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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 election.) | null | null | null | null | null |
The NFL’s $250 million, 10-year social justice campaign amounts to less than 1 percent of its revenue. (Charlie Riedel/AP)
Why Lynch chose to go from protecting civil rights heading the Justice Department to defending discrimination in the largest, most powerful sports league in the United States could be just greed. As a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of those venerable New York-based law firms, Lynch can earn more than $6 million a year with clients such as the NFL.
But Lynch also was never the strident attorney general on civil rights like her predecessor, Eric Holder. And since entering private practice, doing what she’s doing for the NFL has become her modus operandi. She successfully shielded McDonald’s against a discrimination lawsuit from Black franchisees.
What Lynch’s joining the NFL to uphold its inequitable managerial employment system reminded me of most was how receptive we all are to the seductive nature that is the NFL. How addicted we are to its intoxicating, violent product. The league is an analgesic we just can’t quit, no matter how debauched it can be. Discriminatory hiring. Can’t wait till the playoffs start? Using a eugenics-sounding practice called race-norming to pay dementia-addled Black former players less than similarly injured White players by arguing Black players have less cognitive ability to start with. Give us a 17-game schedule!
We even celebrated Flores being hired Saturday by the Steelers as some sort of assistant to the only black head coach in the league, Mike Tomlin, which means Flores joined a legion of black workers everywhere who are more likely than their white counterparts to be underemployed when it comes to their resumes.
How hooked we are to the NFL was on display at the halftime show during this year’s Super Bowl that so many hailed as the best such intermission ever. Matured rap stars Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and 50 Cent were joined by the queen of hip-hop soul, Mary J. Blige, the purveyor of rap to White middle America, Eminem, and 2018 Pulitzer winner Kendrick Lamar, who performed his signature Alright, celebrated by his generation of Black America as its anthem for a new century.
Brian Flores’s experience is shared by many Black coaches
A few years later, what does Jay-Z have to show for his efforts to help the league embrace social justice? A league social justice campaign called Inspire Change that the league says will drop $250 million over 10 years, or conservatively estimating, less than 1 percent of its revenue over that time. There has been a lot of sloganeering, like stenciling End Racism into end zones, including in Kansas City where the team continues to refuse Native American pleas to change its name and imagery Native people find offensive. And when Flores filed his suit in early February, there was one Black head coach employed by the 32 teams in the league whose rosters are 70 percent Black. Since then, Miami replaced Flores with Mike McDaniel, who the league went to lengths to highlight — for the first time most anyone can recall — is biracial. Even McDaniel seemed uncomfortable explaining his parentage.
Jay-Z once cut a little ditty with Pharrell called Frontin’, which is rap vernacular for, among other things, putting up a facade. If Lynch is guilty of erecting such a disguise for the league’s history of discrimination, Jay-Z and the entertainers he lined up for the Super Bowl halftime show are culpable in frontin’ for the league, too. How are Black men aspiring to be not just players, but head coaches in the league, “… gon’ be alright,” as Lamar raps, if they are systematically locked out of those top management positions?
But it’s not just on them. It’s on us fans as well. A researcher I once worked with, Shaun Harper, the founder and executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center, wrote in The Washington Post that Flores’s lawsuit laid bare how hollow the NFL’s campaign against racism is. He then wrote a fanciful piece in The Grio about a mass boycott of the league by the Black players who predominate it. “The campaign … was meant to powerfully communicate that hundreds of Black men across teams (plus any allies who wished to join them) would not be playing a 2022-23 season until the NFL meaningfully engaged them and retired Black players in collaboratively developing a sustainable strategy that would immediately accelerate the hiring of more Black head coaches,” Harper imagined. | null | null | null | null | null |
On all-star stage, LeBron James flirts with a post-Lakers future
That history of “Decisions” is instructive because James is suddenly embroiled in perhaps the bleakest chapter of his career. The 2009-10 Cavaliers won 61 games and a playoff series. The 2013-14 Heat won 54 games and reached the Finals. The 2017-18 Cavaliers won 50 games and reached the Finals.
By comparison, the Lakers (27-31) are in ninth place in the Western Conference. James’s co-star, Anthony Davis, is sidelined yet again with a significant foot injury that will keep him out for at least a month. James’s third wheel, Russell Westbrook, has proved to be a disastrous basketball fit and a major impediment to the Lakers’ cap flexibility and trade options. The rest of James’s supporting cast isn’t up to the task of a long playoff run, and reinforcements didn’t arrive at the trade deadline.
With all eyes and ears on James in Cleveland, he candidly acknowledged that this season has been “a hell storm” and the “strangest” of his 19-year career. He also went out of his way to praise Oklahoma City Thunder General Manager Sam Presti at length, comments that some observers perceived as a slight to Lakers General Manager Rob Pelinka. Then, in an interview with the Athletic, James said that “the door is not closed” on a possible return to Cleveland. The 37-year-old forward added that he plans to play on the same team as his oldest son, Bronny, a high school junior who is on track to be draft eligible in 2024.
Davis was crucial to the Lakers’ 2020 title push, but his unreliable health has short-circuited the Lakers’ past two seasons. Westbrook is under contract for next season, and trading him this summer will not return a star. The Lakers don’t have many quality draft assets or young prospects to cash in for veteran talent. And while James’s statistical production remains strong, his presence no longer guarantees that his team will be among the top title contenders like it did earlier in his career.
If James is indeed plotting his next move, he can do so with a clear conscience and without fear of major backlash. He delivered the 2020 championship, a pair of best-selling jerseys and dozens of nationally televised games to a Lakers franchise that was adrift following Kobe Bryant’s 2016 retirement. He helped bring Davis to town and steered the Lakers through Bryant’s tragic death. He didn’t oversee a new Lakers dynasty, but he has played spectacularly and aged gracefully. In short, James came, he made “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” and he conquered.
The “when” and “where” of what comes next remain to be seen. James is under contract through the 2022-23 season, meaning he could theoretically be traded this summer or leave as a free agent in the summer of 2023.
His flirtation with the Cavaliers, who are 35-23 and the East’s fourth seed, is especially intriguing given how well their young pieces would complement James. Darius Garland, a first-time all-star, could serve as a secondary ballhandler and scorer a la Irving. Evan Mobley, the 2022 rookie of the year favorite, has Davis-like versatility and potential on defense. Jarrett Allen, another first-time all-star, would complete a long and athletic frontcourt capable of helping James handle the likes of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid. James has praised all three players, saying that Mobley was “going to be a damn good basketball player” back in November before aligning himself with Garland and Allen.
Few would begrudge James a full-circle return to the franchise that drafted him, especially if the move back to his home state facilitated his long-standing dream of playing with Bronny. To make a trade for James work this summer, Cleveland could use Kevin Love’s expiring contract to help match salaries. The biggest potential hang-up would probably be whether the Cavaliers could convince the Lakers to accept a pick-laden return package like the one the Brooklyn Nets sent to the Houston Rockets last year for James Harden.
For James and Cleveland, a third act would only make sense if it opens a championship window and doesn’t gut the Cavaliers’ well-balanced core. For the Lakers, this summer will bring tough choices: Do they try to sign James to a contract extension, retool around him for one final run before 2023 free agency or trade him in an effort to replenish their asset base and enter a new chapter?
Now that James is dropping breadcrumbs and musing in public, Pelinka and company will soon need to decide whether this mutually beneficial partnership has run its course. | null | null | null | null | null |
Justice Department lawyer Christopher Perras reminded the 12-member jury that Gregory McMichael, 66, Travis McMichael, 36, and William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, had a history of spouting racially derogatory remarks, and said that helps explain why they erroneously viewed Arbery as a potential criminal when they cut him off in pickup trucks and threatened him with guns almost exactly a year ago, on Feb. 23, 2020.
Attorneys for each of the three defendants will present their own closing arguments next, and then the government will have time for rebuttal. Then the jury — eight White people, three Black people and one Hispanic person — will begin deliberations. | null | null | null | null | null |
“I understand that a significant number of agency rules and actions would need to be postponed or reworked as a result of the Preliminary Injunction,” wrote Dominic J. Mancini, the deputy administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs of the Office of Management and Budget.
The libertarian Conservative Enterprise Institute, which has consistently opposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions, cited the ruling in calling on the EPA to rescind its new tailpipe standards for cars and light trucks.
Richard Revesz, who directs the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Louisiana judge’s decision was “one of the most aggressive and ill-founded administrative law opinions” that he has read in recent years.
“I don’t know how a court could tell a president that the executive branch cannot estimate the harm of a pollutant,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m sorry the executive branch cannot study whether something is a carcinogen.’”
“Right now the Interior Department is facing a legal minefield,” he said. “It’s kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” | null | null | null | null | null |
When it comes to hip fractures, time is of the essence.
Delays in surgery are associated with the risk of death and pressure sores, and patients with broken hips should ideally get surgery within 48 hours.
But radiologists are in short supply, and the national shortage is exacerbated by a spiking demand for radiology services. And rushed radiologists and human error can lead to the improper identification and classification of hip fractures.
Study: Most radiologists don’t notice a gorilla in a CT scan
Artificial Intelligence could help, suggests a recent study. When researchers pitted machine learning against human radiologists, the computer won, classifying hip fractures 19 percent more accurately than human experts.
The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, was conducted in the United Kingdom. Like the United States, it has an aging population, and hip fractures rise along with age. There are an estimated 300,000 hip fractures every year in the United States, and that number is expected to rise to more than 500,000 by 2040.
Researchers had a minimum of two clinicians classify over 3,600 hip radiographs. But they were no match for a pair of computer models trained to do the same task. The algorithms located hip joints with overwhelming accuracy, and showed what researchers call “an impressive, and potentially significant” ability to classify the fractures.
Why fractures are so problematic for older people
The algorithms’ accuracy varied depending on the type of fracture, but overall their diagnoses were accurate 92 percent of the time compared with 77.5 percent of the time for the clinicians.
The researchers say their new algorithm could clear up the U.K.’s huge radiology bottleneck. Like U.S. radiologists, those clinicians simply have more work than they can complete quickly.
“This new technique we’ve shared has great potential,” said Richie Gill, a co-author of the paper who is co-director of the Centre for Therapeutic Innovation and the Institute for Mathematical Innovation at the University of Bath, in a news release. The method could achieve greater access and speed diagnoses, he said.
AI is increasingly used to beef up radiologists’ expertise. According to a 2020 study conducted by the American College of Radiology, an estimated 30 percent of radiologists use AI tools on the job, and even more are contemplating the switch. | null | null | null | null | null |
"Don't weigh me" cards. (More-Love.org)
When Dani Donovan stepped into her doctor’s waiting room in Omaha, she was surprised and pleased to see a stack of cards with bold black letters stating: “Please Don’t Weigh Me Unless It’s (Really) Medically Necessary.”
Underneath were smaller red letters saying, “If you really need my weight, please tell me why so I can give you my informed consent.”
“I didn’t even know that saying ‘no’ to being weighed was a thing you could do,” said Donovan, 30, an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder advocate who has a binge-eating disorder and often avoided doctor’s appointments because being weighed was so stressful. The card led to a good conversation with her doctor, Donovan said, that helped build trust and make her feel empowered.
She posted a picture of the card on Twitter, explaining that “saying ‘no’ when you’re asked to step on the scale at the doctor’s office can feel so intimidating.” More than 26,000 people noticed her post, with comments ranging from supportive to flat-out cruel.
The cards are a tool created by an eating disorder advocacy group that believes most health conditions can be addressed without weight numbers, and doctors’ constant focus on weight, no matter why the patient is there, is shameful, not helpful. Some doctors agreed, saying that they welcomed the chance to let the patient lead nutrition and weight discussions. Others emphatically said it’s a necessary data point and needs to be taken every time, no matter what.
Bias against people with obesity
There have been many studies showing that the medical world — and the world in general — has a bias against people who have obesity. One piece published in the British Medical Journal found that weight stigma actually led to increased mortality and other chronic diseases and “most ironically, (weight stigma) actually begets heightened risk of obesity.”
Umbereen S. Nehal, a former chief medical officer for Community Healthcare Network in New York and a board-certified pediatrician, strongly believes patients need to be weighed every time, regardless of when they were last weighed or why they are in the doctor’s office.
She said there’s no question that studies have shown the prevalence of weight stigma in the medical community, and she has a lot of sympathy and empathy for the intention behind the cards. But she would like to see data on how this particular intervention results in better outcomes before allowing patients to opt-out of the scale.
“Is the hypothesis that somebody who is obese, let’s say, if we don’t weigh them, fatphobia will go away? Those visual cues will not go away,” said Nehal. “So my beef with this is that it disrupts processes in the system for efficient data collection and that data are used for a variety of things.”
Jones, a survivor of several eating disorders including anorexia and bulimia, said the cards are a response to experiences she had at doctor’s offices. She was praised when she lost weight, even when her chart clearly stated that she had an eating disorder, Jones said.
Scale may be necessary at times
She said the cards — which are for sale on her website — clearly say that if a weight is needed, to just tell the patient, and that patients recognize there are situations when the scale is necessary.
“I wish I could say I was surprised by the ‘controversy’ around the cards,” Jones said. “I created them to address weight stigma, and it’s basically fatphobia to jump to conclusions and say blanketly that asking not to be weighed is unhealthy.”
Body shaming yourself: How to fight the ‘pervasive sense that there’s something wrong with you’
“It’s not like we’re never going to obtain their weight and get that measurement, it’s just on the patient’s terms,” Wieseler said. “The cards help patients feel safe and empowered with their health, and help them be an advocate for themselves.”
Weight gain during the pandemic
Fatima Cody Stanford, an internist and a specialist in obesity medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital who teaches at Harvard Medical School, emphasized that weight is an important measurement. Many people don’t go to the doctor that often, she said, so when they do, getting on the scale is a way to see changes.
Stanford also mentioned that, in her experience, some patients don’t want to accept that weight and it can sometimes have consequences on their health. For example, she said, someone might point out that they are concerned about diabetes because it runs in their family, but when the doctor asks if everyone in the family also has obesity, the patient doesn’t want to see the connection.
To eliminate bias, some seek out doctors of their own race or ethnicity
She emphasized that the cards don’t change the explicit and implicit biases that physicians have toward people who have obesity, and they don’t address that medical schools do a poor job of teaching about weight. In one 2020 study, she found that there are “literally zero countries” who have stellar programs for medical schools or residents to address weight. Stanford said she herself was mocked by a former program director for going into “fat” medicine.
“What winds up happening is the biases that these physicians have, due to their lack of knowledge about this disease that we call obesity, yields very negative, explicit and implicit bias toward those that have obesity, right? So patients come in, I’m exaggerating here, but say they have a hangnail, and it’s like: ‘Well, you know, if you got that weight under control …’ ” said Stanford. “They may have excess weight that is contributing to other things, but the way it’s approached and the judgment that comes along with it, is why people are probably requesting these cards.”
Stanford suggested a card that said “I’m happy to get weighed but please do not provide any negative or derogatory comments associated with my weight.” That way, the doctor gets their data point but also a pointed reminder.
“So then the doctor gets that card,” she said, “and they might think, ‘Oh, I need to really think about what I’m saying and be more mindful.’” | null | null | null | null | null |
Controversy overshadowed figure skating at the Olympics. Young skaters still have dreams.
Caleb Wein, 20, teaches beginners to skate at Rockville Ice Arena. He and his ice dance partner, Angela Ling, still have Olympic aspirations, but they were upset to see someone test positive for a banned drug and still be able to compete. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
After leading his first 50-minute lesson Sunday morning, Caleb Wein distributed report cards to young skaters wearing colorful Lego, cat and dinosaur-themed helmets. One boy, covered in black pads, beamed after receiving strong grades as he skated toward his family outside the rink at Maryland’s Rockville Ice Arena.
“Thank you, Coach Caleb,” the boy yelled as he headed toward a hot dog lunch. Wein smiled and nodded before turning his attention to his next group of trainees.
Wein and his ice dance partner, Angela Ling, remember the joy and optimism of learning to skate as 4-year-olds. After a strong training session, their lifelong dreams of competing in the Olympics didn’t seem so far away. Wein and Ling, one of the top young pairs in the United States, have continued chasing the sport’s grandest stage even as their flawless vision of Olympic figure skating changed this winter.
They were upset when Russian skater Kamila Valieva was allowed to compete in the Olympic women’s individual competition in Beijing after she tested positive for a banned substance. The harsh reality of the sport continued to set in as they watched the pressure coaches placed on the 15-year-old Valieva and her teammates.
“It’s not a good look,” said Wein, who qualified for the World Junior Championships with Ling in Sofia, Bulgaria, later this year. “You don’t want the potential next generation to be seeing this and getting kind of pushed away from the sport and kind of repulsed by some of the things that are going on.”
Wein, 20, and Ling, 17, will continue pursuing the Olympics, but they worry the controversy could discourage skaters from entering the sport. They visited the rink on their lone day off this week to provide children the amusement and encouragement that helped the duo’s passion flourish.
The controversy stands as the dominant story line of the Beijing Games, one with ripples that the entire sport could feel for years. Olympians are awaiting medals, advocates are demanding governance reform and a new generation of skaters waits to learn what the reeling sport will look like as they seek to fulfill their own Olympic dreams.
The Games formally ended with Sunday’s Closing Ceremonies, but across the country, American skaters are still flocking to local rinks; training for local, regional and national competitions; and hoping they someday might be able to also perform on the world’s biggest stage.
Inside the Detroit Skating Club in Bloomfield Township, Mich., 11-year-old Emelia Nemirovsky was on the ice practicing triple jumps with one of her coaches. Banners for 1998 Olympic champion Tara Lipinski and 2014 Olympic champions Meryl Davis and Charlie White hung overhead as Nemirovsky glided across the ice.
Nemirovksy’s mother and grandmother, who are both Russian, put her on the ice and started teaching her how to skate when she was just a pudgy-faced 4-year-old. Now, the sixth grader practices 16 hours a week at the metro-Detroit club and is on the U.S. Figure Skating National Development Team at the intermediate level.
“I love looking forward to the Olympics,” she said. “The skaters really push me and want to make me achieve that goal.”
She watched every moment of this year’s competition, studying the routines and dissecting the way the skaters moved with the music. She’d never seen anything like the women’s free skate, in which Valieva succumbed to crippling pressure and the joy was sucked out of the arena entirely.
“It was a disaster, honestly,” she said. “It’s not something you want to look up to.”
The women’s competition in Beijing has been a particularly fraught topic in skating clubs, with much of the discussion focused on the role of the coaches and vulnerability of Valieva.
“Normally, figure skating is not like that,” said 14-year old Erin Biederman, of Franklin, Mich. “At competitions it’s normally really supportive.”
Even with all the drama swirling around this year’s women’s figure skating competition, Biederman, who is working toward making it to U.S. nationals for juniors, says it hasn’t changed her attitude toward the sport or her future goals.
“I still want to go to the Olympics,” she said.
The Winter Games every four years represent the culmination of a journey, one that includes years of training, competing and persevering. The process can be difficult for any skater. In December 2018, Ling, from Ontario, posted her profile on a skating website in search of a dance partner, prepared to move anywhere to pursue her Olympic dreams. She eventually found Wein and settled in Rockville.
As the pair has ascended the sport’s ranks, no detail, on or off the ice, has been too small. Coaches have scrutinized their diet, knowing one mistake could end their Olympic goals. So they were particularly frustrated that Valieva was allowed to compete after testing positive for the prohibited substance trimetazidine.
But after watching Valieva place fourth and cry as coaches scolded her, Wein and Ling were struck by the pressure Valieva carried. Ling also felt concerned as she viewed the Russians who medaled — Anna Shcherbakova (gold) and Alexandra Trusova (silver) — express dissatisfaction.
“You don’t want the younger kids to see that, like, ‘Oh, they won the Olympics, but they’re still upset. So what do they have to look forward to?’” Ling said. “None of it was good.
“There’s a lot of issues in skating. But this one really pushed it out and people saw it and are upset about it. Hopefully, some things will change.”
Sunday is usually the one day Wein and Ling escape skating, but the pair arrived at the rink early for an 11 a.m. session. They carried clipboards full of paperwork as they directed a group of 25 youngsters in beginner skating lessons. When Wein and Ling instructed the children to skate backward, most traveled across the ice. One boy kept falling, however, until Ling and Wein guided him to the opposite wall.
“I hope that next generation doesn’t get turned away from the sport because they think it’s unfair,” Wein said, “or they just don’t want to be a part of that.”
Most coaches haven’t noticed a difference in skaters’ objectives, noting the United States provides more support and autonomy in development than in Russia, where skaters often begin Olympic training as children.
Shirley Hughes, a Denver-based coach who trained U.S. Olympian Ashley Wagner, worries young skaters will feel pressure to replicate Valieva’s movements and difficult jumps. Valieva was the first woman to land a quad at the Olympics.
“That’s what I’m worried about: They’ll say, ‘What good does it do to try because they’re not going to choose me anyway?’” Hughes said. “I tell them they can take their own path and they can do as well as possible and not worry about the quads.”
Audrey Weisiger, a veteran coach from the Fairfax Ice Arena in Virginia, believes interest in skating will persist. During a recent children’s class, she asked the group about the Olympics.
“There’s this big competition coming up,” Weisiger recalled telling the children. “Aren’t you excited?”
“Yes, yes, Ms. Audrey,” they responded.
“Okay,” Weisiger said. “What’s it called?”
“The Cardinal Classic,” they yelled, referring to their upcoming Northern Virginia competition.
“Most of the kids that skate in America are skating because they like it,” Weisiger said. “American skating schools, we’re an open house. You come in, you sign up, you pay your lesson fee and you skate. That’s not going to change.”
Kayla Ruble in Detroit contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
“I understand that a significant number of agency rules and actions would need to be postponed or reworked as a result of the Preliminary Injunction,” wrote Dominic J. Mancini, deputy administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs of the Office of Management and Budget.
The libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has consistently opposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions, cited the ruling in calling on the EPA to rescind its new tailpipe standards for cars and light trucks.
Richard Revesz, who directs the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, said the Louisiana judge’s decision was “one of the most aggressive and ill-founded administrative law opinions” that he has read in recent years.
“I don’t know how a court could tell a president that the executive branch cannot estimate the harm of a pollutant,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m sorry, the executive branch cannot study whether something is a carcinogen.’” | null | null | null | null | null |
George Polk Awards honors The Washington Post for journalism on Jan. 6 and ‘Pegasus Project’
The Washington Post today received two honors from the 74th annual George Polk Awards for journalism that shed light on the siege at the U.S. Capitol and how spyware designed to track terrorists and criminals was used to infiltrate the phones of private citizens.
“The Attack,” revealed stunning new details about official failures that exacerbated the unprecedented Jan. 6 attack, while also chronicling the aftermath and enduring consequences. Seventy-five journalists worked on the project, which involved interviews with more than 230 sources and analysis of thousands of pages of court and internal investigation documents.
The Polk Awards are presented by Long Island University and memorialize George Polk, a CBS correspondent who was killed while covering the civil war in Greece. Winners will be honored at an in-person luncheon April 8. | null | null | null | null | null |
Low temperature difference from normal on Wednesday morning. It shows temperatures up to 40 degrees below normal in the north-central United States and up to 40 degrees above normal in the eastern United States. (NWS)
Blizzard conditions are even possible early this week in the Dakotas and parts of Minnesota.
To the south and southeast of the wintry weather, a pulse of warm air surging ahead of the cold air will trigger heavy rain and severe thunderstorms in parts of the South, Tennessee Valley and Southeast. Some areas could see flooding and damaging winds, and a few tornadoes cannot be ruled out.
Not until the weekend will the Lower 48 see a pause from the extreme weather. And, even then, it will be much chillier than normal over much of the country as winter refuses to give into spring.
The frigid air, set to enter the northern Plains and Upper Midwest on Monday and Monday night, will bring temperatures about 20 to 40 degrees below normal from Montana through the Southern Plains. In some places, the cold could threaten records, according to the National Weather Service.
Single-digit and subzero high temperatures are forecast across much of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas on Tuesday with lows of minus-15 to minus-20. Wind chills could dip as low as minus-40.
A second, reinforcing blast of cold will dive through the northern Plains on Thursday into Friday. Unlike the first blast, it will penetrate somewhat farther east, spilling toward the Ohio Valley, northern Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. That will set the stage for a mix of wintry precipitation in these areas as a storm system rides up the Arctic front pressing eastward.
Some of the heaviest snow is predicted just north of Minneapolis, where up to a foot could fall. Minneapolis is under a winter storm warning through Tuesday, with 4 to 8 inches predicted, which, combined with winds of 20 to 25 mph, is expected to limit visibility.
A second storm will develop on Wednesday as the second pulse of Arctic air arrives in the central United States. While details still need to come into focus as to the exact location, it could produce a swath of icy precipitation from parts of Oklahoma through southern Ohio into Wednesday night.
Mostly snow is probable to the north of the icy zone, probably stretching from northern Oklahoma, through St. Louis and toward Columbus and Cleveland on Wednesday into Thursday. By Thursday night and Friday, substantial snow will become possible from through much of the Northeast north of southern New York State.
The potential for heavy rain also means the possibility of flooding Monday and Tuesday. On Monday and Monday night, the zone at greatest risk of flooding spans from eastern Oklahoma through southern Illinois. That area shifts toward Kentucky, Tennessee and northern Alabama from Tuesday into Wednesday.
The threat of flooding may increase in the Tennessee Valley, in particular, on Thursday and Friday, as the week’s second storm system brings the potential for more heavy rainfall. The National Weather Service predicts five-day rainfall totals of 3 to 6 inches in this zone, and locally higher amounts cannot be ruled out. | null | null | null | null | null |
The University of the District of Columbia (UDC) in Washington. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
“In a surprise announcement” during naming ceremonies for UDC’s athletic facility, the school said, it accepted the financial gift from the Leonsis Foundation and from Leonsis’s Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Washington Wizards, Capitals and Mystics, among other properties.
The $200,000 “lead gift” from Leonsis’s groups comes at the start of UDC’s Memorial Fund Campaign, which is seeking to raise $2 million for upgrades to the sport complex, student scholarships and youth sports camps, the school said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Let’s hope the ERA advocates are more successful this time
Equal Rights Amendment bookmarks and stickers at a print shop owned by Kati Hornung. (Julia Rendleman for The Washington Post)
Regarding the Feb. 13 Metro article “A trailblazing Virginian takes her campaign national”:
Though I have nothing but praise for the success Kati Hornung has had in getting support for the Equal Rights Amendment in Virginia and elsewhere, she did this by standing on the shoulders of giants who worked on this issue in Virginia for decades before Ms. Hornung began her efforts.
It would have been more contextual if The Post had researched and provided a deeper history of the actions of such pro-ERA stars as Catherine East, who served on John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women; Marianne Fowler, chair of the Virginia Women’s Political Caucus; Jean Marshall Crawford, state coordinator, Virginia NOW; Kathy Wilson, chair of the National Women’s Political Caucus and a Republican leader; Elise Heinz, a Democratic state delegate representing Arlington and Alexandria; Sonia Johnson, co-founder of Mormons for ERA; and others (including me) who fought valiantly against the Democratic leadership in the Virginia General Assembly, which bitterly opposed ratification of the amendment.
Let’s have no revisionist history as to why the ERA failed back then. It was scuttled by the Democratic Party in almost all the unratified states. Ms. Hornung’s efforts are laudable, and I hope they can be successful this time around.
Amoretta M. “Amie” Hoeber, Potomac | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Taking the Mr. Wimpy approach to the gas tax
Democrats are considering legislation that would put a hiatus on the gas tax through the end of the year. (Lynne Sladky/AP)
Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) introduced a bill that would suspend the federal gas tax until the end of 2022. They remind me of J. Wellington Wimpy, who famously said, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” In this case, it would be a discount for the cost of filling up your gas tank. Tuesday might never come for motorists who have to pay for these proposed goodies. What neither senator addressed is the result, which would be billions less going into the Highway Trust Fund. This is a critical source of funding for highway and transit projects.
A federal gas tax holiday would result in Uncle Sam not collecting $0.18 for every gallon of gas purchased.
The Highway Trust Fund already faces financial difficulties. The loss of billions would have to be made up at a later date. Congress will have to decide how to make up the lost money. It will raise taxes, transfer revenue from another source or reduce the scope or number of transportation funded projects. Motorists and transit riders will be the losers.
Larry Penner, Great Neck, N.Y. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission announced Monday that Medina Spirit, who finished first in the Kentucky Derby on May 1 before testing positive for an anti-inflammatory, is formally disqualified and all purse money is forfeited.
Bob Baffert, the horse’s Hall of Fame trainer, was suspended from all Kentucky racing facilities for 90 days and fined $7,500.
Medina Spirit died suddenly in December after a workout at Santa Anita racetrack in California. | null | null | null | null | null |
“In a surprise announcement” during naming ceremonies for UDC’s athletic facility, the school said, it accepted the financial gift from the Leonsis Foundation and from Leonsis’s Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Washington Capitals, Wizards and Mystics, among other properties.
The $200,000 “lead gift” from Leonsis’s groups comes at the start of UDC’s Memorial Fund Campaign, which is seeking to raise $2 million for upgrades to the sports complex, student scholarships and youth sports camps, the school said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Bob Baffert, the horse’s Hall of Fame trainer, was suspended from all Kentucky racing facilities for 90 days and fined $7,500. Baffert, whose horses won the Derby six times before last year, can appeal the decision.
In June 2021, Baffert was handed a two-year suspension by Churchill Downs Incorporated, which hosts the Derby. Monday’s decision by the KHRC extends the ban to all facilities in the state under its jurisdiction from March 8 through June 5.
“Winning the Kentucky Derby is one of the most exciting achievements in sports,” the statement read, “and we look forward to celebrating Mandaloun on a future date in a way that is fitting of this rare distinction.”
The KHRC decision comes a week after the commission held a closed hearing at which an attorney for Baffert, Clark Brewster, argued that the anti-inflammatory treatment betamethasone was not administered illegally to Medina Spirit because it came in the form of an ointment rather than an injection. In the wake of the discovery of betamethasone in the horse’s system after a race-day test last year, Baffert initially denied it was administered to Medina Spirit before attributing the positive result to the use of an antifungal ointment called Otomax.
“Medina Spirit was treated by veterinarian prescription with a topical salve for a skin infection,” Brewster told Thoroughbred Daily News after last week’s hearing. “The Kentucky rules expressly permit use of topical salves, and the treatment given to Medina did not violate any rule.”
The three stewards who presided over the hearing were not swayed by Brewster’s argument, however.
Medina Spirit died suddenly in December after a workout at Santa Anita racetrack in California. In a statement this month, the California Horse Racing Board said that a necropsy of Medina Spirit, who was subsequently cremated, did not establish a definitive cause of death.
This year’s Kentucky Derby is set to be staged May 7, with the second leg of the Triple Crown, the Preakness in Baltimore, scheduled for May 21 and the third race in the series, the Belmont Stakes in New York state, scheduled for June 11. | null | null | null | null | null |
Public transportation in the region has been an undeniable mess since the coronavirus came to town, sure. More than 4,000 WMATA employees had covid-19 and seven of them died. These are some of the crucial front-line workers of our region. Plus revenue fell when much of the nation’s workforce stopped going to the office, crippling an ailing agency that has never had a good excuse for its persistent dysfunction.
When Metro suddenly pulled more than half of the fleet off the tracks because of flaws in the new 7000-series cars that caused derailments, an entire region that relies on public transportation was jilted.
“As the system has jumped from crisis to crisis, this culture of mediocrity has been a common theme,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House Oversight subcommittee on government operations, during that Feb. 9 hearing. | null | null | null | null | null |
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — A Virginia man was killed when a car he was driving went out of control and hit a county deputy’s cruiser, according to a sheriff’s office.
Enrique Rodriguez Guevara, 24, of Stafford was killed in a collision that took place about 8:30 p.m. on Saturday on State Route 610 just east of Shelton Shop Road, The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg reported.
According to Sheriff’s Maj. Shawn Kimmitz, Rodriguez Guevara was driving east on Route 610 when his car hit a concrete median and went into the westbound lanes and into the path of the cruiser. Kimmitz said the deputy was not responding to an emergency and had no time to react to the vehicle entering his lane.
Rescue workers took the deputy and Rodriguez Guevara to a hospital. The deputy was treated and released, but Rodriguez Guevara died from his injuries. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population lives 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 |
He said that covid was “not over” and that Britain’s public health system should remain vigilant for possible future waves of infection and new variants. But he declared that the country would now treat the coronavirus more like seasonal flu.
At a news conference afterward, Johnson said the country had “emerged from the teeth of the pandemic,” which he called “two of the darkest years in our peacetime history.”
Union leaders predicted that people without benefits would show up to work sick because they could not afford to stay home without pay.
The deployment of vaccines will continue, with first, second and booster shots available. In addition, the government will offer a fourth booster dose but to a more limited number of people.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid said Monday that people age 75 and over, residents of nursing homes and those who are especially vulnerable to covid, such as the immunosuppressed, will be offered an additional booster vaccine shot in the coming months.
Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical officer, said that he would still urge people to quarantine if they have the virus, which he described as “standard public health advice for a significant and highly transmissible infection.”
The government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, said that it was essential to be able to “ramp up” the whole system again quickly as there was “no guarantee that the next variant” will be less severe than omicron.
In an interview Monday, Sturgeon suggested that Scotland would be more cautious than England. She told reporters that she thought isolation “still has a part to play” and that free testing should be reduced in a “phased, careful” way.
Lemsip is a popular British cold and flu remedy. | null | null | null | null | null |
The country follows Mexico and Argentina as the third in Latin America to expand abortion rights in just over a year.
Demonstrators demand the decriminalization of abortion during the Global Day of Action for Legal and Safe Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean in Bogotá on Sept. 28, 2021. (Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)
“It is without a doubt an advance that the constitutional court has declared that women have the right to decide,” said Catalina Martínez Coral, regional director of the Center for Reproductive Rights, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit before the court. “It recognizes the agency we have over our own body and life, and we celebrate that decision.”
The constitutional court was legally obligated to issue a ruling on abortion by mid-November 2021. But the decision was delayed after a judge requested a recusal for comments he publicly made about the subject. The remaining eight judges were evenly split, forcing the court to assign two additional judges to break the tie — one for each of the two lawsuits before the court. On Monday, one of these tiebreaking judges voted in favor of expanding access, leading to a 5-4 vote to allow abortion in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Until early last year, elective abortion was legal in Latin America only in Cuba, Uruguay, Guyana and parts of Mexico. Other countries allow the procedure only in cases of rape or when the health or life of the mother is at risk. Seven countries prohibit it under all circumstances: El Salvador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Suriname, and Haiti.
Argentine President Alberto Fernández signed legislation early last year to allow abortion during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. Mexico’s supreme court in September ruled unconstitutional a state law that imposed prison terms for people who had illegal abortions and those who aided them. The ruling is binding on other states.
In Ecuador, the country’s constitutional court decriminalized abortion last year in all cases of pregnancy resulting from rape. Previously, abortions were only allowed if a patient’s life was in danger or if a woman with an intellectual disability was raped.
On Monday, crowds of abortion rights supporters gathered outside the constitutional court wearing their movement’s emblematic green scarves as they awaited the decision. A group of abortion opponents also protested outside, where they had arranged rows of small white boxes with crosses on them.
While abortion rights activists celebrated the decision, many had hoped the court would rule in favor of total decriminalization of the procedure. Barriers to abortion access would continue to persist in Colombia for the most vulnerable, some said, even for those who meet the legal requirements.
Such was the case for a young woman who sought out an abortion three years ago and spoke in an interview about her ordeal on the condition of anonymity to protect her privacy. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was 12 years old, she said she was a victim of sexual abuse at a young age and struggled with homelessness for part of her life. She argued to her health provider that her pregnancy posed a danger to her mental health and would make her eligible for an abortion. “Every time the baby kicked, all I felt was fear and despair,” the woman said.
“These rights only exist for women with money. If I had money … my life would be a different story,” the woman said. “It’s not an easy decision for anyone. It’s one you make thinking less about your own conditions and more about what life will be like for the other, for the one inside of you. ”
How abortion laws in the U.S. compare to those in other countries
Abortion rights advocates throughout Latin America draw inspiration from Argentina vote
How the pandemic has affected abortion rules around the world | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden has vowed to announce his choice by the end of the month, and Durbin has publicly set a goal of confirming that nominee before Easter, April 10. Biden made a campaign pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the high court, and he reiterated that pledge after Breyer announced his retirement. | null | null | null | null | null |
The lawsuit, which also names former Prince George’s County police corporal Bryant W. Strong as a co-defendant, alleges Strong used excessive force on Oct. 17, 2019, when he slammed Ward-Blake to the ground after pulling the 24-year-old over for driving a car with expired tags. Ward-Blake’s girlfriend and her 6-year-old daughter were in the car at the time.
Murphy is no stranger to federal lawsuits involving police officers. In 2015, Murphy secured a $6.4 million settlement with the city of Baltimore after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody. Gray’s death set off days of civil uprising across the city.
In the Ward-Blake case, a grand jury last year indicted Strong on charges of second-degree assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment. Strong is scheduled to go on trial in May.
Murphy and Ruff allege that Strong had been the subject of multiple excessive force investigations by the department before his interaction with Ward-Blake but that supervisors within the department did not take appropriate action. The attorneys said Strong was cited in an internal review, known as the Michael Graham report, that was made public in 2020. The report cited Strong as one of the officers that received numerous excessive force complaints within the department between 2016 and 2019.
Murphy accused the Prince George’s government of not protecting the rights of its citizens, but stopped shot of criticizing County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D) who he said has done the “right thing” by addressing police brutality within the department. But he added that more work needs to be done.
“We’re here for a Black life that mattered,” Murphy said. “Demonte Ward-Blake’s life mattered. The Black and Brown lives of Prince George’s residents who have been repeatedly victimized by police officers here in this county for decades now, their lives matter. ” | null | null | null | null | null |
International borders are fully reopened
Tourism is one of Australia’s biggest industries, worth more than $43 billion and employing about 5 percent of the country’s workforce.
Death toll from major storms increases
Heavy rains and high winds swept across Northern Ireland and northern England on Monday before moving on to France.
In France, a couple in their 70s died Sunday after their car was swept into the English Channel near a small town in Normandy. The couple had called for help, but it did not reach them in time.
Politicians, journalists slam Pakistan’s cybercrimes law: Pakistan’s political opposition and journalist community Monday rejected a tough new cybercrimes law approved by the country’s president that enhances jail terms for social media users convicted of disseminating “fake news.” The development came a day after President Arif Alvi approved the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Ordinance, enhancing jail terms from three to five years for people convicted of spreading “fake news” on social media. Suspects arrested under the law will not be entitled to bail during trial. The legislation takes effect immediately.
Mount Etna erupts in Italy: Mount Etna has roared back to spectacular action after a few months of relative quiet, sending up a 7.5-mile high volcanic ash cloud over eastern Sicily. The lava flow from Etna, one of Europe’s most active volcanoes, was centered on the crater on the mountain’s southeast slope, Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology said Monday. There were no immediate reports of injuries or property damage on the inhabited towns ringing the slopes of the volcano, which is popular with hikers, skiers and other tourists.
Slovakia honors slain journalist, fiancee: Slovakia marked on Monday the anniversary of the 2018 slayings of an investigative journalist and his fiancee by unveiling a monument to honor them at a central square in the capital of Bratislava. Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova, both 27, were shot dead at their home in the town of Velka Maca, east of Bratislava, on Feb. 21, 2018. Kuciak had been investigating possible government corruption when he was killed. The killings prompted major street protests and a political crisis that led to the government’s collapse.
Search expanded in Greek ferry fire: Fire service rescuers expanded a search Monday inside a burning ferry anchored off the Greek island of Corfu where 10 people remain missing. The fire on the Italian-flagged Euroferry Olympia is burning for a fourth day. The body of a Greek man was discovered inside the ship Sunday. A total of 281 people were rescued. | null | null | null | null | null |
Public transportation in the region has been an undeniable mess since the coronavirus came to town, sure. More than 4,000 WMATA employees have had covid-19 and seven of them died. These are some of the crucial front-line workers of our region. Plus revenue fell when much of the nation’s workforce stopped going to the office, crippling an ailing agency that has never had a good excuse for its persistent dysfunction.
When Metro suddenly pulled more than half of the fleet off the tracks because of flaws in the new 7000-series cars that caused a derailment, an entire region that relies on public transportation was jilted.
“As the system has jumped from crisis to crisis, this culture of mediocrity has been a common theme,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform subcommittee on government operations, during that Feb. 9 hearing. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man fatally stabbed at mall in Montgomery, police say
Slaying reported at Lakeforest Mall, police say
A man was fatally stabbed Monday at the Lakeforest Mall in Montgomery County, the county police said.
The victim was found about 11 a.m. with “multiple stab wounds,” the police said.
He died at a hospital, according to the police.
No information was immediately available about the circumstances of the incident.
The mall is in the Gaithersburg area. | null | null | null | null | null |
Alabama death row inmate who sought new trial dies
Death row inmate who sought new trial dies
Kuenzel was convicted in 1988 of killing Linda Jean Offord during a 1987 robbery at a convenience store in the eastern Alabama city of Sylacauga. His conviction was based largely on plea deal testimony from his roommate, who admitted being at the crime scene but said it was Kuenzel who went into the store and killed the clerk.
Kuenzel lawyers said they found out decades after the conviction that a teenage witness — who testified she saw both men at the convenience store — initially told a grand jury that she wasn’t certain whom she saw. Defense lawyers said they also learned that the roommate, who had blood on his pants after the murder, had a shotgun of the same gauge used to kill Offord, and had injuries.
Border Patrol agent kills man on trail
Federal and local authorities are investigating the death of a man who was shot by a U.S. Border Patrol agent late Saturday a few miles north of the Mexico border outside the Arizona town of Douglas.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection area spokesman John Mennell confirmed Monday that the agency was investigating with the Cochise County sheriff’s office, and that Mexican Consulate officials were notified of the death in the Skeleton Canyon area of the Peloncillo Mountains.
The shooting was reported about 10 p.m. Saturday in “difficult terrain” on East Geronimo Trail, about 30 miles east of Douglas, the sheriff’s office said.
Other people in the area were detained and taken to a Border Patrol station “for interview purposes and further processing,” the sheriff’s office said. | null | null | null | null | null |
White House weighs measures to stabilize gas prices if Russian hostilities over Ukraine send costs skyrocketing
Administration officials prepare response to potential gas price hikes should Moscow constrict exports amid growing tensions
The Biden administration is considering options for responding to a global energy shock should Russia invade Ukraine. (Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post)
White House aides are reviewing how the United States could respond if Russia curtails exporting global oil products due to hostilities over Ukraine, anticipating a potential spike in gas prices that could further compound already high prices domestically.
Moves being discussed by administration officials include another potential release of the American government’s strategic oil reserves, said two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The administration’s contingency planning reflects the mounting alarm globally over the state of affairs between the United States and Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday formally recognized the independence of two regions in eastern Ukraine, and the White House quickly retaliated by announcing new sanction measures.
Moscow formally recognizes two Ukrainian regions as independent
If the United States imposes broader sanctions on Russia over a military incursion in Ukraine, Russia could strike back by limiting sales of oil and other energy products to Europe and other parts of the world.
Russia produces roughly 11 percent of the world’s oil supply, or roughly 10.5 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
White House officials have also recently expressed openness to a holiday from the national gas tax. White House spokeswoman Emilie Simons said in a statement last week that “all options are on the table.”
The United States has roughly 585 million barrels in reserve and imports roughly 6 million barrels a day, according to Patrick De Haan, an industry analyst at GasBuddy. If released in full, the U.S. reserves could meet America’s typical import consumption of crude oil for about 97 days, he said.
President Biden announced a separate release of 50 million barrels of oil last fall from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in response to high gas prices related to the global economy’s uneven rebound from the pandemic.
“If Russia responds to sanctions by curbing their oil exports, that’s what the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was built for,” De Haan said. “The U.S. SPR stands ready for its intended purpose — to offer the nation security if there is a disruption.”
The administration is “prepared, if necessary, to deploy all tools and authorities at our disposal” to bring down prices at the gas pump, according to the White House said in a statement, which added that millions of barrels tied to the administration’s fall announcement are rolling onto the market and helped gasoline fall by more than 10 cents a gallon during the holiday season.
Vice President Harris told reporters on Sunday that administration officials were looking closely at what could be done, if necessary, to prevent price hikes at the pump from hurting American consumers. CNN also previously reported that the U.S. State Department has been putting together a global strategy with companies across the world regarding increasing production of natural gas that can be provided to Europe.
“Maybe we will incur some cost — and in this situation that may relate to energy costs, for example,” Harris said. “But we are taking very specific and appropriate, I believe, steps to mitigate what that cost, if it happens.”
Most industry experts say it still appears unlikely that Russia would curb its exports. Doing so would deprive Russia of a major source of revenue, while also hurting its standing among the expanded alliance of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) of which it is a leading member, according to Jason Bordoff, a Columbia University energy expert and founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy.
“We’ve never seen Russia cut off oil exports — it’s a blunt instrument that would hurt not just the U.S. but also China and other allies,” Bordoff said. “They certainly have that tool at their disposal in retaliation for sanctions — it’s a possibility I can’t dismiss, but those are some of the reasons they might not do it.”
Biden authorizes use of strategic oil reserves to combat high U.S. gasoline prices
The administration is probably acutely sensitive to the impact of high gas prices on consumers, given that voters are already widely frustrated with inflation. High oil prices have proven one of the most persistent and damaging political head winds for the Biden administration as part of a broader inflationary spike coming out of the coronavirus pandemic. The average price for a gallon of gas hit $3.53 on Monday, a slight increase from $3.33 a month ago and a big increase from $2.63 last year, according to AAA.
The White House has few obvious answers — outside deploying the nation’s limited reserves — should Russia constrict its supply, analysts say.
The administration could ask Saudi Arabia or Iran to bolster its spare capacity for production. But such a move requires other international concessions that the administration may be reluctant to make, and it is unclear how quickly those countries could move.
A Russian cessation of exports would also fall particularly hard on Europe, which receives the bulk of Russian pipeline exports of natural gas. The U.S. government would probably try to encourage private firms to export more liquefied natural gas — which can be transported by vessel — to Europe, but those efforts would be unlikely to fill the hole left by a major Russian drawdown. The result will be higher prices for European consumers at a time when many European political leaders have already faced substantial blowback over heating costs.
“You can do certain things to help soften the blow in the short run, and those actions — including SPR — are potentially important steps to take,” said Jonathan Elkind, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “But they wont address fully and they wont address in more than the short-run how the markets look.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Man is slain near school in Prince George’s, according to police
Victim was fatally shot in Landover area, police say
A man was fatally shot Monday evening near a school in the Landover area of Prince George’s County, according to the county police.
The man was found on the ground around 5:20 p.m. after a shooting was reported in the 1400 block of Nalley Terrace, the police said.
He died at the scene, the police said.
The address, in the Landover area, is that of John Carroll Elementary School. | null | null | null | null | null |
The lawsuit, which also names former Prince George’s County police corporal Bryant W. Strong as a co-defendant, alleges Strong used excessive force on Oct. 17, 2019, when he slammed Ward-Blake to the ground after pulling the 24-year-old over for driving a car with expired tags. Ward-Blake’s girlfriend arrived at the scene later but her 6-year-old daughter was in the car the entire time.
Murphy has represented several plaintiffs in federal lawsuits involving police officers. In 2015, Murphy secured a $6.4 million settlement with the city of Baltimore after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody. Gray’s death set off days of civil uprising across the city.
In the Ward-Blake case, a grand jury indicted Strong in 2020 on charges of second-degree assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment. Strong is scheduled to go on trial in May.
Murphy and Ruff allege that Strong had been the subject of multiple excessive force investigations by the department before his interaction with Ward-Blake but that supervisors within the department did not take appropriate action. The attorneys said Strong was cited in an internal review, known as the Michael Graham report, that was made public in 2020. The report cited Strong as one of the officers that had the highest rates of using excessive force within the department between 2016 and 2019.
Murphy accused the Prince George’s government of not protecting the rights of its citizens, but stopped short of criticizing County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D), who he said has done the “right thing” by addressing police brutality within the department. But he added that more work needs to be done.
“We’re here for a Black life that mattered,” Murphy said. “Demonte Ward-Blake’s life mattered. The Black and Brown lives of Prince George’s residents who have been repeatedly victimized by police officers here in this county for decades now, their lives matter.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Russian President Vladimir Putin signs decrees recognizing the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic at the Kremlin on Feb. 21. (Aleksey Nikolskyi/Kremlin Pool/Sputnik/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
“The level of threat for our country is becoming greater and greater,” Putin said. “Russia has every right to take countermeasures to enhance our security, and that’s how we plan to act.”
The agreement with the two breakaway territories signed by Putin also says Russia can have military bases there. Separatist leaders, however, do not control the entirety of the two Ukrainian regions, and it is unclear whether Russian troops would enter just the portions held by separatists or extend into the Ukrainian territories that Putin regards as part of the republics.
Since 2014, the Donbas region has been divided into separate territories: the Kyiv-controlled parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.” Russian-backed separatists claim all of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as their territory, but they control only about one-third of the region — about 6,500 square miles — along the border with Russia.
The senior Biden administration official said economic sanctions probably would be imposed Tuesday but did not characterize their scope. The administration also announced a ban on U.S. trade with the breakaway regions.
Late Monday, the United Nations Security Council was set to hold an emergency meeting on the Ukraine crisis, following a request by Kyiv citing Russia’s decision to recognize the separatist regions.
Putin threatened Ukrainians responsible for bringing democracy to the country, a statement all the more chilling amid reports that Moscow has compiled a hit list of Ukrainians to be killed or sent to concentration camps following a military occupation. “We know their names,” he said, “and we will find them and bring them to justice.”
Sonne and Nakashima reported from Washington. John Hudson and Sammy Westfall contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
James Davis, lawyer
James Davis, 87, a lawyer who started the intellectual property practice at the Howrey law firm in Washington before retiring from the firm in 2005, died Jan. 5 at a hospice center at Bonita Springs, Fla. The cause was a heart ailment, said a daughter, Jennifer Goodman.
Mr. Davis was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., and moved to the Washington area in 1964. Before joining Howry in 1972, he clerked at the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, served as a trial judge at the U.S. Court of Claims and taught chemistry at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. In 2020 he moved to Bonita Springs from Bethesda, Md.
Raymond Jacobson, lawyer political activist
Raymond Jacobson, 93, a lawyer and political activist who had been an advance man for Democratic presidential candidates Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert H. Humphrey, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, died Jan. 23 at his home in North Bethesda. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a son, Louis Jacobson.
Mr. Jacobson was born in Orlando and had lived in the Washington area since 1955. Over the years, he was an official at Democratic Party political conventions and had worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the International Trade Commission and the International Trade Administration.
He had been an aide in congressional offices and from 1981 to 2010 was a court-appointed lawyer in D.C. Superior Court.
Martha Hartke, senator's widow
Martha Hartke, 101, the widow of Sen. Vance Hartke (D-Ind.), who served in the Senate from 1959 to 1977 and died in 2003, died Jan. 21 at an assisted-living facility in New Market, Va. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a son, Jan Hartke.
Mrs. Hartke was born Martha Tiernan in Richmond, Ind. She participated in activities for congressional spouses. | null | null | null | null | null |
That history is instructive because James is suddenly embroiled in perhaps the bleakest chapter of his career. The 2009-10 Cavaliers won 61 games and a playoff series. The 2013-14 Heat won 54 games and reached the Finals. The 2017-18 Cavaliers won 50 games and reached the Finals.
By comparison, the Lakers (27-31) are in ninth place in the Western Conference. James’s co-star, Anthony Davis, is sidelined again with a significant foot injury that will keep him out for at least a month. James’s third wheel, Russell Westbrook, has been a disastrous fit and a major impediment to the Lakers’ cap flexibility and trade options. The rest of James’s supporting cast isn’t up to the task of a long playoff run, and reinforcements didn’t arrive at the trade deadline.
With all eyes and ears on James in Cleveland, he candidly acknowledged that this season has been “a hell storm” and the “strangest” of his 19-year career. He also went out of his way to praise Oklahoma City Thunder General Manager Sam Presti, comments that some observers perceived as a slight to Lakers GM Rob Pelinka. Then, in an interview with the Athletic, James said that “the door’s not closed” on a possible return to Cleveland. The 37-year-old added that he plans to play on the same team as his oldest son, Bronny, a high school junior who is on track to be draft eligible in 2024.
Davis was crucial to the Lakers’ 2020 title push, but his unreliable health has short-circuited the Lakers’ past two seasons. Westbrook is under contract for next season, and trading him this summer will not return a star. The Lakers don’t have many quality draft assets or young prospects to cash in for veteran talent. And while James’s statistical production remains strong, his presence no longer guarantees that his team will be among the top title contenders as it did earlier in his career.
If James is indeed plotting his next move, he can do so with a clear conscience and without fear of major backlash. He delivered the 2020 championship, a pair of best-selling jerseys and dozens of nationally televised games to a Lakers franchise that was adrift following Kobe Bryant’s 2016 retirement. He helped bring Davis to town and steered the Lakers through Bryant’s tragic death. He didn’t oversee a new dynasty, but he has played spectacularly and aged gracefully. In short, James came, he made “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” and he conquered.
The “when” and “where” of what comes next remain to be seen. James is under contract through the 2022-23 season, meaning he could be traded this summer or leave as a free agent in the summer of 2023.
His flirtation with the Cavaliers, who are 35-23 and the East’s fourth seed, is especially intriguing given how well their young pieces would complement James. Darius Garland, a first-time all-star, could serve as a secondary ballhandler and scorer a la Irving. Evan Mobley, the rookie of the year favorite, has Davis-like versatility and potential on defense. Jarrett Allen, another first-time all-star, would complete a long and athletic frontcourt capable of helping James handle players such as Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid. James has praised all three players, saying Mobley was “going to be a damn good basketball player” in November before aligning himself with Garland and Allen.
Few would begrudge James a full-circle return to the franchise that drafted him, especially if the move back to his home state facilitated his dream of playing with Bronny. To make a trade work this summer, Cleveland could use Kevin Love’s expiring contract to help match salaries. The biggest hang-up could be whether the Cavaliers can convince the Lakers to accept a pick-laden return package similar to the one the Brooklyn Nets sent to the Houston Rockets last year for James Harden.
For James and Cleveland, a third act would only make sense if it opens a championship window and doesn’t gut the Cavaliers’ well-balanced core. For the Lakers, this summer will bring tough choices: Do they try to sign James to a contract extension, retool around him for one final run before 2023 free agency, or trade him in an effort to replenish their asset base and enter a new chapter? | null | null | null | null | null |
Russian military vehicles carry soldiers toward the border with Ukraine on Feb. 21. (For The Washington Post)
The agreement with the two breakaway territories signed by Putin also says Russia can have military bases there. Separatist leaders, however, do not control the entirety of the two Ukrainian regions. Since 2014, the Donbas region has been divided into separate territories: the Kyiv-controlled parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.” Russian-backed separatists control only about one-third of the region — about 6,500 square miles — along the border with Russia.
The senior Biden administration official said new sanctions will be imposed Tuesday but did not characterize their scope. The administration also announced a ban on U.S. trade with the breakaway regions.
Late Monday, the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting on the Ukraine crisis, following a request by Kyiv citing Russia’s decision to recognize the separatist regions.
Zelensky told his countrymen in a video address posted on social media that “we will give up nothing to no one” and that Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders “will stay that way, despite any statements or actions taken by the Russian Federation.”
“It’s very important to see now who is our real friend and partner, and who continues to frighten the Russian Federation with words,” he said.
The State Department, which evacuated the U.S. Embassy from Kyiv to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, said Monday that out of precaution, embassy workers would be staying over the border in Poland and commuting to Lviv to carry out their duties.
The evacuees in Taganrog Hotel, set up to accept the influx of people evacuating to Russia’s Rostov region from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic just across the border, were convinced that Putin would accept the council’s recommendation and recognize the regions.
Daria Kaleniuk, a prominent anticorruption activist and executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv, blasted Putin’s speech. “I am convinced now there will be war,” she tweeted, “with [the] goal to destroy our country.” She urged the West to “act now” to sanction Moscow.
Putin threatened those responsible for a 2014 fire in the Ukrainian city of Odessa that resulted in the deaths of pro-Russian activists. “We know their names,” he said, “and we will find them and bring them to justice.”
“The level of threat for our country is becoming greater and greater,” he said. “Russia has every right to take countermeasures to enhance our security, and that’s how we plan to act.”
Sonne and Nakashima reported from Washington. John Hudson, Dalton Bennett and Sammy Westfall contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba speaks to the press following the E.U. Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Brussels on Feb. 21. (Olivier Hoslet/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
But despite increasingly urgent calls for action and the deteriorating situation on the ground, the E.U.’s sanctions package will not be coming just yet — much to Ukraine’s disappointment.
“We believe there are good and legitimate reasons to impose at least some of the sanctions now to demonstrate that the European Union is not only talking the talk about sanctions but walking the walk,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs, told reporters Monday.
“We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen and after our country will be fired at, or after we will have no borders and after we will have no economy or part of our country will be occupied,” he said in an interview with CNN from Munich. “Why would we need those sanctions then?”
E.U. foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Monday morning that Europe is ready to levy sanctions but will wait for the right moment. At an evening news conference, he suggested that the bloc might move ahead if Russia recognized the independence of two Russian-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine.
Not long after, news broke that Russian President Vladimir Putin said he will indeed recognize the regions, effectively throwing the issue back to the E.U.
The question of exactly when and how to act remains contentious on both sides of the Atlantic.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that the United States and its European allies have built a “massive” sanctions package to deter Moscow but would not “lay out the specifics,” because that might give Russia a chance to plan accordingly.
“As soon as you trigger them, that deterrent is gone,” Blinken said in an interview with CNN on Sunday.
“Until the tanks are actually moving, the planes are actually flying, the bombs are actually dropping,” he continued, “we’re going to do everything we can with diplomacy and with deterrence and dissuasion to get President Putin to reverse the decision that we believe he’s made.”
Voices within the E.U. argue that it would be foolish to wait for Putin to launch a full-scale invasion to levy sanctions.
“We do not need to wait for an attack, for a military attack,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said Monday ahead of meetings in Brussels.
Landsbergis cited cyberattacks, the pressure on the Ukrainian economy and the news that Russian troops may not, in fact, leave Belarus after military exercises as evidence that an attack of sorts is already underway.
Over the weekend, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told CNBC that “everything,” including energy, is still on the table. However, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has said that Russia’s energy sector should be excluded from E.U. sanctions.
“Some countries like Italy are afraid of energy sanctions and want to exclude energy from the package,” Landsbergis said. “Well, I think Putin is not drawing any red lines for his attack. Therefore I don’t think that we should be drawing any red lines for our sanctions.”
“I think ministers have made a clear decision not to put the details of that on the table at this stage, and I think that is the right decision,” Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said Monday. “The main focus needs to be on preventing war rather than how we respond to it.”
Jeppe Kofod, Denmark’s foreign minister, said there is still hope that Russia will come to the table. “If they don’t,” he said, Europe stands ready to impose “the most devastating sanctions, economically, politically, that Russia has ever seen.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Twitter banned Trump last year from the social media platform, citing the “risk of further incitement of violence,” following the Jan. 6 insurrection repeatedly encouraged by the former president.
Numerous user accounts had emerged by Monday and reported delays or errors setting up the account. A Washington Post reporter early Monday was able to download the app and submit an email address to create an account, but a verification email was not immediately received.
Reuters reported that the app was set to be released in full on Monday, Presidents’ Day, according to an executive’s posts on a beta version of the platform.
A representative for Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the timing of the app’s official launch.
Truth Social was listed in the top charts for downloads on the App Store on Monday morning, ahead of HBO Max and TikTok.
After he lost his online platform in the spring, Trump launched a blog called “From the Desk of Donald Trump.” But as The Post and others reported, the site had low readership. | null | null | null | null | null |
Two children are shot in Annapolis, police say
“Young kids" were playing, official says
Two children, described as “very young,” were shot Monday night in Annapolis, police said.
The children were outside playing when gunfire broke out, according to a police official.
The shooting occurred about 7:10 p.m. in the 1300 block of Tyler Avenue, police said.
The children were taken to hospitals, police said.
Their conditions, and their exact ages, were not immediately available.
The site is a residential area about one mile southwest of the Maryland state house. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man is fatally shot in Fairfax County, police say
The slaying, in the Centreville area, did not appear random, according to police
A man was shot fatally Monday night in the western part of Fairfax County, according to police.
The man was shot in the 14800 block of Bodley Square in the Centreville area, police said.
A man was seen running from the scene, according to police. They said the shooting did not appear to be a random act.
At least two guns were discovered during the investigation, police said.
The site is a residential development of townhouses northwest of Route 29 and Interstate 66 in the London Towne area. | null | null | null | null | null |
China still walks its tightrope between Russia and the West as tensions flare in Ukraine
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk to each other during their meeting in Beijing, Feb. 4, 2022. (Alexei Druzhinin/AP)
China did not explicitly endorse Moscow’s latest moves over Ukraine but still recognized on Tuesday what it called Russia’s legitimate security concerns, in Beijing’s latest tightrope act over the crisis in Eastern Europe.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called on all parties involved to “exercise restraint” and resolve the crisis through negotiation, in a phone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Antony J Blinken. He still, however, referred to countries’ legitimate security concerns, a nod toward Russia’s views that Ukraine represents a threat.
Speaking at an emergency U.N. meeting on Monday night, Zhang Jun, China’s representative to the United Nations called on all parties involved to “seek reasonable solutions” and address each country’s concerns based on “equality and mutual respect.” China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday that it was in communication with all “relevant parties.”
The comments from top Chinese diplomats — coming after the Russian commitment to deploy troops to the two breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which Putin recognized as independent — underline Beijing’s conflicted position as the Ukraine crisis unfolds against the backdrop of warming ties between Moscow and Beijing.
For China, supporting a Russian invasion of Ukraine would harm already deteriorating ties with Western nations, but Beijing is also keen to bolster its burgeoning relationship with Moscow to counter what it sees as U.S. efforts to suppress its rise as a global power.
“China wants to preserve its ties with Moscow, abide by its principles, and avoid harming relations with the United States and the European Union,” said Bonnie Glaser, the director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Navigating this crisis may be one of the toughest diplomatic challenges that [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping has had to face,” she said.
At the start of the 2022 Winter Olympics, the two powers signed a joint statement pledging a strategic relationship of “no limits.” As the Ukraine crisis has escalated, Beijing joined Moscow in repeatedly criticizing the United States and NATO for provoking what it says are Russia’s legitimate security concerns.
Significantly, Russia’s latest moves over Ukraine happened one day after the Beijing Olympics had concluded.
Still, over the weekend Wang, the foreign minister, said that the “sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of any country should be respected and safeguarded, adding, “Ukraine is no exception.”
In China, media outlets described the crisis as “escalating under American provocation.” A CCTV report on Tuesday on unverified footage of Russian troops in the Donbass reminded viewers that Moscow, as an ally, is obliged to protect the two areas. Horizon News, a social media account under Beijing News, appeared to accidentally post instructions on Ukraine coverage on its Weibo account. The post, later deleted, said that no posts unfavorable to Russia or with pro-Western content should be published.
Chinese commentator Hu Xijin, former editor of the state-run Global Times, went slightly further than his government’s carefully neutral official statements, describing Russia’s recognition of the two breakaway regions in Ukraine as a measure to “break the deadlock” of the crisis. “With these concrete actions, he is showing Russia’s strategic determination,” he wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
Local commentators stressed the balance their country has to strike. “Simply put, China has to back Russia up with emotional and moral support while refrain from treading on the toes of the United States and European Union,” Ming Jinwei, a popular commentator and senior editor at Xinhua News Agency wrote Tuesday in his WeChat blog | null | null | null | null | null |
CORRECT CREDIT TO PORTUGUESE NAVY INSTEAD OF AIR FORCE In this undated photo provided by the Portuguese Navy, smoke billows from the burning Felicity Ace car transport ship as seen from the Portuguese Navy NPR Setubal ship southeast of the mid-Atlantic Portuguese Azores Islands. The ship’s crew were taken by helicopter to Faial island on the archipelago, about 170 kilometers (100 miles) away on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. There were no reported injuries. (Portuguese Navy via AP) (Uncredited/Portuguese Navy) | null | null | null | null | null |
VMI’s civil rights hero: How a White valedictorian saved a Black teen’s life in 1965
Virginia Military Institute plans on adding a new monument to Jonathan Daniels, who was killed defending 17-year-old Ruby Sales in Alabama
Civil rights activist Jonathan Daniels with Rachel West in Selma, Ala., in 1965. (Courtesy of VMI)
On Aug. 20, 1965, Jonathan Daniels stepped outside a county jail in central Alabama, his first day free after a week of incarceration for protesting segregation.
The White Episcopal seminarian — who’d grown up in a White New England town and graduated from the segregated Virginia Military Institute — was an unlikely civil rights activist. But Daniels had made repeated trips to Alabama to demonstrate alongside African Americans.
Now Daniels and more than a dozen Black demonstrators — who’d all been arrested after protesting the discriminatory way White-owned shops treated Black customers — craved a cold drink.
So they walked the short distance from the sewage-plagued jail in Hayneville, Ala., to a convenience store. But when Daniels and one of his Black compatriots, a 17-year-old girl named Ruby Sales, approached the front door, a White man clutching a 12-gauge shotgun stood in their way.
“He said, ‘The store is closed. … If you don’t get off of this goddamn property, I’m going to blow your damn brains out,’” Sales recalled in 1965, according to the documentary, “Here Am I, Send Me: The Story of Jonathan Daniels.”
Daniels asked the man — Tom Coleman, a state highway employee who served as a volunteer special deputy sheriff — if he was threatening them, according to “Outside Agitator,” a biography of Daniels by historian Charles Eagles. Then, Daniels pushed Sales out of the way and onto the ground as Coleman opened fire, killing the VMI alumnus instantly.
Black civil rights activist recalls white ally who took a shotgun blast for her
The death of Daniels made national news and turned him into a civil rights hero. He’s also become an idolized martyr at his alma mater, VMI, the nation’s oldest state-supported military college.
At the time of Daniels’s death, VMI was an all-White, all-male public college that resisted racial integration and whose cadets once fought and died for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
VMI wouldn’t enroll its first Black cadets on its Lexington campus until 1968, the last public college in the state to integrate.
Now, in the wake of last year’s state-ordered investigation that found a “racist and sexist culture” on campus, VMI is planning to enhance its commemoration of Daniels. The school already boasts the Daniels courtyard and Daniels Library, and one of the arches leading into the student barracks is named after him. A plaque in the courtyard bears his image over a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr.: “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.”
According to the college’s spokesman, Bill Wyatt, VMI has retained an architectural firm to help design a new monument honoring Daniels planned for near the school’s entrance. VMI expects to finalize the design and select the exact site for the monument later this year.
“The design will capture the last moments of Daniels’s life while summoning the viewer to reflect on their personal opportunities for humanitarian service,” Wyatt said.
The school’s renewed focus on Daniels comes as it has been grappling with what to do with its many Confederate commemorations. In December 2020, VMI removed a 108-year-old statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson. The school has also scrubbed Jackson’s name from a barracks arch.
But VMI still has not figured out whether to relocate, keep or contextualize other tributes and traditions with ties to slavery or the Confederacy.
VMI has always honored Daniels, though. Over the years, alumni have made pilgrimages to the site of his killing in Hayneville, located between Selma and Montgomery. In the late 1990s, the college’s Board of Visitors voted to establish the Jonathan M. Daniels ’61 Humanitarian Award, whose recipients have included President Jimmy Carter (D) and the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the legendary civil rights activist.
‘Unadulterated hell’
Daniels, in many respects, did not fit the typical mold of a VMI cadet. He was not from the South or Virginia. And, his biographer wrote, he was a “gentle, intellectual, undisciplined young man” who frequently skipped class, smoked cigarettes on the school grounds and earned multiple speeding tickets. His mystified friends worried he might not withstand “the physical rigors and regimented life of a military institution.”
On the other hand, VMI — which he’d likely heard about through a family friend who was an alumnus — made total sense. His father, Phil Daniels, a physician who strongly influenced him, served in World War II, suffering injuries to his feet and legs. He earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, according to his obituary.
But, when Daniels entered VMI in 1957 as a “rat” — as all new cadets are known — he found his predicament “almost unbearable,” according to his biographer. At VMI, rats face a months-long induction period full of verbal harassment and grueling workouts.
Daniels, an English major who loved music, theater, philosophy and literature, lamented that he had little time to study.
“The life of a rat is somewhat less than ethereal bliss,” Daniels wrote, according to the biography. VMI, he said, was “pure, unadulterated hell.”
His classmates didn’t think the nearly 6-foot-tall, 142-pound native of Keene, N.H., would survive. “The experience may have given him some idea of what it was like to be a second-class citizen and to be oppressed by another group,” his biographer wrote.
At VMI, Daniels found refuge with a clique of fellow English majors who belonged to a club that he described in his senior yearbook as a “monument to humanism in a wasteland” of athletes, scientists and engineers. (He also found relief in a bottle of J&B scotch, which he kept hidden in a hollowed-out Civil War dictionary, his biographer said.)
A description of him next to his senior yearbook photo noted “his purposeful egoism,” but said it was “balanced by unfailing tact and generosity.”
“The presence of a New Hampshire Yankee in a southern military college has for four years roused the curiosity of his Dixie colleagues,” the entry read.
Indeed, the New Englander was constantly bombarded with Confederate traditions, such as an annual event honoring VMI cadets who fought and died for the Confederacy at the Battle of New Market in 1864. During the New Market ceremony his junior year, the event drew a record crowd of 2,000 people, ending with students marching to “Dixie.”
VMI’s spokesman said there was no indication that Daniels pushed the school to integrate. The future civil rights activist was hardly exposed to people of color during his years at VMI, his biographer wrote.
“The all-white VMI student body and faculty did not appreciably expand Daniels’ personal contact with Blacks or his understanding of race relations,” his biographer wrote, “though he did regularly observe Blacks in menial jobs,” who were routinely slurred by White cadets with the n-word.
His final year at VMI, Daniels was an editor on the student newspaper, won a Danforth Foundation fellowship for graduate school and was elected class valedictorian. But Daniels struggled to write the valedictory speech, his biographer wrote, because he “could not say things he did not believe, and he had mixed feelings about VMI.”
In his VMI commencement speech, Daniels said: “We have spent four years in preparation for something. What that something is, who we are, we do not know.”
‘I had to come back’
It did not take long for Daniels to find that “something.” He spent a year at Harvard’s graduate school studying English, but left after discovering a renewed passion for religion. By the fall of 1963, he entered the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. As part of his training, he was dispatched to an inner-city parish in Providence, R.I.
“It was unlike anything Daniels had known in Keene or at VMI,” his biographer wrote. “For the first time, Daniels gained experience with Blacks.”
The work galvanized him. And, in early 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. issued a call for clergy of all faiths to join him in Selma, Ala. — for demonstrations and a drive to boost Black voter registrations — Daniels and other seminarians and ministers followed.
For much of 1965, he went to Alabama repeatedly, helping Black people register to vote, getting them on or reinstated to welfare rolls, or even taking people to medical appointments. His final visit came in August.
“Something had happened to me in Selma which meant I had to come back,” Daniels explained, according to the biography. “I could not stand by in benevolent dispassion any longer without compromising everything I know and love and value. The imperative was too clear, the stakes were too high, my own identity was called too nakedly into question.”
That month, he arrived in the town of Fort Deposit, where he and other activists protested outside shops that still had separate entrances for African Americans or refused to hire people of color.
When armed White counterprotesters arrived, Daniels and his compatriots got arrested. They were driven to the Hayneville jail, where Daniels led inmates in prayers and hymns. When Daniels and others were released about a week later — with little explanation — they feared a trap.
Milling about outside the jail, they had nowhere to go. That’s when a handful of them, including Daniels and Ruby Sales, headed to the store down the road.
Moments later, when Tom Coleman fatally shot Daniels, the seminarian fell backward, clad in his clerical collar. Another demonstrator was injured by Coleman’s gunfire: Richard Morrisroe, 26, a Roman Catholic priest from Chicago.
When Daniels’s body was delivered to a local funeral home, according to Taylor Branch’s “At Canaan’s Edge,” it had no identification, other than his 1961 VMI class ring.
In a 2015 interview with The Post, Sales said she was confident Daniels saved her life.
“He walked away from the king’s table,” she said. “He could have had any benefit he wanted, because he was young, White, brilliant and male.”
Coleman was quickly put on trial, but not for first-degree murder, the initial charge. Instead, he was tried for manslaughter. On Sept. 30, an all-white jury found him not guilty, after a trial in which Coleman’s lawyer argued that Daniels had been armed and that his client shot him in self-defense, even though no weapons were ever found in Daniels’s possession and other witnesses confirmed he carried nothing dangerous.
The press widely condemned the verdict.
Three years after Daniels was gunned down in Alabama, VMI opened its doors for the first time to five Black cadets — Harry Gore, Adam Randolph, Dick Valentine, Phil Wilkerson and Larry Foster.
Valentine, who graduated from VMI in 1972, participated in one of the college’s pilgrimages to Hayneville almost four years ago, according to an article on VMI’s website. The alumni stopped at the county courthouse for a service. Valentine, now the head of the office of civil rights for Florida’s Department of Children and Families, addressed the group.
“Jonathan was placed in a situation where he had to act, and he did. It cost him his life, but we’re all better for it,” Valentine told fellow graduates. “I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that there’s a connection between the activities of [that day] and what took place three years later … when VMI … let people of color attend the university. So, I just wanted to make a connection that the struggle is real. … There’s no wrong time to do the right thing.” | null | null | null | null | null |
A police investigator checks out the car from which a 4-year-old boy allegedly shot at officers who were trying to arrest his father. (KUTV)
The officer knocked the gun as it fired, the bullet grazing his arm and shooting up into the awning above the McDonald’s drive-through.
After McDonald’s workers gave him the wrong order, Johnson allegedly pulled and flashed a gun. Employees asked him to go to the front of the restaurant while they fixed his order, the statement said. Instead, they called the police.
After arriving at the McDonald’s, officers ordered Johnson to get out of his car, according to the statement. When he didn’t obey, police said, they opened one of the doors and dragged him out.
Officers trying to arrest Johnson at first didn’t know the shooter was a child and could have easily returned fire, Rivera told KUTV. But the officer who sent the bullet off target yelled out “Kid!” to the others as soon as he saw the young face in the back seat, Unified police said in the statement. Officers did not fire any shots in return.
After the shooting, state social workers took custody of both children, Unified police told The Washington Post. | null | null | null | null | null |
Putin puts all his cards on the table
Russian President Vladimir Putin signs decrees on the recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic on Monday. (Aleksey Nikolskyi/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Monday was a busy day for Vladimir Putin. First he convened a bizarrely scripted security council meeting of the Russian Federation to discuss the situation in Ukraine. One reporter described the debate as “like a Netflix drama” in which some of Putin’s lackeys fumbled the script. Even observers partially sympathetic to Russian grievances characterized Putin as going “full Blofeld.” I would characterize it as a classic Potemkin debate.
That meeting ended with his security council recommending that Putin walk away from the Minsk accords and recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway republics in a reprise of what happened in Georgia in 2008. A few hours later, Putin directly addressed Russia. It was a stemwinder of a speech that ended with him recognizing the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Much of it seemed to be lifted from his disquisition last summer about how Ukraine was not really a sovereign country. As the young people would say, there was definitely a vibe shift.
Putin on the Ukrainians who brought democracy to the country: "we know their names and we will find them and bring them to justice." Scary
So, beyond confirming a lot of U.S. intelligence warnings, what are the takeaways from Monday’s developments? They are both obvious and grim.
1) This is only the beginning. Recognizing the two republics and signing friendship treaties with them gives Russia a legal pretext to deploy troops to the Donbas. Maybe they then provoke the Ukrainians by trying to take all the territory claimed by those republics. But it seems unlikely that the military escalation will stop there. As Michael Kofman tweeted, “Russia doesn’t need 190k troops on Ukraine’s borders to recognize the independence of separatist republics. These troops are not even near the Donbas. This is the first step in what will likely be a large-scale Russian [military] operation to impose regime change.”
2) The economic ramifications will be considerable. It’s easy to point out that Russia’s economy is not terribly large compared to the United States, European Union, China, India or any other great power. But that is a deceptive way of looking at how sanctioning Russia would affect the global economy. The global economy is already facing an array of stressors, including the coronavirus pandemic, inflation and supply chain problems. Neither Russia nor Ukraine is a large market, but each country is a key supplier of a variety of goods including natural gas, wheat and palladium. As Patricia Cohen and Jack Ewing of the New York Times note, “isolated shortages and price surges — whether of gas, wheat, aluminum or nickel — can snowball in a world still struggling to recover from the pandemic.”
Furthermore, Putin is likely to respond to sanctions with more cyberattacks, which might lead to retaliatory cyberattacks from NATO, and the collateral damage from such attacks on the global economy will sting a bit.
3) It’s possible to implement the best policy and still lose. In the past few months I have talked to folks across the foreign policy spectrum as the Ukraine situation has worsened. These include skeptics of President Biden’s overall foreign policy approach and miscues made during his first year in office. And the consensus is that Biden’s approach, apart from one gaffe, has been about as good as one could hope. He has consulted with allies, prepared for contingencies, and thrown the Russian state a little off balance by publishing intelligence before Russia has been able to surprise folks as in 2014.
All of this has raised the costs for Putin to move on Ukraine. The Russian economy will not be in a good way as things escalate. Monday’s weird Russian security council meeting revealed that not all of Putin’s team was as gung-ho about this move as he was. Nonetheless, Putin has clearly decided he is willing to pay the price to expand Russia’s borders.
Biden did almost everything right, and has worsened Putin’s strategic situation. Nonetheless, everyone will lose in the coming weeks. | null | null | null | null | null |
A recent incident highlights Utah’s long and troubled history of racism
Racism helped shaped the state’s schools and culture.
In this July 9, 2020 photo, protesters gather in front of district attorney's office in Salt Lake City. (Rick Bowmer/AP)
By Alexander Hyres
Alexander Hyres is an assistant professor in the history of US education at the University of Utah College of Education.
On Feb. 9, 2022, Kenneth Akers, a Black military veteran, posted a notice of suspension on Twitter from his daughter’s middle school in South Jordan, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. The suspension form for Akers’s daughter provided several mundane details before describing the administrator’s recommendation: “Stay away from the other student. Keep your hands to yourself. Report inappropriate language to teacher/administrator.”
What led to the girl’s suspension? According to Akers, five White students made racist comments to his daughter, including the use of a modified slur. When she confronted the White students, one of the boys called her an offensive term, and she responded by slapping the boy. From the administrators’ point of view, the problem was not the racism that Akers’s daughter faced at school, but rather her response to it.
The school’s response highlights continuities in Utah’s history of racism and anti-Blackness, which reaches back into the mid-19th century. Religious persecution forced White members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) out of Ohio, Illinois and Missouri. They arrived in what is now Utah in 1847 led by Brigham Young and colonized the ancestral lands of the Indigenous peoples who lived there. The group of White LDS colonizers included two enslaved Black people.
Upon their arrival, White LDS colonizers set about codifying the institution of slavery, making Utah one of only two western territories to legalize the institution. Before the Civil War, the LDS church supported slavery as an institution, in part to gain the support of proslavery representatives in Congress as they sought official territorial status. After the war, all enslaved Black people in Utah became freed, but the racial inequality that shaped the Utah landscape remained ever-present, producing consequences that have shaped institutions and culture to the present.
In Salt Lake City during the latter half of the 19th century, Black people built a sustained community presence, including establishing their own newspapers, churches and community organizations. But they faced discrimination both from the LDS Church and secular institutions. Beginning in 1849, the church banned Black people from becoming priests — a key element to full participation in the Church. This reality would not change until the Revelation on Priesthood in 1978.
Racism and anti-Blackness also confronted Black Utahns in schools. During the early 20th century, the Salt Lake City School District promoted vocational education for Black students and a liberal arts education for White ones. D.H. Christensen, Salt Lake’s schools superintendent, visited Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute in 1911 to learn about vocational education and Washington returned the favor two years later. During his visit in 1913, Washington gave a lecture at the University of Utah, entitled “Industrial Development of the Negro Race.” A local newspaper applauded Washington’s perspective by asserting, “[he] owns no burning desire to make his race prominent or powerful; he wishes that its members will be useful and self-supporting.” Washington also spoke at two local Black churches: Calvary Baptist and First Methodist Episcopal.
In their positions toward both slavery and vocational education, White LDS people of the state aligned themselves with the American South. The Hampton-Tuskegee idea, which originated in the South, sought to cultivate Black people as docile laborers and teachers for the benefit of White capitalists — North, South and West.
Curricular segregation was not the only means by which local power brokers divided Black and White people in the city. Local real estate agents and the real estate funding apparatus segregated Salt Lake City using racial covenants and discriminatory lending. The plan for the city’s east-west divide, detailed by a 1940 map from the Home Owners Loan Corporation, a federal real estate agency, has continued to mark the racial division and spatial organization of housing and schooling.
The rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, and White resistance to it, occurred in Utah just as it did in the South, albeit on a smaller scale. The Salt Lake City school system became a critical site of contention over questions of justice and equity in a predominantly White and LDS space.
In 1970, James D. Maher, a White music teacher at West High School, had a verbal altercation with four Black students. Maher reportedly believed the students were being too loud in the hallway outside his classroom and used a slur to refer to them. Leaders in the city’s Black community called for Maher to be fired. The school district responded by suspending Maher and the Black students. Maher received his pay; the Black students received tutoring at the district office. White students, including the student body president, Clayton Christensen, rallied to support their teacher.
Hundreds of White students at West High School walked out of school in solidarity with Maher. White students who walked out of school were not punished or criminalized. Responding to the media about the incident, Christensen asserted, “we feel no discrimination exists in our school. If it does, it is only in the mind of black students.”
Black students organized their own protests against Maher but framed their complaints and demands in broader terms. In August 1970, two of the students who were involved in the incident with Maher joined a protest of approximately 100 other people to protest racism and the unpopular war in Vietnam, which relied on a draft system that disproportionately affected young men of color. The group demanded the firing of Maher, the end of police on campuses, the hiring of Black and Chicano teachers and counselors and the right to protest on campus. Maher kept his job; the other demands did not result in much action, either.
The failure by the Salt Lake City School District — and other school districts in the state — to root out racism has become all too familiar in the decades since then.
In October 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice released a report about the Davis Public Schools, a district just north of Salt Lake City, and its treatment of Black students in particular. Of the report, one local journalist wrote, “Davis School District has intentionally ignored ‘serious and widespread’ racial harassment in its schools for years — failing to respond to hundreds of reports from Black students” who complained that White students call them “slaves,” slurs and threatened to lynch them. Those threats had real, lasting and significant consequences for Black students in the district. A few weeks following the report, Izzy Tichenor, a Black 10-year-old autistic girl, died by suicide after her classmates allegedly bullied her.
The collection of these recent events is not an aberration for Utah. At the same time, the state's White majority sees no urgency in dealing with this history or its consequences in the present. Rather than dealing with racism in the schools, legislators and White activist Republican parents seek to maintain and perpetuate the status quo.
A more inclusive and just future for the state and especially for students like Kenneth Akers’s daughter is possible, though. But it will require White Utahns to join with people of color — who are already doing the work — to break from the past and seek to cultivate spaces where all are truly welcomed and supported in their communities and schools. Building such spaces will require uncovering and rooting out racism in both mundane and institutional forms. Beyond doing so because it is just, eliminating the legacies of centuries racism is key to attracting and retaining diverse people. Only righting the wrongs of the recent and long ago past will enable Utah to maximize its potential. | null | null | null | null | null |
Where the new ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ comes up short
The PBS series does a lot right — but it also has a crucial flaw
The A.E.P. (American Electric Power) natural gas plant in Dresden, Ohio. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
By Joyce Chaplin
Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips professor of Early American history at Harvard University.
During a global pandemic, the ultimate fantasy may be to travel around the world without worrying about any material constraints. The new PBS series “Around the World in 80 Days” sates this escapism. An adaptation of Jules Verne’s serially published story “La Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours,” (1872), the series updates the adventure, but ignores the themes that made Verne’s work resonate in the first place: how new technologies and energy sources were changing human experience and knowledge of the world.
Occasionally, most daringly, Verne considered how these new material ways of being had implications for societal relations. In contrast, the PBS series implies that there’s no connection. This may be the wrong kind of escapism. Rethinking technology and energy will be crucial for imagining and making a better future for ourselves.
Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a prolific French author who wrote everything from poetry to science essays, but is best known for his speculative fiction, and especially his “Voyages extraordinaires.” These 54 novels — among them “Five Weeks in a Balloon,” “From the Earth to the Moon,” “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” “The Mysterious Island” and “Around the World in Eighty Days” — are fantastic yet also meticulously realistic. Verne was fascinated with tangible things: the steel, iron, telegraph cable, gases, rubber and pressure gauges that made possible (or at least plausible) his extraordinary voyages.
He wasn’t naive about the energy costs of such ventures, even in his most realistic tale, “Around the World in Eighty Days.” When the novel’s central character, Phileas Fogg, bets that he can circle the world in 80 days, he is banking on steam-powered ships and railways, and an environment built for them, including railroad tracks, coaling stations and the newly opened Suez Canal. Verne played on the contrast between the coal-fired segments of the journey and its charmingly archaic interludes: an elephant, an ice sledge rigged with sails, and, toward the end, a steamship Fogg purchases midway across the Atlantic so he can cannibalize its wood to feed its coal-starved boiler.
Verne cleverly showed that the voyagers are always burning fossil fuel — his era’s new technologies took a constant, global toll. As Fogg and his French valet Jean Passepartout board a night train, leaving London, Passepartout cries out in desperation: “In the rush … my state of confusion … I forgot … to switch off the gas lamp in my bedroom.” “Well, my dear fellow,” Fogg replies, “you’ll be paying the bill.” That bill stands in for all the resources, primarily fossil fuel, consumed to go around the world as fast as possible in the 1870s.
The illustrations for the full novel’s first edition (1873) made that point three times. A small image on the title page showed Passepartout rushing to blow out the neglected gas lamp. A page-size illustration toward the end of the book showed him sitting in his bedroom, sullenly aghast, holding a long bill that scrolled down to his feet. Most evocatively, the novel’s frontispiece presented Passepartout and Fogg staring up at an image of the planet they’ve circumnavigated, its center studded with a burning gas lamp. Verne’s contrast between coal and elephants displayed a world on the verge, both newfangled and not.
He also explored the steam age’s changing social relations. This was a more tentative speculation. Verne was no advocate for social equality; his novels are notorious for their racist and cultural stereotypes. Passepartout is never represented as Fogg’s equal or friend. In India, when Fogg rescues a widow condemned to be burned on her husband’s funeral pyre, the episode supplements a long imperialist campaign to stigmatize Hinduism and declare European moral superiority.
But the widow, Aouda, turns out to be the story's most consequential character. After she, Fogg and Passepartout arrive in London, they think Fogg has lost his bet, his fortune and all his friends. Aouda proposes marriage to him, offering herself as friend and family. It’s when Fogg accepts, sending for a clergyman to marry them, that they discover they’ve gained a day going around the world — the bet is won. By making Aouda’s choice and action key to the plot, Verne inserts a topsy-turvy element, defying the novel’s prevailing social conservatism.
He also, as a Frenchman, made a statement about the British Empire, by subjecting quintessential Englishman Phileas Fogg to Aouda’s power. In a sped-up, coal-fired world, a woman of color turns out to be as mighty as a steam engine.
The PBS series is most invested in that element of the story, and far more forthright than Verne in targeting racism, colonialism and sexism. The series casts a Black actor as Passepartout and invents a new character, a White female companion, journalist Abigail Fix. The widow-burning episode is replaced with a village wedding in India. But in putting the new character of Fix in place of Aouda, and thereby centering a White woman’s ambition and actions, the series appears less daring than Verne’s original story line. In the end, it’s Fogg’s White valet back in London who reveals the day gained. The romance between Fix and a Black Passepartout, on the other hand, is more radical than anything Verne proposed. An episode focused on a Black U.S. marshal hauling a founder of the Ku Klux Klan to justice may best approximate the novel’s outsider criticism of a morally compromised global power, in this case a British perspective on the United States today.
The series’s awareness of the material costs of global travel is more uneven. It embeds some pre-steam forms of travel — a balloon across Europe, camels overland to Aden, a stagecoach out of San Francisco — within the chain of steamships and railways. Occasionally, coal shares the spotlight, as when a train’s supply must be jettisoned and its wooden body cannibalized to burn instead.
But there is no constantly burning gas lamp and no hint that the tale’s era’s fossil-fuel demands configured our own. Instead of a lamp-pierced globe, the series’s central icon is a round, ticking clock, whose mechanical movement is pre-steam, in fact, from the Middle Ages.
And this is a missed opportunity. Verne has inspired countless fantastic reconsiderations of steam-age technology and society. In the genre of retrofuturism, authors have explored past prophecies of the future, and in steampunk, they have hypothesized that the material dimensions of the Victorian era were unintentionally liberationist, the means by which colonized people and women can fight oppression. Some authors have thrown in speculation on alternative energy, as in the subgenre of solarpunk.
The PBS series comes closest to this speculation when it presents the telegraph system — what’s been called “the Victorian Internet” — as a source of liberation. When the telegraph system is working, for example, Fix can file her newspaper stories and affirm her autonomy. When telegraph lines are cut or telegrams are delayed, they threaten and impede the travelers. Yes, modern media have offered new opportunities, though not without risk, and this began with the telegraph network of wires coated with gutta percha and encased in metal that was installed around the world in the 19th century. More hints about those material particularities and their social costs and opportunities would have added greatly to the series.
It’s essential for us to imagine more equal social relations, to undo the damage of colonialism and to confront racism and sexism. But, in 2022, in the middle of a climate crisis plus a pandemic, 150 years after Jules Verne speculated on coal, imperialism and the state of the world, it’s naive to speculate about social justice without reconsidering energy and technology, and especially ways to extract ourselves from the heavy legacies of steam power. Without alternatives to fossil fuel, the fantasy won’t go anywhere, let alone around the world. | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden has nominated more than ever — but Black women face many obstacles in legal careers
Judge J. Michelle Childs, who is among those being considered by President Biden to be his Supreme Court pick, listens during her nomination hearing for U.S. District Court before the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 16, 2010. (Charles Dharapak/AP)
By Gbemende Johnson
After Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced his retirement, President Biden confirmed that he would, as promised during his campaign, appoint the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court. Such an appointment would be in keeping with Biden’s other judicial appointments, which have increased the proportion of Black women among all active federal judges from 4.5 percent directly before Biden took office to 5.7 percent today. That in itself gives him a deeper pool from which to choose the next justice.
And yet, as I discuss in my recent research, women of color continue to endure many obstacles in their legal careers. Black women in particular are more likely to report racial discrimination in law school; are underrepresented in federal judicial clerkships, compared with their proportion in the U.S. population; and continue to face barriers in representation within leadership positions at U.S. law firms.
Biden has put more Black women on the federal bench
Before Biden took office, four Black women were serving as U.S. Courts of Appeal judges — two appointed by President Bill Clinton and two appointed by President Barack Obama. Because the Supreme Court hears so few cases each year, the federal appeals courts are the final stop for the vast majority of cases. Biden has appointed 11 Black women to the federal bench — and nearly half of those have been to the appeals courts (including the elevation of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson from the D.C. District Court). That’s a much higher rate of appeals appointments for Black women compared to his Democratic predecessors, according to the Federal Judicial Center data. One of the women named as a possible Supreme Court nominee, South Carolina federal district Judge J. Michelle Childs, is currently a nominee for the D.C. Court of Appeals.
Supreme Court justices have not always come from the federal judiciary; however, eight of the current nine Supreme Court justices were elevated from the federal circuit courts of appeal, making it the traditional stepping stone to the Supreme Court.
Biden may not select a sitting appeals court judge. However, the very recent appointments of appeals court judges Tiffany Cunningham, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, Eunice Lee and Holly Thomas — some of whom received a number of Republican votes — suggest he may have been preparing to use this strategy. However, nominating Childs from the South Carolina federal district court could garner the votes of both Republican South Carolina U.S. Sens., Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott.
Black women and the legal career pipeline
Charlotte E. Ray is widely regarded as the first female Black lawyer in the United States; in 1872, she received her law degree from Howard University and was admitted to the District of Columbia bar. While far more Black women are lawyers today, disparities in law schools and legal careers cumulatively produce a narrower candidate pool for judicial positions.
According to American Bar Association statistics, in 2020, Black women made up about 5 percent of all students in accredited U.S. law schools. That’s slightly lower than adult Black women’s 2020 proportion of the U.S. population at large, approximately 7.3 percent. And it’s actually a slight decrease from 2015, when 5.5 percent of all law students were Black women.
Sotomayor said people of color feel pressure to prove themselves every day. She's right, our research finds.
Black women are less satisfied with law school than other demographic groups, according to a detailed survey of approximately 4,000 law students published in 2020 by the National Association of Law Placement (NALP) and Center for Women in Law. Specifically, Black women were more likely to report having seriously considered leaving law school than other women of color, men of color, White men or White women. While that’s due to a number of factors, female Black law students reported higher rates of unfair treatment due to race and ethnicity than did other demographic groups; fully 69 percent of Black women reported feeling that faculty underestimated their abilities.
Judicial clerkships are often the next stop for law students who want to be judges, offering valuable networking opportunities. But between 2006 and 2016, the percentage of federal clerkships occupied by African American/Black women actually declined, dropping from 3.1 percent for the 2006 graduates to 2.2 percent for 2016 graduates. And more recent figures from 2019 show that disparities remain in terms of the percentage (4.1 percent) of federal clerkships obtained by Black/African American law school graduates regardless of gender.
Of the 11 Black women Biden appointed to federal judgeships, eight had experience in private practice, similar to the experience profile of many judicial nominees. So how are Black women faring in law firms? Overall, U.S. law firms have increased the proportions of female Black lawyers on staff over the past 12 years. But their numbers thin at the top levels of these organizations, with Black women holding less than 1 percent of all partnerships at U.S. law firms each year since 2009. Lawyers of color also have disproportionate rates of attrition from law firms, as measured by someone who has left a particular firm (which could include shifting to a different legal career).
Further, women of color attorneys report lower career satisfaction. In addition, research by attorneys Destiny Peery, Paulette Brown, and Eileen Letts find that Black women often endure unique family pressures and encounter biases, stereotypes, and disparate treatment — all of which can help push them to leave the legal profession, contributing to what social scientists often call the leaky pipeline.
Legislative caucuses can be especially effective when they listen to their Black women members
A diverse federal judiciary is not guaranteed
Legal organizations, professional associations, and law students themselves have nevertheless cultivated a more diverse legal profession — offering Biden a diverse pool of judicial candidates. Social science research suggests that women of color’s identities and life experiences can inform their jurisprudence and decision-making with unique perspectives.
But an increasingly diverse federal bench is far from inevitable. Black women in particular, and people of color in general, face unique barriers to getting ahead in the legal profession. And each president has different priorities — which could cause that diversity to stagnate or even decrease in years to come.
Gbemende Johnson (@GbemendeJ) is associate professor of government at Hamilton College. | null | null | null | null | null |
White House prepares new Russia sanctions as Putin sends in troops
Good morning, Early Birds. What are we missing out there? Tips: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision on Monday to send troops into two separatist-controlled regions of Ukraine has forced the White House to wrestle with whether the move constituted the invasion President Biden has warned of — and if so, what to do about it.
There's a lot riding on the rhetorical distinction.
After he took flak last month for speculating about a potential “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukrainian territory, Biden spelled out exactly what would trigger the brutal sanctions he’d promised if Putin attacked Ukraine. “Any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion,” Biden told reporters.
Such a move, he added, would bring a “severe and coordinated economic response.”
The White House is expected to announce new sanctions on Russia today, according to a senior administration official, but it’s unclear whether they’ll constitute the devastating package the administration had promised if Russia attacked, a more limited set of measures, or somewhere in between. The administration is coordinating with allies on the announcement, the official said.
Some Democratic lawmakers are urging Biden to impose sanctions sooner rather than later.
If any more “Russian troops or proxy forces cross into Donbas” — the eastern Ukrainian region that Russian troops entered on Monday — “the Biden administration and our European allies must not hesitate in imposing crushing sanctions,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement on Monday night.
A Menendez spokesperson clarified that he was referring to areas of the Donbas that have been controlled for years by Russian-backed forces as well as those under Ukrainian government control.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee who’s close to Biden, said in a statement of his own that the time “to impose significant costs on President Putin and the Kremlin starts now.”
“Russia has invaded Ukraine,” Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, told The Early. “And instead of saving their powder and waiting for the giant military invasion to launch sanctions, I don't [understand] why you wouldn’t launch those sanctions now. Because it’s happened. So what are you waiting for?”
Troop deployment not necessarily “a new step”
It's not clear whether the administration agrees with Menendez or not.
A senior administration official told reporters on Monday that “Russian troops moving into Donbas would not itself be a new step," since Russian forces have been active in the separatist region since 2014. The administration planned to monitor what Russia did overnight and ”respond to any actions that Russia takes in a way that we believe is appropriate to the action," the official said.
“After the call, a different administration official defined a Russian invasion that would prompt a clear U.S. response as crossing into Ukrainian territory that Russia has 'not occupied since 2014,'" as our colleague Ashley Parker reports.
“This is exactly sort of the scenario that we were concerned about”
Biden signed an executive order on Monday afternoon prohibiting Americans from investing in or trading with the Ukrainian regions controlled by Russian-backed separatists, but several Russia experts said they didn't expect those measures to have too much effect.
“I almost wish they wouldn’t have come out with that,” said Heather Conley, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in George W. Bush’s administration who’s now president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
“This is exactly sort of the scenario that we were concerned about,” she added. “That there would be something that would be sort of overanalyzed — Is this what this means? Is that what that means? — and it would demonstrate hesitancy or lack of clarity. Unfortunately, it sounds like we are at that moment.”
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who's now a fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, said he hoped Putin's moves on Monday called for aggressive sanctions, even if it doesn’t go as far as the severe ones Biden promised to implement if Putin launched a full invasion.
“It may not be the full load that they planned to hit Russia with had tanks rolled across the borders of Belarus, from Crimea and from" Russia itself, Pifer said. “But I think that there needs at this point to be some significant pain inflicted on Russia.”
Still, other Russia hands are advocating for a more measured approach.
For years, Russian troops have moved freely in the Crimea — which Russia annexed in 2014 but which the U.S. and most of the rest of the world consider part of Ukraine — and Russia's movement of troops into separatist-controlled areas of the Donbas doesn't change much on the ground, said Thomas Graham, a former National Security Council senior director for Russia in the Bush White House who's now a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He urged Biden to wait to impose crippling sanctions.
“That's got to be reserved for movement into Ukrainian-controlled territory,” he said.
Global Power
Putin questions Ukraine's statehood in televised address
The miseducation of Vladimir Putin: “In his speech to the Russian nation on Monday, Putin buoyed his case for codifying the cleavage of two rebel territories from Ukraine by arguing that the very idea of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction,” the New York Times’s Michael Schwirtz, Maria Varenikova and Rick Gladstone write.
“With a conviction of an authoritarian unburdened by historical nuance, Putin declared Ukraine an invention of the Bolshevik revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin, who he said had mistakenly endowed Ukraine with a sense of statehood by allowing it autonomy within the newly created Soviet state.”
“As a misreading of history, it was extreme even by the standards of Putin, a former K.G.B. officer who has declared the Soviet Union’s collapse the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
“But the happy brotherhood of nations that Putin likes to paint, with Ukraine fitted snuggly into the fabric of a greater Russia, is dubious.”
Sen. Durbin is determined to make history and confirm Biden’s Supreme Court pick
All eyes on Dick Durbin: “As a college intern in the 1960s, a young Richard J. Durbin was awed by the United States Senate as a grand theater of democracy, a solemn forum where men of distinction engaged in momentous, nation-changing debates,” our colleagues Mike DeBonis, Seung Min Kim and Rhonda Colvin report.
“The 77-year-old Democrat will hold the gavel when the Senate Judiciary Committee holds hearings as soon as next month on Biden’s forthcoming nominee to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.”
“Personally, it’s the reason I ran the first time for office,” Durbin told our colleagues. “I want to be smack dab in the middle of, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, the actions and passions of our time, and I couldn’t ask for a better seat than to be chair of Judiciary filling a Supreme Court vacancy.”
Here’s where things stand: “Biden began the interview process for his Supreme Court nomination in recent days,” a person familiar with the process told the Wall Street Journal’s Ken Thomas.
Ukraine’s cultural divide, visualized: “The Donbas region in eastern Ukraine has been a flash point in the escalating crisis between Russia and Ukraine, which hinges on land borders and strategic influence,” our colleague Sammy Westfall reports.
“The region became even more critical Monday as Putin recognized the independence of two Moscow-backed breakaway enclaves there that call themselves the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic. The action is a considerable escalation that signals an end to the seven-year peace deal known as the Minsk agreement. It’s also seen as one that could give the Russian leader a pretext to invade Ukraine.”
“Putin has described Russians and Ukrainians as one people, writing in an essay shared on the Kremlin’s website in July that ‘true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.’”
“The most recent official census, in 2001, found that more than half of the population in Crimea and Donetsk identified Russian as their native language. Separatist rebels have capitalized on Donbas’s distinctive regional identity to fuel support and rebellion against Kyiv. Moscow, too, has used this identity, and further laid the groundwork for it by issuing passports, as a pretext to send in forces to ‘defend’ people.”
The Supreme Court created a ‘vigilante’ loophole. Both parties are rushing to take advantage. By The Post’s Kimberly Kindy and Alice Crites.
Efforts launched to convince former three-term Gov. Pataki, 76, to run again. By the New York Post’s Carl Campanile.
Uproar over ‘crack pipes’ puts Biden drug strategy at risk. By the New York Times’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
For Ukraine’s Jews, the threat of war stirs memories of past horrors. By the New York Times’s Michael Schwirtz.
What’s at stake for the global economy as conflict looms in Ukraine. By the New York Times’s Patricia Cohen and Jack Ewing.
The Taliban confront the realities of power. By the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson.
Trump’s Truth Social tops downloads on Apple App Store; many waitlisted. By Reuters’s Kenneth Li, Julia Love and Helen Coster.
Buttigieg has 24 hours to respond | null | null | null | null | null |
Tuesday briefing: Escalation in Ukraine; abortion decriminalization; landmark equal-pay settlement; ‘Stand your ground’ laws; and more
Russia sent troops into separatist regions of Ukraine.
Why? Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the independence yesterday of two Russia-backed areas in eastern Ukraine (which you can see here) and sent “peacekeeping” forces there.
What this means: It’s a dramatic escalation of the crisis and raises the risk of a full-scale war.
The response: The U.S. and its allies will announce more sanctions on Russia today.
What that means: The nation (not including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which make their own public health rules) will treat the coronavirus more like seasonal flu, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said yesterday. People who test positive will no longer be required to isolate starting Thursday.
Meanwhile: Queen Elizabeth II is still isolating at Windsor Castle. The palace announced this weekend that the 95-year-old had “mild cold like symptoms” from covid.
A jury is weighing the hate-crimes trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers.
What to know: Closing arguments wrapped up yesterday, and a decision could come as soon as today.
The trial: Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan are accused of chasing and killing Arbery in Georgia in 2020 because he was Black.
In Minneapolis: Closing arguments are today in a trial of three officers involved in the death of George Floyd, another unarmed Black man killed in 2020.
A third Latin American country decriminalized abortion.
Colombia will now allow abortions in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, a court decided yesterday. Abortion had been permitted only in cases of rape, nonviable pregnancy and when the mother’s health was at risk.
The bigger picture: In just over a year, Mexico and Argentina have also expanded abortion rights. Activists say this could lead to further changes in the region.
Stand-your-ground laws may have led to hundreds more deaths each year.
What are these laws? They allow people to defend themselves, with deadly force if necessary, if they believe someone is trying to kill or seriously harm them.
The numbers: The laws were linked to an 11% rise in firearm homicides, which means 700 additional deaths each year, according to a study published yesterday.
U.S. women’s soccer players settled a landmark discrimination case.
The case: Members of the U.S. national team claimed they had been underpaid for years compared to the men’s team.
The deal: U.S. Soccer will pay men and women at an equal rate going forward. The 28 players who sued will get $22 million, according to an announcement this morning, plus $2 million to start a charitable fund.
Cold and snowy weather will hit the U.S. this week.
The cold: Temperatures about 20 to 40 degrees below normal are forecast today in the north and will move through Texas by tomorrow. A second blast of cold arrives Thursday and will move east.
The storms: Montana, the Dakotas and Minnesota should get snow today. The central U.S. is expected to get snow and ice tomorrow night and Thursday.
And now … it’s Taco Tuesday: These recipes (and drink ideas) will make it a meal to remember. | null | null | null | null | null |
Broyles, a lawyer and former television reporter for KFOR, announced in September that she was challenging Republican Stephanie I. Bice for the U.S. House seat representing Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District. In November 2020, she lost a Senate race against incumbent James M. Inhofe (R) after receiving 32.75 percent of the vote in Oklahoma, the Associated Press reported. | null | null | null | null | null |
“Whatever they had left over wasn’t enough to give us a big boost,” Gary, 61, said of the extra customers as he swept the tile floor of his gutted storefront on East Glebe Road last month. “It’s just an example of how far down business has gotten. When people aren’t gong out to work, they’re not bringing clothes in." | null | null | null | null | null |
After unexplained absence, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto tells viewers his second b...
Fox News host Neil Cavuto announced on his show “Your World” on Feb. 21 that he has been recovering from a covid hospitalization. (Richard Drew/AP)
“I’m among the vulnerable 3 percent or so of the population that cannot sustain the full benefits of a vaccine,” he told viewers. “But let me be clear, doctors say had I not been vaccinated at all, I wouldn’t be here.”
Host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly cast doubt on the efficacy of the vaccines and spoken out against vaccination requirements. “Almost 4,000 people died after getting the covid vaccines,” he said in May, citing self-reported data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System in a way experts say is misleading. | null | null | null | null | null |
A police investigator checks out the car from which a 4-year-old boy allegedly shot at officers who were arresting his father. (KUTV)
The officer swiped the gun to the side as it fired, the bullet grazing his arm and shooting up into the awning above the McDonald’s drive-through.
After McDonald’s workers gave him the wrong order, Johnson allegedly flashed a gun. Employees asked him to drive to the front of the restaurant while they fixed his order, the statement said. Instead, they called the police.
After arriving at the McDonald’s, officers ordered Johnson to get out of his car, according to the statement. When he didn’t obey, police said, they opened one of the car doors and dragged him out.
Officers arresting Johnson at first didn’t know the shooter was a child and could have easily returned fire, Rivera told KUTV. But the officer who sent the bullet off target yelled out “Kid!” to the others as soon as he saw the young face in the back seat, Unified police said in the statement. Officers did not fire any shots in return. | null | null | null | null | null |
At least 2 injured in two-alarm fire in Southwest D.C. apartment building
At least two people were injured after a two-alarm fire struck an eight-story apartment building in Southwest Washington early Tuesday, officials said.
At around 2:05 a.m. Tuesday, fire officials responded to a block-long apartment building in the 300 block of G St. SW after flames appeared from a unit on the third floor, D.C. fire spokesman Vito Maggiolo said in an interview.
“It’s two in the morning — everyone’s asleep,” Maggiolo said. “There’s a significant fire burning.”
Firefighters located two victims of the blaze, according to Maggiolo. Information about their condition was not immediately available. | null | null | null | null | null |
Leila Barghouty joins Post Video as supervising producer for weekends
Leila Barghouty (Leila Barghouty)
Announcement from Editorial Video Director Micah Gelman and Breaking News Senior Video Producer Nicki DeMarco:
We are thrilled to announce that Leila Barghouty is joining Video as supervising producer for weekends. In this role, Leila will serve as a critical link to ensuring seamless video coverage seven days a week.
Leila has spent most of her career as a contractor at a variety of global news organizations. In late 2020, she worked as a producer on Vox’s short-form daily news show, “Answered,” which covered such topics as coronavirus mutations, the science behind pandemic responses and the presidential election. Before that, she worked as a breaking news producer at AJ+, creating short social videos and long-form explainers. Leila’s breadth of experience overseeing documentary and series productions at the Atlantic, CNN and Vice News will enhance our breaking news storytelling and bring new ambition to our projects.
Leila is also an accomplished writer and researcher. Most recently, she worked with Stanford University — her alma mater — on the Open Policing Project, filing thousands of FOIA requests and uncovering racial and geographical bias in police and sheriff's departments across the country. As a writer for Teen Vogue and Bustle, she reported incisive stories on crystal sales potentially funding the Taliban, the legacy of the women who protested Brett Kavanaugh and the public outpouring of grief on social media during the pandemic.
Leila has a bachelor’s degree in media from the University of Michigan and a master’s in data journalism from Stanford. She moved from New York City to the District in October and enjoys cake decorating and mountain climbing with her dog, TK. (Not a typo, the dog’s real name.)
Please join us in congratulating and welcoming Leila to The Post. Her first day is March 7. | null | null | null | null | null |
Democrats think this means she may be the choice of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) wing of the party against the Trump wing. If she wins, she’d face Rep. Tim Ryan, the expected Democratic nominee.
Vance has taken a ton of heat recently for claiming “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” In that appearance, Vance added that “Mexican fentanyl” is a much bigger problem, describing the southern border as a “total war zone.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Spike Lee, 64, is an award-winning filmmaker, cultural icon, social critic and die-hard New York Knicks fan whose career includes directing, producing, writing and acting in feature and documentary films, most recently the HBO documentary “NYC Epicenter: 9/11➔2021½.” His vast body of work — close to 40 films — has won numerous awards, including an Academy Award (best adapted screenplay) for “BlacKkKlansman” and an Emmy Award for the documentary “When the Levees Broke.” | null | null | null | null | null |
All three men already had been convicted of state murder charges and sentenced to life in prison, with Bryan eligible for parole after 30 years. U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood will determine their federal sentences.
In a case that hinged on proving the defendants’ state of mind, prosecutors argued that the men’s prejudice helped explain why they erroneously viewed Arbery, 25, as a potential criminal when they cut him off in pickup trucks and threatened him with guns in a Georgia neighborhood on Feb. 23, 2020.
Arbery’s parents objected, saying that would be favorable to the defendants. Wood, the federal judge, rejected the plea deal, setting the stage for the trial.
Under sentencing guidelines, in the absence of a plea deal, the men are expected to serve their sentences in state prison, experts have said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The U.S. women’s soccer team won the 2019 World Cup months after it filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, alleging pay discrimination. (Alessandra Tarantino/AP)
Members of the U.S. women’s national soccer team announced Tuesday that they had reached a $24 million settlement with the U.S. Soccer Federation over claims that they had been systematically underpaid for years when compared with the U.S. men’s team.
The USWNT first filed its lawsuit against U.S. Soccer in March 2019, and the case has taken several turns over the past three years before finally reaching a resolution. Here’s a look back at the key events.
March 8, 2019: The members of the U.S. women’s national soccer team file a gender discrimination lawsuit against U.S. Soccer, the sport’s governing body in this country. The players accuse the national federation of paying lower salaries to women and subjecting them to more dangerous playing conditions than their male counterparts, and they ask for nearly $67 million in back pay and compensation.
July 7, 2019: The U.S. women win their second straight World Cup and fourth overall with a 2-0 victory over the Netherlands in the final, spurring chants of “Equal pay! Equal pay!” from the stands during the team’s victory celebration.
“Everyone is ready for this conversation to move to the next step,” U.S. co-captain Megan Rapinoe said after the game. “I think we’re done with: ‘Are we worth it? Should we have equal pay? [Are] the [male and female] markets the same?’ Yada, yada. Everyone is done with that. Fans are done with that. The players are done with that …
“What’s next? How do we support women’s federations and women’s programs around the world? … It’s time to move that conversation forward to the next step.”
For comparison’s sake, the U.S. men have never advanced past the quarterfinals in the modern-era World Cup — its lone run to the semifinals came in the inaugural 1930 event, which featured only 13 teams — and didn’t even qualify for the 2018 tournament in Russia.
March 11, 2020: U.S. Soccer President Carlos Cordeiro apologizes for a court filing that argued players for the women’s national team have less “skill” than their male counterparts. Cordeiro would resign the next day, though he has since announced his desire to return to the position in a challenge to Cindy Parlow Cone, who replaced him as U.S. Soccer president.
May 1, 2020: A U.S. District Court judge in California rejects the notion that the U.S. women’s players have been underpaid relative to the U.S. men but rules that the players’ additional claims of unequal treatment in terms of travel, medical staff and training equipment can go forward.
In rejecting the equal-pay portion of the lawsuit, Judge R. Gary Klausner noted that the U.S. women had agreed to a different pay structure than the men in their previous collective bargaining agreement: While the men operate under a pay-for-play salary model, with players earning more for victories, the women opted for a pay structure that includes more security in the form of negotiated annual salaries, maternity and child-care benefits, and severance pay when they are no longer on the team. Because the women had agreed to that salary model, Klausner said they could not retroactively claim that their collective bargaining agreement was inferior to that of the men.
The U.S. women were “shocked and disappointed,” a spokeswoman said. They would appeal to the full Ninth Circuit panel in 2021.
May 2, 2020: U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden promises to cut funding for the 2026 Men’s World Cup in the United States unless U.S. Soccer agrees to give the women equal pay.
From 2021: USWNT’s trials and triumphs are an incredible story, but a new film doesn’t give the full picture
Nov. 22, 2021: A Washington Post report reveals that players on the Chicago Red Stars of the National Women’s Soccer League had filed a report to U.S. Soccer, which operates the league, regarding abuse by Coach Rory Dames in early 2018. Dames was twice cleared by U.S. Soccer and kept his job until he resigned shortly before The Post published its story.
Dames had coached USWNT players, including Christen Press, who said she first spoke up about Dames in 2014 during a meeting with Sunil Gulati, then the president of U.S. Soccer, and other U.S. Soccer officials. Press said Gulati dismissed her concerns by saying Dames’s behavior was normal for a professional coach, and she said she was told that she had to play in the NWSL to keep her spot on the U.S. women’s national team.
Subsequent Post reporting found that allegations had been filed against Dames as far back as 1998, when he was a youth coach. In February 2022, several USWNT stars publicly criticized U.S. Soccer for its “willful inaction” on the Dames accusations and said the organization’s failure to act was tied in to its overall treatment of female players.
“There is no justice unless this never happens again,” Rapinoe said. “It’s all part of the same system. It’s part of a system of disrespect and of misogyny and sexism and inequality and discrimination. This is the first step, not the last step.”
Five NWSL coaches resigned or were fired amid misconduct allegations, and U.S. Soccer enlisted former acting attorney general Sally Yates to investigate.
Feb. 3, 2022: The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission asks the Ninth Circuit to be allowed to participate in the USWNT’s appeal of the earlier ruling about equal pay, with opening arguments set for March 7.
February 22, 2022: The USWNT players reach a $24 million settlement with U.S. Soccer, which also agrees to pay the men and women at an equal rate moving forward.
The agreement includes $22 million for the 28 players who filed the lawsuit and establishes a $2 million charitable fund for women’s and girls’ soccer but falls short of the $67 million they had asked for in their suit.
“This is going to be one of those incredible moments that we look back on and say the game changed forever, U.S. Soccer changed forever, and the landscape of soccer in this country and in the world changed forever because of this,” Rapinoe said after the settlement was announced. | null | null | null | null | null |
Marcus Arbery and Wanda Cooper-Jones, Ahmaud’s parents, celebrated the verdict after emerging form the courtroom, raising their arms alongside civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump before a group of reporters.
Crump praised the Justice Department and said the conviction would ensure that Arbery’s case would live in history books.
“Tomorrow will be the two-year mark for when their son Ahmaud Arbery was lynched for jogging while Black,” Crump said. “These parents joined a fraternity that no parent wants to be a member of — and with such dignity. They stood up for Ahmaud to say that Ahmaud’s life mattered, that Ahmaud Arbery will never be forgotten.”
“It’s been a very long, stressful fight,” said Cooper-Jones, wearing a blue dress and dark sunglasses. “As a mom, I will never heal.”
All three men already had been convicted of state murder charges and sentenced to life in prison, with Bryan eligible for parole after 30 years. U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood will determine their federal sentences.In a case that hinged on proving the defendants’ state of mind, prosecutors argued that the men’s prejudice helped explain why they erroneously viewed Arbery, 25, as a potential criminal when they cut him off in pickup trucks and threatened him with guns in a Georgia neighborhood on Feb. 23, 2020.
Legal experts said hate crimes cases can be difficult to win, so securing a plea deal would have eliminated the risk of an acquittal. But Arbery’s parents strongly objected, saying that the deal would be favorable to the defendants. Wood, the federal judge, rejected the plea deal in light of their opposition, setting the stage for the trial.
Cooper-Jones alluded to the dispute with the Justice Department over the plea deal when speaking on Tuesday, chastising federal officials for their efforts to secure the plea.
“That’s not justice for Ahmaud,” she said. “What the DOJ did today, they were made to do today.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Maryland should focus on the facts, not the assumptions, in marijuana businesses
Workers harvest cannabis by clipping the plants' top flowers at Maryland's first legal outdoor marijuana grow on Oct. 1, 2019, in Cambridge, Md. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
To obtain a license, one must apply by a certain time and then qualify. If any number of demographic groups — White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, male, female, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, veteran, disabled or any number of the many different genders — did not apply or did not apply on time or did not qualify, this is not a matter of being “shut out.” It is a matter of not applying, not applying in time, not qualifying or failing for any other number of reasons.
Rather than make some assumption of being discriminated against (“shut out”), unless it is factually supported, let’s document what really happened.
Dana Skaddan, Fairfax Station | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Vaccines for children are important
A 5-year-old holds his vaccination card after receiving a coronavirus vaccine at Children's National Shepherd Park on Nov. 3 in D.C. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post)
The Feb. 18 Friday Opinion essay by Govind Persad, Alyssa Burgart and Emily Largent, “The FDA was wrong to delay vaccines for kids under 5,” made a good case for why the Food and Drug Administration should not have delayed giving vaccines to kids under 5. One can only surmise that the reason for the delay was the poor response in children between the ages of 2 and 4. As the essay pointed out, there was no reason to at the same time delay vaccination of children under the age of 2, who had a good response.
What makes this delay even sadder is that the testing of the vaccine seems to have been poorly designed. Adults received 30 micrograms of the vaccine, which comes out to approximately 0.2 micrograms per pound of a range of body weights. Response in children ages 6 months to 12 months and 5 years to 10 years, which was also good, had a similar dose based on body weight. However, children ages 2 to 4, who had a poor response, were given a dose approximately one-half (0.1 micrograms per pound) of those with a good response. This discrepancy in dose levels needs to be examined before a successful response is dependent on a booster shot.
Kira Lueders, Kensington | null | null | null | null | null |
“It is a good question,” Kallas said, adding: “Certainly, saying ‘no’ to Nord Stream 2 is a very strong message from Germany.”
“[This step] may sound technical, but it’s a necessary administrative step without which the certification of the pipeline cannot happen now,” he said.
“Welcome to the brave new world," Medvedev said in a tweet.
Whether that’s the case remains to be seen — as is whether the decision has any practical impact on what happens from here. Meister, for one, said Nord Stream 2 is more symbolic than anything “but practically of secondary importance.”
The temporary nature of the pause left the pipeline critics, such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), saying it was a good first step but calling for further steps by the U.S. government — up to and including sanctions on the companies involved. Biden and Democrats have resisted sanctioning those companies, though, and Germany’s move would at least seem to buy time. | null | null | null | null | null |
Supreme Court will hear another clash pitting religious rights against laws protecting LGBTQ persons from discrimination
The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg)
The court will hear the case, 303 Creative LLC v, Elenis, in the term that begins in October.
A lower court ruled for the state, and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit agreed in a 2-to-1 vote. The panel agreed Colorado was restricting Smith’s speech, but said it could be justified.
Dissenting Judge Tim Tymkovich cited George Orwell, and said the decision imposes government-approved messages on individuals, subverting “our core understandings of the First Amendment.”
Colorado had asked the Supreme Court not to take up the case. It said Smith was looking for a fight, because she’s never offered her services and turned down a same-sex couple, nor is there evidence Colorado is looking to punish her for her views. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hundreds of Ukrainians, supporters, and friends of Ukraine from across the U.S. gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to urge President Biden to stand by Ukraine. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Russia has started to invade Ukraine, according to the White House. Yet Congress left town last week without passing a bill to impose sanctions on Russia if it did.
The Biden administration still can and is imposing sanctions, but they might not be as effective as if Congress had passed a package of hundreds of sanctions targeting Russia’s elite and banks all at once, says an international sanctions expert.
Here’s how sanctions work.
They’re essentially an economic alternative to using military force to try to compel a country to do (or not do) something. There is a long list of economic punishments that the U.S., especially working in concert with other countries, can put together. It includes: “trade embargoes; restrictions on particular exports or imports; denial of foreign assistance, loans, and investments; blocking of foreign assets under U.S. jurisdiction; and prohibition on economic transactions that involve U.S. citizens or businesses,” writes the Congressional Research Service.
At any given time, the U.S. has sanctions levied against a dozen or more countries. Right now that list includes Iran, North Korea, Syria, Burundi, Belarus, Cuba, Libya, Venezuela, Russia, and many more.
In the Trump era, Congress took back some of its authority to impose sanctions, specifically on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. Lawmakers from both parties didn’t seem to trust Trump to get tough on Russia, so they passed legislation requiring the president to institute those sanctions.
“I’m surprised it fell apart,” Shagina said, “because normally the U.S. is relied on to put this together.”
Biden had so far been acting cautiously.
Biden responded with targeted sanctions saying Americans couldn’t do business in those regions — a move some foreign policy experts saw as symbolic at best.
“It’s weak symbolism. It’s not strong enough,” Daniel Fried, a sanctions expert at the Atlantic Council and a former U.S. ambassador to Poland, told The Post’s Rachel Pannett. Britain, meanwhile, issued sanctions against five Russian banks.
And that raises the question of: Why were these first sanctions from the U.S. targeting regions in Ukraine, and not Russia?
Shagina said that’s just how the ladder of sanctions goes. Biden appears to be deciding whether what Russia did counts as a full-scale invasion, reports The Post’s Ashley Parker. And he is probably reserving the tougher stuff targeting Russia itself — its banks, its exports — for when Russia sends troops deeper into Ukraine.
It’s similar to what former president Barack Obama did in 2014 when Russia annexed the region of Crimea from Ukraine. He first limited trade and business to the region, then eventually targeted Russia defense companies, six of the country’s largest banks, and Putin’s inner circle.
Biden will announce more sanctions Tuesday afternoon.
She suggested the Biden administration shift the red lines to imposing the tough sanctions now, because, she warned, “after the full invasion might be too late.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Let’s start with a tragedy: Since the 2020 election, 37 states have introduced legislation designed to limit how Black history, especially in its relation to institutional racism, can be taught, and 14 states have successfully imposed such laws, according to Education Week.
Efforts to suppress Black history deprive us of stirring examples of Americans overcoming adversity and courage under fire. Rather than making anyone feeling guilty or uncomfortable, these true-life stories should inspire us all. They are testaments to the resilience and human spirit found in people of all races. | null | null | null | null | null |
The official banner for the 2022 UEFA Champions League final was on display this past fall in Krestovsky Stadium in St. Petersburg. Whether the May 28 game will be held there, given the situation in Ukraine, is another matter. (Anatoly Maltsev/EPA-EFE)
The uncertain geopolitical situation created by Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has raised questions about whether the Champions League final, the showpiece of European soccer, will be held as planned in St. Petersburg this spring.
Officials at the Union of European Football Associations, which sponsors the Champions League, reportedly have been discussing whether holding the May 28 game in the Russian city’s Gazprom Arena is viable, and the British government led calls Tuesday for the event to be moved.
English clubs Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United are in the final 16 of the competition, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the situation Tuesday as he spoke in the House of Commons to announce sanctions against five Russian banks and three Russian billionaires after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into two regions in eastern Ukraine.
“A Russia that is more isolated, a Russia that has pariah status — [there is] no chance of holding football tournaments in a Russia that invades sovereign countries,” Johnson said.
UEFA said in a statement Tuesday that it was not planning to move the game out of Russia but was “constantly and closely monitoring” developments. The Associated Press, citing an unnamed person it said had knowledge of the situation, reported that the crisis over Ukraine was discussed by top-level UEFA officials, including organization president Aleksander Ceferin.
Johnson was not the only British official to address the situation Tuesday. Nadine Dorries, the UK’s secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said on Twitter that she had “serious concerns about the sporting events due to be held in Russia, such as the Champions League Final, and will discuss with the relevant governing bodies.”
“We won’t allow President Putin to exploit events on the world stage to legitimize his illegal invasion of Ukraine,” she added.
Tracey Crouch, the former UK sports minister, told the BBC that UEFA should move the final “immediately.”
There is recent precedent for UEFA moving the Champions League final from its original site. The organization has had to relocate the event in each of the past two years, both times from Turkey to Portugal, because of the coronavirus pandemic. | null | null | null | null | null |
In analyzing Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, some commentators have focused on factors specific to the actors in this case — President Vladimir Putin’s desire to show that post-Soviet Russia remains a global power, for example, his hatred of democracy, or Russians’ view that Ukraine is historically part of their state. But those factors pale beside the fact that one country (Ukraine) has been positioning itself to join an alliance (NATO) meant to counter the other (Russia).
This isn’t just the view of Putin, who has been demanding that NATO rule out ever admitting Ukraine. International-affairs scholars know that, throughout history, few moments are more ripe for war than when the enemy of one country makes a bid to join forces with other adversaries. Such alliances can utterly transform the balance of power between two countries, and therefore, when a potential alliance is signaled but not yet consummated, the nation that will be put at a disadvantage faces a huge incentive to strike.
Ukraine’s membership in NATO was hardly imminent, but Russia felt threatened enough by the possibility that it was willing to risk all-out war to prevent it. Recognizing the dynamic at play in this situation is the first step toward understanding the conflict. It’s also the first step in recognizing how NATO’s membership process may unintentionally invite this kind of crisis.
The relationship between alliance formation — imminent partnerships, especially — and war is a close one, as we explored in a recent scholarly article. In 1939, for instance, Britain made a commitment to defend Poland but was not able to make good on the pledge right away. Germany attacked Poland before Britain and France could get into position. In 1954, the Chinese communists attacked islands held by the Chinese nationalists in a failed attempt to block an alliance between the United States and Taiwan. And in a situation remarkably similar to the current crisis in Ukraine, Russia attacked Georgia in 2008 after NATO membership for Georgia was proposed. Perhaps not coincidentally, Georgia is still not a NATO member.
Alliances — even “defensive” ones such as NATO — bring about significant power shifts, creating a new landscape of winners and losers. When a country stands to benefit from a future power shift caused by joining an alliance, then it knows its hand will be strengthened in future negotiations. As a result, negotiations in the present — such as those between Ukraine and Russia over the status of two breakaway regions in Ukraine’s east — lack staying power. Whatever is agreed upon today can unravel after the power shift.
Political scientists refer to this phenomenon as a “commitment problem” — and commitment problems lead to crises and even war. Our research suggests that impending alliances are particularly dangerous when certain conditions apply. Conflict is most likely to occur when the alliance explicitly or implicitly targets another country; when the anticipated power shift from the alliance is large; when it takes time for the alliance to be fully implemented (opening a window for attack); and when an attack is likely to block the alliance.
Ukraine potentially joining NATO checks those boxes. NATO is a military juggernaut, and Ukraine’s situation would be utterly transformed if its 30 members were pledged to defend it. NATO also “targets” Russia, in the sense that its raison d’etre, at its founding, was to counter the Soviet Union. In Putin’s mind, war today to block NATO membership for Ukraine may lead to a better outcome than negotiating with Ukraine in the future, when it could be backed by the combined strength of NATO countries.
In principle, Ukraine and NATO could have defused the situation by committing to Ukraine being barred from NATO. Russia’s aggressive incursion into eastern Ukraine suggests that this solution is now unlikely. But the underlying commitment problem, as well as other factors, made this approach unrealistic from the beginning. The NATO powers understandably didn’t want to reward Putin for his aggression, and Ukraine wants badly to be under NATO’s umbrella. What’s more, it’s not clear that NATO’s rules permit such a concession: NATO’s “open door” policy, based on Article 10 of its founding treaty, holds out the promise of membership to any European country able to fulfill specific obligations of membership (civilian control of the military, a democratic government, and so on). Why would Putin believe a commitment to rule out membership for Ukraine if it otherwise seems on track for meeting membership requirements?
Potential new alliances can always provoke hostility, but the path NATO lays out for potential members all but invites armed conflict — however inadvertently. To join NATO, countries must first be offered a membership action plan, a formal invitation and a tailored road map for future NATO membership. To obtain such a plan, prospective new members must first peacefully resolve outstanding international, ethnic and territorial disputes. The problem is obvious: Putin can sabotage a state’s NATO bid by starting a conflict.
He’s done it before. In 2003, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili made Georgian accession to NATO a priority. Five years later at a NATO summit in Bucharest, President George W. Bush pushed for a membership action plan to be offered to Georgia. However, separatist movements in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions served as a roadblock. Other NATO members, including France and Germany, were reluctant to extend a membership action plan under these conditions.
Seeing an opportunity, Russian forces invaded in August 2008. (In 2011, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev boasted that Georgia would have already become a NATO member had Russia chosen not to attack.) Putin may have invaded the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, grabbing it from Ukraine, for similar reasons. By now, using force to thwart NATO bids is a standard play for Russia.
A better approach for defending Ukraine might have used the United States’ commitment to Taiwan as a model. That commitment is deliberately ambiguous — and therefore sidesteps the problem of creating a dangerous implementation window on the way to a formal mutual defense pact. Certainly, the United States’ stance on Taiwan does not create a road map for China to use armed conflict to prevent a U.S.-Taiwan alliance, as the NATO membership rules do.
The standoff in Ukraine points to an underlying systemic problem. Telegraphing the possibility of a military commitment can trigger a dangerous race between efforts to implement and to block the alliance. NATO is likely to face these crises again, because its transparent and drawn-out membership processes exacerbate the dangers caused by potential alliances.
Even as the United States and its allies work diplomatically to end the Ukraine crisis, they should be thinking about how to change these structural flaws. In particular, the alliance might consider replacing its road map for future members with a more opaque, private, deliberative process, so that adversaries aren’t encouraged to preempt membership by instigating fights. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - In this March 4, 2018, file photo, MacKenzie Scott arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills, Calif. A new batch of Scott’s donations are coming to light, with one youth-focused nonprofit announcing Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022, they received what they called a “transformational” $50 million gift from the philanthropist. The donation was made to National 4-H Council, a Maryland-based organization that supports a U.S. government-backed youth program.(Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
Republican Kelly Schulz picks Hogan appointee as running mate for Md. governor
Former Maryland secretary of commerce Kelly Schulz. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Republican Kelly Schulz on Tuesday announced Jeff Woolford, an assistant secretary and chief medical officer of the Maryland Department of Health, as her running mate for Maryland governor.
Woolford, a U.S. Air Force veteran who served as a fighter pilot and flight surgeon, has held various positions for the past two years in the administration of Gov. Larry Hogan (R). In March 2020, he was named chief of staff of the Maryland Department of Human Services. He was then selected in July of that year to serve as the director of community and facility initiatives with the Maryland Department of Health, before being named an assistant secretary last April.
Woolford, a lieutenant colonel in the Maryland Air National Guard, was tasked with operating the state’s mass-vaccination clinic at Baltimore’s M&T Stadium.
“Jeff’s professional experience, personal character, and life story make him extremely qualified to serve as our next lieutenant governor,” Schulz, the former Maryland commerce secretary under Hogan, said in a statement.
Schulz brings in hefty fundraising haul in governor’s bid
Woolford, a native of Baltimore, lives in Carroll County with his wife and two children. He launched Parallax Enterprises LLC, a health-care company that focuses on patient safety, in 2013.
Woolford is a political newcomer, having never run for public office. He joins Schulz in what is likely to be a bitter Republican primary against Del. Daniel L. Cox (R-Frederick), who has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump, and former delegate and perennial candidate Robin Ficker.
As with many other candidates in the race, Schulz’s selection of Woolford provides gender balance to her ticket.
“I’m humbled by the opportunity and look forward to meeting with voters in every corner of the state,” Woolford said in a statement. “Over the last seven years, Maryland has made a lot of progress and I am committed to making sure we continue in the same direction.”
Schulz made the announcement on what was originally the filing deadline for the primary. The Maryland Court of Appeals recently decided to move the filing deadline for the June primary from Feb. 22 to March 22 as it weighs a ruling on a newly filed lawsuit challenging the legislative redistricting map approved by the General Assembly last month.
Maryland gubernatorial primary could be the most expensive in state’s history
Woolford is the 10th candidate for lieutenant governor to be named so far this year.
Among Democrats, former Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez chose former Baltimore City Council member Shannon Sneed to join his ticket; former U.S. education secretary John B. King Jr. selected Michelle Siri, an attorney and women’s rights advocate; author and former nonprofit executive Wes Moore named former state delegate Aruna Miller; Comptroller Peter Franchot named Monique Anderson-Walker, a former member of the Prince George’s County Council; former Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III chose longtime Montgomery County Council member Nancy Navarro; former Montgomery County Council candidate Ashwani Jain named longtime Maryland resident LaTrece Hawkins Lytes; former Maryland attorney general Douglas F. Gansler selected former Hyattsville mayor Candace Bacchus Hollingsworth, and liberal activist Jerome Segal named Eastern Shore town council member Justin Dispenza.
On the Republican side, Cox has selected as his running mate Gordana Schifanelli, an attorney from Queen Anne’s County. | null | null | null | null | null |
Spike Lee, 64, is an award-winning filmmaker, cultural icon, social critic and die-hard New York Knicks fan whose career includes directing, producing, writing and acting in feature and documentary films, most recently the HBO documentary “NYC Epicenters: 9/11➔2021½.” His vast body of work — close to 40 films — has won numerous awards, including an Academy Award (best adapted screenplay) for “BlacKkKlansman” and an Emmy Award for the documentary “When the Levees Broke.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Heavy artillery is loaded onto a Russian army carrier, 30 km from the border with Ukraine in Rostov Oblast, Russia, on Tuesday. (Photo for The Washington Post)
Since October, Russia’s military presence has been building up on Ukraine’s border. Military analysts and Western officials warn of a full-scale assault that could lead to the worst conflict in Europe since World War II. In photos, videos and maps, this is how the situation on the ground is unfolding, starting with the most recent events.
On Monday evening, after Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the breakaway territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine as independent, he sent what he called “peacekeeping" troops into the region, only parts of which are controlled by pro-Moscow separatists.
The Kremlin said Tuesday that its recognition of the two separatist enclaves covers areas controlled by the Ukrainian government. NATO and Western nations are bracedfor a deeper invasion into Ukraine.
Earlier on Monday, Putin called a meeting of Russia’s National Security Council and grilled members on the merits of recognizing these separatist areas.
Vladimir Putin admonished his head of foreign intelligence during a carefully orchestrated, pre-recorded meeting of the Russian Presidential Security Council. (The Washington Post)
Parts of Donetsk and Luhansk have been under separatist controlsince 2014. After that meeting, Putin aired an angry, pre-recorded speech that recognized the regions’ sovereignties and rejected Ukraine’s legitimacy as an independent nation.
Russia's Vladimir Putin recognized the two pro-Russian separatist enclaves in the Donbas region on Sunday, accusing Ukraine, without evidence, of "genocide." (Reuters)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave a late night, emergency address on Feb. 22, after Russia recognized two the breakaway regions in east Ukraine. (AP)
Putin’s screed came after a drastic uptick in violence in eastern Ukraine over the weekend. Civilians in Ukrainian-controlled parts of the east said they thought their homes were being targeted by separatists to provoke Ukrainian forces. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that Russian troops might stage an attack that looked like it came from Ukraine to justify an invasion.
Meanwhile, separatist-controlled areas announced a mass evacuation of its civilians, saying they knew of plans for an imminent attack from Ukraine. Buses were escorted by the head of police from Donbas to Rostov, a city in southwestern Russia.
Increased shelling begins
Though they increased in intensity, clashes between Ukrainian soldiers and the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine are nothing new. Since 2014 Ukrainian forces have been fighting Moscow’s proxies in the east.
Despite military aid from western countries and newfound equipment, the 209,000 active-duty fighters face a potential fight against Russia alone. In the trenches, Ukrainian soldiers acknowledged the challenges ahead, should Putin follow through with a full-scale invasion.
“Our defense is our job,” Oleksander, a battalion commander told The Washington Post. “But whoever helps us, we’ll be grateful for it.” He took The Post into the trenches where his troops were preparing for a possible Russian invasion.
Belarus military exercises
As tensions escalated in the east, Russia was also conducting military exercises in Moscow-allied Belarus, which is to Ukraine’s north. The country’s southern border lies some 50 miles away from Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
Moscow and Minsk said they would withdraw troops when the exercises ended Feb. 20, but when the deadline came, they announced Russian forces would stay indefinitely.
The tension playing out between Russia and Ukraine is one involving land borders and strategic influence. Ukraine was once a part of the Soviet Union, a fact Putin used to question the legitimacy of the country’s independence. He sees Ukraine, which has been an independent nation since 1991, as an integral part of greater Russia.
He has also demanded Ukraine not join NATO because it would increase the alliance’s footprint on Russia’s borders.
In 2014, Russian military forces annexed Crimea on the Black Sea. Moscow-backed separatists also took control of the eastern industrial regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which are on Russia’s border. On Tuesday forces entered those eastern regions and Putin called on Ukraine to accept Crimea as Russian territory. | null | null | null | null | null |
There was Arnold, the fast-talking comic actor. There was the low-level Bill Clinton staffer and former photography shop owner and his Twitter running buddy, the novelist and former member of British Parliament. There was the mysterious insider who reassured anxious Americans, in the pages of the New York Times, that there were Good People — like him — working to foil Trump from within his own administration. And, of course, there was the bulldog lawyer representing Trump’s alleged porn-star paramour. | null | null | null | null | null |
The past few years have been difficult for the talk show host. She fainted during a live airing of a Halloween-themed episode of the show in 2017, which resulted in her taking a three-week leave. In 2018, she said that she had been diagnosed years prior with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that can lead to hyperthyroidism.
Williams began her career in radio and gained renown for her role as a shock jock on New York’s Hot 97 radio station. As The Washington Post’s Bethonie Butler wrote in a piece on the 10th anniversary of her talk show, during William’s time on radio, her “brash takes on hip-hop culture and celebrity gossip lit up urban radio airwaves” amassed her a legion of devoted fans, but she also “made some enemies of the very culture she was covering.”
Shepherd, whose eponymous “Sherri” will take over Williams’s time slot, said in a Instagram video Tuesday that she plans to put her own spin on the new show. | null | null | null | null | null |
For the vast majority of the last decade, the Virginia men’s basketball team at this stage of the regular season has removed virtually all doubt regarding its NCAA tournament credentials.
But such assurances are far from certain heading into Wednesday night’s rematch with seventh-ranked Duke in Charlottesville despite the Cavaliers (17-10, 11-6 ACC) having won five of six, including amassing a pair of Quadrant 1 victories, to boost what had been a spotty resume.
So the final visit to John Paul Jones Arena for retiring Blue Devils Coach Mike Krzyzewski presents Virginia with one last crack, at least before the ACC tournament, at another convincing triumph given the underwhelming body of work from its final two opponents.
“We’ve had some struggles, but I think we continue, we use the words ‘chase’ and ‘pursue’ quality, and I think we know how airtight we have to be,” Virginia Coach Tony Bennett said. “Not perfect, but really good from a defensive standpoint, to be in a lot of competitive games and continue to try to improve offensively.”
The Cavaliers’ upswing this month has included two of their most robust offensive showings, most recently outlasting Miami, 74-71, Saturday night at Watsco Center in Coral Gables, Fla., while matching their second most points in an ACC game this season.
Senior forward Jayden Gardner sparked the season sweep of the Hurricanes with a game-high 23 points on 9-of-14 shooting, including a turnaround step-back jumper from the foul line as the shot clock expired to expand the lead to 65-57 with 1:39 to play in the second half.
Gardner has finished with at least 23 points in two of the last three games and leads the Cavaliers in scoring this season (15.3) after transferring from East Carolina, where he was first-team all-AAC as a junior, and immediately joining the starting lineup.
Gardner is averaging 18.7 points over the last six games, with a season-high of 26 in a conference game on 10-of-19 shooting during a 63-53 victory over visiting Georgia Tech Feb. 12. The performance marked the most points by a Cavaliers player against an ACC opponent this season.
The Blue Devils (23-4, 13-3) entered this week in first place in the ACC, one game in front of Notre Dame, and have won nine of 10. Their only loss in that stretch was to visiting Virginia, 69-68, Feb. 7 when Reece Beekman made a three-pointer with 1.1 seconds left in the second half.
Gardner, meantime, scored 17 points against the Blue Devils and guarded freshman sensation Paolo Banchero with more success than most. Banchero leads Duke in scoring (16.9) but managed nine points, a season low, on 3-for-9 shooting against the Cavaliers.
It remains the only game this season in which Banchero, a 6-foot-10, 250-pound forward and projected lottery pick in the NBA draft, has failed to reach double figures.
The Cavaliers also forced 15 turnovers that led to 20 points and committed just five, equaling their second fewest this season and fewest overall against an ACC opponent.
A victory Wednesday would deliver Virginia its first two-game regular season series sweep of the Blue Devils since 1994-95 in addition to keeping the Cavaliers in the mix to finish among the top four in the conference and secure a double-bye in the ACC tournament.
Six of the past eight results between the schools have been decided by two points or fewer.
“Almost all the last few have been down-to-a-possession games,” Bennett said. “That’s what we try to hope for against them and Coach K and that talent, but we’ve got some really good players too, and it’s just been exciting, and that’s why it comes down to who can execute, can you take care of the ball, can you execute down the stretch.” | null | null | null | null | null |
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The Maryland State Board of Education voted Tuesday to allow local school districts to decide whether K-12 students must wear face coverings, sending the proposal to end an emergency order to a legislative committee to make a final decision.
After COVID-19 health metrics improved in the state, the board voted 12-2 to rescind the order on March 1. Still, the Maryland General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Administrative, Executive, and Legislative Review has the last say on the matter. | null | null | null | null | null |
CORRECTS DAY OF RULING TO TUESDAY, FEB. 22, 2022 - FILE - This file image provided by the Maryland U.S. District Attorney’s Office shows a photo of firearms and ammunition that belonged to Christopher Paul Hasson, a Coast Guard lieutenant. A federal appeals court has upheld a prison sentence, Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022, of more than 13 years for a former Coast Guard officer accused of stockpiling weapons and plotting politically motivated killings inspired by a far-right mass murderer. Christopher Hasson argued that a federal judge in Maryland improperly applied a “terrorism enhancement” to his case, more than tripling the recommended range of a prison term under federal sentencing guidelines.(Maryland U.S. District Attorney’s Office via AP, File) (Uncredited/Maryland U.S. District Attorney) | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Curtailing freedom is Putin’s goal
A television screen in the White House airs Russian President Vladimir Putin's remarks from the Kremlin on Feb. 21. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The United States, under President Biden’s administration, has managed to prevent Russia from succeeding at its misinformation campaign in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s failed attempt to avoid accountability for invading Ukraine. That is no small feat.
The United States, which is often on the defense with Russia, has been able to keep up with Russia at a game in which Mr. Putin is known to be the master villain. There are no justifiable pretexts left with which Mr. Putin could hide or cloak his true intent. But, be not fooled: It is not for the reasons we have been led to believe — i.e., the idea that Ukraine could one day join NATO and be a threat to Russia on its border. No, it is because Ukraine’s growing closeness with democratic ideals and a free people is an even greater threat to Mr. Putin’s imperial objectives and corrupt rule over Russia. Freedom is what Mr. Putin seeks to contain, just as China does.
Christopher P. Fishkin, Jamaica, N.Y. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The Fed ignoring climate concerns would be a dereliction of duty
The New York Stock Exchange in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Sebastian Mallaby’s critique in his Feb. 18 op-ed, “Biden’s Fed choice is wrong about climate policy,” of Sarah Bloom Raskin’s focus on climate policy as a relevant concern for the Federal Reserve conflicts with the increasing consensus among banking regulators that climate change represents a serious threat to the stability of the financial system. The Network for Greening the Financial System, with more than 100 bank regulatory agency members including the United States, China and Russia, reflects the significance of this threat and the need for a coordinated international response. For the Fed to avoid a serious financial issue because of domestic political considerations would be a dereliction of duty.
Alan Miller, Rockville
The writer is a retired climate finance expert in the International Finance Corporation and a lead author of a report on the risks of climate change for the financial system prepared for the Global Commission on Adaptation in 2019.
Sebastian Mallaby got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It is not the government but the Republicans who are supposed to be out of power who are politicizing the Federal Reserve. They would allow the banks to distribute their profits instead of building up their reserves to guard against the undoubtedly increased risks caused by climate change. Quoting past instances when climate change was less advanced was a red herring.
George Soros, New York | null | null | null | null | null |
Heavy artillery is loaded onto a Russian army transport about 19 miles from the border with Ukraine in Rostov Oblast, Russia, on Feb. 22, 2022. (Photo for The Washington Post)
On Monday evening, after Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the breakaway territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine as independent, he sent what he called “peacekeeping” troops into the region, only parts of which are controlled by pro-Moscow separatists.
Vladimir Putin admonished his head of foreign intelligence during a carefully orchestrated, pre-recorded meeting of the Russian Security Council. (The Washington Post)
Parts of Donetsk and Luhansk have been under separatist controlsince 2014. After that meeting, Putin aired an angry, prerecorded speech that recognized the sovereignty of the regions and rejected Ukraine’s legitimacy as an independent nation.
Meanwhile, separatist-controlled areas announced a mass evacuation of civilians, saying they knew of plans for an imminent attack by Ukrainian forces. Buses were escorted by the head of police from Donbas to Rostov, a city in southwestern Russia.
Although they have increased in intensity, clashes between Ukrainian soldiers and the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine are nothing new. Since 2014, Ukrainian forces have been fighting Moscow’s proxies in the country’s east.
Despite military aid from Western countries and newly obtained equipment, the 209,000 active-duty fighters face a potential battle against Russia alone. In the trenches, Ukrainian soldiers acknowledge the challenges ahead, should Putin launch a full-scale invasion.
“Our defense is our job,” Oleksander, a battalion commander, told The Washington Post. “But whoever helps us, we’ll be grateful for it.” He took The Post into the trenches where his troops were preparing for a possible Russian invasion.
Moscow and Minsk said they would withdraw troops when the exercises ended Feb. 20, but when the deadline came, they announced that Russian forces would stay in Belarus indefinitely.
The tension playing out between Russia and Ukraine involves land borders and strategic influence. Ukraine once was a part of the Soviet Union, a fact that Putin used to question the legitimacy of the country’s independence. He sees Ukraine, which has been an independent nation since 1991, as an integral part of greater Russia.
In 2014, Russian military forces annexed Crimea on the Black Sea. Moscow-backed separatists also took control of the eastern industrial regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which are on Russia’s border. On Tuesday, forces entered those eastern regions and Putin called on Ukraine to accept that Crimea is Russian territory. | null | null | null | null | null |
Vanecek was injured during a Feb 1 game and has not played since. The Capitals have not disclosed the nature of his injury but Coach Peter Laviolette has discussed his recovery process. The way in which it was described was similar to how officials would discuss returning from a concussion. | null | null | null | null | null |
“It is a good question,” Kallas said, adding: “Certainly, saying no to Nord Stream 2 is a very strong message from Germany.”
This step “may sound technical, but it’s a necessary administrative step without which the certification of the pipeline cannot happen now,” he said.
“Welcome to the brave new world,” Medvedev said in a tweet.
Whether that’s the case remains to be seen — as is whether the decision has any practical impact on what happens from here. Meister, for one, said Nord Stream 2 is more symbolic than anything, “but practically of secondary importance.”
The temporary nature of the pause left pipeline critics such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) saying it was a good first step but calling for further steps by the U.S. government — up to and including sanctions on the companies involved. Biden and Democrats have resisted imposing sanctions on those companies, though, and Germany’s move would at least seem to buy time. | null | null | null | null | null |
According to her filings in the Supreme Court, Lorie Smith is an artist and website designer who plans to go into the wedding website business. She wants to create only websites “that promote her understanding of marriage as between one man and one woman, and she would like to post an online statement explaining she can only speak messages that are consistent with her religious convictions.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Temple Hills man shot in January has died, police say
A 56-year-old man who was shot in January died of his injuries on Friday, Prince George’s County police said.
Police identified the man as Michael Duncans of Temple Hills.
On Jan. 30, officers responded about 11:15 p.m. to the 3300 block of 28th Parkway in the Temple Hills area for a reported shooting, police said. They found Duncans with a gunshot wound in a bedroom, police said.
He was taken to a hospital, where he died, police said.
A $25,000 maximum reward is being offered for information leading to an arrest in the case, police said. Those with information are asked to call detectives at 301-516-2512. | null | null | null | null | null |
Want to make your home more energy efficient? An architect takes your questions.
(Mary Dorn Photography)
Wayne Turett is the founder of the Turett Collaborative, an architecture and interior design firm based in New York. Turett, who founded the firm in 1991, has led initiatives to use energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive materials without sacrificing sustainability or style. The firm does new construction as well as renovation and restoration. Turett’s family has a carbon-neutral, passive house on Long Island designed by his firm. The passive house movement seeks to minimize carbon emissions and create buildings that use little energy for heating and cooling while improving indoor air quality and comfort. | null | null | null | null | null |
A college student got into an Uber. Hours later, she was dead.
Authorities are investigating the mysterious death of a University of New Orleans college student who was pronounced dead over the weekend upon arrival at a nearby hospital after an Uber ride.
Police said the woman, who has been identified by the New Orleans coroner’s office as 21-year-old Ciaya Jordan Whetstone, arrived at the hospital shortly before 7 a.m. Saturday via “private conveyance.” Friends and co-workers told local news media that Whetstone got into a vehicle from the Uber ride-hailing service about 1 a.m. and was not heard from again until she showed up unresponsive at a hospital.
Police would not confirm that the woman was dropped at the hospital via an Uber. But Uber said Tuesday that it has deactivated the driver and has launched its own investigation.
“Our thoughts are with Ciaya Whetstone’s family as they grieve the loss of their daughter. We stand ready to assist law enforcement with their investigation,” a spokesman for the company said in a statement.
The coroner’s office said the cause and manner of death is under investigation.
Friends told NOLA.com that Whetstone, from Bamberg, S.C., had attended the Carnival parades in Metairie on Friday night before partying with friends. A friend told the news organization that an Uber driver later dropped Whetstone at her apartment and waited for her while she checked on her dog. Then Whetstone, who seemed intoxicated, got back in the Uber, saying she was going to “find her car,” the friend said.
Authorities told The Washington Post they are actively investigating these reports but would not confirm them.
Following Whetstone’s death, friends and classmates expressed their grief on social media, with one writing, “My hearts aches for the loss of a great young lady.” Another wrote that her heart “is torn to pieces,” adding: “Heaven gained one awesome Sweet angel! You will always have a special place in my heart Ciaya Whetstone!”
Another, who referred to Whetstone as “Sissy,” said she couldn’t believe the tragic news was real.
Whetstone was a junior in the College of Business Administration at the University of New Orleans, the school said. Following her death, the university president, John Nicklow, offered condolences:
“As a University, few things are more challenging than dealing with the sadness of the death of a student. Our thoughts are with Ciaya’s family and friends,” Nicklow said in a statement.
Whetstone’s family could not immediately be reached for comment. But her stepfather, Chris Ferrand, told NOLA.com that her loved ones are “still in such a shock.” He said that the family is working on funeral arrangements.
“We’ve got a tough few days ahead of us,” he told the news organization. | null | null | null | null | null |
Bryce Purnell of Archbishop Spalding competes Saturday at the Maryland Independent Schools championships at Harford Community College in Bel Air. (Courtesy of Mike Laidley)
With just over 20 seconds left in the 285-pound match Saturday at the Maryland Independent Schools wrestling championships, Archbishop Spalding senior Bryce Purnell got a reversal and put No. 1 seed T.J. McCauley of St. Mary’s Ryken on his back.
The official slapped the mat at Harford Community College in Bel Air and awarded a pin — only for a Ryken coach to point out that Purnell’s knees were out of bounds. After a break of nearly 10 minutes as the situation was sorted out, Purnell earned back the points and the takedown.
He held on for a 5-2 win and became the Cavaliers’ third state champion, joining Brady Pruett (126 pounds) — Purnell’s best friend, who encouraged him to start wrestling in his sophomore year — and Sean Garretson (106).
“[Purnell] actually won two state titles in the course of 20 seconds,” Coach Mike Laidley said.
Purnell’s primary sport is football; he is set to join the University of Virginia as a defensive end. He was a backup on the wrestling team until two weeks ago, when the starting heavyweight quit a week before the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association championships.
“It was really electric,” Purnell said. “There’s no feeling like winning in wrestling.”
Despite having only 11 wrestlers compete, Spalding finished in third place with 229.5 points, trailing only Mount Saint Joseph (300.5) and St. Mary’s Ryken (279).
Will Levy of Landon was named most outstanding wrestler after winning the 138-pound title match against Mount Saint Joseph’s Cameron Cannaday.
Also, Montgomery Blair won its first Montgomery County title since 1972. The Blazers pulled it off by sweeping the individual crowns of the last three weight classes, lifting them over Churchill and Springbrook in dramatic fashion.
It was a weekend of championships for D.C. and Maryland as St. John’s won the D.C. State Athletic Association titles and the Severna Park boys took home the Maryland 4A trophy.
In Maryland, the smaller classes also produced powerhouse performances at the Fifth Regiment Armory in Baltimore. Huntingtown senior Adam Szatanek led a dominant throwing team by placing first in the shot put with a mark of 58 feet 5.25 inches, a school record and a top-10 throw in state indoor track history.
“It's a lot of mental preparation because it's just you versus yourself,” Szatanek said. “I set a goal for myself to put up a new personal record, not to win the state championship specifically, but we ended up doing both of those.”
Huntingtown’s Aiden Walker and Travis Hook finished second and fifth in the event. Together with Szatanek, the throwing team netted 22 points — almost half of the team total of 48.5 that gave Huntingtown the 3A title Thursday.
On the girls’ side, Northern came out on top in a battle with Howard, finishing at 67 points to Howard’s 65.
In the 2A championship Wednesday, the Oakland Mills boys dominated behind sprinter Judson Lincoln IV. The 6-foot-3 senior won the 300 meters in 36.38 seconds and the 500 meters in 1:07.27. He also helped secure wins for the Scorpions in the 4x200 and 4x400 relays. Oakland Mills scored 109 points, well ahead of second-place Walkersville (38).
South County senior Katherine Helms enjoys her routines. She warms up with Aleigha Scherber, a fellow swimmer on her club team, Mason Makos; she also heads to Panera before meets, selecting a chicken-based meal (often a chicken Caesar salad). And Monday through Friday, she wakes up at 4:15 a.m. to swim with Makos.
At the Virginia Class 6 state swim meet, the final competition of her high school career, that routine and those early alarms paid off. She won both of her events, the 200- and 500-yard freestyles, and passed three swimmers while anchoring the 200 freestyle relay to bring the Stallions from seventh place to fourth. Helms said she built her strongest relationships while swimming before sunrise, which has sustained her love of the sport. With eight club practices each week, her drive stems from Makos.
“We’re all on our own high school teams, but our Makos family is where our hearts are,” Helms said.
Helms has enjoyed her high school career, but she’s even more excited for her next four years at North Carolina State because of the college’s team-centric environment, which mimics her club experience.
“Once you’re a college athlete … you’re competing for something bigger than yourself,” Helms said. “That’s what’s going to make me an even better swimmer — competing for my team, competing for my coaches.”
Spalding succeeds with strong defense, so when it led Calvert Hall by three goals in the second period Thursday in the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association Conference A championship game, Coach Rob Trantin was encouraged.
But Calvert Hall took advantage of the Cavaliers’ rare defensive missteps, and Spalding allowed three shorthanded goals and an unfortunate knock-in by its goalie as he attempted to make a save late in a tied game. An empty-netter sealed the Cavaliers’ fate as they lost, 6-4.
“Our Spalding teams take a lot of pride in the fact that, when we do have games where we go up by [a few] goals, teams don’t come back,” Trantin said. “It doesn’t happen often [where teams come back]; we’re normally very stout defensively, so it’s very disappointing that that’s the end result.”
Defense was in fact the reason Spalding beat Calvert Hall in the teams’ previous meeting Feb. 4. The Cavaliers were able to block shots and keep the puck away from the goal in that one, but they couldn’t match that effort last week.
“They’ve been the strength of our team, so for one night to be like that is tough,” Trantin said. “I have a lot of confidence in our defenders and our goaltending. I’m sure they want to have a lot of those plays back, but that’s hockey.”
The Cavaliers will face St. Albans in the first round of the Mid-Atlantic Prep Hockey League tournament Wednesday. St. Albans (8-6-1) defeated Landon in a shootout to win the Interstate Athletic Conference title, 2-1.
Spalding previously lost to St. Albans in their only meeting in December, but Trantin said he believes the Cavaliers can fare well if they clean up their power play and cut down on penalties. | null | null | null | null | null |
Bishops ask lawyers to audit sex abuse record
The inquiry is intended to cover all abuse and is not limited to investigating only cases in a certain time-period.
Second-largest lake in country is drying up
Iraq’s Razzaza Lake was once a tourist attraction known for its beautiful scenery and an abundance of fish that locals depended on. Now dead fish litter its shores and the once-fertile lands around it have turned into a barren desert.
One of Iraq’s largest lakes, the man-made Razzaza is seeing a significant decline in water levels and has been hit by pollution and high salinity.
The lake is the latest victim of a water crisis in Iraq. Upstream dams in Turkey, Syria and Iran have shrunk the country’s rivers and their tributaries, seasonal rainfall has dropped and infrastructure has fallen into disrepair.
Israeli troops kill boy, 14, in West Bank: Israeli troops killed a Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, the Palestinian health ministry said, in an incident the army described as the shooting of a firebomber. The boy killed in al-Khader village, near Bethlehem, was 14, the ministry said in a statement, urging an international investigation of Israel. The army said soldiers deployed nearby saw three people throwing firebombs at passing cars. "The troops operated to stop them, firing at one of the suspects," its statement said, adding that he died of his wounds despite them providing first aid.
Archaeologists find 9,000-year-old shrine in Jordan desert: A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said Tuesday that it had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan's eastern desert. The ritual complex was found in a Neolithic campsite near large structures known as "desert kites," or mass traps that are believed to have been used to corral wild gazelles for slaughter. Such traps consist of two or more long stone walls converging toward an enclosure and are found scattered across the deserts of the Middle East. The proximity of the site to the traps suggests that the inhabitants were specialized hunters and that the traps were "the center of their cultural, economic and even symbolic life in this marginal zone," the statement said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Many people in other countries believe that the entirety of America is a kind of modern-day Tombstone (or at least the Hollywood version of that frontier town), where everyone is armed, shots ring out at all hours, and arguments are settled with an exchange of gunfire.
It can be hard to argue against that view, exaggerated though it may be, when our rate of gun homicide is so much higher than any other comparable country and by some estimates there are well over 400 million guns in circulation in America.
But it’s not just the number of guns we have or the rate at which we kill each other that leave people elsewhere shaking their heads. It’s also the laws that make it possible.
The very name of these laws was crafted by their proponents to evoke principle and courage, to argue without quite saying so is that what real men do when threatened is, they kill.
By analyzing states that did and did not pass such laws between 2000 and 2016, the authors of the study, a group of American and British public health researchers, attempted to isolate the effects of Stand Your Ground laws on homicide rates.
It isn’t just that the South has often had higher rates of violent crime than other regions. It’s also about a particular explanation of why that might be so, one that relates directly to Stand Your Ground.
This has even been demonstrated in experiments. In one oft-cited study, researchers had someone bump into unwitting subjects in a hallway and then insult them. Those raised in the South were more upset, felt a greater threat to their masculinity, and were more primed to take aggressive action in response.
What isn’t in doubt, however, is that Stand Your Ground laws are explicitly intended to make it easier for people to commit deadly violence and face no legal consequence, in situations where arguments become fatal due to the presence of a gun. And that’s an idea, you could argue, that is encouraged by all of American culture.
You don’t have to listen to the NRA’s assertion that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” all you have to do is watch a movie or a television show. American culture is saturated with the idea that shooting people is the very essence of what makes a “good guy.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Some thoughts on the Sino-Russian entente
How new is the Xi-Putin statement?
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at the Kremlin in Moscow, June 5, 2019. (Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)
Early this month, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping met and then the two countries released a joint statement on international relations entering a new era and global sustainable development. The statement sparked a lot of chatter among foreign policy wonks, including my Post colleague Fareed Zakaria. How big a deal is it?
The phrase that everyone is focusing on is, “new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.” That sounds pretty serious! On the other hand, the very next part of the statement claims that, “strengthening of bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.” That is such a laughably absurd claim that it calls into question the truth value of the other 5,000 odd words in the document.
If one takes the document seriously and not literally, however, there are realpolitik and idealpolitik implications. The former are more important right now, while the latter might be more important in the future.
Right now what matters is that neither great power perceives the other one as an immediate threat. Border disputes between the two countries were resolved back in 2008. This frees up considerable military assets by both sides to concentrate elsewhere. As the New York Times’ Edward Wong notes, “Moscow felt confident enough to move troops from its east to near Ukraine to prepare for a potential invasion — drawing down Russian troops on the borders with China and Mongolia to their lowest level since 1922.”
There are limits to the realpolitik benefits. The statement did not mention Ukraine. At the Munich Security Conference, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated explicitly that “Ukraine is no exception” to the principle of respecting territorial sovereignty. China does not want to see what an actual war in Europe would do to the global economy. But Xi appears to be copacetic with enabling Putin to attempt some coercive diplomacy. Now that war is happening, China will likely reprise its 2014 behavior, which allowed Putin to change facts on the ground.
The speculation that China will move on Taiwan at the same time that Russia moves on Ukraine seems much more fanciful. Part of the reason Russia is moving on Ukraine is that its strategic position has worsened since 2014, as Ukraine has reoriented itself more and more toward the West. China, on the other hand, can envision a future in which it is stronger and not weaker. Xi can afford to wait until its military buildup is more formidable, and has little reason to rush his timetable.
The idealpolitik implications have the potential to be longer-lasting. The joint statement provides a rather peculiar definition of democracy:
There is no one-size-fits-all template to guide countries in establishing democracy. A nation can choose such forms and methods of implementing democracy that would best suit its particular state, based on its social and political system, its historical background, traditions and unique cultural characteristics. It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one.
The sides note that Russia and China as world powers with rich cultural and historical heritage have long-standing traditions of democracy, which rely on thousand-years of experience of development, broad popular support and consideration of the needs and interests of citizens.
Those sentences take quite the journey, by which I mean that it starts with a plausible point but ends in a place that requires a powerful willingness to suspend disbelief. Suffice it to say that I don’t think either Russia or China has any long-standing traditions of democracy.
What is interesting is not the plausibility of the argument but rather the effort to make it. Russia and China are attempting to reinterpret norms of democracy as a means of advancing their material interest. It will not work now, but think of rhetorical adaptation strategies like this one as a more long-term form of power politics.
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has been warning for years that the Sino-Russian entente is on stronger footing than many inside the Beltway had speculated. It is good to see that this statement has triggered a reassessment of the strategic situation. There are some serious implications that emerge from this rhetoric. Everyone inside the Beltway will focus on the realpolitik; I hope at least a few strategic planners start thinking about the idealpolitik as well. | null | null | null | null | null |
LINCOLN, Neb. — Several female Nebraska state lawmakers on Tuesday railed against the Legislature’s handling of a male state senator who resigned after admitting that he took photos of a female subordinate without her consent, calling for an overhaul of their internal policies and recounting their own experiences of being groped, harassed and belittled. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Seattle Storm’s Sue Bird dribbles in the first half of a WNBA second round playoff basketball game against the Phoenix Mercury, Sunday, Sept. 26, 2021, in Everett, Wash. Sue Bird officially re-signed Friday, Feb. 18, 2022, with the Seattle Storm, her only WNBA team, in what is expected to be her final season. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
“We’re close,” Cedric L. Richmond, the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, said on a Sunday night videoconference with members of organization called “Win with Black Women,” according to a person with direct knowledge of the private conversation. He urged the those taking part in the conversation to “keep protecting” the potential nominees against possible attacks on their records.
Richmond said the White House would likely inform only a few close allies and rely on them to spread the word once a decision is made and an announcement is at hand. Richmond also said the White House plans to distribute talking points to supporters on how to respond to expected criticism against the nominee, who Biden has said will be a Black woman.
“We know what some of the attacks are going to be--'Not qualified.' ‘Affirmative action pick,” Richmond told the group. “Well, it wasn’t ‘affirmative action pick’ when we just picked friends, White friends of the president, for all these decades. You know, it was just patronage or whatever they wanted to call it.”
White House officials said Biden is on pace to meet his self-imposed deadline of announcing his pick by the end of February, and maintained that no decision had been made.
The president has said he will pick a nominee by the end of this month, giving him a week to meet the deadline he announced publicly at a difficult moment in his presidency. He is also navigating a growing crisis in Ukraine, the complex politics of the pandemic and other challenges. His approval rating is mired in negative territory and his party is bracing for a backlash in the midterm elections.
“When we’re going to have to make some calls right when the president makes his mind up, before he announces it to the public, the unfortunate part is we won’t have the ability to call each and everybody on this phone,” said Richmond during the Sunday videoconference. “And so what I would ask for is just the latitude and you all give us the wiggle room to maybe just call two or three people that can disseminate this widely.”
Clyburn, whose influence on Biden has been apparent ever since he helped turn around Biden’s struggling campaign with a coveted endorsement ahead of the South Carolina presidential primaries, has a waged a public campaign for Childs. He said in an interview on Monday that “no one has told me” that Biden has made a decision.
The South Carolina congressman said that he spoke with Richmond twice on Sunday but they did not discuss the Supreme Court. Richmond and Clyburn are close from their days serving together in the House.
“I’m not going to share that with you,” said Clyburn. | null | null | null | null | null |
But early glimpses at Truth Social suggest its offerings are almost identical to what Twitter and other sites have offered for years — except tweets are called “Truths,” and retweets “ReTruths." The site’s early struggles also have fueled doubts that Trump’s company will be able to handle tougher long-term challenges, such as policing for dangerous content and guarding against cyberattacks.
Though Trump has criticized social networks’ “wildly aggressive censorship,” his site’s “terms of service” mark some extensive restrictions for acceptable speech. People are banned from trying to “trick” or “mislead” other users, violating anyone’s “privacy or publicity rights,” or posting messages that “depict violence” or include messages related to “sexual fetishes,” “sugar babies” or “sexually suggestive” phrases. People are also forbidden from posting anything “false,” “indecent,” “misleading,” “profane,” “obscene,” “filthy” or “otherwise objectionable.”
Trump’s company, the Trump Media & Technology Group, also prohibits anyone from attempting to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.” Truth Social has already banned an account named for a Twitter parody that targeted former Rep. Devin Nunes, who resigned from Congress to become the Trump company’s CEO.
There were other signs that Truth Social’s growing pains were just getting started. The app for now is available only for iPhones in the U.S. On a ‘help’ page, the site’s own name is misspelled. | null | null | null | null | null |
An analysis of census survey data shows low-income parents lost both child care and income at much higher rates than their wealthier counterparts during this winter’s covid surge
Kevin Flanagan at home with his kids, Brian and Meredith, in Seekonk, Mass. (Jesse Burke for The Washington Post)
The latest wave of coronavirus cases has disrupted even the best-laid child-care arrangements. But low-income parents have been hit disproportionately with a double whammy in recent weeks — losing both child care and income at much higher rates than their wealthier counterparts, according to The Washington Post’s analysis of census survey data.
Day-care closures and other child-care disruptions increased sharply from December to January, as cases of the omicron variant peaked across the country, but they were most common in households that make less than $25,000 a year, data from the Census Household Pulse survey shows.
In the first two weeks of January, 30 percent of households with children under 11 reported child-care disruptions in the past four weeks, up from 22 percent in December — as children got sick or quarantined after coronavirus exposure, or child-care centers shut down over outbreaks or lack of staff.
Mia Rodriguez, who recently started a $10-an-hour job at the day care her daughter attends in Wichita, doesn’t get paid sick leave. So when her 1-year-old tested positive for the coronavirus in December, she had to take off a week unpaid while continuing to pay for child care.
Inequities in child-care disruptions are another example of how the pandemic recession has widened inequality nationwide. Lower-income, and often service-sector, workers weathered higher job losses and more exposure to the virus in these jobs. They also experience the problems of soaring inflation more deeply, research shows.
The disparities in how families deal with child-care disruptions underscore the lopsided safety net in the United States, said Betsey Stevenson, an economics professor at the University of Michigan and former Obama White House economic adviser. The country’s highest-paid workers are also the most likely to receive other protections such as sick leave, vacation time and health insurance, she said. And if they do need to borrow money, wealthier Americans typically get more favorable terms.
In interviews with nearly two dozen parents of varying incomes who either don’t get paid leave or have exhausted all of it, all said they have faced significant covid-related child-care disruptions since December. Many described going without pay for several weeks and, in some cases, having to quit altogether to care for their children. Others said they were putting off job searches or sticking to gig work because of child-care uncertainties.
Parents with less than a college degree — who tend to have fewer work-from-home options or the means to find alternative care — were also more likely to be impacted by child-care disruptions, studies show. Less-educated parents lost about two hours of work per week during the last school year, compared with insignificant impacts for their more-educated counterparts, according to researchers at Washington State University.
The Biden administration has flagged affordable child care as one of its biggest priorities. Last year’s American Rescue Plan Act included $39 billion for child-care funding, including grants for child-care providers and subsidies to help low-income families pay for day care. Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which is stalled in the Senate, also includes measures such as free universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds.
His daughter’s day care, which costs $342 a week, has closed down three times since December, for at least a week each time, he said. A few weeks ago, he got a call just as he was starting his morning deliveries. A teacher had tested positive for the coronavirus, which meant he’d have to pick up his daughter within the hour.
Now he’s back to searching for work, though most warehouses require 10- or 12-hour shifts, making them impossible to balance with day care. Rivera’s electricity was recently shut off and he owes $8,000 in back rent on his apartment in Berks County, Penn. | null | null | null | null | null |
Advocating for her life in a deadly battle against breast cancer
Katrece Nolen, a breast cancer survivor, has shared her experiences. (Tiffany Davis)
While crawling on the floor with her youngest child, a toddler at the time, Katrece Nolen caught a glimpse down the front of her shirt. One breast appeared slightly larger than the other.
“Something is off,” she remembered thinking. So she called her doctor.
But her doctor was away that day, and the receptionist asked if she wanted to make an appointment for a later date.
“I said, ‘No, I need to see somebody today,’ ” Nolen recalled. And that’s what she did.
It was 2013. Nolen would be diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, which is especially aggressive. She would beat it, though, and her urgent pursuit of a diagnosis and treatment was a big part of the reason.
“The most important thing about self-advocacy is don’t give up,” said Nolen, who is 47, African American and cancer-free for nine years. “You have to push through the despair to get the test results, the diagnosis and the appointments you need.”
I talked with her after seeing a recent report by the American Cancer Society that highlighted racial disparities in breast cancer outcomes. Although Black women have a 4 percent lower incidence of breast cancer than White women, the death rate for Black women is 41 percent higher, the report said.
The Black-White disparity was due largely to “decades of structural racism,” the report said, which consigns millions of low-income Black people to environmentally toxic neighborhoods and severely limits their access to health care, quality food and good schools.
Although the risk of cancer mortality decreases as socioeconomic status improves, the report said, “Black people have a higher mortality than White people at every economic level.”
Nolen is on the upper rungs of that socioeconomic ladder. She’s an entrepreneur, civic activist and book author. She holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Oklahoma State. She lives in wealthy Loudoun County with her husband, who is an electrical engineer, and their two children.
She’s got health insurance, work flexibility and access to the best medical facilities in the region. Still, to get the care she needed and the respect she deserved, she had to push.
After seeing a doctor about the swelling in her breast back in 2013, Nolen had a mammogram and an ultrasound exam. But results were inconclusive.
“So, a couple of weeks later, I was trying to button my shirt and I couldn’t button my shirt, it had swollen up that much that fast,” Nolen recalled.
She returned to the doctor’s office and was given the name of a specialist. But when Nolen called to make an appointment, she was told that the specialist would not be available for two months.
“I said, ‘You know, this swelling occurred in just a few weeks. I don’t think waiting two months will work out for me. Can she see me sooner?’ ” Nolen recalled asking. “And they said, ‘No, she’s booked up.’ ”
Just before hanging up, Nolen asked if another doctor was available. Turned out there was. Good thing she’d asked. You’d have thought the doctor’s office would have suggested that first, given Nolen’s symptoms.
Inflammatory breast cancer, though rare, moves fast and can spread to other parts of the body within weeks. It kills roughly 60 percent of the women who get it within five years. And Black women with the disease tend to live about two years less than White women.
Taking an appointment two months down the road could have been a fatal mistake.
This year alone, an estimated 36,260 Black women will be diagnosed with breast cancer and 6,800 Black women will die from the disease, according to the ACS report.
Given the skills and resources that Nolen needed to get herself well, it’s no wonder Black women in the poorest parts of cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, Richmond and the District have some of the highest breast cancer death rates in the nation.
Not that Nolen’s survival was guaranteed.
At her next appointment, she still had to push. She’d brought her mammogram results on a compact disc, only to be told that the medical equipment reads film. She would have to reschedule, the receptionist said.
“I said, ‘No, you didn’t mention anything about film,’ ” Nolen recalled. “ ’I’m here. I’ve been waiting. I can at least have a talk with the doctor, right?’ ” The receptionist said no.
“And I said, ‘No, no, no. I need to be seen today,’ ” Nolen insisted.
Nolen was discussing the matter with the office manager when the doctor she was scheduled to see walked in. She apologized for the delay, explained why film was required then stopped to look at Nolen.
“She said, ‘Ms. Nolen, looking at your records and looking at you, standing right here in front of me, I think you may have inflammatory breast cancer,’ ” Nolen recalled. “And I was like, ‘What? I don’t even know what that is, but, Oh, Lord.’ ”
The doctor requested a skin biopsy and Nolen had the procedure done the next day, which was a Friday. She spent a nerve-racking weekend waiting on the results and reading about the disease. On Monday, the doctor called to say the diagnosis had been confirmed. The next day, Nolen was back in the doctor’s office, helping to assemble a cancer treatment team.
After nine months of rigorous treatment, the cancer was gone. In 2020, Nolen wrote a book about her experience, “I’ve Been Diagnosed. Now What?”
Now what? That was a life and death question, and Nolen had advocated hard for the right answer.
For too many others, the prognosis did not look so good. | null | null | null | null | null |
MLS is ‘bullish’ on Las Vegas for expansion; D.C. United trades Júnior Moreno’s rights
MLS Commissioner Don Garber said the league will pause at 30 teams. (Richard Drew/AP)
MLS is aiming to finalize a deal this spring for Las Vegas to become the league’s 30th team, Commissioner Don Garber said Tuesday.
The city has been atop MLS’s list for some time and, should an agreement be reached, it would have a presence in three of the top five sports leagues in the United States. The Golden Knights entered the NHL in 2017, and the NFL’s Raiders relocated from Oakland in 2020.
An MLS team in Las Vegas would not begin competition for several years but would complete the league’s aim of expanding to 30 teams. Charlotte FC becomes No. 28 this season — the 10th new team since 2012. St. Louis City will begin play in 2023 as the 29th squad.
Among the obstacles in Las Vegas is a plan to build a soccer stadium. Allegiant Stadium, the roofed home of the Raiders, is too narrow for soccer, but international matches have been staged there.
The primary investors would be billionaires Wes Edens and Nassef Sawiris, who own Premier League club Aston Villa. Edens also owns a stake in the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks.
“Expansion deals are complicated in any market, and certainly going to a place that requires a soccer-specific stadium, you have to be sure everything is aligned in the community, everything’s aligned with building a fan base, everything is aligned politically,” Garber said during a video conference call with reporters. “We’re making a lot of progress. We do hope to finalize something in the first third of the year.”
Garber said MLS is “bullish” on Las Vegas, even though the metro area is 29th in population in the United States and the No. 40 media market, which would be the league’s smallest.
“Market size in the future of media will be less important than market engagement,” Garber said. “Where is the future growth and opportunity happening, and where do we think MLS can be successful?”
Phoenix and San Diego also have been in the expansion mix, and although going beyond 30 has not been ruled out, Garber said MLS will “pause” after determining the 30th team.
“Then we can decide if Major League Soccer is going to expand beyond 30 to 31 or to 32,” he said. “When we said we would have 28 teams, we never thought we would go beyond that. And then when we had a path to 30, we never thought we would go beyond that. ... We’ve got some time to figure that out.”
Ninety-seven percent of MLS players are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, Garber said.
Similar to other leagues, Garber said, MLS will only test vaccinated players who are symptomatic. Unvaccinated players will be tested more frequently, he added. That policy is still being finalized.
Moreno on the move
D.C. United traded midfielder Júnior Moreno’s MLS rights to FC Cincinnati for up to $425,000 in general allocation money, three people close to the deal said. With little chance of returning to the club, he was not in D.C. training camp over the past six weeks. United is expected to receive $250,000 this year and, if Moreno hits certain performance thresholds, as much as $175,000 in the future.
The Venezuelan national team player was out of contract after making 97 appearances (91 starts) in four years. He had not been in the league long enough to qualify for free agency, which allowed United to retain his rights as long as it engaged in negotiations. It became clear, though, that he was not in the club’s plans.
Also, United is finalizing a deal with second-round draft pick Sofiane Djeffal, a French central midfielder out of Oregon State who performed well at training camp. He is in the mix for playing time in Saturday’s season opener against Charlotte at Audi Field.
Kamara returns
Ola Kamara, MLS’s co-leading scorer last year, rejoined training Tuesday after missing several weeks because of health and safety protocols. He has been the subject of trade talks, but no deal appears imminent.
XDC Network, a blockchain technology provider, is United’s new jersey sponsor, replacing Leidos, whose logo appeared on the front of the team’s uniform over the previous eight seasons. The three-year agreement is worth between $5 million and $6 million per season, two people close to the deal said. | null | null | null | null | null |
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Two children were shot Monday night in Annapolis when someone walked out of a wooded area and began firing shots, fire and police officials said.
Two children — a 15-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl — were playing outside when a person emerged from a wooded area and fired shots “indiscriminately” toward Tyler Avenue, striking the children, Annapolis Police Chief Edward Jackson said. The two children were flown to hospitals with life-threatening injuries and a 15-year-old girl who was injured while running from the area was taken to a hospital as a precaution, police said. The 11-year-old girl has been released from the hospital, police said Tuesday. | null | null | null | null | null |
But his outlier stance on the coronavirus has drawn fire. A former supervisor at UCLA, contacted by the state during Ladapo’s background check, was highly critical of his public statements about the virus. Ladapo signed the Great Barrington Declaration, written by three epidemiologists in October 2020 urging “focused protection” of the most vulnerable to the coronavirus until society reaches herd immunity.
The declaration has been signed by nearly a million people, including many doctors and scientists, but it has also been roundly rejected by many others as unrealistic and dangerous.
Ladapo joined a demonstration by America’s Frontline Doctors at the U.S. Supreme Court on July, 27, 2020, as they extolled hydroxychloroquine as a cure for covid. In a clip, preserved on Twitter, Ladapo, who comes across as mild-mannered, says the doctors group is trying to “bring more light” to the covid debate. He was drawn to the group because of its stance on “individual autonomy.”
You can also watch Ladapo on Facebook, speaking at the group’s summit, sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots Action. He lamented that panic was dictating pandemic policy and prodded viewers to demand an end to shortages and “stop accepting things that don’t make sense.”
Ladapo may have particularly endeared himself to DeSantis with his disdain for wearing masks. In October, visiting the office of state Sen. Tina Polsky (D) to discuss his confirmation, Ladapo refused to wear a mask even after she repeatedly asked him to wear one, explaining that she had a serious medical condition. Polsky later disclosed that she has breast cancer.
Ladapo has successfully dodged many legislators’ questions during the confirmation process. But one is likely to remain relevant throughout his tenure: Whatever happened to the medical credo “First, do no harm”? | null | null | null | null | null |
The Path Forward: Cryptocurrency with Paul Grewal
Coinbase is one of the world’s most popular exchange platforms for cryptocurrency. On Thursday, March 3 at 2:00 p.m. ET, join Washington Post Live for a conversation with Paul Grewal, chief legal officer at Coinbase, about the growth of digital currency, blockchain technology, the regulatory landscape and the future of money.
Paul Grewal
Chief Legal Officer, Coinbase | null | null | null | null | null |
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