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South Carolina’s effort to cancel professor tenure echoes the 1950s
Ending professor tenure chills academic freedom and undermines teaching about race and racism.
South Carolina State House, Columbia, S.C. (iStock)
By Jesse Leo Kass
Jesse Leo Kass is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of South Carolina and an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz.
South Carolina legislators have recently proposed the “Cancelling Professor Tenure Act.” Academic tenure is a job status that not only confers stability in an often-precarious profession but protects professors from being arbitrarily dismissed from their jobs, allowing them to freely communicate ideas, especially politically controversial ones, without fear of retaliation. The proposed bill would remove the tenure system at public universities in the state and replace it with one where professors are on job contracts that last five years or less.
The South Carolina bill is just the latest in a series of efforts by state governments to exert greater control over public universities. Several other states have also sought to revise tenure rules or eliminate the practice altogether.
In parallel to attacks on tenure, state legislators are also interfering in debates about teaching politically controversial topics. For example, South Carolina legislators asked universities to stop teaching “Critical Race Theory,” claiming that CRT “proclaims all white people are oppressors and all black people are inherently oppressed.” Bills banning the topic from being taught at public universities have been proposed in South Carolina and nine other states. Elsewhere including in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma and New Hampshire, bills have passed that affect campus discourse on race-related political issues. Many of these efforts infringe upon professors’ freedom of teaching: exactly what tenure is designed to protect.
Efforts by state legislatures to squash academic freedom are nothing new. The modern tenure protection that legislators seek to remove was created in the 1950s in response to intense political attacks on professors. A study of those attacks shows the importance of protecting academic freedom from politicians.
The attacks took place against the backdrop of the Red Scare, a national atmosphere of fear that Americans sympathetic to communism were committing treasonous acts in support of the Soviet Union. Left-leaning professors were often a target of suspicion. In South Carolina, suspicion fell on seven professors at Benedict College and Allen University, two small, private, church-related historically Black schools.
In the governor's 1958 annual message to the legislature, he declared that professors at Allen University were “highly trained communist workers.” He claimed they were engaged in “typical [Communist Party] projects” that included teaching “hate white and hate Southern and hate State.” The governor then announced that state approval of the university's teacher-training program would be withheld until the university addressed the professors' activities. Loss of approval meant that graduates from this program would be unable to teach in South Carolina’s public schools, potentially ruining the careers of many. A few weeks after the governor delivered his annual message, he gave a similar speech about Benedict College.
None of the professors was planning anything like a communist takeover of South Carolina. However, they did engage in teaching and political activities that ran counter to the segregationist beliefs held by many South Carolina politicians at the time. For example, a history professor taught students about the achievements of freed, formerly enslaved people living in the South Carolina Sea Islands during Reconstruction.
Outside the classroom, the professors spoke out against racial segregation. Among other activities, they published a letter criticizing segregation in a regional newspaper, supported a student-led bus desegregation campaign, ran workshops on voter registration and hosted the celebrated academic and civil rights champion, W.E.B. Du Bois, as a campus speaker. Two of the seven professors directly challenged segregation; they were White and lived in an otherwise all-Black apartment complex. All these activities were well within the professors’ rights. FBI files on one of the professors show agents reporting again and again that they found no evidence of “subversive” activities.
But the professors’ political activities took place during a time when South Carolina politicians were eager to aggressively defend racial segregation, in response to legal challenges raised by the recent Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Casting the professors as communists at the height of the Cold War was a politically expedient way to demonstrate that challenging segregation was beyond the pale. Moreover, the professors had limited job protection from attacks by politicians because neither Benedict nor Allen had adopted written tenure regulations at the time.
This became an issue when the presidents of Allen and Benedict, desperate to restore state approval of their schools’ teacher-training programs, began trying to force the professors out. Many of their efforts seemed like something out of an absurdist comedy, such as when one of the professors received a letter from the president of Allen requesting his resignation. He declined the request, but then, only a few hours later, received a letter informing him that he had, in fact, resigned. He wrote back to explain that the president cannot simply “resign” people from their jobs.
Ultimately, the presidents' efforts, under intense pressure by the governor, were successful. The professors left South Carolina a few months after the governor's speech.
These dismissals sent a strong and frightening message to professors who remained in the state. The writer Calvin C. Hernton, who was teaching at Benedict at the time, told a colleague that Benedict’s environment was one where “no body had guts enough to challenge or merely ask WHY? They are all scared stiff of losing their indecent jobs!”
The consequences extended far beyond Benedict and Allen. Throughout the state, the governor's attacks had a chilling effect on political discussion. This not only shaped what professors wrote and taught. It also hindered the process of racial desegregation by silencing, in a very public manner, the voices of scholars who had been encouraging students and the broader public think critically about segregation. Ultimately, South Carolina only desegregated its public universities in 1963, making it the last state in the nation to do so.
The dismissals of the Allen and Benedict professors drew national attention and provoked a backlash. In 1960, the American Association of University Professors issued a detailed 19-page report that rebuked Allen and Benedict for violating due process in dismissing the professors.
Reports like this helped create the modern notion of tenure with its strong job protections. Today, these are the very protections that some legislators in states like South Carolina now seek to remove. The vast majority of professors now labor without the protection of tenure. Removing the protections of tenure altogether, as some states hope to do, will make the problem even worse.
The future may closely resemble the situation in the 1950s, when an accomplished professor could be dismissed over a false accusation of being a Communist Party agent. Indeed, much of the current discourse surrounding “canceling tenure” says that universities are promoting “socialist propaganda” — statements that could well have been made by South Carolina politicians in the 1950s. Politicians seeking to “cancel” tenure would benefit from reading a speech that one of the professors, Edwin D. Hoffman, gave in response to the governor’s 1958 address: “[The] First Amendment … erects a fence inside which man can talk. Lawmakers and government officials are told to stay outside that fence.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Chicago cop Jon Burge allegedly tortured suspects. Why couldn’t the U.S. prosecute him?
The Chicago Police Department apologized for what it called ‘torture.’ But while the United States is a party to international human rights treaties, it doesn’t have laws at home against these violations.
(Alex Menendez/AP)
By Mark Berlin
Last month, after serving nearly 20 years in prison, Keith Walker received a certificate of innocence from a Cook County judge in Illinois, after he argued that Chicago police detectives tortured him into giving a confession that Chicago prosecutors would later use to convict him. During the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Chicago police detectives used similar techniques against more than 100 mostly African American men. Judges sentenced some of these men to death for crimes they didn’t commit. Walker is now one of a growing number of Chicago survivors of techniques that included electrocution, suffocation and other acts defined as torture in international law whose convictions were overturned after they served decades in prison.
In recent years, the city of Chicago has officially apologized for this pattern of abuse, acknowledging that it was torture, and compensated dozens of survivors for their treatment. But the United States lacks criminal laws that can be used to effectively prosecute torture. And that means that while Chicago has been forced to compensate victims in civil actions, no individual Chicago police detective has ever been held criminally accountable for the torture — and it is unlikely that any ever will be.
International law requires domestic criminalization of torture
Since World War II, countries have agreed to a number of international treaties that codify a set of actions as violations of human rights deemed so egregious as to “shock the conscience of humanity” and compel international cooperation to combat them. These include torture, war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, and most countries have ratified most of these treaties.
Prosecutors working for international courts, such as the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court, can bring charges against individuals for international crimes. But the legal circumstances under which they can do so are limited, so the treaties that establish these prohibitions are designed to rely primarily on domestic courts. These treaties (such as the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1949 Geneva Conventions) obligate countries that join them to criminalize the relevant offenses in domestic law. That way, their own criminal courts can prosecute individuals for these crimes.
In keeping with its treaty commitments, the United States has passed federal criminal legislation allowing it to prosecute some international crimes, such as war crimes and genocide. But the U.S. government has not criminalized acts of torture committed in the United States — even though the United States has been a party to the Convention against Torture, an international treaty that defines torture and obligates state parties to criminalize it, since 1994. The current U.S. criminal statute for torture applies only to conduct that occurs abroad.
Germany convicted a Syrian man of war crimes in Syria. Can national courts prosecute injustices everywhere?
The consequences of not criminalizing torture
Criminalizing human rights violations in national law makes it easier to prosecute abuses committed or directed by government officials, including police officers, immigration agents or even political leaders, my research finds. In theory, countries may prosecute torture using ordinary criminal statutes, such as those for assault, that cover similar conduct. But legal loopholes make that hard.
For example, criminal statutes for assault may fail to cover some common torture techniques, such as deprivation of food or sleep. The Convention against Torture contains a relatively precise definition of torture that is meant to close such loopholes. Most countries that have criminalized torture base their national laws on that definition.
When Illinois prosecutors looked into prosecuting Chicago police detectives for torture years after the abuses occurred, they found that without a state torture law, the three-year statutes of limitations for the relevant ordinary offenses under Illinois law had run out. Likewise, the statute of limitations for relevant offenses at the federal level is five years. Presumably, if Congress and the president had enacted domestic torture legislation, it would have included a much longer or even no statute of limitations, as with other federal offenses that the government deems the most serious, such as terrorism or sexual abuse.
Codifying special categories of crime can also help deter such crimes. Research suggests that by raising the perceived likelihood of successful prosecutions, explicit criminalization can persuade some would-be perpetrators that violations are not worth the potential costs.
Recognizing these special categories of offense and clarifying their scope can also alter the perceptions of individual police officers, victims and members of the public about the moral or legal acceptability of conduct, such as coercive interrogations, that they may have previously considered routine or as not quite torture.
Finally, explicitly criminalizing an offense such as torture creates a bureaucratic basis for collecting and analyzing data about it. Criminal laws against hate crimes and femicide offer examples of how criminalization improves policymakers’ ability to study a problem.
Why aren't more Americans alarmed by white supremacist violence?
Perpetrators of other international crimes are also off the hook
The United States also lacks a federal statute criminalizing crimes against humanity, a category of offense that refers to specific acts of violence or persecution committed against civilians as part of a “state or organizational policy.” The allied victors of World War II — the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — first used the concept after the war to prosecute Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.
Some legal scholars, including the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, have argued that the Trump administration’s family separation policy could have constituted a crime against humanity, since it appears that executive officials, as a matter of policy, knowingly and intentionally inflicted severe psychological trauma on children to deter future unauthorized migration. The absence of a U.S. law that would explicitly apply criminal liability to acts of official policy makes it more difficult to hold such officials accountable, since existing legal doctrines establish a high threshold for criminal liability of policymakers for official acts.
Many call on the United States to fill these legal gaps
Last year, the American Bar Association passed a resolution calling for U.S. legislation to fill these gaps. One lawmaker from Chicago, Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), has introduced legislation to criminalize torture as defined in international law. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has for years sought to pass the Crimes against Humanity Act, which would incorporate the offense into U.S. federal law.
Neither chamber of Congress has ever advanced such measures to a floor vote. Adopting such legislation probably would increase the United States’ ability to prevent and prosecute human rights violations.
Mark Berlin (@mark_berlin) is an assistant professor of political science at Marquette University and the author of Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws against International Crimes (Oxford University Press, 2020). | null | null | null | null | null |
Eleven questions for… David Axelrod
Good morning, Early Birds. TGIF. Tips: earlytips@washpost.com. We're off Monday for Washington's Birthday (as the federal holiday is officially known). See you on Tuesday.
⏰: “The Senate on Thursday approved a measure to fund the federal government through March 11, marking the final legislative step toward preventing a shutdown that would have occurred by the end of the week,” our colleague Tony Romm reports. “The measure now heads to President Biden’s desk, where his signature will give lawmakers about three more weeks to reach the sort of longer-term deal that has eluded them for months — a tricky debate that some hope will pave the way for billions of dollars in new coronavirus aid.”
Ten questions for … David Axelrod: We chatted with the longtime adviser to Barack Obama about his decision to step away from running the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, his advice for Biden's State of the Union and how Democrats can survive the midterms. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
The Early: You announced on Tuesday that you'll step down next year as the institute's director. What led you to make that decision?
Axelrod: We should have told you — I decided that that was a terrible mistake, so I'm going to rescind the whole thing. [Laughs.] No, I knew from the very beginning when I started the IOP that I would stay no longer than 10 years, because I fundamentally believe that 10 years is long enough to run any organization and there are diminishing returns. You develop habits that sort of get in the way of innovation and entrepreneurism that I think is essential to keep a program fresh.
The Early: You published a New York Times op-ed this week in which you urged President Biden to acknowledge how hard things are in his upcoming State of the Union, without delivering an updated version of Jimmy Carter's malaise speech. What led you to write that piece and how do you think he can strike that balance?
Axelrod: Part of what led me to write that is my own experience in the Obama White House during the Great Recession. And part of it was I saw the president did a press conference the day before the anniversary of his inauguration. He was very, very much touting his achievements and talking about the great progress the country had made. And it just didn't match up with people's mood.
The Early: Was there a particular moment in this press conference that felt off key?
Axelrod: One particular answer that struck me was, he was asked what he had learned from the last year and what he would be doing [differently] as a result. And he said, 'I want to get out of the building and I want to travel the country more.' I thought that was a great answer — until he added the clause, ‘so I can tell people what we're doing.’ A better answer would have been, ‘so I can hear what's going on in people's lives in their own words.'
The Early: A Los Angeles Times poll out this morning found that only 47 percent of California voters approve of Biden, down from 59 percent in the same poll in July. What do you make of one of those numbers?
Axelrod: I think the country is out of sorts. There's a sense that he needs to overcome — some of which is his fault, a lot of which isn't — that things are out of control in a lot of different ways. Inflation, crime, the debate and discussion about the virus and what we need to do and the masks and no masks and so on. And he doesn't seem as if he's in command of it all the time. And that is a challenge. Now, I will say I actually think he's been very much in control of what he can control relative to this Ukraine situation. He's been very strong in terms of calling Putin out, making clear what the ramifications will be of Putin invades, pulling NATO together.
The Early: Nationally, about 42 percent of Americans approve of Biden's job performance and about 53 percent disapprove, which makes him about as popular as Donald Trump was at this point in his presidency. What do you think that augurs for the midterms?
Axelrod: Well, if the president's numbers are in the summer, into the fall what they are right now, it is a dark auguring for the Democratic Party. Presidential approval ratings are pretty strongly tied to party performance in midterm elections. Democrats don't want him to go into the fall with a 41 or 42 percent approval rating. That would be a profoundly bad spot to be.
The Early: What can Democrats do to limit the potential damage?
Axelrod: My strong feeling is if they allow this just to be a referendum on the Democratic president and the Democratic Party, they're likely to lose quite a few seats. The goal should be to make it a comparative process. And they have an opportunity because the Republican Party really hasn't offered any sort of agenda. All we know is that [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy promises to take out vengeance on members of the Democratic caucus. He promises to reinstate [Reps.] Marjorie Taylor Greene [(R-Ga.)] and Paul Gosar [(R-Ariz.) to their committees]. The impression you're left with is what they're promising is gridlock, chaos and vengeance.
The Early: What was the last book that you finished? And what are you reading now?
Axelrod: Right now I'm reading [“Lincoln’s Men”]. It is a book about John Hay and John Nicolay, the two young aides to President Lincoln. I love it because I was a White House aide, so it's cool to read a book about what it was like to be a White House aide then. There are certain things that are the same — the relationship they had with Lincoln and so on.
The Early: You’ve done nearly 500 episodes of your podcast, “The Axe Files.” Which interviews have really stuck in your mind?
Axelrod: One particularly moving episode was with Karl Rove. And it was moving because we share this very sad thing in common in that we both lost parents to suicide. It was important to me for two reasons. One is I always think we should talk about these things because there are a lot of people struggling, particularly now, with mental health issues, mental illness. The second thing is we have so much vitriol in our politics. We've come to the point where we can't just oppose each other but we have to demonize each other and disqualify each other as citizens and as humans. And I think it's really important when we can find our common humanity.
The Early: You compared Sen. Joe Manchin’s announcement in December that he couldn't support the Build Back Better Act to Martha Coakley’s loss in 2010. The White House, of course, has not succeeded in bringing Build Back Better back from the dead in the way that Obama did with the Affordable Care Act. Do you have any advice for the Biden administration?
Axelrod: When Obama brought the Affordable Care Act back, he did it basically by going underground and working quietly. They just have to figure out what, if anything, Manchin would accept and then move forward on that if they can. These long, protracted legislative dramas, particularly within your own party — it's a bad look. And I don't think [Biden] needs another chapter like that.
The Early: To paraphrase a question that New York magazine used to ask New Yorkers: Who is your favorite Chicagoan, living or dead, real or fictional?
Axelrod: I had the honor of covering and then working for the late Mayor Harold Washington, who was the first African American mayor of Chicago. And Harold was a larger-than-life figure who, in many ways, reflected this town. He was tough and he was cocky and he was funny and irreverent but really loved the city. He was very blunt and straightforward, but also warm. He’s someone that I remember with great fondness and admiration.
Invariant adds Ashley Sullivan
New hire: The lobbying firm Invariant has hired Ashley O'Sullivan. She was previously an in-house lobbyist for the drug distributor AmerisourceBergen and before that worked for the lobbying firm Roberti Global.
Series of escalations at Ukrainian border could open the door to Russian invasion, U.S. warns
The proof is in the Putin: “Biden and his top aides acknowledge they are risking American credibility as they constantly renew the alarm that Russia is only ‘several days’ away from triggering an unprovoked land war in Europe that could kill tens of thousands of Ukrainians in its opening hours, and plunge the world back into something resembling the Cold War,” the New York Times’s David E. Sanger writes. “But Biden’s aides say they are willing to take that risk.”
“Their pessimism was reinforced Thursday by a series of escalations. Russian-backed forces in the Donbas region appeared responsible for shelling a school, and later claimed they had come under fire from Ukrainian forces, exactly the kind of incident Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned might be used as a pretext to justify an invasion.”
Happening today: “Biden will hold a phone call Friday afternoon with trans-Atlantic leaders about Russia’s buildup of military troops on the border of Ukraine and continued efforts to pursue deterrence and diplomacy.”
Omicron slammed essential workers. So the National Guard became teachers, janitors and more. By The Post’s Hannah Knowles and Karoun Demirjian.
Biden officials launch ‘screening tool’ to help identify disadvantaged and polluted communities. By The Post’s Darryl Fears.
Trump and two of his children must be deposed by N.Y. attorney general, judge rules. By The Post’s Shayna Jacobs and Jonathan O'Connell.
Child poverty spiked by 41 percent in January after Biden benefit program expired, study finds. By The Post’s Jeff Stein.
McCarthy endorses Cheney’s primary rival in rebuke of Republican incumbent who has denounced Trump. By The Post’s Mariana Alfaro.
‘Trooper 1’ files federal lawsuit against Cuomo, DeRosa and State Police. By the Albany Times-Union’s Brendan J. Lyons.
Who will replace Jeff Zucker at CNN? These 9 execs could be in the running, according to company insiders and news veterans. By Business Insider’s Claire Atkinson.
‘I live in a different world’: Here’s how high-risk Americans feel as the U.S. moves on. By the New York Times’s Amanda Morris and Maggie Astor.
We’re going✈️crazy leggings, wayyy too much hairspray and baby Whitney Houston
the @USFL is back @HerschelWalker is all over the news
did i have a stroke or is it still 1985 | null | null | null | null | null |
The German economy depends on Russian gas. There’s a long history behind that.
What happens now to the Nord Stream 2 project?
Pipes for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline at the port of Mukran in Sassnitz, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2020. (Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters)
By Marina E. Henke
“If Russia invades … then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” These were President Biden’s words last week. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who stood next to Biden during the news conference, said very little — he didn’t mention the pipeline in his remarks but noted, “All things will be on the table.”
Economic sanctions appear to be the prime tool to punish Russian aggression in Ukraine — and the 764-mile Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a key coercion instrument in this toolbox. Owned by the Russian energy company Gazprom, the pipeline project has cost more than $8.4 billion. About half that price tag was reportedly shouldered by Gazprom, with five European companies covering the rest. Construction was completed in 2021 and Russia is eager to start operating the pipeline.
Germany’s politicians remain deeply divided on what to do — a likely reason for the German chancellor’s silence. Why would Germany risk losing its reputation as a reliable NATO ally by prioritizing the Nord Stream 2 project? Here’s what you need to know.
It all began with the 2003 Iraq War
The story starts in the early 2000s, in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder famously sided with French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin in opposing the U.S.-led intervention.
Because Germany had opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it thought its oil and gas needs would no longer be fully taken into consideration by many oil-rich countries in the region that were sympathetic to the U.S. plan. And yet, there was Russia — an ally in the anti-U.S. coalition, and one of largest energy exporters in the world. It seemed like a no-brainer at the time to the German government to replace Middle Eastern oil and gas sources with Russian ones.
Schroeder lost to Angela Merkel in Germany’s 2005 federal election. He and many of his collaborators moved into the private sector and used their new positions to strengthen Germany’s connection with Russian resources, including working with Russian energy giants Rosneft and Gazprom. In 2017, Schroeder became the new chair of the board of Rosneft, and this month, he was nominated to become a Gazprom board member. His former minister for economic affairs, Wolfgang Clement, became a board member of RWE, a German electricity giant.
Others within Schroeder’s inner circle continued to be influential in government politics. These officials were instrumental in drafting the September 2015 agreement that allowed for the construction of Nord Stream 2 — despite criticism and warnings from the United States and other countries.
Will Russia recognize the independence of two eastern Ukraine republics? Here’s what people there think.
Is Nord Stream 2 critical to Germany’s energy needs?
The German government in 2015 argued that the pipeline project would provide the country with the energy security it badly needed. If Russia blocked the transit of natural gas via Ukraine and the existing Jamal pipeline, Germany would still get its energy. Moreover, if Germany hoped to realize its “green energy revolution,” that meant getting rid of coal and nuclear energy production — and that also meant finding a quick substitute: Russian natural gas.
But from the start, Nord Stream 2 was a geopolitical risk. In 2020, Germany received 56.3 billion cubic meters of Russian gas through the existing pipeline, about 50 percent of its natural gas needs. Many analysts say Germany would find it difficult to replace this supply in the short to medium term — if Russian gas stopped flowing, Germany’s gas reserves would be gone in six weeks. This suggests Germany is highly dependent on Russian gas and potentially vulnerable to Russian influence.
Ostpolitik and East German pro-Russian sentiments
Decisions by Schroeder and his entourage are not the only reason for Germany’s dependence. Other factors pushed Germany to move forward with the Nord Stream 2 project and (for now) stick with it.
First, a romantic idea of the benefits of “Ostpolitik” is still going strong in influential center-left circles in Germany. Conceived by West Germany Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1960s, Ostpolitik sought greater contact with the Soviet leadership.
“Wandel durch Handel” — “Change through trade” — was a key premise of the policy. “The walls erected by the East should … be broken through in as many places as possible by the flow of ideas, people and goods,” Brandt argued. All of this, he insisted, would lead to “a transformation of the other side.” Many Germans, nearly 50 years later, believe that Nord Stream 2 could serve a similar function.
Second, certain age groups in the former East Germany have deep sympathies with Russia. While negative memories of Soviet control predominate in other former Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland and the Baltic States — and threat perceptions of Russia run high — many East Germans don’t share these feelings.
In 2015, a year after the Russian annexation of Crimea, a Pew Research Center survey found that 40 percent of East Germans still trusted Putin, compared with 19 percent of West Germans. And 42 percent of East Germans also supported an immediate lifting of Russian sanctions, compared with 26 percent of West Germans. Many of them say that Russia was unfairly treated after German reunification and that Russia today deserves the same respect as the United States.
Given these divisions, what happens now? Scholz appears to be considering ways to decrease Germany’s dependence on Russian gas. The government is looking at plans to build a liquefied natural gas terminal on Germany’s northern coast. These terminals could hold gas from the United States and Qatar.
If Russia launches an invasion of Ukraine, it looks unlikely that Nord Stream 2 will start operating anytime soon. But it will not be an easy decision for Germany — and maybe not a definitive decision either.
Marina E. Henke (@mephenke) is professor of international relations at the Hertie School in Berlin and director of the school’s Center for International Security (@hertie_security). She holds a PhD from Princeton University and has published widely on topics related to European security and defense policy and transatlantic relations. | null | null | null | null | null |
Czech Republic goalkeeper Barbora Votíková blocks a shot by Trinity Rodman during the second half of a SheBelieves Cup match in Carson, Calif. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)
CARSON, Calif. — First came the sweatshirt. Then the jersey, a T-shirt, two scarves and the white high-top sneaker. Yes, a shoe.
Someone was so excited about getting Trinity Rodman’s autograph Thursday, they removed footwear and tossed it across the gulf separating the north stands from the field at Dignity Health Sports Park.
Rodman had just made her U.S. women’s national soccer team debut during a 0-0 draw with the Czech Republic on the first day of the SheBelieves Cup. She gathered the flung items off the grass and began signing. Every few seconds, she looked over her right shoulder so she wouldn’t lose track of her exiting teammates.
Rodman hadn’t scored, though she came close twice in the 30-minute outing. But that was really beside the point. On a cool night under a full moon, the Washington Spirit’s 19-year-old forward continued her skies-the-limit ascent in what Coach Vlatko Andonovski called “the first of many for her.”
Her second-half appearance added to a swelling list of accomplishments over 13 months: second overall pick in the National Women’s Soccer League draft, rookie of the year, NWSL champion, U.S. Soccer’s young player of the year and, two weeks ago, the largest contract in NWSL history.
A former youth national team star, Rodman trained with the senior squad for the first time last month. She was supposed to be a practice player only during this camp, but a teammate’s injury vaulted her into active duty.
In the first of three U.S. matches over seven days, Rodman got her chance when she replaced Mallory Pugh. It was a fitting swap, given that Pugh, in 2017, had been the first teenager without any NCAA experience to join the NWSL.
When Rodman entered, “I just looked at her and smiled and said, ‘Let’s go,’” said midfielder Andi Sullivan, one of five Spirit players on the field in the second half. “Gave her a big hug in the locker room afterward. Hopefully many more for her.”
Rodman’s debut came some 30 miles up the 405 from her hometown of Newport Beach, Calif., where she was nurtured by her mother, Michelle Moyer. (She shares the same last name as her father, NBA Hall of Famer Dennis Rodman, but they aren’t close.)
She became the fourth teenager since 2010 to debut for the revered U.S. squad.
Becky Sauerbrunn, a 36-year-old defender who made her 200th appearance, said she was sitting near Rodman in the locker room before the match.
“I just kind of leaned over and was like: ‘Are you excited? Are you nervous?’” Sauerbrunn said. “And she was like, ‘Yeah, I am a little nervous.’ I think that’s great. It was an excited nervous. You could tell she was going to do great.”
Rodman played on the left wing. She usually plays on the right for the Spirit, but on either flank, she uses speed and cunning to bedevil defenses.
Against the defensively disciplined Czechs, Rodman did not enjoy any free space to run at — and typically surge past — defenders. She did have scoring opportunities, though.
In the 68th minute, she collected Kristie Mewis’s entry pass, only to have goalkeeper Barbora Votikova stuff the attempt. An offside flag nullified the play, though TV replays showed Rodman was clearly onside.
Five minutes later, Spirit teammate Emily Sonnett crossed to Rodman for a 10-yard header that Votikova saved easily.
“She was dangerous when she got a couple of good opportunities and was threatening the back line,” Andonovski said. “I was excited to see her. I know the players around her were excited to see her there. ... She definitely needs more minutes, more games. I have no doubt she is going to perform even better.”
Rodman was among several young players filling roster slots usually taken by World Cup veterans, such as Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Christen Press and Tobin Heath.
With World Cup and Olympic qualifying scheduled this summer, Andonovski intends to get a good look at prospects in competitive matches before probably reintegrating many of the big names. The average age of Thursday’s starters was 25½, the youngest in almost four years.
A younger, new-look USWNT takes center stage at the SheBelieves Cup
Catarina Macario, a 22-year-old attacking midfielder who lined up at striker, played the entire match. Emily Fox, a 23-year-old defender from Ashburn, Va., and Sophia Smith, a 21-year-old forward, were also in the lineup.
Despite a wealth of possession and chances, the young Americans couldn’t capitalize. In the first half, Sullivan missed a clear header inside the six-yard box.
“It doesn’t matter how good they are and how much potential they have,” Andonovski said. “It’s not easy to just throw them on the field and expect them to click immediately. … We’ll just need to be patient with them.”
Rodman, among them.
“She is a special player,” Sauerbrunn said. “Anyone with eyeballs can see that. What she did was a little snapshot of what we are going to see in her future. ... I am really excited for her. She has a long, bright career ahead of her for many, many years.”
Notes: On Sunday in Carson, the Americans will play New Zealand, which lost to Iceland, 1-0, in Thursday’s first match. ...
Audi Field in Washington is the leading candidate to stage a U.S. friendly April 9, two people close to the situation said. The Americans will also play April 12, probably at another East Coast venue. The opponent will be the same for both matches. ...
Sullivan’s husband, D.C. United midfielder Drew Skundrich, was in attendance with four teammates. United is training in Southern California and will play a preseason match against the L.A. Galaxy on Saturday in Carson. | null | null | null | null | null |
The scene where two city police officers were shot responding to a call at Waverley Drive and Key Parkway on Feb. 11 in Frederick, Md. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
The Frederick state’s attorney concluded that two Frederick city police officers were justified in shooting a 25-year-old man during an encounter last week that left all three people wounded, officials said in a statement released Thursday.
Online court records state Lewis also was charged with two counts of attempted second-degree murder, two counts of assault and a weapons charge.
The online court record did not name a defense attorney for Lewis.
The officers were treated for gunshot wounds following the incident but were later released from the hospital, officials said last week. Prosecutors said Lewis remains hospitalized. | null | null | null | null | null |
People struggle in the wind as they walk across Westminster Bridge, Feb. 18, 2022, as Storm Eunice brings high winds across the country. (Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images)
LONDON — An intense storm battered Ireland and the United Kingdom on Friday, prompting officials to urge millions of people “stay at home” and Britain’s meteorologist office to issue rare “danger-to-life” weather warnings.
The Met Office issued not one, but two, rare “red” weather warnings — the highest possible level — for Wales and parts of southern England, including London. It was the first time the British capital has ever received such a warning since the system was introduced in 2011.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office said that COBRA, the government’s crisis committee, would meet on Friday afternoon amid reports that the storm could be one of the most intense windstorms in decades, with winds gusting up to 100 miles per hour.
Later in the day, the storm was expected to move the Netherlands, where the country’s meteorology institute issued its own “code red” for some regions and urging people to stay indoors if possible.
Assessing how much damage Eunice has brought will take time. But already on early Friday, the storm caused widespread travel disruption. All trains in Wales were closed. Train operators across the rest of the country warned of disruptions and several services were operating with a speed limit of 50 miles per hour. Hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled.
Others on social media shared images and footage of flying objects and falling debris. Ellen O’Regan, a journalist with the Irish Examiner, tweeted pictures of the roof of her family home pierced with a tree branch. Another social media user appeared rather surprised when he captured the moment a giant tree toppled over in the middle of a seaside town.
A number of attractions, including the London Eye, a Ferris wheel on London’s south bank, and Legoland, a theme park based in Windsor, closed on Friday as a precaution. Some zoos and parks also closed.
The London Mayor Sadiq Khan urged Londoners to “stay at home” and “not take risks.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The Senate Caucus Room where the Senate Watergate committee hearings were held in 1973. Garrett Graff relies on prodigious research to recount not just the Watergate burglary and coverup but, as he writes, “a dozen other distinct but related scandals” during the Nixon administration. (AP)
By Leonard Downie Jr.
Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is a journalism professor in DC at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School. His most recent book is “All About the Story: News, Power, Politics and The Washington Post.”
Nearly half a century has passed since five men with burglary and eavesdropping equipment were arrested on June 17, 1972, inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor of the Watergate office building. During that time, scores of books, totaling untold thousands of pages, have been published about the scandal, which resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Do we need still another Watergate book?
The answer turns out to be yes — this one: Garrett M. Graff’s “Watergate: A New History.” It is a remarkably rich narrative with compelling characters, who range from criminal and flawed to tragic and heroic. As someone who played a small role in the drama while I was editing many of The Washington Post’s Watergate stories, I found that Graff convincingly populates and re-creates an extraordinary time in the history of the country and this city.
To do so, Graff, a prolific journalist, historian and author, waded through scores of previous books, plus countless pages of oral histories, news stories and Nixon’s Oval Office tape transcripts, as well as FBI, court and congressional records, among other documentation in various archives. “My goal was not to re-investigate,” Graff writes, explaining that he “purposefully chose not to conduct fresh interviews.” Instead, he decided “to tell the story based on the documentary archival record,” which has been steadily expanding over the decades.
His story encompasses not just the Watergate burglary and coverup, but “a dozen other distinct but related scandals” during the Nixon administration, including illegal wiretaps, campaign “dirty tricks,” possible treason, attempted misuse of the FBI and CIA, and the bribery conviction of Vice President Spiro Agnew, “plus a little bit of presidential tax fraud.” It makes for a challenging read at nearly 700 pages of text, detailing fast-paced, interlocking events over six years.
Yet, Graff succeeds in his stated mission to tell “a more human story, one not filled with giants, villains, and heroes, but with flawed everyday people worried about their families, their careers, and their legacies.” The book is filled with apt sketches of its many characters, major and minor, from all the president’s men, and some of their spouses, to journalists, investigators, lawyers and members of Congress. It vividly re-creates all the key events, from Nixon’s overreaction to the revelation of the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in June 1971 to his resignation in August 1974.
Graff surprisingly focuses often in the book on Mark Felt, the FBI’s No. 2 official at the time, who became a key unnamed source of information for several reporters, especially The Post’s Bob Woodward, who identified him only as Deep Throat until Felt was unmasked by his own family decades later. Graff appears to identify as Felt’s motivation his loss in a rather unseemly competition to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director.
Graff sprinkles his book with readable anecdotes and asides, some of them in the many footnotes dotting the bottoms of pages. For example, when Nixon wanted someone to break into the Brookings Institution to find possibly embarrassing information about himself, Tony Ulasewicz, a former New York cop hired as a White House staff gumshoe, was assigned to the job. But he had to go to a public library to find what and where Brookings was. Eventually, that burglary plot was abandoned.
Graff writes that the $100 bills the burglars were carrying when they were arrested inside the Watergate were intended to bribe any building guards who might find and confront them. Instead, the guard on duty, Frank Wills, famously called the police when he twice found tape keeping a garage door open.
Each morning during the Senate Watergate hearings, chaired by Democrat Sam Ervin, the avuncular senator could be seen briefly studying a book held open in front of him by an aide. Graff notes that Ervin was perusing a Senate cafeteria menu placed inside the book, before he pointed to the sandwich he wanted to order for lunch.
Graff also seeks to correct conflicts, errors and evasions that he found in previous books, including many of “the more than thirty memoirs by key participants” in the scandals and the investigations of them. He credits Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their editors at The Post for their investigative work on Watergate, but he also dwells on a few mistakes they made and discrepancies he believes he has found in their descriptions of their work. Graff also rightly credits significant Watergate scoops by a few of their competitors. And he expresses skepticism about some of the “cinematic drama” of the “All the President’s Men” movie, which frames much of people’s knowledge of Watergate today.
Interestingly, in his day-by-day narrative of the final week of Nixon’s presidency, Graff notes that “accounts and recollections get muddy; across the half-dozen central memoirs, including Nixon’s and [White House chief of staff Alexander] Haig’s, and the books that record this moment, like Woodward and Bernstein’s ‘The Final Days,’ there are conflicting accounts of who said what in which meeting.”
More important, after presenting all his prodigious research and analysis, Graff concludes that “we’ll never really know the full truth of Watergate” because its “remaining mysteries are spread among too many people, many of whom are now dead, their secrets buried alongside them.” Who ultimately ordered the Watergate break-in and why? Just to bug the offices or phones of the Democratic National Committee? Or to find something embarrassing that could be used against the Democrats during the 1972 election? Or to discover whether the Democrats had dirt on the Nixon campaign? Graff finds multiple theories in the memoirs of the president’s men.
His book is weakest on the long-term impact of Watergate. Much of the ensuing campaign finance reforms and elections of “Watergate baby” reformers to Congress have gradually washed away over the last half-century. Perhaps the most lasting impact has been in the news media, where investigative reporting that holds power accountable in all walks of American life emerged from Watergate and has endured, even as the media is being reshaped in the digital age. Graff recognizes the change, but he also appears to disparage it and to minimize the importance of today’s investigative reporting as Watergate’s legacy. “After a generation of journalists that had probably trusted government too much,” he writes near the end of his book, “came a generation of journalists who seemed to believe that Watergates existed inside every government office and corporate headquarters.”
I’ve read a couple dozen books about Watergate, and I’ve written chapters about The Post’s Watergate investigation in two of my own books. I found “Watergate: A New History” to be engaging, informative and thought-provoking, more than earning its place on bookshelves alongside the old histories.
Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is a journalism professor in D.C. at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School. His most recent book is “All About the Story: News, Power, Politics and The Washington Post.”
A New History
Avid Reader. 793 pp. $35 | null | null | null | null | null |
By Costica Bradatan
Costica Bradatan is a professor of humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. His latest book “In Praise of Failure” is forthcoming.
“I am an American,” Thomas Mann said during a radio interview in 1940. If he sounded relieved, it was because he was: He had been in limbo for years. Mann left Germany in 1933, and the Nazi government deprived him of his German citizenship in 1936. He first took up residence in Switzerland and later became a citizen of Czechoslovakia. As Adolf Hitler’s expansionist intentions became clearer in the late 1930s, Mann must have realized how unsafe it was becoming for him to stay in Europe. The occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 probably sealed the writer’s decision to move to the United States, when he was in his 60s.
Mann’s first American home was Princeton University, which had already attracted prominent German figures fleeing the Nazis, most famously Albert Einstein. In “The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton,” Stanley Corngold documents, in depth and with an excellent eye for detail, this important stage in Mann’s American life, before he moved to California in March 1941. What Corngold, a Princeton professor himself, seeks to achieve is to “shape a cultural memory of Thomas Mann during his American exile in Princeton — a link, by memory, to a continuum between ‘our’ past and present.”
He more than delivers. The picture of Mann that emerges from his book is rich, multilayered and always fascinating. As his friend and fellow exile Hermann Broch observed, Mann had a “stupendous capacity for work,” which allowed him to put his exile to good use. Throughout those years, Mann was highly productive — in several domains simultaneously.
There is, first, Mann the academic. The writer had been hired by Princeton to give a series of public lectures in the humanities, as well as some more-specialized seminars. The lectures’ topics ranged from Goethe’s “Faust” and Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” to Mann’s own “Magic Mountain,” and they attracted an appreciative audience. The irony must not have been lost on Mann: Here he was, a “lecturer in the humanities” at one of the finest American universities (not to mention the honorary degrees he had received, or would receive, from others) without having ever earned his Abitur (the German high school diploma). But irony was always Mann’s element, both in his work and in his life.
All this time, Mann kept working on his literary projects. During his stay in Princeton, he completed “Lotte in Weimar” (better known in English as “The Beloved Returns”) and wrote an “Indian story” (“The Transposed Heads”), as well as the first chapters of “Joseph the Provider” (the last installment of the tetralogy “Joseph and His Brothers”). For the last he drew inspiration from New Deal economic policies. Many of Franklin Roosevelt’s ideas about the “national distribution of wealth and commodities” make a cameo in Joseph’s work for the pharaoh.
The most demanding part of Mann’s Princeton life, however, and that which forms the bulk of Corngold’s book, must have been his activism as a public intellectual. He was a political essayist in much demand and wrote for such prominent publications as the New Republic, the Atlantic and the Nation. He also toured the country, lecturing on a wide range of topics. And from 1940 until the end of the war, he had a monthly radio program that was recorded in the United States, flown to England and then broadcast into Germany via the BBC.
Through these efforts, Mann comes across as one of the most prolific and impactful “militant humanists” working against Hitler’s regime from abroad. Life in Germany under the Weimar Republic, and then his years of uncertainty and exile after 1933, had been his schooling in bourgeois humanism and liberal democracy. The same man who, on Sept 18, 1914, spoke of the “great, basically decent, even solemn people’s war of Germany” now savaged the Nazi government for initiating and conducting a completely unjustifiable war. The German people’s lack of opposition to the Nazis made Mann ashamed of his former country, and he wanted to conjure up a different Germany, one of which anyone could be proud. He ended up finding that country in his own work: “My home is in the works that I bring with me. . . . They are language, German language and form of thought, personally developed traditional ware of my country and my people. Wherever I am, Germany is.”
After the war, Mann would say that his “years of battle against [Hitler] were morally a good time.” He had his reasons to be nostalgic. His postwar life in America (which is beyond the scope of Corngold’s book), with the onset of the Cold War and then the McCarthy years, became increasingly disappointing. The same “militant humanism” that he had employed so brilliantly against Hitler now made him look positively “un-American” to some people in power. “I had to get to be 75 years old and live in a foreign country that has become home to me just to see myself publicly called a liar, by burners of witches,” he observed bitterly in 1951.
Mann returned to Europe in 1952, never to leave again. Ironically, it was politics that had brought him to America, and politics that pushed him away. The mind is always in exile.
The Mind in Exile
Thomas Mann in Princeton
Princeton. 280 pp. $35 | null | null | null | null | null |
Is using this word ever okay? And who has the power to decide?
Mychal Denzel Smith is the author of “Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream.”
In the two decades since he published his book “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,” Randall Kennedy has witnessed the persistence of the n-word as “an oft-heard feature of the soundtrack of American racism at its most base and violent.” He’s also watched as efforts to expunge the word have “lost perspective, abandoned essential norms of freedom of thought and expression, and degenerated into petty tyranny.” While he has discovered that the word is here to stay with all its repugnant associations, he believes it also can be put to use for good. As he writes in a new introduction to his book, rereleased on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, he approves of the use of the word “as a tool of antiracist protest, or as a comedic intervention, or as a gesture of solidarity, or as a sly term of endearment.” These uses, he argues, “manifest a wonderful capacity to transmute ugliness into art.”
Illustrating Kennedy’s point, comedian Roy Wood Jr. turned the ugliness of the n-word into art in his 2021 special, “Imperfect Messenger.” In the show, Wood praises Leonardo DiCaprio for his vivid portrayal of an enslaver in the 2012 film “Django Unchained.” White actors, Wood contends, need to play heinous characters in the interests of accurately depicting stories of racism. And then Wood gives his routine its comedic turn, saying DiCaprio is “one of the bravest White allies I ever seen in my life. ... He put 10 toes in the ground and called ... Jamie Foxx a nigger to his face, in front of Samuel L. Jackson — bra-ve-ry.”
Such an incident, had it occurred off-screen, might have spelled the end of DiCaprio’s career or, at least, his standing as a well-respected, A-list actor. But in context, for authenticity’s sake, it was 100 percent necessary.
Kennedy would likely concur. As he writes in his introduction, “There are people of all backgrounds, including different racial identities, who put nigger to uses that are enjoyable, instructive, and moving.” He provides as examples the work of writers Carl Van Vechten, Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, comedian Lenny Bruce and a number of others.
His point is that a racial asymmetry exists wherein Black people are the only ones “allowed” to say nigger (instead of the euphemistic idiom “n-word”). Such linguistic policing does not take into account the context in which the word appears: its use in everyday speech often as a slur or its mention in a title of a work, or in a direct quote.
But this troublesome word presents even further complication.
There’s another facet that Kennedy largely overlooks as exemplified in an incident he recalls at the New School in 2019. Professor Laurie Sheck upset a student in her graduate creative writing class during a discussion of a documentary about James Baldwin called “I Am Not Your Negro.” Sheck told the class that the film’s title was a modification of a phrase Baldwin had uttered in an interview. He had said: “I am not your nigger.” In explaining, Sheck used the full word, and the student’s complaint led to an investigation by the New School administration, which ultimately determined the professor had not violated university policy on discrimination.
I taught a class at the New School in the fall semester following this incident, and it was, understandably, a focus of the new faculty orientation. We were led in a number of exercises regarding offensive language and how to handle our encounters with it in the classroom. But I never felt that Sheck had erred in saying “nigger” aloud — she did not use the word to insult any student or Baldwin, or to express any disdain for Black people. She uttered a quote that contained the word. Where she was at fault, to my mind, was acting as though she had the sole power to determine whether it was appropriate for her to say the word. She used her position as instructor and ultimate authority within the classroom to subject her students to a pedagogical choice that could cause them anguish. But if the classroom is a collaborative space, where Sheck and other White professors are not burdened by the same insults as their students, then such decisions must be weighed in collaboration with those who would be most affected. The solution is to redistribute power. In my class, whenever abhorrent language appeared in a text, we had a discussion prior to the lesson to decide whether we would allow anyone in class, including me, to utter the slur aloud. If anyone was uncomfortable, we agreed that no one would say it. The power was not mine alone.
Kennedy spends little time, in the original book and in the new introduction, considering this power, but it is the crux of the issue. Even if there are a few reasonable instances when a White person may utter the word — while quoting Baldwin or playing an enslaver in a film — they still exist within a larger world in which a White person saying it signals something outside of that particular moment. Our debates over the word’s use are proxies for the more uncomfortable conversations about race that we tend to shy away from in this country — conversations about the way people are treated like niggers (which is to say, subhuman) and who has the power to treat them as such.
The word is still injurious not only because of its specific origin as a slur but also because anti-Black conditions remain so pervasive at every level of our institutions. Black people continue to be demeaned, abused and exploited as a class. Many U.S. communities are moving with all deliberate speed to outlaw the teaching of the nation’s history of enslavement. Within such a context, it is not as innocuous as Kennedy makes it out to be when comedian and talk show host Bill Maher uses the word in a joking manner. On his show “Real Time,” Maher interviewed Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska. When Sasse invited Maher to visit Nebraska, saying, “We’d love to have you work in the fields with us,” the host replied: “Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house nigger.” Not only does Maher (inexplicably) wield immense power to sway the racial discourse in this country, he also is in a position to hire and fire Black people and influence their career paths within his industry. That he would make such a “joke” calls into question whether he has the judgment to make personnel decisions fairly.
Speaking of judgment: Kennedy spends much of the book examining legal cases involving the word, most having to do with terms of employment. Kennedy essentially re-litigates each of his examples, assessing whether judgment on the use of the word in each context was justly rendered. Absent from this analysis is that the majority of judges in the United States are not Black — meaning that more often than not the ultimate authority, in a legal setting, about the use of the word will be someone who will never feel the indignity of being called a nigger. Without institutional power, Black people have limited opportunity to render judgment on people who cross antisocial boundaries and should be outcast as pariahs for such inappropriate conduct.
In his riff on DiCaprio, Wood observes that after playing a monstrous enslaver in “Django Unchained,” DiCaprio did not appear on screen with a Black actor for nearly 10 years. “He knew,” Wood says, “once you call Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington ‘nigger’ in front of Samuel L. Jackson, you got to lay low for a decade.”
Wood was joking. But his gibe had a larger meaning. Of course, people can say anything they want. That doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences.
The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word — With a New Introduction by the Author
By Randall Kennedy | null | null | null | null | null |
In his memoir, Dwight Chapin still looks sympathetically on his mentor and his years in the White House
Dwight Chapin, pictured in 1968, acknowledges that Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, used him as “an outlet for his frustration and his anger." But Chapin still regarded Haldeman as his "closest friend.” (Bettmann Archive)
By Thomas Mallon
Thomas Mallon’s novels include the political trilogy of “Watergate,” “Finale” and “Landfall.”
The Haldeman-Chapin dynamic was established long before the two men entered the West Wing: “He advised me, trained me, protected me, and nurtured me,” writes Chapin. “I had a need to be liked, to be respected, and he understood that.” Haldeman, sounding like HAL in the movie “2001,” would scold Chapin (“I’m disappointed in you, Dwight”) for paying too little attention to detail. Obsessed with the time management of Nixon, whose physical movements were tracked on a “locator board,” Haldeman could be “abusive” — Chapin’s word — toward his underling, especially in memorandums. When a college friend of Chapin’s, playing a joke, greeted the arrival of the president’s helicopter with a “Welcome Dwight Chapin” sign — whose much smaller letters said “And President and Mrs. Nixon” — the Nixons were amused. Haldeman was not.
Chapin offers the reader sympathetic and defensive glimpses of Nixon, depicting him as “a very sensitive man.” (Nixon, too, had trouble firing people face to face.) While admitting that the president became “increasingly isolated” during his years in the White House, Chapin explains away the wilder rhetorical excesses and revenge fantasies on the secretly recorded Oval Office tapes as “musing out loud.” His overall estimation of Nixon remains high but confused: “By any truthful measure,” he insists, “Nixon’s domestic policy was brilliant and successful.” Not to genuine conservatives it wasn’t, then or now. Chapin also declares “that there are people who believe that Richard Nixon and his administration did not want the Vietnam War to end; that the president kept it going because it was politically useful.” In a half-century of arguing about — and often for — Richard Nixon, I have never heard anyone advance this explanation.
Chapin’s biggest achievement involved setting up Nixon’s trips, in 1972, to China and the Soviet Union. Understandably, given all the lows that would follow, he oversells the former as “indisputably one of the most dramatic, unprecedented, unchartered, risky, consequential diplomatic missions ever conceived.” Nonetheless, the logistical work he did for the 385-person American delegation was good enough to win even Haldeman’s compliments. Comparing the two trips, Chapin writes: “The Chinese were well mannered, intelligent, and curious. The Russians we dealt with were basically thugs.” Much of the advance work for the latter journey involved anti-bugging precautions.
Chapin makes a handful of fair revisionist points against the now-MSNBC-revered former White House counsel John Dean, and he rightly accuses the press of exploiting the obvious alcoholism of Martha Mitchell, wife of the attorney general, for its own purposes. But when in his acknowledgments he starts climbing onto the grassy-knoll version of Watergate that is Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s “Silent Coup” (1992), a reader can only sigh. Before this, Chapin offers some bits of Watergate trivia that may be news to readers; he says that Dean plagiarized his remark about a “cancer” on the presidency from White House aide Richard Moore.
Thomas Mallon’s novels include the political trilogy “Watergate,” “Finale” and “Landfall.”
The President’s Man
The Memoirs of Richard Nixon’s Trusted Aide
By Dwight Chapin | null | null | null | null | null |
Elizabeth Chudleigh, depicted around 1760, married the Duke of Kingston in 1769, but she had a secret: she was already married. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
By Clare McHugh
Clare McHugh is the author of the novel “A Most English Princess.”
With the American colonies in open rebellion against the Crown in April 1776, members of the British ruling class had far more serious matters to concern them than whether, 32 years previously, a young woman and a young man had legally wed, in secret, in the middle of the night, in a Hampshire mausoleum. And yet the bigamy trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh is what preoccupied aristocrats and politicians, along with a good portion of the British populace, at the time.
Chudleigh, a former maid of honor to the Princess of Wales, had by this point attained a secure position in society. Although she had grown up with slender means, the daughter of a baronet’s second son who had died when she was a small child, she had become a popular maid of honor, “a unique position between debutante and lady-in-waiting, the first step on a well-trodden ladder to an advantageous marriage,” as the job is described in “The Duchess Countess: The Woman Who Scandalized Eighteenth-Century London,” by Catherine Ostler.
Chudleigh achieved this thanks to her lovely looks, enormous charm and daredevil spirit. For a masquerade in the Haymarket, where King George II was a fellow guest, she dressed as the Greek princess Iphigenia, wearing a gown of sheer, flesh-colored silk, appearing, in the candlelight, to be clad in nothing at all. The monarch, far from feeling offended, openly proclaimed his admiration for his son’s wife’s lady and ordered up another masquerade in her honor.
But this boldness, so helpful in attracting the royal eye — one thinks of Kate Middleton’s famous appearance in a see-through minidress at a charity fashion show when she and Prince William were students at the University of St Andrews — had a downside. On summer holiday five years before, Chudleigh fell for a hotblooded but penniless naval officer she encountered at the Winchester Races: Augustus Hervey, grandson of the Earl of Bristol. On the spur of the moment, they hauled the local vicar out of bed and, in front of a handful of witnesses, exchanged vows. When Hervey returned to sea, Elizabeth kept her impetuous marriage a secret, thus preserving the 200 pounds she earned annually as a maid of honor, a job open only to spinsters.
In this skillful and highly entertaining biography, Ostler theorizes that the uninhibited Chudleigh was a bit unhinged. Having lost a previous love interest, and experiencing at an early age the deaths of both father and older brother, this young woman may have suffered from what today would be labeled borderline personality disorder. Citing psychiatrist James Arkell, the author writes that those with the disorder “are often charismatic performer types, like Elizabeth.” Notably, this same diagnosis has been applied posthumously to Diana, Princess of Wales, a child of a painful divorce. While it’s intriguing to speculate on modern interpretations of Chudleigh’s behavior, the real strength of the book is the author’s painstaking effort to corral all the facts in recounting a life that even her contemporaries found wildly improbable.
Living for years in the highest echelons of London society, supposedly as a single woman, Chudleigh avoided contact with her groom, who took up with numerous other women during his travels abroad. But eventually Hervey, back in Britain, desired to marry again. Chudleigh had by then attracted the attention of the fabulously wealthy Duke of Kingston. In the ecclesiastical courts, she argued that her union with Hervey had never been legal: There were no reliable witnesses to the alleged wedding, it happened after canonical hours, and no banns were read. The church lawyers agreed, and thanks to a special license granted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Chudleigh married Kingston in 1769, on her 48th birthday.
The two might have lived happily ever after but for the duke’s death four years later, at which time his family, led by a resentful, disinherited nephew, sought to prove the ducal marriage invalid on the grounds that Chudleigh was already someone else’s wife. The case went to the House of Lords, and for the trial spectators packed Westminster Hall to the rafters. Among the onlookers were Queen Charlotte and five of her children, including the future King George IV, then age 13, and the future King William IV, 10. Newspapers devoted endless inches to this woman who had climbed from undistinguished beginnings to become one of the richest ladies in Britain. Society gossip and man of letters Horace Walpole dubbed her the Duchess Countess, and the snarky nickname caught on because Hervey had by now rather unexpectedly inherited his grandfather’s title.
Chudleigh dressed for her trial in black with a black hood, in the manner of Mary Queen of Scots going to her execution, and testified at length in her own defense. But the sole living witness to the events in question, a vengeful servant called Ann Craddock, gave damning evidence. When the guilty verdict was announced, Chudleigh sank “lifeless to the ground,” according to a witness. She recovered her composure sufficiently to ask for leniency, and the Lords agreed not to brand her thumb with a letter “M” (for “malefactor”), the statutory punishment for having two spouses simultaneously. Chudleigh, enlisting a look-alike cousin to ride around town in her distinctive carriage, was able to travel to Dover incognito and escape to the Continent. She retained a portion of the rents from Kingston’s estates and used that money to start over.
The last years of Chudleigh’s life — spent in St. Petersburg, Estonia and Paris — are colorful but less interesting than the account of the trial, which Ostler carries off masterfully. “Bridgerton” fans take note: For sheer incident and drama, Chudleigh’s story rivals any episode of the popular Regency-era Netflix series. And it’s all true.
The Woman Who Scandalized Eighteenth-Century London
By Catherine Ostler. Atria Books. 432 pp. $30 | null | null | null | null | null |
Hostess Boost™ Jumbo Donettes® (Hand-out/Hostess Brands)
Now, Hostess — snack maker of Twinkies, Ho Hos and Ding Dongs — is combining the two by creating caffeinated doughnuts.
"For adults who are increasingly looking for alternative sources of caffeine, our new Hostess Boost Jumbo Donettes offer a tasty, energy-boosting, grab-and-go way to jumpstart the day," Christopher Balach, general manager of Hostess Brands, said in a statement.
Caffeine consumption has increased in recent decades, and consumers are getting it from more sources outside standbys like coffee, tea and soda. Hostess is following other food companies looking to tap into that growing market by adding the stimulant to their food and drinks.
Researchers in 2014 determined that 85 percent of people in the United States consumed at least one caffeinated beverage a day, most typically coffee, tea or soda. Despite popping up on the market and making news, energy drinks like Red Bull, Monster and 5-hour ENERGY at the time made up a sliver of the market.
But a study in 2019 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found the rise of energy drink consumption in the U.S. “increased substantially” and that those who drank such beverages took in far more caffeine than those who didn’t. The study also hinted at a growing market among younger people.
Over the past decade, companies have tried to cater to that increasing demand by selling everyday foods spiked with caffeine — potato chips, sunflower seeds, chocolate, maple syrup and beef jerky, to name a few. Cracker Jack started selling snack mixes spiked with caffeine under the brand Cracker Jack’D Power Bites, The Washington Post reported in 2013.
"There's a proliferation of foods; all kinds of things are now being caffeinated," Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest told NPR in 2012.
Health & Science Slew of caffeinated food products has FDA jittery
Despite a seemingly timeless pairing, the marriage of coffee and doughnuts solidified after World War II. While selling a variety of food out of a fleet of 200 trucks, William Rosenberg noticed 40 percent of his sales came from only two products: pastries and coffee, the Los Angeles Times reported. In 1948, that led Rosenberg to open the Open Kettle in Quincy, Mass. Later renamed as Dunkin’ Donuts, the business would swell to about 1,000 shops across the country by the end of the 1970s. Today, there are more than 11,300 locations worldwide, including some 8,500 in the United States, according to the company’s website.
Since doughnut shops were often the only businesses open in the wee hours, police officers were frequent patrons looking to grab a bite and something to keep them awake through the graveyard shift, according to Time. In his autobiography, Rosenberg said he leaned into that dynamic, intentionally creating a welcoming atmosphere for officers so he’d get a free police presence in return.
Recent market research shows that coffee is the dominant member of the pair, even in doughnuts’ eponymous businesses. In doughnut shops, people bought 2.1 billion servings of coffee compared to 805 million servings of doughnuts in a yearlong period spanning 2018 and 2019, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. | null | null | null | null | null |
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! We hope the lost dog in the Senate yesterday found its owner. 🐶
As a scheduling note, The Climate 202 won't publish on Monday in observance of Presidents' Day. We'll be back in your inbox on Tuesday. But first:
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will consider climate change in assessing gas projects
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will now consider how pipelines and related natural gas projects affect climate change and environmental justice communities, the commission ruled in a 3-to-2 vote on Thursday.
The ruling marks the first time that FERC, an independent agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, oil, and natural gas, has updated its policy for reviewing gas projects since 1999.
Environmental advocates hailed the move, saying it will provide a crucial new avenue for blocking new fossil fuel infrastructure and staving off the worst effects of the climate crisis. But conservatives and industry groups slammed the decision, asserting that it will prevent millions of Americans from accessing affordable energy.
At its meeting on Thursday, the commission voted to approve two policy statements related to its assessment of pending and future gas projects. The new guidance will be applied immediately, although the commission will solicit public comments and could make changes in the future based on that feedback.
The vote was split along party lines. All three Democrats — Chairman Richard Glick and Commissioners Allison Clements and Willie L. Phillips — voted in favor of the policy statements, while Republican Commissioners James Danly and Mark Christie dissented.
Under the Natural Gas Act, the commission must evaluate whether projects are in the public interest when deciding whether they are needed. The guidance clarifies that as part of this evaluation, the commission will consider how projects contribute to climate change and affect low-income and minority communities.
The guidance also states that if a project's emissions are expected to exceed 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the commission will prepare an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act — a much more comprehensive document than an environmental assessment.
In theory, the guidance means that FERC could block the construction and operation of interstate natural gas pipelines, storage facilities and liquefied natural gas terminals if it finds that their climate damages outweigh their benefits.
In practice, Glick told reporters after the meeting that companies will be encouraged — but not required — to propose ways of mitigating their projects' planet-warming emissions.
“The focus of the policy statement is suggesting to the companies they should come forward if they believe their emissions are going to be significant and might outweigh the benefits of the project,” Glick said.
“What we do in many cases is companies come forward with mitigation techniques, whether it be for wetlands, forests, species, things like that,” he said. “So I think we would just encourage companies to come forward and do the same with regard to greenhouse gas emissions.”
The clash between Democrats, Republicans
Democratic commissioners said the guidance would foster greater legal certainty for companies, noting that courts have rebuked FERC for failing to consider projects' climate effects.
In 2017, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated FERC's approval of the Sabal Trail gas pipeline, saying the commission had ignored its massive “downstream” greenhouse gas emissions.
“If we were to continue the commission turning a blind eye to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions,” Glick said, “we would definitely be adding to the legal uncertainty of each commission order approving a project.”
However, Christie and Danly argued that the D.C. Circuit got it wrong in the Sabal Trail case. And they asserted that FERC had overstepped its authority without congressional approval.
“What the majority does today is essentially assume it has the power to rewrite both the Natural Gas Act and the National Environmental Policy Act,” Danly said. “But that is a power that we do not have. Only legislators in Congress have that power, and they have not delegated it to us.”
Bernard McNamee, a former FERC commissioner who was nominated by Donald Trump, told The Climate 202 that he thinks the agency should leave climate policy to Congress, even as President Biden's climate and social spending package stalls in the Senate.
“There's been frustration among Democrats on Capitol Hill that they've been unable to pass climate legislation, and now you have three members of FERC suddenly taking on this authority that's going to impact not only natural gas access, but also electricity access,” said McNamee, who is now a partner at McGuireWoods and a senior adviser at McGuireWoods Consulting.
Adam Carlesco, a staff attorney at the environmental group Food and Water Watch, said FERC has been rubber-stamping new pipelines for years, and the ruling could finally change that. “Climate science tells us that we cannot build new fossil fuel projects if we are to have a chance at averting real climate chaos,” he said in a statement.
But Amy Andryszak, president and CEO of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, which represents pipeline interests, said in a statement that the guidance “does not add clarity to the certification process, but instead creates more questions.”
On the Hill, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) called the ruling “just the latest attack in Biden’s war on American energy.” And Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), the holdout vote on Biden's spending package who hails from a fossil-fuel-rich state, said the decision “puts the security of our nation at risk.”
Biden officials launch tool to identify disadvantaged communities
The Biden administration today launched an online tool to identify communities that are overburdened by pollution and other environmental hazards, The Post's Darryl Fears reports.
The White House Council on Environmental Quality is urging Americans to use a "beta version" of the tool over the next 60 days to reveal communities affected by health threats such as tainted water and poor air quality.
“Too many American communities are still living with water that isn’t safe to drink, housing that isn’t built to withstand climate change-fueled storms, and too few opportunities to benefit from the nation’s bright and clean future,” Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory said in a statement.
However, the administration is not relying on race as a factor in deciding where to focus environmental justice efforts for fear of legal challenges, despite evidence that people of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards, the New York Times's Lisa Friedman reports.
Biden administration could soon name EPA environmental justice boss
The Biden administration could fulfill its promise to create a Senate-confirmed position to elevate environmental justice considerations at the Environmental Protection Agency as early as next month, E&E News’s Kevin Bogardus and Kelsey Brugger report.
President Biden's first budget blueprint last year called for appointing a new assistant administrator for environmental justice, who would elevate environmental justice initiatives so that they are considered across all of the agency's regional offices, programs and authorities. The budget proposal also included an additional $287 million and at least 171 full-time employees for environmental justice programs at the EPA.
The omnibus bill, an appropriations package for the entire federal government, could provide the money to establish the new position as early as next month. Although the agency already has an Office of Environmental Justice within the administrator's office, the post suggested by Biden would receive an influx of appropriated funds and could have a more lasting and powerful impact at the EPA.
Biden touts $1 billion for Great Lakes cleanup during Ohio trip
Biden and EPA Administrator Michael Regan visited Ohio on Thursday to tout $1 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law that will be used to clean and restore the Great Lakes, which provide drinking water to about 40 million people, The Washington Post’s John Wagner reports.
“It’s going to allow the most significant restoration of the Great Lakes in the history of the Great Lakes,” Biden told a crowd of about 60 people, including members of Congress, local elected officials and labor leaders. The president added that the funds would make "the water safer for swimming and fishing, drinking, providing habitats for wildlife and wildfowl.”
Southern California to see jump in extreme fires caused by warming, study says
High-risk fire days in Southern California could nearly double if climate change remains unchecked, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, The Post’s Diana Leonard reports.
The study predicts that the fire season will soon expand to last all year, with more large fires occurring during historically cooler and wetter months. Scientists say this trend is particularly concerning in autumn, when conditions such as strengthened Santa Ana winds and dry vegetation could cause the blazes to ignite more easily and burn more intensely. And under the world's current emissions reduction trajectory, Southern California could be about 5 degrees warmer than it was at the end of the 20th century by 2100, creating even higher temperatures ripe for wildfires.
Skiers across the globe are racing to save the future of their favorite sport from climate change, Denise Hruby reports for The Post. As the athletes fly down slopes blanketed by artificial snow because of global warming, they are becoming more aware of the sport's climate effects, such as an excess of electricity needed to run cable cars and the carbon-intensive travel to far-flung mountains.
Some skier environmentalists say the key to reducing the sport's climate impact is to stop traveling by car or airplane to chase wintry conditions across the globe. Instead, they are urging fellow skiers to arrive by bike, electric bus or train.
Some local governments are also taking matters into their own hands. In the Alps, which have been warming at twice the global average, the Austrian province of Tyrol ordered all ski resorts to become climate-neutral by 2035, prompting the construction of wind farms and solar panels.
The International Ski Federation is taking a different tone, too. Johan Eliasch, the president of the federation, said he thinks that skiing needs to “act in harmony with nature and not against it” and that he feels a “personal responsibility to reduce the impact of our activities on the climates.”
Warming oceans and melting glaciers caused by climate change may threaten penguins, but hey, these dogs are pretty cute.
"WELL ONE OF US IS GOING TO HAVE TO CHANGE" pic.twitter.com/js7NfpEFNn | null | null | null | null | null |
Mike Lindell speaks to members of the media before his hearing at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in D.C. on June 24. (Will Newton for The Washington Post)
Mike Lindell just wants to do two things. He wants to give pillows to Canadian truckers and he wants people to know he wants to give pillows to Canadian truckers.
The latter is easier. Here I am, talking about it, explaining to you that the CEO of MyPillow would like to make HisPillows TruckerPillows. He wants to do this, of course, because the anti-government protest initiated by truckers in Canada late last month has become a cause celebre on the political right, though they likely wouldn’t use French to say that. The ongoing obstruction of Canada’s capital has spawned enormous demonstrations of support here in the United States and plans for similar efforts that seem to consistently be just over the horizon.
Lindell wants in. He wants in on the energy and, more specifically, he wants in to Canada so that he can hand out those pillows. But that’s harder than it seems, given that he was barred from entry for the same reason that the truckers are protesting: his truck couldn’t cross the border unless its driver was vaccinated, which he apparently wasn’t, or if he had a negative PCR coronavirus test to offer, which he apparently didn’t.
So now Lindell has a new plan. He told the Daily Beast on Wednesday night that, instead of trucking the pillows in, he’d fly them in — via helicopter, then chuck them out the window.
Now, look. I’m not sure how much Lindell has thought this through, certainly, or if he was joking or what. I suspect that Canada is somewhat stringent with its rules about aircraft smuggling things into the country specifically in order to avoid border controls. It seems like the sort of thing they will police, quite literally.
But then my colleague Sarah Dunton asked another, related question: What, exactly, is the airspeed of an unladen MyPillow, plunging through the frosty Canadian air onto a trucker? And, secondarily, what would the effects on that trucker be?
To answer, we turn to physics.
As it turns out, a lot of people online have had related questions about pillows in the past. In 2018, for example, someone asked on Quora whether a pillow dropped from an airplane would break on hitting the ground. The question received a thorough — and (for our purposes at least) useful — response.
The answer, offered by a mechanical engineering student named Alaudin Awang Noor, began with the physics of a falling object. As you may recall from high school, objects don’t simply fall faster and faster and faster. At some point, they reach terminal velocity, the point when the downward pull of gravity is offset by the drag of the air around it. So a pillow (or anything else) will fall through air faster and faster until it reaches the point that it’s going as fast as it is going to go.
Noor estimated a number of variables in order to calculate the maximum velocity at which the pillow would fall. Happily, he showed his work, so we can recreate his calculations.
According to Amazon, a “classic series” MyPillow is 26 inches by 16 inches by 4.1 inches and weighs 1.5 pounds. (This is apparently the pillow that Lindell plans to drop, along with some Bible pillows for kids.) Noor used basic estimates of air density at sea level to evaluate drag. I found a table of air pressure calculations for Ottawa from 1967 that probably allow us to refine this further, but there is a limit on how much math I’m going to do for a post about a pillow bombardment. So we’ll use Noor’s number.
He assumed the pillow at issue would be a cube. I think we should assume it will, instead, be a long cylinder, reducing its drag coefficient slightly. So we end up with the following:
This gives us a terminal velocity of about 7 meters per second — or 15.7 miles per hour.
So now the question is how much damage that would do. In order to answer this, I first tried to figure out what it looked like when a pillow was moving at that speed (a speed that Wolfram Alpha helpfully informs us is about 80 percent the speed of a falling raindrop). I downloaded an app for my phone and tried to get my 5-year-old son to swing a pillow around, a skill I am very confident he possesses. But some combination of the app being fluky and the kid being tired conspired against me.
Then I tried to figure out if there were data considering the speed of pillows when used for their naturally intended purpose: pillow fights. I found a very interesting study from 2009 in which the effect on head movement of various roller coasters was compared with a fender bender car accident and with a pillow fight. While the study did not include an indication of how fast the pillows were when they hit the research participants, it did offer an amusing photo of how the head movement was tracked, showing a boy with a weird metal thing in his mouth. (And here I thought I was the one conducting weird experiments with the assistance of children.) I can report that the study found that the effects of roller coasters were minimal, surely a relief to Six Flags Theme Parks, which helped conduct the research.
Finally, though, I realized I was overthinking it. Instead of measuring pillows, we could just compare the effect to other moving objects. Like, say, a baseball bat. It turns out that baseball bats swing at about 70 miles an hour when swung by a major leaguer, more than four times as fast as our falling pillow. In other words, getting hit by a pillow moving at a bit under 16 miles an hour probably wouldn’t do a lot of damage.
(Over at Reddit, being Reddit, someone estimated that you would need to swing a pillow in a pillow fight at about 1,900 miles an hour to break someone’s skull. I’m adding that here just for the sake of completeness.)
Wolfram Alpha also pointed out that 15.7 miles an hour is a bit more than half as fast as Usain Bolt can run at his fastest. So imagine a pillow coming at you about half as fast as this and hitting you. Probably wouldn’t hurt much.
Now, we come to the last point we need to consider. When announcing this definitely-going-to-happen plan to the Daily Beast, Lindell included a qualifier: the pillows would be dropped “with little parachutes.” Ergo, more drag; ergo, slower terminal velocity.
While Mike Lindell giving an anti-vaccine trucker a concussion after striking him with a pillow bearing his own face would be an unhappy but fittingly surreal coda to the moment, we can nonetheless conclude that the risks posed to those on the ground from Lindell’s pillow-drop will be minimal.
Hopefully, though, it gives him an idea about how to celebrate Thanksgiving. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R-Minn.) died Thursday night following a battle with kidney cancer, his wife announced in a Facebook post on Friday. He was 59.
Hagedorn, who was elected to the House in 2018, was diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer in 2019 and began receiving care at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., according to KSTP, a St. Paul, Minn., television station.
Hagedorn announced he had a kidney removed as well as cancerous tissues surrounding the kidney, the station reported. In July 2021, he announced a reoccurrence of his kidney cancer. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The West and Ukraine must get on the same page in Munich
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a meeting of the U.N. Security Council in Manhattan on Feb. 17. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)
The world’s spotlight is turning toward Munich, where U.S. and European leaders are converging for an annual meeting, to try to avert a war in Europe. But Vladimir Putin shows no signs he is deterred — and the diplomacy has almost run its course. This weekend will test whether the West can finally rally around a unified position and send the Russian president the clearest signal possible to step back from the brink.
The Munich Security Conference, which first convened in 1963 to bolster the transatlantic alliance to prevent another war in Europe, has never in its 59-year history been more relevant. Two years ago, the last time the conference met in person, the theme was “Westlessness,” based on the idea that the project of building a world order rooted in democracy, civil society, free-ish trade and universal rights had lost momentum. Putin’s threats to destroy Ukraine’s democracy — and Ukraine’s courageous resistance — have reminded the West that these values are still worth fighting for.
But throughout the crisis, it seems that the United States, its European partners and the Ukrainian government just haven’t been able to get on the same page. These divisions have hampered the effort to help Ukraine defend itself and given Putin several openings to exploit. This weekend, with all these leaders in the same place at the same time, is perhaps the last chance to fix it.
“I can’t think of a more consequential time to be in Munich,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who is leading one of the congressional delegations along with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). “I’m a great cheerleader for the North Atlantic alliance, but it’s going to have to be more than just talking about our values. We have to act.”
The Biden administration insists it is leading a unified front on Ukraine. The U.S. delegation will be led by Vice President Harris (who will be going through something like a diplomatic trial by fire) and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Blinken spoke at the U.N. Security Council Thursday and warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could begin within “several days” and would likely target Kyiv. The Biden administration doesn’t concede that the alliance is having internal difficulties.
“The reality is we think that the West is more united and NATO is stronger than they have been in decades,” a senior administration official said Wednesday, in a preview of Harris’s trip. “The vice president will underscore how that unity is a source of strength that will allow us to respond swiftly and severely to any further Russian aggression.”
But there are real differences on several key issues. The United States is promising crippling sanctions after an invasion, but the Europeans are not completely on board with some of the proposed measures, and the Ukrainian government wants the West to sanction Putin before, not after, an attack. This week, Congress failed to even agree on a sanctions bill.
“The European response is to be tough after an invasion. I think we should be tough right now,” Graham said. “I think the dismemberment of the Ukrainian economy by this military buildup should be punished.”
The allies have been divided on other issues as well. For months, countries such as Germany have dragged their feet on supplying or approving the supply of weapons for Ukraine, prompting complaints from the Baltic states. Individual European leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron have been pursuing their own diplomatic gambits, leading to humiliating dressing-downs in Moscow. Some allies have abandoned their Kyiv embassies; others have not.
All the while, Ukrainian leaders have been begging officials in Washington, Paris, London and Berlin to tamp down the rhetoric, stop pressuring Ukraine to make concessions it won’t countenance, and ramp up the pressure on Moscow. This will be the message Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will bring when he arrives at the Munich conference.
In an interview, Whitehouse told me that the gaps between Democrats and Republicans, and among the United States, European countries and Ukraine, are limited and manageable. He said he was encouraged and hopeful the West had risen to the challenge.
“I think what we have seen is a pretty solid demonstration of the Atlantic alliance actually proving itself,” he said. “It seems that everybody's held their ground. Ukrainians are solid, patriotic, determined, resolute. NATO has not cracked in any way.”
That’s an optimistic take. If Putin backs down, that optimism will have seemed justified. But ignoring these divisions and papering over these problems both within the transatlantic alliance and between the allies and Ukraine do not help. Putin surely isn’t done trying to exploit them.
This conference in Munich may end up laying bare some of the problems inside the West, but we should welcome that — it’s the only way to address and fix them. Invasion or no invasion, this crisis is likely far from over. For the sake of Ukraine’s security and our values and interests, Putin must see Western “unity” in both talk and action. | null | null | null | null | null |
Under state law, Gov. Tim Walz must call a special election to fill the vacancy. Hagedorn’s district leans Republican, and that didn’t change much when the state's new congressional district maps were released Tuesday. Hagedorn carried the district by less than half a percentage point over Democrat Dan Feehan in 2018 and by 3 points in a rematch in 2020. No Democrats have launched campaigns for the seat in the current cycle. President Donald Trump carried the district with nearly 54% of the vote in 2020. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: D.C. schools should step up amid a perfect storm of mental health challenges
The number of students dealing with anxiety and stress has increased during the pandemic. (iStock)
By Kisha Clark
Kisha Clark is a parent advocate with Parents Amplifying Voices in Education.
What does the world look like to a child struggling with mental health challenges?
Confusing. Scary. Lonely. Mean. Cold.
The pandemic has compounded mental health challenges in young children. A recent report from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy noted massive increases in self-harm hospitalizations as well as incidents of depression and anxiety because of the pandemic, telling The Post children are now enduring a “perfect storm of a stressor.”
Fortunately, D.C. has made investing in school-based mental health a major priority. Over the past several years, D.C. has worked to expand behavioral health services to all public schools. We now spend upward of $30 million annually on that school-based mental health system. Promisingly, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) recently announced big increases in education spending in next year’s budget and a multi-year investment in school-based mental health services. These are welcome and needed resources.
However, given the growing mental health needs of students, teachers and staff because of the pandemic, and the already substantial mental health needs of our students, we will need to do more to provide the kinds of services all students should be able to access at every public school.
The experience of my daughter has opened my eyes to the complex and difficult circumstances children with mental health needs face in our public schools — even when they are staffed with qualified and caring mental health professionals.
Attending one of the largest middle schools in upper Northwest D.C., she was one of more than 1,400 students. Even with a full-time psychologist and a handful of counselors and social workers, she couldn’t get the daily supports her depression, anxiety and ADHD diagnoses required. The result, as with the experience of so many children, was that her behavior challenges were too often met with punitive responses. Instead of additional counseling, she got in trouble. Instead of having a chance to calm down and regroup in school, she was sent home and missed class.
We made the decision to move her to her neighborhood school on Capitol Hill. There, thanks to a social worker and vice principal who had the bandwidth to focus on creative solutions for students with behavioral health needs, students had access to a “calm-down” space. It was a comfortable room, scented with lavender and chamomile, where my daughter and other students could relax and reset so they could return to class and continue to learn. Working with the vice principal and her teachers, we were able to develop a process to have her academic and mental health needs met, the opposite of what took place at her previous school.
She’s now enrolled at our neighborhood high school. The counselors, social workers and coordinators there have developed plans that help her complete her schoolwork. Initially, we faced some of the old challenges; however, the school leadership is open to creating a climate and space that my daughter and her peers need — one they can use to stay engaged in school while living with mental health challenges.
My daughter’s experience illustrates a broader point: Even with a “comprehensive” school-based mental health system, the actual support students can access can vary greatly. This is why the mayor and D.C. Council’s 2023 budget should deepen D.C.'s commitment to the behavioral health support system in our public schools through two key steps.
First, we should conduct a comprehensive assessment of every school community’s needs. Because of the diversity of our schools and neighborhoods, assessments of this kind are essential to understand and address the challenges faced by public school students, staff and educators in D.C. Such assessments would also help us understand broader trends and complex contributors to the mental health issues young people face, giving us new tools and insights to address them.
Second, because a system is only as good as the accountability baked into it, we need to establish strong monitoring features in our school-based mental health system. That means ensuring that the services students need are delivered to families with clarity. It also means that when the system does not work correctly, failures are acknowledged and addressed quickly and leaders are transparent about efforts to improve policies and programs.
These solutions and others can take us to the next step in building the school-based mental health system that gives all our public school students a chance to thrive, through the pandemic and beyond. And as we do that, the world will look a little less confusing, a lot kinder, more supportive and a bit warmer for students across D.C.
The mighty work of DC Appleseed | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: My mother needed Spanish-speaking caregivers. It became my mission to find them.
By Zoila Ortega
Zoila Ortega is the founder of Career Nursing Academy in Locust Grove, Va.
I approached my mom, as I had a thousand times before, to help her out of bed for her breakfast. “Who are you?” she asked, in what I remember as one of the most difficult moments of my life.
It was the first time she ever asked me that question, but it would not be the last. My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2010. As a nurse and educator with two master’s degrees and a doctorate, I was well equipped with clinical knowledge about her diagnosis. But all the books in the world could not have prepared me for the personal toll of seeing my mother slowly lose her memory.
My mom and dad immigrated to the United States from Cuba in the 1950s to seek a better life for our family. I was not quite 2 years old at the time. I grew up grateful for the opportunities that they gave me, and I wanted to give back to the country that took us in. That’s one of the reasons I became a nurse and began training others to be caregivers.
I thought I could easily assist my mother through her illness. At the time of her diagnosis, I had been training nurses for more than 45 years and had set up nursing programs at universities across the United States. And for a while, I did.
Eventually, my mom’s Alzheimer’s progressed, and she forgot how to make meals and needed help with bathing and other daily tasks. My father had died years before, and there was no other family member available to help consistently with her care. And after three years of caring for her by myself, I realized I needed the help of a professional caregiver.
Increasingly, my mother regressed to her native Spanish, so I set about finding a home care worker who was fluent in her mother tongue. In my small community in central Virginia, there’s a shortage of caregivers, and the Hispanic community, though vibrant and growing, is small.
I reached out to the Virginia Board of Nursing and designed a program that would be more accessible to immigrant and minority communities. At the time, entry requirements for training programs in Virginia were a huge obstacle to applicants whose first language is not English. People in lower-income groups were often weeded out by strict entry exams and expensive course fees. My curriculum attempted to reduce these barriers to entry while adhering to the standards that the state had set.
We opened Locust Grove’s Career Nursing Academy in May 2015. The academy’s certified nursing assistant program, which requires 145 hours of training and clinical practice over six weeks, has graduated more than 1,000 caregivers. Although we teach entirely in English, the academy has teachers who can translate and field questions in Spanish, German and Filipino/Tagalog, among other languages.
One student recently cared for a Spanish speaker in his 80s. When she spoke to the man in his native language, he wept. He had not conversed in Spanish in 11 years.
I was another beneficiary of the work of the academy I helped create: I was finally able to get supplemental home care for my mom. During the final years of her life, she was cared for by several Spanish-speaking certified nursing assistants who helped ensure that she got the care that she needed.
Every year, more families seek home care for their loved ones, but our country’s care economy has not kept up with the demand. As a nation, we don’t invest in our caregivers enough; many in our state make just $12 an hour, and the average home care worker nationwide earns just $17,200 a year.
We can fix the shortage of home care workers by properly funding the industry. President Biden’s economic plan would invest $150 billion to address the growing need for home care. Those funds would ensure that caregivers nationwide are able to get the training they need.
Paying caregivers better would help attract more workers to the industry. Last year, Virginia took needed steps to improve conditions for home care workers: The General Assembly voted to provide workers with 40 hours of paid sick leave per year, one-time bonuses of $1,000 and temporary wage increases through Medicare and Medicaid.
These policies, though helpful, do not address the long-term problem. Lawmakers must make home care a national priority. In doing so, our leaders have the opportunity to make home care accessible for millions of families.
My mom ended up living for more than seven years after her diagnosis — far longer than her doctors expected, which I credit to the great home care we provided her. All families should be fortunate enough to care for their loved ones at home if they choose.
It was difficult to see my mother’s memory progressively fade, but I was comforted, as was she, that she was able to get loving care at home — and in a language she understood. | null | null | null | null | null |
Did Travers rise to Whitman’s almost unattainable level? That is for the public to decide. But the faraway eyes are present here, and the iron mask is gone. It’s an arresting portrait, better than the others, and worthy of a wider audience. Washington is filled with mediocre paintings of Lincoln, including an undistinguished portrait hanging in the Oval Office, painted in 1915, and a problematic painting in the White House’s State Dining Room, of a seated Lincoln, by G.P.A Healy. It has redeeming qualities — the face is well rendered — but it was cut away from a larger project, a group study, and it shows Lincoln in an awkward position, his long legs tucked uncomfortably beneath him. Nearby, in the East Room, George Washington is shown standing to his full height in the famous Lansdowne Portrait by Gilbert Stuart.
It is unclear what lies ahead for the portrait, which narrowly escaped destruction in a warehouse fire early in its history. But the Hartley Dodge Foundation, which owns it, seems more than willing to share. Nicolas W. Platt, the foundation’s president, said they would consider lending to an institution “that can make viewing this extraordinary piece of our nation’s heritage available to a large audience.” In any event, it is exciting to know that our most familiar president has become a bit less familiar, thanks to the restoration, and a colorful new way of seeing him. | null | null | null | null | null |
The special counsel is just trying to find the guy that did this
The exterior of the White House is seen illuminated this month with colored lights in celebration of the 2022 Beijing Olympics. (Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)
It is not overstating things to point out that the narrative above consumed right-wing media and networks this week. Night after night, Fox News hosted guests who somberly discussed this alleged spying on the sitting president. The idea permeated the network’s non-opinion programming as well (recognizing the blurriness of that line). As the network cut away from a Hillary Clinton speech it was airing live on Thursday, the Fox anchor declared that she was speaking even as Durham “continues the investigation into whether or not her campaign was involved in an effort to listen in to President Trump or listen in to candidate Trump.” Just a shrugging and wildly inaccurate assertion about the campaign maybe “listening in” on the sitting president, offered as an aside. A connect-the-dots puzzle showing four points from which Fox News managed to sketch out a dragon.
It’s important to point out what immediately preceded that “if.” He had mentioned that stuff about data from the White House being included in the Russia research because “a member of the defense team was working for the Executive Office of the President of the United States (‘EOP’) during relevant events that involved the EOP.”
The “member of the defense team” who was working for the executive office of the president is Michael Bosworth, who served as deputy White House counsel under Barack Obama. He was not still serving in the White House when Trump was president (perhaps obviously) but he was there “during relevant events that involved the EOP.” In other words, he was there during the period in which the relevant data collection from the EOP was occurring — meaning that the relevant data was being collected only when Obama was president!
This is just one thread of the colorful tapestry that Fox News and others on the right wove this week. For example, there’s no evidence in Durham’s filings showing that Clinton’s campaign drove this research. In fact, it seems like it was instead driven by the technology executive whose firm had collected the pertinent data and who had retained Sussman for counsel before all of this began. | null | null | null | null | null |
A “Freedom Convoy” protester carries a flag in Ottawa on Feb. 17. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network’s deputy director, Elizabeth Simons, said one of the men arrested in Alberta has links to the far-right Diagolon movement, who’s de facto leader, Jeremy MacKenzie, has been in and out of Ottawa. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police began making some arrests on Feb. 17 to end a standoff that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned was threatening public safety. (Reuters)
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network’s deputy director, Elizabeth Simons, said one of the men arrested in Alberta has links to the far-right Diagolon movement, who’s de facto leader, Jeremey MacKenzie, has been in and out of Ottawa. | null | null | null | null | null |
As Biden travels the country urging support for his plan, there is no specific bill and talks have evaporated
But it’s not clear such a plan exists anymore, at least in any recognizable form. Behind the scenes, discussions between the White House and key senators on what was once a massive climate and social spending package have virtually evaporated. It’s far from evident what, if any, version of Biden’s once-sweeping proposal could pass this year and what it would include. Would it be a climate plan? A prescription drug initiative? A health-care bill?
According to Biden’s descriptions, it’s all of the above. Yet Biden has also conceded that the proposal will need to be broken into chunks after talks collapsed late last year, and that it is unlikely to include an extension of an expanded child-care tax credit. First lady Jill Biden recently acknowledged that two years of tuition-free community college is no longer part of it — a reality that congressional negotiators have understood for months.
Congress has in many ways moved on to other priorities, and Biden’s forthcoming Supreme Court nomination is expected to occupy the Senate’s attention for much of this spring. Yet Biden sometimes makes it sound as though Build Back Better is on the cusp of passage.
A month after the House passed a version of Build Back Better last fall, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) came out against the package. With the Senate divided 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans and the GOP united against the package, Manchin’s support was, and remains, critical to any deal.
“There’s been a risk from the beginning in setting our sights so high,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said. “That’s been a built-in risk from the beginning that we decided not to play small ball, that the president decided that this was a moment of crisis for democracy and that required him to go big for American families. That does present the risk of appearing like you got much less than you asked for.”
But, Murphy added: “I think the president needs to continue to talk about this. I think it’d be a mistake to pivot off of a theme that he’s been talking about for a year — putting money into the hands of American families — just because it’s hard to get it done here.”
“The president continues to bring it up, because, as we talk about the impact of inflation, which most people experience in their daily lives as rising costs, one of the ways that we can address that is by passing legislation that will help lower costs for Americans, whether it’s child care or health care or the cost of prescription drugs,” Psaki said.
As for the prospects of resurrecting Build Back Better, Psaki said that the White House is “continuing to work in lockstep and in partnership with a range of senators. And they’re having their own discussions about moving these efforts forward.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement that “the president and his team are working hard with a wide range of lawmakers on cutting costs for American families, including with regard to prescription drugs and energy,” echoing Biden’s recent focus on climate and drug costs as two major elements of any plan. Bates also stressed that the plan would “reduce the deficit.”
The group includes Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chairman of the Finance Committee; Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), head of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee; and Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), who leads the Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Wyden said that, for the moment, he is not caught up in the exact timing of a bill. “What I’m telling everybody is: 'Look, I’d like to have this done sooner or later,’ ” Wyden said. “So I’m just going to be focused on building the case.”
Biden traveled to Ohio on Thursday to promote the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed last year, and during his speech, he highlighted the $1 billion in funding from the law that will go toward cleaning and restoring environmentally degraded sites around the Great Lakes.
Manchin, when he pulled out of negotiations with the White House on Build Back Better last year, voiced concerns about the cost of the package, its climate provisions, its impact on the deficit and its effect on rising inflation. This week, he said he still sees factors that give him pause.
“I saw inflation come a long time ago. I knew the geopolitical unrest was there, and it’s now heightened more than ever, and covid was uncertain,” Manchin said. “So all these uncertainties, we’re saying, wait a minute. This is too much.”
“No one seems to have a timetable, really,” he added, pointing to other congressional priorities, such as a government funding bill, as more urgent.
Beyond the challenges of passing a bill in a midterm election year — and doing so under strict Senate rules limiting what can be passed with a simple majority — looms another question: What should Democrats call the plan now?
Some, such as Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), have suggested rebranding the measure and killing off the “Build Back Better” name for good because it has become associated with Biden’s sweeping social agenda that at one point approached $6 trillion before being whittled down. Psaki has said the White House is open to renaming the package as long as some version of it gets passed.
“I don’t think it matters what you call it, and I think that the substance of the bill is deeply popular, and so I think it’s good for [Biden] to be out there talking about it,” Schatz said. “What you name it is secondary to putting together the bill and getting 51 votes.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Following the news of Hagedorn’s death, lawmakers from both parties offered condolences.
Hagedorn “bravely endured the personal challenge of cancer treatment with dignity and grace while serving our country and his constituents,” Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) said in a statement. “Despite our policy differences on many issues, Jim and I were united in the common goal of achieving greater opportunities for future generations of Minnesotans.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) described Hagedorn as “a fighter for his constituents and a friend to so many, including me.”
“Through his battle against cancer, he showed a level of determination that should inspire us all,” she said on Twitter.
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) tweeted that Hagedorn was “a strong conservative with a great sense of humor who loved this country & worked tirelessly for the people he represented.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Lynn Wilson, Army Department employee
Lynn Wilson, 81, who retired from the Army Department in 1995 as a division manager in the Military Traffic Management Command, died Jan. 5 at his home in Woodbridge, Va. The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Barbara Wilson.
Mr. Wilson was born in Haskell, Tex. He moved to the Washington area and began working for the Army Department in 1964.
Melvin Laney Sr., consultant
Melvin Laney Sr., 82, a self-employed consultant who specialized in medical, legal, information technology, scientific and pharmaceutical issues, died Dec. 11 at a health-care and nursing facility in Sandy Spring, Md. The cause was dementia, said a son, Culbert Laney.
Dr. Laney, a resident of Spencerville, Md., was born in St. George, Utah, and grew up in the Washington area. He did consulting with the federal government, including the Justice Department and NASA; AT&T; and information technology businesses. In the late 1980s and 1990s, he was the chief executive of McNet Physicians Network, which advised clients on employee health-care plans for small businesses.
Barbara Field, child-care worker
Barbara Field, 90, who worked at the child-care center at the United Methodist Church in Annandale, Va., from 1982 to 1985, died Jan. 13 at a hospital in Falls Church, Va. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a daughter, Donna Field.
Mrs. Field, a Falls Church resident, was born Barbara Norrie in Toronto. She was an FBI secretary for four years after moving to Washington in 1950. She was a volunteer at the Thrift Shop of Trinity Episcopal Church in Arlington, Va., and a duckpin bowler.
Nancy Petersen, teacher
Nancy Petersen, 68, who taught English to speakers of other languages in public schools in Montgomery County from 2006 to 2018, mostly at Rock View Elementary School in Kensington, Md., died Jan. 5 at her home in Bethesda. The cause was uterine cancer, said her husband, David Petersen.
Ms. Petersen was born Nancy King in Ithaca, N.Y., and grew up in the Washington area. From 2006 to 2009, she taught a Saturday-morning class on language and citizenship for the refugee program of Montgomery College in Silver Spring, Md. | null | null | null | null | null |
Warren Minami, finance officer
Warren Minami, 83, the director of the Bureau of Computing Services at the International Monetary Fund from 1982 to 2001, died Jan. 9 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. The cause was complications of covid-19, including pneumonia and a stroke, said a son, Wayde Minami.
Dr. Minami, a resident of Potomac, Md., was born in San Francisco. During World War II, he was confined with other Japanese Americans at the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona. Before joining the IMF, he was a corporate vice president of American Security Corp., a vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank, and assistant director of the division of data processing for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Virginia Maxwell, fiberworks artist
Virginia Maxwell, 94, a fiberworks artist who created capes, hats, jackets and other decorative and functional apparel, died Dec. 17 at her home in Springfield, Va. The cause was hypertensive heart disease, said a daughter-in-law, Virginia Caputo.
Mrs. Maxwell was born Virginia Irby in Mercedes, Tex., and had lived in the Washington area since 1962. She was a member of the Fiberworks artists group at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Va., and she was a creator of crocheted clothing decorations. She taught fiberworks art at senior centers.
Barbara Mishkin, lawyer
Barbara Mishkin, 85, a Washington lawyer who retired in 2006 from the firm then known as Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells), died Jan. 7 at her home in Bethesda, Md. The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said a son, Paul Thaler.
Mrs. Mishkin was born in Philadelphia and grew up in the Washington area. Before joining Hogan & Hartson in 1983, she was deputy director of the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research.
Margaret Farrell, teacher
Margaret Farrell, 86, a Prince George’s County schoolteacher for 33 years who retired in 1998, died Jan. 7 at a retirement community in Silver Spring, Md. The cause was kidney failure, said a niece, Brooke Supple.
Mrs. Farrell was born Margaret Koeneman in Rochester, Minn. She taught English literature at High Point High School in Beltsville from 1965 to 1978 and at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt from 1978 to 1998. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Polk Penguin Conservation Center at the Detroit Zoo in Royal Oak, Mich., Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. The Detroit Zoo’s massive penguin center has reopened to the public more than two years after it was shuttered to repair faulty waterproofing. Visitors were welcomed inside the Polk Penguin Conservation Center this week for the first time since the 33,000-square-foot facility closed in 2019. Billed as the world’s largest penguin center, the PPCC opened in 2016 and was an immediate hit. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
By Mike Householder | AP | null | null | null | null | null |
BEAR, Del. — A 31-year-old Newark woman and a 7-year-old boy were killed in a crash that split an SUV in two, Delaware State Police said.
The woman who was driving the Kia was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead, police said.
The driver of the Dodge, an 18-year-old Landsdowne, Pennsylvania, man, was taken to a hospital, where he’s in stable condition. Before the crash, police said the Dodge was observed traveling at an apparent rate of speed. Speed appears to be a factor in the crash, but impairment on the part of the Dodge driver isn’t suspected, police said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Readers critique The Post: What we got wrong about a potato plague
Mitigating a potato plague
The Feb. 6 news article “On Canada’s ‘Spud Island,’ ugly potatoes cause economic pain” highlighted the challenges faced by family farms in producing and distributing the world’s favorite vegetable: potatoes. However, the article, which cast the current crisis faced by Prince Edward Island growers because of recent potato wart detections as a United States vs. Canada trade issue, did not accurately reflect the situation. This is an issue of science, and it should remain so. The Canadian federal government remains just as committed to preventing the spread of potato wart as U.S. growers are in keeping the disease off their farms.
After their latest disease detections — the second major instance in just 18 months — Canadian authorities took action to restrict the movement of seed potatoes from Prince Edward Island internationally and domestically to prevent the spread of wart to other potato-producing Canadian provinces. They also halted shipments of fresh table stock potatoes to the United States until all parties could be certain that only disease-free potatoes were crossing the border.
Beyond producing unmarketable potatoes, the detection of potato wart in the United States would be devastating to our growers and the communities they support. At least $300 million per year in export markets would be immediately cut off, and we would need to undergo a lengthy and costly battle to regain those international customers. Potato wart has been found in Prince Edward Island in eight of the past 10 years. The detections in 33 potato fields in the province since 2000, plus a dramatic drop in the amount of disease testing via soil samples, makes U.S. potato growers question how widespread the disease is on the island. As a solution, U.S. potato farmers consider it extremely positive that Canada has committed to conduct 35,000 soil samples to determine the scope of the disease, and thereby begin the process of resuming trade with the mainland United States. U.S. potato growers and consumers want normal trade to resume, and we welcomed the announcement that trade between Prince Edward Island and Puerto Rico (which has no commercial potato production) has normalized. However, we are not willing to risk the consequences of introducing potato wart into U.S. agriculture and must allow the scientific process to determine where the disease is present to be assured that the disease threat is mitigated.
Kam Quarles, Washington
The writer is chief executive officer of the National Potato Council.
Diverse religious views are welcome
The Feb. 7 news article “An imperiled Roe v. Wade prompts more candor from religious voices” was a breath of fresh air. I’ve looked and haven’t seen anything like it in any other major newspaper. The usual coverage of religion and Roe v. Wade defaults to ultraconservative evangelical Christian definitions of the issue and religion and makes more moderate and liberal religious views something of an afterthought. This article presented the more moderate and liberal religious views with real faces and studious, degreed clergy who have wrestled with the issue thoughtfully and heartfully. Moreover, the article included rabbis and Judaism, which most coverage of the issue omits. I am grateful for the article’s balance, for its clarity and matter-of-fact style and for The Post’s inclusion.
Mark E. Hoelter, Washington
The writer is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister.
Context and clarity needed
In the tragic Feb. 7 Metro article, “6 years in crash that left 2 dead” about a woman sentenced in a driving-under-the-influence case, I tripped over this intriguing line: “She had been traveling 75 mph, about 2.5 times over the speed limit, authorities said.” What was the speed limit? It couldn’t be 30 mph, since 75 mph is not “about” 2.5 times the speed limit; it is exactly 2.5 times. But it wasn’t The Post who said this; it was “authorities.” The Post is off the hook, and my head hurts.
Steve Earle, Front Royal, Va.
I appreciated the thorough reporting in the Feb. 7 Metro article “6 years in crash that left 2 dead” — “gas pedal was pressed down at its maximum” — but, as with nearly all articles that include sentencing, I have no idea how to evaluate the sentence handed down by the judge. Was it excessive? Was it average? It would be a great service if The Post would provide context. I recognize that this would place another burden (and would vary by state) on time-sensitive reporting, but it would be valuable and appreciated.
Patrick Plunkett, Alexandria
Missing game coverage
As a Howard University men’s basketball season ticket holder, I was disappointed to see that the Feb. 6 paper had mentioned only the score of the Howard-University of Maryland Eastern Shore game the day before — even though American University ’s game played at the same time was noted in a college basketball roundup. If The Post, as with many companies, is suffering with workplace shortages, I would happily dust off my high school sports editor visor and chip in. Just let me know.
Christopher Donnellan, Falls Church
Keep our favorite comic
Regarding the Feb 5. Free for All letter “Sally forth from Classic comics”:
I love seeing “Classic Peanuts” each day. I admit the water-bed scenario went on a bit long, but the comic strip is almost always as relevant today as it was decades ago, and it makes me happy. Many of the newer strips are often more obtuse and, truthfully, not that funny. Keep running “Classic Peanuts”!
Lisa Roney, Washington
I have read two recent letters in The Post complaining about the “Classic Peanuts” comic. Please keep this comic in the paper. It is one of the few clean, apolitical comics, and the situations are mostly timeless. If a few readers don’t like it, they don’t have to read it. I ignore about a third of the comics, but, out of consideration for other readers, I don’t ask to have them removed.
Bruce Weiss, Frederick
Goldberg was not the only one who misspoke
In her appropriate Feb. 5 op-ed about the paucity of knowledge about race in this country, “Whoopi’s rant shows why we need critical race analysis,” Karen Attiah misspoke (regarding Whoopi Goldberg’s mistake) when she wrote, “White Christian Europe and its descendants in America relied on brutal violence against Jewish, Black and other people of color to create today’s world order.” What a shame that the original American Indigenous peoples are now collectively lumped together as “other people of color.”
As I learned as an adult, those original inhabitants not identified were slaughtered, violated and displaced and even today remain in deplorable conditions as a result of White Pilgrims conquering this country.
Oh, that’s right, we have done them a great favor this month by changing the name of our football team. Take that and a nickel to the store of equality.
Jacksie A. Chatlas, Washington
Another myth in need of busting
I was disappointed with Rebecca Simik’s Feb. 6 Outlook essay, “Five Myths: Nursing,” reporting that a Lancet research article found nurse practitioners “performed as well as junior doctors.” What is a junior doctor? How is that title defined?
As a nurse practitioner for 30 years, attending the same professional development and reading the same peer-reviewed journal articles, I do not compare myself to a “junior” doctor, and none of us should. As experienced registered nurses, we undergo rigorous education at the bachelor’s, master’s and (for some) the doctoral levels, attend many hours of precepted clinical hours and must have a national board certification before being licensed as a nurse practitioner. Every two years, we must prove professional development in our specialty as well as in pharmacology to support re-licensure as a registered nurse and a nurse practitioner and to renew our license to prescribe medicines. Many of us also have Drug Enforcement Administration licenses to prescribe scheduled drugs such as Ritalin and morphine.
Though our nascent entrance into the health-care field began with different educational training, our ongoing professional development is the same, and we should never be compared to “junior” doctors.
Nancy Runton, Alexandria
Demographics make a difference
I was saddened to read the Feb. 8 obituary for Phil Harvey, “Fought — and won — a long legal battle over his sex-product business.” I had a summer internship with PSI as part of my master’s in public health program at the University of Michigan in 1972, and I lived in Harvey’s house while he was abroad. He was an eccentric and innovative pioneer in the field of reproductive health and rights.
In addition to breaking down legal and social barriers to improving human and reproductive rights, he was a pioneer in social marketing. Now, 50 years later, perhaps it is high time to recognize the consequences of societal inaction and denial, as outlined in Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Demographic determinants and sociopolitical dynamics define our future, but they are intertwined. Fragile states and territorial, ethnic, religious and other conflicts stem from expanding populations competing for limited resources. How can anyone ignore the effect of population growth and its consequences on global warming, migration and deterioration in the human condition in so many countries? Though nobody should control individual choices, the role of many religious, political and cultural entities with massive influence continues to use ideological altruisms to obscure the truth. Our nation would be economically dormant without a younger migrant labor force. All of our businesses should welcome migrants. This is what made America great.
Demographics make a difference. I see little reporting on that dimension. It is a journalistic oversight to kowtow to politics and ignore science.
William Johnson, Arlington
Presel’s favorite achievement
I was disappointed with the mini-obituary for Ambassador Joseph Presel [Metro, Feb. 11] and would like to amend the record. As the obituary noted, he was ambassador to Uzbekistan from 1997 to 2000. Always self-deprecating, however, he once told me that he hated it when people called him “ambassador.”
Presel always said his proudest achievement was in having been the subject of discussion in the Soviet Politburo. The report of the Politburo’s review of Presel’s activities related to human rights issues in the Soyuz appeared in the Bukovsky archive, which quotes the relevant results from a March 24, 1977, Politburo meeting. Here’s a rough translation: “On further measures to discredit U.S. intelligence in the anti-Soviet campaign of human rights. Decision #50/71 of the Politburo of the Central Committee on the KGB note number 575 of 03/21/77. The note positively evaluated the materials published in ‘Izvestia’ that exposed action by the U.S. special services. To enhance the effect after the visit of [Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance to Moscow, [the government will] arrange interviews with [Soviet Jewish activist Sanya] Lipavsky and disseminate them through TASS, APN, and Gosteleradio. The KGB will organize [protest] letters from Soviet citizens to Washington; however, so as not to provoke a response [from the United States], [the government] will avoid compromising the 1st Secretary of the Embassy of the United States [Joseph] Presel and the [Washington Post] correspondent [Peter] Osnos and [will not] expel them from the country.”
Presel’s reaction to this was as follows: “My dislike of publicity is almost pathological. It is not that I am sorry about my service in Moscow — it was useful and probably the most interesting posting I had in the Service — but I have never found it necessary to blow my horn. However, I must tell you that the citation from the Politburo archives is one that I have long treasured. I look on it as my good conduct medal. I am delighted to have gotten under their skin to that extent.”
He was something of a force of nature — totally untamed and always his own inimitable persona. One of a kind.
Joe Clare, Fairfax
It’s ‘normality,’ not ‘normalcy’
So, Benjamin Dreyer considers me a “word-peever” because I don’t think “normalcy” is a legitimate word, according to his Feb. 8 Tuesday Opinion commentary, “It’s the end of ‘normalcy,’ but not in the way you think.” Well, in actualcy and as a matter of practicalcy, I wonder if any doctor or scientist has ever discovered an abnormalcy, which I presume would be the opposite of the word he’s defending.
Perhaps this makes me a fussbudget, but I think there’s a relation between sloppy speech and sloppy thinking. It’s a question of causalcy.
Norm Antokol, Silver Spring
An unnecessary display
The Feb. 11 Metro article “Health care tops Biden visit” was accompanied by a photograph of pro-Trump protesters at President Biden’s motorcade in Virginia with the derogatory saying “Let’s go Brandon” prominently displayed on their signs. Is this the best picture The Post could find of the president’s event there? Why not print a photograph of those who were there in support of the president instead of a bunch of whining Trump supporters? Must The Post continue to give these people space they don’t deserve?
Jared Wermiel, Silver Spring
A disrespectful cartoon
I am on the board of directors of my condominium association. I found ridiculous and insulting the implication in the Feb. 7 “Dustin” comic strip that homeowners association board presidents have plenty of free time. I can’t even joke about it.
The president of my association, at a 55-and-older community, is running a business while doing a heroic job of guiding us through multiple major construction projects, contracts, multiple property managers, several smaller projects, meetings, meetings and more meetings. Residents snipe at her over non-issues, such as being unethical when she followed Montgomery County law exactly. Her business has suffered because she has spent so much of her time on condo activities.
Condo/homeowner/co-op associations are not a joke or a hobby. They are an important responsibility for managing property held partly or completely in common. Boards and committees are volunteers with the interests of the association at the center; they are not paid staff. The associations could not function without them. If it were such an easy task, dozens of people would be running for boards and volunteering for committees, when the reality is that there are barely enough people to do the work, and sometimes not enough.
Respect, please.
Carol Edwards, Silver Spring | null | null | null | null | null |
Live updates:Covid-19 live updates: U.S., WHO ramping up vaccine aid to African countrie...
From masking to testing, here’s what experts say should stick around as restrictions ease
As the crushing omicron wave subsides, even the strictest states are dropping mask requirements. Countries around the world are getting rid of testing requirements for vaccinated visitors. And the travel industry is pushing for the United States to jettison its testing rules to fly into the country.
So should we prepare to travel like it’s 2019 again?
Not quite — and possibly not ever, said health experts interviewed by The Washington Post.
“The pandemic, whether we want to believe it or not, is still happening,” said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and chief science officer at eMed, which offers proctored rapid tests for home use.
In the United States, the seven-day average of new coronavirus cases has dropped significantly from the omicron peak and well below the numbers seen during the delta surge. But new infections are higher than they were during much of 2020 and 2021. While hospitalizations and deaths are dropping, Washington Post data show that the average number of daily new deaths in the country is nearly 2,300, and almost 69,000 are hospitalized with covid-19.
Can I travel safely after recovering from covid-19?
Doctors say travelers need to determine the level of risk they are comfortable taking based on their own health status, especially as some rules fall away.
But as the surge wanes, experts caution that any return to normalcy will not be the same as it was pre-pandemic. Leading infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, has said that we will “have to ‘live’ with something that will not be eradicated.”
Or as Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, put it: “2019 doesn’t exist anymore.”
As travel restrictions loosen around the world, experts offered strategies on what precautions to keep — and where we can return to some normalcy.
Omicron may be on your next flight. Here’s how to protect yourself.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever stop wearing a mask in airports’
The federal mask mandate for airports, airplanes and other forms of mass transportation is in place at least through March 18. But even when masking up is no longer required, Mina said, it makes a lot of sense to continue doing so at airports, where people congregate from many different places.
He said that even if travelers are coming from a place with low coronavirus case numbers, they have no idea where the people surrounding them are coming from.
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop wearing a mask in airports,” he said.
Gronvall said some people might be ready to eat indoors again as cases drop.
“But if you’re in a tight crowd with strangers and you’re not eating or drinking at the moment …personally, I’m going to wear a mask,” she said. She also pointed out that mask-wearing could continue to be useful as a protection against other respiratory diseases, such as the flu.
‘People should be taking precautions around people they know are immunocompromised’
Henry Wu, an associate professor of infectious diseases at Emory University School of Medicine and director of the Emory TravelWell Center, is preparing to travel to Hawaii to visit his parents, who would be at risk for severe disease from the coronavirus. He said he plans to take a coronavirus test before he sees them to be extra cautious.
“If you’re visiting some frail family members, be particularly careful before visiting them,” he said. Traveling with kids who are not old enough yet to be vaccinated should also warrant extra care, he said.
Regardless of their own health status, Gronvall said, travelers should keep in mind the most vulnerable people they will be around.
“People should be taking precautions around people they know are immunocompromised,” she said.
And Wu said individuals who are themselves at higher risk should take into account what treatments might be available to them overseas if they were to catch the virus.
“It’s an important consideration, because even if you’re vaccinated and unlikely to die from the infection, if you’re somebody who would try to get those treatments, it may be tricky to travel right now,” he said.
‘I think it’s a pretty low ask to have people test themselves before traveling’
One of the biggest recent changes for travelers has been the decision by several countries to do away with testing before arrival for vaccinated visitors. But experts say it could be wise to take a precautionary test — or to bring tests on a trip.
Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at George Mason University, said it’s a good idea to do “due diligence” before traveling if someone has had recent exposure.
And, she said, travelers should think ahead to the end of their trip; a negative test is required to return to the United States.
“We’re really focused on the destination, but not always the return home, which can be challenging for some,” Popescu said.
Mina said he thinks that testing even before domestic flights, which may not require tests, is a sound practice.
“As long as the tests are available, which they generally are … I think it’s a pretty low ask to have people test themselves before traveling,” he said.
Mina said it especially makes sense to take a test when traveling from a place with high case numbers to a destination with very low numbers. He also suggested bringing a test along “just because.”
“If you land somewhere and two days in, scratchy throat and sniffles, you may want to know, 'Was this covid? Did I pick this up?” he said.
‘A booster shot is definitely a good idea’
Experts say travelers should be up to date with their vaccinations, which means getting a booster once eligible.
“The real advice for travelers is no matter what, vaccination is by far … the most important thing you can do,” Wu said. “And clearly the booster makes a big difference.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccine can wane over time, especially in older adults. Clinical trials have shown that a booster helped prevent severe disease, the agency said.
“A booster shot is definitely a good idea,” Gronvall said. “And if somebody has already gotten omicron, I would wait for a couple of months and then get a booster.”
‘It really depends a lot on the place’
Instead of treating every destination the same, travelers should consider the situation where they’re going, Gronvall said, and whether case numbers are high. In some parts of the world, vaccination numbers are low, and the disease is still spreading.
“It really depends a lot on the place,” she said.
Popescu said travelers can look at data from the CDC, World Health Organization, Johns Hopkins covid-19 tracker and regional public health bodies. Currently, the CDC has more than half the world’s destinations under its highest warning category.
“Even if restrictions are relaxed, if you are still seeing substantial community transmission, you want to be aware of that,” she said.
Popescu added: “If you’re indoors in an area with low community transmission, I think that’s very different than indoors in a very crowded space where you’re still seeing a lot of community spread.”
‘Mix and match as needed’
While some travelers might want to make hard and fast rules about safety precautions, experts emphasize that people can layer on the tools they have amassed over the past two years as the situation demands.
“Masking, avoiding crowded areas, these are all tools we can use and mix and match as needed,” Wu said.
Mina said he is “choosing actively not to go to really packed places.” But if it made sense to go to dinner for a business meeting, he would. Decreasing risk as much as possible — even if not 100 percent of the time — can still be beneficial, he said.
“It doesn’t have to be an on-off thing,” Mina said.
‘It is going to come back’
As countries and states relax some rules, experts warn that travelers should expect restrictions to return if the pandemic takes another turn for the worse.
Mina said authorities should create dynamic policies that address the reality of the virus in real time — whether that’s easing rules when cases are low or reinstating them when infections spike.
“This virus is going to turn out to be seasonal; it is going to come back,” he said.
Wu said that means there will be times to take more precautions and times that travelers can let their guards down a bit.
“We’re not going back to the previous normal,” he said. “I think the new normal is using these tools to help protect ourselves.”
He and others warned that there could always be new variants, though Wu said the hope is that they would not be more threatening as the world gains more immunity.
“There are no guarantees, as much rampant transmission as we have around the world, that we won’t have to learn additional letters of the Greek alphabet,” Gronvall said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Catholics priests can’t say ‘We baptize.’ But God is more forgiving than sticklers.
A Phoenix pastor erred in administering the sacrament. As with much in the church, the gravity of the mistake varies among the faithful.
Occasionally baffling rules are a mainstay of the Catholic Church. (iStock)
By Lawrence Downes
Lawrence Downes is a writer and editor in New York.
Here’s one you maybe didn’t see coming: the possibly thousands of Catholics who didn’t grow up Catholic at all. They were parishioners of the Rev. Andres Arango, a pastor in Phoenix who for decades botched baptisms by using the wrong word in the rite.
Instead of saying, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” Arango said, “We baptize you,” which — as his parishioners learned from their bishop last month — was horribly wrong.
Why, you ask. In Catholic teaching, a priest stands in for Jesus Christ. The words he uses in baptism are the ones Jesus left as explicit instructions to his disciples for building his church. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican body that arbitrates these things, set the stage for this drama when it declared last June that baptisms with “we” language so fundamentally rewrote the script that they had to be done over. Saying “we” — presumably out of a desire to be inclusive, communal, meaning all of us folks here in the church and the wider community — was not how Jesus said or meant it, so in Arango’s baptisms, God essentially didn’t show up. The divine grace just wasn’t there. The baptisms not only were “illicit,” meaning not allowed, they were “invalid.” They never happened.
Because the church considers baptism necessary for salvation, the implications are grave.
The news from Phoenix has caused anguish, confusion and ridicule. The pastor has resigned. The diocese is urging parishioners to check their records, contact their pastors and redo the sacraments if necessary. Some Catholic sticklers are saying, smugly: Those are the rules. Others are asking: Really now?
Catholic bishops and priests, I need to know how you’ll fix the church you broke
As with many Catholic things, it’s complicated. Here is a secular metaphor: You hit the ball over the fence, propel your body around the bases and glide over home plate. Who cares if your foot didn’t actually touch rubber?
Maybe nobody. But if the other team notices and complains, the umpire can call you out. If you're lucky, you’ll be able to go back, make it right and score the run. Unless you are already in the dugout, in which case it’s too late.
To be Catholic is to confront legalisms such as these, the things that have to be done right or not at all, things that are done and cannot be undone. You might call yourself a lapsed, former, recovering or simply — as I do — a bad Catholic, but to the church you are still one of theirs, if you’re baptized. I think of the fugitive priest in Graham Greene’s novel “The Power and the Glory,” on the run in Mexico during the anticlerical purge of the 1930s, who can’t say Mass. Not because he has fathered a child, is a weak, miserable human being or is about to be executed, but because he has no more wine. (“It had gone down the dry gullet of the Chief of Police.”)
A priest needs wine — real wine, made from grapes, with a measurable alcohol content — to turn into the blood of Christ during the Mass, where Catholics eat Christ and drink his blood, executing their faith with a literalness that you may find baffling, or bracing, or both. “It is the center of existence to me,” Flannery O’Connor wrote of the Eucharist. “All the rest of life is expendable.” If the sacrament were only a symbol, O’Connor once said to Mary McCarthy and Robert Lowell, “to hell with it.”
The tragedy for the faithful in Phoenix, San Diego and other places Arango worked at is that Catholic baptism is not rocket science. It’s so simple that in emergencies a layperson, even a non-Catholic, can do it. You just have to use the right words.
Some Catholic hard-liners are taking the wrong lesson from this calamity — that parishioners need to monitor priests from the pews for inclusive language. They think this is only about the incantation and about owning the libs. These are the textual hard-liners who are flexible when it suits them. They hear Jesus say, blessed are the peacemakers, and think he is endorsing firearms. As for welcoming strangers at the border and not killing prisoners with lethal injections — both explicit instructions from multiple popes, citing Jesus’ authority — they hear those commands not at all.
Five myths about Catholics
As the sticklers are preening and cynics are cackling, regular folks are agonizing. It’s appalling that the burden falls so heavily on the faithful instead of the local church and the bosses in Rome. It’s a perplexing situation, but I trust the Jesuits when things get tricky. The Rev. Thomas Reese, the Jesuit journalist, saw this coming when he wrote last year that Vatican literalists were treating the baptismal text like a computer password.
“It was a mistake and a pastoral catastrophe,” he wrote. “It would have been better to declare the formula illicit but valid.”
But laws have loopholes, and here is a big one. The church acknowledges that God is not bound by any sacrament, meaning — to state the blindingly obvious — the Creator has final cut on this movie. Reese, sensibly, counsels us to give God the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, God willing, the Phoenix faithful will be fine. They can go back and touch the plate if they can, but maybe they shouldn’t worry too much. It hinges on a mysterious question: Will God overlook this mistake and embrace the blameless faithful anyway, or will he be a jerk about it? | null | null | null | null | null |
John Durham, shown in 2006. (Bob Child/AP)
Two weeks ago, it was the idea that the Biden administration was sending crack pipes to addicts across the country — a claim that the Washington Free Beacon reported had been confirmed by an anonymous administration official. The claim was stated as fact by oodles of congressional Republicans and was even the subject of newly introduced legislation.
The latest follows a strikingly similar pattern, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler summarizes. Special counsel John Durham had issued a filing with some intriguing allegations: that a tech executive tied to the Clinton campaign “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP” — that is, the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Durham said access to the data had been “exploited” “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
Despite that, and despite the fact that Durham never said there was spying on the Trump White House, the march to scandal resumed. It was repeatedly stated as fact — often not even qualified as a possibility or even a likelihood — that the Clinton campaign had spied on Trump’s White House. And there’s little sign of any backpedaling.
Perhaps nobody has gone further than Fox and its prime-time lineup, though. On Sunday night, weekend host Steve Hilton stated, “After Trump became president, they hacked the White House.” Sean Hannity added Monday that “without a doubt, unequivocally, the Trump campaign — their campaign, their transition team, even the Trump White House … was spied on by the Clinton campaign.”
Despite Monday bringing both the New York Times fact check and a filing from defendant Michael Sussman stating that the time period was in fact during Obama’s White House, the effort continued apace. Hannity declared Tuesday that the effort was to “mine from Trump Tower and even the Trump White House to smear Donald Trump.”
What comes next is utterly predictable. If conservative media even acknowledges Durham debunked their claims — which is a big “if” given Durham did so somewhat indirectly — the argument will be that, okay, maybe there wasn’t spying on Trump in the White House, but what about collecting data on Trump Tower! (Nevermind that calling this “infiltrating” or “spying” or “hacking” is highly suspect, given the type of data collected.)
Which, okay, we can debate whether that’s a good idea just as we can debate whether lines might have been crossed by those trying to probe Trump’s connections with Russia. But we should at least start with a base-level understanding of what is and isn’t actually being alleged or in evidence. And for two weeks running now, certain people have been pretty uninterested in being at all discerning about that — both before and after their read on the situation has been shot down. | null | null | null | null | null |
But Mr. Snyder, widely regarded as a bad owner, does not deserve the state’s largesse. He has been accused of sexual harassment, triggering inquiries both by the NFL and Congress, which is probing the NFL’s handling of the matter. His franchise was fined $10 million by the NFL after a workplace misconduct investigation. In interviews with The Post, more than 100 current and former employees have accused him of presiding over an organization in which women were exploited and marginalized. | null | null | null | null | null |
Matt Herbst recently left an Ohio Apple Store for another job in part for that reason. After starting there five years ago, he earned a shot at what the company calls a “career experience,” a six-month stint at Apple’s headquarters in California. But the store wouldn’t allow him to go, he said, because of a worker shortage caused by the pandemic. Herbst, now 24, detailed his experience at Apple in a recent blog post. | null | null | null | null | null |
Pete Hoener, Washington’s tight ends coach since 2020, is retiring after more than 45 years of coaching. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
The Washington Commanders announced Friday that longtime tight ends coach Pete Hoener has decided to retire after more than 45 years of coaching at the college and pro level. The team is expected to hire Juan Castillo, the former Chicago Bears offensive line coach, as his replacement, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.
Hoener’s retirement is, so far, the only coaching change for Washington after it finished 7-10 last season. But the loss is a significant one.
Hoener, 70, followed Ron Rivera to Washington in 2020 after spending nine seasons with him with Carolina, where he helped Greg Olsen become one of the game’s top tight ends. Olsen was the first tight end in NFL history to have three consecutive 1,000-yard receiving seasons and the first in Carolina history to have as many as 10 100-yard games.
Before his stint with Carolina, Hoener helped develop San Francisco 49ers tight ends Vernon Davis and Delanie Walker — one a first-round pick, the other a sixth-rounder who developed into a Pro Bowl player.
Described by players as both a tough coach and a father figure, Hoener helped turn a depleted tight ends corps into one of Washington’s more reliable and promising position groups. His style was old-school, with “colorful language,” as he described it, with an eye toward developing “complete” tight ends.
“When you demand excellence of a player on everything he does each and every time, and you teach him to detail his work and that it’s part of taking ownership of his career,” he said last June, “that’s just my way to emphasize all those points.”
A tight end and defensive end at Bradley, Hoener began his coaching career as an assistant at the University of Missouri before eventually moving into the pro ranks as the tight ends coach for the then-St. Louis Cardinals in 1985.
From 1987 to 2000, he was a college assistant at Purdue, Texas Christian, Iowa State and Texas A&M before returning to the NFL as the Cardinals’ tight ends coach in 2001. He spent a season as the Bears’ offensive line coach in 2004, then headed west to work with the 49ers.
With Washington the past two seasons, he took a group that lost Davis to retirement and Jordan Reed to free agency and helped it thrive. Logan Thomas, a former fourth-round quarterback, emerged as the leader of the unit and finished his first full season as a starting tight end ranked among the top 10 at his position in many statistical categories.
Last season, Hoener also helped to develop Ricky Seals-Jones, a former wide receiver, into a red zone threat, and he taught the game to Sammis Reyes, a former Division I basketball player, almost from scratch. For hours in the 2021 offseason, after Washington signed Reyes to a three-year deal based primarily on his size and potential, Hoener and Reyes were holed up at the team’s Ashburn, Va., training facility studying the basics of football.
“He’s amazing,” Reyes said. “He took the time to meet with me alone, to teach me the game every weekend for like seven weekends straight over the summer. We were in the facility, just studying. Just us two, no one else. This is something that no one knows and no one saw. He took the time to teach me the game, step by step. He broke down the game for me to the most basic level, and he realized there are a lot of gaps of information that I just didn’t know at the time.
“I respect him so much just because he took the time, his own time. He didn’t have to do that for me.”
Virginia legislature has bipartisan support to build stadium complex for Commanders
Washington now turns to Castillo, with a deal that is expected to become official next week.
Castillo, 62, spent the past two seasons as the Bears’ offensive line coach. He also spent two seasons (2017-18) as the offensive line coach for the Buffalo Bills, who are led by General Manager Brandon Beane and Coach Sean McDermott. Rivera worked with Beane and McDermott with Carolina, and he has since said that the Bills’ remodel is one he has emulated while trying to revamp Washington’s roster.
Castillo also worked alongside Rivera in Philadelphia from 1999 to 2003, when Rivera was the Eagles’ linebackers coach and Castillo their offensive line coach. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Carnival cruise ship Valor heads up the Mississippi River in New Orleans, on April 8, 2020, during the pandemic. (David Grunfeld, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate via AP)
“The decision to suspend a search-and-rescue case is never one we come to lightly,” Chief Warrant Officer Tricia Eldredge, Command Duty Officer at Sector New Orleans, said in a statement late Thursday night. “We offer our deepest sympathies to the family during this difficult time.”
Lupoli said the woman was traveling with her husband on the Carnival Valor ship, which departed Saturday from New Orleans for a five-day cruise to Mexico. It returned Thursday to its home port. Lupoli said the Carnival’s CARE team is providing support to the woman’s husband, adding that the crew’s thoughts are with the family. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police identified a woman who was fatally shot earlier this month in her car in Northeast Washington. (iStock)
D.C. police have identified a woman who was killed in a homicide earlier this month in Northeast Washington.
Officials said the victim was Pamela Thomas, 54, of Northeast. She was fatally shot around 3 p.m. on Feb. 9 in the 500 block of Division Avenue NE.
Authorities said officers responded to that area and found she had been shot inside a vehicle. She was taken to a hospital where she later died.
A nearby surveillance camera captured a view of one of the suspects. D.C. police said a reward of up to $25,000 is being offered for information that leads to an arrest and conviction in the case. | null | null | null | null | null |
NEW YORK — We’ve seen her on the legal drama “All Rise’’ originally on CBS and “First Wives Club” for BET+, but Ryan Michelle Bathe’ has jumped to the top of the marquee as a star of “ The Endgame ” on NBC, debuting Monday.
The series co-stars Morena Baccarin (“Homeland,” “Deadpool,” “Gotham”) as Elena Federova, an international arms dealer who in the pilot has just been captured. Federova is always at least one step ahead of everyone else, so even in custody she’s got the upper hand. The only person who comes close to figuring her out is Bathe’s Val Turner of the FBI, a buttoned-up, by-the-book agent. Val’s hit a rough patch because her estranged husband, a former federal agent, was caught taking drug money — and she turned him in.
That two women are the stars of this thriller series for network television is “a huge step,” acknowledges Bathe’.
Playing this character, says Bathe’, “is very bleak in many ways because she is so isolated and so lonely and you have to feel that. From ‘action’ to ‘cut’ it’s high tension and there’s nothing to break it. We don’t get a chance to breathe on this show, and that’s what makes it good.”
Bathe’ is the opposite of Val, she’s upbeat, animated and very relatable. She jokes that getting exercise is largely off the table lately because she would have to wake up too early.
Production on ‘The Endgame” is also in New York, keeping her from her family in Los Angeles. Bathe’ is married to “This is Us” star Sterling K. Brown and they have two sons, Andrew and Amare’.
By returning to New York, Bathe’ has “the thing that I said I always wanted.” She has fond memories of walking around the city, but “it never occurred to me that I only did that in late spring, summer and fall. I completely blanked about the winter.”
Bathe’s mother is actor/singer Clare Bathe’ — who recorded the hit song “There But for the Grace of God Go I” in 1979 with her group Machine.
“I grew up on stages,” said Bathe’. “I grew up backstage. Theater was something that I grew up with.”
With both parents in showbiz, Bathe’ says her sons are showing signs that entertainment is in their blood. | null | null | null | null | null |
The fear of the banana republic is hardly an idle one — and here Trump is a central figure, too. He has boasted of his willingness to go that route: In 2016, he ran by pledging that he intended to use the power of federal law enforcement to help his friends and pay back his enemies. His rallies routinely erupted with chants of “lock her up,” directed at his opponent, Hillary Clinton. When as president he told then-FBI Director James Comey that he should be “letting Flynn go,” he was doing as he had promised, using the presidency to try to save an ally from criminal investigation. Trump sees the law and law enforcement as a weapon: He wielded it to protect himself and rout his foes, as when his attorney general William P. Barr ordered the violent breakup of peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrations near Lafayette Square. Trump has said that if he gets a second term, he would pardon hundreds of violent insurrectionists charged in the attack on the Capitol. More recently, his remarks about the investigation his administration began under special counsel John Durham suggest that he is still game to go after foes by wildly accusing them of crimes. Trump continuously mischaracterizes the Durham investigation as having shown that Clinton’s aides “spied” on his campaign and his presidency, and he issued a statement saying that “in a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.” This was “treason at the highest level,” he said.
But the far graver peril in this situation is inaction, a paralyzing refusal to hold Trump criminally liable for his behavior. The country has seen what happens when lawlessness triumphs; when some citizens feel they can do pretty much what they want with impunity. As historian Eric Foner has pointed out, in 1873, in reaction to the election of a biracial government in Colfax, La., a White mob assaulted the county courthouse, murdered a group of African Americans and seized control of the town government without substantial consequences. In 1874, in New Orleans, a white supremacist organization known as the White League tried to topple the state government (U.S. troops at least suppressed this riot). In 1898, following Reconstruction, armed Whites overturned a duly elected biracial government in Wilmington, N.C. Because there was no law enforcement, no accountability and no consequences, such violence was condoned, sanctioned by the state and some leaders — which thus empowered anti-democratic forces for decades across the Deep South and elsewhere. (One of the impeachment charges against Andrew Johnson said he had fomented post-Civil War white supremacist violence in New Orleans and Memphis.) | null | null | null | null | null |
The thorniness of those issues contrasted with the uplifting simplicity of what Sui said of competitors Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov, who stand in second after a smashing 84.25. “I think it’s a wonderful thing,” Sui said, “to compete with each other and we are improving because of each other.”
Even the idea that Sui and Cong led after the short program at PyeongChang 2018, and finished with a silver to the German team of Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot, fades here. “I think each competition for us is different,” Sui said, “and we have different expectations, but this time the Olympics is held in Beijing and it’s completely different for us because we are competing in our home country.” | null | null | null | null | null |
World Stage: Crisis in Ukraine with Lithuania Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte
Lithuania is a Baltic republic of 2.8 million people that gained independence in 1991 after half a century under Soviet rule. On Thursday, Feb. 24 at 9:00 a.m. ET, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius speaks with Lithuania’s Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte about what is at stake for her country and the region in the current crisis between Ukraine and Russia. | null | null | null | null | null |
In a letter to Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), U.S. Archivist David S. Ferriero wrote that officials had “identified items marked as classified national security information within the boxes” at Mar-a-Lago, and had been in touch with the Justice Department over the matter.
Ferriero’s letter, though, provides the first official confirmation of classified material being in the boxes, and is likely to reignite calls that the Justice Department investigate to see how the information got out of secure facilities, and who might have seen it.
Ferriero wrote that the archives was conducting an inventory of the boxes’ content, and expected to complete that process by Feb. 25. He wrote that the archives also had “asked the representatives of former President Trump to continue to search for any additional Presidential records that have not been transferred to NARA, as required by the Presidential Records Act.”
Ferriero wrote that the archives had “identified certain social media records that were not captured and preserved by the Trump Administration,” and also learned that some White House staffers were conducting official business using non-official messaging accounts and not copying those records on to official channels, as they are required to do. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Find a doctor who listens
When a doctor dismisses troubling symptoms without identifying their cause — as was the case for Chloe R. Kral when a physician said, “Some people faint a lot,” as described in the Feb. 15 Health & Science article “’How did no one figure this out?’” — run, don’t walk. Find another doctor.
In my case, 22 years ago, as a premenopausal woman, the words I heard were “Women bleed all the time.” Had it not been for a change of insurance providers and the opportunity to meet a gynecologist who took my symptoms seriously and ordered appropriate tests, I doubt I would be here to write this letter. The diagnosis: ovarian cancer. I was fortunate that it was discovered at a relatively early stage and I had excellent care from three oncologists.
Ms. Kral’s story, too, has a happy ending, but at great cost in every way to her and her family.
Adrienne Dern, Silver Spring | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Highways ruined neighborhoods all across the country
On-ramps for Highway 405 and Interstate 5 in the Eliot neighborhood of Portland, Ore., in July 2021. (Mason Trinca for The Washington Post)
The Feb. 12 Real Estate article “Atoning for the past” was enlightening.
The article mentioned that the objective of expressways built through cities in the 1960s was to improve economic opportunity, and it focused on the financial impact from eminent domain. But the damage wreaked by urban expressways goes well beyond that and continues to this day. These expressways took homes away through eminent domain, segregated cities, destroyed historic housing and neighborhoods, and facilitated “white flight” to the suburbs. This occurred in cities across the country, including D.C. and Flint, Mich., my hometown.
Rosina Perthel, Potomac | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Making sports competition fairer for all
People protest an Indiana bill to ban transgender women and girls from participating in school sports that match their gender identity during a rally in Indianapolis on Feb. 9. (Michael Conroy/AP)
As a former commissioner of a coed soccer program with 1,100 boys and girls, and grandson of Hazel Wightman, winner of the 1924 Olympic tennis gold medals in women’s and mixed doubles, I enjoyed Diana Nyad’s thoughtful Feb. 11 op-ed about the importance of providing everyone with opportunities to participate and chances to triumph in athletic events [“Cisgender women also deserve athletic victory”].
Males have some natural physical advantages after puberty, but athletics could be organized in a way that would work at all levels from secondary school to the Olympics. Sporting events that are now intended for “boys,” “men” and “gentlemen” could allow participation by everyone without regard to gender and might be better described as “open.” Events for “girls,” “women” and “ladies” could restrict participation to those born as females to provide a level playing field and give each participant an opportunity to triumph.
Sandy Harlow, Timonium, Md. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Reforming education is harder when battling indoctrinated systems
In his Feb. 15 Tuesday Opinion column, “Imagine if a lemon law penalized schools,” Mitch Daniels addressed what he called the “inadequate performance” of college and university graduates and the very bad “performance record” of high school graduates. He continued to speak of the many graduates “not nearly literate or numerate enough to identify the main idea of a reading passage or to perform basic computations.” What he did not address was the history of K-12 schooling in the United States as it developed from the end of the 19th century up to today.
This is a history of ideas about education and is well documented from the two perspectives: those who support dominant teaching theories and those who disagree. For the first, there are the writings of John Dewey, the best-known spokesperson for existing practices, compiled by Reginald D. Archambault (“John Dewey on Education,” 1964), as well as almost anything coming from the education establishment and the schools of education. The best-known spokesperson for those who disagree is E.D. Hirsch Jr., with “The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them” and others. There are, of course, numerous other publications discussing the weaknesses of dominant ideas. While teaching in a public high school, I learned that it is impossible to question prevailing doctrines because they are presented as being “best for the children.” I suggest that Mr. Daniels as well as any who share his viewpoint inform themselves about the history of U.S. public school education over the past hundred years and more.
Susan Toth, Alexandria
Though I agree with the majority of Mitch Daniels’s column, I believe he missed one important point about warranties: If I purchase a lawn mower, there is an expectation that I will put oil and gas into the mower and handle it properly. When parents send their children to school, they are expected to support and encourage their children. Don’t expect the school systems to teach children to read if there is not a support system at home.
Joseph Koch, Moseley, Va. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Solving the Ukraine crisis
People protest Russian threats against Ukraine at a monument in Solidarity Square in Gdansk, Poland, on Feb. 16. (Piotr Wittman/EFE/Shutterstock)
Regarding the Feb. 16 front-page article “Biden: Russian pullback unclear”:
Ukraine should be fast-tracked as a full member of the European Union, along the lines of ex-Warsaw Pact and Baltic states in the immediate post-Cold War period.
Russian President Vladimir Putin truly fears Ukraine being fully integrated into European political, social and economic institutions, not any illusory expansion of NATO’s military arm. Ukrainian integration would have the salutary effect of forcing E.U. nations to take tangible steps to guarantee their own security. For starters, they could take charge of ensuring Ukraine’s borders through military monitoring and other confidence-building measures.
The United States should welcome the assertion of a European security and defense identity. Geostrategically, Ukraine can never be part of NATO’s defensive alignment.
Robert Rudney, Washington
The writer retired in 2012 as senior adviser to the U.S. Department of the Air Force.
The autocratic ruler of a large and once-dominant European nation that has lost its empire but is dreaming of a return to former glories threatens to crush a newly independent but far smaller neighbor with overwhelming military force on the pretext of “protecting” an ethnic minority there, with which the larger nation claims kinship based on their common language and cultural heritage. Sound familiar? See Adolf Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland, with its large German-speaking population, from Czechoslovakia in 1938. The rest of Europe went along for the sake of “peace in our time.” Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.
Joel Hoffman, Alexandria
As diplomats from most countries depart Kyiv, again a tyrannical dictator is about to make the case that “might makes right” [“Biden warns Putin of ‘severe costs,’“ front page, Feb. 13]. Despite assurances otherwise, the United States and its allies will essentially stand by and watch a fledgling pro-Western democracy fall for lack of a credible deterrent short of global nuclear war.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter decided to defer production and deployment of the “neutron bomb” tactical nuclear weapon despite NATO’s decision to accept it. This was a direct result of a June 1977 Post article by Walter Pincus. Although President Ronald Reagan resumed production, President George H.W. Bush canceled the program and ordered all ground-based battlefield tactical nuclear weapons removed. Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine inherited tactical nuclear weapon arsenals from the Soviet Union. Russia might still have up to 6,000 such weapons.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton persuaded Ukraine to dismantle all of its nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet Union, likely tactical as well as strategic. This was in exchange for security assurances from the United States, Britain and Russia.
Gary Gilbert, Potomac
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s miscalculation has come back to haunt him. He thought his threat to invade Ukraine would keep Ukraine from fulfilling his worst nightmare: joining or becoming a de facto member of NATO.
Instead, it seems to have had an opposite effect: drawing Ukraine and the Atlantic alliance nations closer.
Mr. Putin underestimated the power that negative world opinion, backed by the threat of multinational military resources, could have on him and Russia as a result of his action against Ukraine.
The United States marshaled world opinion and the threat of military intervention against Mr. Putin. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s willingness to put the crucial natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany at risk must prove to Putin that Germany is strongly behind the Atlantic alliance’s opposition to a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Ben Lacy, Washington | null | null | null | null | null |
LANDOVER, MD - FEBRUARY 4: A large crowd of fans showed up on a cold damp night to take part in the Washington Commanders ÒPark-N-Party to celebrate the team’s new brand identity. The fan had several activities to experience such as meeting former players viewing the new helmets and uniforms along with the team’s three Super Bowl trophies. The event was held in one of the parking lots at FedEx Field on February 4, 2022 in Landover, MD . (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
The staff of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) is involved in building an incentive package. His administration already proposed spending $1.2 billion through the stadium authority this year to upgrade facilities and keep the Orioles in Camden Yards and the Ravens in M & T Bank Stadium for years to come.
“All those jurisdictions are amazing leaders and partners to us,” team President Jason Wright said earlier this month during a public interview with the Economic Club of Washington. “Like I said, our biggest thing is we can listen to everybody about what their goals are try to figure out where we fit. That’s our only goal.”
The Commanders’s lease for the county-owned land beneath FedEx Field obligates them to play there through the 2027 season, but the team has sought to replace the outdated facility for years.
The team is currently subject to an inquiry from Congress over allegations of a hostile workplace culture. The National Football League announced earlier this month it will launch an investigation of sexual misconduct allegations against Snyder. That follows the league’s $10 million fine year last year for fostering a culture in which sexual harassment, bullying and intimidation were commonplace. | null | null | null | null | null |
National Archives confirms classified material was in boxes at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence
In a letter to Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), U.S. Archivist David S. Ferriero wrote that officials had “identified items marked as classified national security information within the boxes” at Mar-a-Lago and had been in touch with the Justice Department over the matter.
Ferriero’s letter, though, provides the first official confirmation of classified material being in the boxes, and it is likely to reignite calls that the Justice Department investigate to see how the information got out of secure facilities, and who might have seen it.
Ferriero wrote that the National Archives was conducting an inventory of the boxes’ content and expected to complete that process by Feb. 25. He wrote that the agency also had “asked the representatives of former President Trump to continue to search for any additional Presidential records that have not been transferred to NARA, as required by the Presidential Records Act.”
Ferriero wrote that the National Archives had “identified certain social media records that were not captured and preserved by the Trump Administration” and also learned that some White House staffers were conducting official business using non-official messaging accounts and not copying those records on to official channels, as they are required to do. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - This undated photo released by the Garland Police Department, shows Richard Acosta Jr., 33, accused of driving his son to and from a Dallas-area gas station convenience store where the 14-year-old is accused of fatally shooting three teens and wounding a fourth. Acosta has been indicted on a capital murder charge on Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. He remained jailed Friday on $3 million bond. (Garland Police Department via AP) (Uncredited/Garland Police Department) | null | null | null | null | null |
In this image provided by the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Christi Grimm is shown in this official undated photo, in Washington. The Senate has confirmed Grimm as the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services. (Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services via AP) (Uncredited/AP) | null | null | null | null | null |
On Feb. 17, Judge Arthur Engoron ordered former president Donald Trump and his two children to comply with New York Attorney General Letitia James's subpoenas. (Reuters)
The Second Circuit has also made clear that there are no “hard and fast rule[s]” governing when and how an adverse inference should be applied in the wake of a Fifth Amendment invocation, and that “how [the court] should react to any motion precipitated by a litigant’s assertion of the Fifth Amendment in a civil proceeding . . . necessarily depends on the precise facts and circumstances of each case.” Thus, the Second Circuit has held that devising an appropriate remedy for a Fifth Amendment assertion should be left to the discretion of the trial court.” | null | null | null | null | null |
A large crowd of fans showed up on a cold damp night to take part in a party to celebrate the new brand and identity of the Washington Commanders. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
The staff of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) is involved in building an incentive package. His administration already proposed spending $1.2 billion through the stadium authority this year to upgrade facilities and keep the Orioles in Camden Yards and the Ravens in M&T Bank Stadium for years to come.
“All those jurisdictions are amazing leaders and partners to us,” team President Jason Wright said earlier this month during a public interview with the Economic Club of Washington. “Like I said, our biggest thing is we can listen to everybody about what their goals are and try to figure out where we fit. That’s our only goal.”
The Commanders’s deal with Prince George’s obligates them to play at FedEx Field through 2027, but the team has sought to replace the outdated facility for years.
The team is currently subject to an inquiry from Congress over allegations of a hostile workplace culture. The NFL announced earlier this month it will launch an investigation of sexual misconduct allegations against Snyder. That follows the league’s $10 million fine year last year for fostering a culture in which sexual harassment, bullying and intimidation were commonplace. | null | null | null | null | null |
The thorniness of those issues contrasted with the uplifting simplicity of what Sui said of competitors Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov, who stand in second after a smashing 84.25. “I think it’s a wonderful thing,” Sui said, “to compete with each other, and we are improving because of each other.”
Even the idea that Sui and Han led after the short program at PyeongChang 2018, and finished with a silver to the German team of Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot, fades here. “I think each competition for us is different,” Sui said, “and we have different expectations, but this time the Olympics is held in Beijing, and it’s completely different for us because we are competing in our home country.” | null | null | null | null | null |
11 missing in ferry fire after hundreds saved
A fire on an Italy-bound ferry has left 11 people missing, authorities said, after hundreds quickly evacuated the burning boat and two others were dramatically rescued hours later.
In the early evening — a point when 278 of the 291 people onboard had already been safely transported to shore — Greek television showed the operation to retrieve two more people who had been trapped in a lower section of the ferry. With the boat still smoldering in the Ionian Sea, a helicopter lowered rescuers by rope onto the ship. The Greek coast guard said soon after that the two passengers — after spending 12 hours on the boat, amid flames and smoke — had been taken by helicopter to a nearby island.
There were conflicting reports about whether any of the other missing 11 might still be onboard.
The fire broke out on the Euroferry Olympia several hours after it had departed the port of Igoumenitsa, en route to the Italian city of Brindisi, in what was supposed to be a nine-hour journey. The cause of the fire was not immediately known, and the weather was good.
Witnesses, speaking to Greek television outlets, said the fire began around 4 a.m. and that the crew quickly tried to alert passengers and bring them to the deck. Passengers were given life jackets and asked to descend steps into rescue boats that crew members had lowered; nobody jumped directly into the sea. From there, coast guard vessels and other nearby ships came to gather the passengers and crew and take them to shore.
— Chico Harlan,
Taliban holds several Brits, American
Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have detained several British citizens and an American, including a former freelance television journalist who has been traveling to Afghanistan for more than 40 years, both governments and a family member say.
A statement from the British government this week said there are a number of British nationals in Taliban custody. While the government refused to release their identities, Hassina Syed, the wife of Peter Jouvenal, a former freelance cameraman-turned-businessman, told the Associated Press that her husband was taken Dec. 13.
Serbian ambassador to Portugal dies in fall from cliff: Serbia's ambassador to Portugal died after falling off a cliff in the beach town of Cascais near Lisbon on Friday, the local fire brigade said. A fire brigade spokesman would not comment on the circumstances that led to the fall, telling Reuters that emergency services rushed to the scene around 1.30 p.m. and found Oliver Antic, 72, alive but badly hurt. Paramedics tried to save him but he died shortly after the rescue, the spokesman said.
U.S. halts aid to Burkina Faso after coup: The United States has halted most U.S. aid to Burkina Faso after determining that the January ouster of President Roch Kabore constituted a military coup, triggering aid restrictions under U.S. law, two sources familiar with the matter said Friday. The State Department made the determination in line with a U.S. law under which U.S. foreign aid — except funds to promote democracy — must be stopped to a country whose elected head of government is deposed by military coup or in a coup in which the military plays a decisive role.
French court finds former soldier guilty in child's killing: A former soldier was found guilty Friday of killing an 8-year-old girl after luring her from a wedding celebration in a French Alpine town. Nordhal Lelandais was sentenced to life in prison with 22 years guaranteed behind bars. He also was found guilty of molesting two cousins, ages 4 and 6 — one of them two weeks before Maelys de Araujo's death in August 2017. | null | null | null | null | null |
The homicide reduction partnership will bring representatives from local and federal agencies to four police areas in Wards 7 and 8
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and Police Chief Robert J. Contee III, left, join Prince George's County leaders earlier this month to highlight safety initiatives. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
D.C. leadership announced a new partnership aimed at reducing violent crime in the two districts that saw 62 percent of all homicides last year, adding yet another crime initiative as public safety becomes a chief concern for District residents.
The program coalesces local and national resources from agencies including the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service, and directs them toward four police areas east of the Anacostia River where homicides were in large part concentrated last year.
“This is significant,” said D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III, who added that each department had committed to assigning agents to the program areas. “That is a significant contribution to this effort.”
The initiative comes at a critical time for D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who is four months out from a crowded Democratic mayoral primary race and under mounting pressure to address violent crime in the city. A Washington Post poll conducted earlier this month found that Bowser’s overall job performance rating had fallen from 67 percent in 2019 to 58 percent — with more than 7 in 10 residents giving her negative marks on reducing crime. Thirty-six percent of respondents said crime, violence or guns was the District’s top problem.
“I don’t spend too much time talking about polls,” Bowser said at a Friday news conference where she announced the new partnership. “The truth is I have enjoyed incredible approval ratings over my course of time of being mayor, and I have done that by doing the job and doing the job well.”
Bowser acknowledged, however, that there is reason for residents to feel less safe than they did before the pandemic. Homicides and carjackings in the city have increased significantly over the last few years, according to data provided by D.C. police. In 2021, there were 426 carjackings and more than 200 homicides for the first time since 2003. The upticks in those particular categories of crime have brought more visible crime to neighborhoods across the city, putting residents on edge when they stop for gas or walk to the grocery store.
The new homicide reduction partnership will replace the Summer and Fall Crime Prevention Initiatives, which were three- and four-month-long programs targeting areas with high density of violence. Contee said the new effort will expand on parts of those initiatives that reduced violent crime and homicides in certain neighborhoods by double-digits over the last ten years. He said it will run from March 1 to the end of the year.
“We must reckon with this gun violence as a city and a nation, that this is a gun culture that is feeding cycles of violence and destroying families,” said Bowser, who vowed to ask the council for enough funding to increase the size of the police force. “We need to make sure, though, that anyone who is willing to pick up a gun and use it against their neighbors know what the consequences are.”
U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew M. Graves said his office was “fully supportive” of the initiative and vowed that officials would do whatever possible to “make sure that 2022 does not look like 2021.”
The partnership is the latest effort by the D.C. government to quell fear and reduce violence in the city. At this time last year, Bowser announced what was supposed to be her signature crime initiative, Building Blocks D.C., which focuses on 151 city blocks particularly vulnerable to gun violence. Officials said Friday that the new partnership would work alongside Building Blocks.
Earlier this month, Bowser and Contee held a news conference at another park to take a stand on carjackings. They partnered with leaders from neighboring Prince George’s County and vowed to share information, strategies and responsibility to put a stop to the crime that has swept both jurisdictions.
D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine, whose office prosecutes all juvenile crimes, began partnering with Prince George’s State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy (D) in January of last year through their Multi-Jurisdictional Crime Task Force. While the U.S. Attorney for D.C. and D.C. Housing Authority, among other agencies, were included in the most recent partnership, Racine’s office was absent on Friday.
Racine’s communications director, Abbie McDonough, said the attorney general was not invited to the news conference nor to participate in the partnership. When asked Friday, Bowser said she would “have to check” to see if he was invited.
Also on Friday, Contee said the police department had identified a suspect in the fatal shooting at the Days Inn hotel on Jan. 27. He also asked for the public’s help identifying a man wanted in connected to the murder of 54-year-old Pamela Thomas, who was fatally struck by a stray bullet Feb. 9 while sitting in the back seat of an SUV next to her 8-year-old son.
“His mom got murdered next to him. Think about that just for a minute,” Contee said, adding there is a possible $50,000 award for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. “It motivates me even more that we got to find this guy.” | null | null | null | null | null |
He lost the presidency and both houses of Congress, and was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors twice. He’s being investigated in New York for business fraud, and in Georgia for election fraud. He’s being probed by the House’s Jan. 6 select committee — and one would hope, ultimately by the Justice Department — for whipping up a riot and attempting a self-coup.
Yet somehow he’s managed to survive, legally, financially and politically. Indeed, astonishingly, he remains far and away the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
That evidence includes a letter that may turn out to be, as a practical matter, the biggest blow Trump has ever suffered, even bigger than his six corporate bankruptcies and two presidential impeachments. A blow dealt not by prosecutors, plaintiffs, politicos or the press — but by his own longtime accountants.
Now the man who long has had trouble finding decent legal representation may find it all but impossible to find new auditors and tax preparers. It’s hard to imagine that any reputable accounting firm will touch his tax returns, let alone fix and bless his financials for a decade or more.
Even if lenders don’t exercise any rights they may have to call in their loans, Trump apparently still needs to refinance hundreds of millions’ worth of them soon. As Trump biographer Timothy L. O’Brien of Bloomberg Opinion puts it, “good luck refinancing your debt when the accountants” — who have just declared a decade of your financials utterly worthless — have “just walked out the door.” | null | null | null | null | null |
A permit that would have allowed owners to move a troubled metal scrapyard from a wealthy area in the city to a working-class area was denied.
General Iron's new facility on the Calumet River on Chicago's Southeast side. (Jamie Kelter Davis/for The Washington Post)
Under pressure from community organizers and their key ally, the Biden administration, the city of Chicago has scrapped an effort by the owners of a metal scrapyard to relocate the troubled facility from a wealthy White part of town to a working-class Mexican American area.
The city’s Department of Public Health announced Friday that a permit application that would have allowed Reserve Management Group to operate in Southeast Chicago has been denied.
In its announcement, the department sided with activists and protesters who said adding a scrapyard to the Southeast, which is already teeming with heavy industry pollution, would be unacceptable.
A Health Impact Assessment conducted in the months leading to the decision found that area communities “rank among the highest in Chicago for vulnerability to air pollution, based on underlying health and social conditions.” Furthermore, the Southeast population has higher rates of chronic conditions such as coronary heart disease and COPD in adults than Chicago overall.
The permit’s denial is at least the second time an intervention by the Biden administration had a direct impact on shutting down a polluting industry as part of an unprecedented bid by the White House to alleviate pollution in disadvantaged communities.
Last year in May, the administration confronted an oil and gas refinery, Limetree Bay in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, after mishaps rained oil on neighborhoods and shrouded them with noxious odors. The facility was ordered to shut.
In the Chicago case, EPA Administrator Michael Regan expressed his concerns about the city’s permit consideration in a letter to Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D). He followed up with a flight to the city to discuss the matter directly with the mayor.
Regan asked Lightfoot to delay her decision until after the city conducted a sweeping Health Impact Assessment. On Friday, the health department said the assessment factored heavily in the denial.
Mexican American activists and environmentalists who opposed the permit with noisy protests and a hunger strike that lasted a month cheered the decision.
But the denial could cost the city. RMG has argued that city officials in the Lightfoot administration, as well as that of her predecessor, Rahm Emmanuel, encouraged the development of a new, $80 million Southside Recycling facility after activist in Lincoln Park forced the old scrapyard to close. A state court is still considering a $100 million lawsuit RMG filed against the city.
“This is a win for every person in the United States of America,” Olga Bautista, executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, said in a telephone interview. “It’s for every front line community in Chicago, and Illinois, and across the country. We didn’t not back down. We stood up for our families and our children.”
“Previous research has clearly detailed the stark environmental injustices facing those who live and work along the Calumet Industrial Corridor,” Alliance for the Great Lakes President & CEO Joel Brammeier said in applauding the decision. “This denial is an important step in addressing and reversing that harm.”
In an interview with The Washington Post last summer, Steve Joseph, RMG’s owner, said, “We never would have closed this purchase and never done this deal and never spent a dime on it if we didn’t have that agreement with the city that took sometime over a year to negotiate.”
Peggy Salazar, the outgoing leader of the network Bautista took over, said the effort to relocate the metal recycler was an insult.
Health officials called their assessment the “most rigorous and comprehensive study of a proposed industrial facility in Chicago to date.” It was necessary, “in part because of the size and nature of the proposed recycling facility, and the fact that public health considerations raised during the permitting process had not been fully addressed during zoning.”
RMG already operated a scrap metal business on land it owned in Southeast before adding the scrapyard and that operation can continue.
The health department said it will continue to monitor RMG’s operations and ensure the company is in compliance with existing permits.
“We are committed to protecting and enhancing the health, environment, and quality of life for all Chicagoans,” said Health Commissioner Allison Arwady. “In an already vulnerable community, the findings from the HIA combined with the inherent risks of recycling operations and concerns about the company’s past and potential noncompliance are too significant to ignore.” | null | null | null | null | null |
If alleged conduct is true, the danger Rhodes poses "cannot be understated,” U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta said. Rhodes is charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, has been charged with seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. (Susan Walsh/AP)
A second federal judge has ordered Stewart Rhodes — founder and leader of the extremist group Oath Keepers — to remain jailed pending trial on a charge of seditious conspiracy for allegedly guiding a months-long effort to use political violence to prevent the swearing-in of President Biden.
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of Washington on Friday denied Rhodes’s renewed request for bond pending a July trial, calling his case the most serious brought against nearly 750 federal defendants charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Rhodes is accused with 10 co-defendants of coordinating travel, organizing into teams, undergoing paramilitary training, and staging weapons, ready “to answer Rhodes’ call to take up arms at Rhodes’ direction” before, during and after Jan. 6 to prevent Biden’s inauguration, the indictment alleges. That day, members of the Oath Keepers forcibly entered the Capitol in helmets and combat gear, confronted police, and moved in two groups toward the U.S. Senate and in search of House Speaker Nancy A. Pelosi (D-Calif.), prosecutors have asserted.
“If the conduct as alleged is true, the danger it poses cannot be understated,” Mehta said.
Rhodes, the most high-profile figure arrested in the probe, allegedly “devised and carried out a plot to prevent the lawful transition of presidential power,” Mehta said in reading aloud a more than hour-long detention order. If freed he could “continue to plot and prepare for political violence that undermines the foundation of our democracy,” the judge said.
“He presents a clear and continuing danger in my view,” Mehta said, that has not been neutralized over the year since the rioting by his cooperation with the FBI, testimony before a House Jan. 6 select investigative committee or refraining from attempting to flee or obstruct justice.
Mehta’s decision came after Rhodes appealed an earlier U.S. magistrate judge’s order that he remain jailed in the first and only seditious conspiracy case brought so far by U.S. prosecutors in the Capitol attack.
Rhodes’s defense attorney, James Lee Bright, argued that his client voluntarily met with FBI agents several times over a year before his indictment, offered to self-surrender, turned over his phone to agents and has no passport.
While he engaged in “certainly a lot of bombastic language,” Bright said, “there was no conspiracy to overthrow the government.”
Who is Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 riot?
Rhodes’ “ability to communicate and organize are his greatest weapon,” and his skill with encrypted communications and access to a network of like-minded individuals made it impossible for any conditional release to ensure the safety of the community, Mehta said.
The rioting at the Capitol followed a rally at the Ellipse, at which Trump urged his supporters to march to Congress. Pro-Trump rioters assaulted more than 100 officers and stormed Capitol offices, halting the proceedings as Congress met to confirm the winner of the U.S. presidential election on Jan. 6 and forcing the evacuation of lawmakers from the House floor.
Rhodes attorneys have said that he and co-defendants were drawn to Washington and gathered that day in helmets and body armor to provide security for VIPS and staged firearms nearby in the hope that President Donald Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, transforming the Oath Keepers into a kind of militia to keep Trump in power despite the 2020 election results.
But Mehta said they could have stayed with those they were protecting and away from the U.S. Capitol during rioting. And before and after that day, Rhodes gave a number of statements contradicting the premise that he was simply waiting on an order from Trump that did not happen, Mehta said, telling followers to prepare to act with or without Trump and following the course of “revolution.”
According to the indictment, Rhodes began preparing followers for violence two days after the election and continued plotting after Jan. 6. On Nov. 5, Rhodes told an invitation-only message group of Oath Keepers leaders: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit,” On Nov. 10, he published a call to action titled, “WHAT WE THE PEOPLE MUST DO,” citing the example of an anti-government uprising in Serbia and storming parliament, the court filing said.
Rhodes warned in December that if President-Elect Biden were to assume the presidency, “We will have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them,” and coordinated the marshaling and stashing of a small “arsenal” of firearms just outside Washington, D.C., for use if needed on Jan. 6, according to charging papers.
In her earlier Jan. 26 detention ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge Kimberly C. Priest Johnson of Texas also pointed to FBI reports that said investigators found weapons in a search of Rhode’s storage unit and evidence he purchased $40,000 of firearms and related gear in the days before and after Jan. 6.
Mehta said he was not concerned with Rhodes First and Second Amendment rights to free speech and to purchase and transport firearms but with his actions, and the timing and amount of gun purchases far in excess of any need for individual self-defense or recreation in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 and through Biden’s inauguration two weeks later.
“Mr. Rhodes is accused not just of speaking. He is accused of taking action, gathering people, and planning to disrupt the lawful electoral certification process … of authorizing, if not outright, ordering conspirators to enter the Capitol in tactical gear,” who moved in two groups, Mehta said. | null | null | null | null | null |
RICHMOND, Va. — Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s pick to lead Virginia’s information technology agency is resigning the post in what an agency spokeswoman called a “personal decision.”
A spokeswoman for the Virginia Information Technologies Agency said Wittmer’s resignation would be effective March 1.
Wittmer’s hiring was announced in late January. He previously served in a similar role in Kansas after a long career in the private sector, the newspaper reported. | null | null | null | null | null |
A permit that would have allowed owners to move a troubled metal scrapyard from a wealthy area in the city to a working-class area was denied
Reserve Management Group's new facility on the Calumet River on Chicago's Southeast Side. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Washington Post)
Under pressure from community organizers and their powerful ally, the Biden administration, the city of Chicago has scrapped an effort by the owners of a metal scrapyard to relocate the operation from a wealthy White part of town to a working-class Mexican American area.
The city’s Department of Public Health announced Friday that a permit application that would have allowed Reserve Management Group (RMG) to operate in Southeast Chicago has been denied.
In its announcement, the department sided with activists and protesters who said that adding a scrapyard to the Southeast Side, which is already teeming with heavy-industry pollution, would be unacceptable.
A health impact assessment conducted in the months leading to the decision found that communities there already “rank among the highest in Chicago for vulnerability to air pollution, based on underlying health and social conditions.” The Southeast’s adult population has higher rates of chronic conditions such as coronary heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease than in the city overall.
The permit’s denial is at least the second time an intervention by the Biden administration has had a direct impact on shutting down a polluting industry. Shortly after his inauguration, President Biden launched an unprecedented bid to alleviate pollution in disadvantaged communities.
Last May, the administration took on an oil and gas refinery, Limetree Bay in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, after mishaps rained oil on neighborhoods and shrouded them with noxious odors. The facility was ordered to close.
In Chicago, EPA Administrator Michael Regan expressed concerns about RMG’s permit application in a letter to Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D). He followed up with a visit to the city to discuss the matter directly with the mayor.
Regan asked Lightfoot to delay her decision until after the city conducted a sweeping health impact assessment. On Friday, the health department said the assessment factored heavily in the permit’s denial.
Mexican American activists and environmentalists who opposed the permit cheered the decision. It affirmed their raucous protests and a hunger strike that lasted a month.
But the denial could cost the city. RMG has argued that officials in the Lightfoot administration, as well as that of her predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, encouraged the development of the new, $80 million Southside Recycling facility after White activists in Lincoln Park forced the old scrapyard to close. A state court is considering a $100 million lawsuit the company filed against the city.
“This is a win for every person in the United States of America,” Olga Bautista, executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, said in a telephone interview. “It’s for every front-line community in Chicago, and Illinois, and across the country. We did not back down. We stood up for our families and our children.”
Research has shown the stark environmental injustices facing those who live and work along the Calumet Industrial Corridor in Southeast, said Joel Brammeier, president and chief executive of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, in a statement that applauded the decision. “This denial is an important step in addressing and reversing that harm.”
In an interview with The Washington Post last summer, Steve Joseph, RMG’s chief executive, said, “We never would have closed this purchase and never done this deal and never spent a dime on it if we didn’t have that agreement with the city that took sometime over a year to negotiate.”
Peggy Salazar, the outgoing leader of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, said the company’s negotiations with the city to relocate a metal recycling operation that was cited for multiple explosions and fires were an insult.
Health officials called their assessment the “most rigorous and comprehensive study of a proposed industrial facility in Chicago to date.” It was necessary “in part because of the size and nature of the proposed recycling facility, and the fact that public health considerations raised during the permitting process had not been fully addressed during zoning.”
RMG already operated a scrap metal business on land it owned in Southeast before adding the scrapyard, and that operation can continue.
The health department said it will continue to monitor RMG’s operations and ensure that the company is in compliance with existing permits.
“We are committed to protecting and enhancing the health, environment and quality of life for all Chicagoans,” said Health Commissioner Allison Arwady. “In an already vulnerable community, the findings from the HIA combined with the inherent risks of recycling operations and concerns about the company’s past and potential noncompliance are too significant to ignore.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“I don’t care how many times I go to the grave site, how many times I pray, how many times I cry,” she said Friday evening. “That is not going to bring my child back, and I go through that every day when these guys still get to talk to their loved ones on the phone.” | null | null | null | null | null |
But Mr. Snyder, widely regarded as a bad owner, does not deserve the state’s largesse. He has been accused of sexual harassment, triggering inquiries both by the NFL and Congress, which is probing the league’s handling of the matter. His franchise was fined $10 million by the NFL after a workplace misconduct investigation. In interviews with The Post, more than 100 current and former employees have accused him of presiding over an organization in which women were exploited and marginalized. | null | null | null | null | null |
Our otherwise divided Congress, meanwhile, has long been united by its willingness to dodge ethics rules and avoid enacting meaningful ethical restrictions. When Congress created the federal conflict of interest law, it conveniently exempted its own members and staffers. There’s nothing stopping a member such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W. Va.) from voting to block an environmental bill that would affect his own investment in waste coal. There’s little stopping other members from making suspiciously timed stock trades after they receive confidential government briefings on market-moving information.
That could change: Congress is poised to ban stock trading by lawmakers, with bipartisan support. But the details are everything. Depending on which of several competing bills prevails, Congress either will take a first step toward creating a real ethics program — or it will give us more window dressing for legalized corruption.
The last time the public similarly demanded a change, Congress pulled a fast one by passing the nearly useless Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (Stock Act). That law did not bar members from owning or trading stocks, which would remove opportunities for insider trading. All it did was shorten the deadline for disclosure. So it’s no surprise this toothless law failed to prevent suspicious trades. In fact, former congressman Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) pleaded guilty to insider trading in 2019. During the pandemic, the Justice Department investigated four senators on suspicion of insider trading related to the coronavirus. Those probes were closed without action, but the appearance of impropriety left a stain. To make matters worse, some in Congress have shown they can’t even be bothered to meet the disclosure deadline. Insider and other news outlets identified 57 members of Congress who failed to fully comply with the disclosure requirements.
Now, a decade after Congress conned the public with the Stock Act, there’s a danger that its members could pass another ineffectual law to make it look as though they’re addressing the public’s concern without having to change their disgraceful behavior. Several proposals on the table fall short.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has introduced a bill with a cumbersome enforcement mechanism that seems designed to fail. His bill would entitle a member to a vote by the full Senate or House before any fine is collected — a process bound to end in partisan side-taking. And even if their colleagues vote to punish members, the proposal is toothless: While Hawley’s bill authorizes a fine, it doesn’t specify how much to collect, so the ethics committees may lack authority (or, at least, the nerve) to levy a significant sum. The bill does require members to forfeit profits or tax deductions from unauthorized transactions, but only sales generate profits or deductible losses, so it wouldn’t prevent suspicious purchases. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) has introduced his own weak ban that doesn’t apply to members’ spouses and lets lawmakers keep stocks they owned before taking office. Passing a bill with any of these deficiencies would be worse than doing nothing at all, because it would once again let Congress hide behind the illusion of reform.
In contrast, Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) introduced a stronger proposal, the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act. It improves on the Trust In Congress Act, previously introduced by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who was the first and most vigorous champion of a stock trading ban, and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.). These plans would require members and their spouses to divest several types of assets or put them in blind trusts they don’t control, which would foreclose opportunities for insider trading.
Ossoff’s bill has a strong enforcement mechanism, applies to spouses and dependent children, and contains a crucial disclosure requirement. It would empower each ethics committee to assess a fine equal to a month’s salary and to keep assessing successive fines in that amount for each month the member remains in noncompliance. A member would have no right to demand the full chamber vote on whether to dismiss the fine.
It would close an existing loophole, too: Under an existing law, members can put assets, rather than just cash, into blind trusts. Lawmakers are notified when the trustee sells an asset, but the public is not, giving members more insight into their conflicts of interest than the public has. Ossoff would address that problem by requiring all sale notices to be released publicly. The public would finally know which members have truly eliminated their conflicts of interest and which are only pretending not to know what they own. The disclosure is important, because it would give the public a tool in pressuring members to sell off conflicting assets instead of just concealing them in blind trusts.
Last week, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) introduced another bill, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would bar members and their spouses not only from trading but also from owning stock in large corporations (unless as part of a diversified mutual fund). This approach would meaningfully improve the situation, too. Although it goes further than the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act by prescribing the strong medicine of divestiture for stocks, rather than the creation of a blind trust, it doesn’t cover as many types of assets as Ossoff and Kelly’s bill would. The two bills are therefore complementary and could be combined to magnify their effect on government ethics.
In truth, we’d like to see an even stricter ban — one that applies not only to members of Congress, their spouses and their minor children but also to their senior staffers, the president and vice president, political appointees and judges, and which limits the holdings they can own to diversified mutual funds and U.S. Treasury bonds (with narrow exceptions applicable only in unusual circumstances).
But some of the proposals before lawmakers now are a strong first step in the right direction. After passing these bills, or an amalgam of them, Congress could use the momentum to establish the stricter ban we propose. The public has entrusted government leaders with great power; it’s time those leaders realized that they must put the public above all else. | null | null | null | null | null |
February 13, 2022|Updated today at 2:24 p.m. EST
Six months before the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, George Fitch, a former U.S. diplomat, found himself in Kingston, Jamaica, for a wedding when he met with tennis buddy and Seattle businessman William Maloney. They drank. They talked. And they concocted an idea to try to send Jamaica to the Winter Games, using bobsled as the vehicle to accomplish that feat because, to Fitch, it resembled Jamaica’s popular Pushcart Derby and the country’s track and field pedigree lent itself to a sport that required power and pace.
“This Jamaican bobsled team was a real thing,” former coach Howard Siler said in “Breaking the Ice,” a 2014 documentary about the team. “It was the real deal. It was blood, sweat and tears — historic athletes.”
“What saved me was going to Kenny Barnes,” Fitch told ESPN, referencing the former Jamaican military officer. “He didn’t laugh this thing off and dismiss me out of hand. He had Major George Henry from the Jamaica Defence Force there. When I said I needed speed to push, he looked over at Henry and said, ‘Hey, George, who’s our current sprint champion?’ And he said Mike White. Likewise with Devon Harris, who was 800 meters. I said it took good hand-eye coordination to drive the sled. He said, ‘Like a helicopter pilot?’ So, same thing — he turns to George and says, ‘Who’s our helicopter pilot?’ He says Dudley Stokes. So there you had the three principal members of the Jamaica bobsled team.”
A colonel identified Harris during a cross-country race. He finished 14th out of 40, but his superior liked what he saw and pushed him to try out.
Stokes played soccer and ran track as a boy, dreaming of representing Jamaica on the international stage, but he abandoned those hopes when he joined the military at 18. There, he learned to fly planes and helicopters. After a friend explained bobsledding, he was intrigued.
“The most interesting thing to me was that [the sled] had to be driven,” Stokes said in a recent telephone interview. “I said to myself: ‘That will be interesting. Can I drive this?’ ”
Two months after Fitch hatched the idea for a Jamaican bobsled team — and four months before the 1988 Winter Games — he flew the athletes to Lake Placid, N.Y., where Siler taught them how to walk on the ice and push their borrowed sled. When the group returned to Kingston, they continued to train at the army base with a makeshift sled, practicing for three hours every weekday afternoon and another six hours each Saturday morning.
Per International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation requirements, the team had to participate in a World Cup event to qualify for the Olympics. Five weeks before the Games, the Jamaicans competed in a two-man World Cup race in Innsbruck, Austria, finishing better than four teams.
In Calgary, the Jamaican bobsledders received a warm reception during the Opening Ceremonies. They finished 30th out of 40 teams in the two-man bobsled. They entered the four-man race for which they hadn’t practiced — and crashed, preventing them from finishing.
The bobsledders felt dejected. Fitch thought they were dead. But when the team emerged from the overturned sled to walk it across the finish line, the crowd greeted it with cheers. To his surprise, Stokes said, Jamaica was in a frenzy.
Four years after their Olympic debut, Harris, White and the Stokes brothers went to the 1992 Olympics in Albertville. A four-man team of the Stokes brothers, White and Ricky McIntosh placed 25th.
The Stokes brothers also guided the four-man team that finished 14th at the 1994 Games in Lillehammer — besting the United States, Russia and France, among others. They returned with Harris to Nagano in 1998, although they never again reached their 1994 Olympic apex.
Members of the 1988 team remained involved with the country’s bobsled program by fundraising or supporting current athletes. Dudley Stokes coached the bobsled program in 2002, when Jamaica fielded a two-man team in Salt Lake City. He helped manage the Jamaica Bobsleigh Federation in 2006, although the country didn’t participate in the Turin Games, and returned to help Jamaica’s first women’s team — the tandem of Carrie Russell and Jazmine Fenlator-Victorian — place 18th at the 2018 Games in PyeongChang.
Stokes was less involved during this Olympic cycle, but he helped recruit Shanwayne Stephens, the pilot of Jamaica’s current four-man team, which Saturday will be the country’s first to compete in the Olympics since Nagano. Stephens and Nimroy Turgott competed in a two-man sled. Fenlator-Victorian, who qualified for the women’s monobob, also competed in Beijing, as did Benjamin Alexander, the country’s first Olympic Alpine skier, whom Stokes mentors.
Since the 1988 team members retired from competition, a new generation of Jamaican Winter Olympians has sought to build on the team’s foundation. It’s in that evolution that Stokes sees the 1988 team’s legacy kept alive — and where current Olympians base their ambitions and expectations. | null | null | null | null | null |
11 missing in Greek ferry fire after hundreds rescued — including two who were trapped for hours
ROME — A fire on an Italy-bound ferry has left 11 people missing, authorities said, after hundreds quickly evacuated the burning boat and two others were dramatically rescued hours later.
In the early evening — a point when 278 of the 291 people on board had already been safely transported to shore — Greek television showed the operation to retrieve two more people who’d been trapped in a lower section of the ferry. With the boat still smoldering in the Ionian Sea, a helicopter lowered rescuers by rope onto the ship. The Greek coast guard said soon after that the two passengers — after spending 12 hours on the boat, amid flames and smoke — had been taken by helicopter to a nearby island.
A video taken before sunrise and shared by several Greek news outlets showed fire raging across much of the 600-foot ferry, as one of the crew members said, “Mayday, mayday.”
The ferry — part of the Grimaldi Lines group, which operates a network of routes across the Mediterranean — was also carrying some 180 cars and trucks, according to Italy’s ANSA news agency.
Grimaldi, the ferry operator, said in a statement that it was offering “complete assistance” to those who had been rescued.
It said there was no detectable fuel spills or environmental damage that resulted from the fire. The operator said the vessel had undergone an inspection two days earlier that yielded a “positive” outcome. | null | null | null | null | null |
The NFL has hired prominent attorney Mary Jo White to conduct its investigation of the latest sexual harassment allegations against the Washington Commanders and their owner, Daniel Snyder.
The league confirmed the selection of White, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, after informing the House Committee on Oversight and Reform that White would lead the investigation.
White led the NFL’s investigation of allegations of workplace misconduct against former Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson. Her investigation concluded there was no information to discredit the claims made against Richardson. The NFL fined Richardson $2.75 million in 2018 and he sold the franchise to David Tepper.
Lisa Banks, an attorney representing many former team employees, said D.C. attorney Beth Wilkinson had “earned the trust of dozens of victims and witnesses who provided her with evidence of pervasive sexual harassment and abuse” during the previous investigation of the team’s workplace. Banks said in a statement that she and her clients had “understood that Ms. Wilkinson would also conduct the investigation into Tiffani Johnston’s allegations … given her unique knowledge of the Commanders organization, its culture of sexual harassment, and Dan Snyder’s credibility.”
Johnston was among six former employees who appeared on Capitol Hill during the roundtable to tell lawmakers about their experience working for the team, as the panel investigates the team’s workplace culture and the NFL’s handling of allegations of pervasive sexual misconduct at the franchise. The committee has continued to press the league for documents and information related to Wilkinson’s investigation.
In that case, the NFL told Wilkinson not to submit a written report and did not release her findings publicly, leading to criticism by former team employees and other observers. Goodell and the league took that approach to avoid violating promises of confidentiality made to some witnesses who spoke to Wilkinson.
Last week, the Commanders initially announced that they would investigate the latest allegations arising from the Capitol Hill roundtable. Later that day, the NFL said the league — not the team — would conduct the investigation. Goodell said in Inglewood, Calif., at his annual news conference during Super Bowl week, that it would not have been proper for the team to investigate itself.
Following Wilkinson’s investigation, the NFL announced last July that the Washington team had been fined $10 million and that Snyder’s wife, Tanya, the team’s co-CEO, would assume responsibilities for the franchise’s day-to-day operations for an unspecified period. | null | null | null | null | null |
Spring came Friday morning, but soon left town
Spring was here on Friday. Or rather, it was here in the morning, but then it left.
In the morning we reached 68 degrees in Washington. At 19 degrees above average, that qualified as spring in February.
But spring in Washington can be elusive and fickle, especially in February, when it is also precocious and premature.
So by 1 p.m. the mercury had skidded to a more typical Feb. 18 reading of 45, and in that zone it spent most of the daylight hours. On Friday, we might wish to say, spring was gone with the wind.
Of all of Friday’s meteorological components, the wind seemed least likely to be ignored. As of 4 p.m. the day’s average wind speed clocked in at more than 20 mph.
At its peak it blew at 33 mph, and at least once gusted to 49.
That seemed to squelch spring.
It seemed to provide an almost ceaseless hum, thump and thud in our ears.
Pauses did appear.
But then, like an earnest and unfulfilled orator, the wind seemed to add an “and furthermore,” and its battering resumed.
The sun certainly did its part to provide a warm experience.
It was the bright sun of a day almost exactly two-thirds of the way from the darkness of the winter solstice to the buoyant hope of the spring equinox.
It was not the sun that could be blamed for Friday’s chill. | null | null | null | null | null |
The NFL hired prominent attorney Mary Jo White to conduct its investigation of the latest sexual harassment allegations against the Washington Commanders and their owner, Daniel Snyder.
White led the NFL’s investigation of allegations of workplace misconduct against former Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson. Her investigation concluded there was no information to discredit the claims made against Richardson. The NFL fined Richardson $2.75 million in 2018, and he sold the franchise to David Tepper.
Johnston was among six former employees who appeared on Capitol Hill during the roundtable to tell lawmakers about their experiences working for the team as the panel investigates the team’s workplace culture and the NFL’s handling of allegations of pervasive sexual misconduct at the franchise. The committee has continued to press the league for documents and information related to the previous investigation of the team’s workplace conducted by D.C. attorney Beth Wilkinson.
Lisa Banks, an attorney representing many former team employees, said Friday that Wilkinson had “earned the trust of dozens of victims and witnesses who provided her with evidence of pervasive sexual harassment and abuse” during the previous investigation. Banks said in a statement that she and her clients had “understood that Ms. Wilkinson would also conduct the investigation into Tiffani Johnston’s allegations … given her unique knowledge of the Commanders organization, its culture of sexual harassment, and Dan Snyder’s credibility.”
In that case, the NFL told Wilkinson not to submit a written report and did not release her findings publicly, leading to criticism by former team employees and other observers. Goodell and the league said they took that approach to avoid violating promises of confidentiality made to some witnesses who spoke to Wilkinson.
Last week, the Commanders initially announced that they would investigate the latest allegations arising from the Capitol Hill roundtable. Later that day, the NFL said the league — not the team — would conduct the investigation. Goodell said in Inglewood, Calif., at his annual news conference during Super Bowl week that it would not have been proper for the team to investigate itself.
Following Wilkinson’s investigation, the NFL announced in July that the team had been fined $10 million and that Snyder’s wife, Tanya, the team’s co-CEO, would assume responsibilities for the franchise’s day-to-day operations for an unspecified period. | null | null | null | null | null |
Victim had a gunshot wound, according to the police.
A man was fatally shot Friday night in Prince George’s County, the police said.
The man was found around 7:50 p.m. in the 2500 block of Kent Town Place, after a shooting was reported there.
The man was found outdoors. He had a gunshot wound and died at the scene, police said.
The site is south of Landover Road and east of Route 50 in the Kentland area of the county. | null | null | null | null | null |
Battlefield junior Camille Spink won the 50- and 100-yard freestyle races, breaking her state meet record in the latter. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Junior Camille Spink has raced in six individual events at the Virginia Class 6 swim meet throughout her career at Battlefield. Each year, she has made her competition look more and more pedestrian — she has never lost an individual race at those meets.
This year, she finally took her team to the mountaintop as the Bobcats won the state title Friday at Jeff Rouse Swim and Sport Center in Stafford.
“She has been phenomenal ever since she made it to high school,” said Coach Jay Thorpe, who has coached Spink for the past decade.
Just two points separated Battlefield (233) and second-place Yorktown (231), matching the closest girls’ margin in Class 6 meet history.
Spink, a University of Tennessee commit, secured first-place times in the 50- and 100-yard freestyle races, breaking her state meet record in the latter (48.13 seconds). She also swam a dominant opening leg in Battlefield’s 200-medley relay victory (1:41.48), which likewise set a meet record.
South County senior Katherine Helms was the meet’s best long-distance swimmer, winning the 200 and 500 freestyle races by multi-second margins. McLean sophomore Catherine Hughes also won both of her individual events, the 200 individual medley and 100 breaststroke.
Patriot boys healthy and strong
Before Friday’s meet, Patriot Coach Lisa Bussian said that almost every one of her team’s top swimmers tested positive for the coronavirus or had to quarantine for possible exposure at some point this season. But finally healthy at the state meet, the boys’ team, led by seniors Landon Gentry and Joshua Hochard, captured its first state title since 2017.
“They were just little bumps in the road,” Gentry said. “We always come back from those.”
The win was especially meaningful for Gentry, who won the 200 individual medley and set a Class 6 meet record in his 100 butterfly victory (47.73). His brother Austin was on that 2017 team.
The Pioneers were sharp early and bookended the day with wins in the opening and closing relays, including a state record in the final 400 freestyle relay (3:05.69).
Yorktown sophomore Nolan Dunkel set a Class 6 meet record in the 100 backstroke (48.81) as his team finished third behind Patriot and Thomas Jefferson.
Friday’s meet, which featured spectators after a closed-off spectacle in 2021, also offered seniors such as W.T. Woodson’s Aiken Do (50 freestyle winner) an opportunity to experience fanfare and reflect on their four years one final time.
The Cavaliers’ seniors, for instance, lived out their final meet through three songs: “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne, “Shake It” by Metro Station and “Everytime We Touch” by Cascada. The tracks, which Do called “absolute bangers,” were staples during the season’s pre-meet bus rides and dance circles and represented a rejuvenated spirit and rekindled energy between the boys’ and girls’ teams after they spent a year apart in 2021.
“We’re more than a swim team. We’re a family,” Do said. “It’s not just a group you see in the hallways or the people you swim or dive with. ... This year, it all just meant a lot more.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Meyers Taylor, No. 1 in the World Cup standings this season in two-woman, is the only American driver ranked in the top three in any team bobsled event heading into Beijing. (She is also ranked No. 1 in monobob, which will be making its Olympic debut in Beijing.) Hunter Church, No. 10 in four-man, is the only male driver ranked in the top 10.“
For Team USA, van den Berg’s motivating principle will be efficiency. In Beijing, U.S. bobsledders will be racing on BMW/Designworks sleds built last decade at a cost of about $250,000 each, in part because each piece — cowling, chassis, runners, steering mechanisms — were built in different places, by different firms, and assembled piecemeal. Once van den Berg’s sled-building project gets underway post-Beijing, that will all change. | null | null | null | null | null |
Three shot in Prince George’s incident, police say
A teenager was critically wounded, according to police.
A teenager was critically wounded Friday evening in a triple shooting in the Marlow Heights area of Prince George’s County, the police said.
The gunfire broke out around 5:30 p.m. in the 4200 block of 28th Avenue, according to Cpl. Antonia Washington, a police spokeswoman.
The critically wounded teenager was described as male, but no age was available at the time of publication. A woman was also wounded, the police said, and the third victim was described as male, but no age was given for him.
The gunfire was reported near the Marlow Heights shopping center, close to St. Barnabas Road and Branch Avenue, according to police. | null | null | null | null | null |
A previous version of this article incorrectly said that Whoopi Goldberg was suspended by “The View” after saying “the Holocaust isn’t about race” during an interview on “The Late Show.” Goldberg made the comment on “The View,” where she is a co-host. She was suspended by ABC, not the show itself. And the full name of the late-night show she appeared on is “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” The article has been corrected.
But it’s not just discrete events we’re hoping our televised leaders will help us process: It’s the nuanced, ongoing impact of the whole of history on our current state, including the goings-on of the show being hosted. As Donald Trump’s presidential term melted America’s political compass, Jimmy Fallon’s “The Tonight Show,” with its timeless escapism, slid to third place in the premier late-night time slot, behind a relatively radicalized Jimmy Kimmel and the linguistic dexterity and ethical rectitude of Stephen Colbert. There seemed to be a shift in balance from what we wanted (a respite from reality) and what we needed to feel safe (an acknowledgment of reality). More hosts began tackling subjects that had previously been beyond their scope — or, at least, beyond broad public scrutiny. Chris Harrison led 19 years of “The Bachelor” and its spinoffs mostly without incident, until the host felt compelled to defend a Season 25 finalist after old photos surfaced of her attending a party that celebrated the antebellum South — while he was being questioned by the first Black Bachelorette in the franchise’s history. The search for Alex Trebek’s replacement on “Jeopardy!” after the host’s death turned out to be a rigged game, with executive producer Mike Richards naming himself quizmaster before writer Claire McNear uncovered a podcast of Richards’s from 2013 and 2014, on which Richards did things like call his co-host “booth slut” and use crude stereotypes about Jews, Asians and poor people. In late January, Whoopi Goldberg was suspended by ABC after saying “the Holocaust isn’t about race” on “The View.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Coppin State hosts Norfolk State following Tate's 20-point showing
BOTTOM LINE: Norfolk State faces the Coppin State Eagles after Dana Tate scored 20 points in Norfolk State’s 69-66 victory against the Delaware State Hornets.
The Eagles have gone 2-4 in home games. Coppin State is fourth in the MEAC in rebounding averaging 32.5 rebounds. Tyree Corbett leads the Eagles with 9.2 boards.
The Spartans are 8-1 against MEAC opponents. Norfolk State ranks second in the MEAC shooting 34.4% from 3-point range.
The teams play for the second time this season in MEAC play. The Spartans won the last meeting 84-77 on Jan. 22. Jalen Hawkins scored 20 points to help lead the Spartans to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Nendah Tarke is averaging 13 points, 6.6 rebounds and 3.1 steals for the Eagles. Corbett is averaging 14.1 points over the last 10 games for Coppin State.
Joe Bryant Jr. is shooting 36.2% from beyond the arc with 1.7 made 3-pointers per game for the Spartans, while averaging 16.2 points, 5.2 rebounds, 3.2 assists and 1.5 steals. Hawkins is averaging 12.8 points over the last 10 games for Norfolk State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Columbia Lions (4-19, 1-10 Ivy League) at Dartmouth Big Green (6-15, 3-7 Ivy League)
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Dartmouth -11.5; over/under is 138.5
BOTTOM LINE: Dartmouth plays Columbia in a matchup of Ivy League teams.
The Big Green are 3-4 on their home court. Dartmouth has a 4-6 record in games decided by 10 points or more.
The Lions are 1-10 against conference opponents. Columbia is 2-15 in games decided by at least 10 points.
The teams play for the second time this season in Ivy League play. The Big Green won the last meeting 76-63 on Jan. 29. Aaryn Rai scored 20 points points to help lead the Big Green to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Rai is averaging 11 points and 6.8 rebounds for the Big Green. Brendan Barry is averaging 13.7 points over the last 10 games for Dartmouth.
Geronimo Rubio De La Rosa is averaging 12.5 points and 3.3 assists for the Lions. Cameron Shockley-Okeke is averaging 11.6 points over the last 10 games for Columbia. | null | null | null | null | null |
Flowers, Long Island Sharks take on the Mount St. Mary's Mountaineers
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Mount St. Mary’s -1; over/under is 136.5
BOTTOM LINE: NEC foes Mount St. Mary’s and LIU square off on Saturday.
The Mountaineers have gone 7-4 in home games. Mount St. Mary’s is 2-1 in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Sharks are 9-6 in NEC play. LIU is eighth in the NEC shooting 30.9% from downtown. Devin Nicholson paces the Sharks shooting 60% from 3-point range.
The teams play for the second time this season in NEC play. The Sharks won the last matchup 74-57 on Jan. 7. Tyrn Flowers scored 23 points to help lead the Sharks to the win.
Tre Wood is averaging 6.2 points and 3.6 assists for the Sharks. Flowers is averaging 19.1 points over the last 10 games for LIU. | null | null | null | null | null |
Gardner-Webb visits Presbyterian following Terry's 21-point game
BOTTOM LINE: Gardner-Webb visits the Presbyterian Blue Hose after Lance Terry scored 21 points in Gardner-Webb’s 81-70 loss to the Winthrop Eagles.
The Blue Hose have gone 6-6 in home games. Presbyterian ranks fifth in the Big South in team defense, giving up 67.0 points while holding opponents to 45.2% shooting.
The Runnin’ Bulldogs are 9-4 in conference matchups. Gardner-Webb ranks fifth in the Big South with 8.6 offensive rebounds per game led by Ludovic Dufeal averaging 2.0.
The teams meet for the second time in conference play this season. The Runnin’ Bulldogs won 64-61 in the last matchup on Jan. 13. D’Maurian Williams led the Runnin’ Bulldogs with 16 points, and Rayshon Harrison led the Blue Hose with 21 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Harrison is averaging 17 points for the Blue Hose. Winston Hill is averaging 11.7 points, 5.7 rebounds and 1.8 steals over the past 10 games for Presbyterian.
Williams is shooting 41.3% and averaging 14.3 points for the Runnin’ Bulldogs. Terry is averaging 2.1 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Gardner-Webb. | null | null | null | null | null |
N.C. A&T visits Campbell after Henderson's 22-point game
BOTTOM LINE: Campbell plays the North Carolina A&T Aggies after Cedric Henderson Jr. scored 22 points in Campbell’s 71-67 loss to the Radford Highlanders.
The Fighting Camels are 8-3 on their home court. Campbell is 4-2 in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Aggies have gone 6-7 against Big South opponents. N.C. A&T has a 5-13 record against opponents above .500.
The teams square off for the second time this season in Big South play. The Fighting Camels won the last matchup 73-72 on Jan. 22. Messiah Thompson scored 20 points points to help lead the Fighting Camels to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jordan Whitfield averages 2.0 made 3-pointers per game for the Fighting Camels, scoring 11.6 points while shooting 39.5% from beyond the arc. Henderson is shooting 53.3% and averaging 14.1 points over the last 10 games for Campbell.
Kameron Langley is averaging six points, 4.7 assists and 1.5 steals for the Aggies. Demetric Horton is averaging 10.7 points and 6.5 rebounds over the last 10 games for N.C. A&T. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mikaela Shiffrin’s last shot at medal delayed, as winds push event to Sunday
High winds Saturday made the conditions too perilous to stage the mixed team parallel race. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
YANQING, China — Alpine skiing purists may scoff at the mixed team parallel race — first tacked onto the end of the Olympic program four years ago, and featuring competitors from different nations racing a giant slalom course side by side — as a gimmicky contrivance that had surely been dreamed up by some soulless television programmer.
But the medals given out at the end of it shine as brightly as those from any other race. And so, from a skier’s perspective — particularly, one suspects, a skier hoping to salvage an otherwise painful Olympics — if it was worth racing it Saturday, it must be worth just as much Sunday.
Wind gusts of up to 40 mph Saturday at National Alpine Skiing Center forced officials to postpone by a day the mixed team race — known in America as Mikaela Shiffrin’s sixth and final shot at an Olympic medal here. It’s now scheduled to be held, conditions permitting, Sunday at 9 a.m., local time.
“It was pretty clear with the wind gusts, it wasn’t possible to stage the race,” Jenny Wiedeke, communications director of the International Ski Federation (FIS), said Saturday following the postponement announcement. “ … When you have air fences flying, then it’s a pretty clear decision.”
It took about 75 minutes from the postponement announcement for organizers to declare the race’s rescheduling, during which time officials from FIS, the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) and the Olympic Broadcast Service (OBS) also considered canceling the race altogether.
Among the factors complicating the rescheduling decision: The weather forecast for Sunday was no better than the one for Saturday, and some teams were scheduled to fly out of Beijing late Saturday night or early Sunday.
According to Olympics historian Bill Mallon, only once in the history of the Winter Olympics had an event been canceled: In 1928 in St. Moritz, Switzerland, the men’s 10-kilometer speedskating race was called off when warm weather melted the ice.
This year’s mixed team race first appeared to be in some trouble Friday night, when the event, originally schedule for 11 a.m. Saturday, was moved up an hour because of the winds in the forecast.
But skiers, officials, volunteers and media members arriving at the National Alpine Skiing Centre on Saturday morning were greeted with an inauspicious sight: Multiple segments of the facility’s gondola system were shut down because of the winds, forcing everyone into shuttle buses for a slow, perilous climb up a road full of hairpin turns to the top.
Soon, the scheduled 10 a.m. start was pushed back by an hour, then another — and then, at around 11:30 a.m., local time, it was postponed.
As a result, Shiffrin’s last chance at redeeming her 2022 Olympics would have to wait another day.
Shiffrin came to Beijing as both the most accomplished skier in the field — with 73 World Cup victories and three Olympic medals in her career — and the most ambitious: No other skier at these Olympics competed in all five individual events, and few would have even considered it.
But that aggressive schedule only served to place Shiffrin’s failures here under an every-other-day spotlight. By Thursday, she had nothing tangible to show for those five races, which included a ninth-place finish, an 18th and three separate races — in fact, her best events: the slalom, giant slalom and Alpine combined — in which she failed to make it to the finish line.
Shiffrin’s sixth and final try at a medal would be in the mixed team race, where she is listed on the Team USA roster along with Tommy Ford, A.J. Hurt, Paula Moltzan, River Radamus and Luke Winters. A U.S. Ski and Snowboard spokesperson confirmed the roster remains intact for the rescheduled race.
The 15 teams are put into a bracket (with top-seeded Austria receiving a first-round bye), and four skiers from each country, two male and two female, are chosen in each round to race a counterpart from the opposing team. Each heat is worth a point, and the team with the most points at the end of the four heats moves on. In the event of a 2-2 tie, the aggregate times are used to determine the winner.
If a bit convoluted and contrived, the event nonetheless holds the promise of medals at the end. And if by the end of Sunday, Shiffrin has secured the fourth of her Olympic career, there is little doubt she will have considered it worth the effort. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Spartans are 8-5 against Big South opponents. South Carolina Upstate has a 4-11 record against opponents over .500.
The teams square off for the second time this season in Big South play. The Spartans won the last meeting 70-57 on Jan. 22. Jordan Gainey scored 17 points to help lead the Spartans to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Tahlik Chavez averages 2.8 made 3-pointers per game for the Buccaneers, scoring 11.7 points while shooting 35.2% from beyond the arc. Buskey is shooting 32.7% and averaging 10.7 points over the past 10 games for Charleston Southern.
Gainey is shooting 52.8% from beyond the arc with 2.3 made 3-pointers per game for the Spartans, while averaging 13.3 points. Bryson Mozone is averaging 16.8 points and 6.4 rebounds over the last 10 games for South Carolina Upstate. | null | null | null | null | null |
Central Arkansas hosts Eastern Kentucky after Moreno's 24-point performance
BOTTOM LINE: Eastern Kentucky plays the Central Arkansas Sugar Bears after Michael Moreno scored 24 points in Eastern Kentucky’s 80-76 overtime victory against the North Alabama Lions.
The Sugar Bears have gone 6-3 at home. Central Arkansas is 3-13 in games decided by at least 10 points.
The Colonels have gone 4-9 against ASUN opponents. Eastern Kentucky scores 80.3 points and has outscored opponents by 5.4 points per game.
The teams meet for the second time in conference play this season. The Sugar Bears won 79-72 in the last matchup on Jan. 5. Darious Hall led the Sugar Bears with 21 points, and Cooper Robb led the Colonels with 18 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Camren Hunter is averaging 14 points for the Sugar Bears. Eddy Kayouloud is averaging 13.9 points and 5.7 rebounds while shooting 52.5% over the last 10 games for Central Arkansas.
Robb averages 2.1 made 3-pointers per game for the Colonels, scoring 10.0 points while shooting 37.4% from beyond the arc. Jomaru Brown is shooting 35.4% and averaging 15.0 points over the last 10 games for Eastern Kentucky. | null | null | null | null | null |
Colorado State faces UNLV following Roddy's 31-point outing
BOTTOM LINE: Colorado State visits the UNLV Rebels after David Roddy scored 31 points in Colorado State’s 83-68 win over the New Mexico Lobos.
The Rebels have gone 10-3 in home games. UNLV is fourth in the MWC with 14.2 assists per game led by Jordan McCabe averaging 4.9.
The Rams are 11-3 against MWC opponents. Colorado State is 3-0 in one-possession games.
TOP PERFORMERS: Royce Hamm Jr. is averaging 8.4 points and 9.3 rebounds for the Rebels. Hamilton is averaging 17.7 points over the last 10 games for UNLV.
Roddy is scoring 19.9 points per game with 7.8 rebounds and 3.0 assists for the Rams. Stevens is averaging 9.9 points and 2.2 rebounds while shooting 52.3% over the past 10 games for Colorado State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cowart leads Grambling against Southern after 20-point performance
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Southern -9.5; over/under is 143.5
BOTTOM LINE: Grambling takes on the Southern Jaguars after Shawndarius Cowart scored 20 points in Grambling’s 71-70 loss to the Prairie View A&M Panthers.
The Jaguars are 8-0 in home games. Southern is 4-7 against opponents over .500.
The Tigers are 7-5 in SWAC play. Grambling is sixth in the SWAC scoring 65.7 points per game and is shooting 41.0%.
The teams square off for the second time in conference play this season. The Tigers won the last meeting 83-77 on Jan. 15. Cameron Christon scored 23 points to help lead the Tigers to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Tyrone Lyons is shooting 52.0% and averaging 13.9 points for the Jaguars. Terrell Williams Jr. is averaging 11.8 points over the last 10 games for Southern.
Tra’Michael Moton is averaging 10.7 points, 3.2 assists and 1.5 steals for the Tigers. Christon is averaging 15.6 points and 3.5 rebounds while shooting 45.2% over the last 10 games for Grambling. | null | null | null | null | null |
Flagg leads Sam Houston against UT Rio Grande Valley after 20-point outing
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: UT Rio Grande Valley -6; over/under is 145
BOTTOM LINE: Sam Houston faces the UT Rio Grande Valley Vaqueros after Savion Flagg scored 20 points in Sam Houston’s 75-71 overtime victory against the Abilene Christian Wildcats.
The Vaqueros have gone 4-8 at home. UT Rio Grande Valley has a 1-2 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Bearkats are 11-3 in conference matchups. Sam Houston has a 2-1 record in games decided by less than 4 points.
The teams meet for the second time in conference play this season. The Bearkats won 86-78 in the last matchup on Jan. 4. Flagg led the Bearkats with 27 points, and Justin Johnson led the Vaqueros with 22 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Johnson is shooting 51.3% and averaging 18.0 points for the Vaqueros. Xavier Johnson is averaging 11.6 points over the last 10 games for UT Rio Grande Valley.
Jaden Ray is averaging 8.6 points and 4.1 assists for the Bearkats. Flagg is averaging 18.7 points and 6.6 rebounds over the past 10 games for Sam Houston. | null | null | null | null | null |
Florida State visits No. 9 Duke after Evans' 28-point game
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Duke -15; over/under is 142.5
BOTTOM LINE: Florida State visits the No. 9 Duke Blue Devils after Rayquan Evans scored 28 points in Florida State’s 81-80 win against the Clemson Tigers.
The Blue Devils are 14-2 on their home court. Duke is 17-4 against opponents over .500.
The Seminoles are 7-8 in ACC play. Florida State is eighth in the ACC scoring 71.7 points per game and is shooting 43.6%.
The teams square off for the 17th time this season in ACC play. The Seminoles won the last meeting 79-78 on Jan. 19. Caleb Mills scored 18 points to help lead the Seminoles to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Paolo Banchero is averaging 16.9 points and 8.5 rebounds for the Blue Devils. Mark Williams is averaging 8.3 points over the last 10 games for Duke.
Evans is averaging 8.4 points and 1.5 steals for the Seminoles. Mills is averaging 8.5 points and 1.1 rebounds while shooting 44.4% over the last 10 games for Florida State. | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: Georgia Tech takes on Pittsburgh in ACC action Saturday.
The Panthers have gone 8-8 in home games. Pittsburgh has a 2-9 record in games decided by 10 points or more.
The Yellow Jackets are 3-11 in ACC play. Georgia Tech is seventh in the ACC shooting 35.8% from deep. Jalon Moore paces the Yellow Jackets shooting 100% from 3-point range.
TOP PERFORMERS: John Hugley is shooting 44.0% and averaging 14.3 points for the Panthers. Ithiel Horton is averaging 1.6 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Pittsburgh.
Michael Devoe is averaging 18.6 points, 3.3 assists and 1.5 steals for the Yellow Jackets. Jordan Usher is averaging 9.5 points over the last 10 games for Georgia Tech. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hampton visits Longwood following Godwin's 27-point game
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Longwood -14.5; over/under is 137.5
BOTTOM LINE: Hampton faces the Longwood Lancers after Marquis Godwin scored 27 points in Hampton’s 93-82 victory against the North Carolina A&T Aggies.
The Lancers have gone 14-1 at home. Longwood is second in the Big South in rebounding with 33.4 rebounds. Isaiah Wilkins leads the Lancers with 5.8 boards.
The Pirates are 4-9 in Big South play. Hampton is 3-9 in games decided by at least 10 points.
The teams square off for the second time in conference play this season. The Lancers won the last matchup 73-49 on Jan. 24. Justin Hill scored 20 points points to help lead the Lancers to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Hill is averaging 13.8 points, 3.8 assists and 1.6 steals for the Lancers. DeShaun Wade is averaging 2.7 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Longwood.
Russell Dean is averaging 14.3 points and 3.5 assists for the Pirates. Najee Garvin is averaging 15.2 points over the last 10 games for Hampton. | null | null | null | null | null |
Louisiana plays UL Monroe after Brown's 26-point performance
BOTTOM LINE: Louisiana plays the UL Monroe Warhawks after Jordan Brown scored 26 points in Louisiana’s 78-77 win against the UL Monroe Warhawks.
The Ragin’ Cajuns are 6-6 on their home court. Louisiana has a 2-2 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The Warhawks are 5-10 against Sun Belt opponents. UL Monroe is 4-1 in one-possession games.
The teams play for the second time this season in Sun Belt play. The Ragin’ Cajuns won the last meeting 78-77 on Feb. 18. Brown scored 26 points points to help lead the Ragin’ Cajuns to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Trajan Wesley is averaging 4.7 points for the Ragin’ Cajuns. Brown is averaging 17.1 points and 9.1 rebounds while shooting 55.7% over the last 10 games for Louisiana.
Elijah Gonzales is averaging seven points, 4.5 assists and 1.9 steals for the Warhawks. Andre Jones is averaging 18.7 points over the last 10 games for UL Monroe. | null | null | null | null | null |
Marshall hosts Charlotte after Butler's 21-point showing
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Marshall -2.5; over/under is 149.5
BOTTOM LINE: Charlotte plays the Marshall Thundering Herd after Austin Butler scored 21 points in Charlotte’s 77-67 loss to the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers.
The Thundering Herd have gone 8-7 at home. Marshall allows 76.4 points and has been outscored by 1.9 points per game.
The 49ers are 6-7 against C-USA opponents. Charlotte averages 10.8 turnovers per game and is 7-3 when turning the ball over less than opponents.
The teams square off for the second time in conference play this season. The 49ers won the last meeting 88-64 on Feb. 5. Jahmir Young scored 24 points to help lead the 49ers to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Taevion Kinsey is averaging 19.2 points, 5.2 rebounds and 4.5 assists for the Thundering Herd. Andrew Taylor is averaging 11.9 points over the last 10 games for Marshall.
Young is averaging 19.5 points, 5.6 rebounds and 3.8 assists for the 49ers. Butler is averaging 10.5 points over the last 10 games for Charlotte. | null | null | null | null | null |
New Mexico State visits Grand Canyon following Allen's 20-point game
BOTTOM LINE: New Mexico State visits the Grand Canyon Antelopes after Teddy Allen scored 20 points in New Mexico State’s 75-64 win against the Dixie State Trailblazers.
The Antelopes are 12-1 in home games. Grand Canyon is sixth in college basketball giving up 58.4 points per game while holding opponents to 38.4% shooting.
The Aggies have gone 10-2 against WAC opponents. New Mexico State is fourth in the WAC with 25.1 defensive rebounds per game led by Allen averaging 6.2.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jovan Blacksher Jr. is scoring 16.7 points per game and averaging 2.8 rebounds for the Antelopes. Woods is averaging 13.9 points and 2.2 rebounds over the last 10 games for Grand Canyon.
Allen is scoring 19.8 points per game and averaging 7.3 rebounds for the Aggies. Jabari Rice is averaging 10.4 points and 6.0 rebounds over the last 10 games for New Mexico State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Portland hosts Pepperdine following Mallette's 25-point game
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Portland -8; over/under is 148.5
BOTTOM LINE: Pepperdine visits the Portland Pilots after Houston Mallette scored 25 points in Pepperdine’s 86-66 loss to the Gonzaga Bulldogs.
The Pilots are 9-4 in home games. Portland has a 2-3 record in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Waves are 1-12 against WCC opponents. Pepperdine is seventh in the WCC with 32.0 rebounds per game led by Victor Ohia Obioha averaging 4.8.
The teams square off for the 10th time this season in WCC play. The Pilots won the last meeting 82-63 on Jan. 16. Chris Austin scored 22 points points to help lead the Pilots to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Tyler Robertson is averaging 14.8 points, 6.3 rebounds and 4.2 assists for the Pilots. Austin is averaging 9.1 points over the last 10 games for Portland.
Jan Zidek is scoring 13.1 points per game with 3.9 rebounds and 1.2 assists for the Waves. Mallette is averaging 9.9 points over the last 10 games for Pepperdine. | null | null | null | null | null |
Princeton visits Yale following Gabbidon's 32-point game
Princeton Tigers (18-5, 8-2 Ivy League) at Yale Bulldogs (15-9, 9-1 Ivy League)
BOTTOM LINE: Yale hosts the Princeton Tigers after Jalen Gabbidon scored 32 points in Yale’s 81-72 win against the Pennsylvania Quakers.
The Bulldogs are 9-2 on their home court. Yale ranks sixth in the Ivy League with 7.6 offensive rebounds per game led by EJ Jarvis averaging 2.1.
The Tigers are 8-2 in Ivy League play. Princeton is the top team in the Ivy League with 37.3 points per game in the paint led by Tosan Evbuomwan averaging 1.4.
The Bulldogs and Tigers face off Saturday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Azar Swain is shooting 34.0% from beyond the arc with 2.2 made 3-pointers per game for the Bulldogs, while averaging 18.9 points. Gabbidon is shooting 57.1% and averaging 15.8 points over the last 10 games for Yale.
Ethan Wright averages 2.4 made 3-pointers per game for the Tigers, scoring 14.9 points while shooting 40.1% from beyond the arc. Evbuomwan is averaging 15.9 points, 6.3 rebounds, 4.3 assists and 2.3 steals over the last 10 games for Princeton. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rhode Island visits George Washington after Bamisile's 21-point outing
BOTTOM LINE: George Washington hosts the Rhode Island Rams after Joe Bamisile scored 21 points in George Washington’s 73-52 win over the Duquesne Dukes.
The Colonials have gone 6-4 at home. George Washington gives up 71.2 points to opponents and has been outscored by 4.8 points per game.
The Rams are 4-8 in conference matchups. Rhode Island has a 1-3 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The teams play for the 10th time this season in A-10 play. The Colonials won the last matchup 63-61 on Jan. 22. James Bishop scored 15 points points to help lead the Colonials to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Bishop is shooting 32.5% from beyond the arc with 2.0 made 3-pointers per game for the Colonials, while averaging 17.3 points. Bamisile is shooting 46.2% and averaging 10.8 points over the past 10 games for George Washington.
Makhel Mitchell is averaging 11 points, 5.6 rebounds and 2.8 blocks for the Rams. Makhi Mitchell is averaging 6.1 points over the last 10 games for Rhode Island. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sacramento State plays Idaho State, aims to break road skid
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Idaho State -2.5; over/under is 124.5
BOTTOM LINE: Sacramento State visits Idaho State looking to stop its five-game road slide.
The Bengals have gone 5-6 at home. Idaho State is ninth in the Big Sky in rebounding averaging 29.5 rebounds. Malik Porter paces the Bengals with 4.3 boards.
The Hornets are 2-13 in conference play. Sacramento State is 4-9 in games decided by at least 10 points.
The teams square off for the second time in conference play this season. The Hornets won the last meeting 61-60 on Jan. 28. Cameron Wilbon scored 19 points to help lead the Hornets to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Tarik Cool is scoring 12.1 points per game with 3.2 rebounds and 2.7 assists for the Bengals. Liam Sorensen is averaging 10.2 points and 4.6 rebounds while shooting 38.2% over the past 10 games for Idaho State.
Bryce Fowler is averaging 17 points, 5.3 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 1.6 steals for the Hornets. Zach Chappell is averaging 12.8 points over the last 10 games for Sacramento State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Shaver leads Boise State against Utah State after 20-point game
BOTTOM LINE: Boise State hosts the Utah State Aggies after Marcus Shaver Jr. scored 20 points in Boise State’s 85-59 victory against the Air Force Falcons.
The Broncos have gone 10-3 at home. Boise State is ninth in the MWC with 11.7 assists per game led by Emmanuel Akot averaging 3.0.
The Aggies are 6-8 against conference opponents. Utah State ranks eighth in the MWC allowing 68.1 points while holding opponents to 42.7% shooting.
The teams meet for the 10th time in conference play this season. The Broncos won 62-59 in the last matchup on Jan. 21. Mladen Armus led the Broncos with 22 points, and R.J. Eytle-Rock led the Aggies with 14 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Abu Kigab is averaging 13.7 points and 6.2 rebounds for the Broncos. Tyson Degenhart is averaging 8.6 points over the last 10 games for Boise State.
Steven Ashworth is shooting 37.7% from beyond the arc with 1.8 made 3-pointers per game for the Aggies, while averaging 8.5 points and 3.3 assists. Justin Bean is shooting 48.1% and averaging 10.6 points over the last 10 games for Utah State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Texas A&M-CC hosts Northwestern State following Coleman's 20-point outing
BOTTOM LINE: Northwestern State visits the Texas A&M-CC Islanders after Kendal Coleman scored 20 points in Northwestern State’s 88-64 victory against the Incarnate Word Cardinals.
The Islanders are 8-3 in home games. Texas A&M-CC leads the Southland at limiting opponent scoring, allowing 70.6 points while holding opponents to 42.7% shooting.
The teams square off for the third time in conference play this season. The Demons won the last matchup 90-76 on Jan. 29. Carvell Teasett scored 27 points to help lead the Demons to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Terrion Murdix is averaging 8.8 points, 3.8 assists and 1.7 steals for the Islanders. Isaac Mushila is averaging 14.7 points and 9.9 rebounds over the last 10 games for Texas A&M-CC.
Coleman is scoring 15.4 points per game and averaging 9.4 rebounds for the Demons. Teasett is averaging 13.6 points and 1.5 rebounds over the last 10 games for Northwestern State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Texas A&M visits Vanderbilt following Pippen's 29-point outing
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Vanderbilt -3.5; over/under is 135.5
BOTTOM LINE: Vanderbilt plays the Texas A&M Aggies after Scotty Pippen Jr. scored 29 points in Vanderbilt’s 94-80 loss to the Auburn Tigers.
The Commodores are 9-6 on their home court. Vanderbilt is 7-12 against opponents with a winning record.
The Aggies are 5-8 in SEC play. Texas A&M ranks fifth in the SEC shooting 32.5% from 3-point range.
TOP PERFORMERS: Myles Stute is shooting 43.8% from beyond the arc with 2.1 made 3-pointers per game for the Commodores, while averaging 8.7 points. Pippen is averaging 13 points, 3.6 assists and 1.5 steals over the last 10 games for Vanderbilt.
Quenton Jackson is shooting 43.8% and averaging 13.1 points for the Aggies. Wade Taylor IV is averaging 0.8 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Texas A&M. | null | null | null | null | null |
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