as if their ordeal might be over. Diana woke up and was even able to get on her phone and text her family hello. Chris remembers the whole staff smiling and making plans for next steps.
The happy moment was all too brief. It wasn’t long before Diana started seeming confused. Soon, she could no longer see, even though she was still talking to Chris. An hour later, she slipped into a coma, and the somber group of three walked into the room again.
Now, the doctors told Chris that even if Diana woke up, she might “not be the same,” she might not remember him or the children. Chris crumpled into the chair next to her and wept. Dezfulian came by and prayed with him.
“That’s when I prayed the most,” Chris said, “because at that point, even the doctors were like, ‘We don’t really know what to do next.’ ”
Diana went back on ECMO, and as the days slowly passed, Chris could see her belly growing. Through everything, the baby’s heart rate held steady and he was growing nicely. On Nov. 10, when Diana had been in the hospital for more than three months and the baby was 31 weeks along, doctors delivered a baby boy by Caesarean section. He was 4 pounds and 12 ounces.
The infant was healthy. But Diana’s body seemed exhausted from the ordeal: She developed an infection, as well as an air leak in her lungs, and one eventually collapsed. Doctors began preparing for a lung transplant.
It was in this dark moment that things began to shift. Without the added stress of carrying the baby, Diana’s body began to repair itself, and by the end of November, doctors were able to wake her up. She was tremendously weak and, at first, didn’t know Chris. His heart felt like it was disintegrating. But then, when a nurse told Diana he was her husband, she pointed to a picture of them on the beach that Chris had posted on the wall and said, “No, that’s my husband.”
Slowly, against all odds, Diana’s memories came back and she began asking about her other children and wondering how it could be that she was no longer pregnant. She asked Chris, “Why didn’t anybody tell me I was going to have a C-section?”
Just before Christmas, on Dec. 23, Diana was able to return home. Chris rattled off the numbers to her: 139 days at the hospital, 101 on a ventilator, 51 of those also on ECMO. She was still attached to an oxygen tank and had three tubes in her lungs to keep them inflated that they were pretty painful. But she couldn’t wait to be home.
As soon as they arrived, Chris scooped her up and put her in a bed Diana’s father had set up on the main floor, and Cain, 1, and daughter Miranda, 7, piled onto the blankets. Chris cradled their newborn baby, Cameron, plump and healthy, whom they had named after Dezfulian, Diana’s doctor. Cameron had been discharged several weeks before Diana.
She replied that even if things had not worked out the way they did, “I wouldn’t change anything.” He felt relief, but also sadness for all the others who had been in the same spot as he had — or would be in the future.
Doctors are optimistic that, physically, Diana will make a full recovery, but it will take time, and she’s still weak on her left side because of the strokes. Emotionally, she’s struggling. She has anxiety about seeing people and leaving her home for fear that she and loved ones will be infected with the virus.
Most of their extended family who had resisted vaccines have now gotten them after learning of Diana’s ordeal, but a few remained reluctant. In January, they got word that Gilbert, one of Diana’s favorite relatives on Chris’s side who was also unvaccinated, had covid. He was one of the first people Chris had told about his feelings for Diana, and he was always joking to Chris that he had done well for himself in finding her. | null | null | null | null | null |
Acela train bound for D.C. is stuck for hours
The Acela train left Boston on time at 5:05 a.m. but got stuck in the Hunters Point neighborhood of Queens at 8:37 a.m., Amtrak spokesperson Jason Abrams said. It was moving again as of 3:20 p.m., and there were no reports of injuries to the 106 passengers or to crew members, Abrams said.
Prosecutors rest in Floyd officers' case
Federal prosecutors rested their case Monday against three former Minneapolis police officers charged with violating George Floyd’s civil rights, after a contentious day of trial that included testimony by a use-of-force expert and from the teenager who recorded widely seen video of Floyd’s murder.
Darnella Frazier, who was 16 when Floyd was killed, testified that she knew Floyd needed medical care when he became unresponsive.
J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao are accused of depriving Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, of medical care while he was handcuffed, facedown, as officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck for 9½ minutes. Kueng knelt on Floyd’s back and Lane held down his legs while Thao kept bystanders back. Kueng and Thao are also accused of failing to intervene to stop the May 25, 2020, murder.
Police arrest suspect in 11 serial stabbings
Police in Albuquerque arrested a man suspected of stabbing 11 people as he rode a bicycle around the city over the weekend, leaving two victims critically injured, authorities said. The suspect was identified as Tobias Gutierrez, a 42-year-old homeless man with a lengthy criminal history.
He was booked into jail on charges of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, police said in a statement.
West at its driest in 1,200 years, study says: The American West's megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years, and the dramatic drying that started in 2021 shows no signs of easing soon, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Charges in 2018 Colo. wildfire unlikely to stick: Criminal charges will probably be dropped against a mentally ill Danish man who is accused of starting a large 2018 Colorado wildfire and who can no longer be forcibly medicated, a prosecutor said Monday. District Attorney Alonzo Payne made the comment during a hearing to discuss the case against Jesper Joergensen, who has repeatedly been found mentally incompetent to stand trial. He was in the United States illegally when he was charged with starting the fire that destroyed more than 140 homes.
One body found at site of small-plane crash off N.C. coast: A small plane carrying eight people crashed into the ocean off North Carolina's Outer Banks and left behind multiple debris fields where crews searched for the missing passengers, the Coast Guard said. One body has so far been recovered and identified, Carteret County Sheriff Asa Buck told reporters Monday afternoon, but he declined to release that person's name.
Woman stabbed to death in Lower Manhattan: Christina Yuna Lee, 35, was found fatally wounded in her bathtub about 4:30 a.m., stabbed by a man who followed her in from the street Sunday, authorities said. Police announced Monday that Assamad Nash, 25, was arrested on charges of murder and burglary. Leaders including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) and New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) denounced Lee's killing as the latest in a string of unprovoked attacks on people of Asian descent. | null | null | null | null | null |
“In Russian doping cases it’s often the athlete but even more so, particularly when the athlete is a child, there’s that figure in the shadows who’s working with the coach. They’ve got dossiers on every one of those coaches,” Tinsley said of Russian intelligence agencies like the Federal Security Service. “The whole context of it is, ‘Don’t screw this up for the state.’ ”
“We’re like, ‘Oh my God, the Russian skaters — we have to have them as our coach, we’re going to be famous,’ ” Zettner said of her fellow students.
“What I try to teach my students starting at about the age of 13 is that you can’t just come to practice and start whining, ‘I am tired, I can’t do this now, let’s do it tomorrow,’ ” Tutberidze said. “Just look at the map and see the size of Russia — and when you’re selected and sent to an international competition, you will have a jacket, on its back it says ‘Russia.’ And if you’re supposed to be the best that Russia sent for the world to see, then you cannot just step out on the ice with a bad attitude, thinking, ‘I am tired today, I don’t feel like skating my best and representing the Russian people as they expect me to.’ ”
Tutberidze’s training appears to rely on keeping skaters as light as possible and having them rotate before they leave the ice in their jumps, which can cause severe back injuries. One student, who moved to train with Tutberidze when she was 13, was recorded in videos landing a quad jump. But by 14 she wasn’t able to jump anymore due to a back injury. Another student who landed quads retired before the Olympics because of a back injury.
After her skaters make history, Tutberidze appears to quickly move on to younger stars. Female skaters can face adversity when they hit puberty, Weisiger said, because their changing bodies force them to relearn many skills. (U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu became the first American woman to land a quad in competition, but she hasn’t attempted it since hitting a growth spurt.) Oftentimes, they’re unable to get back some of those skills. | null | null | null | null | null |
The women’s individual figure skating competition begins in Beijing, just one day after a court ruled that 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, the Russian star embroiled in a doping case, is eligible to participate. Americans Mariah Bell, Karen Chen and Alysa Liu will also compete as the short program gets underway at around 5 a.m. Eastern. Elsewhere, look for snowboarder Hailey Langland in the women’s big air finals, freestyle skier Eileen Gu in the women’s slopestyle finals and Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin in the women’s downhill. Follow along for live updates and highlights from the Winter Games. | null | null | null | null | null |
The last 22 years rank as the driest period since at least 800 A.D.
The extreme heat and dry conditions of the past few years pushed what was already an epic, decades-long drought in the American West into a historic disaster that bears the unmistakable fingerprints of climate change. The long-running drought, which has persisted since 2000, can now be considered the driest 22-year period of the last 1,200 years, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Previous work by the same authors of the new study had identified the period of 2000 through 2018 as the second-worst megadrought since the year 800 — exceeded only by an especially severe and prolonged drought in the 1500s. But with the past three, scorching years added to the picture, the Southwest’s megadrought stands out in the record as the “worst” or driest in more than a millennium.
Scientists refer to this combined hot and dry effect as “aridity” — a warm and thirsty atmosphere that can pull moisture from soil and plants, melt snow and intensify heat waves.
This “background drying” brought on by a warmer atmosphere can dwarf occasional wet or cool periods. For example, the Southwest’s 2021 drought maintained its grip despite robust monsoon rains and record summer precipitation in some areas, in part due to extraordinary heat waves early last summer, and generally above-average temperatures.
The study’s tree ring record also provides a sobering view of what is possible in the West. “The tree rings tell us that there can actually be very, very extreme dryness in the West without the help of climate change at all,” Williams said. “Even without climate change, we can have monumentally severe and long-lasting droughts.”
That analysis found that at the current warming trajectory, droughts in drying regions that previously occurred only once every 10 years are now happening about 1.7 times per decade, on average. If the Earth warms 2 degrees Celsius, scientists expect those once-rare events to take place roughly two-and-a-half times per decade, on average.
The Central Sierra Snow Lab at the University of California at Berkeley tweeted that its snowpack lost 5 percent of its water content amid unusually warm weather over the past week. At its monitoring site, the snowiest December on record has been followed by a record streak of 37 days without precipitation.
The hot, dry weather, combined with gusty winds, fueled several brush fires in Southern California late last week. California has seen 12 million acres burn in the past decade, and 18 of the top 20 largest wildfires in state history have occurred in the past two decades.
Williams said that tree ring records do provide some reason for hope — megadroughts do eventually end when the rains return. Those rains are arriving in increasingly intense bursts as the atmosphere warms. | null | null | null | null | null |
When she left softball, she joined the world of bobsledding, where she had some breathtaking victories and met her husband, fellow bobsledder Nic Taylor. She won bronze in Vancouver in 2010, and silver in Sochi in 2014 and PyeongChang in 2018. When the sport opened up the possibility for co-ed sleds, she qualified for national competition as the female driver of three men. (Again, sounds like my carpool.) | null | null | null | null | null |
The past 22 years rank as the driest period since at least 800 A.D.
Previous work by some of the same authors of the new study had identified the period of 2000 through 2018 as the second-worst megadrought since the year 800 — exceeded only by an especially severe and prolonged drought in the 1500s. But with the past three scorching years added to the picture, the Southwest’s megadrought stands out in the record as the “worst” or driest in more than a millennium.
Scientists refer to this combined hot and dry effect as “aridity” — a warm and thirsty atmosphere that can pull moisture from soil and plants, melt snow, and intensify heat waves.
This “background drying” brought on by a warmer atmosphere can dwarf occasional wet or cool periods. For example, the Southwest’s 2021 drought maintained its grip despite robust monsoon rains and record summer precipitation in some areas, in part because of extraordinary heat waves early last summer, and generally above-average temperatures.
The study’s tree-ring record also provides a sobering view of what is possible in the West. “The tree rings tell us that there can actually be very, very extreme dryness in the West without the help of climate change at all,” Williams said. “Even without climate change, we can have monumentally severe and long-lasting droughts.”
That analysis found that at the current warming trajectory, droughts in drying regions that previously occurred only once every 10 years are now happening about 1.7 times per decade, on average. If the Earth warms 2 degrees Celsius, scientists expect those once-rare events to take place roughly 2½ times per decade, on average.
The Central Sierra Snow Lab run by the University of California at Berkeley tweeted that its snowpack lost 5 percent of its water content amid unusually warm weather over the past week. At its monitoring site, the snowiest December on record has been followed by a record streak of 37 days without precipitation.
The hot, dry weather, combined with gusty winds, fueled several brush fires in Southern California late last week. California has seen more than 12 million acres burn in the past decade, and 18 of the top 20 largest wildfires in state history have occurred in the past two decades.
Williams said that tree-ring records do provide some reason for hope — megadroughts do eventually end when the rains return. Those rains are arriving in increasingly intense bursts as the atmosphere warms. | null | null | null | null | null |
Second-graders put their hearts into White House Valentine’s Day project
D.C. students work with first lady Jill Biden to decorate the White House with artwork featuring love, hope and kindness.
First lady Jill Biden shows Washington, D.C., students the Valentine's Day decorations they helped create for the White House. Biden invited students from Aiton Elementary to create hearts that feature words such as love, kindness, hope and family. (Susan Walsh/AP)
First lady Jill Biden has turned Valentine’s Day into a lesson for second-graders.
The longtime teacher had Washington elementary school students design Valentine’s Day hearts that are hanging in the East Wing of the White House.
Twenty second-graders from Aiton Elementary School and their teacher, Alejandro Diasgranados, visited the White House on Monday and see their “heart work” on display, Biden’s office said. It will be the first time many of these students have been to the White House.
The first lady will also take the group to the North Lawn to see her Valentine’s Day installation: hand-painted, wooden artwork in the shapes of the Bidens’ puppy, Commander, and cat, Willow. There’s also a separate heart-shaped cutout inscribed with a Bible verse: “Three things will last forever — faith, hope and love — and the greatest of these is love.”
Students in both of Diasgranados’s second-grade classes designed two Valentine’s Day hearts using a template and instructions provided by the first lady’s office.
Diasgranados is Washington’s 2021 Teacher of the Year. Biden, a veteran community college professor, met Diasgranados in October when she and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona hosted the 2020 and 2021 Teachers of the Year at the White House. | null | null | null | null | null |
He also produced “Animal House” and made the Bill Murray comedies “Meatballs” and “Stripes.”
Filmmaker and producer Ivan Reitman, center, is honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1997. From left are actors Nastassja Kinski, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams. (Damian Dovarganes/AP)
Ivan Reitman, a director and producer who made some of the most beloved movie comedies of the 1970s and ′80s, turning “toga” into a byword for frat-party excess with “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and introducing viewers to the slimy work of “supernatural elimination” in “Ghostbusters,” died Feb. 12 at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 75.
His family announced the death in a statement to the Associated Press, which did not give a cause. Publicists for two of his children — filmmaker Ivan Reitman and actress, producer and writer Catherine Reitman — did not share additional details.
Mr. Reitman was one of the most successful comic filmmakers of his time, known for channeling an irreverent, anti-establishment sensibility in movies that harnessed the talent of “Saturday Night Live” stars such as John Belushi, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd. His movies rarely drew critical acclaim, but they made more than $2 billion at the box office and inspired filmmakers such as Todd Phillips, whose comedies “Road Trip” (2000) and “Old School” (2003) were among the more than 70 movies and TV shows that Mr. Reitman produced.
Mr. Reitman directed nearly 20 films, often involving rebellious goofballs in outlandish situations. The end of his U.S. Army comedy “Stripes” (1981) saw Murray, Harold Ramis and other soldiers accidentally invade Czechoslovakia, while the climax of “Ghostbusters” (1984) showcased the demonic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a corporate mascot who lumbers through the streets of New York, wreaking havoc.
“This movie is an exception to the general rule that big special effects can wreck a comedy,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote in a review of “Ghostbusters,” which starred Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis as a trio of ghost-catching New Yorkers. The film earned some $230 million in the United States and spawned books, comics, television shows, a remake and two sequels, including “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” (2021), which was produced by Mr. Reitman and directed by his son.
Mr. Reitman was the son of Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust and fled communist Czechoslovakia. He grew up in Canada, where he made satirical short films and low-budget horror comedies. He launched his mainstream movie career with “Animal House” (1978), which he produced with Matty Simmons, capitalizing on the success of the comedy magazine National Lampoon. Filmed for less than $3 million, the movie starred Belushi as a member of the raucous fraternity Delta Tau Chi, and made more than $140 million at the U.S. box office.
“It killed me I didn’t get to direct it,” said Mr. Reitman, who was passed over for a more experienced filmmaker, John Landis.
Mr. Reitman later directed Murray in his first starring film role, as a summer camp counselor in “Meatballs” (1979), and helped launch Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career as a comedic actor, pairing him with the diminutive Danny DeVito in “Twins” (1988) — they played the separated-at-birth title characters — and casting him alongside a pack of unruly children in “Kindergarten Cop” (1990).
Mr. Reitman branched out as a director as well, including in the political satire “Dave” (1993), starring Kevin Kline as an ordinary man who impersonates the president and ends up serving as commander in chief. He also produced, directed and wrote the story for “Legal Eagles” (1986), a legal comedy and crime thriller starring Robert Redford, Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah.
The movie was partly modeled after romantic comedies of the late 1940s and ′50s, which represented “an island of optimism in a world that is perceived more and more as chaotic,” Mr. Reitman told the New York Times.
“When people talk about making movies that way, it’s not so much to re-create the movies of the ’40s but to re-create the sensibilities where people stood up for what was right, where people trusted each other, where there was an order to life,” he said. “What I’m struggling to do is find a contemporary way of telling a story and still have those sensibilities at play, because I think, at heart, I’m like that.”
Ivan Reitman was born in Komarno, Czechoslovakia — now part of Slovakia — on Oct. 27, 1946. His mother was an Auschwitz survivor, and his father owned the country’s largest vinegar factory and fought with the resistance during World War II, according to the Associated Press.
Soon after the communist takeover, Mr. Reitman fled the country with his family, hiding under the floorboards of a tugboat. “We were five days in that boat,” his father, Leslie, later told the Times. “It was very hard on him. This affects a child. Maybe what he missed as a very young child, this is what he wanted to recapture in high school and college — the crazy stuff.”
The family settled in Toronto, where his father bought a dry-cleaning business and then a carwash. Mr. Reitman and his family later donated the property to the Toronto International Film Festival, helping to build a year-round home for the organization.
Mr. Reitman sang in a folk group before studying music at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1969. He directed student plays and led the film club, making short films of his own after taking a summer course through the National Film Board of Canada.
One of his first movies, a 20-minute satire titled “Orientation” (1968), screened at Toronto theaters. A year later he produced “The Columbus of Sex,” an art film that depicted a young man’s sexual exploits and spurred an obscenity trial, at which Mr. Reitman was convicted and fined $300.
Mr. Reitman also worked on the stage, producing the Broadway musical “The Magic Show” which featured magician Doug Henning and ran from 1974 to 1978, and “The National Lampoon Show,” an off-Broadway revue that opened in 1975 and paved the way for his work on “Animal House.”
Mr. Reitman also produced the horror movie “Shivers” (1975), helping to launch the career of director David Cronenberg, and increasingly focused on producing in the early 1990s, with credits on comedies including “Beethoven” (1992), “Space Jam” (1996) Howard Stern’s “Private Parts” (1997), “Trailer Park Boys: The Movie” (2006) and “I Love You, Man” (2009).
He also branched into science fiction with “Evolution” (2001) and made a sports drama, “Draft Day” (2014) with Kevin Costner, in his last feature as a director. He was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 2009.
As a director, Mr. Reitman sought to strike a balance between freedom and control, giving cast members leeway to interpret their roles while still working to ensure the movie held together as a whole.
“There’s a moment when the actors can say anything they want, and then, part of the fun for me as a director is to take that raw work and just structure it and rework it and make it conform to the character work and to the plot, which is evolving as well,” he told the Times. “It’s a way of being a co-writer of a movie as it’s being shot. But it doesn’t allow for the same kind of focused direction and polished style that leads to much recognition for the creator of the film.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The reform worked, in a uniquely rapid and emphatic fashion. In the first post-reform cycle of national assessments, Indiana fourth-graders jumped from 27th to 14th. Two years later, the state ranked ninth. The extra costs for summer tutoring, or the reputational bruise from too many youngsters having to repeat third grade, clearly got the system’s attention.
Turns out the idea of an education “warranty” flickered briefly, a couple of decades ago. A few isolated high schools around the country, and even the Los Angeles Unified School District, touted guarantees of proficiency in reading, writing and problem-solving, with free retraining for graduates not meeting that standard. But all sank without a trace. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ashley Caldwell couldn’t land her final jump in women’s aerials Monday night, but she already had a gold medal from the mixed team event. (Diego Azubel/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Ashley Caldwell knew she had lost her shot at a medal as soon as her back hit the snow. The freestyle skier from Virginia possessed the two highest scores of the night entering the third of three rounds in the women’s aerials final. But on her last performance of the Beijing Games, she went into the jump a little too fast, caught a small draft and fell backward upon landing.
She leaves Beijing with the first medal of her career — gold, to boot — which she won with the U.S. team last week when freestyle skiing’s mixed-team aerials event made its Olympic debut.
“Having a second opportunity for a medal is huge,” said Caldwell, 28. “It draws attention to what an incredible sport this is, and for our country, the United States — I would love for these two medals now, the team medal and Megan Nick’s bronze, to help encourage the sport in our country.”
Mixed-team aerials is one of seven events that debuted during the Beijing Games, five of which were part of the International Olympic Committee’s continued push toward gender parity at the Olympics. In addition to mixed-team aerials, mixed-team snowboard cross, mixed-team short-track relay, mixed-team ski jumping and women’s monobob had their inaugural runs here.
Men’s and women’s big air freestyle skiing are also new this year.
Four-man bobsled has been a part of the Olympic program since the first Winter Games in 1924, and two-man bobsled was added in 1932, but two-woman bobsled wasn’t added until 2002.
Like female aerials skiers, until this year female bobsledders had just one choice of event at the Olympics despite the fact that four-woman bobsled debuted at the world championships five years ago.
Humphries and Meyers Taylor were crucial in getting the discipline added to the Games.
“To be able to have two opportunities to medal now, that’s a game-changer,” Meyers Taylor said. “Now we’re more on-par with the men, with the two medals. We’d still like to have more numbers for women and to have that comparability to medal for all the women, brakemen included, but you know, getting the monobob added was a start. It’s really cool to see all the girls out there, see all the different nations represented and see how well they did, like, this was a tough track for these monobob sleds. This is not easy. And to see from top to bottom how well the girls did and how well they represented, it’s really amazing.”
Because of the new events in Beijing, Games organizers are touting these Olympics as the most gender-balanced Winter Games to date, with women making up 45 percent of athletes and women’s events tallying 46, up two from four years ago in PyeongChang.
But as Meyers Taylor pointed out Monday, gender parity can be measured in myriad ways. The number of events available only to women — which is still fewer than the men — is just one.
Men can jump off the normal hill, the target landing distance for which is 90 meters, and the large hill, the target landing distance for which is 120 meters. The discrepancy means male ski jumpers have four events open to them: individual normal hill, individual large hill, the men’s team event and the mixed-team event. Women have just two.
“My hope is that women will continue to have options. Of course, if I had it my way, there would be women’s four-man and breakmen would have multiple medal opportunities,” Meyers Taylor said. “ … I really want the younger pilots to have the choice. If they decide that monobob is what they want to do, then yes, I’ll support them wholeheartedly. But if they decide they want four-woman, then yes, I’m going to support that, too. Now it’s up to the next generation to decide where the sport goes, and I think it’s in good hands.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Team USA’s Maggie Voisin in third after second run of slopestyle final; Eileen Gu in eighth
Eileen Gu third after first run of women’s freestyle skiing slopestyle final
U.S. freestyle skier withdraws from competition, returns to the U.S. after leg injury
No, that’s not a nuclear power plant at Beijing’s big air venue
Remember when Australia winning winter medals was a novelty? Yeah, that’s ancient history.
Canada’s women’s hockey team ‘is a different animal’
The women’s individual figure skating competition begins in Beijing, just one day after a court ruled that 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, the Russian star embroiled in a doping case, is eligible to participate. Americans Mariah Bell, Karen Chen and Alysa Liu will also compete as the short program gets underway at around 5 a.m. Eastern. Elsewhere, freestyle skier Eileen Gu needs a strong final run to medal in the women’s slopestyle finals and Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin will compete in the women’s downhill. Follow along for live updates and highlights from the Winter Games.
Switzerland’s Mathilde Gremaud jumped into first place after the second run Monday of the women’s freestyle skiing slopestyle final with a score of 86.56. American Maggie Voisin earned a score of 74.16, good for third place, after landing a double cork 1260 to end her second run.
Estonia’s Kelly Sildaru, the 2020 Youth Olympics gold medalist in freeski slopestyle, was in second with an 82.06 from her first run.
China’s Eileen Gu, in search of a second gold medal in Beijing, had been in third after the first run but after some good performances by her rivals, was in seventh as she began her second run. Gu then fell during the rail section and skied off the rest of the course before getting a score of 16.98. Norway’s Johanne Killi, who had a disappointing first run, then moved up to fifth, pushing Gu to eighth.
A problem with her bindings had caused Gremaud, who won a silver medal in the slopestyle at the 2018 Olympics, to falter in her first run and receive a low score that started her off in 11th place.
Seeking her second gold medal of the Beijing Olympics, Eileen Gu was in third place after the first run of the women’s freestyle skiing slopestyle final Monday.
In first was the Chinese star’s biggest obstacle in the event, Estonia’s Kelly Sildaru. Taking second in the early going was France’s Tess Ledeux, who finished second to Gu in the big air final last week.
Gu, who had a shaky jump onto a railing early, scored a 69.90 on her first of three scheduled runs. Sildaru, who posted the highest score in qualifying, scored an 82.06 Monday and Ledeux was awarded a 72.91.
American Maggie Voisin, who finished fourth in qualifying, started the final in eighth place with a score of 35.4.
Another member of Team USA, Marin Hamill, withdrew from the final after a crash in qualifying injured her right leg and required her to be taken to an ambulance on a stretcher.
U.S. skier Marin Hamill dropped out of the women’s freestyle skiing slopestyle competition after crashing on her second qualifying run Monday and suffering a right leg injury. She will return to the U.S. for further evaluation rather than competing in Tuesday’s final, U.S. Ski & Snowboard confirmed.
Hamill’s first run scored 69.43, good for seventh after qualification. But she crashed and fell during her second run, and was taken off the course on a stretcher.
Hamill initially qualified alongside Eileen Gu, the Californian competing for China, and American Maggie Voisin. The injury came a day after the freestyle skiing slopestyle competition was originally slated to begin, but the event was rescheduled after heavy snowfall and wind forced several event postponements.
At a surreal Olympics of throat swabs, burner phones and barricaded hotels, Big Air Shougang may provide the most surreal images: the world’s most acrobatic snowboarders and skiers twisting and flipping against a backdrop of post-apocalyptic industrial ruins. If you concentrate on the athlete, you will see breathtaking body control that verges on artistry. If you adjust your focus just slightly, you will see rusted silos and paint-chipped buildings, seemingly vacant — unless, God forbid, there are zombies in there plotting the demise of humankind in an unholy alliance with disinfecting robots.
Big Air Shougang hosted Eileen Gu’s indelible gold medal performance at the outset of the Beijing Olympics, but it has grown infamous for its surroundings. Opened in 2019 and constructed on the grounds of an abandoned steel mill, the gigantic jump made of snow has provided a stage for daring feats of athleticism and fodder for memes.
Next up: Thursday’s gold medal game.
BEIJING — Six thousand two hundred and seven miles from the Ice Cube in Beijing’s Olympic Park, John Shuster’s people were gathered around televisions in the Gold Medal Lounge in Duluth, Minn., in the wee hours of Saturday morning, hoisting $1 drafts in his honor.
Well, truthfully, they were pounding beers because it’s what curlers do. But the Duluth Curling Club’s most famous member was in the Olympics again, and because of that, the lounge — which looks out over the club’s rink — extended its hours for the midnight Central time start. And if nothing else, it was worth toasting Shuster for that. | null | null | null | null | null |
A longtime friend of the West Virginia senator has a growing lobbying business in Washington as companies seek to understand and influence the key lawmaker
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) arrives for a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Feb. 8. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
When some of the Democratic officials in the room objected — Justice until recently had been a registered Republican — Puccio offered to call the man who for the past three decades has been his friend, business partner, boss, political ally and patron: Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).
“Larry’s position was, ‘Justice and I will run the party, and everything else, as we desire.' I was pushing back on that,’ ” said Chris Regan, then the vice chairman of West Virginia’s Democratic Party, who attended the meeting. Puccio was a senior adviser at the time for Justice’s campaign. “I remember Larry just yelling back: ‘We can get Manchin on the phone, if you need to hear it from him.’ ”
Puccio isn’t the only Manchin ally who’s been lured to K Street — several top lobbying firms snapped up former Manchin aides last year — but he goes back further with Manchin than almost anyone else in politics. With trillions of dollars tied to Manchin’s vote, Washington clients have sought out Puccio’s guidance on how to influence the senator.
“Larry has always been with Joe. We all started out together. Their friendship is rock solid,” said Tom Mainella, the Democratic mayor of Fairmont, W.Va., and a friend of both men.
Manchin declined an interview request, and his office declined to answer written questions. Puccio didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“Senator Manchin and Mr. Puccio have been friends for years,” a Manchin spokesperson told The Washington Post in a statement. “Senator Manchin’s decisions are always driven by the best interests of West Virginians and not influenced by lobbying or friendship.”
Puccio’s relationship with Manchin has made him a valuable lobbyist in Washington, where Manchin wields an effective veto over trillions of dollars in spending. Manchin’s declaration in December that he couldn’t vote for Democrats’ health-care, child-care and climate package — President Biden’s top legislative priority — doomed the bill for now, and his opposition to some policy ideas kept them from being included in the legislation in the first place.
The Appalachian Natural Gas Operators Coalition paid Puccio and his partner, Angel Moore, $180,000 last year to lobby the Senate and the Energy Department on “proposed taxes and fees related to energy production,” according to disclosure filings.
Manchin “can share thoughts with Larry, or Pucci — you know, a lot of people call him Pucci — that never go beyond Larry’s ears,” said former congressman Nick J. Rahall (D-W.Va.), who considers both men friends. “He’s tight-lipped.”
“There are some groups that are working alongside those of us in West Virginia,” McKay said, “but there are also those saying: ‘My second cousin twice removed drove through Charleston one time, so Manchin should listen to us.’ ”
Puccio’s rise in West Virginia was sometimes met by the same complaints that have dogged Manchin — that they have moved the Democratic Party too far left and that they are too close to the coal industry. The two led a group of investors aimed at building a tannery that was later abandoned amid local pushback over its impact on a nearby river, said Leslee McCarty, who helped lead a petition against the sale and as a result later campaigned against Manchin for office. | null | null | null | null | null |
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A fire-resistant roof, at least 5 feet of defensible space around a home, a clearly defined evacuation route in a neighborhood and the removal of vegetation overgrowth in a community are some of the new statewide insurance standards to reduce the wildfire risk of older homes, California officials announced Monday. | null | null | null | null | null |
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee lawmakers passed a ban Monday against instant runoff voting in elections, a move that seeks to end a long-running legal dispute between state election officials and the city of Memphis. Voters there still haven’t used the method since voting in 2008 to adopt it for city elections. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Wizards held on for a 103-94 victory over the Detroit Pistons at Capital One Arena behind another spectacular performance by Kuzma, who is enjoying in his new role as the team’s top option.
Gafford clears protcols
Wizards center Daniel Gafford cleared the NBA’s health and safety protocols and is available to return to the court. However, he did not play Monday because Coach Wes Unseld Jr. wants to ease him back in.
Newly acquired Kristaps Porzingis did not play as he continues to nurse a bone bruise in his knee. Unseld said Porzingis, who has gone through pregame workouts before both games since he arrived, will travel to Indiana for Wednesday’s game, and the hope is to get him on the floor before the all-star break.
Hachimura did not leave the game immediately but later walked to the locker room and never returned. | null | null | null | null | null |
“There is nothing I love more than to make a straight line,” said artist Carmen Herrera, shown here circa 1959. (Jesse Loewenthal)
Carmen Herrera was 106 when she died on Feb. 12 in the loft in Manhattan where she had worked for more than half a century, creating a lifetime’s worth of abstract art that went almost entirely overlooked until her life was nearly over.
Ms. Herrera, who was born in Cuba in 1915 and trained in Paris in the aftermath of World War II, anticipated the artistic movement known as minimalism with her use of straight lines and geometric shapes. She exhibited her works occasionally over the years but did not sell her first painting until 2004, when a show at the Latin Collector gallery in New York helped propel her to sudden renown.
“How can we have missed these brilliant compositions?” art critic Laura Cumming wrote in the London Observer in 2009, describing Ms. Herrera as “the discovery … of the decade.”
Critics and collectors, once made aware that Ms. Herrera existed, were rapt by the intensity of her work, which she achieved by juxtaposing geometric shapes in contrasting colors — black and white, red and blue, black and yellow and, in her noted sequence “Blanco y Verde,” white and green. Pairing green and white, she once remarked, is “like saying yes and no.”
With her “hard-edged style of pared-down geometric shapes” and “simplified palettes,” she established herself a leading abstract artist of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, James Meyer, the curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, said in an interview.
Last month, the National Gallery acquired two works by Ms. Herrera — an untitled painting in green and white, executed in 2013, and an untitled aluminum relief conceived in 1966 and completed in 2016. Her works are also housed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Tate Modern in London.
Ms. Herrera, Meyer said, “is an example of an artist persisting in her work, unaffected by lack of recognition, a lack of sales, pursuing her vision with great rigor and self-confidence and happily receiving recognition late in life.”
Her death was confirmed by artist Tony Bechara, her friend of decades and legal representative. He did not cite a specific cause.
Ms. Herrera was born in Havana in 1915 — on May 30, according to her Cuban passport, or on May 31, according to her U.S. one, Bechara said — one of seven children in a progressive and affluent family. Her father, who died when she was 3, was the editor of the Havana newspaper El Mundo. Her mother was a reporter for the publication and a committed feminist.
Ms. Herrera began painting as a girl, went to finishing school in Paris and returned to Cuba to study architecture at the University of Havana. She met a visiting American, Jesse Loewenthal, and returned with him to the United States. They were married in 1939.
The couple lived for a period in Paris, where Ms. Herrera, who had previously painted in a more traditional, representational style, began to explore abstract art in earnest after discovering the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, which cultivated abstract artists.
“That was an eye-opener,” she told the Observer in 2010. “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I went to the studio, and I worked and worked and worked and worked. I was angry that I didn’t know about this before.”
Ms. Herrera faced obstacles as a woman painting during a time when, Meyer said, “what we call the art world tended to be sexist and tended to diminish women’s accomplishments.”
But also, he noted, “the style of her work … fell somewhat between the cracks.” Ms. Herrera was working in what would become known as the minimalist style in the 1950s, when the abstract expressionism of artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline was ascendant. Ms. Herrera, Meyer said, was “working in a much cooler, cleaner way,” without “manifest brushwork.”
“There is nothing I love more than to make a straight line,” Ms. Herrera told the London Sunday Telegraph in 2010. “How can I explain it? It’s the beginning of all structures, really.”
Asked where a line ends, she replied, “It doesn’t.”
Ms. Herrera recalled her indignation when, by her account, a gallerist in New York told her, “Carmen, you can paint circles around the men artists that I have, but I’m not going to give you a show because you’re a woman.” Ms. Herrera did find, however, that obscurity had its benefits; she was free to pursue her art with no need to satisfy anyone but herself.
“I do it because I have to do it,” she told the Telegraph. “People keep saying, ‘How do you work all those years without any reward, no money, few exhibitions?' Because it was a vocation. Why would anyone go to a hospital to take care of the lepers if they do not have the vocation of being nuns? It’s the same.”
After she made her first sale at age 89, Ms. Herrera’s work attracted ever greater notice — and fetched ever greater prices, into the tens of thousands of dollars per piece. In 2016 and 2017, she was the subject of an exhibit at the Whitney, “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight.”
By the end of her life, Ms. Herrera, suffering from severe arthritis, relied on a wheelchair to move about her studio. She had no immediate survivors. She continued to paint, she told the New York Times in 2009, because “only my love of the straight line keeps me going.” | null | null | null | null | null |
After reports last week that Valieva tested positive in December for a banned heart medication, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled Monday that Valieva can continue competing at the Beijing Games, but the International Olympic Committee said no medals will be awarded until her case is resolved.
The decision was panned by others in skating and regulatory officials — criticism that spoke to frustrations with Russia and its history of doping at the Olympics. Investigations relating to Russia’s state-sponsored use of performing-enhancing drugs have spanned eight years and five Olympic Games. An independent commission from the World Anti-Doping Agency accused Russia of running a state-sponsored doping program in 2015, prompting the IOC to ban Russia from the 2018 PyeongChang Games but still allow athletes to compete as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.” This year, the athletes are competing as the “Russian Olympic Committee.”
“In Russian doping cases it’s often the athlete but even more so, particularly when the athlete is a child, there’s that figure in the shadows who’s working with the coach. They’ve got dossiers on every one of those coaches,” Tinsley said of Russian intelligence agencies such as the Federal Security Service. “The whole context of it is, ‘Don’t screw this up for the state.’ ”
In an interview on Russian state television Saturday, Tutberidze insisted that Valieva was “innocent and clean” and vaguely implied a conspiracy was at play. “Either this was an ill-fated confluence of circumstances, or it was a very well-conceived plan,” Tutberidze said. “I hope our officials will not abandon us and defend our rights and prove our innocence.”
“We’re like, ‘Oh, my God, the Russian skaters — we have to have them as our coach, we’re going to be famous,’ ” Zettner said of her fellow students.
“What I try to teach my students starting at about the age of 13 is that you can’t just come to practice and start whining: ‘I am tired. I can’t do this now. Let’s do it tomorrow,’ ” Tutberidze said. “Just look at the map and see the size of Russia — and when you’re selected and sent to an international competition, you will have a jacket. On its back it says ‘Russia.’ And if you’re supposed to be the best that Russia sent for the world to see, then you cannot just step out on the ice with a bad attitude, thinking: ‘I am tired today. I don’t feel like skating my best and representing the Russian people as they expect me to.’ ”
That attitude has pushed her skaters and the sport to new heights. All three of Tutberidze’s athletes at these Games jump quads, rotating four times in the air — a feat that no other female skater at the Olympics will attempt. That provides their programs with a significantly higher degree of difficulty, enabling them to stay ahead of the pack even if they falter.
Other athletes and coaches say women’s figure skating has remained stagnant for many years and welcome the sport moving forward. But they say it must be done safely, with female skaters using athleticism and safe training methods to achieve quad jumps.
“I think we will have more and more American girls doing quads,” Weisiger said. “I’m not opposed to teaching kids difficult skills they can accommodate. I’m opposed to it when it means breaking your leg or taking drugs. I do think we have the ability, and I think we can push the envelope. We just need to do it intelligently.”
Tutberidze has said her athletes train up to 12 hours a day, and several of her former stars have spoken about how severely they restricted their eating so that they could be light enough to perform quads and other difficult elements.
Tutberidze’s training appears to rely on keeping skaters as light as possible and having them rotate before they leave the ice in their jumps, which can cause severe back injuries. One student, who moved to train with Tutberidze when she was 13, was recorded in videos landing a quad jump. But by 14 she wasn’t able to jump anymore because of a back injury. Another student who landed quads retired before the Olympics because of a back injury.
After her skaters make history, Tutberidze appears to quickly move on to younger stars. Female skaters can face adversity when they hit puberty, Weisiger said, because their changing bodies force them to relearn many skills. (U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu became the first American woman to land a quad in competition, but she hasn’t attempted it since she hit a growth spurt.) Oftentimes they’re unable to get back some of those skills.
It appears little has changed with Tutberidze’s most recent crop of skaters. Her choreographer, Daniil Gleikhengauz, remarked in an interview that Shcherbakova once said she was full after eating two shrimps for dinner and that she was lucky not to be obsessed with food like some other girls.
Valieva only began competing at the senior level in the fall. But she immediately began stampeding her rivals, including her training mates. Her scores have broken world records. And her stunning success already has won her widespread acclaim in Russia; her fan club got her a Pomeranian, and she is an ambassador for Puma.
“I can tell you that this is a very fragile, little girl, and yet she’s a concentration of all the best qualities of a figure skater,” Katsalapov said through an interpreter. “. . . Watching her perform is a pleasure. It’s a delight. And she’s getting better from one competition to the next one.”
Then news broke that she tested positive in December for trimetazidine, a heart medication that has been banned by WADA since 2014. The drug’s ability to enhance performance is unclear, but some elite athletes have turned to it because it’s supposed to make the heart more efficient and could allow an athlete such as Valieva to train longer and harder and recover faster.
“Our laboratories ... should have written a letter of objection to dispute the accusation” that the drug was a doping agent, Tutberidze said. “That this substance does not help with ‘highest, strongest, fastest’ and only helps to recuperate the heart muscles.” | null | null | null | null | null |
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Eileen Gu’s quest for history marches on.
In case the American-born Chinese skier wasn’t shouldering enough attention at the Beijing Games, Gu won her second medal of the Winter Olympics on Tuesday, taking silver in a clean, thrilling final run in women’s slopestyle. She is two-thirds of the way toward becoming the first action-sport athlete to reach the podium in three of freestyle skiing’s events: big air, where she took gold when the discipline made its Olympic debut last week, slopestyle and halfpipe. Her shot at clinching the milestone in halfpipe arrives Friday.
At that point, the roars from the fans who pack into limited spectator stands at each of Gu’s events might grow deafening.
At Genting Snow Park on Tuesday, Gu’s own yelp of triumph echoed loudest of all. Slopestyle is perhaps the 18-year-old’s weakest discipline by a slim margin, and she entered the third heat of the final in eighth place. After a big fall on her second run drew a loud groan from those in attendance, Gu mustered her strongest, surest run of the day to vault to silver with a score of 86.23.
It was her first major competitive adversity at these Games. She shooed it away much in the same fashion she has everything else since arriving in Beijing: with fierce self-belief and aplomb, punching her fists at her side and letting out a roar when she came to a stop at the bottom. She knew she had been good enough.
Gu finished just behind Swiss gold medalist Mathilde Gremaud, who won with a score of 86.56 in her second run. Estonia’s Kelly Sildaru earned bronze with an 82.06 from her first run.
Maggie Voisin, 23, was the only American in the final after Marin Hamil, 20, injured her right leg Monday in qualification and returned to the United States for evaluation. Voisin finished fifth with 74.28 earned in her second run, a victory in itself for a comeback worthy of admiration. In 2018, Voisin finished fourth in slopestyle after tearing the same ACL twice four years. This year’s Olympics come 13 months after the Montanan’s older brother died by suicide.
“I’m really, really proud. I put down my second run, my best run,” Voisin. “I put down what I wanted to — of course, I could’ve cleaned it up a little it more, but I’m still really, really proud of myself and what I was able to accomplish here.
“I have been through so much in the last four years to just even be at the Olympics, to say the least. Of course, sitting in third for a minute being like, ‘Oh man, can I hold on, can I put down my third run better?’ was kind of a crazy feeling, but no. No regrets.”
Gu’s attention now shifts to one final shot at a podium, and perhaps a second gold. The feat may feel more straightforward than her first two competitions, both because of Gu’s strengths as a freestyle skier and because of her schedule.
Trying to reach the podium in three events — and managing the extracurricular obligations that accompany being the face of the Beijing Games — is a delicate balancing act. Gu barely had time to stop and talk to reporters Monday after saving a shaky qualification run to make it through to the final. Because the women’s qualification runs were delayed a day by high winds and poor visibility from a snowstorm, Gu ate lunch while waiting for her final score, then rushed off to halfpipe training.
“I was feeling a little bit tired mentally after big air,” Gu said Tuesday after the final. “I almost felt like I wasn’t full in it. I wasn’t in the zone. I wasn’t feeling that rush of excitement and feeling too calm, which sometimes doesn’t work out the best. I’m one of those people that needs the pressure on and glad I was able to put it down.”
If competitive pressure is what Gu needs, she’ll face no shortage in her final event of the Games, where history awaits. | null | null | null | null | null |
Trump Tower in New York in January. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
On Monday morning, Trump claimed that he had at last been vindicated.
It’s a useful parallel, in fact, comparing his claims about having been spied on with his claims about fraud in the 2020 election. In neither case has any such thing been proved despite, as always, the robust effort by his allies to provide some foundation to Trump’s unfounded claims.
When that allegation was first reported in October 2016, it was pretty obviously unfounded. I wrote about the various ways in which the idea didn’t pass the smell test, from the theoretical — why leave any trail at all if you’re trying to secretly communicate with Russia? — to the technical, given that the Trump Organization server wasn’t controlled by Trump at all. Others, like technologist Rob Graham, reached a similar conclusion: that this was probably just a glitchy side effect of marketing emails.
Last year, Durham unveiled an indictment against an attorney named Michael Sussman centered on the Alfa Bank rumor. Durham claimed that Sussman had lied to an FBI official in September 2016 when trying to get the FBI to investigate the connection, saying he was not working for a specific client as he offered the tip. The allegation is that this was a false statement of the sort that tripped up various Trump allies during the Russia probe: that Sussman was, in fact, working for the campaign of Hillary Clinton. As journalist Marcy Wheeler has written, the criminal case is not terribly strong.
The theory behind the Alfa Bank rumor is complicated. Sussman’s law firm, Perkins Coie, had been retained by Clinton’s campaign (leading it, separately, to engage the investigative firm Fusion GPS that later generated the infamous dossier of reports alleging a more robust connection between Russia and Trump’s team). An unidentified individual first noticed traffic between the Trump server and the Russian bank and brought it to an executive at a technology firm who had retained Perkins Coie and was working with Sussman. (Wheeler has an excellent timeline of all of this.) That triggered an effort to examine the scope of those connections, one that at least some of those involved in the research apparently understood to be an effort to create a jumping-off point for further research that could bolster a Trump-Russia narrative. (The tech executive, I’ll note, wasn’t sold on the Alfa-Trump link even back in August 2016.) Durham’s filing ties the campaign to Sussman and Sussman to the executive, but it’s not explicitly argued that the probe flowed down from Clinton’s team — or up to it.
Now the technical stuff. At issue here are what are called domain name server (DNS) lookups. Traffic on the Internet is pushed around between points identified with Internet protocol (IP) addresses, strings of numbers that might be thought of like latitude and longitude in real-world positioning. In the real world, we don’t generally point people to latitude and longitude coordinates but to street addresses. On the Internet, we don’t generally go to IP addresses but domains. A DNS lookup converts a domain like washingtonpost.com to this newspaper’s actual Web server IP address.
It’s important here to know why those records might have been collected. An expert on the technology with whom I spoke on Monday explained that Internet service providers often allow third parties to collect domain name lookups because the information is useful for tracking bad actors on the Internet. If, for example, there are suddenly a number of lookups to we11sfargo.com, with ones replacing the Ls in the domain name, that might suggest some effort to redirect traffic away from the bank to some spoof site. Or organizations might similarly have a passive DNS collection process in place so that they might know if there’s a sudden spike in lookups for unusual servers in, say, Russia — an early indication that maybe someone is trying to run a scam targeting employees.
The “particular healthcare provider” is apparently Spectrum Health, which — when the story first emerged in 2016 — was identified as similarly linked to the Trump email server but also provided reporters with the marketing spam emails that explained that connection.
It’s useful to note that Durham’s claim about data being “exploited” emerged early. Both Wheeler and Graham elevated questions about the ethics of digging through collected DNS records to investigate something that was probably outside of any agreement governing what the data was being collected for. But that doesn’t mean 1) that any laws were violated or 2) that this constitutes “hacking.” If I give you a key to my house and you use it to come in and read my diary, I will certainly be angry with you, but it’s not like you committed burglary.
Yet that’s how the paragraph above has at times been conveyed. On Fox News, for example, a story about the Durham filing ran with the headline “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia: Durham.” There are a few problems with this, including that the connection between Clinton’s team and the Perkins Coie Alfa Bank investigation is not direct, nor did Durham use the word “infiltrate,” a word that suggests illicit access to data.
Instead, both of those claims come not from Durham but, as the article makes clear, from former Trump staffer Kash Patel. It’s a statement from Patel that makes the Clinton claim and uses the word infiltrate. It’s Patel — whose recent career has often centered on backstopping Trump’s claims of being unfairly investigated — who drew the line that Fox is attributing to the special counsel. (Fox News later updated its headline.)
Durham describes an effort to impugn Trump by claiming that during a meeting with a government agency in February 2017, Sussman alleged that DNS lookups “demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.” This doesn’t support a throughline back to Clinton, of course, since Trump wasn’t spending much time at the White House while Clinton was still a presidential candidate. Durham’s filing asserts that the lookups centered on those phones went back to 2014, when Trump wasn’t even yet a candidate.
There are legitimate questions about the effort to link Trump back to Russia using this data that was not only sketchy at the outset, but had also been debunked by the time the election was over. But there is no question that this is not proof that Trump Tower was “wiretapped.” It is not proof that Mark Levin’s claims in early 2017 were accurate, since they weren’t. (He’s tried to take credit for his foresight in recent days.) If it’s evidence of Trump being “spied on,” as the former president has also claimed in recent days, it’s a very broad sort of spying — collecting all of the domain-name lookups from a physical location or a network — being conducted not by the Obama administration or by Hillary Clinton, but by an anti-Trump lawyer.
“In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death,” Trump said over the weekend, the sort of escalation of rhetoric that is not lessened by our being so accustomed to him doing it. It is also not, as he said at another point, a bigger scandal than Watergate.
This is precisely the same claim he made back in March 2017 — “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” — well before this particular justification of his claims had been generated in the first place. | null | null | null | null | null |
With Kyle Kuzma in lead role, Wizards hold on for win over Pistons
Here’s what to know from Washington’s 103-94 victory
The Wizards held on for a 103-94 victory over the Detroit Pistons at Capital One Arena behind another spectacular performance by Kuzma, who is enjoying his new role as the team’s top option.
“I think it’s always a little bit of both,” Kuzma said about the balance between being aggressive and reading defenses. “But at the same time, it’s always about taking what the defense gives you so you’re not forcing action. That’s just what I did. Keeping it simple. Attack when I had it. If I didn’t have a shot, getting off of it.
“I knew that they would switch one through five. And every time that happened, I would just bring it out, wait a second ... and just figure it out on the move. Just trying to counter what their game plan was.”
The Pistons had runs to tie the game at halftime, take the lead in the third quarter and cut the lead to two in the fourth, but the Wizards responded each time.
“Well, it’s a good sign,” Wizards Coach Wes Unseld Jr. said about responding to those runs. “Obviously, we’ll try to limit your exposure to situations like that. We’ve seen runs get out of hand. ... But I thought second half we were much better. ... Got stops, were able to get out and run a bit. That big third quarter.
“Those are going to happen. So anytime that happens, our ability to bounce back is always good to see. But sometimes it’s just lucky offense. You kind of have to really look at and say, ‘Hey, are we doing the right things, or are we just getting bailed out?’ At times it’s okay. It’s better than the alternative, but we want to make sure we’re clear with our process and our execution.”
“I feel like we’re more engaged,” Avdija said about the post-trade-deadline roster. “This change also changed a little bit our roles. Everybody needs to do a little bit more. We’re short on the rotation. [Kristaps Porzingis] still needs to come back, and we’re excited, man. We just keep our heads in the game. Do what we need to. Everybody knows their role. We just keep sharing the ball, and I think we can do great things.
“We needed a change. It’s a progress. It’s going to take some time, and I believe in this team.”
Gafford clears protocols
Wizards center Daniel Gafford cleared the NBA’s health and safety protocols and is available to return to the court. However, he did not play Monday because Unseld wants to ease him back in.
Porzingis, acquired at the trade deadline, did not play as he continues to nurse a bone bruise in his knee. Unseld said Porzingis, who has gone through pregame workouts before both games since he arrived, will travel to Indiana for Wednesday’s game, and the hope is to get him on the floor before the all-star break.
Hachimura did not leave the game immediately but later walked to the locker room and never returned. Unseld didn’t get into details but called it a pretty good sprain. | null | null | null | null | null |
San Francisco police use rape kit DNA to identify suspects, district attorney says
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin speaks at a news conference in San Francisco on Nov. 23, 2020. (Jeff Chiu/AP)
The San Francisco Police Department routinely uses DNA collected from rape victims to identify suspects in other crimes, District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Monday, a potentially illegal practice that he said threatens to discourage survivors of sexual assault from coming forward.
“I was horrified,” Boudin said of his reaction upon learning of the practice. His office was evaluating a case when an assistant district attorney found that the evidence identifying the suspect was a sample collected from a rape victim in 2016.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Boudin read the police department’s lab report, which said that “during a routine search of the SFPD Crime Lab Forensic Biology Unit Internal Quality Database, a match was detected and verified. Direct comparisons with the samples listed below were performed,” listing the 2016 rape kit sample.
The language suggested that the practice was routine and not an isolated incident, Boudin said, and the head of the crime lab confirmed to his office that such searches are done regularly. SFPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday evening. Boudin said he had briefly spoken to SFPD Chief William Scott, who told him that he would look into the matter.
Boudin said his office was “committed to not using this sort of evidence” to prosecute crimes, “both on ethical grounds and also on legal grounds.”
Using a victim’s DNA to identify them as a suspect in another case is a “pretty clear” violation of the California constitution, Boudin said, which mandates the “prompt return of property when no longer needed as evidence.”
A student’s rape went unsolved for 14 years. Police say the suspect gave his DNA to a genealogy database.
“In this case, it’s no longer being used to prosecute the person who committed the sexual assault and should be destroyed or returned,” he said. Boudin also suggested it could be in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects people’s rights “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
“If survivors believe their DNA may end up being used against them in the future, they’ll have one more reason not to participate in the rape kit process,” State Sen. Scott Wiener (D) said in a statement, adding that he would “address this problem through state legislation, if needed.”
San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen (D) said in a statement Monday she had asked the city attorney to draft legislation that would make it illegal for evidence collected from a rape kit to be used for “anything other than investigating that rape.”
The use and storage of rape kit evidence “without the consent or knowledge of the victims and for purposes totally unrelated to the original sexual assault does real damage to the trust that we need from folks who survived sexual assault, and whose cooperation my office needs to be able to prosecute and hold accountable for causing harm,” Boudin said.
San Francisco, like many other cities across the country, has struggled with a backlog of rape kits. Statewide, nearly 14,000 rape kits in California have yet to be tested, according to End the Backlog, a project of the Joyful Heart Foundation, a nonprofit that works against sexual assault.
Boudin said he had not spoken with Mayor London Breed (D) about the matter. Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Boudin, a former public defender, is part of a new wave of Democratic prosecutors implementing more liberal policies on drug crimes and incarceration. He is facing a recall over criticisms that he is too soft on crime, an accusation lodged against many officials in one of the country’s most liberal cities.
San Francisco’s struggle with rampant crime has drawn increased attention in recent months. In December, Breed declared a state of emergency in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, long known for open drug use and widespread homelessness. Breed said the “reign” of criminals would come “to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant” of the crime “that has destroyed our city.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Julia Fox models the LaQuan Smith Fall/Winter 2022 collection at 60 Pine Street during New York Fashion Week on Monday, Feb. 14, 2022, in New York. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
NEW YORK — Julia Fox, fresh from her breakup with the artist formerly known as Kanye West, opened LaQuan Smith’s New York Fashion Week show in black as the designer honored his beloved late mentor, Andre Leon Talley, with a moment of silence Monday night inside a century-old private club. | null | null | null | null | null |
Supporters of Yoon Suk Yeol, the presidential candidate of the main opposition People Power Party, listen to his speech during a presidential election campaign in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022. Candidates kicked off official campaign on Tuesday for South Korea’s presidential election on March 9. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
SEOUL, South Korea — Candidates for South Korea’s presidential election began their formal campaigns Tuesday in a race tainted by intense political strife over allegations involving the main candidates and their families. | null | null | null | null | null |
The State Department late Monday issued an alert urging U.S. citizens to depart Belarus and Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova near Ukraine, immediately because of Russian military activity in the vicinity. Earlier Monday, the department relocated all remaining U.S. Embassy personnel in Kyiv to the far western city of Lviv, near the border with Poland, because of what Secretary of State Antony Blinken said was “the dramatic acceleration in the buildup of Russian forces” on the Ukrainian border and mounting U.S. fears of an invasion.
Russia has backed separatist militants in Ukraine’s east for the past seven years — and continues to demand that Kyiv implement a 2015 peace deal for the region brokered by France and Germany after the Kremlin annexed Crimea in 2014.
Moscow is trying to force through a sweeping rewrite of the post-Cold War European security order, demanding that Ukraine be barred from joining NATO and that the Western military alliance remove forces and troops from Eastern Europe. The United States and its NATO partners have rejected the ultimatum. | null | null | null | null | null |
The threat was reported over the weekend at Potomac Mills, according to police.
Lending a phone may seem a simple act of kindness, but it led to a lot of trouble over the weekend at Potomac Mills Mall in Virginia, according to a Prince William County police account of a bomb threat there.
Officers went to the giant shopping and entertainment center in Woodbridge, Va., about 6:45 p.m. Saturday after a bomb threat was phoned in to the county’s 911 center, police said.
During a search, an apparently suspicious item was found near the food court area, police said. They said patrons were evacuated from the vicinity until officers and a state police bomb squad determined that the item presented no threat.
A search of the rest of the mall found nothing suspicious, according to police.
The investigation indicates that the phone used for the call came from a mall employee, police said. A youth had approached the employee and asked to make a call, according to police. The call turned out to be the bomb threat, police said.
The employee did not know the phone had been misused and was found to be uninvolved in the threat, according to a police account released Monday.
A 14-year-old boy was taken into custody and charged with “threats to bomb,” police said in a statement. | null | null | null | null | null |
BEIJING — The International Olympic Committee says there will be no medal ceremony in Beijing if 15-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva places in the top three in the women’s individual event.
NEW YORK — Gonzaga reclaimed the No. 1 ranking in The Associated Press men’s college basketball poll Monday for a third stint this season atop the AP Top 25, moving up one spot to swap places with Auburn after the Tigers fell to No. 2 following their first loss since November.
NEW YORK — Becky Hammon, Penny Taylor and Doug Bruno will headline the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame’s Class of 2022. | null | null | null | null | null |
“President Hernández is working with the United States very closely,” Trump said in December 2019. “You know what’s going on our southern border. And we’re winning after years and years of losing.”
Hernández has denied those allegations. In response from the State Department ban, he said on Twitter that many accusations came from “drug traffickers and confessed assassins who were extradited by my government or had to flee and hand themselves in to U.S. authorities for fear of being extradited.” | null | null | null | null | null |
International Skating Union vice president Alexander Lakernik, left, and IOC disciplinary chair Denis Oswald look on during the ice dancing medal ceremony Monday. (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
BEIJING — Denis Oswald, the chair of International Olympic Committee’s disciplinary commission, said Tuesday he does not see evidence that Russia has a culture of sports doping.
Speaking less than a day after the Court of Arbitration for Sport allowed figure skater Kamila Valieva to compete in Tuesday night’s women’s short program over the IOC and World Antidoping Agency’s objections, Oswald defended the IOC’s handling of recent Russian doping cases. Valieva tested positive for a banned substance Dec. 25 during the Russian national championships.
“Until we know the circumstances of the [Valieva] case, I don’t think it’s fair to speak about culture,” he said. “I mean, since the last two years or so, I don’t think there have been that many doping cases with Russian athletes. Is the culture still present or not? I don’t know. But what I see is that the number of positive cases with Russian athletes is — I don’t know if I should say — has diminished or disappeared. I don’t remember in recent time to have a positive test with Russian athletes.”
Speaking during and after a news conference Tuesday, Oswald, who led the IOC’s investigation into Russia’s state-sponsored doping program at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, also said that he does not believe Valieva’s positive test for a banned heart drug indicates a more widespread issue.
“It is not established that there was a relation between this, which seems to be a single case, and the doping state of 2014,” he said. “It seems to have no connection between the two. No such connection has been established so far.”
The 2014 investigation led to the banning of 43 Russian athletes, though 30 of those successfully appealed their bans through CAS.
The IOC said that if Valieva finishes in the top three in this week’s women’s individual competition, as she is heavily favored to do, the IOC will not hold a medal ceremony in Beijing and instead will organize “dignified medal ceremonies once the case of Ms. Valieva has been concluded.” Oswald said the organization made that decision because “we want to allocate the medal to the right person.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Figure skating live updates Women’s short program begins under a cloud after doping case roils Beijing Games
Tara Lipinski: Kamila Valieva ‘should not be skating’
How Kristi Yamaguchi changed American figure skating
When will the top skaters take the ice?
Kamila Valieva before the women's short program Tuesday in Beijing. (Natacha Pisarenko/AP)
The women’s figure skating individual competition is underway at the Beijing Games, where controversy around the event has bubbled for days. Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old sensation at the center of another Russian doping case, has been cleared to compete, and Mariah Bell, Karen Chen and Alysa Liu will take the ice for Team USA.
Follow along for live updates, analysis and highlights.
Although Valieva is cleared to compete, the International Olympic Committee has already canceled any medal ceremonies that might involve her. Valieva tested positive for a banned substance in late December. That drug, trimetazidine, has never been approved for use in the United States.
Mariah Bell, Karen Chen and Alysa Liu will compete for Team USA. Bell, 25, won the national championships in January to secure a spot on this Olympic team. In doing so, she became the oldest U.S. women’s figure skater at the Games in nearly a century.
Bell is the first American on the ice, competing at 6:29 a.m. Eastern. Liu will skate at around 8:18 a.m., with Chen scheduled for 8:46 a.m. Valieva will follow Chen on the program. Most of the medal contenders will be in the final two groups, which begin around 8 a.m.
Follow more Beijing Olympics coverage here. See the full event schedule here and the full medal count here.
Tara Lipinski did not mince words during NBC’s introduction to the women’s short program at the Beijing Olympics, saying that Kamila Valieva of the Russian Olympic Committee “should not be skating in this competition” because of a failed drug test.
Her broadcast partner, Johnny Weir, concurred.
Earlier in these Games, Valieva became the first woman to land a quadruple jump (twice, in fact) during her free skate as ROC won in last week’s team competition.
Valieva is part of a strong Russian group in Tuesday’s competition, which also includes Alexandra Trusova and Anna Shcherbakova.
The short program is underway in Beijing.
By Robert Samuels5:11 a.m.
Over the past four years, Russian Coach Eteri Tutberidze’s team has transformed women’s skating; triple axels and quadruple jumps that were deemed rare or impossible have become commonplace.
The rules of the sport have not kept up — women are not allowed to do the high-point earning quadruple jumps in the short program. That means the standings can change significantly between the first phase of competition and the four-minute final.
By Dan Steinberg4:56 a.m.
BEIJING — Thirty skaters will perform in the women’s short program. The competitors are separated into five groups of six, with a brief warm-up period before each group begins.
Most of the top medal contenders will not skate until the final two groups. Here are some of the most notable skaters. All times are Eastern.
6:29 a.m.: Mariah Bell (U.S.)
6:36 a.m.: Madeline Schizas (Canada)
8:05 a.m.: Wakaba Higuchi (Japan)
8:18 a.m.: Alysa Liu (U.S.)
8:25 a.m.: Loena Hendrickx (Belgium)
8:46 a.m.: Karen Chen (U.S.)
8:52 a.m.: Kamila Valieva (ROC)
8:59 a.m.: Young You (South Korea)
9:05 a.m.: Alexandra Trusova (ROC)
9:12 a.m.: Anna Shcherbakova (ROC)
9:18 a.m.: Kaori Sakamoto (Japan)
The top 24 skaters advance to the free skate on Thursday evening in Beijing (Thursday morning Eastern), and scores are cumulative. If Valieva is among the top 24, a 25th competitor will be added. | null | null | null | null | null |
BEIJING — She is an exceptional athlete who has already won medals in the Beijing Olympics. But the deep fascination with Eileen Gu’s origin story has threatened to overshadow anything she does on the slopes.
“We’ll see if her stance ... will be fully accepted there over the long run,” says Rui Ma, founder of the San Francisco-based investment consulting firm Tech Buzz, who immigrated from China to the U.S. as a child in 1989. “It certainly doesn’t seem to be accepted by many Americans at the moment.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“When you get up from bed, that’s the most difficult part of the day,” Sofia Goggia said of her recovery from a serious crash last month. (Christian Hartmann/Reuters)
Three weeks and change ago on a slope in her native Italy, her left leg went down the hill, her right up the slope, nearly full splits at upward of 60 mph. Goggia is a champion ski racer. In that moment, she was reduced to a rag doll tossed on its head. The Olympics? What about her career?
These people, those who choose to strap boards to their feet and point them straight down mountainsides knowing precisely what can and does happen to their kind, are made of different stock. Even the gold medalist in Tuesday’s Olympic women’s downhill, Corinne Suter of Switzerland, put it thusly: “It’s always difficult when you have such a hard crash, because you think, ‘Yeah, it’s okay.’ But it’s not.”
They do it anyway. Since her crash in a World Cup super-G event — so violent that her compatriot Elana Curtoni, the leader at the time, turned away from the screen in horror — Goggia had not been able to compete. The Olympic champion in the downhill four years ago in PyeongChang. she partially tore the ACL in her left knee. Goodness knows what else was going on with her body. There were legitimate questions about whether she would be able to defend her title here.
“After that crash, I don’t think anybody knows the full details of her injury,” said American star Mikaela Shiffrin, who finished 18th. “But it’s a significant injury. It feels a little bit impossible that she got here.”
Coming from a ski racer, that means something. Goggia’s idol — well, idol who became a friend — is American legend Lindsey Vonn, who won more World Cup races than any woman in history. In the final competition of Vonn’s career — the 2019 world championships — she crashed badly in the super-G, breaking a rib and blackening an eye. Her response, at age 34, was to strap back in for the downhill. She was bruised and battered. She took bronze anyway.
A master electrician would have trouble figuring out how these racers are wired. From the moment she picked herself up off that slope in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy — a slope that was strewn with the remnants of a gate she plowed through and the two skis she had popped off — Goggia’s mind was on one event: the Olympic downhill.
“I always said to myself that if I could endure and overcome the period that separates me from Cortina to China,” Goggia said, “then the downhill itself would have been the easiest part.”
In theory, that’s reasonable. In practice? Well … “She’s a strong woman,” said her teammate Nadia Delago, and that is obviously true. Strong women can’t force ligaments to heal. They can, however, choose to dismiss pain.
“When you get up from bed, that’s the most difficult part of the day,” Goggia said. “Yesterday and today, I’m starting to walk like a normal person.”
Walking is one thing, skiing another. With the downhill the goal, Goggia skipped the Olympic super-G last Friday. Over the previous three days, she took a pair of training runs down the hard, speedy slope here. She couldn’t declare herself fully fit. “I would have loved to have 80 percent of my strength,” she said. But given what they subject their bodies to on a daily basis, ski racers rarely can claim to be fully fit. If her physical fitness was rated on a 1-to-10 scale, she said she was “maybe 5.5.” By Tuesday morning, with the downhill at hand, that would have to do.
“I worked on my fear, and I just wanted to be here,” Goggia said. “I just wanted to be here at the Olympic Games. I just wanted to play here. I had to pick myself back up in a way or another.”
She skied 13th, one spot behind Shiffrin, the three-time Olympic medalist whose biggest disappointments came earlier in these Games, when she skied out of both the giant slalom and slalom, her two best disciplines. The downhill is Goggia’s best event. Injury or not, she had expectations, both external and internal.
“I know she’s been dealing with a lot of pressure as well this whole season,” Shiffrin said. “She’s just been shining through with it.”
So one more opportunity to do just that. Near the top of the course, on one sweeping turn, she felt pain in the knee. “But it was just one second and a half,” she said. The run lasted more than a minute-and-a-half. Spit on the pain, and ski further. Scared?
“No, no, no, no,” she said. “I wasn’t scared. I just said to myself, ‘I’m here. Let’s play.’”
After a mile-and-two-thirds, she crossed the finish line. She was a little more than four-tenths of a second faster than Delago, her countrywoman. When she saw the green light next to her name — indicating she held the lead — she bent at the waist and unleashed a scream that rang through the finish area, where scant fans were allowed in the stands.
“I saw the green light,” she said, “and of course I exploded.”
She knew that gusts of winds had slowed her slightly, and she wasn’t shocked when Suter, skiing two spots after her, nipped her time by all of .16 of a second. The disappointment, though, was fleeting. Suter was the only skier able to beat her.
Just more than three weeks ago, Sofia Goggia’s legs splayed like a fawn’s on ice. Tuesday she stood, kissing both her hands and waving to the onlookers as she stepped up on a podium. The record books will forever show she won silver in the women’s downhill at the Beijing Olympics. It will display nothing of what it took to achieve that, beginning with an attitude and approach the rest of couldn’t comprehend. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nana Takagi of Team Japan is comforted by teammates after falling during the speedskating women’s team pursuit finals at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
BEIJING — Norway won its second straight Olympic gold medal in men’s team pursuit speedskating, and the Japanese women were headed for another gold as well Tuesday — until one of their skaters crashed on the final turn.
“Coming across the line, I just couldn’t believe it,” said Valerie Maltais of Canada.
Added teammate Isabelle Weidemann, “We are still thinking, is this real?”
Erin Jackson won gold in the women’s 500 meters. | null | null | null | null | null |
Over the last decade, he said, simmering resentments have burst into rage. People can’t travel far north of Bamako without risking their lives — extremists plant bombs in the roads — and with swaths of farmland cut off, it’s hard for to put food on the table.
The French military effort in Mali isn’t beloved in Paris, either: One columnist for the center-left Le Monde newspaper called the situation a “diplomatic and military humiliation.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Israeli prime minister makes historic visit to Bahrain, seeking to fortify Gulf coalition against Iran
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, right, speaks with Bahrain's foreign minister in Manama, Bahrain on Feb. 14. (Government Press Office/Reuters)
MANAMA, Bahrain — With a red carpet, an honor guard of dozens of fully outfitted soldiers and an escort of two government officials, Naftali Bennett was welcomed Monday as the first-ever Israeli prime minister to visit Bahrain, a historic move for Israel as it attempts to fortify a regional axis of defense against Iran.
Bennett’s visit to the tiny, oil-rich country comes as Israel and the Gulf states advance security collaborations — and as a shadow war between Israel and Iran, with a series of tit-for-tat attacks on commercial vessels at sea, becomes increasingly public.
“In this turbulent era, it is important that our region in particular sends a message of cooperation and goodwill and standing against threats together,” Bennett told reporters before flying to Bahrain Monday.
Since the signing of the Abraham Accords that normalized ties in 2020, announcements of once-clandestine security relations between Israel and the Gulf Arab states have accelerated, said Yonatan Freeman, an international relations expert at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He added that these included “gateway” countries such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which are widely viewed as mediators between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Earlier this month, Israeli and Bahraini defense ministers signed an agreement “which will contribute to the stability of the region,” said Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz. His visit, made possible by a flight over Saudi airspace, coincided with a U.S.-led naval exercise involving some 60 nations, including Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Last fall, navies from Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates conducted their first joint military exercise with Israeli warships, in a five-day drill on the Red Sea that was coordinated by the U.S. Navy. | null | null | null | null | null |
A pedestrian died after a crash in Prince George’s County
A pedestrian has died after being hit by a vehicle in a crash that happened over the weekend in Maryland.
Prince George’s County police said the incident happened around 6:50 p.m. Thursday near Indian Head Highway and Oxon Hill Road in the Oxon Hill area.
Authorities said the pedestrian — who was later identified as Brandon Harris, 39, of Oxon Hill — was walking in the far right lane and was hit by a vehicle. The driver stayed on the scene and was not hurt. Harris suffered critical injuries and died two days later. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police identify man who died in crash Saturday in Maryland
A man died in a crash in Maryland. (iStock) (iStock)
Authorities have identified a man who died in a crash that occurred Saturday in Maryland.
Prince George’s County police said the incident happened around 3:40 a.m. Saturday at Old Fort and Old Palmer Road.
An initial investigation found that the driver was going east on Old Fort Road when he went off the road and hit a pole. It is not known what caused him to go off the road, police said.
He was the only person in the vehicle and was pronounced dead at the scene. Police later identified him as Olando Bharat, 44, of Fort Washington. | null | null | null | null | null |
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