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Texas State hosts Little Rock following Harrell's 21-point game
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Texas State -14; over/under is 131.5
BOTTOM LINE: Texas State hosts the Little Rock Trojans after Mason Harrell scored 21 points in Texas State’s 84-67 victory against the Arkansas State Red Wolves.
The Bobcats have gone 11-1 at home. Texas State is third in the Sun Belt at limiting opponent scoring, giving up 63.5 points while holding opponents to 42.3% shooting.
The Trojans are 3-8 in conference play. Little Rock has a 3-13 record in games decided by 10 or more points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Asberry is scoring 13.6 points per game with 4.5 rebounds and 2.0 assists for the Bobcats. Harrell is averaging 12.3 points and 2.9 rebounds while shooting 50.0% over the last 10 games for Texas State.
Isaiah Palermo is averaging 12.1 points for the Trojans. Myron Gardner is averaging 10.3 points over the last 10 games for Little Rock. | null | null | null | null | null |
Toledo hosts Central Michigan following Miller's 23-point showing
BOTTOM LINE: Central Michigan visits the Toledo Rockets after Kevin Miller scored 23 points in Central Michigan’s 75-70 loss to the Eastern Michigan Eagles.
The Rockets are 10-1 in home games. Toledo is fourth in the MAC at limiting opponent scoring, allowing 69.2 points while holding opponents to 40.3% shooting.
The Chippewas have gone 5-7 against MAC opponents. Central Michigan allows 79.1 points to opponents while being outscored by 13.0 points per game.
The teams play for the 10th time this season in MAC play. The Rockets won the last meeting 82-54 on Jan. 5. Ryan Rollins scored 21 points points to help lead the Rockets to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: JT Shumate is shooting 49.1% from beyond the arc with 2.0 made 3-pointers per game for the Rockets, while averaging 15.2 points and 6.1 rebounds. Rollins is averaging 15.5 points, 5.4 rebounds and 3.5 assists over the past 10 games for Toledo.
Miller is shooting 42.2% and averaging 13.0 points for the Chippewas. Cameron Healy is averaging 2.3 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Central Michigan. | null | null | null | null | null |
UC Davis hosts CSU Bakersfield following McCall's 25-point game
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: UC Davis -5.5; over/under is 131.5
BOTTOM LINE: CSU Bakersfield takes on the UC Davis Aggies after Justin McCall scored 25 points in CSU Bakersfield’s 79-69 loss to the UC Riverside Highlanders.
The Aggies are 5-4 on their home court. UC Davis is sixth in the Big West with 11.6 assists per game led by Ezra Manjon averaging 3.2.
The Roadrunners have gone 1-9 against Big West opponents. CSU Bakersfield is 3-7 in games decided by at least 10 points.
The Aggies and Roadrunners face off Saturday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Manjon is averaging 15.4 points and 3.2 assists for the Aggies. Elijah Pepper is averaging 1.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for UC Davis.
Justin Edler-Davis is averaging 9.4 points and 6.4 rebounds for the Roadrunners. McCall is averaging 11.7 points over the last 10 games for CSU Bakersfield. | null | null | null | null | null |
UC Riverside hosts Cal Poly after Pickett's 21-point outing
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: UC Riverside -10.5; over/under is 123.5
BOTTOM LINE: UC Riverside faces the Cal Poly Mustangs after Dominick Pickett scored 21 points in UC Riverside’s 79-69 win over the CSU Bakersfield Roadrunners.
The Highlanders have gone 8-3 at home. UC Riverside is ninth in the Big West scoring 63.8 points while shooting 42.2% from the field.
The Mustangs are 1-9 in conference games. Cal Poly has a 1-9 record in games decided by at least 10 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Pullin is scoring 13.1 points per game and averaging 5.6 rebounds for the Highlanders. Pickett is averaging 14.8 points and 5.2 rebounds over the last 10 games for UC Riverside.
Kobe Sanders averages 1.1 made 3-pointers per game for the Mustangs, scoring 6.7 points while shooting 32.9% from beyond the arc. Alimamy Koroma is averaging 14.7 points, 7.4 rebounds and 1.8 blocks over the past 10 games for Cal Poly. | null | null | null | null | null |
UIC plays Robert Morris after Franklin's 23-point outing
BOTTOM LINE: UIC takes on the Robert Morris Colonials after Damaria Franklin scored 23 points in UIC’s 88-79 loss to the Youngstown State Penguins.
The Colonials have gone 4-9 at home. Robert Morris is 1-12 against opponents over .500.
The Flames have gone 6-10 against Horizon opponents. UIC gives up 72.7 points to opponents and has been outscored by 2.3 points per game.
TOP PERFORMERS: Spear is shooting 54.7% and averaging 14.3 points for the Colonials. Michael Green III is averaging 1.8 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Robert Morris.
Franklin is scoring 18.0 points per game and averaging 7.1 rebounds for the Flames. Johnson is averaging 13.0 points and 3.0 rebounds over the last 10 games for UIC. | null | null | null | null | null |
Western Kentucky faces Old Dominion following McKnight's 22-point showing
BOTTOM LINE: Western Kentucky takes on the Old Dominion Monarchs after Dayvion McKnight scored 22 points in Western Kentucky’s 77-67 win against the Charlotte 49ers.
The Hilltoppers are 11-4 in home games. Western Kentucky ranks fifth in C-USA with 31.4 points per game in the paint led by Darrius Miles averaging 4.0.
The Monarchs are 5-8 in C-USA play. Old Dominion has a 7-6 record in games decided by 10 or more points.
The teams meet for the second time in conference play this season. The Hilltoppers won 77-60 in the last matchup on Feb. 6. Camron Justice led the Hilltoppers with 18 points, and C.J. Keyser led the Monarchs with 19 points.
Keyser is shooting 42.0% and averaging 14.5 points for the Monarchs. Jaylin Hunter is averaging 0.8 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Old Dominion. | null | null | null | null | null |
Williams leads UAPB against Prairie View A&M after 28-point performance
BOTTOM LINE: UAPB takes on the Prairie View A&M Panthers after Shawn Williams scored 28 points in UAPB’s 74-69 loss to the Alabama A&M Bulldogs.
The Golden Lions have gone 4-5 in home games. UAPB averages 12.9 turnovers per game and is 5-8 when it has fewer turnovers than its opponents.
The Panthers are 6-5 in conference matchups. Prairie View A&M ranks third in the SWAC scoring 29.6 points per game in the paint led by D’Rell Roberts averaging 1.3.
The teams play for the second time this season in SWAC play. The Panthers won the last matchup 75-58 on Jan. 11. Dewayne Cox scored 18 points to help lead the Panthers to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Brandon Brown is averaging 9.1 points, 7.1 rebounds and 1.6 steals for the Golden Lions. Dequan Morris is averaging 18.0 points over the last 10 games for UAPB. | null | null | null | null | null |
Program aims to put GPS-tracking collars on mother bears to help biologists learn more about their species and habits
A female bear cradles one of her young cubs in the spring forest in Virginia. (Bill Lea/Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources)
Try walking into the den of a roughly 200-pound mother black bear while she’s watching and creep close enough to place an orphaned cub next to her. Then, back away slowly and hope she’ll take it in as one of her own.
That’s what a team of wildlife biologists with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) is doing as part of a project near Farmville in central Virginia, as they try to accomplish two goals: place orphaned bear cubs with foster bears, and learn more about the species’ habits and lifestyle.
The black bear population in Virginia has made a comeback, experts said. Instead of being found mainly in the mountainous and southeastern parts of the state near the Great Dismal Swamp, in the last two decades more black bears have been found in the central part of the state.
“There’s still a very healthy population of bears in the mountains but they’re running out of room,” said Katie Martin, a bear biologist for DWR. “So when moms kick those yearlings out, they have to go find their own territory.”
In Virginia, black bears almost went extinct in the early 1900s as they were overhunted, but after limits were imposed on the number that can be harvested, their population has rebounded, Martin said. There are about 18,000 to 20,000 black bears in Virginia.
Martin and her group started a program to learn more about bears and their habits, while also considering if they would be good candidates as foster moms.
They use a collar outfitted with a GPS system to track the bears and learn about their eating habits, movement and reproduction. The collars are typically placed on bears in the summer, which helps biologists find them in the winter when they need to place orphaned cubs — otherwise trying to find a wild bear is like “trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Martin said.
Outfitting a bear with a collar is no easy task.
Wildlife officials set up a “trap” made from large, culvert pipes, then outfitted with doors on each end. They put soft bedding inside, then bait the trap with sunflower seeds covered in molasses or a bit of vanilla.
And they wait.
Once the bear is lured in, the doors go down and she’s caught. They immobilize her with a sedative by using a syringe attached to the end of a pole. Once the bear is asleep, experts take her out of the trap, check her weight and age, then outfit her with the battery-run collar.
Martin said if her cubs are nearby, they usually go up a tree and watch as humans work on their mother. The process takes about 30 minutes.
They then give the bear a “reversal agent” that wakes her before backing away. The mother bear, Martin said, “feels like she’s taking a little nap,” and when she wakes up “she can’t remember anything.”
The batteries in the collar last about two years, at which point the collar falls off. Martin’s team tracks the collar and refurbishes it to use again.
They use wildlife cameras and data collected from the collar to determine if the mom should foster a new cub. “We’re looking to see if she’s in good shape, nice and fat, and we’re watching to see if she can handle another cub,” Martin said.
Experts will track the mother bears that have been collared and place a new cub with her, carefully approaching when she’s in a den with her other cubs.
To put the new cub in the den, Martin said she and her team often wait for a rainy, cold day. She rubs Vaseline on the cub’s head to get rid of any human scent, wraps it in a blanket, tucks it in the bib pocket of her overalls, then quietly places the cub near the den.
“Once that cold air hits the cub, it starts crying and the mother bear’s instinct is ‘There’s a cub crying, I need to take care of it,’ ” Martin said. “She will reach out, pull it into the den and we back out and leave them alone.”
Since Martin and her team started their work, they’ve put collars on nearly 40 bears in five years. They have placed close to 20 cubs with foster mama bears.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, she said, there’s been a rise in the number of cubs brought in by humans. Martin said bears typically run off if they hear a dog barking as a protective mechanism for their cubs. The mama bear’s “thinking, ‘I’ll make the intruder follow me and I’ll come back later to get my cubs,’ ” Martin said. “She’s trying to use herself as a distraction to protect her cubs.”
But humans intervene, Martin said, and people find the cubs and think “they’re crying and they’re cute and alone so they’ll pick them up.” Martin said that’s the “worst thing to do.”
“The female bear is going to come back,” Martin said. “They’re wonderful moms and they’re best defense is to make you follow her and run away.”
Animal sightings are up amid stay-at-home restrictions, but they’ve always been there
Martin said her group works to return cubs to foster moms in the wild because that’s the best place for them to “learn how to be a bear.”
“A mother bear knows where the best blackberries and blueberries are,” Martin said. “In the fall, she’s teaching them where the best acorns are. She teaches them how to dig a den, how to avoid people, where to go so they’re not disturbed, how to climb trees.”
This winter, Martin said, she’s not placed any orphaned cubs in dens — which to her is a victory that the cubs were left alone by humans. She recently checked on a cub she placed last winter with a female bear they named Harrison.
“The cubs looked good and healthy,” she said. “That was a true success.” | 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. 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 are racing largely 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 |
The vice president and secretary of state are both highlighting the U.S. presence at the high-profile event unfolding in the shadow of war. The double billing creates a complicated dynamic.
Vice President Harris speaks Friday during a meeting with the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
MUNICH, Germany — As Vice President Harris met Friday with the heads of Baltic nations at a high-stakes security conference here centered on Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, she made a vow that was equal parts American might and personal promise.
The split screen brought into sharp relief the complex dynamic at the conference as Harris, the senior official and head of the U.S. delegation, shares a double-billing with Blinken, who has known many of the foreign officials here for decades.
While this is Harris’s first visit to the annual Munich conference, Blinken has attended it several times, and his familiarity with the players was evident. He warmly greeted Germany’s new foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, as “my friend.” He held a meeting with Qatar’s foreign minister and discussed how the Gulf state could help in boosting Europe’s energy supply should a Russian invasion of Ukraine lead to a shortage. He hashed out technical issues in meetings with counterparts from Austria, Britain, Germany and France.
Harris is also taking marquee meetings with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. As a groundbreaking leader and a figure of great interest overseas, her picture frequently adorns the conference’s Twitter feed.
“I don’t think there’s any plans to limit or reduce the vice president’s role at the Munich Security Conference or … on the global stage,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Tuesday.
For Harris — a politician widely believed to be a potential heir to Biden but who is relatively inexperienced in international affairs — being front-and-center at Munich offers an opportunity to excel on the international stage, show global leadership and display presidential stature.
Her supporters reject the notion that Harris’s expertise ends at the border. As a senator, she was a member of the chamber’s intelligence committee, and she made several international trips during her tenure as California’s attorney general. Her trip to Munich is the fifth international trip of her vice presidency and the second in less than a month.
Still, Blinken has held senior foreign policy positions in two presidential administrations over the past 20 years. He was staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while Biden was chairman. As secretary of state, he has been managing America’s web of alliances since the Russian crisis erupted, trying to harmonize European countries’ differing priorities and project a united front.
The vice president will face an array of pressures from America’s allies over the next two days. The Baltic leaders she spoke with on Friday, deeply mistrustful of the Russian behemoth on their border, want the United States to beef up its military presence in their countries. Countries like France and Germany hope Harris emphasizes diplomatic efforts to defuse the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Earlier this week, Russian leaders signaled that they were drawing down their forces in Ukraine. But later, U.S. officials said their claims of a withdrawal were false and that Russia had actually added troops at the border, a ruse intended to mislead the international community. Blinken warned this week that Russia could carry out a “fake — even a real — attack using chemical weapons” as a pretext for attacking Ukraine.
U.S. says Putin could use a "false flag" operation
Harris reiterated that sentiment on Saturday at her keynote. Although the 2022 conference is a slimmed-down affair compared to years when there was no pandemic, on Saturday Harris spoke to more than 30 heads of State, 100 ministers, and the heads of many of the most important international organizations.
And both she and Blinken have been trying to stress that the U.S. aims to defend Ukraine, not harm the Russian people, a senior administration official said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Next Gen car represents a major gamble for NASCAR, the country’s most popular form of auto racing. But it’s a gamble the sport had to take as the automotive industry steers away from four-door sedans, internal combustion-engines and the old-school design principles at the heart of the 1970s-era stock cars NASCAR’s Cup series has been racing and refining for decades.
Two: NASCAR needed to attract new car manufactures to challenge Ford, Chevrolet and Toyota and provide a hedge in case one of them pulled out of Cup racing, as Dodge did in 2012. | null | null | null | null | null |
80 percent of us have quit them by now. One researcher says we’ve been going at it all wrong.
By Steven Petrow
It’s that time again — the February day by which approximately 80 percent of us, according to one estimate, will have abandoned our New Year’s resolutions — whether we vowed to lose weight, stop drinking, learn to meditate or start exercising.
Do we completely lack the willpower to make better choices? No, says Wendy Wood, provost professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California. Wood’s research tells us that more of our behavior is about habit than conscious choice.
Habits aren’t just about hanging your coat by the door or putting on your seat belt in the car, Wood says. Forty-three percent of our behaviors are habit driven — such as when we brush our teeth, what we eat for breakfast, which cocktail we pour in the evening. No surprise, these automatic, unthinking actions are difficult to change.
“It’s very hard to alter our habits once we formed them. In fact, many of us think that we should be able to make a decision, right? I am going to lose weight this year. I’m going to make more friends this year. I’m going to be nicer to my family, my partner, this year, I’m going to save more money,” says Wood, who wrote “Good Habits/Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes that Stick.” “But the problem is that so many of those behaviors are habits and that memory sticks,” making change frustratingly difficult.
The Washington Post spoke to Wood recently from her home in D.C. about the mental health challenges of changing our habits and why we shouldn’t get discouraged by the New Year’s resolutions we may have already abandoned, as well as new approaches to making lasting positive changes in how we live. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why is it so hard to keep resolutions about changing behavior?
A: We form habits when we repeat a behavior over and over in the same context, and we start to connect the context with that response. Once habits are formed, when you’re in that context again, the habit automatically springs to mind. It’s like standing in front of your sink in the morning, you just automatically pick up the toothbrush. You don’t ask yourself if you want to do it. Until we realize that habit memories don’t fade easily, we’re going to be constantly challenged with New Year’s resolutions.
Q: You say most of our resolutions die. Why?
A: We start off being really motivated, and then we find that it’s not all that easy. And so we get a little less motivated but the [bad] habit memory is still there. Ultimately, three weeks later or whenever we quit. At that point, our habit is still there, but our motivation has decreased to the point where we just sort of give in and do the old habit anyway.
Don’t think of it as a New Year’s resolution. Think of it as a new skill.
Q: What can we do to be more successful?
A: Find some way to make the behavior enjoyable. If you hate going to the gym, you’re probably not going to go on a regular basis unless you can figure out some way to make it more fun — like listening to podcasts, going with a gym buddy or finding a different activity. Any of those could be more fun. And that’s going to help you keep your resolution.
Q: What else can we do to have a greater success rate?
A: Change your environment, to make the behavior easier to repeat so it can become a habit. People are more likely to walk if they live in a pedestrian environment. If they live close to parks, they’re more likely to get exercise. If you take mass transit, you’re more Likely to get exercise than if you drive a car. All of these are things you can change and make [things] a little easier in your life. And then they’ll be more likely to become a habit.
A: The third thing is to forgive yourself if you don’t do it every day. If people go off a diet or eat something they shouldn’t, they figure, “I’ve already ruined everything. I’m just going to eat everything I want anyway.” Habit memories form slowly. If you don’t do something for a couple of days, the habit memory will still be there.
Falling short on your 2021 resolutions? Remember: Pandemic.
Q: I was going to have an alcohol detox in January, and I didn’t get very far. I felt that it was my willpower that was at fault.
A: Denying ourselves things is hard. There was a very clever study that was done several decades ago by [social psychologist] Daniel Wegner where he showed that when people tried not to think of a white bear, they could do it. I mean, no one ever tries to think of a white bear anyway, so it shouldn’t be a hard task. But once they’d been asked not to people started thinking about white bears all the time. They couldn’t stop. That’s what happens when we deny ourselves things. We start thinking about them a lot, and obsessing about them, and they sort of take over.
I understand your challenge because I love a good glass of wine or two at dinner, and I’m trying to cut down because it disrupts my sleep. I add friction to drinking wine by not having it in the house. There is a liquor store two blocks away, and I could walk there if I wanted to. But most of the time, I’m just not motivated enough to do that. Adding friction to behaviors that you don’t want to perform makes it easier to control them.
Q: Let’s talk more about friction since you say it’s key to changing bad habits.
A: I find that if I buy lots of fresh vegetables, they tend to sit in my fridge and I don’t use them, and I end up throwing them away. But if I go and buy vegetables that are already somewhat prepared, then it’s much easier to get myself to eat them. And even though I hate spending the extra money for prepared vegetables, in the end it saves me money because I’m much more likely to eat them. So understanding what’s going to remove the friction for you is important.
Q: You’ve written a good bit about executive control. Can you define that, and explain its role in behavior change? I understand it’s not nearly as important as understanding our habits.
A: That’s a term psychologists use to describe our decision-making selves. The parts of our neural and mental processes that control behavior thoughtfully. It takes effort, and it takes a little bit of time to exert that kind of control. We only rely on executive control once in a while. [For instance,] you could have a New Year’s resolution to sign up for a retirement program at work, or to switch to a new health insurance. Those are one-off decisions and you just have to muster your effort and energy and make the right decision. Do a little background research, figure out how to do the behavior, and then proceed from there. That’s executive control: Thinking, rational selves is how we experience it.
Q: When I’m stressed, sometimes I will fall back on my bad habits. But sometimes I assert my better habits. What did you learn about stress and habits?
A: We tend to fall back on both good and bad habits when we’re stressed. And that’s simply because we don’t have as much energy. Our cognitive resources are taken up by dealing with the stress. We’re thinking about whatever the thing is that’s worrying us.
We don’t have as much energy, resources, ability to be making decisions about our behavior. So we fall back on old habits. And that’s true for both good and bad habits.
Q: In the last line of your book you write, “That is the promise of a habit life well lived.” What is the promise you’re talking about?
A: That your goals and your habits are in line. So you’re not struggling with yourself in the way that so many of us do. That you’re living a life simply, straightforwardly, easily, automatically that is healthy and productive, and that allows you to have meaningful relationships with other people. That’s what understanding habits can do. | null | null | null | null | null |
Signalman First Class U.S. Navy veteran Carl Felton holds the French Legion of Honor medal inside of a family home in New Market, Md., on Feb. 15, 2022. More than 75 years after he served during the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France, Frederick County resident Felton received an official commendation from the country he helped liberate. Felton, who is just a few days past his 96th birthday, recently received a medal declaring him a knight in the French Legion of Honor, the highest honor awarded by France. (Katina Zentz/The Frederick News-Post via AP) | null | null | null | null | null |
Segregated schoolhouse found in woods on way to being saved
By Cathy Free, The Washington Post | AP
“This is my family’s history,” said Morris, a genealogy hobbyist from Richmond, who is working on a book about her family going back to the early 1800s, when her ancestors were enslaved.
“My great-grandfather and my great-grandmother were born into slavery, and my great-great-grandparents were also slaves,” said Morris, who is in her early 50s.
It is unclear when the building stopped being a schoolhouse and fell into ruin, but it has sat neglected for years in a wooded area in the community of Dawn, Virginia.
She followed a short pathway into the woods — probably the same one her father took — and ended up at the ramshackle school building. It was no trouble to peek inside, she said, because the doors and windows of the school were missing.
Her father often spoke fondly of the school when she and her three siblings were growing up in Richmond, said Morris. He was the youngest of nine children born to parents who were farmers on their own land in the rural community of Dawn, just outside Hanover.
“We’re really happy that Kimberly brought this to our attention,” Ingram said. “She’s passionate about it, and you can tell (the school) means a lot to her. When she talks about history and her ancestors, her eyes glow.”
“The little school my dad went to in the 1930s produced (horse) grooms, farmers, railroad workers and millworkers who all contributed to making Caroline County what it is today,” said Morris. “The building deserves to be saved.”
The Old Dawn School, also known as School No. 4, was probably built in the 1910s, about a decade before educator and presidential adviser Booker T. Washington campaigned to improve the quality of education for Black children in the South, said Ingram.
Washington worked with philanthropist businessman Julius Rosenwaldto build more than 5,000 rural “Rosenwald” schools across the United States and more than 360 in the Virginia commonwealth, between 1917 and 1932, she said.
“A lot of these early Black schools were built by people in the community who often paid for a third of the school in many cases,” Ingram added. “The schools are symbolic of the struggles Black families had to go through during that time to educate their children.”
“I stood in front of the school while she took my picture, and it was like going back in time,” said Morris. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police arrested more than 100 protesters Friday, but small standoffs remained in the minus-24-degree weather Saturday as law enforcement pushed in from east to west to disperse straggling demonstrators and tow trucks slowly pulled away the parked big rigs that have paralyzed the city.
As their numbers dwindled early Saturday, some protesters shoveled snow to form barricades to make it harder for police to move in. Law enforcement armed with batons and guns, some on horseback, appeared to advance at a faster pace than the day before.
It is expected to be approved, though its use has drawn criticism from both the left and the right that it is too far-reaching.
With so many moving parts — the presence of children, the possibility of violence, the tightly packed vehicles and combustible fuel — the police have taken a largely restrained approach, even by Canadian standards. Police, some in tactical gear, have continued to leave open exits for demonstrators and drivers who decide to leave.
“You must leave,” a police recording played on loop Friday told a crowd as a drone circled above. “You will be arrested.”
Lich, Barber, as well as a third organizer who left Ottawa Friday, Benjamin Dichter, are named in a $306 million Canadian dollar proposed class-action lawsuit filed by Ottawa resident Zexi Li, 21, over damages caused by the demonstrations.
“It is a movement of anti-government extremists that have successfully tapped into the exhaustion of a lot of Canadians who are frustrated after four lockdowns and going onto year three of this [pandemic]," she said. “They were able to frame their grievances around this issue.”
Police Friday afternoon said one officer had been lightly injured and no known protesters.
Later in the evening a video circulated of a police horse barreling into a line of protesters, several of whom appeared to fall on the ground. . Police said a bicycle was thrown at the animal and that to their knowledge anyone who fell walked away uninjured. Convoy supporters disputed this account. In addition, false rumors spread online that someone had died in the incident.
After days of defiance, protesters have largely not prevented members of the convoy from leaving. But they have done alongside a new message: We will be back.
By Friday he said he was planning to head back once he received the address for a temporary site being set up outside of the city until the convoy could return to Ottawa.
“We think it’s a temporary thing,” he said. “We don’t think they will do it [arrests] for long.” | null | null | null | null | null |
‘Greetings from a dead man’: They were strangers, until a dying man brought them together
Rick Massumi, a former SEC attorney and known figure in the music and art scene, had no family in D.C. when he learned he had terminal liver cancer.
Duggan, who owns the D.C. bar Madam’s Organ, laughs now at the wryness and lack of lament in those texts. But at the time, he responded to the realization that he was about to lose a friend in the only appropriate way — with a lot of curse words.
There are many ways to tell Ronald “Rick” Massumi’s story. We could start at the beginning when he was a kid growing up in McLean. We could cut to the middle of his life when he was an attorney working for the Securities and Exchange Commission and doing pro bono work for music festivals, artists and local businesses. But starting at the moment the 68-year-old realized he was dying feels right because of what happened after he received that diagnosis.
Most people have to die before all the important figures in their life come together. It’s at their funeral that their favorite high school teacher sits in the same room as their favorite boss. But Massumi, who was one of the longest serving board members for the National Council for the Traditional Arts, got to witness those connections.
“It really was amazing how people were rallying around him,” his younger brother Brian Massumi, who lives in Canada, said. “When I was there I kept thinking to myself, ‘It’s like a wake but he’s still with us.’”
He described his brother as having an “insatiable curiosity” and said he was in high school when their parents split up and their mother took them to live in Arizona. From there, Rick Massumi went to Vassar College. He then attended Georgetown Law and worked as an attorney for the SEC before going into private practice. Brian Massumi said one of the things his brother was proudest of was the work he did free behind the scenes. He produced music for bands he feared would be forgotten and he fought to keep gentrification from changing D.C. neighborhoods by doing pro bono work for local businesses.
Another name on the list is Karla Soptirean. She was working in Munich as an IT consultant when she learned through Duggan that Massumi wanted someone who wasn’t tied down by a job to go on adventures with him in his final months. The pandemic had left her feeling depressed and burned out, so she quit her job and arrived in D.C. in December. She planned to travel to exciting cities with Massumi and dine in great restaurants. Instead, his condition declined faster than anyone expected and she took on caretaker tasks. Dying can be ugly and she saw all of that — and she decided to stay beside him. She called him a “mentor.” He called her his “guardian angel.”
Junghans said she wasn’t sure what to expect when Massumi told her about Soptirean, but she came to “love” and “trust” her. Soptirean also played a key role in a scene that brought happiness to Massumi. During one hospital stay, when it was uncertain if he would make it home, she tucked his beloved cat in her jacket and with Duggan’s help took it undetected into his room.
“He always told me, ‘I don’t have anyone. I’m so lonely,’” Anastasia Novoseltceva said. “And now, all these people are coming from all over the world. He has so many friends.”
Her name is also on that list. The Russian native met Massumi a decade ago when she was 20 and staying in D.C. for a summer. They ended up at the same performance because of a mutual acquaintance and afterward he drove her and her roommate home. When he saw that they were staying in a high-crime area in a run-down house, he offered them a free room in his home. Novoseltceva said they were skeptical at first but quickly realized he only wanted to help them. They also barely saw him because he worked such long hours.
Over the years, she and Massumi formed a close friendship and they once traveled to Russia together, where he danced to the accordion in her family’s home. He told her she was the daughter he never had.
“I was raised without a dad, so to find one across the ocean,” she said. “For me, there is no word. The word does not exist to express who is to me.”
After he had several strokes, she drove him to his medical appointments and she was with him on the day he was told he had liver cancer. In the months since, she has finally gotten to meet some of the people she had heard him talk about and some she hadn’t.
“Everyone is texting each other, asking, ‘How is everything? How are we feeling?'” she said. “I had only one close friend here in the United States, who was Rick, and now I have, I can’t even count on my two hands how many I got from this sad situation.”
“This experience has brought an unexpected and incredibly moving new element I treasure,” it read. “It is like a whole new family has blossomed up around me. I watch in wonder as all these people rally round me and I feel a unique and powerful love pouring on me unlike any other I have ever experienced.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Across the country, enrollment in charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated schools, increased by 7 percent — around 240,000 more students — during the 2020-2021 academic year, according to a report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy organization. D.C.'s charter sector grew by 948 students to 44,890 students this academic year. The school system’s enrollment shrunk by 928 to 49,389 students, according to the latest enrollment figures.
And Tennessee approved 29 new virtual schools to open this academic year, some of which are charter schools and others are operated by school districts.
KIPP DC, the city’s largest charter network that educates more than 7,000 students, enrolled 271 preschool, elementary and middle school students in a full-time virtual program this academic year. Twenty high schoolers also remained in virtual school. The network says it had plans to create a small virtual high school before the pandemic and now expects to have a permanent virtual academy for students of all ages.
Douglas N. Harris — who chairs the economics department at Tulane University and is the director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans — said virtual schools will need to improve if they want to remain a growing and viable part of public education options. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE- This early 1900s photo provided by the The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation shows the front of the Dudley Digges House in its original location on Prince George Street, in Williamsburg, Va. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given a $5-million boost to efforts to preserve the colonial-era schoolhouse where enslaved and free Black children were taught in Virginia, officials announced Friday, Feb. 18, 2022. (Courtesy of John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library/The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation via AP, File) (Uncredited/The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
This story was first published on Feb.18, 2022. It was updated on Feb. 19, 2022, to correct that William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg did not announce the award on Friday. The announcement was scheduled for release on Feb. 22. This story also corrects the university’s name. It is William & Mary, not the College of William & Mary. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Santé prison in Paris. (Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images)
Jean-Luc Brunel, the former head of a French model agency who was accused of rape in the 1990s and later of supplying young girls to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, was found hanged in his Paris prison cell early Saturday. The French Penitentiary Administration confirmed his death in La Santé prison to The Washington Post.
The 76-year-old was found dead in his cell at around 1 a.m. Saturday during an overnight check by guards at the Paris prison, prosecutors told Le Monde. Brunel was being held as part of an ongoing investigation into the alleged rape of minors and trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation. Several models had accused him of sexual assault and rape, and French police had interviewed many potential witnesses in the case. Brunel had denied the allegations.
Among his alleged victims was Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who previously said in court documents that Epstein pressured her to have sex with Brunel when she was a teenager.
“The suicide of Jean-Luc Brunel, who abused me and countless girls and young women, ends another chapter,” she tweeted. “I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to face him in a final trial to hold him accountable, but gratified that I was able to testify in person last year to keep him in prison.”
Former model Thysia Huisman, who accused Brunel of abuse when she was 18 in 1991, also expressed her disappointment.
Brunel’s death comes days after Britain’s Prince Andrew settled the sexual abuse lawsuit brought by Giuffre who says she was trafficked to him by Epstein, a multimillionaire investor whose well-known associates also included Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, among others. The amount and details of the settlement between Andrew and Giuffre — who said she was recruited as a teenager by Epstein and his longtime paramour, Ghislaine Maxwell, in Palm Beach, Fla. — were not disclosed in a court filing this week.
Maxwell faces as much as 65 years in prison after being convicted in December of sex-trafficking charges for assisting Epstein in abusing young girls.
Attorney Brad Edwards, who represents Giuffre and other Epstein accusers, told The Washington Post that he was struck by the timing of Brunel’s apparent suicide just days after his client’s settlement with Andrew this week.
“Rather than be held accountable, he just checked out,” he said of Brunel. “They’re both very selfish people, so if the world isn’t going to be what they want it to be, then there’s no sense in living.”
Brunel was a model talent scout for the Karin Models agency, which he went on to lead. When he was banned from the agency after a BBC report highlighting his alleged abuse, he moved to the United States. Through Maxwell, he was introduced to Epstein, who gave him funding to found Brunel’s U.S. agency, MC2 Model Management, according to the Guardian. Brunel, who is credited with discovering supermodels such as Christy Turlington and Milla Jovovich, became a frequent companion of Epstein’s whenever the financier traveled to France.
For years, several American models in Paris had accused Brunel of sexual misconduct — groping and other sexual advances, drugging women’s drinks, rape — in the hope that he would be stopped. But justice was considered elusive for Brunel’s alleged victims, much as it was for the women who accused Epstein of abuse only to see him serve just 13 months in jail more than a decade ago.
In December 2020, Brunel was arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris shortly before boarding a plane for Dakar. French authorities said Brunel was a central figure in the probe into alleged sexual exploitation of women and girls by Epstein and his inner circle. Brunel was released on bail last November but was ordered to return to prison while awaiting trial.
Edwards, who said he yet to speak with his clients about Brunel’s death, recalled the pained reactions from those he represented after Epstein’s death in 2019. He told The Post that Epstein’s accusers “all felt like something had been stolen from them” — and anticipated a similar reaction following Brunel’s death.
“Everybody was looking forward to accountability,” he said. “Any time that they’re deprived in this way, it feels like a form of re-victimization.”
This is a developing report and will be updated. | null | null | null | null | null |
President Donald Trump meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday, March 14, 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump’s political committee, offered a statement only touting the former president’s golf courses when asked about the talks.
As president, Trump frequently defended the Saudi government even as it committed a wide range of human right abuses, including the 2018 murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the imprisonment and execution of gay citizens. Trump’s first overseas trip as president was to Saudi Arabia and he regularly praised the country’s wealth and power, even as some advisers pushed him to take a tougher line on the country.
His company has been trying to revive Doral since his presidency ended. Last year Florida legislators passed legislation easing the path for his company to pursue a future casino license for Doral and last month his company announced that it would attempt to build 2,300 homes there.
It’s difficult to say how such a deal would affect Trump financially. Professional golf organizations pay rental fees to courses where they hold events, but also impose sometimes expensive obligations and responsibilities as part of that, said Larry Hirsh, president of Golf Property Analysts in Philadelphia.
Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law, was spotted on the sidelines of a Saudi golf event earlier this month. Bloomberg reported that Kushner has sought backing from the $500 billion Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, along with other government-controlled funds in the region.” A spokesman for Kushner did not respond to a message seeking comment.
PGA Tour officials have closely watched efforts by the Saudis to recruit its players, worried about the Saudi league luring away some of the tour’s players with the promise of higher purses. But most of the league’s marquee players have not left and some have been critical of Mickelson, who has supported the tour and helped with recruitment efforts. The PGA declined to comment on Trump’s talks with the Saudi league.
On whether the crown prince knew about or ordered the killing by Saudi agents in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Trump said in the statement, “maybe he did or maybe he didn’t!” He suggested that U.S. interests in Saudi oil production, weapons purchases and support for administration policies in the Middle East were more important than holding an ally to account, and he stressed the importance of staying in the kingdom’s good graces because they were spending money in the U.S. | null | null | null | null | null |
NEWARK, Del. — A 30-year-old Maryland man was killed when he was struck by a car while riding his bicycle in Delaware, police said.
The man — who was not immediately identified — was riding his bike on Salem Church Road in Newark at about 10:15 p.m. Friday when the driver of a 2008 Chevrolet Malibu behind him attempted to pass him. At the same time, the bicyclist veered to the left and was hit by the front passenger side of the car, Delaware State Police said in a news release. The impact knocked the man off his bike and into the northbound lane, police said.
The bicyclist, of Elkton, Maryland, was taken to Christiana Hospital, where he later died. Police said the 20-year-old driver of the car lost control after the collision, drove into a road sign, then went back into the street and crossed over both lanes before hitting a tree and coming to a stop. The driver was not injured in the crash. | null | null | null | null | null |
Elana Meyers Taylor and Sylvia Hoffman won bronze in two-woman bobsled at the Beijing Games. (Christian Bruna/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
YANQING, China — It was almost 11 p.m. on Saturday, and a bitter winter wind howled through the Yanqing National Sliding Centre. As temperatures, with the gale, dropped below zero, American two-woman bobsled driver Elana Meyers Taylor stood on a wooden podium, never seeming to feel the chill, and thought the bronze medal around her neck might have been the greatest thing she has ever won.
“So much emotion,” she later said. “I wanted to cry, I wanted to smile, I wanted to laugh. I wanted to do everything. Yes, I’ve been on Olympic podiums before but none that’s been harder to get on than here.”
Next to Meyers Taylor, her brakewoman, Sylvia Hoffman, danced. Beside them, Germany’s Laura Nolte and her brakewoman, Deborah Levi, celebrated their gold, laughing with their teammates Mariama Jamanka and Alexandra Burghardt, who took silver. But Meyers Taylor was too worn out to dance or laugh much. She watched the American flag rise in the distance and shook her head in amazement.
Six days before, Meyers Taylor had sat in a sled storage container area with US. driving coach Brian Shimer and said she wasn’t sure she could keep going with these Games. She had been in isolation for eight days after testing positive for coronavirus. Her husband, Nic, an alternate on the men’s bobsled team had tested positive, too, and was held in a room next door. In the room beside him, their son, Nico — who also tested positive — stayed with her father, Eddie.
She was exhausted, her mind still foggy, uncertain how she was going to keep racing in the monobob event that ended the next day.
“You’ve got this, we’re going to do this,” she remembers him telling her.
The next day, she won silver in the monobob with a big final run.
That final monobob run revived her, giving her hope for the rest of the week. But she was still tired, still unsure if she should be here, worn down by the virus and the loneliness of isolation. She and Hoffman had practice runs, but they weren’t good. And in the first two runs Friday, the Germans were unstoppable.
But somehow she kept improving, putting together better and better runs, hanging in third place as the Germans sailed off, until it became obvious she would win the bronze.
“She did the damn thing,” Hoffman said. “She came out day by day, run by run, and she tried to put it together. We all encouraged her. ‘Dude, you got this.’ I think it really helped because she’s been through a lot. She got better and better and then she crushed it on race days. Both race days, I was like, ‘Wow, this woman is on fire.’ ”
It was Meyers Taylor’s fifth Olympic medal, having won three silvers and two bronzes. For years, it used to bother her that she could never win gold. For a time, she used to wonder if there was something wrong with her that she could never finish first in a two-woman race at the Olympics.
“Finally, I started to realize it was much more about the journey,” she said. “There’s a lot of things in competition you can’t control. In PyeongChang I tore my Achilles’ right before the event. Here, I was in isolation. So many things happen that you can’t control.”
She is 37 and the most decorated female bobsled racer of all-time, at least in the Olympics. It’s hard to imagine her making another Olympic run in four years. She said she knew as she started her fourth and final heat on Saturday night that it was probably her last Olympic race. This understanding almost made her want to cry.
And when it was over and she was sure they had won bronze, she and Hoffman leaped out of their sled and laughed and shouted and danced on the ice that covered the surface at the end of the track.
As they did, Meyers Taylor’s longtime rival and new American teammate, Kaillie Humphries, walked quietly through the interview area just a few feet away. Humphries, who has won three gold medals and a bronze in four Olympics, has been good friend of Meyers Taylor. They were in each other’s weddings. But that was when Humphries still competed for Canada. Now that Humphries is representing the United States, the relationship is a little trickier.
Humphries and her new brakewoman, Kaysha Love, could not see Meyers Taylor on the podium. Instead, they were still doing interviews, talking about what went wrong.
I didn’t drive perfectly,” said Humphries, who finished seventh. “And I think, yeah we went into it, and it wasn’t here. But at the end of the day, we faced it with as much strength and courage as we could, and it sucks. I hoped for more, we have all the right pieces … but I wasn’t afraid to put it all out there.”
Then she and Love quietly left the area. The night belonged to two German teams who were celebrating loudly. But it also belonged to Elana Meyers Taylor. And on the night she won her fifth — and probably last — Olympic medal, she looked at her bronze and thought it was as amazing as anything she had won before. | null | null | null | null | null |
Americans nurtured Afghanistan’s economy. Now they’re gutting it.
Biden’s decision to seize central bank assets is part of a pattern of abandonment
President Biden’s recent decision to seize the frozen reserves of the central bank of Afghanistan came as a shock to starving Afghans battling a harsh winter coupled with a crippled economy. It has led to severe withdrawal limits at private banks, further squeezing the pocketbooks of average people. Imagine dissolving the U.S. Federal Reserve, blocking the savings of all Americans and implementing a weekly withdrawal limit of less than $400.
Biden’s intention to divide the money between survivors of the 9/11 attacks and, nonspecifically, humanitarian aid to “benefit” the Afghan people, is as confounding as it is cruel. A year ago, the United States was trying hard to preserve and strengthen institutions in Afghanistan like the central bank. Now, the Biden administration is knocking the legs out from under the country’s banking sector, thwarting the economy and leaving Afghans like me unable to access our savings.
The pattern of costly and damaging starts and stops is nothing new. I remember vividly in 2011 meeting U.S. government officials at USAID offices in Kabul made of cramped cubicles inside tight cargo containers. At the time, I was leading the implementation of large power projects at the national power utility of Afghanistan. USAID was promoting the idea of providing electricity to southern Afghanistan from Central Asian countries via imported electricity passing through the rough terrain of more than 500 miles.
As a parting shot to the new Taliban-led government, which the United States considers illegitimate, the U.S. government imposed punishing sanctions that throttled the economy. The impact has gone beyond the widespread starvation that has left 97 percent of the population unsure where their next meal will come from. Seven billion dollars of the bank’s funds were frozen, leading to instant consequences for everyday Afghans. For instance, when my father wants to withdraw cash, he has to register his name four days in advance and stand in a queue for hours — once, more than six hours. When it’s his turn, he is permitted to withdraw the equivalent of $400. That sum won’t cover regular household expenses like rent, groceries, utility bills and medicine.
Such actions by the United States send a bitter signal to 38 million Afghans. The majority of Afghans, especially in rural areas, didn’t know about the 9/11 attacks and why the United States invaded and bombed them for 20 years, but they do feel the hunger of 23 million of their fellow citizens and the pain of 3.2 million malnourished children younger than 5, of which 1 million could starve to death by the end of the winter.
In seizing the central bank funds, Biden issued a statement that his plan was “designed to provide a path for the funds to reach the people of Afghanistan, while keeping them out of the hands of the Taliban and malicious actors.” But this concern can be addressed in various ways; members of the Supreme Council of the central bank have suggested having monitored and conditional access to reserves. The transactions can be verified electronically and through one of the international auditing firms currently operating in Afghanistan.
The resumption of irrigation, energy and transport projects will more likely bring an end to the crisis without the need for more humanitarian assistance. Lifting sanctions on commercial activity and completing unfinished development projects will be sufficient for the economy to recover. This would be in line with American values. It would do justice to the $2 trillion in American taxpayers’ money spent on the war in Afghanistan. | null | null | null | null | null |
BALTIMORE — A woman and two children were seriously hurt in a house fire in Baltimore early Saturday morning.
The Baltimore Sun reports that the woman is in critical condition and the two children are in serious condition at a hospital.
Firefighters arrived to flames showing from the top floor of a three-story occupied house in the 4800 block of Beaufort Avenue in northwest Baltimore. Firefighters rescued the woman and two children. The fire was extinguished shortly before 8:30 a.m. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The best way to beat cancer is to prevent it
Thirty percent of all cancer deaths in the United States are caused by tobacco. (Dave Martin/AP)
In his Feb. 15 op-ed, “How to save lives from cancer with tools we already have,” Edward Abrahams wrote of improving the lives of cancer patients by providing better access to the latest developments in science and technology. Our health-care system hasn’t figured out how to equitably provide these expensive treatments to all who might benefit.
An underrated way to reduce the cost of cancer care is to prevent cancer. The best way to do that is to reduce tobacco use. Thirty percent of all cancer deaths in the United States are caused by tobacco. The public health campaigns and lobbying efforts of the past 50 years successfully reduced the prevalence of adult smokers from 40 percent to below 20 percent. But, despite that, smoking today is the leading cause of preventable disease in the United States, killing more than 400,000 Americans each year. These statistics are appalling. Reduction of tobacco use could save billions of dollars and prevent untold needless suffering.
Leaders in government, policy, law and public health must accept the challenge of reducing tobacco use by intensifying public education and facing up to the inordinately powerful and profitable tobacco industry.
Donna Chacko, University Park
The writer is a retired radiation oncologist. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Decriminalizing drugs, especially cannabis, throughout the U.S.
Chris Alexander, then policy coordinator for Drug Policy Alliance and now New York's Office of Cannabis Management's executive director, speaks as advocates urge New York state legislators to support the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act at the state Capitol on May 8, 2018, in Albany, N.Y. (Hans Pennink/Associated Press)
Regarding Shane Sullivan’s Feb. 13 Local Opinions essay, “Facing a surge in overdose deaths, D.C. should now decriminalize drugs”:
The decriminalization of drugs is appealing not just in D.C. but also in the United States in general. The decriminalization of drugs would help diminish racial disparities that are embedded in the American prison system, promote public safety and health, and allocate money to better resources.
In the United States, minorities are incarcerated for drug offenses at much higher rates and are more likely to receive harsher sentences than Caucasians. The decriminalization of drugs (especially cannabis) can significantly reduce the racial disparity this country is facing.
Money now spent on the drug war and penitentiaries could be put to better use by allocating it to the expansion of drug treatment programs. In most cases, drug addiction is a disease. Therefore, it is appropriate that it be treated as such. Offenders rarely get the treatment they need for disorders while in jails and prisons. This is essential to public safety and health, as those who struggle with addiction receive the help they need and no longer pose a threat to those around them.
Sophia Godinho Silveira, Atlanta | null | null | null | null | null |
Rick Massumi, a former SEC attorney and known figure in the music and art scene, had no family in D.C. when he learned he had terminal liver cancer
Duggan, who owns the D.C. bar Madam’s Organ, laughs now at the wryness and lack of lament in those texts. But at the time, Duggan responded in the only appropriate way to the realization that he was about to lose a friend — with a lot of curse words.
There are many ways to tell Ronald “Rick” Massumi’s story. We could start at the beginning, when he was a kid growing up in McLean. We could cut to the middle of his life, when he was an attorney working for the Securities and Exchange Commission and doing pro bono work for music festivals, artists and local businesses. But starting at the moment the 68-year-old realized he was dying feels right because of what happened after he received that diagnosis.
Most people have to die before all the important figures in their life come together. It’s at their funeral that their favorite high school teacher sits in the same room as their favorite boss. But Massumi, who was one of the longest-serving board members for the National Council for the Traditional Arts, got to witness those connections.
“It really was amazing how people were rallying around him,” said his younger brother, Brian Massumi, who lives in Canada. “When I was there, I kept thinking to myself, ‘It’s like a wake, but he’s still with us.’ ”
He described his brother as having an “insatiable curiosity” and said he was in high school when their parents split up and their mother took them to live in Arizona. From there, Rick Massumi went to Vassar College. He then attended Georgetown Law and worked as an attorney for the SEC before going into private practice. Brian Massumi said one of the things his brother was proudest of was the work he did free behind the scenes. He produced music for bands he feared would be forgotten, and he fought to keep gentrification from changing D.C. neighborhoods by doing pro bono work for local businesses.
Another name on the list is Karla Soptirean. She was working in Munich as an IT consultant when she learned through Duggan that Massumi wanted someone who wasn’t tied down by a job to go on adventures with him in his final months. The pandemic had left her feeling depressed and burned out, so she quit her job and arrived in D.C. in December. She planned to travel to exciting cities with Massumi and dine in great restaurants. Instead, his condition declined faster than anyone expected, and she took on caretaker tasks. Dying can be ugly, and she saw all of that — and she decided to stay beside him. She called him "a mentor.” He called her his “guardian angel.”
Junghans said she wasn’t sure what to expect when Massumi told her about Soptirean, but she came to “love” and “trust” her. Soptirean also played a key role in a scene that brought happiness to Massumi. During one hospital stay, when it was uncertain whether he would make it home, she tucked his beloved cat in her jacket and with Duggan’s help took it undetected into his room.
“He always told me, ‘I don’t have anyone. I’m so lonely,’ ” Anastasia Novoseltceva said. “And now, all these people are coming from all over the world. He has so many friends.”
Her name is also on that list. The Russian native met Massumi a decade ago when she was 20 and staying in D.C. for a summer. They ended up at the same performance because of a mutual acquaintance, and afterward he drove her and her roommate home. When he saw that they were staying in a high-crime area in a run-down house, he offered them a free room in his home. Novoseltceva said they were skeptical at first but quickly realized he only wanted to help them. They also barely saw him because he worked such long hours.
Over the years, she and Massumi formed a close friendship and once traveled to Russia together, where he danced to the accordion in her family’s home. He told her she was the daughter he never had.
“I was raised without a dad, so to find one across the ocean,” she said. “For me, there is no word. The word does not exist to express who he is to me.”
After he had several strokes, she drove him to his medical appointments. She was with him on the day he was told he had liver cancer. In the months since, she has finally gotten to meet some of the people she had heard him talk about and some she hadn’t.
“Everyone is texting each other, asking, ‘How is everything? How are we feeling?' ” she said. “I had only one close friend here in the United States, who was Rick, and now I have, I can’t even count on my two hands how many I got from this sad situation.”
“This experience has brought an unexpected and incredibly moving new element I treasure,” it reads. “It is like a whole new family has blossomed up around me. I watch in wonder as all these people rally round me and I feel a unique and powerful love pouring on me unlike any other I have ever experienced.” | null | null | null | null | null |
And then Childs reenrolled her daughter for first grade.
Across the country, enrollment in charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated schools, increased by 7 percent — around 240,000 more students — during the 2020-2021 academic year, according to a report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy organization. D.C.'s charter sector grew by about 1,200 students to 45,143 students this academic year. The school system’s enrollment shrunk by around 500 students to 49,389 students, according to the latest enrollment figures.
KIPP DC, the city’s largest charter network that educates more than 7,000 students, enrolled 271 preschool, elementary and middle school students in a full-time virtual program this academic year. Twenty high schoolers also remained in virtual school. The network says it had plans to create a small virtual high school before the pandemic and is considering a permanent virtual academy for students of all ages in the coming years.
Douglas N. Harris — who chairs the economics department at Tulane University and directs the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice — said virtual schools will need to improve if they want to remain a growing and viable part of public education options. | null | null | null | null | null |
President Donald Trump meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office on March 14, 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Gary Williams, a longtime golf commentator who owns 5 Clubs Golf, said the PGA Tour has aggressively moved to keep its players with higher purses and other incentives but is likely to lose some major players. “They’re a real threat, there’s no doubt,” he said of the Saudis. “They may not have a real business plan but they have a lot of money.” Williams said he expects a number of other courses to sign up, besides Trump. “He needs revenue for those golf courses.”
President Biden has called the kingdom a “pariah” and has vowed to be tougher on the Saudis but has approved an arms sale and talked to the king. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nuclear talks at key point, Scholz warns
Efforts to revive Iran’s nuclear agreement are still bogged down over disagreements despite high-level diplomacy, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz warning that it’s now or never to save the accord.
“Now is the moment of truth,” Scholz said Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, which was attended by many world leaders and high-level diplomats. “If we do not succeed in this very soon, the negotiations risk failing.”
Negotiations in Vienna to rekindle the 2015 deal — which traded sanctions relief for limits on Iran’s nuclear work — are in their 10th month, with diplomats suggesting talks should wrap up by the end of February.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian was also in Munich, meeting with European counterparts and United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. He urged Western parties to the negotiations to stop playing “double games” over the text and terms of a revived accord.
'Hostage' princess okay, U.N. confirms
Princess Latifa, the daughter of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who once claimed that she was being held “hostage” in the emirate, has told a senior United Nations human rights official that she is “well.”
Her case made global headlines, and the U.N. was among those to express concern for her safety.
— Adela Suliman
Cleanup crews tackle Storm Eunice damage: Crews cleared fallen trees and worked to restore power to about 400,000 people in Britain as Western Europe cleaned up Saturday after one of the most damaging storms in years. At least 12 people were killed, many by falling trees, in Ireland, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Named Storm Eunice by the British and Irish weather services, and Storm Zeynep in Germany, Friday's storm recorded a gust of 122 mph on the Isle of Wight. If confirmed, it would be the highest ever in England.
Bosnian nationalists threaten to form own region: Bosnian Croat nationalists say they could launch a political process to form their own region in Bosnia unless an election law is changed in a way that bolsters their representation in national institutions. A possible Croat boycott of the presidential and parliamentary vote would further deepen the country's worst political crisis since the end of the Balkan wars of the 1990s: Bosnian Serbs have been challenging state institutions as part of their longtime bid to secede and join Serbia.
12 people remain missing in Greek ferry fire: Rescue teams in Greece searched for 12 people believed to be missing after a ferry caught fire in the Ionian Sea while en route to Italy. After working all night to try to extinguish the blaze that broke out Friday, firefighting vessels surrounded the Euroferry Olympia, which was carrying more than 290 passengers and crew. The Greek coast guard and other boats evacuated about 280 of them to Corfu. A coast guard spokeswoman on Saturday said none of the 12 missing people had been found.
Al-Shabab claims deadly attack in central Somalia: At least 13 people died after a suicide bomber blew up a restaurant in the central Somali town of Beledweyne. Another 18 people were injured in the attack, the Somali National Television said on Twitter. The al-Shabab militant group claimed responsibility for the attack. Witnesses said the restaurant was packed with local officials and politicians at the time of the attack, and one of those killed was a parliamentary candidate. | null | null | null | null | null |
‘Homer at the Bat’ at 30: The landmark ‘Simpsons’ episode that pushed the show’s boundaries
“When I do an autograph show for baseball, I feel like I’m at a Comic-Con,” Boggs says last week by phone from Tampa, while recounting his guest appearance on a beloved episode of “The Simpsons,” titled “Homer at the Bat,” that first aired 30 years ago this month. He voiced a cartoon character named “Wade Boggs” who comes to barroom blows over the question: Who’s the best prime minister in British history? (Today, without pause, the real Boggs replies with winking conviction: “Pitt the Elder!”)
Many recording sessions crackled with mutual admiration. Jean remembers Ozzie Smith being accompanied by a son who did an impression of Bart; and Reardon recalls Ken Griffey Sr., still an active player at the time, wanting to meet Homer. Dan Castellaneta, a Chicago Cubs fan, broke into his Homer voice upon meeting the veteran, as if calling a Griffey home run at Wrigley Field in the ‘70s. | 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 now we have a colorful new way of seeing him. | 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 continually 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, long after 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 |
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Tylor Perry made a 3-pointer with two seconds remaining to lift North Texas to a 58-57 win over UAB on Saturday, the Mean Green’s 12th consecutive victory. On the subsequent possession for the Blazers, Jordan Walker missed a 3-pointer, allowing the Mean Green to hold on for the victory. | null | null | null | null | null |
Adam Silver on Kyrie Irving, trade demands and the play-in tournament
Skills challenge participants and how it works
NBA All-Star Game lineups
CLEVELAND — NBA Commissioner Adam Silver conducted his annual All-Star Weekend address before Saturday’s festivities, painting a relatively rosy picture of the league’s progress through the pandemic. Here’s a digest version of Silver’s comments.
NYC Mandate: Silver said that he was “not sure exactly” whether New York City would alter its vaccine mandate to allow unvaccinated Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving to play home games, but noted that other cities have begun to change their policies as case counts have dropped. Although Silver said he hadn’t had direct communications with New York Mayor Eric Adams, he said that his “sense is that certain restrictions will be lifted” if infections continue to decrease following the omicron wave.
International Games: Silver said that the NBA was eagerly looking forward to hosting games in international markets, something it had to stop doing during the pandemic. The NBA probably won’t play regular season games during the 2022-23 season in European markets, but such games could happen during the upcoming preseason.
James Harden trade: Silver said that the NBA has “no ongoing investigation right now” into possible tampering by the Philadelphia 76ers toward James Harden in advance of last week’s blockbuster trade with the Brooklyn Nets. The commissioner added that the league office “wants players and teams to honor contracts” in general, but noted that both the 76ers and Nets “ultimately seem satisfied by the outcome of the trade and willingly entered into it.”
Trade demands: Silver reiterated his previous “unhappiness with public trade demands” like the one made by Ben Simmons, which triggered a stalemate with the Philadelphia 76ers. He admitted that the league hasn’t discovered “a secret idea to fix that problem” from happening again. Similarly, he said that it’s a “problem when players are paid not to play” like Houston Rockets guard John Wall, but that there was “no ready fix” and that such situations would need to be discussed during the next Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations with the National Basketball Players Association.
Locker room media access: Silver said that restoring media access to locker rooms was “not going to be so easy” for two reasons. First, the ongoing pandemic and the possibility of future variants have led the league to conclude that “creating a little bit of distance may make more sense for the foreseeable future.” Second, he said that conducting interviews while players are dressing is an “anachronism” and that the NBA would meet with the Professional Basketball Writers Association to discuss possible alternatives.
Competitive balance: Silver said that he felt that “there’s been a leavening” on the issue of competitive balance and that the subject hasn’t been a major discussion for the league and its team owners. Four different organizations have won the NBA title over the past four seasons.
Play-in tournament: Silver said that he was “more pleased” with the NBA’s play-in tournament that he expected because the new format, which was introduced in last season, has created more competitive races throughout the standings. Rather than simply benefiting from the additional television revenue and interest created by the tournament games, Silver noted that the stretch run of the regular season has been more competitive, with some teams fighting to get top six seeds so that they can avoid the play-in tournament and others fighting for the 9th and 10th seeds to avoid the lottery.
Suns investigation: Silver said that the NBA’s investigation into alleged misogynistic and racist comments by Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver was “ongoing” with no update to report publicly.
By Washington Post Staff8:00 p.m.
The new format will have four rounds featuring shooting (Round 1), passing (Round 2) and a team relay (Round 3). All three teams will compete in those rounds, with the top two teams moving on to the final round, in which the first team to make a half-court shot wins.
Skills challenge participants
Team Rooks: Scottie Barnes (Toronto Raptors), Cade Cunningham, (Detroit Pistons), Josh Giddey (Oklahoma City Thunder)
Team Antetokounmpos: Giannis Antetokounmpo (Milwaukee Bucks), Alex Antetokounmpo (Raptors905), Thanasis Antetokounmpo (Milwaukee Bucks)
The NBA unveiled a new collection of awards earlier this month that will be presented during All-Star Weekend, headlined by a fully redesigned Kobe Bryant All-Star Game MVP trophy. In addition to the Bryant trophy, which pays homage to the Los Angeles Lakers legend with its design touches, the NBA revealed new rings to be given to each all-star; new trophies for the slam dunk contest, the three-point contest, the skills challenge and the celebrity game; and new medals for the winners of the Rising Stars Challenge.
“The NBA trophies, to this point, have been all over the place and lackluster in my opinion,” said Victor Solomon, who works with the league as a licensee. “We basically threw everything out and started from scratch. Part of my interest in evolving the trophies was to create something more symbolic of the boldness and creativity of the players who are winning these awards. These guys are some of the most thoughtful and aesthetically focused people in the world, and we were giving them some afterthought, off-the-shelf trophy.”
Seeking to captain the winning team for the fifth straight year, LeBron James selected Giannis Antetokounmpo with the first pick. He then filled out his lineup with Stephen Curry, DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Jokic.
Kevin Durant, who will not play in Cleveland because of a knee sprain, selected Joel Embiid, Ja Morant, Jayson Tatum, Andrew Wiggins and Trae Young. Tatum was initially selected as a reserve but was promoted to the starting pool because of Durant’s injury.
The drama ramped up when it came time to pick the reserves, once it became clear that Durant was intent on not selecting James Harden. Once the dust settled, Durant selected Devin Booker, Karl-Anthony Towns, Zach LaVine, Dejounte Murray, LaMelo Ball and Rudy Gobert. | null | null | null | null | null |
People take part in a rally Feb. 19 in the center of the western Ukraine city of Lviv to show their unity as fears mount that Russia could invade the country in the coming days. (Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP/Getty Images)
By Scott Gehlbach
Zhaotian Luo
Has Russian President Vladimir Putin decided on a “catastrophic” war, as President Biden announced Friday? Media reports in recent weeks have focused on the possible impact of war on the government and people of Ukraine. Analysts warn of horrific consequences, with thousands of casualties, a monumental refugee crisis and the installation of a puppet government in Kyiv.
But what would a Russian invasion of Ukraine mean for Russia itself? War inevitably affects domestic politics — and our research suggests that a war in Ukraine could change the nature of Russia’s authoritarian system.
In a recent working paper, we examine the relationship among various tools of autocratic survival. If possible, autocrats aim to avoid repression, which is costly and may not work. Yet the alternative means of retaining control — manipulating public opinion by suppressing outside information — may deprive authoritarian leaders themselves of information they need to survive.
Our research shows that autocrats resolve this trade-off by balancing the use of information manipulation and repression: censorship first, but if that approach fails, repression. How this plays out depends on public sentiment. When citizens are inclined to oppose the government’s policy, censorship doesn’t help much, and the likelihood of repression is high.
Russians show little support for a long war with Ukraine
So what does this mean for the Putin regime, and how are Russians likely to react to a war in Ukraine? For the Kremlin, the most optimistic outcome is that a war would be rapid and decisive, leading the Russian population to rally around the flag, as was the case after Putin seized Crimea in 2014. In this scenario, Putin’s approval ratings, under pressure from years of economic stagnation and an ineffective response to the pandemic, would climb again.
Such a scenario isn’t impossible, but it is not likely. A 2022 invasion of Ukraine would look nothing like the lightning strike on Crimea in 2014, or even like the grinding conflict in the Donbas that followed. Ukraine isn’t likely to be able to stop a full-scale assault, but it can inflict substantial casualties. With help from the West, Ukrainian insurgents would continue to send Russian soldiers home in body bags, making a prolonged conflict likely.
And Putin has done little to prepare the Russian public for such losses. Russians reportedly have little appetite for a war with Ukraine, in what would be Russia’s largest military conflict since the Cold War. Opinion surveys show declining support for the conflict in Eastern Ukraine that will soon enter its ninth year, with less than 10 percent of the Russian population in support of open conflict with Ukrainian troops.
If the war is long, Putin will try to censor outside information
To forestall the loss of popular support, the Kremlin’s spin doctors would no doubt construct a narrative that justifies the war — that Russian troops are providing protection to an ethnic Russian minority at risk of genocide, say, much like the story to justify Russian intervention in Georgia on behalf of South Ossetians in 2008. Yet such propaganda is unlikely to succeed without unprecedented censorship of outside information. Russia’s few remaining independent media outlets would therefore be unlikely to survive a prolonged conflict.
There would, of course, be other voices attempting to bring news to the Russian public, including through social media. To prevent this, the government would probably close down YouTube and other channels where such voices have been communicating their views. Those who nonetheless publicize news of Russian casualties would face physical reprisal, as happened during the early days of the Donbas War.
If censorship doesn’t work, repression will rise
Yet even such extreme measures may fail, as information about Russian losses and Ukrainian opposition trickle in. If that’s the case, Putin would turn to the dictator’s last resort: overt repression. Having failed to maintain popular support for the war, and with his own presidency at risk, Putin would impose further restrictions to hang onto power, much as his neighbor Alexander Lukashenko has done in Belarus. The end result? We might see a Russia that’s far more autocratic than at any point in the post-Soviet era.
Russian security forces would no doubt suppress any street protests against the war in Ukraine, and imprison Russians who speak out against the regime. Activists already in prison — most especially Alexei Navalny — would be at greater risk of torture and death. Russia’s opposition parties — which the Kremlin has until now tolerated, managed and even created to maintain a pretense of political competition — might find that they’ve outlived their usefulness. The FSB, the security agency that’s already more powerful than any institution save the presidency itself, would grow more powerful yet.
Having embarked on this path, it would be difficult for Putin to turn back. Any hope of a more open regime would necessarily await Putin's removal from power, or a natural death in office.
It could be that Putin is gambling on the first, optimistic scenario above — that a quick Russian victory yields increased popular support. Alternatively, he might be betting that he can manipulate public opinion even in the face of significant battle losses. Last, he may be wagering that repression would work with minimal cost. What happens to Russia’s political system depends on which of these gambles is correct.
Another Russian invasion would be terrible for Ukraine. It could also be terrible for Russia, whose population could suffer the loss of whatever political freedoms and civil liberties remain after two decades of Putin’s rule. The stakes of the current crisis extend far beyond the boundaries of Ukraine — those working to avert conflict are fighting for Russia’s future as well as Ukraine’s.
Scott Gehlbach is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
Zhaotian Luo is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: New Mexico State visits the Seattle U Redhawks after Teddy Allen scored 30 points in New Mexico State’s 82-66 win against the Grand Canyon Antelopes.
The Redhawks are 16-1 on their home court. Seattle U averages 76.5 points while outscoring opponents by 10.3 points per game.
The Aggies have gone 11-2 against WAC opponents. New Mexico State averages 12.7 turnovers per game and is 7-1 when turning the ball over less than opponents.
The teams play for the second time in conference play this season. The Aggies won the last meeting 79-64 on Feb. 5. Allen scored 33 points to help lead the Aggies to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Emeka Udenyi is averaging 6.5 points and 5.7 rebounds for the Redhawks. Darrion Trammell is averaging 16.5 points over the last 10 games for Seattle U.
Allen is shooting 45.7% and averaging 20.2 points for the Aggies. Jabari Rice is averaging 1.5 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for New Mexico State. | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: Indiana visits the No. 18 Ohio State Buckeyes after Trayce Jackson-Davis scored 30 points in Indiana’s 74-69 loss to the Wisconsin Badgers.
The Buckeyes are 11-1 on their home court. Ohio State is 2-3 in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Hoosiers are 7-8 against Big Ten opponents. Indiana is 2-2 in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
The teams meet for the 10th time in conference play this season. The Hoosiers won 67-51 in the last matchup on Jan. 7. Jackson-Davis led the Hoosiers with 27 points, and Malaki Branham led the Buckeyes with 13 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jamari Wheeler is averaging 7.2 points and 3.6 assists for the Buckeyes. E.J. Liddell is averaging 12.8 points over the last 10 games for Ohio State.
Jackson-Davis is shooting 57.8% and averaging 18.0 points for the Hoosiers. Parker Stewart is averaging 1.0 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Indiana. | null | null | null | null | null |
Lafayette hosts Holy Cross after Gates' 24-point game
BOTTOM LINE: Holy Cross faces the Lafayette Leopards after Gerrale Gates scored 24 points in Holy Cross’ 55-50 win against the Navy Midshipmen.
The Leopards have gone 5-7 in home games. Lafayette is seventh in the Patriot scoring 66.5 points while shooting 42.7% from the field.
The Crusaders are 7-8 in Patriot play. Holy Cross is sixth in the Patriot scoring 31.2 points per game in the paint led by Kyrell Luc averaging 2.6.
The teams meet for the second time in conference play this season. The Crusaders won 79-74 in the last matchup on Jan. 8. Gates led the Crusaders with 27 points, and Tyrone Perry led the Leopards with 18 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Neal Quinn is scoring 14.3 points per game with 7.8 rebounds and 3.7 assists for the Leopards. Leo O’Boyle is averaging 6.9 points and 2.1 rebounds while shooting 43.1% over the last 10 games for Lafayette.
Luc is averaging 13.5 points and 1.6 steals for the Crusaders. Gates is averaging 11.8 points and 6.4 rebounds over the past 10 games for Holy Cross. | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: Marist hosts the Quinnipiac Bobcats after Jao Ituka scored 23 points in Marist’s 62-53 victory over the Siena Saints.
The Red Foxes have gone 5-6 in home games. Marist is 6-10 against opponents with a winning record.
The Bobcats are 7-8 against MAAC opponents. Quinnipiac has a 4-9 record in games decided by 10 or more points.
The teams play for the second time in conference play this season. The Bobcats won the last matchup 94-87 on Jan. 29. Matt Balanc scored 20 points to help lead the Bobcats to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Ituka is scoring 15.7 points per game with 3.2 rebounds and 1.6 assists for the Red Foxes. Ricardo Wright is averaging 14.6 points over the past 10 games for Marist. | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: Southern Miss hosts the Marshall Thundering Herd after Isaih Moore scored 25 points in Southern Miss’ 84-70 loss to the UTEP Miners.
The Golden Eagles are 3-8 on their home court. Southern Miss is 3-17 in games decided by at least 10 points.
The Thundering Herd have gone 3-11 against C-USA opponents. Marshall has a 2-4 record in one-possession games.
TOP PERFORMERS: Tyler Stevenson is averaging 15.1 points and 7.8 rebounds for the Golden Eagles. DeAndre Pinckney is averaging 9.3 points over the last 10 games for Southern Miss.
Andrew Taylor averages 1.8 made 3-pointers per game for the Thundering Herd, scoring 13.6 points while shooting 30.7% from beyond the arc. Taevion Kinsey is shooting 41.0% and averaging 11.8 points over the last 10 games for Marshall. | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: Norfolk State visits the Morgan State Bears after Joe Bryant Jr. scored 29 points in Norfolk State’s 89-59 victory against the Coppin State Eagles.
TOP PERFORMERS: Sheryn Devonish is averaging 6.7 points and 3.2 assists for the Bears. De’Torrion Ware is averaging 14.2 points over the last 10 games for Morgan State. | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: West Virginia looks to break its three-game skid with a victory against TCU.
The Horned Frogs are 9-4 in home games. TCU averages 68.3 points and has outscored opponents by 4.9 points per game.
The Mountaineers are 3-10 in conference games. West Virginia ranks eighth in the Big 12 with 30.4 rebounds per game led by Gabe Osabuohien averaging 5.7.
TOP PERFORMERS: Mike Miles is scoring 14.8 points per game with 3.8 rebounds and 4.0 assists for the Horned Frogs. Damion Baugh is averaging 8.5 points and 2.9 rebounds while shooting 44.6% over the last 10 games for TCU.
Taz Sherman is averaging 18.6 points and 1.5 steals for the Mountaineers. Sean McNeil is averaging 7.8 points over the last 10 games for West Virginia. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Tigers are 10-4 against SWAC opponents. Texas Southern is 3-2 in one-possession games.
The teams play for the second time this season in SWAC play. The Tigers won the last matchup 90-71 on Jan. 9. Bryson Etienne scored 21 points to help lead the Tigers to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Williams is averaging 14.9 points and 3.7 assists for the Golden Lions. Dequan Morris is averaging 17.0 points and 4.3 rebounds while shooting 52.8% over the past 10 games for UAPB.
Joirdon Karl Nicholas is scoring 9.5 points per game with 5.7 rebounds and 1.0 assist for the Tigers. Etienne is averaging 11.8 points over the past 10 games for Texas Southern. | null | null | null | null | null |
BEIJING — On the last day of the Winter Olympics, cross-country skier Jessie Diggins won Team USA’s final medal in the hell marathon also known as the women’s 30-kilometer mass start final while battling ferocious winds and brutal temperatures a day after waking up with food poisoning. In other words, it was the product of what seemed like an fittingly agonizing effort to close out the Beijing Games.
The 30-year-old’s superpower, aside from her athletic gifts, is her ability to withstand unimaginable levels of pain. In a sport that engages some 80 percent of the body’s muscles, just bopping along at the pace of a weekend warrior skiing for a good workout, Diggins prides herself on pushing her body until she has nothing left to give, then pushing once more.
She already had become the first American woman to win an individual cross-country medal; Sunday’s victory further puffs her resume. Diggins is the second American cross-country skier to win an Olympic medal in a distance event, following Bill Kock’s win in 1976. She is the first non-European skier to win the Olympic women’s 30-kilometer final.
Diggins propelled herself occasionally only with her arms and poles when her legs failed her, and at some point her mind went blank so she relied on others to tell her which lap she was skiing. That her coaches, teammates, ski technicians and the U.S. biathlon team braved the icy temperatures to cheer her on was invigorating. She gave herself pep talks on every downhill.
The silver was a herculean effort that fits right into Team USA’s hodgepodge of victories in Beijing. Even as Mikaela Shiffrin’s inexplicable struggles here meant the Alpine team managed only Ryan Cochran-Siegle’s silver in super-G and the men’s snowboarders failed to win an individual medal for the first time since 1998, other U.S. athletes delivered when expectations were mammoth — led by Chloe Kim in the halfpipe, Nathan Chen on ice and Kallie Humphries in her bobsled. | null | null | null | null | null |
BEIJING — A pile of figure-skating rubble created by Russian misbehavior. A new Chinese champion — from California. An ace American skier who faltered and went home empty-handed. The end of the Olympic line for the world’s most renowned snowboarder. All inside an anti-COVID “closed loop" enforced by China’s authoritarian government. | null | null | null | null | null |
BEIJING — Their plight had become one of the biggest stories of the Olympics, and in the hours before the Closing Ceremonies, the United States figure skaters who had yet to receive their team event silver medals here would not depart quietly Sunday afternoon.
It seems an odd group to be taking a stand against doping in the Olympics. American figure skaters have won two bronze and now a silver in three Olympic team events. Aside from stars such as Nathan Chen and Vincent Zhou, the U.S. skating team is not filled with big names or prominent voices. But the attention that has come with the denial of their medals and the international outrage over the CAS ruling last week allowing Valieva to skate in the women’s individual competition has given the U.S. team a platform it didn’t expect. | null | null | null | null | null |
A new push to censor Internet pornography could harm marginalized groups
History shows that anti-porn laws become weapons against LGBTQ Americans, feminists and others
By Quinn Anex-Ries
Quinn Anex-Ries is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His research examines the historical relationship between technology and sexuality.
In the past two years, battles over online pornography have escalated. In December 2020, Mastercard and Visa announced that they were discontinuing service to the popular adult content site Pornhub. Then, in March 2021, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) signed a measure requiring tablets and smartphones sold in the state to automatically enable filters blocking pornography and other “material that is harmful to minors.” The law goes into effect if five states pass similar laws. Several months later, the popular Internet subscription service OnlyFans announced that it would prohibit all pornographic content.
Backlash from content creators and sex workers prompted OnlyFans to reverse course. Yet efforts to ban online pornography are growing in strength. In fact, in recent months, lawmakers in Arizona introduced legislation nearly identical to the Utah law, and the banking industry successfully pressured online pornography platform AVN Stars to shut down.
High-profile skirmishes over online pornography are microcosms of the broader debate raging over Internet regulations. Large swaths of the American public, along with federal regulators and political pundits, have adopted the view that the Internet is unchartered — and untamable — territory.
But when it comes to pornography, the debate is anything but new. For over a century, government officials, concerned citizens and erotic media producers have wrestled over the distribution of pornography via platforms ranging from the U.S. mail to the telephone to cable television. These battles offer a cautionary note as lawmakers grapple with how to regulate the Internet. While proponents historically have sold tools to limit pornography as ways to protect public safety and national morality, multiple generations have wielded them more as weapons against LGBTQ communities and political radicals — with devastating effects.
In 1865, Congress passed the first law banning “obscenity” conveyed by mail in response to reports that Union soldiers received large numbers of pornographic books and photographs through the mail.
Eight years later, anti-vice reformer Anthony Comstock lobbied for harsher restrictions on all forms on obscenity, arguing that pornography posed an existential threat to the nation’s youths. This effort culminated with the 1873 passage of the Comstock Act, which banned the transmission of pornography, contraceptives and other sexually explicit materials through the mail.
Appointed as a special agent in the Post Office, Comstock led a ruthless campaign to cut off the flow of sexually explicit material. But he also used the powers afforded by his law to systematically target and arrest members of the free love social movement, whose advocacy for gender equity and against the institution of marriage earned Comstock’s ire. He waged a multiyear campaign to censor literature promoting women’s sexual autonomy and to penalize the free lovers who mailed these materials. This push solidified opposition to the free love movement and resulted in a Supreme Court ruling upholding much of the Comstock Act — even as the campaign for women’s liberation persisted.
Changing social attitudes toward sexual expression and liberalized court rulings in the first half of the 20th century gradually weakened the legacy of Comstock’s censorship regime — until everything changed after World War II. Fears about the sexual corruption of youths and a sharp rise in mail-order pornography ignited a public backlash and renewed anti-pornography efforts at the Post Office.
This was also the era of the “Lavender Scare” — the campaign led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) to purge gay men and lesbians from the federal workforce for fear that they posed a security risk either due to communist sympathies or susceptibility to blackmail. McCarthy’s efforts intensified the stigma against gay and lesbian Americans, and in this climate, their publications, some sexually explicit and others not, became prime targets for the Post Office. In an initiative spearheaded by Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield in 1959, postal inspectors persecuted gay publishers and consumers across the country, often with devastating personal and legal consequences. Routine intimidation of the Adonis Male Club, a gay male pen-pal service, for example, led some to take their own lives for fear of the consequences of an obscenity indictment.
This campaign continued until Lynn Womack, publisher of several popular gay physique magazines, challenged the Post Office’s claim that nude male publications were inherently obscene, ultimately winning his case in the Supreme Court in 1962.
This victory and several later Supreme Court decisions, including a 1967 ruling that protected the right to sell pornographic material to consenting adults, afforded new free speech protections to pornography. At the same time, however, these gains for advocates of sexual freedom galvanized conservative lawmakers to pass legislation that armed citizens with new mechanisms for blocking materials perceived as pornography. In 1967 and 1970, Congress passed Anti-Pandering Statutes that circumvented the First Amendment by allowing individual citizens to issue “prohibitory orders” blocking anyone from sending unsolicited sexually oriented, erotically arousing or sexually provocative mail-order advertisements to their homes.
While nondiscriminatory in intent, these laws were systematically used to target LGBTQ and antiwar publications. Across the country, ordinary people and those with legal and political power, including judges and members of Congress, filed prohibitory orders against gay and lesbian periodicals and underground military newspapers on the grounds that they were “sexually provocative.” The organizations receiving these orders faced potential legal ramifications from accidental delivery and bore the cost of implementing the measures. Many spoke out publicly in opposition to what they saw as unfair and biased treatment.
As new technologies made print-based pornography increasingly obsolete in the 1980s, the battleground shifted to the next generation of communications platforms: telephones and cable television. Fearing that these platforms would make pornography accessible to both children and unsuspecting adults, lawmakers plotted to censor “dial-a-porn” and “cableporn” — the commercial phone sex industry and pornography on cable television.
Despite opposition from free speech advocates, in 1989, Congress implemented a “reverse blocking” system which required phone customers to affirmatively opt-in to access dial-a-porn services. And 1996 legislation mandated that all televisions manufacturers equip all televisions made in the United States with v-chip technology that allowed a user to block specific program categories — namely, violent and pornographic shows.
As was true of the postal campaigns from decades prior, these laws disproportionately affected the LGBTQ community. Conservative media activists frequently attacked LGBTQ content on the telephone and television as pornographic — regardless of whether it contained actual sexual content. The ensuing public outrage, combined with the new laws and the willingness of Congress to act, often compelled businesses to censor platforms on their own. American Express, for example, canceled its merchant account with the popular gay phone sex line, The Connector, in January 1983, but continued business with similar heterosexual services.
With the v-chip, LGBTQ programs faced systemized censorship because they were more likely to be rated for older audiences and thus subject to blocking. The debate about television filtering erupted in 1999 when conservative Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed that Tinky Winky, the popular Teletubbies character, was gay and that such “sexual innuendo” was inappropriate for a G-rated show.
By the mid-1990s, the Internet eclipsed almost all other debates about the regulation of pornography. The courts overturned the first Internet pornography regulations due to free speech violations. But in 2000, Congress passed legislation mandating that all schools receiving federal funds use filtering software to limit access to sexually explicit online content. Like the v-chip, this software was often used to block access to a wide range of information, including non-pornographic material related to the LGBTQ community and sexual orientation. Only lawsuits in states like Tennessee and Missouri forced school districts to grant access to constitutionally protected information on the LGBTQ community.
More recent efforts to block Internet pornography have also perpetuated these historical exclusions. In 2018, Congress passed a legislative package, FOSTA-SESTA, intended to curb online sex trafficking. While regulators rarely use the law, its passage led many platforms, including Tumblr, Craigslist and eBay, to crack down on a range of consensual pornographic and sexually explicit material. This has had particularly adverse effects on the livelihoods of sex workers and the availability of LGBTQ media.
Questions about how best to prevent exploitation and regulate online pornography are only growing. This history provides clues as to the answer. Crafting policy solutions that allow individuals to choose how they encounter pornography online while also preserving free speech rights is possible. But only if lawmakers work collaboratively with the marginalized communities — including sex workers and LGBTQ people — most frequently subjected to censorship under anti-pornography legislation. | null | null | null | null | null |
During the meeting, the queen was heard responding to a question about how she is. The monarch pointed to her leg or her cane, and quipped, “Well, as you can see, I can’t move.”
Charles tested positive on Feb. 10. He had met with the queen two days before the test. Then, on Feb. 14, Clarence House confirmed that Charles’s wife Camilla had tested positive for the coronavirus.
It has been a painful year for the queen and her family. Her grandson Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, told Oprah Winfrey in March that they felt the palace was especially out-of-touch on issues such as mental health and racism. In April, after a short illness, the queen’s husband of 73 years, Prince Philip, died — and the queen was forced to sit alone at the funeral because of covid restrictions.
Last week, her second son, Prince Andrew, settled a sexual abuse lawsuit brought by a woman who says she was trafficked to him by his former friend, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. | null | null | null | null | null |
Or think of former House speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who now sits on the board of directors for Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News. (Disclaimer: I am an MSNBC contributor.) I suppose he would rationalize his decision to stay on the board despite its news outlet’s central role in spreading a web of conspiracy theories, whipping the GOP base into a perpetual frenzy and normalizing racism like this: “We know they spread the big lie and endangered millions of Americans by spreading disinformation about covid. They have a terrible record of fanning white supremacy. Knowing all of this, why would I consider remaining on the board? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rub shoulders with other soulless people and make sure I keep getting cushy gigs on other boards.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Snow covers a charred vehicle after wildfires ravaged the area in Superior, Colo., on Jan. 2. The blaze in a suburban area near Denver destroyed nearly 1,000 homes and other buildings. (Jack Dempsey/AP)
By Jonathan S. Comer
When disasters strike, the flood of images on TV and social media can have a powerful psychological effect on children — whether they are physically in the line of danger or watching from thousands of miles away.
This risk is important for parents and media to understand. In just the past few months, news coverage has been saturated with images of wildfires burning through neighborhoods in Colorado, tornado damage across the Midwest, a school shooting in Michigan and news of rising illnesses from the pandemic.
With climate change, researchers estimate that today’s children will face three times as many climate-related disasters as their grandparents. And the pervasiveness of social media and 24-hour news make exposure to images of disasters more probable.
What does childhood anxiety look like? Probably not what you think.
Harm for some kids
The Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health in 2021 as professionals saw rising rates.
Exposure to disasters in particular can trigger post-traumatic stress symptoms, such as loss of sleep, intrusive thoughts about the experience, memory impairments or severe emotional distress. But while around 10 percent of people who are directly exposed to traumatic events develop symptoms that are severe enough to meet diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a majority do not.
A once-dominant theory of disaster mental health, sometimes called the “bull’s eye model,” proposed that the negative mental health effects of a disaster were directly related to how close the person was to the center of the event — the bull’s eye. But more and more studies are finding that the negative mental health effects of disasters extend far beyond the immediate disaster area.
People who survive multiple disasters have worse mental health
Hurricane Irma’s impact
Nursing home deaths rose 25 percent after Hurricane Irma, study finds
We were able to more firmly establish whether changes were because of disaster and media exposure, and not something else.
Jonathan S. Comer is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Florida International University. Anthony Steven Dick is professor of psychology at Florida International University. | null | null | null | null | null |
The study adds cardiac ailment to a list of potential health effects of loneliness and isolation that include dementia and mental health issues
For older women, being lonely and socially isolated can increase the chance of developing heart disease by as much as 27 percent, according to research published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Loneliness grows from individual ache to public health hazard
Data from nearly 58,000 postmenopausal women who were tracked for more than a decade showed that, independently, social isolation increased heart disease by 8 percent and loneliness increased it by 5 percent, but the effect was much stronger for those who reported high levels of both feelings, giving them a 13 to 27 percent higher risk for cardiovascular problems than women with low levels of both. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for U.S. women, responsible for 1 in 5 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There’s a serious problem plaguing some older people: Loneliness
One of the researchers described social isolation as “physically being away from people,” whereas loneliness is a feeling “that can be experienced even by people who are regularly in contact with others.” A socially isolated person is not always lonely, and a lonely person may not be socially isolated. | null | null | null | null | null |
Portland police investigate a shooting they said left one dead and five others injured, on Feb. 19, 2022 in Portland, Ore. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
One person died and five others were injured in a shooting that took place late Saturday in northeast Portland, Ore., authorities said.
Local news organizations reported that the shooting took place around the same time as protesters were set to gather in nearby Normandale Park to draw attention to the case of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer earlier this month during a predawn, no-knock raid.
Officers from the Portland police were called to an intersection at the northeast corner of Normandale Park around 8 p.m. local time on Saturday after receiving reports of a shooting. They found a woman dead, a police statement said, while five other people, two men and three women, were transported to hospitals.
The police did not provide details about the condition of the shooting victims, and said that the identity of the woman who was killed, “as well as cause and manner of death will be determined by the Oregon State Medical Examiner.”
Portland police homicide detectives were investigating the shooting late Saturday and closed off the area around the corner where the shooting happened. | null | null | null | null | null |
BEIJING — Their plight had become one of the biggest stories of the Olympics, and in the hours before the Closing Ceremonies, the United States figure skaters who had yet to receive their team event silver medals would not depart quietly Sunday afternoon.
Washington Post reporters recall notable moments from the 2022 Winter Games and what it was like to cover the Olympics from a pandemic bubble in Beijing. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
It seems an odd group to be taking a stand against doping in the Olympics. American figure skaters have won two bronze and now a silver in three Olympic team events. Aside from stars such as Nathan Chen and Vincent Zhou, the U.S. skating team is not filled with big names or prominent voices. But the attention that has come with the denial of its medals and the international outrage over the CAS ruling last week allowing Valieva to skate in the women’s individual competition has given the U.S. team a platform it didn’t expect. | null | null | null | null | null |
Gregory McMichael sits during opening statements last fall in the state murder trial of him, William “Roddie” Bryan and Travis McMichael in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Gwynn County, Ga. (Octavio Jones/Pool/Reuters)
McMichael offered that oversight to explain why he did not immediately call police to report Arbery, a Black man whom he suspected of theft and trespassing. That McMichael reached for his firearm over his phone, however, also revealed a glaring subtext of the hate crimes trial that began last week and is expected to conclude Monday against McMichael, 66, his son Travis, 36, and a third White man, William “Roddie” Bryan, 52.
“Guns are as ordinary in some communities as household appliances or tools,” said Austin Sarat, the political science chair at Amherst College who has written about American gun culture.
In Canada and other Western countries, gun ownership is much rarer and gun violence far lower. But Americans consider guns part of “the social networks” in which people participate in civic life, he said.
Gun ownership in the United States has remained relatively steady over three decades, with about 44 percent of households having at least one gun, according a Gallup survey in 2020. The country’s homicide rate of 3.96 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019 ranked 32nd globally, according to a survey from the University of Washington. But it was more than eight times the rate in Canada and nearly 100 times the rate in Britain.
After Arbery was killed, Gregory McMichael told police that he and his son grabbed their firearms believing Arbery might have a gun. Even as Arbery lay bleeding on the street, Gregory McMichael said, he worried that the 25-year-old was “going for a weapon.” But prosecutors noted that Arbery had nothing on him as he jogged through Satilla Shores in shorts and a T-shirt — not even a backpack or a cellphone.
Former Justice Department lawyer Jonathan M. Smith said such charges are typically used by prosecutors to lengthen sentencing guidelines in cases of gang- or drug-related violence. Smith, who is executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, said he did not think the government was intending to make an overt political statement about gun control. | null | null | null | null | null |
A truck is towed from in front of Parliament Hill as Canadian police work to restore normality to the capital after trucks and demonstrators occupied the downtown core for more than three weeks to protest pandemic restrictions in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on February 19, 2022. (Patrick Doyle/Reuters)
Ottawa — Canadian authorities are back in control of nearly all of Canada’s capital Sunday after police arrested over 170 protesters, towed dozens of vehicles, and fenced or cordoned off large swaths of Ottawa in an operation over the weekend to disperse the self-styled “Freedom Convoy” that pushed the government to invoke wide ranging emergency powers.
But while the big rigs, barbecues, and bouncy castles were gone, major questions remained over how long the police would stay to prevent the possible return of demonstrators, and what consequences protesters, from participants up to its far-right organizers, would face for the three-week long illegal blockade.
Tall fences have blocked off access to Wellington Street, the center of the encampments that clogged the thoroughfare running in front of parliament and the prime minister’s office. A small contingency of holdouts remained in downtown Ottawa Saturday night, holding a street party in open defiance of the police, who have repeatedly warned that those who remain risk arrest and fines.
“If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges,” they said.
The act is expected to pass, though critics from both the left and the right have objected to its far-reaching use. Trudeau said he needed to take the emergency measure as no other efforts to quell the “illegal and dangerous activities” effecting the country’s economy and security were working.
Under the Emergencies Act, banks may freeze transactions suspected of funding the ‘Freedom Convoys’ that paralyzed Ottawa and clogged several U.S.-Canada borders, disrupting millions of dollars a day in trade. Drivers of vehicles documented at the demonstrations can also lose their corporate bank accounts, vehicle insurance, and driving licenses.
Police began to move in Friday, after 20 days of protesters having free-reign in the capital’s downtown. Despite tensions being high, the police response remained largely restrained, even by Canadian standards. Armed officers, some on horses and others in tactical gear, slowly moved truck-by-truck and block-by-block to push out demonstrators.
The police said they used pepper spray, stun grenades, and other anti-riot weapons. Some demonstrators arrested had body armor, smoke grenades and fireworks on them, the police said Saturday.
The police have faced heavy criticism for failing to enforce laws during in the convoy’s first three weeks. Critics noted that police have moved much more quickly and forcefully against other demonstrations, such as those held by indigenous communities. The majority of ‘Freedom Convoy’ attendees were White.
Law enforcement has denied that race or politics influenced their response. Rather they have pointed to the tactical difficulties posed by the tightly packed rows of vehicles. They estimated about 100 trucks had children living in or associated with them. Highly combustible jerrycans of fuel were also in wide circulation across the encampments.
Authorities additionally did not know if protesters were armed — and feared that items like cooking knives, vehicles, and hockey sticks could be used against them in an escalation.
Elizabeth Simons, the deputy director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said the group in question was Diagolon, an insurrectionist movement that’s called for creating a nation-state diagonally running from Alaska through Canada’s western provinces and down to Florida.
The arrests also underscored how the ‘Freedom Convoy,’ which focused from the outset on protesting health mandates and Trudeau’s government, was fueled in part by far-right organizers and influencers with a history of anti-government, anti-science and anti-media agendas.
Lich, Barber and a third early-on organizer, Benjamin Dichter, who left Ottawa Friday, are named in a class-action lawsuit originally filed by an Ottawa resident asking for $360 million Canadian dollars ($280 million) in damages caused by the demonstrations.
Jeffrey Monaghan, an Associate Professor at Carleton University’s Institute for Criminology and Criminal Justice, said that the goal of these court cases should “be trying to take momentum out of these movements.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Olympics Closing Ceremonies begin without breaking China’s carefully enforc...
BEIJING — On the last day of the Winter Olympics, cross-country skier Jessie Diggins won Team USA’s final medal in the hell marathon also known as the women’s 30-kilometer mass start final while battling ferocious winds and brutal temperatures a day after waking up with food poisoning. In other words, it was the product of what seemed like a fittingly agonizing effort to close out the Beijing Games.
The 30-year-old’s super power, aside from her athletic gifts, is her ability to withstand unimaginable levels of pain. In a sport that engages some 80 percent of the body’s muscles, just bopping along at the pace of a weekend warrior skiing for a good workout, Diggins prides herself on pushing her body until she has nothing left to give, then pushing once more.
She already had become the first American woman to win an individual cross-country medal; Sunday’s victory further puffs her resume. Diggins is the second American cross-country skier to win an Olympic medal in a distance event, following Bill Kock’s win in 1976. She is the first non-European skier to win a medal in the Olympic women’s 30-kilometer final.
Diggins propelled herself occasionally only with her arms and poles when her legs failed her, and at some point her mind went blank, so she relied on others to tell her which lap she was skiing. That her coaches, teammates, ski technicians and the U.S. biathlon team braved the icy temperatures that to cheer her on was invigorating. She gave herself pep talks on every downhill. The temperature hovered around minus 18 degrees C (0 degrees F).
The silver was a herculean effort that fits right into the United States’ hodgepodge of victories in Beijing. Even as Mikaela Shiffrin’s inexplicable struggles meant the Alpine team managed only Ryan Cochran-Siegle’s silver in super-G and the men’s snowboarders failed to win an individual medal for the first time since 1998, other U.S. athletes delivered when expectations were mammoth — led by Chloe Kim in the halfpipe, Nathan Chen on ice and Kallie Humphries in her bobsled. | null | null | null | null | null |
Pedestrians pass a Wall Street subway station near the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021. Equities retreated from near-record highs as U.S. trading resumed after the Labor Day holiday. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
Sarah Green Carmichael: When I started reading your new book, “The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward,” I blithely assumed I didn’t have very many regrets. By the time I finished, I realized I did — but that so does everyone else. Your book is based in part on responses from 16,000 people who filled out your World Regret Survey. Most of their regrets fit into one of four categories: foundation regrets (financial instability), connection regrets (scuppered relationships), boldness regrets (insufficient risk-taking), and moral regrets (unfortunate transgressions). I’m curious specifically about career regrets. Did you see any trends in your survey?
Daniel H. Pink, author, “The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward” : The two that seemed to come out the most are not being bold enough and not speaking up. Being “bolder” could mean being more entrepreneurial on the job, not staying in a lackluster job, or not starting a business. And there were a lot of regrets about not speaking up: “I wish I had said something” or “I had something to contribute, but I didn’t” or “I wish I were more assertive.”
SGC: What about regretting their choice of career?
DP: There were not as many as you would think. And most of them were like, “I should have pursued my dream instead of taking this job.” There were an even smaller number, an itty-bitty number, of people saying, “Oh, what a mistake becoming a fine artist. I should have become an accountant.”
SGC: Is that because you don’t have as many regrets if you do something that feels true to yourself, even if it’s not the most remunerative?
DP: A lot of times we evaluate our decisions based on how they turn out, rather than on the integrity of the decision at that moment. But I was surprised that people were not as outcome-ist as I expected. I remember one guy who said, “I started a business and it failed. But I’m glad that I did it. Because now I know. I don’t have any ‘What if?’ questions lingering over me.”
SGC: What else surprised you?
DP: That people who had more formal education were more likely to have career regrets than people who had less formal education. I think it’s basically that if you have more opportunities, you have more opportunities to forego.
SGC: In the book, you discuss the regrets of people who had not built a secure financial foundation. Did they regret not pursuing a career that would make more money?
DP: The financial regrets were really about spending and saving more than earning. They were mostly regrets about buying stuff that made them feel good in the moment. And even worse, borrowing to buy stuff that made them feel good in the moment. I found people saying, “I can’t believe I ate out all the time and I didn’t save any money,” and “I can’t believe I didn’t start putting money away when I was younger. I can’t believe I didn’t understand compound interest until it was too late.”
SGC: Would it be easier for people to take some of these career risks to be bolder, if there was more of a financial safety net in the U.S.?
DP: I can see you and raise you on that. If people had greater stability in their lives, they might be able not only to take more career risks, but they might actually be able to have more time with the people they love because they’re not straining to earn a living. If you think about these four core regrets, they give us clues about what constitutes a good life: People want some stability; they want to be able to learn and grow and contribute; they want to have close relationships; and they want to be in conditions where they can do the right thing.
SGC: It also sounded like people regretted not getting more levels of education, even though education is so expensive. Did you hear from people regretting education debt?
DP: We’re up to 19,000 responses so far, and only 38 people actually mentioned the words “student loan.” Among this group, private universities came up a lot. One person said they regretted “attending a private university that I could not afford and majoring in something that does not make a lot of money.” That was typical.
SGC: There’s some evidence that young people today may be delaying having kids for financial or career reasons, or considering not having children at all. But in your book, fewer than 20 people out of more than 16,000 said they regretted having children. What’s the takeaway there?
DP: There are way more people who regret never having kids than having kids. It’s not even close. I’m hesitant to say, “So go out and procreate, young men and women!” But I do think that tells us something about the importance of love and connection and meaning in our lives. There’s data that shows that people’s day-to-day happiness drops when they have kids, but their overall lifetime happiness increases significantly, because they have somebody who they love, somebody who is in their life forever. They have a legacy.
SGC: Are there any lessons that you would like bosses to draw from the book or from the research?
DP: When people tell you their regrets, they tell you what they value. And if they value these things — if they value a sense of stability, a sense of boldness, doing the right thing, connections to others — why would they not value those things in the hours they spend at work?
I do think that there are hints here about what makes an effective culture inside a company. One of them is a measure of stability. One reason for this “Great Resignation” is that people are leaving jobs because their jobs suck, because they’re unpredictable, because they don’t know their schedule, because they’re not being treated well, because they’re not getting paid enough.
One of the saddest regrets that I saw was a guy who talked about working at a place for 30 years and realizing that he didn’t have any colleagues who were friends. And I think that tells us that people want to have that kind of personal connection.
And business leaders should pay attention to the number of regrets I heard about speaking up, and how people feel like they can’t speak up. When people are in a culture that doesn’t provide psychological safety, they don’t speak up. They worry more about not failing than they do about doing something cool and interesting. So I think there’s a big lesson there.
SGC: Any other advice for leaders?
DP: There is a lesson for leaders in disclosing their own regrets and normalizing those rather than trying to live this kind of performative perfection. We know from the research on self-disclosure that when we disclose our vulnerabilities, people typically don’t think less of us — they typically think more of us. A leader who reveals her regrets and reckons with them is going to be a more effective leader.
SGC: If someone has career regrets, what should they do?
DP: Having career regrets is one of the most normal kinds of regrets that you can have, so treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. I think there’s a strong argument for talking about them with somebody else or even writing about them — when you convert it into concrete words, it’s less fearsome. Try to extract a lesson from it.
This is why I’m a huge fan of the failure resume. I think that everybody should do a failure resume, where you list your setbacks and screw ups, the lessons you learned from them, and what you’re going to do about it.
Overall, in general, people are a little too risk-averse in their careers. There is a far greater number of people who regret playing it safe than there are people who regret taking a risk. It’s not even close.
Americans Shrug Off Inflation With Some Retail Therapy: Robert Burgess
Buy Now, Pay Later? You Might Regret It: Alexis Leondis
The Four Secrets of How to Be a Bad Boss: Adrian Wooldridge | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: After the pandemic, long covid may unleash a tidal wave of health troubles
Eve Efron, who has been struggling with long covid for nearly a year, goes through the pills and supplements she takes to help manage her symptoms in Fairfax, on Feb. 3. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
Slowly, researchers are uncovering the face of long covid-19, and it is not a happy one. In two years of the pandemic, millions of people survived the infection but have experienced debilitating symptoms lingering for months. While SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory pathogen, the research is showing it can trigger disorders in other organs and systems of the body. Long covid is neither a picnic nor a fantasy.
No one knows the true scope. An examination of 57 studies around the world comprising 250,351 people, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in October, showed that covid survivors suffered both short- and long-term difficulties. At six months after diagnosis or hospital discharge, more than half — 54 percent — were still struggling with at least one symptom. The American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation runs a model based on the assumption that 30 percent of the 77 million people in the United States who survived covid have had some kind of Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or PASC. Even if the total is just 10 percent, that’s still 7.7 million people.
What are the maladies? In one large online survey last year, covering 3,762 people in 56 countries and published in eClinical Medicine, the most common symptoms reported were fatigue, malaise after exertion and cognitive problems, or “brain fog.” Many also said they suffered insomnia and other sleep problems, heart palpitations and rapid heartbeat, muscle aches and joint pain, shortness of breath, and dizziness and vertigo. In other research, covid survivors have been found to suffer heart disease and other serious ailments, such as stroke, months after they were first infected.
In an article published by Science recently, authors Serena Spudich and Avindra Nath noted that the early thinking was the virus may have entered the central nervous system of those suffering covid-related neurological troubles. But they said analysis of cerebrospinal fluid, which flows in and around the hollow spaces of the brain and spinal cord, taken from living patients suffering neuropsychiatric symptoms, has failed to find traces of the virus RNA. Rather, they said, it appears the primary driver of neurological disease in these patients is impairment of the immune system, which leads to cascading other effects. Another study announced recently suggested that long covid could be due to damage to the vagus nerve, which extends from the brain down into the torso and into the heart, lungs and intestines as well as several muscles, including those involved in swallowing.
Just as important in weighing the prolonged impact of the pandemic are the mental health costs of long covid. Long-haulers struggle to overcome loss of employment, anxiety and depression. These ailments must not be stigmatized or ignored.
The pandemic will almost certainly leave in its wake millions of people with lasting symptoms and illness. Judging by the preliminary estimates, this poses an enormous future challenge for health care everywhere. There’s no time to waste researching the causes and damage of long covid, and preparing to treat it in all its manifestations. | null | null | null | null | null |
Or think of former House speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who now sits on the board of directors for Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News. (Disclaimer: I am an MSNBC contributor.) I suppose he might rationalize his decision to stay on the board despite its news outlet’s central role in spreading a web of conspiracy theories, whipping the GOP base into a perpetual frenzy and normalizing racism like this: “We know they spread the big lie and endangered millions of Americans by spreading disinformation about covid. They have a terrible record of fanning white supremacy. Knowing all of this, why would I consider remaining on the board? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rub shoulders with other soulless people and make sure I keep getting cushy gigs on other boards.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Fireworks during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony.
The 2022 Beijing Olympics Closing Ceremony.
The national flags are paraded during the closing ceremony.
The Olympic Cauldron is seen alongside the flags of the competing countries.
The Olympic Rings are seen in front of flag bearers.
Performers take part the closing ceremony.
Volunteers during the closing ceremony.
The Italy flag is raised alongside the Greece flag and the China flag during the closing ceremony.
Thomas Bach, IOC President waves the flag of the IOC.
Dancers during the closing ceremony.
Volunteers are presented with gifts by Martin Fourcade of Team France.
Spectators during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony.
Volunteers wave to the fans during the closing ceremony. | null | null | null | null | null |
MADRID — The last-minute scramble to secure the signing of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has started to pay off for Barcelona.
De Jong had added to Barcelona’s lead from inside the area by completing Dembélé’s right-flank pass in the 32nd, and Pedri sealed the victory with a long-range strike in the 63rd which ahd a slight deflection. | null | null | null | null | null |
The recruit’s death is also being investigated as a possible suicide, police said, and did not immediately release the name of the recruit or his wife because they were still notifying next of kin on Sunday afternoon.
In an internal email to the department, Davis wrote he wants to “determine if our leadership performance was in compliance with my expectations.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The recruit’s death is also being investigated as a possible suicide, said police, who did not immediately release the name of the recruit or his wife because they were still notifying next of kin on Sunday afternoon.
In an internal email to the department, Davis wrote that he wants to “determine if our leadership performance was in compliance with my expectations.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Fans are packed in at Daytona International Speedway
Jusan Hamilton takes over as Daytona’s first Black race director
NFL Hall of Famer Charles Woodson will be the Daytona 500′s grand marshal
A full house returns for Daytona this year
What is different about NASCAR’s new racecars?
Why did NASCAR move to the Next Gen car?
Michael Jordan, Bubba Wallace have front-row seats to spectacular Xfinity crash
By Andrew Golden2:54 p.m.
After having a limited number of fans in attendance last year, fans have packed into the Daytona International Speedway for this year’s edition of the Daytona 500. Although numbers aren’t official, officials said they were expecting around 100,000 people to be at the race.
Wow. What a scene with about 30 minutes until the green flag. #Daytona500 pic.twitter.com/TJhTLzgTY1
Dayton 500 officials announced last week that tickets for the race were sold out.
“We are so thankful to the fans who have reserved their place in what will be yet another history-making event at The World Center of Racing,” Daytona International Speedway President Frank Kelleher said last week.
I know it’s been said, but it’s absolutely packed here. Nice weather, big crowd. Pre-race ceremonies coming up. pic.twitter.com/7GCVY6c3nA
— Alex Andrejev (@AndrejevAlex) February 20, 2022
Race directors don’t just come and go at the Daytona 500, where only the third man to hold the job since 1988 — and the first Black man — is running the show.
Jusan Hamilton follows David Hoots and Tim Bermann, the only previous directors in that span.
Hamilton has spent 10 years in NASCAR racing operations, working in event production, social media and leading the Drive for Diversity program that rejected him as a teen. He eventually was named race director for NASCAR’s three national series. Daytona is the culmination of a dream that some might have regarded as unlikely, Hamilton said.
“Why does an African-American kid from Upstate New York have an interest in motorsports?” Hamilton told the Associated Press that he was often asked.
His answer? He loves racing.
“For me, it was, this is what I enjoy,” Hamilton said. “This is what I love doing. There’s a huge connection with me and my family to go to the racetrack each weekend and spend the time together.”
He’ll be running the show on everything from cautions to penalties to monitoring the debut of the sport’s Next Gen car in its debut.
“It’s not necessarily about being the first Black man to call the Daytona 500,” Hamilton said. “Career-wise, it’s a huge accomplishment for me, with the passion I’ve had for motorsports. Bigger picture, I hope it sets a positive example for others that, regardless of race and background, if you work hard and have a mind-set toward your goal, it is achievable.”
A trio of celebrities are set to kick off this year’s Daytona 500, as NFL Hall of Famer Charles Woodson will be the race’s grand marshal. Woodson, a Super Bowl champion and Heisman Trophy winner, will officially kick off the race before turning it over to country singer Trace Adkins for the national anthem.
He'll be giving the starting command at the #DAYTONA500. NFL legend @CharlesWoodson is ready to get things started!@NFLonFOX | @NASCAR pic.twitter.com/QdMIC5HXMq
Lachlan Murdoch, son of Rupert, will cap off the prerace festivities as the honorary starter. Murdoch is the CEO of Fox Corporation; FOX Sports is broadcasting the race for the 19th consecutive year.
Following the pregame festivities, the race will officially get underway, kicking off the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season.
For the first time in two years, fans are back in full force at Daytona International Speedway for the Daytona 500.
Last year, spectators were limited to about one-third of the usual size because of the coronavirus pandemic. This year, officials expect a crowd of more than 100,000, typical of race-day crowds and the number that attended the race in February 2020, just before the pandemic shut down sports.
Attendance last year was limited to about 30,000 fans in the stands and what officials said were a “few thousand” in the infield, making it the smallest official crowd in race history. The 1960 race, the second in Daytona’s history, had an official attendance of 38,775.
NASCAR’s new Next Gen cars differ from their predecessors in ways both subtle and significant.
With no mangled sheet metal to puncture or abrade tires, there ought to be fewer blowouts. And because the tires are bigger (18 rather than 15 inches), that puts more emphasis on the driver’s ability to keep the cars from spinning out.
Though the gas-powered, V-8 engine is unchanged, the Next Gen car makes a deeper sound because the exhaust has been reconfigured.
And the car has been designed to accommodate an inevitable transition from gas-powered engines to a greener powertrain — whether hybrid, electric or some variation — as manufacturers wean themselves from fossil fuels.
Chase Elliott is passing up free agency, signing a five-year contract extension Saturday with Hendrick Motorsports at Daytona International Speedway, the day the NASCAR season begins.
The 2020 Cup champion, Elliott will drive the No. 9 Chevrolet through 2027 and said he felt “so fortunate to be in this position.”
Elliott’s contract had been due to expire after the season.
“I have a great team ... and the support of the best car owner and racing organization in the world,” he said (via the Associated Press). “For me, there’s a lot of pride in driving for Hendrick Motorsports and having the opportunity to win races and compete for championships.
Myatt Snider was uninjured in a fiery crash on the last lap of the season-opening Xfinity Series race Saturday night at Daytona International Speedway.
Snider hit the outside wall, crashing as drivers maneuvered for position on the backstretch. Another car struck him, sending his car flying, and landing on the catch fence, with the cables cutting parts and pieces from his car. Snider immediately signaled that he was okay and climbed from the car.
Snider had what he said was an injury to his left foot and expected that he would be able to drive in next week’s race at Auto Club Speedway, saying he is “extremely blessed to be as okay as I am.”
Michael Jordan, now a NASCAR team owner, had a front-row seat, along with driver Bubba Wallace, who will drive in the Daytona 500 Sunday. (Grandstands were removed from the backstretch after a number of fans were injured in wrecks in 2013 and 2015.)
It was a little too close for comfort for Wallace, who drives for Jordan’s team and tweeted, “Crazy wreck right in front of us. Scary stuff.”
“I’m just glad none of it hit y’all,” Snider tweeted in reply to Wallace.
Snider’s engine flew out and was struck by Matt Mills’s car.
“It’s the last lap and everybody is trying their best to push as hard as as possible, and I’m trying to keep as much momentum as I can get,” Snider told reporters after being checked out in the infield care center. “I felt a push, and then I started feeling the car go right and I’m like, ‘Crap. I might be along for a ride here.’ Sure enough, I was.”
As he was facing backwards, he said, "I started seeing the racetrack and I’m like, “Hmm, this is getting better as it goes.’ I think what happened is that the left rear started yawing toward the fence and then the fence caught it and that’s what really started tearing everything up.”
Austin Hill passed A.J. Allmendinger on the final lap right, winning the race just as the crash took place. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Olympics managed to stage a weekend in Beijing that turned on the lights in Scotland
Bobby Lammie, Hammy McMillan, Grant Hardie and Ross Whyte of Team Great Britain show off their silver medals. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
BEIJING — Before the Beijing Olympics closed down, they spent the weekend causing the lights to switch on eight time zones away in Scotland over the sport of curling, proving Olympics do retain their magic amid their flaws, and the world does retain its you-never-know amid its woes.
Lights went on for match-watching parties Saturday in the groggy hours at 6:50 a.m., and Sunday in the wee hours of 1:05 a.m., and they went on especially over on the southwest coast in Stranraer at the North West Castle Hotel, which in 1970 became the first hotel on Earth to boast its own curling rink.
And to think some hotels crow about their pools.
Of all the rollicking weekends that have hit the British Isles through the years, they just had themselves a rollicking curling weekend as some people might have even sipped. It got its oomph especially in Scotland, a birthplace of curling with its island of Ailsa Craig off the Ayrshire coast, noted home of the up-to-snuff granite that forms most of the world’s primo curling stones.
It’s also home to all 10 curling athletes for Team Great Britain, and where one gold-medal match might have wrung some fun, they got two. The men’s Team Great Britain got silver on Saturday after a 4-3 cliffhanger with an extra end against gold medalist Sweden, and the women’s Team Great Britain won gold on Sunday after a 10-3 non-cliffhanger against Japan.
Britain got two medals here; those were the two.
“I mean, it’s the most exciting and significant weekend in the sport of curling that I’ve ever experienced, or that I’ve ever heard about or read about, ever,” Bruce Crawford, the CEO of Scottish Curling, said from Edinburgh.
It started in the tough hours of Saturday morning in Stranraer southwest of Glasgow, in the historical parish of Inch and the historical country of Wigtownshire, on the shores of Loch Ryan, near the old ferry route through the Irish Sea to Northern Ireland. It’s a town with 10,000 souls and with close ties to three of the five male players, two of them grandsons of the owner of the hotel with the curling.
It’s a town where, in 1999, when Hammy McMillan returned home from a curling world championship in New Brunswick in Canada, two of his friends went by the elementary school to pick up Hammy McMillan Jr., then going on 7, to join the party, and now that latter Hammy has grown to age 29, to Team Great Britain, and to an Olympic silver medal himself. It’s where, on Saturday, they had British flags and a Team Great Britain flag on the wall, and chants in the air.
“These boys are very well-known to this room of super-supporters which included parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles and cousins as well as the best of friends and local curlers,” Gail Munro at McMillan Hotels, a curling champ herself in life, wrote in an email. “The room was packed to capacity and the support of the team was immense.”
The list of worse rooms on the weekend seems to have been long: “Throughout the match,” she wrote, “whenever Team GB played one of their many fantastic shots, the room erupted with cheering, applause, music and chanting. The chants included, ‘There’s a Bruce loose a lot this hoose,’ and, ‘There’s only one Bobby Lammie.’”
The “Bruce” refers to Bruce Mouat, the team skipper, or captain.
It built and built: “The tension was palpable as we waited for Team GB to get the chance to take a lead in the game.” Then: “The chance didn’t come despite the fantastic shot play from Team GB. The more experienced opposition (Sweden) played to perfection and got the gold (4-3 in an extra end).”
And so: “We all know the boys went to Beijing to come home with gold medals for Team GB and we know they will be disappointed but when they get over losing the game, they will realize, as we all do, that this is an immense achievement and a silver Olympic medal in 2022 is just the start of the Olympic journey for these boys.”
Then, as Saturday gave way to Sunday morning, the women began their match at 9:05 a.m. Beijing time, or 1:05 a.m. in Scotland, an inconvenience many surmounted. Crawford, who had gone to one of Scotland’s many watch parties on Saturday morning in Edinburgh, where some revelers knew the players, sat up in his house on Sunday morning, doing what people do when they watch sports from 1 to 3 in the morning: He texted and emailed and WhatsApped.
He and others in the know sensed victory beforehand, and they knew the fate early on as Team Great Britain leaped out in front much more emphatically than it could in its grueling 12-11 semifinal against Switzerland. Then the 10-3 romp ended, and he finally got to sleep around maybe 4:30, then woke around 6:30 to answer calls from TV and radio. “We’ve had record levels of interest,” he said of the Olympic weeks. “We’ve had many inquiries from people wanting to try the sport or wanting to become fans.”
He said, “We’re just so passionate about the sport here. We just love to talk about it and try to encourage more people to have a go.”
The best have had a go since 2017 at the National Curling Academy in Stirling, 26 miles northeast of Glasgow, where three of the five women and three of the five men reside. The men will return with pride, the women with pride and merry disbelief.
“I just don’t really know what’s happened. It’s just a bit weird,” said Hailey Duff, born in Auckland (New Zealand) and living in Forfar (Scotland).
“I think I’m just speechless,” said Jennifer Dodds, born and living in Edinburgh.
“It’s going to take a long time to sink, I think,” said skipper Eve Muirhead, born in Perth (the one in Scotland) and living in Stirling.
As they strive to let it sink, it looks like they’ll have a lot of help. | null | null | null | null | null |
Military is accused
of killing children
The Nigerian military has killed and wounded children in an airstrike in neighboring Niger, a local governor in Niger, state television and an aid agency said Sunday, although Nigeria’s armed forces said they were still investigating.
“As a matter of policy, the Nigerian air force does not make any incursions into areas outside Nigeria’s territorial boundaries. That’s our policy,” army Maj. Gen. Jimmy Akpor, Nigeria’s director of defense information, said. He said an investigation was underway.
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders, which cared for some of the wounded, confirmed the strike. It said that 12 people died, including four children. Local inhabitants told DWB that Nigerian forces were pursuing targets who had fled a border town.
Bennett criticizes possible Iran deal
He also noted the 10-year limits on enrichment and other key aspects of Iran’s nuclear program in the original deal are set to be lifted in 2025.
Body found on burning Greek ferry: Firefighters battling for a third day a blaze on a ferry sailing from Greece to Italy recovered on Sunday the body of a passenger listed as missing, Greek authorities said. It is the first reported fatality after rescuers managed to take at least 281 out of 292 passengers and crew to safety from a blaze that broke out on the Italian-flagged Euroferry Olympia early on Friday. The dead man was found in the cabin of a truck in the ship's hold.
Thousands rally for Zimbabwe opposition activist: Zimbabwe's leading opposition figure, Nelson Chamisa, drew thousands of cheering supporters on Sunday to his first political rally since forming a new party weeks ago, as the country gears up for elections that have been postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Nelson Chamisa formed the Citizens Coalition for Change party in January, making a break from the country's longtime opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. The 44-year-old lawyer and pastor lost a disputed presidential election in 2018 to President Emmerson Mnangagwa, and the country's Constitutional Court threw out his challenge to the result.
Hong Kong weighs new coronavirus controls: Stringent anti-virus controls that ban public gatherings in Hong Kong of more than two people might be tightened to stop a surge in infections, the territory's top health official said Sunday, as 14 deaths and more than 6,000 new cases were reported. Health Secretary Sophia Chan, speaking on a radio program, gave no details of possible new restrictions and called on the public to stay at home. Hong Kong already is operating under its strictest curbs on travel, business and public activity since the pandemic began. They also prohibit gatherings of more than two households. | null | null | null | null | null |
Dozens of pro-Ukrainian activists and Ukrainian Americans rally outside the United Nations as world leaders gather there to discuss the increasing tension with Russia on Feb. 17, 2022 in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
CHICAGO — The screen inside the Ukrainian National Museum flashed with images of gunfire, helmeted young protesters and bloodied bodies. In one massive photo propped against a wall, a lone Ukrainian protester waves the country’s blue and yellow flag as fire burn around him.
Hailing from a country where past conflict is often prologue, Ukrainian Americans were commemorating one conflict while being mired in another.
With each new sign of war, a wave of grief and worry ripples across the Atlantic, reaching Ukrainian enclaves in the U.S. like the roughly 100,000 who live in the Chicagoland area and are densely settled in Ukrainian Village, a historic neighborhood on the city’s West Side. There are over a million Ukrainians living in the United States — one of the largest populations in the West outside Ukraine, second only to Canada.
Many are like Parasiuk and have either immigrated during the past eight years of conflict, or put down deep roots in America while immediate relatives still live in Ukraine. While some are grateful that much of the broader public is starting to wake up to the situation in Ukraine, there is wariness — and frustration — that Western leaders may be doing too little, too late.
The Ukrainian American population is scattered across the country but heavily concentrated in robust communities around Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia. Some trace their arrival to early waves of immigration that immediately followed the end of World War I and Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Russian Republic in 1918. Decades later, after Ukraine broke from the Soviet Union, many in the less economically-developed western part of the country moved to the U.S. for more opportunity.
Throughout her life, Klochko, 47, has witnessed different iterations of Ukraine’s history. She was born in the Soviet era, grew up amid the Iron Curtain’s fall and left Ukraine as it developed into an independent democracy. The last two decades of escalating tensions with Russia are ones she has witnessed from afar — and that by itself brings its own distinctive type of pain, she said.
For many Ukrainian Americans in the U.S., the Budapest Memorandum remains a point of contention. Under the 1994 agreement, Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees that the signatories — which included Belarus, Great Britain, Khazakstan, Russia and the U.S. — would respect Ukraine’s territorial and political sovereignty. Many feel that if the U.S. and others had honored the accord, they would have stopped Russian troops in 2014 from invading and prevented future conflict. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Building health systems for all
Catherine Hopkins, director of Community Outreach and School Health at St. Joseph's Hospital, performs a test on a patient at St. Joseph's Hospital in Yonkers, N.Y., on April 20, 2020. (John Minchillo/Associated Press)
The Feb. 14 editorial “Hope amid the covid whirlwind” pointed out that innovations and new tools against covid-19 could benefit us well into the future. The same is true of many old tools and for the infrastructure to actually get them where they’re needed.
If we start by building out equitable health services that reach everyone now, we can protect lives today and be better prepared for new threats.
Contact tracing, PCR testing and airborne infection control are new to most Americans, but tuberculosis health workers have been experts in all of them for years. Existing TB programs quickly became the backbone of responses to the coronavirus in many countries.
But as a disease fueled by poverty and inequity, TB systems were too often already underfunded, understaffed and ignored. That meant the best chance at responding to the new pandemic was an already under-resourced system.
President Biden announced he’ll convene world leaders this fall to reinvest in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, supporting countries globally to tackle these long-standing pandemics. A bold investment from the United States and other governments would reject the false choice between the challenges of today and challenges of the future and build the health systems that are needed for both.
Joanne Carter, Washington
The writer is executive director of Results, a grass-roots advocacy organization focused on poverty, and a former board member of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Let’s not celebrate cruelty
A southwest view of the stockade at the Confederate-run prison in Andersonville, Ga., on Aug. 17, 1864. (Library of Congress)
The Feb. 17 Metro article “A descendant on defense” brought more attention to the atrocities committed at Andersonville, Ga.
The article reported that Heinrich L. Wirz is battling for the legacy of his great-uncle, Confederate Capt. Hartmann Heinrich “Henry” Wirz, who “now lies in a cemetery in Northeast D.C., under a marker identifying him as a 'Confederate hero martyr.’”
I, too, have a family connection to the prison at Andersonville and Capt. Wirz.
In 1864, my great-great-great grandfather, Gottlieb Spitzer, a private in the Union Army, arrived at Andersonville as a prisoner of war. In his time there, Gottlieb bore witness to Capt. Wirz’s cruelty and inhumanity firsthand. In fact, he was among the hundreds of witnesses to testify against Capt. Wirz at his military tribunal in 1865. His testimony is chilling — describing scenes of torture, starvation and death inflicted at Capt. Wirz’s orders. Gottlieb spent the rest of his life permanently disabled because of the conditions at Andersonville.
I can appreciate the contemporary Mr. Wirz’s interest in his family history. What I cannot appreciate, however, is the urge to redeem those who waged a war designed to maintain human bondage. May we instead honor Capt. Wirz’s victims and strive to create a world befitting their memory.
Sam Facas, Washington | null | null | null | null | null |
It took a sexual abuse scandal of epic proportions to finally force the beginning of real change in our country, though there is still much work to do. The gymnasts themselves have been the catalysts. “We are here,” Olympian Ali Raisman said in her victim statement in 2018. “We have our voices, and we are not going anywhere.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The whole truth on drug store closures
In her Feb. 17 op-ed, Megan McArdle asked, “Why are drugstores closing?” She said the right blames shoplifting and the left blames corporate consolidation, but the only people who really know why are the drugstore executives, and they “aren’t necessarily going to tell the public the whole truth.”
Heyward Donigan, the president and chief executive of Rite Aid, said that the closures are to “reduce costs, drive improved profitability and ensure that we have a healthy foundation to grow from, with the right stores in the right locations.” That is, Rite Aid will close stores that aren’t profitable and keep open those that are.
That pretty much sounds like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Vic Presutti, Dayton, Ohio | null | null | null | null | null |
Dozens of pro-Ukrainian activists and Ukrainian Americans rally outside the United Nations in New York City as world leaders gather there to discuss the increasing tension with Russia on Feb. 17, 2022. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
CHICAGO — The screen inside the Ukrainian National Museum flashed with images of gunfire, helmeted young protesters and bloodied bodies. In one massive photo propped against a wall, a lone Ukrainian protester waves the country’s blue and yellow flag as fire burns around him.
Hailing from a country where past conflict is often a prologue, Ukrainian Americans were commemorating one conflict while being mired in another.
With each new sign of war, a wave of grief and worry ripples across the Atlantic, reaching Ukrainian enclaves in the U.S., like the roughly 100,000 who live in the Chicagoland area and are densely settled in Ukrainian Village, a historic neighborhood on the city’s West Side. There are over a million Ukrainians living in the United States — one of the largest populations in the West outside Ukraine, second only to Canada.
Many are like Parasiuk and have either immigrated during the past eight years of conflict, or put down deep roots in America while immediate relatives still live in Ukraine. While some are grateful that much of the broader public is starting to recognize the situation in Ukraine, there is wariness — and frustration — that Western leaders may be doing too little, too late.
The Ukrainian American population is scattered across the country but heavily concentrated in robust communities around Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio. Some trace their arrival to early waves of immigration that immediately followed the end of World War I and Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Russian Republic in 1918. Decades later, after Ukraine broke from the Soviet Union, many in the less economically-developed western part of the country moved to the U.S. for more opportunity.
Throughout her life, Klochko, 47, has witnessed different iterations of Ukraine’s history. She was born in the Soviet era, grew up amid the Iron Curtain’s fall and left Ukraine as it developed into an independent democracy. The past two decades of escalating tensions with Russia are ones she has witnessed from afar — and that by itself brings its own distinctive type of pain, she said.
For many Ukrainian Americans in the U.S., the Budapest Memorandum remains a point of contention. Under the 1994 agreement, Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees that the signatories — which included Belarus, Great Britain, Kazakhstan, Russia and the U.S. — would respect Ukraine’s territorial and political sovereignty. Many feel that if the U.S. and others had honored the accord, they would have stopped Russian troops in 2014 from invading and prevented future conflict. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Yes, Georgetown should fire an academic for a racist tweet
A student ascends the steps to the McDonough building on campus of Georgetown Law School in D.C. on Oct. 12. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Yes, you should be fired for a tweet if that tweet reveals you do not have the ability to do your job.
Last month, Ilya Shapiro, a prominent libertarian, was hired to be a senior lecturer at Georgetown Law School and to run its Center for the Constitution. Before his first day on the job, he tweeted a critique of President Biden’s decision to exclusively consider Black women for his pending appointment to the Supreme Court.
Shapiro recommended that Biden select Sri Srinivasan, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who is of South Asian descent: “But alas [Srinivasan] doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman. Thank heaven for small favors?”
Shapiro soon deleted the tweet and apologized for it, calling it “inartful.” But the damage was done. William M. Treanor, the law school’s dean, described Shapiro’s words as “antithetical to the work that we do here every day to build inclusion, belonging, and respect for diversity.” A large coalition of Georgetown student organizations called for Georgetown to rescind his employment. Now he is on paid leave, pending an investigation into whether he violated the university’s policies on “professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment.”
I’ve been a tenured law professor at Georgetown for more than a decade. Let me make this easy for the dean. Yes, Shapiro violated those principles. No, he should not be employed at our school, which educates more Black women than virtually any top law school in the country.
The problem is not that Shapiro is opposed to Biden’s selection criteria. Shapiro is unfit for our community not only because he called Black women “lesser” but also because his tweet evidences a pattern of bias that isn’t just a poor choice of words.
An interesting mix of conservatives and mainly White progressives has risen in Shapiro’s defense. Those on the right deny that Shapiro’s tweet was racist. Some liberals concede that point, but claim academic freedom includes the right to describe Black women pejoratively.
Maybe for conservatives, Shapiro’s bias would be easier to understand in another context. Louis Brandeis was the first Jewish person confirmed to the Supreme Court in 1916. Much of the opposition to his appointment was blatantly antisemitic. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge stated, “If it were not that Brandeis is a Jew … he would never have been appointed.” If someone had complained that a more qualified gentile had been passed over for a “lesser Jew,” it would be obvious that comment was antisemitic.
The fact that Shapiro’s tweet isn’t, to some, as obviously biased demonstrates the hurdles facing women of color. They are presumed incompetent, even when Biden’s two leading candidates graduated from top law schools, clerked for Supreme Court justices and have unimpeachable records as appellate judges.
When President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the court, Shapiro wrote that “she would not have even been on the short list if she were not Hispanic,” and used dog whistles, such as claiming that lawyers question her “abilities as a judicial craftsman” and “erratic temperament.” But when President Donald Trump announced that his replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be female because, in the president’s words, “I think it should be a woman because I actually like women much more than men,” Shapiro apparently tweeted not a peep.
The problem with the academic freedom argument is that it proves too much. It is true that Shapiro has the “right” to say anything he pleases, including any stupid racist or sexist thing. But a university should not be indifferent to the meaning and impact of those words, especially on students.
Allowing Shapiro to teach would force Black women — and other Black students and other women — to make the kind of wretched choice no student should have to make: accept that one of their school’s courses is off limits to them because of credible evidence the instructor is prejudiced, or enroll and serve as test cases for whether Shapiro’s claims to the contrary are correct.
Two weeks after Shapiro insulted Black women, another Georgetown law professor addressed an Asian student in class as “Mr. Chinaman.” After the predictable outcry, the professor half-apologized, saying he was sorry for any pain he caused but, as a European, hadn’t realized his words were racist.
The academic freedom crew would say the student should have just patiently explained to the professor why the slur was wrong, and the university should have embraced the teachable moment. Kumbaya, “we are the world,” yadda yadda yadda.
Students who think their education should be free of racist slurs from professors are not illiberal snowflakes who don’t understand academic values. They simply want to learn in an environment where their teachers don’t judge them by their race or gender.
There is a necessary — and difficult — line drawn when free speech conflicts with anti-racism values. Shapiro’s “lesser black woman” tweet falls on the wrong side of that line. Being a member of the Georgetown community is a privilege that Shapiro has proven he does not deserve. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Washington, Lincoln and the work they left behind
The likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln are carved into Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The coincidence of Black History Month and the Presidents’ Day holiday is not an accident. It’s also an opportunity.
We are struggling with how to tell our national story and how to teach it in schools. At stake is squaring our self-understanding as a beacon of liberty with the undeniable historical facts of slavery, racism and racial subjugation. Not for nothing do historians so often invoke the words “irony” and “paradox.”
Black History Month is an effort to move us toward a more accurate understanding of who we are by encouraging us to face grave national failings while also celebrating human resiliency.
The scholar and educator Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926, when racism, anti-immigrant feeling and segregation were on the rise. The second week of February was chosen to honor the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, “The Great Emancipator,” and Frederick Douglass, the brilliant writer and Black abolitionist. President Gerald Ford recognized it as a month-long remembrance in 1976.
Retropolis: Black History Month founder showed how schools should teach about race
Thanks to Woodson, we now regularly lift up Black American achievement in the face of oppression while also recognizing how deeply racism is embedded in our nation’s development.
Black History Month is a rebuke to those threatening to criminalize the teaching of, well, pretty much anything that might make us think of our country as less than saintly.
Opinion: Take it from a high-schooler who's actually learned about CRT -- adults need to chill out
Advocates of such censorship seem to think that candor about our past is the enemy of love of country.
President Donald Trump summarized this view in a September 2020 speech calling for the restoration of “patriotic education to our schools” in order to “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history” and make sure “our heroes will never be forgotten.”
These observations, citing a different country, might have been uttered by Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. They are also based on a false premise: that facing up to our country’s racism means consigning figures such as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, whom we commemorate this weekend, to history’s trash heap. This is profoundly wrong because it implies that to honor what made them great, we have to lie about their failings.
Michele Norris: George and Martha Washington enslaved 300 people. Let's start with their names.
We should not deny that Lincoln — especially during his 1858 Senate campaign, when he was pursuing his era’s swing voters, who were racist — declared himself opposed to “bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races” and spoke of “a physical difference” between them.
But Lincoln said this in the course of arguing against the far more racist position of his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln was speaking against the spread of slavery and in defense of common humanity across racial lines. “In the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anyone else, which his own hand earns,” he said of Black Americans, “he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Yes, Lincoln pandered to and in some ways partook in the racism of his time. We can recognize this and still honor him for saving the Union, ending slavery and cleansing its stain on our Constitution — even if the embarrassed Founders omitted the actual word — by pushing through the 13th Amendment.
It’s a fact that slaveholders — including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — were central to the founding of a republic that became increasingly democratic. All of them, as Lincoln would later insist, set in motion the process that would bring about this democratization. Washington’s most important contribution beyond the Revolutionary War battlefield was his giving up his office voluntarily after two terms, establishing that we had a republic, not a monarchy, and that we would regularly elect new leaders.
His letter to the Jewish congregation at the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., is still cited by friends of religious liberty for its insistence that our nation “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington declared.
Of course, the ironies of this beautiful statement are staggering. The vile enslavement of Black Americans was rooted in bigotry, persecution and the private but state-sanctioned tyranny that defined the relationship between owner and the enslaved.
It would be easier if our heroes and our history were flawless. But it’s in the nature of humans and nations to fall far short of this standard.
The American promise, as President Barack Obama put it in his 2015 speech in Selma, Ala., is “that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals.”
So let’s honor Lincoln and Washington — not because they got everything right but because they helped create a path for those who would later recognize how much more work our nation needed to do. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Recent presidential history gives us little reason to relax on Presidents’ Day
Tourists outside Lafayette Park in D.C. on Sept. 30. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
In seeking to account for the surprising popularity of this very conservative president, we ventured that perhaps it was owed to the fact that he “thought this a basically good country” and so did the people — that “Mr. Reagan had, from boyhood, a sunny, almost obstinate optimism of the kind that is very much a part of the mental makeup of the nation.”
In August 1994, five years after he departed the White House, Mr. Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He issued a statement that was brief and practical-minded and that ended with this farewell: “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.” In this final statement, we concluded, the 40th president showed “a pretty fair awareness, in the face of a dread diagnosis, of what the American people expect, and sometimes must have.” That is to say, an honest and public-spirited reckoning with the truth.
Twenty-eight years later, we have to confess that, in the current climate, we’re not so sure about all that. Understanding what the American people want from a president has gotten a whole lot more complicated. A large number in this country appear to care little for the truth, or for anything even approaching it.
We are now a little over a year past the Trump presidency, and it still looms large in the rearview mirror. Sunny optimism has faded, to say the least, and the country faces a huge question in the national elections of the next few years: Will Donald Trump’s call to violent action, which culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, become a template for the conduct of future candidates from one of our two major parties?
Will the contemptible, unprecedented behavior of Mr. Trump in refusing, for more than a year now, to accept the results of an election be accepted by the former president’s cowed and confused party? Will it be seen as something to be imitated and employed in one election after another, along with voter suppression and manipulation of the electoral results by partisan bodies ?
It is all too true that Mr. Trump rules his party through fear and that fear is enforced by his considerable popularity in large parts of the country. Many of his devotees have reasons for their discontent, some of them understandable but most amenable to remedy by legal and political means. It is also true, however, that many are swayed by the most despicable kind of demagoguery, which existed long before Mr. Trump’s time, but has been effectively utilized by him. It relies on convincing people that all their difficulties are caused by the machinations and conspiracies of others — by the amorphous and ubiquitous “them,” whether foreign or domestic, racial, religious or ethnic.
What is the future of the presidency on this Presidents’ Day, traditionally a day of bargain sales and midwinter relaxation? That’s a matter to be decided on several November days to come. The prospect of what is at stake in those elections is no inducement to holiday relaxation. | null | null | null | null | null |
It took a sexual abuse scandal of epic proportions to finally force the beginning of real change in our country, though there is still much work to do. The gymnasts themselves have been the catalysts. “We are here,” Olympian Aly Raisman said in her victim statement in 2018. “We have our voices, and we are not going anywhere.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“It was just one of those days. I felt like we were getting open looks and we were getting good shots — they just weren’t falling,” Sellers said. “So we started attacking in the second half and started attacking a little bit too much and we didn’t kick the ball out.”
All-Big Ten guard Ashley Owusu returned from an ankle injury after missing the previous four games. The Terps went undefeated during the junior point guard’s absence, and she clearly was not herself Sunday: She finished with two points in 21 minutes off the bench and wasn’t as aggressive as normal.
Physical play limited Maryland sophomore Angel Reese to a season-low 14 minutes; she was in foul trouble most of the game before fouling out completely. She had six points and five rebounds. Her scoring total matched a season low, equaling her efforts from a loss to then-No. 7 Stanford in November — in which she also fouled out. | null | null | null | null | null |
The first U.S. goal ended a 180-minute drought for a team known over the decades for scoring in bunches. The Americans also had been shut out in five of their previous 13 games.
Naeher is, by far, the most experienced, but with Murphy on the rise and Washington’s Aubrey Kingsbury (nee Bledsoe) also in the mix, the battle for the top spot is likely to remain on into the summer.
Note: Washington’s Trinity Rodman, a 19-year-old forward who made her U.S. debut Thursday, entered in the second half but twice required medical assistance. The second came on a knee-to-knee collision that didn’t allow her to return. Andonovski said the medical staff would evaluate her ahead of Wednesday’s match against Iceland in Frisco, Tex. | null | null | null | null | null |
Gregory McMichael sits during opening statements last fall in the state murder trial of him, William “Roddie” Bryan and Travis McMichael in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Gwynn County, Ga. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)
McMichael offered that oversight to explain why he did not immediately call police to report Arbery, a Black man whom he suspected of theft and trespassing. That McMichael reached for his firearm over his phone, however, also revealed a glaring subtext of the hate-crimes trial that began last week and is expected to conclude Monday against McMichael, 66, his son Travis, 36, and a third White man, William “Roddie” Bryan, 52.
“Guns are as ordinary in some communities as household appliances or tools,” said Austin Sarat, the political science chair at Amherst College, who has written about American gun culture.
In Canada and other Western countries, gun ownership is much rarer and rates of gun violence are far lower. But Americans consider guns part of “the social networks” in which people participate in civic life, he said.
Gun ownership in the United States has remained relatively steady over three decades, with about 44 percent of households having at least one gun, according to a Gallup survey in 2020. The country’s homicide rate of 3.96 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019 ranked 32nd globally, according to a survey from the University of Washington. But it was more than eight times the rate in Canada and nearly 100 times the rate in Britain.
After Arbery was killed, Gregory McMichael told police that he and his son grabbed their firearms, believing Arbery might have a gun. Even as Arbery lay bleeding on the street, Gregory McMichael said, he worried that the 25-year-old was “going for a weapon.” But prosecutors noted that Arbery had nothing on him as he jogged through Satilla Shores in shorts and a T-shirt — not even a backpack or a cellphone.
Former Justice Department lawyer Jonathan M. Smith said such charges are typically used by prosecutors to lengthen sentencing guidelines in cases of gang- or drug-related violence. Smith, who is executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, said he did not think the government was intending to make an overt political statement about gun control. | null | null | null | null | null |
Naeher is by far the most experienced, but with Murphy on the rise and Washington’s Aubrey Kingsbury (nee Bledsoe) also in the mix, the battle for the top spot is likely to continue into the summer.
Note: Washington’s Trinity Rodman, a 19-year-old forward who made her U.S. debut Thursday, entered in the second half but twice required medical assistance. The second came on a knee-to-knee collision that didn’t allow her to return. Andonovski said the medical staff would evaluate her ahead of Wednesday’s match against Iceland (2-0-0) in Frisco, Tex. | null | null | null | null | null |
St. John's swept the DCSAA indoor track and field meet Sunday. (Aaron Credeur/The Washington Post)
“Being scrappy means just getting out there no matter how you’re feeling,” said senior Joshua Thompson, the long jump winner. “Obviously you know your body, but you still give everything you got and you leave it all on the line.”
It paid off. The St. John’s girls turned in a dominant win by scoring 208 points — the next-highest total was 58 — and the boys prevailed, too, despite several record-setting performances by Carroll. What the St. John’s boys lacked in first-place finishes they made up for with numbers, finishing with 183 points to Carroll’s 169.5. That gave St. John’s its second straight sweep of this meet, following its dual crowns in 2020.
“You’re finding something deep down inside to be comfortable being uncomfortable,” Dunham said. “Just fighting to the finish. We want that to be the DNA of our team.”
The 3,200 meters doubled as an opportunity for St. John’s to grab the lead. It was one of the few events Carroll didn’t compete in, and though Pierre Attiogbe of St. Albans won in 9 minutes 15.08 seconds, St. John’s runners finished second, third and fourth.
On the girls’ side, it seemed red-and-black uniforms were rounding the track constantly. For junior Meredith Gotzman, that meant running the 3,200 in trainers instead of spikes, a decision Dunham made to ensure she had extra support to help avoid injury, even at the cost of speed. Coming off a hamstring injury during cross-country season and saving her strength ahead of national meets, Gotzman had to be careful despite wanting to turn in the best time she could.
Her footwear choice didn’t matter: She came in nearly 24 seconds faster than her competition in 11:22.20.
“I just wanted to prove to myself and I guess to others that I can still run the way I know I can,” Gotzman said. But calling back to her coach, she assured him jokingly that she’s “never running in trainers again.”
Carroll finished second in the boys’ and girls’ competitions. The boys set six meet records, including a triple jump of 47 feet 5 inches by sophomore Drew Dillard, topping the mark by more than three feet, and a powerhouse performance by junior Nyckoles Harbor in the 55-meter dash.
“I was just looking to come out here, you know, put some more records under my belt,” said Harbor, who finished in 6.44 seconds. “I feel like I’m the king of D.C.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“It was just one of those days. I felt like we were getting open looks and we were getting good shots — they just weren’t falling,” Sellers said. “So we started attacking in the second half and started attacking a little bit too much, and we didn’t kick the ball out.”
All-Big Ten guard Ashley Owusu returned from an ankle injury after missing the previous four games. The Terps went undefeated during the junior point guard’s absence, and she clearly was not herself Sunday: She finished with two points in 21 minutes off the bench and wasn’t as aggressive as usual.
Physical play limited Maryland sophomore Angel Reese to a season-low 14 minutes; she was in foul trouble most of the game before fouling out. She had six points and five rebounds. Her scoring total matched a season low, equaling her efforts from a loss to then-No. 7 Stanford in November — in which she also fouled out. | null | null | null | null | null |
As a winter day exactly four weeks from the spring equinox, Sunday seemed to share aspects of both seasons, bright enough to lure us outdoors, cold enough to chill us once there.
In Washington, the high temperature as of 7 p.m. was 43 degrees, six below average.
And the low temperature was one of the colder readings for the month at 23 degrees, 10 below the average for the date.
On their own, neither figure suggested the day had any particular thermal appeal to those not firm fans of winter.
But the day, and the afternoon in particular, seemed to be redeemed by the sun, which shone for hours in a sky largely devoid of any interfering clouds.
In itself, and in the warmth, both psychological and physical, that it offered to those positioned to receive it, the sun seemed a silent, smiling suggestion of spring.
To observe it, and to feel the effects of its radiance, was to be reassured that on March 20, which is 28 days from Sunday, the equinox would arrive.
In observing how Sunday signaled the sunny imminence of spring, such contrary indicators as the breezy chill of the day ought not be dismissed. At 1 a.m. the wind chill was 13 degrees.
We had a peak wind of 18 mph, and a peak gust of 22, and each of them reached us from the north, the traditional storehouse of wintry cold.
But even the peak wind demonstrated a decline in harshness on Sunday. The 18 mph figure happened to be half as strong as the 36 of Saturday.
And the 22 mph gust came to less than half of the 50 on Saturday.
So even if the average temperature of 33 on Sunday, as of 7 p.m., might meet nobody’s conception of spring, signs suggested a trend in the vernal direction. | null | null | null | null | null |
The sweep and vagueness of a Chinese official's threat before the Games of “certain punishment” for “any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit” appeared to have a particularly sobering effect on Beijing-bound teams. Campaigners who met with athletes in the United States in the weeks before their departure, lobbying them about Uyghurs and the crushing of dissent in Tibet and Hong Kong, noticed the chill. | null | null | null | null | null |
The boos rained down on Stephen Curry and wife, Ayesha, when they took the stage during All-Star Saturday night to promote their new television show, animosity borne of four straight NBA Finals matchups between the two-time MVP’s Golden State Warriors and the hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. The boos came again during All-Star Game introductions Sunday and then again at halftime, when Curry was honored alongside the other members of the NBA’s 75th anniversary team. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and LeBron James enjoyed loud ovations, but the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse crowd wasn’t ready to forgive Curry for the pain he had inflicted during his three championship runs from 2015 to 2018.
By halftime, he had 24 points on 8-for-11 shooting from deep. By night’s end, Curry had converted the home crowd, soaking in cheers as he scored a game-high 50 points and hit an All-Star Game record 16 three-pointers on 27 attempts to claim his first Kobe Bryant All-Star Game MVP award. James, captain of Team LeBron James, added 24 points, six rebounds and eight assists and hit a deep turnaround jumper to clinch a 163-160 win over Team Kevin Durant.
The victory marked the fifth straight win for James as an all-star captain, and it came as no surprise given that the Los Angeles Lakers forward’s team had four former MVPs — James, Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic — in the starting lineup. Durant’s team was at a disadvantage with its captain sidelined by injury for the second straight season, but Philadelphia 76ers big man Joel Embiid held down the fort with a team-high 36 points in a losing effort.
While Curry stole the show with his ostentatious play, he donned an understated navy jacket during a halftime ceremony that honored the top 75 players in NBA history. More than 40 members of the team showed up in person, walking down a makeshift red carpet to a raised circular stage, while other living members who opted not to attend appeared in video cameos on the scoreboard. Bryant and the other deceased members of the team were honored with portraits on the big screen. | null | null | null | null | null |
The boos rained down on Stephen Curry and his wife, Ayesha, when they took the stage during All-Star Saturday night to promote their new television show, animosity born of four straight NBA Finals matchups between the two-time MVP’s Golden State Warriors and the hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. The boos came again during All-Star Game introductions Sunday and then again at halftime, when Curry was honored alongside the other members of the NBA’s 75th anniversary team. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and LeBron James enjoyed loud ovations, but the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse crowd wasn’t ready to forgive Curry for the pain he had inflicted during his three championship runs from 2015 to 2018.
By halftime, he had 24 points on 8-for-11 shooting from deep. By night’s end, Curry had converted the home crowd, soaking in cheers as he scored a game-high 50 points and hit an All-Star Game record 16 three-pointers on 27 attempts to claim his first Kobe Bryant All-Star Game MVP award. James, captain of Team LeBron, added 24 points, six rebounds and eight assists and hit a deep turnaround jumper to clinch a 163-160 win over Team Durant.
The victory was the fifth straight for James as an all-star captain, and it came as no surprise given that the Los Angeles Lakers forward’s team had four former MVPs — James, Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic — in the starting lineup. Kevin Durant’s team was at a disadvantage with its captain sidelined by injury for the second straight season, but Philadelphia 76ers big man Joel Embiid held down the fort with a team-high 36 points in a losing effort.
While Curry stole the show with his ostentatious play, he donned an understated navy jacket during a halftime ceremony that honored the top 75 players in NBA history. More than 40 members of the team showed up, walking down a makeshift red carpet to a raised circular stage, while other living members who opted not to attend appeared in video cameos on the scoreboard. Bryant and the other deceased members of the team were honored with portraits on the big screen. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ukrainian soldiers take shelter after shelling in the area controlled by Russian-backed separatists, on Feb. 19, in Novoluhanske, Ukraine. Ukraine, with the assistance of NATO countries, is looking for a diplomatic solution with Russia, which has massed scores of troops on the restive border. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
The Kremlin hasn’t yet commented publicly on the call, the second that day between the two leaders. In a readout of the earlier call published on the Russian president’s website, Putin supported the resumption of diplomatic discussions through the Normandy Format talks — with the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine — aimed at settling a seven-year conflict involving Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Adding to the tensions, Russia walked back on a promise to withdraw from neighboring ally Belarus following military exercises Sunday, and continues to keep 30,000 troops in place near that country’s border with Ukraine. In total, more than 150,000 Russian troops are amassed at the Ukrainian border, marking the largest military buildup in Europe since the end of World War II. Satellite images released by U.S.-based Maxar Technologies on Sunday appeared to show new field deployments of armored equipment and troops near the border, Reuters reported.
The United Kingdom and the United States could take steps to prevent Russian companies from trading in British pounds and U.S. dollars if Russian President Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Sunday.
Asked Sunday whether the United States would recognize Crimea and territories in eastern Ukraine as part of Russia to avoid war, Secretary of State Antony Blinken definitively said, “No.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The Kremlin hasn’t yet commented publicly on the call, the second that day between the two leaders. In a readout of the earlier call published on the Russian president’s website, Putin supported the resumption of diplomatic discussions through the Normandy Format talks — with the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine — aimed at settling a seven-year conflict involving Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. | null | null | null | null | null |
Kremlin says Putin could meet Biden ‘at any moment’ but no concrete plans
President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed “in principle” to meet, U.S. and French officials said — even as troops continue to gather near the Ukraine border, suggesting the window for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis is closing. While Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday there are not yet “concrete plans" for a Russia-U.S. summit, he added that dialogue among ministers would continue and “it is possible if the heads of states consider it expedient. A decision can be made at any moment.”
The Kremlin said the two sides agreed on the need for continued dialogue between diplomats and political advisors, through the Normandy Format talks — involving France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine — aimed at settling an eight-year conflict involving Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. It said there was also a possibility of contact between the Russian and French foreign ministers.
By Robyn Dixon4:27 a.m.
MOSCOW — Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov there were “no concrete plans” for a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Biden to discuss the NATO-Russia crisis over Ukraine, but that it was possible if they saw it as useful.
“The decision can be made at any moment,” he said, adding that dialogue would continue. He said diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis continued, with French President Emmanuel Macron, calling Putin at about 1 a.m. Moscow time. Macron’s office announced that he invited Putin and Biden to a summit and that the leaders had agreed in principle.
"Clearly, tensions are rising, and active contacts are continuing,” Peskov said at a press briefing on Monday.
Peskov said that tensions in two Moscow-backed breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine were extremely high but declined to say whether Russian forces would intervene to support them. Western leaders say that Russia’s claims of “genocide,” and major Ukrainian attacks on the regions are a false flag operation designed to create a pretext for an invasion. No evidence of the claims has emerged and Ukraine has denied the attacks.
“The situation is indeed extremely tense, and so far we see no signs of a decrease in the level of tension. Provocations, shelling are becoming more and more intense, of course, this causes very deep concern,” Peskov said. Putin called an extraordinary meeting of the Russian Security Council Monday which includes his hawkish military and security chiefs, who have emerged as his major source of advice according to Russian political analysts.
President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed “in principle” on Sunday to meet, U.S. and French officials said, leaving a narrow window for diplomacy as Russia appeared on the brink of launching a new war in Ukraine.
The office of French President Emmanuel Macron said the two leaders had accepted the meeting and it would take place only if an attack doesn’t occur. The details of the summit will be worked out this week, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Although senior U.S. officials say they believe that Putin has made a decision to invade, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement that U.S. officials “are committed to pursuing diplomacy until the moment an invasion begins.” She confirmed that Biden accepted the invitation — “again, if an invasion hasn’t happened.” | null | null | null | null | null |
At Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston, Abhijeet Dhoble, an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine, said they are seeing an increase in arrhythmia, an abnormality in the timing of the heartbeat, and cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle disease. The patients, who previously had covid, range in age from their 30s to 70s and many had no previous heart disease. | null | null | null | null | null |
Happy birthday, George Washington
How Washington’s birthday could help revive his vision for the country
The Federal Hall statue of George Washington overlooks the New York Stock Exchange on June 7. (Richard Drew/AP)
By Samantha Baskind
Samantha Baskind is a professor of art history at Cleveland State University and author of five books, most recently “The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture.”
Today, we mark George Washington’s birthday during a dark time. Our fatigued country is divided over debates about elections and voting rights protections, charged racial politics and the worth of getting vaccinated during a deadly pandemic. In this fraught moment, we would be well served to come together and remember our common history with a party of historic proportions and spectacle, as Americans did in 1932 when they hosted an epic nine-month bash for the 200th anniversary of Washington’s birth.
Back then, the holiday became an opportunity to reacquaint Americans with their country’s aspirations and principles of government, separate the man from the myth with educational materials about his life and accomplishments, inspire patriotism and have some fun.
Presidents’ Day, officially named “George Washington’s Birthday,” originated as an informal remembrance of the first president held on his exact birthday, Feb. 22. In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes made the day a federal holiday in the nation’s capital, and by 1885 the entire country joined the observance.
In 1896, the Senate began the tradition of reciting Washington’s Farewell Address on Feb. 22, in part a reflection on his hopes for democracy and his warning of the dangers of fractious political parties.
Since then, on an annual rotating basis, a senator from one political party reads the 7,641-word speech, which runs about 45 minutes. After the reading, that senator writes their name in the book along with a message. While serving as a senator in 1956, for example, Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) inscribed: “It gives one a renewed sense of pride in our republic. It arouses the wholesome and creative emotions of patriotism and love of country.”
Government representatives saw the bicentennial of Washington’s birth in 1932 as a cause for special celebration, and so in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed a joint resolution authorizing a nine-month extravaganza.
After seven years of planning by a government-appointed Bicentennial Commission and local community groups, vintage-designed invitations beckoned Americans to birthday balls across the country. They played colonial music and required dress in historic costume. Washington impersonators, including the first president’s great-great-great grandnephew, were in high demand. Despite taking place in the depths of the Great Depression, these lavish parades and pageants marked the extended patriotic party.
For example, the city of Paterson, N.J. hosted a Washington pageant with 1,500 participants, including 200 dancers and 300 singers. John Philip Sousa, composer of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” — the U.S. national march — was commissioned to write a “George Washington Bicentennial March.” To debut the piece, Sousa conducted the official bands of the U.S. Army, Navy and Marines. Spare tire covers were even decorated with images of Washington for members of Congress.
In all, there were 4,760,345 individual bicentennial programs held by churches, schools, civic bodies, fraternal orders and more. The excitement by which Americans lauded Washington may have been the impetus for President Franklin D. Roosevelt to launch his own “birthday balls,” which raised money for polio each year — a cause important to the president, who suffered partial paralysis from a case of polio he contracted in his late 30s.
Crucially, there were copious educational components to the nine-month-long Washington bicentennial celebration. Theaters throughout the country showed an informative film, “Washington: The Man and the Capitol,” to educate Americans about the first president’s leadership. Classrooms received a reproduction of Gilbert Stuart’s iconic portrait of Washington, familiar for its appearance on the dollar bill. Students studied materials provided by the “Education Division” of the Bicentennial Commission, and participated in plays and contests about the foremost commander in chief. A meticulously detailed 39-volume book series collected the president’s writings, and innumerable other publications exalted the life and deeds of one of the nation’s founders.
A primary goal of this literature, distributed nationwide at no cost, was also to debunk overly flattering, even swashbuckling myths about the president. Researchers deemed it dubious that he had chopped down a cherry tree and confessed to his father, “I cannot tell a lie.” So too, the commission presented Washington not only as a great leader, but as a man with sorrows and moments of self-doubt. Organizers failed to go a step further in dispelling myths about the president, neglecting to explain that Washington was an enslaver of more than 100 human beings who signed the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. Not surprisingly, the 1932 commemoration, taking place at the height of Jim Crow segregation, was not inclusive of Black Americans.
At the revelries’ end, Roosevelt commended the organizers for conveying to fellow Americans “much more than a mere demonstration of memorial fever.” The celebrations, he said, “reached deep into the hearts of the people, and revived in them fundamental reasons for pride of country and faith in its system of government.”
Celebrating Washington’s birthday has changed since then. In 1968, when Congress passed the “Uniform Monday Holiday Act,” nearly all of the country’s national holidays were assigned to the first day of the week to create long weekends. This meant that after the law went into effect in 1971, Washington’s “birthday” would rarely fall on the day of his birth. That shift transformed our observance of Washington’s birthday, now mostly a pretext for a short out-of-town trip or to shop at the many well-publicized Presidents’ Day retail sales. Retailers, in fact, coined the moniker “Presidents’ Day” in the 1980s, replacing the official designation: “George Washington’s Birthday.”
In an era where disrespect of the presidency runs rampant across party lines, where insinuation has replaced debate and ideas and an insurrection can take place in the Capitol, we could learn a lesson from the 1932 celebration of Washington. Indeed, more mindful thinking about Presidents’ Day might inspire reflection on foundational values (that the nation has long struggled to abide by) such as equality, liberty, diversity and unity.
This practice could extend to schools as a mandatory scripted education plan like that outlined by the Bicentennial Commission. In addition, a nationwide George Washington documentary could be aired at the same time on Feb. 22 for all to see — an annual communal television experience akin to the Super Bowl.
But maybe it is time for something more radical.
Celebrating George Washington is in part the celebration of democracy, and voting is a pillar of that democracy. There could be no more meaningful way to remember our first leader than creating a holiday grounded by voting. Why don’t we make the first Tuesday in every November “George Washington Voting Day”? Not a shopping or skiing holiday, but a day in which access to free transportation will be made available to voters, along with a guarantee that no citizen will be penalized for missing work.
Fiscal considerations should not be an argument for quashing such a plan. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as those financially strapped Depression-era celebrants of Washington so ably demonstrated. And by doing so, we will be rightfully honoring President Washington’s memory and legacy. | null | null | null | null | null |
More involvement from Black churches could increase the success of liberal activism
Black churches have long been the backbone of advances in civil rights and economic justice
The Rev. T. Anthony Spearman, president of the North Carolina NAACP, demands justice after the fatal shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. last year in Elizabeth City, N.C. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
By Katie Singer
Katie Singer has taught writing, literature and African-American studies at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Most recently she was history faculty at Rutgers University-Newark, before relocating from New Jersey to California.
The Black Church has been a vital facet of Black life in the United States since the beginning of African American history. In many ways it has responded to the continuous racism this country practices, producing many prominent activists — before and after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet it is often overlooked by policymakers and activists who fail to recognize the potential for collaborative social justice activism, a huge part of the Black Church’s legacy. Other times the Church has distanced itself from contemporary movements.
This combination of liberal politicians not wanting to alienate nonreligious constituencies, young activists seeing the Black Church as part of a bygone civil rights era and sometimes churches themselves offering ambiguous messages, means that the Church’s resources go untapped. That leaves activists without a crucial support system that could help advance some of their demands.
The modern Black Church essentially began in 1794 when Bishop Richard Allen, along with fellow Christians, protested the segregation of Black members in Philadelphia’s White Methodist church. In rebellion they formed the first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. By the early 1800s, establishing Black churches and schools was a priority for African American communities as Whites continued to deny them access to or participation in conventional institutions. Black churches enabled African Americans to rely less on White institutions while also providing a base for activists challenging racism and inequality.
This multifaceted role of Black churches continued throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, with churches teaching social and political engagement alongside religious principles. These churches cultivated Black leadership on both sides of the pulpit; ministers became representatives of their communities, and church members organized against social injustices.
Ongoing exclusion of Black Christians from White churches fueled growth for Black churches. Beginning in 1916, the Great Migration — in which millions of Black Southerners moved to Northern, Midwestern and Western states in hopes of finding better jobs, housing and a respite from virulent racism — only increased this segregation. Too many Whites were uncomfortable with the increasing number of African Americans flooding the cities. The migrants enlarged Black congregations and brought with them a different style of religious worship. It was “more emotional and intense,” notes Giles Wright.
This “Southern” style of worship would inform many church services in developing Northern cities, disgruntling some Black churchgoers who wanted worship to remain “respectable.” Their conservative mind-set contributed to the Black Church’s growing reputation — especially among a younger generation — as an institution that avoided relevant issues of social justice. There was a grain of truth to this perception. Before World War II, for example, some local Black clergy, believing having a job to be the primary concern, largely ignored young African American workers’ concerns with unfair labor practices.
Yet this reputation of passivity did not truly reflect reality. Even as credit for civil rights protests and legal advances often went to secular organizations, the Black Church remained at the center of social and political battles. The secular organizations may have been out front, especially in legal cases concerning segregation, but the Black Church provided crucial support and legwork through leaders such as the Rev. Joseph A. DeLaine of South Carolina, who led protests contributing to the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
By World War II, social protest and community outreach were taking center stage in many Black churches, as they viewed community service and civil rights demands as one and the same. This trend brought many African Americans into the civil rights movement. While figures such as King, C.T. Vivian and Fred Shuttlesworth gained renown as the movement exploded into national consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s, less famous participants in the movement’s most publicized battles — from the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott to the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches — were also members of a Black church, or depended on the Church for vision and guidance.
Pressure on legislators, church-led activism and outspoken support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act helped push these laws into the books. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized faith leaders’ contributions, signing the Voting Rights Act alongside King, and future congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), himself an ordained Baptist minister. Rather than abandoning activism after passage of these groundbreaking laws, in some places, such as San Francisco, the Black Church expanded its activism to include gay rights issues.
The 1970s did present some challenges for the Black Church. Black Muslims, for example, dismissed Christianity as the White man’s religion, while leftists saw the church as anti-intellectual. And some Black Power advocates considered the Church’s teachings, such as turning the other cheek, counterproductive to social transformation.
But the Rev. James Hal Cone came out with two key books, “A Black Theology of Liberation” (1970) and “God of the Oppressed” (1975) that inspired Black clergy to redouble their focus on activism. “Any message that is not related to the liberation of the poor in a society is not Christ’s message. Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology,” wrote Cone.
This activism gained newfound importance in the 1980s as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush slashed federal funding for local and nonprofit community businesses, limiting the outreach activities of many secular organizations. In 1981, Reagan recommended a temporary solution to homelessness — houses of worship would take in families on welfare. This move forced Black churches to step up, supporting their wider communities through food pantries, shelter programs and employment services.
This role of the Black Church as the beating heart of Black activism and organizing has remained steady into the 21st century. Even as the Black Lives Matter movement emerged amid the rise of social media and digital technology that provided new tools for organizing, the movement still relied upon the Black Church as a hub. After the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., St. John’s Church in St. Louis became a key meeting place, providing space to channel outrage into action. St. John’s senior pastor, the Rev. Michelle Higgins, continues to lead or participate in activist organizations today, including the Electoral Justice Project and Faith for Justice, which connects Black churches with Black-led activist movements.
And Higgins is not an exception. The Rev. Justin Schroeder of the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis, for example, publicly stated his support for protesters who shut down the Mall of America in 2014, one in a wave of protests against the refusal by grand juries to indict police officers who had killed unarmed Black men.
The Rev. William Barber co-founded the Poor People’s Campaign with the Rev. Liz Theoharis, which highlights the plight of the working poor in the United States by challenging systemic racism, poverty, environmental damage and military spending. This effort mirrors King’s late 1960s focus on economic justice, forgotten in large measure because of its radicalism.
Despite the Church’s powerful and continuous historical legacy, liberals often overlook the potential benefits of partnering with the Black Church. This is in part because of some churches’ lukewarm support of politicians who lean too far left. And it is also practical: the Pew Research Center found that a majority of liberals who identify as Black are Christian, but only a minority of them are churchgoers. Yet policymakers disregard this institution at their own peril; the Black Church is responsible for many of the accomplishments in civil rights and economic justice throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and remains guided by the biblical belief that, “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin” (James 4:17).
Sustained activist engagement also offers a possible solution to declining attendance in the Black Church. While African Americans still identify as religious more often than White or Latino Americans, fewer identify as “religiously affiliated.” Focusing on social justice might especially appeal to younger Black Americans who tend to be engaged in sociopolitical issues. Building upon that legacy could bolster the Black Church today, and highlight its role as a potentially powerful ally in the new civil rights movement. | null | null | null | null | null |
This photographer set out to document U.S. divisiveness but ended up finding connectedness
‘Niagara Falls, Ontario’, from "A Pound of Pictures" (MACK, 2022). (Alec Soth)
Why create art? Why make photographs? There are many answers to those questions, but one seems to be universal: to share our visions with our fellow human beings. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I have always been attracted to artwork — music, film, literature — that helps situate me in the universe. It feels like this is at least one of the motivations for many artists, including photographer Alec Soth.
Soth’s latest book, “A Pound of Pictures” (MACK, 2022), is a great example of the above. Soth has always been an introspective guy who freely gifts us with his observations — both in his books of photographs as well as his various social media presences, including his latest video offerings on his YouTube channel.
Following along with Soth as his photographic journey has unfolded over the years is not unlike keeping in touch with a friend who is excited to let you in on their latest discovery. Sometimes the discoveries have a dark edge — when he ponders isolation in “Broken Manual” or in the ruminations on love and relationships undergirding “Niagara” — others lighter, if no less introspective, such as “Dog Days, Bogota” (which he made on a trip he and his wife took to adopt their daughter) and more recently “I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating.”
Dark or light, serious or fun, Soth is always looking for connections, searching his (and by extension our) place in the universe. And he’s still at it in “A Pound of Pictures.” This time, he takes us along a meandering journey across the United States. As he does this, Soth also meditates on the very nature of the act of photography itself.
Soth says the initial impetus for the work in “A Pound of Pictures” was an idea that he had to follow the route of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train from Washington to the president’s hometown, Springfield, Ill. He wanted to do that as a way to, as he says in the afterword to the book, “mourn the divisiveness of America.”
That would have been a fascinating story, but the concept just didn’t gel for Soth. So he switched gears, continuing to travel but this time in a less structured way. Whereas his first idea took inspiration from Walt Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the new project was refocused on Whitman’s exultation from “Song of the Open Road”:
“From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list […]
Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!”
I particularly like the following lines in the book’s afterward, because I think they are a particularly succinct description of what you’ve just experienced while thumbing through its pages:
“My process is like web-surfing in the real world. The goal is to be carried by a wave of curiosity and free association. Visiting a market in upstate New York, I see a jar of honey. Later that day I find myself thinking about beekeeper boxes. Are they painted certain colors to attract the bees? Is the dark interior similar to the chamber of my large format camera? Before I know it a beekeeper is guiding me by tractor to his magnificent backwoods brood.”
Soth meanders around the United States in a freewheeling way, going where the winds take him. As he does this, he encounters so much that is eye-opening or, at the very least, provokes questions to think about. Whether truth exists in a constant form is an ageless question. Maybe it’s always shifting, like blades of grass swept this way or that, depending on the direction of the wind. And maybe being open to drifting and changing course, like Soth does in the pages of “A Pound of Pictures,” is an effective way of trying to grasp its elusive nature.
One of the things that brings me great joy in writing about photographic works for In Sight is those instances when I feel like I can bring books or projects to a wide swath of people and think there is something to be gleaned for everyone. I think “A Pound of Pictures” fits into that pretty well. Whether you are an astute photo enthusiast (there are many “Easter eggs” throughout the book, references to photographers like Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and other abound) or just interested in photography in general, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by this work.
You can buy the book, here. And you can see more of Soth’s work on his website, here. | null | null | null | null | null |
Monday briefing: The next move in Ukraine; why hundreds of Family Dollar stores closed; Truth Social; All-Star MVP; and more
Biden and Putin agreed “in principle” to a meeting about Ukraine.
The setup: French President Emmanuel Macron proposed the summit yesterday during calls with President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The catch: U.S. officials said they’d talk only if Moscow doesn’t attack Ukraine. Russia said there are no “concrete plans” to meet.
The latest: Russia, which still has 150,000 troops near Ukraine’s border, listed people from that country “to be killed or sent to camps,” the U.S. told the United Nations.
Police regained control of Canada’s capital city.
What happened: More than 190 protesters were arrested and nearly 80 vehicles towed, Ottawa officials said yesterday, and parts of the city were fenced off.
How we got here: The self-described “Freedom Convoy” of truckers and far-right organizers had disrupted the city for weeks and clogged U.S.-Canada border crossings.
What’s next: Canada’s Parliament will vote today on special emergency powers invoked by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Donald Trump’s new social media app is ready to download.
What is it? Truth Social, which bills itself as the nation’s “Big Tent,” was developed by the former president’s new media company. It’s available on Apple devices and says it will be in Google Play Store soon.
How we got here: Trump said he was starting the network last fall. Facebook and Twitter removed him from their platforms last year after a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol.
Family Dollar closed hundreds of stores and recalled products.
Why? A rodent infestation at an Arkansas warehouse was discovered by FDA inspectors earlier this month. More than 1,100 dead rodents were found after the center was fumigated.
What’s happening: The company on Friday said 404 stores in six states are temporarily closed while it completes a voluntary recall.
The ban on avocados from Mexico ended this weekend.
The pause lasted about a week, but it had fueled concerns in the U.S. about a shortage and higher prices. Eight out of 10 avocados purchased in the U.S. come from Mexico.
What happened: The U.S. pulled its inspectors from Mexico earlier this month after one allegedly received a threat.
U.S. skaters pushed an anti-doping message as the Beijing Olympics ended.
The Americans finished second in the team figure skating competition. But they’re upset: The team event’s medals haven’t been awarded because of the investigation into Russian skater Kamila Valieva.
What’s next: Paris is set to host the 2024 Summer Games, followed by the 2026 Winter Games in the Italian cities of Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.
Stephen Curry hit 16 three-pointers and won NBA All-Star Game MVP honors.
The outcome: Curry’s team — picked by captain LeBron James — beat Kevin Durant’s group 163-160 last night in Cleveland. The Warriors guard scored 50 points and nearly doubled the record for three-pointers.
A celebration: The NBA honored its 75th-anniversary team at halftime. Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were among the basketball legends who attended.
And now … some travel tips as pandemic restrictions ease: These are the precautions health experts say we should keep. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Internal Revenue Service is no longer functioning properly. The agency reported a backlog of about 8 million unprocessed returns at the start of the year; it turns out the actual figure is nearly 24 million, according to data obtained by The Post. About half of that backlog is paper returns that the IRS doesn’t have enough staff to process. The other half is a mix of amended returns, cases flagged for more scrutiny and unopened correspondence.
Elizabeth and Will Rodger of Alexandria, Va., filed their tax return electronically around March 15. They are waiting for close to a $9,000 refund since they did not receive their stimulus payments. For months, the IRS website said their return was still processing. Then it said it wasn’t found. They have called repeatedly and contacted their congressman, but still there is no refund and no word from the IRS on what went wrong.
The IRS was once a leader in innovation. Not anymore. The agency’s inability to conduct basic functions is as much a symbol of American decline as collapsing bridges. Congress recently passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Why hasn’t there been a similar rush to fix the IRS and devote the necessary resources to rebuilt it? | null | null | null | null | null |
Nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population live in counties on the coast. If NOAA’s projection materializes by 2050, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates 140,000 homes would be at risk of flooding on average once every two weeks. Ports and other commercial infrastructure along the coasts could also see serious damage, affecting supply chains and raising costs even for those living inland. Then there are the harms to coastal ecosystems, which are already reeling from erosion, flooding and lost habitats. | null | null | null | null | null |
The opinion is not a decision on the merits, but in allowing the cases to go forward, it sets the stage for what could be a nightmarish trial for Trump. Trump may refuse to testify, but unlike a criminal proceeding, taking the Fifth could be used against him in a civil hearing. (Plus, in his flurry of post-presidential speeches remarking on the insurrection, he may have waived his Fifth Amendment rights or, at the very least, given plaintiffs even more statements showing he was seeking to overthrow the elections.) | null | null | null | null | null |
CBP officials say the efforts will be initially focused on southern Arizona’s Tucson sector, including remote and ecologically fragile areas where the most destructive blasting occurred, such as Guadalupe Canyon, as well as the dry creek beds and channels that surge during summer “monsoon” thunderstorms. Segments of the wall were damaged in flooding last year, and erosion along the base of the structure has left its foundation exposed at multiple locations across southern Arizona.
The Department of Homeland Security said about half of the $5 billion the Trump administration obtained for the wall through Congress and nonmilitary sources was awarded to contractors, and the department is still calculating how much of the money can be recovered. New contracts for Biden’s remediation projects will be awarded in April, DHS said, with a second round of awards planned for late summer. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The Justice Department is right to challenge Missouri’s absurd gun law
From the beginning of our history, there has been a tug of war between federal and state power — and between states and localities, and between the federal government and localities. These different levels of government can have different priorities and philosophies that come into conflict. For instance, when Democrats control Washington, but a particular state is controlled by conservative Republicans, and within that state are cities controlled by liberal Democrats, there will be fights over who’s in charge and whose word is law.
The result is showdowns like the one now taking place over one of the most extreme pro-gun laws in America, one that went into effect in Missouri last year. The Justice Department has filed suit against the Missouri law, charging that it violates the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which provides that federal laws take precedence over state laws when the two are in conflict.
There are some complicated legal and constitutional issues at play here, but the Missouri law, called the “Second Amendment Preservation Act,” is utterly bonkers. It reads like the work of a far-right extremist typing away in his backwoods shack between militia training maneuvers and printing his own money.
The law declares that “If the federal government assumes powers that the people did not grant it in the Constitution of the United States, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” It then says broad swaths of federal law on guns “shall be invalid to this state, shall not be recognized by this state, shall be specifically rejected by this state, and shall not be enforced by this state.”
It allows anyone who thinks a Missouri law enforcement officer has infringed their Second Amendment rights to sue. You don’t even have to be the supposedly injured party: “Any person residing or conducting business in a jurisdiction who believes” a law enforcement officer has worked with the federal government to enforce certain federal gun laws could file suit and get attorney’s fees paid. It also penalizes any Missouri law enforcement agency that cooperates with federal officials with a fine of $50,000 for every employee of that agency.
The context here is that in recent years, Missouri Republicans have decided no pro-gun law is too crazy to entertain. One bill that would change the way the law treats self-defense claims has been termed the “Make Murder Legal Act” by prosecutors and police. After the state repealed its law requiring permits to purchase guns, firearm homicides and suicides rose significantly. But for these Republicans, as elsewhere, the solution to people getting killed with guns is always more guns.
But back to this lawsuit. Conservatives are going to say: Isn’t this just like “sanctuary city” laws? You liberals love those, so aren’t you being hypocritical?
There’s some overlap in the two cases, but the key difference is that sanctuary city laws tend to withdraw local officials from participating in the enforcement of immigration laws, which are the federal government’s purview. If there are any sanctuary city laws that attempt to declare all federal immigration law “invalid” — and allow you to sue if a local official gives “material support” to a federal officer — I haven’t heard of them.
There are times when the differing agendas of local and state governments result in something between a standoff and a stand-down. That’s the situation today with marijuana, which is illegal at the federal level but legal in an increasing number of states. The federal government has essentially decided to step back and let states do what they want; the FBI isn’t raiding legitimate marijuana businesses operating with state licenses.
But the Missouri gun law is an entirely different beast. It’s so extreme not only in its results but in its explicit language that the Justice Department really had no choice but to file suit. If one state can simply declare federal laws “invalid” because it doesn’t like them, then the result could be a complete breakdown of the constitutional order.
But maybe that’s part of the point. | null | null | null | null | null |
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