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Ukrainians and Taiwanese people attend a prayer event to pray for the end of the war in Ukraine at a temple in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 3, 2022. (Ann Wang/Reuters)
“I believe that today’s Ukraine is tomorrow’s Taiwan,” said Lung ku, a 69-year-old retired soldier from the southern city of Kaohsiung. “Other countries including the United States are not reliable, and we only have ourselves to defend Taiwan.”
“From the Ukraine crisis there is a lot we must do but these are things we were doing before. Maybe we should do more and do it faster,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. He cited in particular reforming Taiwan’s reservist system and buying more weapons from the United States. | null | null | null | null | null |
While the attacks on the plant did not trigger a release of radioactive material, Rafael Mariano Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, warned of the “risks that we may all incur” if fighting around nuclear sites rages on. Russian forces seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and surrounding area early Friday.
Zelensky’s remarks and the attack on the nuclear plant comes as Russia and Ukraine said they have agreed to limited local cease-fires to facilitate “humanitarian corridors.” The limited agreement was prompted, in part, after several cities in Ukraine’s south warned that they were running out of supplies. The United Nations refugee agency said that while more than 1 million people have fled Ukraine and at least 249 civilians have been killed so far, the true toll is likely “considerably higher” because of the difficulty of conducting accurate counts in war zones.
Speaking from his office building in Kyiv, which is now fortified with sandbags against Russian attacks, Zelensky on Thursday stressed that Ukraine was ready to speak on all topics with Russia at the negotiating table. While the Thursday negotiations concluded with an agreement on cease-fire corridors for Ukrainians to escape the intense fighting, no progress was made on a settlement, said Mykhailo Podolyak, the Ukrainian negotiator.
He added, “There are issues where it’s needed to find compromise, so people don’t die, and there are issues where there can be no compromise. Well, we cannot just say, ‘here it is, it’s your country now, Ukraine is part of Russia.’ This is just impossible. So why suggest it?”
The United States, United Kingdom and others have so far ruled out supporting any no-fly zone, stating that it would likely severely escalate the conflict.
But Zelensky said that only “an immediate closure of sky over Ukraine” would guarantee Russia wouldn’t bomb nuclear installations.
In addition to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv calling the overnight attack a war crime, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he’s seeking an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council on Friday to discuss the fire at the Zaporizhzhia plant. | null | null | null | null | null |
Economists and entrepreneurs fear the Ukraine war will force Russia into an economic isolation not seen since the Cold War
British Prime Minister Tony Blair chats with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an energy conference in London on June 26, 2003. (Ivan Sekretarev/AFP/Getty Images)
He donned white tie and tails to dine with Queen Elizabeth II. He sipped iced vodka with 700 bankers and business executives. And during an energy conference with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, he watched the British oil company BP sign a commitment to invest $6 billion in a Russian oil and gas venture.
In 2003, during a state diner, Russian President Vladimir Putin talks about a prosperous economic future with Queen Elizabeth II. (TWP)
Nearly 20 years on, those deals and plans lie in ruins as Western governments and companies isolate Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. BP, Shell and Exxon have said they will abandon multibillion investments in energy. Banks and insurance companies worldwide are cutting transactions with Russian counterparts.
Computer-chip manufacturers, shipping companies and a host of exporters are halting deliveries to Russia to comply with sanctions. Western nations are closing their skies and ports to Russian planes and vessels. European retailers are shuttering shops in Russia, and some oil traders are declining to buy Russian crude.
With alarming speed, events of the last week have shattered those links.
The shock is causing tumult at all levels of the Russian economy, from the largest companies to small- and medium-sized businesses. Now Russian entrepreneurs with trading partners and bank accounts overseas must worry that their assets will be frozen, Sonin said.
The oligarchs or corrupt politicians who will be hurt by sanctions number in the hundreds or thousands, he said. But the upper-middle class entrepreneurs and professionals who will be “totally devastated by this” number in the millions, he added.
“People cry while talking to each other … nobody actually knows what is going to happen,” said Sonin, who was one of hundreds of Russian economists to sign an open letter protesting the war.
“The effect is catastrophic … even labels are becoming more expensive because the ink comes from overseas,” he said. “In the space of one week … small business in Russia has half died.”
During much of the Cold War after World War II, the Soviet Union had limited trade ties with the West, consisting mostly of oil and gas exports to Europe and imports of food and machinery. The collapse of oil prices in the 1980s decimated the nation’s export revenue and exacerbated product shortages at home, helping trigger the 1991 Soviet collapse.
“Many sectors were open, investment was flowing, the economy was growing at 7 percent a year and many Western companies benefited from that time,” he said in an interview.
Ikea opened its first store in Moscow in 2000, drawing tens of thousands of customers on its first day and quickly added more stores nationwide. French retailer Auchan began building a chain of supermarkets, and automaker Renault opened a factory in Moscow.
Exxon began investing in earnest in 2001, leading a consortium of Russian and foreign investors in developing a large oil and gas project off the coast of Sakhalin Island.
Shell and Exxon executives, including Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s future secretary of state, occasionally met with Putin and other top officials in a sign that the Russian president remained interested in cultivating foreign business executives even as he cracked down on homegrown ones like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom he saw as a threat to his power.
Foreign investment in Russia was small compared with the huge sums flowing to China, and much of it was limited to oil and mineral extraction and or production of consumer goods. But the trend was positive and accompanied by higher investment from Russian companies, too.
Mikhail Kokorich opened his first retail store in Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city, in the early 2000s, eventually building a chain with 100 locations that he likens to Bed Bath & Beyond. At one point, he traveled to the United States to study the retail sector, but he never thought of emigrating there, he said in an interview.
The unraveling of remaining ties in recent days has occurred with breathtaking speed. As the United States and European nations unleashed crippling sanctions, many banks and companies stopped transacting with Russian counterparts, concerned about violating sanctions or not getting paid. Some also expressed outrage over the suffering Russia was inflicting on the Ukrainian people.
Danish shipping giant Maersk said it was halting all new ocean, air and rail cargoes to and from Russia until further notice due to sanctions.
Norway’s state-controlled oil company and sovereign wealth fund announced plans to divest their Russia assets. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and other computer-chip manufacturers began halting shipments to Russia, depriving manufacturers of crucial electronic components.
BP said it would dump its $14 billion stake in Russia’s Rosneft, calling the invasion “an act of aggression which is having tragic consequences across the region.” Shell and Exxon quickly followed suit, announcing plans to abandon their Sakhalin ventures. It wasn’t clear whether any of the companies would find buyers for their assets or simply walk away.
“Russia will pay an enormous price in the economy … the future is very dark,” said Aleksashenko, the former Russian finance official, who now lives in the United States. | null | null | null | null | null |
A county pulled police from schools six months ago. Now it wants to bring them back.
Montgomery County students and community activists protest a proposal to bring police back into county school buildings, on Feb. 24 in Rockville, Md. (Young People for Progress)
Less than six months after Maryland’s largest jurisdiction pulled police out of its public schools, officials are weighing a plan that would bring officers back into school buildings, reviving a testy debate in the liberal county over school security and student well-being.
Under the new plan, which Montgomery County Interim Superintendent Monifa McKnight’s administration introduced at a meeting last month, police officers would be given “work stations” in county high schools, instead of being called in only during emergencies as is currently the case. They would wear plain clothes instead of police uniforms to make them appear more approachable. And they would handle investigations into specific types of criminal activity, such as sexual assault and incidents where guns are used, but stay out of other disciplinary issues like possession of marijuana, school administrators said.
The proposal, which came weeks after a school shooting in Montgomery County, has been met with relief from some parents who say that a stronger police presence will help to keep their children safer on campuses amid an uptick in violence. More students have brought weapons into schools in the past academic year, according to county data. And reports of verbal and physical attacks have nearly doubled since 2019.
But student and community activists who pushed to remove school resource officers from schools last year say there are ways to improve school security without turning to law enforcement. They say bringing police back into schools would negatively affect students of color and students with disabilities, who are disproportionately targeted by police on campus. According to state data, Black students accounted for nearly half of all arrests made in Montgomery schools from 2016 to 2019 despite making up only a fifth of the student body.
For first time in 19 years, Montgomery County schools set to reopen without police
“Students have been clear on what we want, which is no police in schools,” said Amari Mbongwo, 18, a senior at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, Md., and an activist with the group Young People for Progress, “but it seems [officials] are choosing after all this time to ignore the people with the most stake in this issue.”
School administrators said they wanted to review safety practices given the increase in violence. National staffing shortages prevented other options — like using security staff employed by the school — from being a possibility. But the existing program that has groups of police, called “community engagement officers” patrol the areas around schools, was already in place.
By expanding that program, the school system would not be “encouraging or offering the policing of students in any way, shape or form,” Ruschelle Reuben, chief of Teaching, Learning and Schools, said at a meeting last week.
Across the nation, school systems have been grappling with how to balance mounting concerns over security with demands from activists to address what they call the over-policing of underrepresented students.
D.C. has kept a school police program in place even though a city council-appointed Police Reform Commission recommended that officers be removed from campuses. In Northern Virginia, Alexandria City Council members voted in October to reinstate its School Resource Officer program, reversing a decision it had made five months before.
Maryland passed sweeping laws to change police discipline. Now it’s stumbling on implementation, activists say.
Last year, Montgomery County became the first jurisdiction in Maryland to pull police from schools when Marc Elrich (D), the county’s top official, announced as part of his annual budget proposal that he would be redeploying school resource officers to other roles, effectively ending the program. He and several members of the all-Democratic county council championed the removal of police from schools last year, intensifying their advocacy on the issue after video emerged of county police in 2020 handcuffing and berating a Black 5-year-old.
Elrich, who oversees the police department, asserted at the time that while there would be officers in the neighborhoods around school clusters, “they’re not going to be parked on the parking lot, and they won’t be on the grounds.”
He appeared to back away from this commitment in a news conference two weeks ago where he said he supports McKnight’s proposal to bring police back into schools. “This is first and foremost a school question,” he said. “They’re the ones who have to run the schools.”
Elrich did not respond directly to questions clarifying his position this week, saying only that he planned to review the final agreement between the school system and the police department.
Kyson Taylor, 17, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School and a lead organizer for the group MoCo Against Brutality, said many student activists feel frustrated by what they see as the recent about-face from elected officials on the issue.
“My message to [Elrich] is: You took agency last year to do this, to remove these positions from the budget. Where is that now? And what has changed?” he said.
Taylor co-chairs a work group that was convened by lawmakers last year to study the issue of student safety and well-being, and the group concluded in a report released in October that the county should decrease police presence in schools. Taylor and other student activists, say they believe that there are ways to tackle school violence without turning to police, such as investing in more mental health resources for students.
The school system pledged last year to hire 50 social workers, but as of Wednesday, 17 have been hired. More are expected this school year, officials said.
He was a champion of police in schools. A year after George Floyd, he’s changed his mind.
“I’m at a point where I’m not sure exactly what we can do,” Taylor said. “We’ve presented the data; we’ve done the protests; we’ve testified at every possible hearing … After all that, they’re literally going back to the same exact program that we’ve been fighting against.”
Zakiya Sankara-Jabar, co-founder of the activist group of Racial Justice Now! and parent of a second- and ninth-grader in the school system, agreed. “It just seems like MCPS caved too quickly, and despite the fact that they haven’t done what they needed to do around increasing the mental health support in the schools,” she said.
Other parents, however, say McKnight’s proposal doesn’t go far enough to boost school safety given a recent shooting at Magruder High School, which left one student critically injured. The student charged in the shooting was armed with a “ghost gun” that he assembled at home, police said.
“What we want is the re-administration of the SRO program with improvements,” said Eric Delgado, a Montgomery father of two who advocated against the removal of police officers last year. He recently transferred his seventh-grade daughter from a county school to a private Catholic school in part because of concerns for her safety, he said.
“I’m wondering why it has to be either-or when it should be both-and,” Delgado said. “The county has the means to do both — police and mental health resources.”
Montgomery County Police Chief Marcus Jones said he has always believed in the merit of the county’s SRO program, and also supports McKnight’s new plan to bring police back into schools. Having a “highly visible” police presence can help to deter crime on campus, he said,
McKnight’s proposal isn’t subject to a vote by the board of education or county council. Rather, the final plan will be decided between school administrators and the police department, who were still working out the details late this week. School officials have said they plan to meet with more community members and school principals before an agreement is completed.
Council President Gabe Albornoz (D-At Large) said in a news briefing Monday that he “trusts the leadership” of McKnight and other board of education members on the issue of school safety and that “the council will not intervene in individual school policies.”
But council member Will Jawando (D-At Large) said there are still ways lawmakers can exert their influence on the school system. Along with council member Hans Riemer (D-At Large), Jawando introduced legislation in 2020 that would bar police from being stationed in schools. He halted the bill when Elrich removed the SRO positions from his budget last spring, but Jawando said he’s prepared to revive it if it seems like the only way to stop police from returning to school buildings.
“My position has not changed,” said Jawando, who has been a vocal advocate for dramatic police changes in Montgomery. He added that he isn’t surprised that the debate over police in schools has returned so quickly given the recent uptick in crime, but that he hopes officials avoid the “knee-jerk reaction” of returning to old systems such as the SRO program.
“Change is hard,” Jawando said. “We have to stay the course.”
Where the 2022 candidates for Montgomery County Executive stand on the issue of police in schools:
Incumbent Marc Elrich: Elrich said in a news conference on Feb. 16 that he does not want to interfere in changes to school security and is “very supportive of having the school system work this out.” Elrich said on multiple occasions last year that the county would no longer have police in schools; in an email exchange this week, he did not address questions asking whether his position had changed.
Businessman David Blair: Blair said he “fully supports” McKnight’s proposal to bring police back into school buildings. “What the superintendent has proposed seems like a very good modification to what we have in place,” Blair said, adding that he personally felt safer dropping his children off at school when he knew that there were officers on campus. He said he thinks that there is a way for students to feel both “safe and respected” by police in their school buildings.
Council member Hans Riemer (At-Large): Riemer said he does not support having police in schools and that increasing the number of trained security personnel and counseling staff at schools will more effectively improve school safety. “We have a shortage of police officers on community beats where we have serious crime issues,” Riemer added. “We need to put our police resources where they can have the biggest impact on safety.”
Council member Tom Hucker (District 5): Hucker said he has not yet reviewed McKnight’s proposal, but said that the county should prioritize adding mental health resources and hiring more security guards before bringing police back into schools. He added that he might support having police at some schools but not others.
Political newcomer Devin Battley: Battley said he would rather have trained security guards to beef up school security instead of police, though he is not opposed to having police in schools. He recognized that a police presence could be distressing to some students, he said, but “would still rather they were well protected.” | null | null | null | null | null |
CAIRO — The U.N.’s top official for Libya on Friday urged the country’s divided factions to refrain from violence and agree on a framework for the future. Libya is being pulled apart again, with two rival governments claiming power after tentative steps towards unity in the past year following a decade of civil war. | null | null | null | null | null |
Taiwan’s leaders try to calm fears over Ukraine invasion, but citizens worry their island will be next
Ukrainians and Taiwanese people pray for the end of the war in Ukraine at a temple in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 3. (Ann Wang/Reuters)
Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the slogan has been repeated in local headlines, discussed in panels and uttered by jittery citizens worried that the war will embolden their similarly powerful and aggressive neighbor China, which claims Taiwan should be under its rule.
But government officials and researchers focused on cross-strait tensions say the similarities stop there. They stress differences such as the 100-mile sea barrier between Taiwan and China, Taiwan’s key role in global supply chains and the fact that it is surrounded by U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan.
Now, although few residents believe an attack from China is imminent, watching the destruction of Ukrainian cities has made that possibility seem much more real.
Scholars have called for revising Taiwan’s military doctrine, which maintains that it will never strike first. Groups have started organizing civilian defense training courses, free first-aid sessions and talks on how regular citizens can prepare for war.
Officials have tried to tamp down alarm, worried not just about fearmongering but also the possibility that pro-China forces will use public alarm to push for better ties with Beijing to avoid Ukraine’s fate.
The day after the invasion began, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen described the situation Taiwan faces as “fundamentally different” while Cabinet spokesperson Lo Ping-cheng said it was “inappropriate” and “demoralizing” to claim that Taiwan would be next.
“From the Ukraine crisis, there is a lot we must do, but these are things we were doing before. Maybe we should do more and do it faster,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. He cited in particular reforming Taiwan’s reservist system and buying more weapons from the United States.
Some argue that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now entering its second week, has driven home how difficult an invasion of Taiwan would be. China would need to launch what would be history’s largest amphibious attack, and the chance of a U.S. intervention would be high.
“Beijing is taking note of the speed and strength of the international response,” said Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution. “It is becoming more difficult for anyone inside China to argue that Beijing could subdue Taiwan quickly and without high costs.”
“The [Ukraine war] has united Europe and made Taiwan more secure than ever,” said Kuo Yu-jen, a professor of political science at National Sun Yat-sen University, at a panel chaired by an adviser to the president on the implications of the Ukraine crisis for Taiwan.
“Russian troops had been gathering on the border since March last year, which is already a threat. Ukraine still waited for [the attack] to happen,” he said, comparing the situation with the frequent incursions of Chinese aircraft into Taiwan’s air identification zone.
On Monday, former U.S. defense and security officials led by Mike Mullen, who served as chairman of the joint chiefs, landed in Taiwan for two days of meetings with Tsai, Taiwan’s minister of defense Chiu Kuo-cheng and other top officials in what the Taiwan president’s office described as a show of the “rock solid” U.S.-Taiwan ties.
Residents in Taiwan watching the overwhelming international response to the crisis wonder whether an attack on their homeland would incur the same level of sympathy. Taiwan is not recognized by the United Nations or a member of the World Health Organization and other international bodies because of intense lobbying by Beijing.
“I think the reason why both Europe and the United States sympathize with Ukraine is because they are similar in terms of ethnicity and culture, but for Taiwan, we don’t even have the opportunity to show our faces in the United Nations,” said Ian Cheng, 28, a developer in Taipei. “It’ll be difficult for the West to feel connected with us.”
In Taipei, groups of protesters gather outside of the Moscow-Taipei Coordination Commission, Russia’s de facto embassy in Taiwan. Many say they are here to support Ukraine and that their own geopolitical flash point is a secondary priority. Others say that while the threat from China does not seem imminent, they will not shy away when the time comes. | null | null | null | null | null |
In this photo taken on Feb. 18, 2022 Tanzania's main opposition Chadema party chairman Freeman Mbowe who was arrested on July 21, 2021, leaves the High Court in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. (Ericky Boniphace/AFP/Getty Images)
NAIROBI — A Tanzanian court dropped terrorism-related charges on Friday against opposition leader Freeman Mbowe and three co-accused ordering their release, their lawyer said.
Mbowe, who is chairman of the Party for Democracy and Progress, commonly known as Chadema, was arrested on July 21, 2021 while campaigning for constitutional reforms. He was accused of paying three men to blow up gas stations and of being involved in “terrorism-related” activities.
His lawyer, Peter Kibatala, said Mbowe's release was unexpected, coming on the morning when he was scheduled to testify in court.
“We did not know it would happen, we had spent the whole day in prison yesterday preparing Mr. Mbowe and his co-accused for defense,” Kibatala said in a phone interview.
“This has come as a pleasant surprise. We are sad that they did not get [to tell] their side of the story, but elated that this very sad journey has come to an end,” he added.
His arrest came just months after the death of the East African country’s former leader John Magufuli in March 2021. Magufuli’s presidency was marked by widespread crack downs against the opposition, civil society and media, but he was also admired for his focus on infrastructure investments, which earned him the nickname “the Bulldozer.”
His successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, Tanzania’s first female president, backed away from Magufuli’s fierce denial of the covid-19 pandemic and urged all Tanzanians to get vaccinated. She also replaced several top government officials, including the top state prosecutor. | null | null | null | null | null |
While the attacks on the plant did not trigger a release of radioactive material, Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, warned of the “risks that we may all incur” if fighting around nuclear sites rages on. Russian forces seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and surrounding area early Friday.
Zelensky’s remarks and the attack on the nuclear plant comes as Russia and Ukraine said they have agreed to limited local cease-fires to facilitate “humanitarian corridors.” The limited agreement was prompted, in part, after several cities in Ukraine’s south warned that they were running out of supplies. The United Nations refugee agency said that although more than 1 million people have fled Ukraine and at least 249 civilians have been killed so far, the true toll is likely “considerably higher” because of the difficulty of conducting accurate counts in war zones.
But Zelensky said only “an immediate closure of sky over Ukraine” would guarantee that Russia wouldn’t bomb nuclear installations.
In addition to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv calling the overnight attack a war crime, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he is seeking an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council on Friday to discuss the fire at the Zaporizhzhia plant. | null | null | null | null | null |
New movies to stream this week: ‘Huda’s Salon,’ ‘Fresh’ and more
Ali Suliman, left, and Manal Awad in “Huda’s Salon.” (IFC Films)
From Hany Abu-Assad, the Palestinian-Dutch writer-director behind the Oscar nominated films “Paradise Now” and “Omar,” “Huda’s Salon” tells two separate, yet intertwined tales. Set in the walled West Bank city of Bethlehem, both explosive narratives are set off at a hair salon, where a young mother, Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) has just been blackmailed by the shop’s owner, Huda (Manal Awad), who hopes to enlist Reem in a network of women working as spies for the Israeli intelligence corps. (The blackmail involves taking photographs of a fake sexual tryst, staged while Reem was drugged.) When word gets out about Huda’s activities, she is abducted by the Palestinian resistance movement, and interrogated, over the course of the film, by a methodical inquisitor named Hasan (Ali Suliman). Reem, meanwhile, terrified of what her irrationally jealous husband (Jalal Masarwa) might do if he sees the photos, is simultaneously being hunted by Hasan’s thugs. As disturbing as it is to imagine a business executive entrapping a customer into becoming an informant, it’s more troubling to realize that this betrayal is being carried out at the behest of a state agency. But Abu-Assad leans into the story’s nuances and contradictions. During her interrogation, Huda tells Hasan, “It’s easier to occupy a society that is already repressing itself” — a reference to the patriarchal restrictions of the Arab world. At moments like these, it feels as if there’s a third person present at Huda’s interrogation: Abu-Assad himself, whispering overly theatrical lines into his protagonists’ ears. These stagy scenes are the most contrived of “Huda’s Salon.” It’s Reem’s plight that is the most affecting — and the most doomed. R. Available on demand. Contains disturbing violence, graphic nudity, mature thematic material, some strong language and smoking. In Arabic with subtitles. 91 minutes.
— Michael O'Sullivan
In a lineage of cannibal films that includes everything from the ghoulish black comedy of “Eating Raoul” to the serial-killer horror of the Hannibal Lecter movies to the idea of flesh-eating as a metaphor for female sexual desire in “Raw,” “Fresh” falls somewhere in the cracks between those movies. When unlucky-in-love millennial Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has a meet-cute in the produce aisle with Steve (Sebastian Stan), a handsome, funny and successful surgeon several years her senior, they seem to have real chemistry. That is until, on one of their very first dates, Noa discovers that Steve’s previous pillow talk — saying, in effect, that he just wants to gobble her up — is meant literally. Other plot specifics are best left unspoiled, because “Fresh,” true to its name, is not what you might expect. Oh, it’s gruesome, all right, and there’s plenty of distasteful — even, at times, offensive — damsel-in-distress energy. But the debut feature of director Mimi Cave (working from a screenplay by Lauryn Kahn) is full of unexpected touches, not the least of which is casting the genial Stan in the role of heavy. I wouldn’t call “Fresh” feminist — not entirely — and it’s not often laugh-out-loud funny (except when Noa expresses dismay to discover that Steve, on top of everything else, is married). But it’s different, keeping viewers on their toes with its critique of contemporary dating and the objectification of women, while at the same time satisfying the basest appetites of traditional horror fans. R. Available on Hulu. Contains strong and disturbing violence, some bloody images, crude language throughout, some sexual material and brief graphic nudity. 114 minutes.
— M.O.
Co-written by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (“Game of Thrones”), “Against the Ice” is an Arctic adventure tale based on “Two Against the Ice,” a 1957 memoir by Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen about his 1909-12 expedition to Greenland. Variety writes: “Starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Joe Cole and the snow in Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s beard, the film faithfully recounts the many perils that Mikkelsen (Coster-Waldau) and sidekick Iver Iverson (Cole) faced in their attempt to retrieve the findings of an ill-fated previous expedition. Yet somehow, aside from a nicely mounted polar bear attack and a well-turned sled-vs.-cliff encounter, it never feels particularly perilous.” TV-MA. Available on Netflix. 103 minutes.
Vanessa Hudgens, Kiersey Clemons, and Alexandra Shipp lead an all-female vigilante gang in “Asking for It,” a thriller about women seeking revenge in the wake of a sexual assault. In its review of Eamon O’Rourke’s feature debut (which also stars Ezra Miller, Gabourey Sidibe, Radha Mitchell and Luke Hemsworth), the Wrap writes: “Every scene is designed to feel portentous, but with so much talent working together, the constant jump cuts, graphic still shots and Lilah Larson’s ever-present (and excellent) score do keep us effectively on edge.” R. Available on demand. Contains disturbing and violent images, sexual material, nudity and strong language throughout. 102 minutes.
The documentary “Citizen Ashe” examines the life and career of tennis player Arthur Ashe, who in 1975 became the first African American man to win Wimbledon, when he defeated the heavily favored Jimmy Connors in a dramatic 1975 showdown. According to the New York Times, “Ashe’s story certainly has moments of great drama and high tension, but, as a sports figure, he inspired decidedly undramatic sobriquets like ‘the gentle warrior.’ This documentary shows you a truer, sharper picture.” Unrated. Available on Apple TV Plus, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, FandangoNOW and more. 96 minutes.
From Keith Maitland, the director of the acclaimed documentary “Tower,” “Dear Mr. Brody” takes a documentary look at Michael Brody, the heir to a margarine fortune, who, in 1971, announced his intention to away his $25 million inheritance to anyone who wrote to him in need. Focusing on a cache of unopened letters that were recently discovered, the film is a “fascinating” examination of, according to Variety, “greed, need and altruism.” Unrated. Available on demand. 98 minutes.
On the heels of Aaron Sorkin’s dramatic Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz biopic “Being the Ricardos” comes the documentary “Lucy and Desi.” Directed by Amy Poehler, this portrait of a pioneering TV power couple has two fascinating subjects but, according to the Guardian, “feels more like paint-by-numbers PR.” PG. Available on Amazon. Contains mature thematic elements, smoking and coarse language. 102 minutes.
Golden Age of TV is tarnished in Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Being the Ricardos’
In the thriller “Run & Gun,” Ben Milliken plays Ray, a reformed criminal who is blackmailed into accepting one last job from a mobster (Richard Kind of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”). But Ray is ultimately double-crossed, and must revert to his old skills to escape assassins. R. Available on demand. 96 minutes.
The thriller “The Weekend Away” follows two best friends, Beth and Kate (Leighton Meester and Christina Wolfe), who plans for a rejuvenating escape to Croatia go awry after Kate ends up dead — and Beth is suspected of her murder. TV-14. Available on Netflix. 91 minutes.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the documentary “Dear Mr. Brody” is available on Discovery Plus. It is available on demand, but will not be released on Discovery Plus until April. The story has been corrected. | null | null | null | null | null |
The all-star musicians are coming to the Kennedy Center on March 7 behind their new recording, “Beethoven for Three”
From left, Leonidas Kavakos, Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma, who will be performing at the Kennedy Center on March 7. (Shane McCauley)
Three years after Tanglewood, they released their first acclaimed recording, “Brahms: The Piano Trios.” Now they’re getting the band back together to tour their most recent release, “Beethoven for Three,” a recording of Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5 arranged for piano trio — the former by Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries, the latter by the contemporary English composer Colin Matthews.
When the trio returns to the Kennedy Center — where last they converged in 2018 for a similarly concentrated program of Schubert and Brahms — they’ll offer an all-Beethoven program that promises to be full of grand gestures and small revelations. The three will take on a trio arrangement (by pianist Shai Wosner) of the “Pastorale” symphony (No. 6), as well as a pair of beloved trios — the “Gassenhauer” (Piano Trio No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 11) and the “Ghost” (Piano Trio No. 5 in D major, Op. 70, No. 1).
Ax: … because [during the pandemic] there were no orchestra concerts going on. Everything had just simply stopped. And Yo-Yo said, “This is our chance to play things like the Beethoven symphonies for a small group.” And, of course, that was always part of the way these pieces got introduced. The Second Symphony is actually in the complete Beethoven works. It’s a version done by Ferdinand Ries, which [Beethoven] supervised and made changes, too. So that’s actually a very legitimate version of that particular piece.
Ma: I don’t know what he’s doing, but he’s a really great person, a great violinist, but also a really fantastic conductor. So, as you know, conductors usually tell us what to do. So Manny usually tells me what to do. And I like being told what to do, because I’m the second child — so it’s easy for me to just kind of follow other people. So this trio is an ideal way for us to make music together.
Ax: I think he might want to hear more about the pieces. It is a time-honored way to introduce music in different arrangements, because, for example, in Beethoven’s time, the public was not able to hear these symphonies as written for an orchestra because orchestras were very few and far between. Unless you were in a capital city and you happened to be there just that one time in the two or three years when they were doing that piece of Beethoven, you might not have had a chance to hear it at all.
Ax: For me, personally, what’s wonderful about it is I get to learn these pieces better than simply from hearing them on a recording. And the music is so amazing; it’s always different textures. And while I know how the tune [of the Fifth] goes — bum ba ba baaa — I don’t know it back and forth. I certainly don’t know how it works. But I think I know that a little better now.
Beethoven, on the other hand, he will say, “I can take you there. If I’m your guide, I’m going to take you to the mountaintop. You will see the vista from the mountaintop; you don’t have to look at it from the valley.” And, more often than not, he will get you to that place. That’s my arrogant, ignorant stereotype. Manny, now correct me. Because this is the moment when he says, “No … ” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Putin has a huge advantage in the kind of nuclear weapon he would be most likely to use
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a Russian Security Council meeting at the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow on March 3. (Andrei Gorshkov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool via AP)
Vladimir Putin’s brandishing of his nuclear arsenal could hardly be less subtle if Russian TV broadcast him driving a mobile intercontinental ballistic missile launcher through Red Square. He began his invasion of Ukraine less than a week after personally overseeing a Russian nuclear exercise and on Sunday ordered his nuclear forces on high alert. In case the message was lost on anyone, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday vowed that if World War III comes, it will be a nuclear conflict.
But a nuclear conflict won’t necessarily be World War III — and that could be to the Russians’ advantage. If Putin ever does go nuclear, he is more likely to authorize a limited use of smaller, “nonstrategic” nuclear weapons, whether in desperation if his Ukraine invasion continues to sour, or against NATO countries in some future confrontation.
Such non-strategic, or tactical, nukes might not end the world, but they could end a battle — or even a war — by taking out the 160 tanks in an armored division, for example. Russia could be emboldened to take such a step because it has more tactical nuclear weapons than all of its rivals, including the United States. This imbalance deserves immediate American attention.
Russia has only a modest lead over the United States in long-range, strategic nuclear warheads regulated by the 2010 New Start treaty — 1,456 vs. 1,357 of the high-payload weapons. But when it comes to unregulated, shorter-range and lower-payload tactical nuclear weapons, according to a 2021 Congressional Research Service report, the United States has only 230, “with around 100 deployed with aircraft in Europe.” Russia has up to 2,000.
Four years ago, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review presciently raised the prospect that in a conflict near Russia’s borders, Moscow might “rely on threats of limited nuclear first use, or actual first use, to coerce us, our allies, and partners into terminating a conflict on terms favorable to Russia.”
While Russia might lose a conventional war with NATO, the thinking goes — and all sides would lose a full-fledged nuclear war — Moscow’s use of one or a handful of nonstrategic nuclear weapons against military targets would move the conflict into a realm Russia is equipped to dominate.
Wouldn’t Russia be deterred from crossing that line in Europe by the prospect of mutually assured destruction? Maybe, but the notion that Washington would escalate to strategic nuclear weapons in the absence of an imminent threat to the homeland “is just too extreme to be convincing and therefore unlikely to work” as a deterrent, conservative strategist Elbridge Colby wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2018. He argued that if Russia crossed the nuclear threshold with a low-yield weapon against a NATO state, the United States would need to “respond in kind or risk defeat.”
Yet Russia’s nonstrategic nuclear weapons are not only more numerous but also more versatile than America’s, many of which can be delivered only from the air (making their credibility partly dependent on Western air superiority). Russia is building an arsenal including not just ground-to-ground missiles but also “antiship and antisubmarine missiles, torpedoes, and depth charges,” according to 2019 congressional testimony from the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Last weekend, Russia fired conventionally armed Iskander missiles, which can also be armed with nuclear warheads, into Ukraine from Belarus.
The Biden administration is contemplating policies that could widen Russia’s nonstrategic nuclear advantage. The Interim National Security Strategic Guidance last March promised to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.” Some members of Congress and U.S. allies worry that the Pentagon will adopt a “declaratory policy” that narrows the circumstances in which the United States reserves the right to use nuclear weapons. Politico reported in January that the Nuclear Posture Review might also seek to retire the W76-2, a low-yield nuclear weapon that was first deployed in 2019 on an American submarine and is intended as a partial answer to Russia’s nonstrategic force.
The war in Ukraine could be an opportunity for the handful of hardheaded strategists in the Biden administration to prevail against the arms-control idealists, who believe that, given the destructiveness of these weapons, a quantitative advantage provides little practical edge. But nuclear deterrence is about perception and will. Arms-control advocates have long maintained U.S disarmament would be met with Russian reciprocity, but that faith is badly undermined by Moscow’s nuclear threats amid the fighting in Ukraine.
Western technological prowess and financial wizardry are building a virtual blockade around the Kremlin without the direct threat of military force. But the real world is ultimately the strategic backdrop for this and every armed conflict, and the tools of the information revolution can’t increase nuclear deterrence. Putin knows this. To deflate the Kremlin’s threats, the United States will need the weapons necessary to make Putin worry that even on a “limited” nuclear battlefield, he’d lose. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mikhail Klimentov
Alexander Molodkin, one half of the Kyiv-based game developer Weasel Token, was never a political person. He didn’t follow the news. When the Russian troop buildup at Ukraine’s border began, he was optimistic — within reason.
“Something will definitely happen,” he recalled thinking, though he anticipated a more local conflict. Perhaps, he thought, Russia would take the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and stop there. Then, he heard Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 21 speech promising “true decommunization,” and his hope dwindled. On Feb. 24, Russia launched its attack on Ukraine.
The timing has been professionally unlucky, to say the least. Recently, “Puzzles for Clef,” the 2D puzzle adventure game Molodkin and his partner, Tay Kuznetsova, are working on, released a demo as part of a festival on the game distribution platform Steam. This led to an influx of attention and engagement in the team’s Discord server, which Molodkin and his partner moderate. He doesn’t proactively mention the invasion, but when people ask, he’s frank about it.
“It’s pretty much impossible to work at all,” said Molodkin, who spends most of his waking hours monitoring news about the war via Telegram, a popular social platform. “The moment you try concentrating on something not related to war, your mind just keeps trailing off and your thoughts get back to it. More than half an hour or work is just impossible.”
Molodkin keeps his family — his mother, grandmother and partner, Kuznetsova — in the hallway; everyone stays away from rooms with windows. They didn’t leave the country because the difficulties around finding accommodation for a family of four were too daunting. They’re not in a shelter because his grandmother has difficulty with mobility. He and his partner take shifts sleeping, so that someone’s awake in case of an air raid siren.
In the days since Russia’s invasion began, there’s been an outpouring of support for Ukrainian citizens from across the video game industry. Some studios, like Kyiv-based STALKER series developer GSC Game World, have been directly impacted. After initially calling for fans and game developers to provide Ukrainian armed forces with financial support, GSC has suspended development entirely to focus on keeping employees safe.
“We are striving to help our employees and their families to survive,” reads text in a video GSC posted to its YouTube channel this week. “The game development shifted to the sidelines. But we will definitely continue. After the victory.”
Metro series creator 4A Games, which also has a studio located in Kyiv, has made similar calls for support while its parent company, Embracer Group, has donated $1 million to humanitarian aid to support Ukrainians impacted by the invasion. Numerous other Ukrainian developers, including Frogwares and Vostok Games, have issued statements in support of Ukraine’s independence.
The video game publisher Ubisoft, which owns a host of studios around the world, began to advance salaries to its employees in Ukraine in February in anticipation of economic disruption. It also implemented other precautionary measures, such as making housing options available for its Ukrainian employees in neighboring countries, the company wrote in a statement on its site. On March 1, the company donated approximately $221,000 to the Ukrainian Red Cross and Save the Children.
Studios outside Ukraine have also pitched in; CD Projekt Red, the Polish powerhouse behind “The Witcher” and “Cyberpunk 2077,” has pledged 1 million Polish zlotych (roughly $230,000) to humanitarian aid. People Can Fly and 11 Bit Studios — two other Polish companies, the latter of which’s best-known game, “This War of Mine,” is about the civilian experience of war — have similarly promised large donations to humanitarian aid groups and the Ukrainian Red Cross.
Numerous other companies and industry figures have spoken out in support of Ukraine, including indie publisher Raw Fury and Bungie CEO Pete Parsons. In addition, Necrosoft Games director Brandon Sheffield has spent the week assembling an indie game bundle whose proceeds will be split 50-50 between two Ukrainian aid-related charities. The bundle doesn’t launch until Friday, but Sheffield says it already contains more than 700 games.
The Ukrainian government has urged video game companies to cut off the Russian market. On Thursday, CD Projekt Red announced they would do just that, pausing sales of their games in Russia and Belarus.
On Wednesday, EA Sports, which publishes video games in the NHL and FIFA franchises, announced that it would remove club and national teams associated with Russia from its games, following the lead set by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) and FIFA governing bodies. The IIHF also suspended Belarusian teams from play; those teams would be removed from “NHL 22” as well.
The esports world, for its part, moved in lockstep with its counterparts in traditional sports. Since the invasion began, two tournament organizers announced they would bar Russian teams from participating in their events, and canceled or paused events in the CIS region, which includes Russia and Ukraine.
The teams most impacted by these decisions are Gambit Esports and Virtus.pro. Gambit is owned by the telecommunications company Mobile TeleSystems, whose largest shareholder is a company headed by the Russian billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov. On Feb. 24, Yevtushenkov was present at a Kremlin meeting between Putin and representatives of Russian big business. Virtus.pro shares a connection with the Russian insurance firm SOGAZ, which fell under European Union sanctions following the invasion.
“We recognize that players are not complicit with this situation, and we do not think it is in the spirit of esports to impose sanctions on individual players,” reads the statement from ESL Gaming, which imposed a ban on teams with “apparent ties” to the Russian government. “The Virtus.pro and Gambit players are therefore welcome to compete under a neutral name, without representing their country, organization or their teams’ sponsors on their clothing or otherwise.”
For now, Molodkin and his partner, the Ukrainian game developers working on “Puzzles for Clef,” intend to stay in Kyiv. Still, he admitted he had entertained the possibility of moving to Poland or Portugal if the invasion ended with Ukraine’s integration into Russia.
“We hope that the war ends soon, and that we will win so we won’t have to leave,” he said. “We were never some kind of super patriots for our country, but we still love it. We never intended to leave this place. All our families, relatives and friends are here, and we just don’t want to leave.”
It hasn’t escaped Molodkin that “Puzzles for Clef,” the game he started to help players navigate one crisis — the covid-19 pandemic — is now newly relevant in a totally different crisis.
“When we started this project, the pandemic was very active and people were just isolated a lot. So we wanted to create some really cozy experience,” Molodkin said. “Even though it’s not the pandemic that’s the hot topic at the moment, [our game] will still help people with coping after the wartime[.] We really hope that having this peaceful game will help people with soothing their thoughts and wounds.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated his call for direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the invasion of his country, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv said Russia’s overnight attack on a nuclear power plant amounted to “a war crime.”
Zelensky made his appeal despite saying he is living through “a nightmare” and “cannot even imagine the type of man who would plan such acts.”
After a Russian projectile hit the Zaporizhzhia plant in southeastern Ukraine overnight, igniting a fire that caused widespread alarm, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv on Friday accused Russia of committing a war crime with the attack on Europe’s largest nuclear plant.
Zelensky also weighed in Friday, calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Only such a step could prevent attacks like the one on the Zaporizhzhia plant, which could have been as bad as “six Chernobyls,” he said.
While the attack on the plant did not trigger a release of radioactive material, Rafael Mariano Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, warned of the “risks that we may all incur” if fighting around nuclear sites rages on. Russian forces seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and surrounding area early Friday.
After negotiations Thursday, Russia and Ukraine said they agreed to limited local cease-fires to facilitate “humanitarian corridors.” The limited agreement was prompted, in part, after several cities in Ukraine’s south warned that they were running out of supplies. The United Nations refugee agency said more than 1 million people have fled Ukraine and at least 249 civilians have been killed so far, adding that the true death toll is likely “considerably higher” because of the difficulty of conducting accurate counts in war zones.
The first news conference since the invasion began was a colorful one, as Zelensky, who appeared energetic at moments and exhausted at others, again praised the Ukrainian people for their fight against the invasion. That is why, he said, he had to be “so strong and so decisive.”
But Zelensky said only “an immediate closure of sky over Ukraine” would guarantee that Russia would not bomb nuclear installations.
A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman pushed back Friday, blaming Ukraine for the fire at the plant and calling it a plot to discredit Moscow. At a Friday news briefing, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged Russians to rally around Putin on the ninth day of the invasion.
In London, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he is seeking an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council on Friday to discuss the fire at the Zaporizhzhia plant.
In his Friday video, Zelensky urged Russians not to “remain silent” following the overnight attack. He said Russians should remember the impact of the deadly 1986 catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, then under the control of the Soviet Union. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: D.C. trails Maryland and Virginia in civil rights efforts
By Chad Reese
Inside the John A. Wilson Building, which houses the mayor's office and the chambers of the D.C. Council. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Chad Reese is the assistant direct of activism at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm and advocacy organization.
Since state legislative sessions kicked off, bills to end qualified immunity have been introduced in Virginia and Maryland. But one regional player remains conspicuously absent from these efforts to restore justice for victims of civil rights abuses: D.C.
Qualified immunity is a federal legal doctrine that protects government employees — even when they violate constitutional rights — from lawsuits, whether it’s a school official strip-searching a student or police officers stealing cash and rare coins.
Just last year, there was hope that the D.C. Council might provide a work-around for the problem and give victims a path toward justice. During a committee hearing on the D.C. Police Reform Commission’s recommendations, multiple advocacy groups — including the American Civil Liberties Union, DC Justice Lab and the Institute for Justice — testified in favor of the commission’s recommendation to allow suits in local courts and shared model legislation they agreed would get the job done.
If citizens are not above the law, then government officials are not above the Constitution. But, because of qualified immunity, it is remarkably difficult to sue government officials when they violate your rights. Qualified immunity involves a judge-created two-part test: (1) A rights violation has to take place (2) that violation must be “clearly established” in case law. Realistically, that means you can have your day in court only if you can find another case with the exact same circumstances and where a judge ruled against the government. Because judges can throw out cases without even deciding if a rights violation occurred, this often ends up being an insurmountable barrier.
Unfortunately, there’s been no indication from the D.C. Council since the 2021 hearing that this issue is a priority, despite a new study from the Institute for Justice ranking D.C. as one of the worst jurisdictions in the country for victims of rights abuses.
D.C. — along with along with Delaware and four other states — received an F grade. That’s because, just like federal immunity doctrines such as qualified immunity, D.C.’s courts and local laws work to keep the courthouse doors shut tight against citizens suing to defend their rights.
It is almost impossible, for instance, to sue D.C. government employees for inflicting personal injury because of doctrines that are even more protective of officials than federal qualified immunity. Plus, D.C. lacks a local-level analogue to Section 1983, the federal civil rights statute.
The good news is that states are more than capable of creating pathways to justice, and D.C. just needs to catch up. New Mexico leads the nation in state-law redress thanks to the New Mexico Civil Rights Act. Enacted in 2021, that law lets victims sue the employer of any government worker who violates their state constitutional rights and specifically bans the use of “qualified” or “sovereign” immunities. The result? A guarantee that courts have to take rights violations in that state seriously — and an A-minus grade.
Why is D.C. lagging behind other states instead of leading on government accountability?
Some might point to crime rates, particularly carjackings, as evidence that now is not the time to consider police reform legislation.
But those following the qualified immunity debate know that “police accountability vs. crime reduction” is a false dichotomy. As Evan Douglas, a former patrol officer with the Metropolitan Police Department, wrote last August, “Ending qualified immunity is the best path forward for both law enforcement and the public; doing so will allow judges to hear the most grievous cases without endangering police officers.”
Those worried that ending qualified immunity will make policing more difficult need only look to the Supreme Court’s decision in Graham v. Connor, which clearly instructs courts to adopt the perspective “of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight,” when examining an officer’s actions.
In other words, ending qualified immunity doesn’t mean government officials will be punished for good-faith, split-second mistakes. But it would help restore trust and accountability to government officials who rely on that trust to keep their communities safe.
At the end of the day, the D.C. Council has a clear choice: It can move forward and end qualified immunity, giving victims of civil rights abuses a path to justice, or it can continue to ignore the problem while residents pay the price with their constitutional rights. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The National Mall has plenty of space for two new museums
By Judy Scott Feldman
The Lincoln Memorial and the reflecting pool on the National Mall. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Judy Scott Feldman is chair of the National Mall Coalition.
The Smithsonian is trying to identify locations for two new museums: the National Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. Where will they go?
In the authorizing legislation, Congress identified several potential sites on or near the National Mall. One prime option under consideration is to repurpose the historic Arts and Industries Building next to the Smithsonian Castle, but that building would be difficult to upgrade to modern museum standards.
The National Mall Coalition has a better idea.
Renowned local architect Arthur Cotton Moore has devised a compelling and viable solution for two new museum sites on the Mall. Moore has a long and respected reputation in Washington, having worked on innumerable new and preservation projects, including renovation of the Library of Congress. He is a longtime vice chair of the coalition.
In his solution, side-by-side new museums would be situated along the Mall’s historic north-south axis, as defined by the 1791 L’Enfant Plan and the 1901 to 1902 McMillan Plan, the blueprints for the Mall. The north-south axis extends from the White House to the Jefferson Memorial; it intersects, at the Washington Monument, the east-west axis from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol.
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Moore’s two sites would create a new pedestrian destination on what is poorly utilized Mall acreage south of the Washington Monument across 15th Street from the Holocaust Museum. This area currently is occupied by crisscrossing access roads; those roads can be relocated. Because flooding is a serious concern at the Tidal Basin, the new sites would be raised on an embankment. The good news is the latest federal government climate change maps project that storm surge in 2050 would not inundate this higher ground. A pedestrian bridge elevated over the roads running between the Washington Monument and Tidal Basin would correct the existing dangerous pedestrian crossing.
Importantly, Moore’s concept creates two plots, each about the size of the National Museum of the American Indian, that not only are located on the existing historical Mall but also, in effect, would complete an unrealized “Washington Commons” element of the historic McMillan Plan that envisioned a lively cultural destination on this land. Because of the creation of a large Tidal Basin, it was never realized. Instead, the modern automobile took over this valuable Mall space.
The museum sponsors have a difficult choice to try to find space on the already full Mall or to locate somewhere else in the capital. We agree with the 24 members of the Senate who wrote Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III on Nov. 22, that the museums belong on the Mall to highlight “the untold and overlooked contributions” of both women and Latinos.
The senators’ letter, however, is mistaken in one important respect. It states, “From our perspective, the National Mall is the two-mile park from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, bounded on the north and south by Constitution and Independence Avenues.” This definition is inconsistent with the historic L’Enfant and McMillan plans’ vision of the Mall as a unified landscape laid out across two axes, with the Washington Monument at its heart. Moore’s proposed museum sites are exactly consistent with, and reinforce to important effect, the historic concept of the Mall cross-axis connecting the iconic symbols of American democracy.
Ultimately, any long-term solution for future Mall development, and the inevitable future museums and monuments, is for Congress to charter a new McMillan-type commission to update the McMillan Plan. A new comprehensive, forward-looking vision could again expand the Mall’s boundaries, as the McMillan Plan did more than a century ago to include the Lincoln Memorial, and give new breathing space for the Mall to grow along with our ever-evolving democracy.
For now, Moore’s idea reveals a new opportunity for enhancing an underutilized area of the existing Mall, and provides an ingenious solution to enhancing the American story on this beloved stage for our democracy.
For freedom-seeking Ukraine, a home in Georgetown | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Youngkin can deliver the promise of environmental justice for underserved communities
By Robert "J.R." Gurley
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Feb. 15 in Richmond. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Robert “J.R.” Gurley is president of the Virginia chapter of the Frederick Douglass Foundation.
When Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) met with members of the Frederick Douglass Foundation to celebrate Black History Month, he told us, “Every Virginian deserves dignity and respect, the opportunity to pursue our dreams, and inclusion in the Virginia family.”
Toward this end, we look forward to working with the governor to make the promises of environmental justice a reality for underserved communities in our state.
Youngkin recognized February as a time to “honor the history and achievements of Black Americans,” and we will need his leadership to tackle the challenges and expand the opportunities before us.
More than 1 million people live in rural Virginia, yet often these communities’ opinions are overshadowed by profit-driven companies that seek to build on their untouched land. Why should the future economic viability of these communities be traded for just another corporate project?
The ongoing review of the proposed Green Ridge mega-landfill is the most recent example of environmental injustice for a rural Virginia community, and its outcome will have lasting consequences. As a native Virginian who has worked to ensure opportunity for all, I believe that rejecting this proposed mega-landfill would be a major step in closing the gaps and inequalities within our state.
The landfill is planned for Cumberland County, a historically poor and rural area whose population is more than 30 percent Black. The landfill threatens to deprive the local community of the economic stability and opportunities it sorely lacks. Multiple studies demonstrate the unintended, adverse consequences of a mega-landfill on a local economy, along with its obvious environmental implications, such as air and water pollutants. Most notably, the presence of a mega-landfill drives down the values of houses and other real estate assets in the vicinity. As a result, depreciation of real estate values will hinder Cumberland County’s economic ability to grow, attract new businesses and investments, and level the playing field with its neighboring communities.
The negative economic effects of the mega-landfill will have a disproportionate impact on Black communities, because of their historic disadvantages and lack of safety nets. Roughly 74 percent of Cumberland County residents own their homes, so declining land value would be felt far and wide and could have a generational impact on many families.
The mega-landfill plan blatantly ignores the socioeconomic and environmental implications it will have on Cumberland County and Virginia as a whole.
This is why the Frederick Douglass Foundation, together with the Healthcare Equality Network, is encouraging our state’s leaders to take action and cement themselves as beacons of hope for these overlooked communities.
Fortunately, there is an existing law that can help to delegitimize and reject the Green Ridge project. Passed in 2020, the Virginia Environmental Justice Act defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of every person, regardless of race, color, national origin, income, faith, or disability, regarding the development, implementation, or enforcement of any environmental law, regulation, or policy.” However, the presence of this mega-landfill would disproportionately pollute essential necessities of the nearby Black communities, including access to clean water from their private wells. Clearly, the mega-landfill’s adverse and disproportionate effects on our underserved communities do not reflect the "fair treatment” envisioned by our state’s law.
Upholding the Virginia Environmental Justice Act and blocking this project will not only protect these vulnerable individuals from the physical and economic impacts of living near an unwanted landfill, but it also could be the first step in restoring these communities’ confidence in the state leadership that has neglected their health and prosperity for far too long. To demand Youngkin solve all of Virginia’s historic challenges of environmental and social justice would be unrealistic and counterproductive. However, by empowering those who are consistently overlooked and rejecting projects that are blatantly harmful to neighboring communities, we can set our state on the right path of tackling this deeply entrenched issue. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Ukrainian city, now under attack by Russia, was targeted by Hitler during the German onslaught of World War II
The final Nazi assault on Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine on Oct. 8, 1941, which the Nazis entered as the Russians withdrew from the town. Here an advance party of shock-troops is seen assaulting a Russian position, already burning furiously, just prior to the entry into the town. (AP Photo) (AP)
It was September 1941. Adolf Hitler had launched the World War II invasion of Russia in June, and the Germans surrounded Kyiv on Sept. 16. Three days later the city fell.
“Circumstances require us to act resolutely," Russia’s president Vladimir Putin said of his attack on Ukraine.
And when two pincers of the German army linked up at Lokhvitsa, 130 miles east of Kyiv, a huge Russian force was trapped in a giant pocket. That evening the German general, Franz Halder, noted in his diary, “The...ring is closed.”
For the besieged Russians in one area, loudspeakers were reportedly set up to blare recorded speeches of dictator Josef Stalin, according to author Alan Clark’s 1965 book, “Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45.”
Clark cited the Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte who pitied the Russian soldiers “who died so terribly lonely a death on this battlefield amid the deafening roar the cannon and the ceaseless braying of the loudspeaker."
“It was just ghastly,” he wrote, according to historian David Stahel’s 2012 book, “Kiev 1941."
“And those were only a few from our immediate area," the soldier wrote. "Blood was literally running down the side from the floorboards of the truck, and the driver...was white as a sheet.”
“Shells were still flying about, but we were ordered to get ready to march, not for retreat, but enroute to Kiev,” he wrote.
The weather was awful. It seemed to rain constantly. “Soaked to the skin we dig in and our slit trenches fill quickly with water,” another German wrote. “The rain continues to pour down…We are lying in water and yet we are thirsty.”
Kyiv became a key target of the German air force, which aimed to reduce the city to “rubble and ashes,” Stahel wrote. The city was attacked by German Stuka dive bombers, an airplane often equipped with a siren. The raids spread panic and despair, he wrote.
“All around, wherever you look there are German tanks, sub-machine guns or machine gun nests,” a Russian officer wrote. “Our unit has already been defending on all sides for four days within this circle of fire. At night the surrounding ring is clear to see, illuminated by fire that lights up the horizon.”
On another battlefield in Ukraine, Stahel wrote, 100 dead German soldiers were found hanging by their hands from trees. Their feet had been soaked in gasoline and set afire. It was a gruesome method of killing the Germans called wearing “Stalin’s socks."
As the Germans closed in on Kyiv, residents dug tank traps, built bunkers, and planted mines.
On Sept. 19, 1941, German Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau’s Sixth Army fought its way into Kyiv. By noon, the Germans had seized the old citadel and raised the Nazi flag, the swastika.
In the end, 665,000 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner in the Kyiv pocket, historian and retired U.S. Army Col. David M. Glantz, wrote in his 1995 book, “When Titans Clashed.”
Many of them would die of starvation, on death marches, in labor and concentration camps. Of the 3.3 million Russians captured in 1941, roughly 2 million would be dead by the next year, Stahel wrote.
“The Battle of Kiev was undoubtedly a great tactical victory,” the German general Heinz Guderian, a key architect of the Nazi triumph, wrote after the war.
Kyiv would suffer under Nazi occupation for 779 days.
During that time, an estimated 100,000 people — Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Communists, and Russian prisoners — were murdered at Babi Yar, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Before Kyiv was retaken by the Russians in a ferocious battle in 1943, it would become one of the largest individual mass murder sites of World War II, the museum says.
This week a Russian missile struck near Babyn Yar, now within Kyiv’s city limits, adding five more people to the notorious death toll. | null | null | null | null | null |
SBC President Ed Litton won’t run again, saying he will instead focus on racial reconciliation
The Rev. Ed Litton speaks at the Southern Baptist Convention on June 15, 2021. (William DeShazer for The Washington Post)
Saying he wants to spend his time focusing on racial reconciliation, Southern Baptist Convention President Ed Litton announced via video Tuesday that he would not seek a second term in office.
Litton will become the first SBC president in four decades to forgo seeking reelection after his first one-year term. The last SBC president to do so was the famed Memphis megachurch pastor and radio preacher Adrian Rogers.
Litton, a pastor from Mobile, Ala., was elected in June 2021 by a few hundred votes. He narrowly defeated Georgia pastor Mike Stone, who was a member of the Conservative Baptist Network (CBN), a group that believes the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has become too liberal.
In his video, Litton highlighted some of the disaster relief work that Southern Baptists have done this past year, including after the wildfires in Colorado and the tornadoes in Kentucky, as well as ministry done by Baptist churches at the southern border of the United States.
He also outlined plans for what he called “gospel-centered racial reconciliation,” based on a program Litton had been part of in Mobile, where he is pastor of Redemption Church. As part of that work, Litton met regularly with pastors from different ethnic groups in Mobile, and they worked together on issues of race in their communities.
Litton said he hopes to introduce a national version of the approach taken in Mobile that can be embraced by Southern Baptists, calling it a “very simple strategy to pursue this kind of work that will bridge the racial divides throughout our communities throughout North America and bring about a gospel-centered racial reconciliation.”
“I believe this work is something God is calling me to do and to devote myself to for the next five to 10 years of my life,” he said. “But I also believe that at this important moment in the life of our convention, it is best for me to do so as a pastor and not from the office of president of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
The announcement came two days after the SBC marked “Racial Reconciliation Sunday,” an annual event introduced in the 1960s. Social media postings about the annual event were criticized over the weekend as a sign of liberalism.
On its website, the CBN denounced a recent online event focused on racial reconciliation in the SBC because the event featured Litton and New Orleans pastor Fred Luter — the first Black president of the SBC — along with other speakers but did not include Memphis theology professor Lee Brand, the current first vice president of the SBC. Brand is Black.
“Southern Baptists are asking how they can take seriously claims that current SBC leadership genuinely seeks racial unity when they decline to include in ‘racial unity’ discussions the current first vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention,” read a statement on the CBN website.
Leaders of the CBN and other critics of current SBC leaders have also repeatedly said that the denomination is becoming “woke” and that Baptist leaders have embraced critical race theory, a term about structural racism that has become a rallying cry for political conservatives.
Litton’s first eight months in office were marked by controversy in the SBC. Members of the denomination’s Executive Committee, which oversees the SBC’s operations between annual meetings, feuded over how to proceed with a sex abuse investigation — a controversy that ended with more than a dozen members of the committee resigning last fall.
Not long after his election, critics of Litton discovered that he had used without attribution parts of several sermons from J.D. Greear, his predecessor as SBC president. The controversy became known as “Sermongate.” Litton said that Greear, a friend, had given him permission to use parts of his sermons but that Litton did not give Greear, a North Carolina megachurch pastor, credit, nor did he tell his congregation that parts of the sermons came from Greear.
Litton later apologized for failing to give credit. He alluded to Sermongate — which set off a heated discussion about plagiarism in sermons — in Tuesday’s video as well as to some of the other struggles the SBC has faced in recent months.
“It’s no secret that this has been a difficult year,” Litton said in his video. “As we fought to emerge from two years of a pandemic, many of our pastors and churches are struggling. We’ve also navigated some painful conflicts and intense discussions right now. And I want to speak as plainly as I can. As I have previously stated, I take responsibility for my own failures and shortcomings, for mistakes I’ve made in the preparation and delivery of particular sermons.”
In closing his video, Litton appealed to Southern Baptists to work together to address issues such as sexual abuse and racism, despite the polarized times.
“We must not fail to reckon with our past mistakes,” he said. “But we must commit to seeking for a better future where racism and prejudices are relics of the past and our churches are safe places for survivors and welcoming and wanting people of all ethnicities.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The Babyn (Babi) Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. Five people were killed in the March 1 attack on Kyiv's main television tower which is near Babyn Yar, the site of World War II's biggest slaughter of Kyiv Jews and a place of memorial and pilgrimage. (Dimitar DilkoffI/AFP via Getty Images)
As soon as a projectile hit Kyiv’s main radio and television tower, a short walk from the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center nearby, on Tuesday, Jews worldwide reflexively shuddered.
It is unclear if the Russians targeted the memorial center. More likely, they were interested in knocking Kyiv’s television stations off the air. Five people were killed in the strike.
But the proximity to the site where 33,771 of the city’s Jews were systematically shot dead by machine-gun fire in a two-day killing spree in 1941 is traumatic. Officials at Israel’s Yad Vashem Memorial issued a statement condemning the attack. So did leaders at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish Committee.
For many Jews, Ukraine brings up memories of pogroms, antisemitism and Nazi collaboration. Between 1.2 million and 1.6 million Jews were killed in Ukraine during the Holocaust. But Jewish life in Ukraine is no longer what it was — neither under the Nazis nor the Soviet Union.
And incredibly enough, in 2019 Ukraine elected a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, by a landslide — 73 percent of the vote.
Though he is not a religious Jew, Zelensky has never shied from professing his Jewish identity. Some of his family members were executed by the Nazis, including three great-uncles.
On Tuesday, he tweeted forcefully after the strike: “what is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?”
Despite efforts to suppress the memory of Babyn Yar during the Soviet years, Ukraine has conducted Babyn Yar commemorations on a regular basis since it became independent in 1991, recognizing that under the auspices of the Nazi regime and its collaborators, tens of thousands of Jews and others, including Roma, were executed.
A menorah-shaped monument to the Jewish victims of Babyn Yar was erected on the 50th anniversary of the mass shooting. Last year, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial opened there.
“Today’s generation is certainly not antisemitic like it was in the Soviet Union,” said Andrej Umansky, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization who grew up in Kyiv.
In fact, said Umansky, “We know so much more about what happened in Ukraine to the Jews thanks to Ukrainian scholars.” Many of whom, he noted, are not Jewish. (Under the Soviets, there was no public discussion of the Holocaust. The Babyn Yar site, for example, acknowledged only that Soviet citizens had been massacred there.)
Recent surveys bear a new attitude toward Jews. A 2017 Pew Research study found that Ukraine was the most accepting of Jews among all Central and Eastern European countries. Only 5 percent of Ukrainians in the survey said they would not accept Jews as fellow citizens. In neighboring Russia it was 14 percent, in Poland 18 percent and in Romania 22 percent.
That makes Russia President Vladimir Putin’s pretext for invading, aimed at “denazifying” Ukraine, ring particularly hollow, if not utterly hypocritical.
There is no state-sponsored antisemitism.
“The world opened up and people started to learn about religions and nationalities,” said Misha Galperin, a native of Ukraine who is now president and CEO of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. “People began to travel elsewhere. They got a different exposure to Israel, among other places. Odessa has a regular flight to Tel Aviv. It’s only three hours. It became real and humanized.”
Mark Levin, CEO of the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, said that after the mass exodus of Jews from Ukraine in the wake of the Soviet Union’s fall, Jewish populations in both Ukraine and Russia were able to rebuild and expand their communities though they are not nearly as large as they used to be. There are estimates of between 50,000 and 100,000 Jews in Ukraine.
“In the last 30 years there’s been a renaissance of Jewish life and a building of new Jewish institutions, be it religious, cultural, educational, social,” Levin said. “These are important Jewish communities in the Diaspora today.”
Haredi Jews from across the world travel by the thousands each year to Uman, a city in the central region of Ukraine, that is a pilgrimage site where a famous Hasidic rabbi is buried.
Most Ukrainians, said Umansky, see Jews as part of Ukraine’s history.
“Life in the Soviet Union was constant antisemitism against Jews,” said Umansky. “It’s not like that now.” — Religion News Service | null | null | null | null | null |
By Emily McFarlan Miller
A gay pride rainbow flag flies along with the U.S. flag in front of the Asbury United Methodist Church in Prairie Village, Kan., in 2019. (Charlie Riedel/AP)
The United Methodist Church has delayed its General Conference meeting for a third time because of the continuing coronavirus pandemic. In response, some conservative United Methodists have announced they will preemptively leave the denomination rather than wait for the long-anticipated meeting.
Delegates to the General Conference were expected to take up a proposal to split the denomination over disagreements on the full inclusion of its LGBTQ members at the meeting of its global decision-making body scheduled for Aug. 29 to Sept. 6 in Minneapolis.
But General Conference organizers announced Thursday evening they are postponing that meeting to 2024 because of the continuing pandemic.
Obtaining vaccines and travel visas remains a challenge for delegates traveling outside the United States, according to the Commission on General Conference.
“We engaged in a fair, thorough, integrity-filled discussion of the alternatives,” said Kim Simpson, chairwoman of the Commission on General Conference.
“The visa issue is a reality that is simply outside our control as we seek to achieve a reasonable threshold of delegate presence and participation. Ultimately our decision reflects the hope that 2024 will afford greater opportunity for global travel and a higher degree of protection for the health and safety of delegates and attendees.”
But one group of theologically conservative United Methodists said Thursday it is not willing to wait any longer to discuss a split and announced plans, through its Transitional Leadership Council, to launch the Global Methodist Church on May 1.
“Many United Methodists have grown impatient with a denomination clearly struggling to function effectively at the general church level,” said the Rev. Keith Boyette, chairman of the Transitional Leadership Council, which has been guiding the creation of the Global Methodist Church for the past year and president of the Wesleyan Covenant Association.
“Theologically conservative local churches and annual conferences want to be free of divisive and destructive debates, and to have the freedom to move forward together. We are confident many existing congregations will join the new Global Methodist Church in waves over the next few years, and new church plants will sprout up as faithful members exit the UM Church and coalesce into new congregations.”
Meantime, the Reconciling Ministries Network, which advocates the full inclusion of LGBTQ United Methodists, said Thursday it supports the commission’s decision to once again postpone the General Conference.
“Let us be honest here: holding a pandemic-era General Conference with myriad barriers to safe and equitable participation would not have been a Christ-like way to be the Church,” the group said in a written statement.
Still, the statement said, leaders of the Reconciling Ministries Network lament the delay in discussing a possible split.
“These circumstances only prolong the road to justice for our LGBTQ+ kin and to parity in the global Church,” it said.
The General Conference, which usually gathers delegates from across the globe every four years, originally was planned for 2020. But the Commission on General Conference postponed the denominational meeting twice because of the continuing pandemic, delaying an expected vote on a proposal to schism after a decades-long debate over whether LGBTQ United Methodists can marry or be ordained.
The commission’s latest decision comes as United Methodists have published letters and statements arguing for and against postponing the 2022 meeting.
Last month, 170 delegates from around the globe sent a letter to the commission urging its members to delay the conference until 2024 to “properly ensure the health, safety, and participation of all attendees.”
Travel still carries health risks in 2022, according to the letter. And the General Conference doesn’t have the kind of technology and systems it would take to make sure delegates from all over the world could fully participate in the meeting.
“Especially because of the seriousness of the legislation that this General Conference will be debating, including the possibility of ‘amicable separation,’ it is important that the Commission on the General Conference err on the side of caution and ensure that no delegate, particularly those from Central Conferences” — the denomination’s regional bodies outside the United States — “is precluded from full, in-person participation because of the ongoing COVID pandemic,” the letter read.
Meantime, competing letters from African delegates argued both for and against another postponement.
The 2020 General Conference originally had been set for May 5 to 15, 2020, in Minneapolis. That meeting was rescheduled for Aug. 29 to Sept. 7, 2021, when the Minneapolis Convention Center announced it was restricting events during the pandemic.
It was rescheduled again for 2022 at the same venue.
It is not immediately clear whether the postponed 2020 General Conference will replace the regularly scheduled 2024 General Conference.
Delegates to the General Conference are expected to take up a proposal to split the denomination, called a “Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation.” The proposal, negotiated by 16 United Methodist bishops and advocacy group leaders from across theological divides, would allow churches and conferences to leave with their buildings and other assets to form new Methodist denominations, including a conservative “traditionalist” Methodist denomination that would receive $25 million over the next four years.
Calls to split one of the largest denominations in the United States have grown since the 2019 special session of the United Methodist General Conference approved the so-called Traditional Plan strengthening the church’s bans on the ordination and marriage of LGBTQ United Methodists. — Religion News Service | null | null | null | null | null |
Bear Grylls, Author, “Never Give Up: My Life in the Wild”
Bear Grylls, known as one of the most recognizable faces of outdoor adventure worldwide joins Washington Post’s Dave Jorgenson on Thursday, March 10 at 1:00 p.m. ET to discuss his autobiography, “Never Give Up.” Grylls offers a behind the scenes look at the scariest and most exciting survival adventures from his multiple TV series, including those with President Barack Obama, tennis star Roger Federer and Oscar winner Julia Roberts.
Author, “Never Give Up: My Life in the Wild” | null | null | null | null | null |
The mayor of Mariupol warns that his city faces a ‘humanitarian catastrophe.’
This image from video shows a flaring object landing in grounds of the nuclear plant in Enerhodar, Ukraine, in the early hours of March 4, 2022, as Russian forces shelled Europe’s largest nuclear plant. A fire broke out at the plant. (Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant/AP) (AP)
MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — Russian forces seized a massive nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine on Friday as they continued their siege of cities along the country’s southern coast, including Mariupol, where the mayor warned that the city was “on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe.”
West of Mariupol in Kherson, a regional capital and the first major city to fall to Russian forces, a city council member said Russian equipment and soldiers were “absolutely everywhere.”
The number of casualties caused by fighting has been impossible to verify as the violence quickly spreads across Ukraine. The United Nations human rights office said Friday that at least 331 civilians had been killed, while Ukraine’s emergency services put the number of civilian fatalities much higher, at more than 2,000. A U.N. statement said most of the casualties had been caused “by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multi-launch rocket systems, and missile and airstrikes.” Russia has acknowledged the deaths of about 500 of its troops, while Ukrainian officials claim that as many as 10,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or captured.
Russia’s seizure of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power facility, Europe’s largest nuclear plant, came after shelling that set part of the complex on fire, raising fears across Europe of a catastrophic accident. The United Nations nuclear watchdog reported that the blaze had not affected “essential” equipment and that Ukraine’s regulator reported no change in surrounding radiation levels. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tweeted that the Energy Department also had seen no elevated radiation readings.
“The plant’s reactors are protected by robust containment structures and reactors are being safely shut down,” Granholm wrote. Even so, the blaze sparked international alarm and underscored the perils of a war fought around nuclear sites.
The city’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, said officials were hoping that talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials would establish a “period of silence” to restore utilities such as electricity and water. “Our key task is to provide Mariupol residents with food and essentials,” he said in a message posted online by the city council.
Kherson, meanwhile, faces a “global catastrophe” if a humanitarian corridor is not opened soon to allow civilians to be evacuated and for food and medicine to be delivered, the secretary of the city council said.
“In Kherson, we are running out of food — literally, we can still last for maybe three, four days,” the city council secretary, Galina Luhova, said by telephone. “We’re running out of medicines, we’re out of baby food, we are running out of diapers, and we are running out of first aid in hospitals.”
With the conflict now in its second week and Russia sending nearly all of its assembled military power into neighboring Ukraine, satellite images are providing glimpses of the scale of the invading force, as well as the devastation the fighting has wrought. Analysis of satellite imagery by the U.S. firm Maxar Technologies shows bridges and roads damaged and homes destroyed in towns and cities across the country.
In Chernihiv, a strategic northern city on a highway that links the Ukraine-Belarus border with to Kyiv and where a fierce battle has been waged in recent days, the images show damaged roads, bridges and homes. Some factories appear to have been leveled. On Friday, Chernihiv’s regional authority said in a Facebook post that Russian strikes killed 47 people, including nine women.
Alarm over the fate of Ukraine’s cities has intensified amid growing evidence that Russian forces are indiscriminately targeting urban centers. In its report Friday, Human Rights Watch said it had documented the use of cluster munitions on the basis of two witness interviews and the analysis of 40 videos and images. Some of these sources show the “explosion signatures and rocket remnants” consistent with the delivery of cluster munitions from 9M55K Smerch rockets, the group added.
Because of the indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions — they scatter over a wide area small bomblets that could explode even after the fighting has ended — Human Rights Watch claimed that Russia may have committed a war crime by using them.
“Using cluster munitions in populated areas shows a brazen and callous disregard for people’s lives,” said Steve Goose, the arms director at Human Rights Watch. “If these deadly acts were carried out either intentionally or recklessly, they would be war crimes.”
Fahim reported from Istanbul and Cheng from Seoul. Ellen Francis in London, and Hannah Knowles and Steven Mufson in Washington contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
On Nov. 2, Walmart recalled about 3,900 bottles of the “Lavender & Chamomile With Gemstones” spray and five other Better Homes & Gardens products. (Consumer Product Safety Commission)
The cases led to the recall of thousands of products, and warnings went out telling consumers who had bought the sprays to immediately stop using them.
Randy Hargrove, a Walmart spokesperson, told The Washington Post in an email that the company has taken active steps to alert consumers about the recalled products since October.
“Walmart has actively communicated to customers who purchased the product,” Hargrove told The Post.
Better Homes & Gardens, which is listed on the product label, referred questions to Walmart.
Julia Petras, an epidemic intelligence service officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, detailed in an interview with The Post how scientists raced to find out what was sickening the patients. Petras co-wrote a study published Thursday that revealed the woman’s cause of death.
“We became involved immediately, and we went to the [woman’s] house in April to do soil and water samples,” Petras told The Post.
Then more cases emerged.
In June, a 4-year-old girl in Texas went into septic shock after days of fevers and vomiting. Doctors diagnosed her with melioidosis — a rare bacterial disease mostly found in moist soil and water but that can also be found in contaminated liquids. Three months after the girl was discharged, she was unable to speak and remained in a wheelchair.
Around the same time, a 53-year-old Minnesota man was admitted to the hospital after his family found him weak and in an altered mental state. Days later, a blood culture would reveal the presence of the same bacterium that afflicted the 4-year-old Texas girl and the woman in Kansas: Burkholderia pseudomallei.
Petras joined the investigation when a fourth case was discovered in Georgia in July. A 5-year-old boy had died after melioidosis spread to his brain, and an autopsy revealed the same bacterium found in the other three patients.
“It was odd to me,” Petras, who reviewed the patients’ medical records, told The Post. “That struck me as unusual, and it got us thinking about the most probable root of exposure for these [four] people.”
Petras and her team of scientists began considering — since the patients had not traveled to a region where the bacterium is prevalent — whether they might have inhaled a product that got to their respiratory tract, she said.
“That’s when we really started testing on products that could be sprayed in the air,” Petras told The Post. CDC scientists and local and state health departments visited the homes of the four patients to conduct interviews and collect more samples of household and cleaning products and food items, as well as personal-care products.
She added: “We made sure that we cast a very wide net, and we didn’t rule anything out. Any product we thought could harbor this bacteria, we sampled.”
Consumers who had purchased the product was warned not to use it.
On Nov. 2, Walmart recalled about 3,900 bottles of the “Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray With Gemstones” and five other Better Homes & Gardens products “due to the presence in two bottles of a rare and dangerous bacteria and risk of serious injury and death,” the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: RT is a terrible network. But don’t ban it.
On Thursday, the production company behind RT America ceased its operations after the channel was dropped by several U.S. TV distributors. Such trends could continue. If technology companies decide to block RT content on their own, that is their call and should be part of broader efforts to actually combat disinformation.
But ultimately, RT’s ability to broadcast its twisted narratives is not an important press freedom issue, and governments shouldn’t turn it into one. Instead, they should be focusing their efforts on amplifying independent outlets and voices in Russia — ones that are being shut down and targeted by Russian authorities by the day. | null | null | null | null | null |
Dorothea Koehn
Janine Prantl
Displaced Ukrainians after arriving by train in Lviv, Ukraine, on March 3. (Jonathan Alpeyrie/Bloomberg)
Michael Doyle is a professor at Columbia University and senior fellow of the Carnegie Council, where he directs its refugee and migration project. Dorothea Koehn is a master’s of international affairs candidate at Columbia and a research fellow at the Carnegie Council. Janine Prantl is a postgraduate legal fellow for the Global Strategic Litigation Council for Refugee Rights.
In response to the aggression against Ukraine, the United States, the European Union and democratic states across the globe (even banker-friendly Switzerland) have frozen the assets of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his oligarchic cronies. This has clearly failed to halt the onslaught. The question is what to do now.
The answer is, it is time to seize the frozen assets and use them to support humanitarian aid in Ukraine and the more than 1 million Ukrainians forced to flee as refugees. If and when Ukraine is freed from Russian occupation, any remaining funds can be used to help rebuild the country. In the meantime, the seizure would relieve the European taxpayers who will pay to support the refugees and punish the responsible aggressors.
The sums involved are potentially enormous. Various economists have estimated Putin’s wealth between $100 billion and $200 billion — largely held in offshore accounts and properties outside of Russia, and therefore potentially subject to seizure.
But he is not the only Russian whose assets are vulnerable. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimated in a 2017 paper that the amount of Russian wealth held outside the country was about $800 billion — roughly equal to the total wealth of all Russians inside Russia. The scale of this financial diaspora was corroborated by the 2021 Pandora Papers, which identified 4,400 Russians with stakes in offshore companies. Forty-six of them were identified as oligarchs, including oil magnate and close Putin associate Gennady Timchenko, who was sanctioned by the United Kingdom last week. Seizing the assets of Putin’s supporters among these wealthy and well-connected Russians could be a game changer.
The legal basis for seizure is firmer than many might guess. Relying on executive powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, President Biden issued an executive order last month seizing about $7 billion that the Afghan central bank had deposited in the Federal Reserve of New York. The administration plans to divide these assets: half for families of 9/11 victims and half for humanitarian and other assistance in Afghanistan.
The Magnitsky Act authorizes the U.S. government to freeze the assets of any foreigners, anywhere in the world, accused of human rights violations under international law. Canada, which has a similar Magnitsky Act, is considering a further step: A bill (S-217) before the Canadian Parliament would authorize Canadian courts to confiscate the frozen assets and redistribute them to address humanitarian needs of people displaced by the violations. In Europe, where the E.U. provides a legal basis for freezing assets of those who violate human rights, member states have taken individual action: In 2017, a Spanish judge ordered the seizure of properties owned by an uncle of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a money-laundering case.
We have surveyed possible legal authorizations. The precedents include U.N. Security Council seizure of funds held by Iraq’s government, as a response to unlawful occupation of Kuwait — but that method is not available in the current crisis, since Russia has veto power in the Security Council. Another route would seem to be through the International Court of Justice, where Ukraine has instituted proceedings against Russia on the basis of the genocide convention. But the ICJ, which settles disputes between states, does not issue judgments against individuals and has no enforcement mechanism. A better venue might be the International Criminal Court, which pursues crimes perpetrated by individuals. Though neither Russia nor Ukraine is a party to the ICC, Ukraine has declared it would accept the court’s jurisdiction, and the ICC prosecutor has announced his intent to start an investigation.
Most promising are recent cases in Europe under “universal jurisdiction,” which allows for prosecution of international crimes in domestic courts no matter where or by whom they were committed. Noteworthy decisions include the recent conviction in Koblenz, Germany, of a high-ranking Syrian official for torture committed in Syria; he was sentenced to life in a German prison.
Similarly, courts in other countries can be mobilized to hold Putin and his allies culpable for the Ukrainian aggression and the consequent war crimes. Democratic states do not have the Russian aggressors in custody, but we can confiscate their overseas wealth, sending a clear message that their actions are not cost-free.
Once seized, the funds from Putin and his fellow oligarchs could be allocated to the E.U. to fund its newly proposed refugee assistance facility, which offers countries 10,000 euros for each refugee to assist in temporary settlement. Alternatively, some could be allocated to the U.N. refugee agency.
Seizure of assets should be conducted respecting principles of international law. There would need to be a review process so oligarchs listed for sanctions could appeal their status. Before actual seizure, provision should be made for a swift hearing in case intelligence agencies might have misestimated an oligarch’s role as a Putin enabler.
NATO has ruled out a military response. Economic sanctions, wielded well, can not only punish and raise the cost of continuing aggression but sustain and support the victims. It is time to take this next step. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Two legal developments show the Jan. 6 investigation is closing in on Trump’s inner circle
By Randall D. Eliason
The affidavit in support of the criminal complaint against Joshua James as seen on March 2. (Jon Elswick/AP)
On Wednesday, Joshua James pleaded guilty in federal court to seditious conspiracy: conspiring to use force to hinder the execution of any law of the United States. James is one of 11 members of the extremist militia group the Oath Keepers recently indicted on charges related to this and other crimes. He admitted in court that he and other members traveled to Washington with weapons and military gear, planning to take up arms against the government and prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. As part of his plea, James has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
James is the first Capitol riot defendant to plead guilty to sedition. His cooperation could be a major breakthrough as prosecutors investigate the scope of the conspiracy to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power, potentially moving beyond the Oath Keepers themselves. For example, James and other Oath Keepers provided security for Trump confidant Roger Stone during some of the events of Jan. 6. Now prosecutors have a cooperating witness who may provide a firsthand account of what role, if any, Stone and other senior Trump advisers may have played in orchestrating the insurrection.
Also Wednesday, attorneys for the House Select Committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 dropped another bombshell. They told a federal judge in California that the committee thinks Trump himself may have committed federal crimes in connection with the attempts to overturn the election.
The allegations came in litigation concerning former Trump attorney John Eastman, the architect of the universally discredited theory that on Jan. 6, Vice President Mike Pence could simply have rejected the electoral votes of certain states that Biden won and declared Trump the winner. Eastman was one of the Trump advisers who occupied the “war room” at the Willard hotel in early January, orchestrating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results. The House committee subpoenaed Eastman’s emails and he has withheld thousands of them, claiming they are protected by attorney-client privilege.
In the court filing, attorneys for the committee argue that the emails should be turned over, based on the rule that communications with an attorney are not privileged if made in furtherance of a crime or fraud. They allege that Trump was communicating with Eastman in furtherance of at least two federal felonies: conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of a congressional proceeding.
It’s true that these allegations are in a civil proceeding limited to the question of attorney-client privilege, which is a far cry from a criminal indictment. Prosecutors seeking to prove a crime would face a much higher burden of proof. But the implications for the criminal investigation are clear. For the first time, government attorneys have told a federal judge that Trump may have committed crimes in connection with Jan. 6. These claims have now moved from the realm of social media chatter into serious allegations in federal court. If the judge finds that the crime-fraud exception applies, the shock waves will be even stronger.
The significance here is not whether the Select Committee will make a formal criminal referral to the Justice Department, although that certainly seems likely. The department doesn’t need a referral to act, and it actually might be counterproductive. The significance is what these allegations say about how the committee’s attorneys — a number of whom are former federal prosecutors — feel about where the evidence is pointing. We can be confident that the prosecutors at the Justice Department are in touch with these attorneys and are paying attention.
In his recent speech marking the first anniversary of Jan. 6, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the department would pursue those responsible “at any level,” whether or not they were physically present at the Capitol. As Garland noted, in a large investigation like this, prosecutors typically build cases against lower-level players, persuade them to cooperate, and gradually move up the ladder to more serious charges and higher-level defendants. It takes time to do this properly. But this week’s events further confirm that this is exactly what’s happening.
These investigations are moving inexorably into the activities of those in Trump’s inner circle. As investigators proceed up the ladder of alleged conspiracies, people such as Eastman and Stone are only one rung from the top. And we all know who’s sitting on that top rung. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) attend a White House event Thursday. (Sarah Silbiger/For The Washington Post)
For the second time in two nights Thursday, viewers of Fox News’s prime-time programming were greeted with a call to assassinate Vladimir Putin. First came Sean Hannity saying we need to “cut the head of the snake off” amid Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Then Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appeared on the same show Thursday and suggested that Russians themselves should do the deed. “I’m begging you in Russia … you need to step up to the plate and take this guy out,” Graham said.
Graham’s call was greeted with bipartisan condemnation, and The Post’s Julian Mark laid out the many pitfalls of the approach after Hannity’s call the night before. Thus far, both of them remain on an island, despite allegations that Putin has engaged in war crimes. (NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Friday accused Putin of “a blatant violation of international law.”)
Instead, though, this led to a hugely deadly power struggle which included several civil wars — and that ultimately culminated in Rome installing its first emperor, Augustus. Some believe Caesar’s assassination prevented a separate and extremely deadly conquest by Caesar, but it certainly went a long way to birthing the Roman Empire.
Stauffenberg in July 1944 hid a bomb in a briefcase and tried to detonate it near Hitler. It wound up merely injuring Hitler and killing several others. Stauffenberg was soon executed, along with as many as 5,000 others amid Hitler’s purge. He wound up continuing to lead the country the better part of a year, ultimately committing suicide when Allied forces closed in on him.
The plot coincided with a necessary attempt to launch a coup after Hitler’s death — to prevent someone like Heinrich Himmler from assuming power. But it’s not at all clear that it would have succeeded, especially given the nationalistic fervor that still existed in the country. What’s more, it had already become clear by 1943 that Allied forces were closing in on Hitler, and the final year of Hitler’s reign wound up being exceptionally deadly.
A separate 2006 paper from Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher J. Zorn argued that countries in which there is a “regularized” means of succession — which there is in Russia, in contrast to many countries which have seen assassinations of leaders — the effects of assassination are “muted”: | null | null | null | null | null |
One week of the Ukraine war, analyzed
Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. An observation from Middlebury College political science professor (and friend of The Daily 202) Allison Stanger: “The Polish and Ukrainian national anthems — both countries sharing the experience of Russia periodically swallowing them up — begin with the exact same opening line: Poland/Ukraine has not yet perished.”
Russia's advance is slower than expected, and four other takeaways from one week of war
Russia’s massive assault on Ukraine is just over a week old, but it’s still possible to draw some tentative conclusions about the conflict and the various actors involved, even if the duration and outcome of the war are not clear.
Here are five takeaways, laced with a few questions, from the operation that began Feb. 24.
First, parts of Russia’s advance have unexpectedly bogged down. But just parts.
As the war began, Western intelligence officials painted a grim picture of Moscow wiping out Ukraine’s defenses and taking its capital, Kyiv, in a matter of hours. Russia’s air force would seize control of the skies, pound ground targets and enable its army to grind its way to … wherever Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted.
Kyiv and other major cities have endured hundreds of Russia missiles and artillery barrages, but most are still standing and under Ukrainian control. Some Russian forces are apparently suffering from shortages of food and fuel. A 40-mile-long Russian convoy of tanks and combat vehicles seems to have stalled 20 miles outside of the capital.
But, but, but: The Russians are not having nearly as much difficulty along Ukraine’s southern coast, and Moscow’s war machine can still vastly overpower Ukrainian forces. Military experts still expect the country to fall.
Second, 1 million Ukrainians have left, with ominous ramifications.
The figure comes from the United Nations. Evening newscasts are full of images of desperate Ukrainians – many of them women and children, as men opt to stay behind to fight.
Beyond the vast human consequences, there could be political aftershocks in Europe. Putin surely knows how refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war upset the continent’s politics, feeding right-wing populist movements of the sort he encouraged — the most successful one being Brexit.
Last year, Belarus brought in thousands of migrants, including many Iraqi Kurds, and tried to push them over the border into Poland. The European Union denounced this as a “hybrid attack.” The Daily 202 wonders whether one of Putin’s second-order priorities might not be to stress Poland and other E.U. members among Ukraine’s neighbors.
Third — and this is a wow — the invasion really transformed Germany.
Berlin had said for years it would not link the Nord Stream 2 pipeline — built to bring Russian natural gas to energy-hungry Germany — to geopolitical events like the looming invasion. Germany had a policy of not allowing arms sales to conflict zones and cultivated close economic ties with Russia.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has now reversed all three, freezing the pipeline, giving the green light to weapons flowing to Ukraine, and imposing tough sanctions on Russian financial institutions.
Germany’s shift — Scholz has called it “the turning of an era” — is a symptom of a remarkable broader phenomenon. There’s a joke in D.C. and Brussels that “only Putin could have united NATO and made the EU make quick decisions.”
The Russian president may have decided to roll the dice because he saw a NATO alliance shaken by the Afghanistan withdrawal, a European Union almost perpetually in disarray and Washington helping to break up a French submarine deal with Australia. While it’s still too soon to know the final outcome, the West’s unified response suggests he miscalculated.
Fourth, President Biden is holding the line on the U.S. role.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly begged for a NATO-enforced “no-fly zone” over his country. The United States is no stranger to the concept, having helped set them up and enforce them in the 1990s in Iraq and over the Balkans, as well as in Libya in 2011. (President Barack Obama opposed imposing one over Syria, as the regime’s Russia-backed air force dropped devastating barrel bombs on civilians.)
Biden has made clear he won’t sign on because you can’t just declare a no-fly zone — you have to enforce it by shooting down violators. And be ready to go rescue any of your pilots if they’re shot down. That would put NATO in direct confrontation with Russia, with the possibility of escalation and the possibility — however remote — of triggering World War III.
Fifth, it’s not the first information war, but it may be the most impressive.
Considered in the right light, the Trojan Horse was an example of information warfare, and secrets and lies have been a staple of violent conflict forever. But there’s no doubt that Russia’s war in Ukraine has been defined by the use of information.
The Daily 202 sees three major components.
First, there was the unprecedented American declassification of intelligence about Russian intentions to invade and Moscow’s plans to try to justify its actions, undercutting its reasoning in the court of global public opinion (but not stopping the onslaught).
Second, far more conventional, has been Moscow’s war on information at home and in Ukraine. On Wednesday, a Russian airstrike struck a major TV broadcast tower in Ukraine. At home, Putin has shut down independent news media while flooding state-run media with propaganda to defend the invasion.
The third and most interesting component: Zelensky’s social-media communications with his people and the world, personally assuring everyone he is in charge and staying put. Then there are the videos of captured or killed Russian soldiers, as well as unarmed Ukrainians confronting the armed men and armored convoys Putin deployed.
The message: Ukraine is fighting. But for how long?
Russia has seized a nuclear plant in Ukraine
“A Russian projectile hit the Zaporizhzhia plant in southeastern Ukraine overnight, igniting a fire that caused widespread alarm but triggered no release of radioactive material,” David L. Stern, Danielle Paquette, Amy Cheng, Adela Suliman and Ellen Francis report.
U.S. Embassy says nuclear plant attack is ‘a war crime:’ “It is a war crime to attack a nuclear power plant,” the embassy tweeted. “Putin’s shelling of Europe’s largest nuclear plant takes his reign of terror one step further.”
Zelensky calls for no-fly zones: Zelensky “said that only ‘an immediate closure of sky over Ukraine’ would guarantee Russia wouldn’t bomb nuclear installations.”
Russia passes law punishing journalists for ‘fake’ war news: “Russia’s parliament passed a law Friday criminalizing journalism that contradicts the official line on the war against Ukraine.”
Stoltenberg says the coming days are ‘likely to be worse’: “The fact that Russia shelled a nuclear plant overnight ‘just demonstrates the recklessness of this war and the importance of ending it,’ [NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg] said Friday.”
“The unemployment rate fell to a new pandemic low of 3.8 percent last month, from 4 percent in January, the Labor Department said Friday. Wages, meanwhile, held steady, climbing by 1 cent. Annual wages are up 5.1 percent, although they have not kept up with inflation,” Abha Bhattarai and Andrew Van Dam report.
“I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” former attorney general William P. Barr said in a Friday interview with NBC News, John Wagner reports. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress, and I think that that was wrong.”
“In an interview on Fox News' ‘Fox and Friends,’ Graham said he hopes someone in Russia will understand that Putin is ‘destroying Russia and you need to take this guy out by any means possible,’” NBC News’s Rebecca Shabad reports.
Exclusive to the Post: The Roger Stone tapes
Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, allowed Danish filmmakers to document his activities over more than two years for the forthcoming documentary, “A Storm Foretold.” The Washington Post reviewed more than 20 hours of video filmed for the project.
“The footage, along with other reporting by The Post, provides the most comprehensive account to date of Stone’s involvement in the former president’s effort to overturn the election and in the rallies in Washington that spilled over into violence on Jan. 6,” Dalton Bennett and Jon Swaine report.
Stone privately coordinated post-election protests with prominent figures.
In January, he communicated by text message with leaders of far-right groups that had been involved in the attack on the Capitol.
On several occasions, Stone told filmmakers or his associates that he remained in contact with the president.
How did the documentary come about? Read more here: The story behind the documentary
Stone’s thoughts on Trump: “In an Inauguration Day call with a friend, Stone directed his rage at the man who had confided in him and consulted with him for decades, denouncing Trump as ‘a disgrace’ and expressing support for him to be impeached. ‘He betrayed everybody,’ Stone said.”
China said its friendship with Russia had ‘no limits.’ But at what cost?
Chinese President Xi Jinping wanted to work with Russian President Vladimir Putin to present “a united front against the U.S.,” the Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei reports. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and now China is facing the consequences.
“In Beijing … some officials say they are fearful of the consequences of getting so close to Russia at the expense of other relationships—especially when Russian aggression against Ukraine is isolating Moscow in much of the world.”
‘My city’s being shelled, but mum won’t believe me’
Oleksandra, 25, has been sheltering in the bathroom of her flat in Kharkiv. She’s been speaking regularly to her mother, who lives in Moscow. “But in these conversations, and even after sending videos from her heavily bombarded hometown, Oleksandra is unable to convince her mother about the danger she is in,” BBC’s Maria Korenyuk and Jack Goodman report.
U.S. offers temporary legal status to Ukrainians
“Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas created an 18-month Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program for Ukrainians who have lived in the U.S. since March 1, allowing eligible people to apply for work permits and deportation protections,” CBS News’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports.
Biden isn’t going after the GOP on Russia. Some Democrats want him to.
Biden hasn’t mentioned those within the GOP who have praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. His reluctance to draw the comparison reflects the delicate nature of the foreign conflict — though Republicans have continuously slammed him as “weak” on Russia, Politico’s Christopher Cadelago and Laura Barrón-López report.
Now, some Democrats are calling for Biden to take a stand. “‘We’re Zelenskyy Democrats. And they’re Putin Republicans’ would be my bumper sticker,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), said in an interview Wednesday.
Biden outlines new measures to boost U.S. manufacturing
“Goods can be purchased by the federal government with tax dollars if just 55 percent of their parts were manufactured here. On Friday, President Biden plans to unveil a new regulation upping that standard to 75 percent,” Annie Linskey reports.
The scope: “White House officials said Thursday evening that they do not know what percentage of goods purchased by the federal government will meet the new threshold.”
Postcards from Earth’s climate futures, visualized
Based on the latest United Nations climate report, “The Washington Post envisioned how three locations around the globe could be transformed depending on humanity’s emissions trajectory over the next 80 years. These postcards from Earth’s possible futures show what the world stands to lose as temperatures tick upward. They also reveal how much can still be saved.”
Is there room for patriotism on the left?
For the Nation, Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin and Rafia Zakaria, author of “The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan," debate.
Kazin: Yes. “One cannot engage effectively in the democratic process without being part of a community of feeling … Patriotism will continue to flourish, whether or not progressives embrace it. When left intellectuals and activists abandoned speaking in terms of American ideals in the late 1960s and after, they lost the ability to speak convincingly to their fellow citizens.”
Zakaria: No. “Patriotism not only gives unearned entitlement to those waging war but also places collective blame on those against whom the war is waged. If you dally with patriotism, then its mother, nationalism, will come along and tell you that noncitizens deserve their misfortune.”
Rick Scott: Why I’m defying Beltway cowardice
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) published a stinging op-ed in the WSJ on Thursday night, defending his decision to release a Republican policy platform, which was sharply rejected Tuesday by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.
Scott’s plan included a proposal for all Americans to pay some form of income tax. (“I went out and made a statement that got me in trouble. I said that all Americans need to have some skin in the game. Even if it is just a few bucks, everyone needs to know what it is like to pay some taxes. It hit a nerve,” he writes in the op-ed.)
One standout line: “If we have no bigger plan than to be a speed bump on the road to socialism, we don’t deserve to govern.”
Biden will make an announcement “delivering on his Made in America commitments” at 12:25 p.m.
The president will have a bilateral meeting with Finnish President Sauli Niinistö at 2:30 p.m. in the Oval Office.
Biden will leave the White House for New Castle, Del., at 5:35 p.m., arriving at 6:40 p.m.
The new Batman hits screens
In honor of the new Batman movie’s release today, The Post’s Michael Cavna and David Betancourt offer up their definitive ranking of modern movie Batmen.
Each entry rates the actor’s overall performance — but also his vibes and batsuit. (Robert Pattinson’s vibe: What brooding dudes do in the shadows. And his batsuit? Precisely built for function over form.) | null | null | null | null | null |
New York City mayor Eric Adams speaks during a news conference in which he announced the scaling back of COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates within the city, Friday, March 4, 2022, in New York. (New York City Mayor’s Office via AP) (Uncredited/New York City Mayor’s Office)
NEW YORK — New York City, which has long prided itself as having the nation’s toughest COVID-19 safety protocols, will do away with several of them next week, Mayor Eric Adams announced Friday, including mandatory masking in public schools and vaccination requirements at restaurants, entertainment and cultural venues. | null | null | null | null | null |
Maria Glod named The Post’s Deputy Local Editor
Announcement from Local Editor Mike Semel:
We are thrilled to announce that Maria Glod will be the next deputy local editor, effective immediately.
Maria, one of the newsroom’s strongest and most well-regarded leaders, has been at the center of some of The Washington Post’s most ambitious stories and lines of coverage. For nearly 25 years at The Post, Maria has shown impeccable judgment, a penchant for collaboration and a compassionate and supportive style of leadership.
This is a natural move for Maria, who has spent her entire career in Metro. She was a reporter in our bureaus in Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince George’s counties, as well as downtown. As an editor for the past 11 years, she has worked across the newsroom to bring forth our best coverage of huge events.
She led Post coverage of the Paul Manafort trial in 2018, bringing together National and Metro to provide up-to-the-minute news in what ended up becoming a precursor to the LUFs we use today. The live file combined news with smart context and analysis, deeply reported posts and reader-friendly explainers.
Maria also had a key role in coverage of the Navy Yard mass shooting, as well as the congressional baseball shooting and the shootings at the Virginia Beach municipal building, the racial justice protests, police violence and rising homicides. She also led coverage of the 2014 trial of former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell, coordinating one of The Post’s early and successful live blogs and offering readers a new way to follow a trial.
As a reporter, she covered the cases of the D.C. snipers, some of the first DNA exonerations and racial disparities in Fairfax County schools.
Maria has been central to moving Metro into its digital-first mentality and has plans to strengthen that evolution.
She joined The Post in 1997 as Loudoun County’s cops reporter, and covered the Fairfax schools, national education and the Maryland federal courts before becoming an editor in 2011. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Bucknell University and lives in Chevy Chase with her husband, Mike, son Alex and their pandemic pup.
Please join me in congratulating Maria on her new role. | null | null | null | null | null |
Severe storms and snow to target Plains and Upper Midwest Saturday
It’s the first of two storm systems that will affect large parts of the country through Tuesday.
Already the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center has hoisted a level 2 out of 5 slight risk of severe weather across Iowa on Saturday, with rotating thunderstorms or supercells likely in a narrow corridor during the evening hours. Damaging winds, hail and a couple of tornadoes are possible.
Temperatures will drop some 30 degrees or more behind the storm, the fledgling taste of spring soon to be replaced by a bitter air mass, with readings in the single digits and teens by Sunday in parts of the northern Plains and Upper Midwest.
Meanwhile, temperatures will swell into the 70s and 80s from the Southern Plains to the Mid-Atlantic Sunday and Monday ahead of the second system, which will bring stormy weather and, by Tuesday, a drop in temperatures.
On Friday morning, the GOES West weather satellite was peering down on a swirl of cloud cover working ashore into southern California. That marked an energetic high-altitude disturbance, or pool of cold air and low pressure aloft, set to work northeast over Four Corners region before intensifying over the Colorado Rockies on Friday night.
A “string of pearls,” or a broken line of low-topped rotating thunderstorms, will probably form near the Missouri River somewhere in the Omaha to Sioux City, Iowa, stretch. Temperatures will probably be in the mid-60s in west central Iowa to the lower 70s in southwestern parts of the Corn Belt. Humidity won’t be through the roof, but the combination of springlike warmth and subtle humidity may prove just enough to get pockets of air to rise.
If that happens, an abrupt change in wind speed and direction with height, known as “wind shear,” will foster rotation within the storms. Any cells that form will have the propensity to produce damaging winds to 60 mph, quarter-sized hail and a few brief tornadoes. Storms will rapidly move to the northeast, probably affecting areas like Fort Dodge, Jefferson and Des Moines, before weakening with the setting sun as they progress east.
The deepening, or strengthening, low pressure system will swirl south a shot of frigid Arctic air in its wake, the cold coming in multiple waves. The first will yield a 30-degree temperature drop along the cold front Saturday evening before a reinforcing cold air mass slides southeast on Sunday.
A second storm system will eject out of the Southwest Sunday night into Monday night, bringing a swath of heavy rain and some embedded thunderstorms from the Southern Plains all the way to the East Coast along a cold front. A narrow area of snow will probably develop from the Great Lakes to the interior Northeast. By Tuesday, the front will push away record-challenging warmth in the 70s and 80s from the South to the Mid-Atlantic on Sunday and Monday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: College as a safe space for those wary of coming out
Joel Mittleman’s Feb. 27 op-ed, “What gay men’s stunning success can tell us about the academic gender gap,” illuminated an interesting sociological phenomenon. I can personally — and through hundreds of stories from friends and acquaintances — verify the author’s contentions. While I “passed” in high school and avoided any direct attacks, I was always on high alert for actions, even small gestures, that would give me away as a gay boy. I felt safe in the classroom, however, because I knew teachers would value my hard work and keep me safe.
Even in college, I continued to hide. I got married later and did not finally come out fully until I was 41. By then, much of the developmental lag (i.e., not having developmentally appropriate experiences, such as dating, until much later) had occurred. I am still feeling the effects of those missed years.
I would add one more factor that the author missed: Many gay boys go to college to escape their families, hometowns and churches in order to become the men they really are, able to express their full identity and personality. At 41, I fled to D.C. and graduate school, where I could finally come out. Luckily, I still have wonderful relationships with my family (my mother, son and ex-wife), something that millions of gay men have to forgo if they choose to come out.
Charles H. Jones, Washington | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Gendered pay discrimination isn’t limited to soccer
U.S. women's national soccer team members Alex Morgan, left, and Megan Rapinoe during a news conference in New York in May 2019. (Seth Wenig/AP)
Regarding Sally Jenkins’s Feb. 23 Sports column, “With payout, U.S. Soccer all but admits to its insults”:
It’s imperative for the general public to know about gendered pay discrimination in sports, especially when the argument for the discrimination tends to be geared toward merchandise revenue and fan participation. As a former athlete, I also found this settlement to be an admittance that the insults and gaslighting that the players were receiving were planned, strategic and intentional. I’m a fan of women’s college and professional basketball and often see arguments online regarding why WNBA players should not be paid at the same rate as NBA players, which is disheartening.
Though I have never played at the professional level, I can attest to the amount of time, energy and effort that is put into the game as a female player. I believe that this settlement, and this column, can give me even more of an argument for why discrimination in women’s sports is still wrong whether the naysayer is a fan or not.
Florena Makuiza, Herndon | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Insurrectionist’s sentence was too lenient
Adam Johnson, seen here inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced to 75 days in jail and a $5,000 fine for his actions that day.
Regarding the Feb. 26 Metro article, “Man who toted Pelosi lectern gets 75 days’ jail”:
I was appalled to read that Adam Johnson, who illegally broke into the Capitol with other insurrectionists and paraded around with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, received a sentence of only 75 days in jail and a $5,000 fine. This is an insult to Ms. Pelosi (D-Calif.) and to the three police officers who died as a result of this angry mob. Many other officers were also severely beaten, and the Capitol sustained $1.5 million in damage. I think future insurrectionists, hate groups and militias will only be emboldened by judges giving a slap on the wrist to these violent criminals instead of holding them accountable for their actions.
Z. W. Keiser, Silver Spring | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The link between national security and climate change
Firefighters watch as a helicopter drops water on a wildfire in Laguna Beach, Calif., on Feb. 10. (Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP)
In separate editorials published on Feb. 25 [“Why Ukraine matters”] and Feb. 28 [“A tipping point”], The Post opined about climate change (citing wildfires raging around the world) and the geopolitical significance of oil and gas supply chains (as evidenced by the war in Ukraine). While the views in each of these articles had merit, they were actually evidence of a failure to see the forest for the trees.
The two problems are not independent.
It is time to see carbon fuels as not just an environmental threat but a threat to the security of all nations. Bad actors have for too long used the West’s addiction to carbon fuels as leverage against policies designed to limit the power and inclination of these regimes to create instability through war and terrorism.
It is time for an international commitment to fund a massive, cooperative program to research and develop new energy technologies that are scalable, affordable, clean, safe and easily constructed. While critics might decry the search for a “silver bullet” that would meet these criteria, it is a failure of imagination not to try. We should exhaustively investigate all possible solutions, be they advanced small modular nuclear, super-hot geothermal, improved solar, etc. We can no longer set goals and hope they will be achieved. We must act as if our existence depends on it — because it does.
Elliott Light, Naples, Fla. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Racist ideology runs counter to our foundational principles
In his Feb. 27 op-ed, “Bigotry is reprehensible, but it’s not a federal offense,” George F. Will asserted that prohibiting the distribution of racist ideology is policing thought.
As Mr. Will should know, speech has never been entirely free. I was taught in elementary school civics class that the Bill of Rights does not sanction falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Speech that incites violence or in other fashion causes harm is justifiably forbidden.
There is little doubt that the free distribution of racist ideology motivated the murderers of Ahmaud Arbery, who were so deluded by their beliefs that their camp released the video of the murder in the expectation that it would exonerate them. The United States, created as a bastion of tolerance, is at a crossroads. We must now ask if we are expected to be tolerant of intolerance itself, even as it eats away at civil society. If one of the central tenets of our country’s origin is the self-evident truth that all are created equal, we should not shrink from prohibiting the expression of racist ideology that argues otherwise and is antithetical to that foundational principle.
Frank Venuti, Earlysville, Va. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Russia’s economic struggles will likely limit its military operations
Russian armored vehicles are loaded onto railway platforms at a railway station in the Rostov-on-Don region not far from the Russia-Ukraine border on Feb. 23. (AP)
Regarding the Feb. 27 news article “West vows to punish Russia with blow to its central bank”:
Recently, much has been said about Russian military strength — excluding its weapons of mass destruction — as traditionally measured by the raw numbers of troops, armored vehicles and aircraft. However, the emphasis on numbers obscures an even more important measure of a nation’s ability to conduct military operations, i.e., the strength of the economy underlying the nation and supporting its military services. And there lies the Russian Achilles’ heel.
A nation’s gross domestic product is the measure of the value of all its economic activities and is the accepted method for analyzing and comparing the economies of the world. And when we look at this measure of strength, we find not a Russian colossus but a nation best characterized as rather limp. Russia has an enormous area of 6.6 million square miles, a population of 145 million and a GDP of about $1.48 trillion. Impressive? Hardly. By contrast, South Korea has an area of just 38,700 square miles, a population of only about 51 million people and a whopping GDP of $1.64 trillion. Yes, you read those statistics correctly. South Korea’s GDP generally is ranked 10th-largest in the world, while Russia’s is 11th.
In short, Russia is a nation with feet of clay. Decide for yourself whether strong sanctions can strangle Russian aggression.
Judson B. Fisher, Haymarket
I’ve heard Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) cynically claim that President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. I am aware of absolutely no evidence that supports this claim. On the contrary, our involvement in Afghanistan seemed to have had no deterrent effect on Mr. Putin’s decisions to attack Georgia in 2008 or to invade Ukraine in 2014.
I would submit that our exit from Afghanistan has actually improved our posture to deal with the current crisis. First, we are no longer squandering military and financial resources on that interminable war. Second, were we still enmeshed in Afghanistan, Mr. Putin could have used it as a lever against the United States by aiding the Taliban in its insurgency against us and the Afghan government, increasing our pain. Because Mr. Biden succeeded in finally extracting us from the Afghanistan quagmire, something three other U.S. presidents failed to accomplish, Mr. Putin does not have that lever to use against us. Republican lawmakers should consider acting like Americans in the face of threats to democracy at home and abroad, rather than as politicians trying to score cheap political points.
Jaime Esteva, Franconia | null | null | null | null | null |
Lights illuminate the Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery plant, operated by Rosneft PJSC, in Novokuibyshevsk, Samara region, Russia. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg)
This is not the position of President Biden, however. The White House has repeatedly declined not only to halt imports of oil from Russia, but the drastic sanctions the nation has faced since last Thursday’s invasion have excluded the oil and gas industry. In a news briefing on Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki offered the administration’s position.
“[The] factor we’re looking at here is the impact on the gas pump for Americans and reduction of supply in the marketplace,” she said. “A reduction of global supply would have an impact on raising prices. So that’s the prism we look at it through.”
This is a not-uncommon distillation of the debate: righteous annoyance at giving Russia money as it invades an allied state versus concern about the economic effects of a surge in gas prices. But this distillation, like most distillations, excludes nuance that can help explain the challenge more fully.
In short, ending Russian imports is certainly possible, but it would probably cost consumers more. But a key, often overlooked point is that oil is not endlessly fungible, complicating the picture — and reinforcing that reducing dependence on oil overall would help avoid similar situations in the future.
Russia makes up only a small part of the United States’ crude oil imports. In December, the most recent month for which data are available from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), Russian imports of crude oil were only about 1.4 percent of total imports. What’s more, the U.S. was producing more than 128 barrels of crude oil domestically for every barrel of crude imported from Russia.
If you’ve been tracking this, you’ll notice that this figure seems low: isn’t it the case that Russia makes up something like 8 percent of imports? And it is — because crude oil is not the sole component of the petroleum economy.
There are a wide array of oil and petroleum products that are imported to and exported from the U.S. Where Russia contributes the most is in what’s called “unfinished oil products,” a different category than the crude oil with which we’re most familiar. More than half of the country’s imports of unfinished oil products — oils requiring further processing, in the EIA’s definition — come from Russia. While this is only a small part of the petroleum economy, about 4.5 percent in December, it’s where Russian imports are most essential.
So the question then becomes why we import this oil from Russia and whether we can do without. For that, we’ll turn to an excellent explainer from the Wall Street Journal’s Collin Eaton. A central factor is that it’s less expensive for coastal refineries disconnected from oil networks in the middle of the country to import oil from overseas.
“The U.S. buys Russian oil in part to feed refineries that need different grades of crude with a higher sulfur content to make fuel at top capacities,” Eaton writes. “U.S. refineries were designed decades ago to use heavier grades of crude, often with higher levels of sulfur, when domestic supplies were lower.” About three-quarters of Russian imports go to refineries on the east and (primarily) west coasts to be refined.
What we’re talking about here isn’t really feasibility but profitability. Despite the lack of pipelines from Texas and Oklahoma to coastal refineries, we could ship domestic oil to the coasts, at higher cost. Since the White House’s stated goal is to keep costs down (certainly in part because of the political fallout from seeing prices start climbing again), that is a less appealing option.
But costs are increasing anyway. The price of a barrel of crude oil spiked after Russia invaded Ukraine (as marked by the vertical line on the graphs below). The price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. has also risen as the crisis in Ukraine loomed. This despite the lack of sanctions on Russian oil broadly and despite the fact that Russian oil is still being imported to the U.S.
The desired outcome of sanctioning Russian oil, of course, is to limit the resources flowing into the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But, again, context. About 60 percent of Russia’s exports go to Europe. Another 20 percent goes to China — Russia’s biggest customer and a sympathetic partner in Russia’s current efforts. Limiting imports to the United States would have an effect, but a limited one.
What the situation reinforces is an aspect of fossil-fuel usage that we often gloss over or ignore in these debates: one way to reduce the need to import oil is to reduce the need to use oil at all. As critics of the administration tried to use the situation in Russia as a way to criticize Biden’s canceling the Keystone pipeline (an issue that is also complex), it was hard not to notice that many of those critics were also advocates of expanding fossil-fuel usage broadly. If we used less oil overall, we’d need less oil — but that is not the desired outcome of the oil industry or of the politicians who support it. Of course, it is also not a good short-term solution.
Polling from The Washington Post and our partners at ABC News found that about half of Americans support additional sanctions even if energy prices (as opposed to gas prices) increase, with a wider split by party on that response. | null | null | null | null | null |
Fox Sports television, which employed Mr. Warne as a commentator, quoted a family statement saying the cause was a suspected heart attack at his villa in Koh Samui. Police in Thailand said Mr. Warne’s body was transferred to a hospital for an autopsy. Police added they did not find any wounds on Mr. Warne’s body.
Known as “Warnie,” Mr. Warne took 708 test wickets in 145 matches for Australia from 1992-2007, second only to Sri Lanka great Muttiah Muralitharan’s 800 test wickets from 133 matches.
In 1998, the Australian Cricket Board admitted that Mr. Warne and Mark Waugh were fined for providing information to an Indian bookmaker during Australia’s tour of Sri Lanka in 1994.
Mr. Warne’s exploits off the field took their toll on his marriage, and he split from wife Simone, the mother of his three children. He later had a relationship and became engaged to English actress Elizabeth Hurley in 2010. The pair eventually split in 2013. | null | null | null | null | null |
As the Epstein case did, Kizer’s circumstances have brought international attention to the realities of sex trafficking, highlighting the way that vulnerable people can be groomed into abusive relationships. After being championed by celebrities and the organizers of the #MeToo movement, Kizer’s case received renewed attention during the uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
But even as Kizer has become a symbol to many, her potential fate has remained the same. She could still spend the rest of her life in prison for the night in 2018 when she admitted to shooting Randall P. Volar twice in the head, lighting his house on fire and fleeing in his car. She is still living with the traumatic effects of the exploitation she experienced.
A 2019 Washington Post investigation showed that the Kenosha Police Department knew Volar was abusing underage Black girls for nearly three months before his death. After another Black girl fled from his home, a raid turned up hundreds of videos of child sexual abuse in his possession, including videos he had made of Kizer and girls who appeared to be as young as 12. But while the investigation continued, police and prosecutors allowed Volar to remain free.
Even if Barber loses on that front, he could win on another: Instead of Kizer’s being acquitted of first-degree homicide, he argued, her charge should be only mitigated, meaning reduced from first-degree to second-degree. If his argument is successful, Kizer could no longer receive a life sentence, but she could still face up to 60 years in prison if convicted. Some justices seemed open to that argument.
If Kizer’s public defenders believe that her circumstances meet that definition, they will present their case to a circuit court judge. If the judge agrees that there is “some evidence” her crimes fit, then the case could go before a jury. Kizer’s team could present evidence of what she endured, expert testimony on how trauma affects the brains of children and explanations for each act she committed.
That opportunity would be a significant shift from previous cases in which child sex-trafficking victims were charged in the deaths of their abusers. In most, evidence about the trafficking they experienced was ruled inadmissible or objected to as defaming the deceased. As a result, most victims with stories similar to Kizer’s have been painted as “child prostitutes” or juvenile delinquents making up stories to cover their tracks. Most have been convicted or taken plea deals for lengthy sentences.
If Kizer does go to trial, the attorneys will be choosing jurors from the same community where the Rittenhouse case unfolded. And though the legal defenses will be different, advocates say the national attention on the case and the potential for further unrest could add pressure on the state to offer Kizer a plea deal instead of going to trial. | null | null | null | null | null |
The program will start in hundreds of locations next week with the goal of increasing access to lifesaving treatments, say Biden officials.
Thousands of pharmacy locations, such as CVS MinuteClinics, are expected to implement the one-stop, test and treat program beginning later this month. Photo by Amanda Voisard/for The Washington Post)
Consumers will be able to walk into a clinic at a CVS or Walgreens, get tested for coronavirus and, if the results come back positive, go home with a free course of antiviral medicine under a new “test to treat” program announced by President Biden this week as part of his new pandemic road map.
“At this point, we have enough paxlovid and molnupiravir to provide the medications,” said Tom Inglesby, senior adviser to the White House covid response team, referring to the two antiviral drugs.
The one-stop approach to disseminating the pills is crucial because the medications must be taken within five days of the onset of symptoms to be effective against covid.
“We have a therapeutic window [that] closes every day you let it go by,” said Gerald Harmon, a family medicine specialist in Georgetown County, S.C. and president of American Medical Association.
Inglesby said that by the end of March, the administration anticipates thousands of Test to Treat spots will be set up in pharmacy-based walk-in health clinics, where patients can see a licensed health provider, as well as in community health centers and long-term care facilities.
Participating providers will be listed on a website by the end of next week, so users can search to find the nearest location offering test to treat services, he said. That website, which hasn’t yet launched, will be continually updated as more pharmacy locations join.
Many doctors praised the idea of the program but worried about how it would be executed. For starters, the antiviral medications cannot be prescribed for everyone. Only people twelve or older with underlying health conditions that put them at heightened risk for severe infection are eligible for Pfizer’s pill, and only those 18 or older with underlying health conditions can receive Merck’s drug.
Both pills also have contraindications. Pfizer’s pill cannot be taken alongside several common medications, including some that treat heart conditions and control cholesterol. It is also not recommended for people with severe kidney or liver problems. Molnupiravir does not have known drug interactions, but is not recommended during pregnancy, or for those under 18 because it could affect bone and cartilage growth.
Under the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization, the pills must be prescribed only by licensed physicians, advanced practice registered nurses, and physician assistants because of the complexity of the medications. But Inglesby said the pharmacy-based clinics have licensed health care providers on-site who can screen patients for possible contraindications before prescribing the pills.
After the FDA authorized the drugs in late December, both Pfizer and Merck began ramping up production, but struggled to meet demand during the peak of the omicron wave in January. Since then, doctors say the pills have become more widely available, but can still be tough to obtain because of pharmacy staffing shortages and weekend closures.
This month, Inglesby said, 1 million additional courses of paxlovid will be sent to pharmacies, including those that will be participating in the test to treat program. In April, another 2.5 million courses of Pfizer’s drug will be shipped out. In addition, Pfizer has indicated it can deliver 10 million treatment courses of paxlovid by June.
Even as the supply of the antivirals has been increasing, the number of new daily cases in the United States has plummeted as the omicron surge wanes. Over the last week, an average of 54,609 new cases was reported each day, and only a fraction of those people would likely be eligible for the drugs.
Meanwhile, the availability of rapid coronavirus tests, in short-supply as recently as January, has also increased in pharmacies and other stores as cases have declined. The number of tests now on the market should be sufficient to meet the needs of the test to treat program, said Wilber Lam, a physician and biomedical engineer at Emory University who runs the lab tasked by the National Institutes of Health with evaluating the rapid tests.
Topol said he hopes the program will succeed., “It’s definitely the bold type of move we need," he added. "This is what we want to have in place to be ready for a surge.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The Ukrainian city, now under attack by Russia, was targeted by Hitler during the German onslaught of World War II.
The final Nazi assault on Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, on Oct. 8, 1941. Here an advance party of shock troops is seen assaulting a Russian position, already burning furiously, just before the entry into the town. (AP Photo) (AP)
It was September 1941. Adolf Hitler had launched the World War II invasion of the Soviet Union in June, and the Germans surrounded Kyiv on Sept. 16. Three days later the city fell.
“Circumstances require us to act resolutely,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said of his attack on Ukraine.
And when two pincers of the German army linked up at Lokhvitsa, 130 miles east of Kyiv, a huge Russian force was trapped in a giant pocket. That evening the German general, Franz Halder, noted in his diary, “The ... ring is closed.”
For the besieged Russians in one area, loudspeakers were reportedly set up to blare recorded speeches of the dictator Joseph Stalin, according to author Alan Clark’s 1965 book “Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45.”
Clark cited the Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte, who pitied the Russian soldiers “who died so terribly lonely a death on this battlefield amid the deafening roar of the cannon and the ceaseless braying of the loudspeaker.”
“It was just ghastly,” he wrote, according to historian David Stahel’s 2012 book, “Kiev 1941.”
“And those were only a few from our immediate area,” the soldier wrote. “Blood was literally running down the side from the floorboards of the truck, and the driver ... was white as a sheet.”
“Shells were still flying about, but we were ordered to get ready to march, not for retreat, but en route to Kiev,” he wrote.
The weather was awful. It seemed to rain constantly. “Soaked to the skin we dig in and our slit trenches fill quickly with water,” another German wrote. “The rain continues to pour down. … We are lying in water and yet we are thirsty.”
Kyiv became a key target of the German air force, which aimed to reduce the city to “rubble and ashes,” Stahel wrote. The city was attacked by German Stuka dive bombers, airplanes often equipped with sirens. The air raids spread panic and despair, he wrote.
“All around, wherever you look there are German tanks, submachine guns or machine gun nests,” a Russian officer wrote. “Our unit has already been defending on all sides for four days within this circle of fire. At night the surrounding ring is clear to see, illuminated by fire that lights up the horizon.”
On another battlefield in Ukraine, Stahel wrote, 100 dead German soldiers were found hanging by their hands from trees. Their feet had been soaked in gasoline and set afire. It was a gruesome method of killing the Germans called wearing “Stalin’s socks.”
As the Germans closed in on Kyiv, residents dug tank traps, built bunkers and planted mines.
On Sept. 19, 1941, German Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau’s 6th Army fought its way into Kyiv. By noon, the Germans had seized the old citadel and raised the Nazi flag, the swastika.
In the end, 665,000 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner in the Kyiv pocket, historian and retired U.S. Army Col. David M. Glantz wrote in his 1995 book “When Titans Clashed.”
Many of them would die of starvation, on death marches, and in labor and concentration camps. Of the 3.3 million Russians captured in 1941, roughly 2 million would be dead by the next year, Stahel wrote.
“The Battle of Kiev was undoubtedly a great tactical victory,” German Gen. Heinz Guderian, a key architect of the Nazi triumph, wrote after the war.
Kyiv would suffer Nazi occupation for 779 days.
During that time, an estimated 100,000 people — Jews, Roma (Gypsies), communists and Russian prisoners of war — were murdered at Babyn Yar, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Before Kyiv was retaken by the Russians in a ferocious battle in 1943, Babyn Yar would become one of the largest individual mass murder sites of World War II, the museum says.
This week, a Russian missile struck near Babyn Yar, now within Kyiv’s city limits, adding five more people to the notorious death toll. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: How to beat Putin, for real
Lights illuminate a gas-drilling rig in the Lensk district of the Sakha Republic in Russia on Oct. 13. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg)
The battle has been joined. Now, all that remains to be seen is who will win.
President Biden has rallied not just the West but also much of the world. He has announced sanctions that are more far-reaching than any ever inflicted on a major economy. The results are already evident. Russia’s stock market and the ruble are in tatters.
But despite all this, economic sanctions have rarely forced a country to reverse its path, let alone caused regime change. In the few cases where they do appear to have had some effect — South Africa with apartheid, Iran with its nuclear enrichment — sanctions were usually widely enforced and comprehensive. Because key countries including China, India and the Gulf states are unlikely to boycott Russia, sanctions will lack that long-term bite.
There is one path to changing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculus: sanctioning Russia’s oil and gas industry. This is Putin’s golden goose, the source of the state’s wealth and the reason he might believe that he can weather any storm. So far, not only have these been left untouched, but the financial sanctions have been carefully designed to allow Russia room to continue to sell energy to the world.
The conventional wisdom is that the West cannot sanction Russian energy because it would trigger an energy crisis along the lines of the 1970s episode, which would cause deep discontent at home. But the situation is not analogous to the 1970s predicament at all. Today, the United States is the largest producer of oil and gas in the world. It can ramp up production and exports and help open the spigots in other countries. President Biden is worried that he is going to look like former president Jimmy Carter, when his power position is actually more like that of the king of Saudi Arabia.
Biden should announce that he is going to respond to this massive challenge to the international order by expediting as much production and export of U.S. petroleum as possible to replace Russian energy. With natural gas, he should urge his regulators to facilitate production and he should help more with the financing of liquefied natural gas, so that it can be sent to Europe. He should also encourage countries such as Japan and South Korea to divert more of their liquefied natural gas to Europe. (They have alternative energy sources.) Some of this will take time, but markets will react to the signals and new supplies — and prices will fall.
Opinion | Seize, don’t just freeze, Putin’s billions
But this will not be enough. Biden should also help to unlock two large sources of oil that are currently not getting to the market fast enough or in sufficient quantities. He should suspend former president Donald Trump’s sanctions on Venezuela and Iran. If possible, Washington should work with Iran to close the few remaining gaps and reenter the nuclear deal, which would bring all of Iran’s oil back on the market. And Biden should personally reach out to Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates (both of whom feel unloved by Washington these days), patch up relations with them and ask them to ramp up production — which the Gulf states can best do in the short term.
I can hear all the objections from right and left. Let me address a few. Much of this oil and gas will simply be substituted for (banned) Russian energy, so it is unlikely to cause net-higher emissions. There is even an environmental benefit. U.S. gas leaks less methane than Russian gas, and U.S. oil production is also less environmentally harmful than Russian production. In many places, the increase in natural gas could mean countries like Germany could use less coal, a dirtier fuel in nearly every way. In fact, the best way to cut carbon emissions in the short term — with current technologies and at scale — is to replace coal with natural gas.
All of these measures have downsides — some symbolic, some real. But to govern is to choose, and to govern in a crisis is to make hard, painful choices. The country that has best understood this is Germany. It has suspended its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, announced plans to build two new terminals to receive liquefied natural gas, and acknowledged that it might have to use more coal and extend the life of its nuclear plants that were scheduled to be shuttered. These policies are coming from a coalition government whose second-most-important partner is the Green Party, which has historically been tenacious in its environmental goals.
The Biden administration has said that the stakes could not be higher. And it is right. If Putin’s aggression succeeds, we will live in a different world. So let us make sure that he does not.
When Adolf Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill, a lifelong and rabid anti-communist, said that if Hitler invaded hell, he (Churchill) would have found something nice to say about the Devil. All we must do is take some steps to support all non-Russian energy, and that policy shift will become a deadly weapon that strikes at Putin’s real Achilles’ heel. | null | null | null | null | null |
The pandemic knockdown came following uncertain decades for the guidebook industry. After reaching 19,005,029 in 2006, U.S. travel book sales halved over the next decade. In 2013, BBC Worldwide sold Lonely Planet, a move followed by massive layoffs. Then, having acquired Frommer’s, Google quietly stopped all production of Frommer’s print guidebooks. (The Frommers repurchased rights and resumed printing guidebooks.) | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - This April 7, 2019 file photo shows Reba McEntire on stage at the 54th annual Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas. Amazon has seen solid returns from its investment in streaming live sports, but its upcoming bet on the Academy of Country Music Awards is more of a gamble. The show will air exclusively on Prime Video this Monday night in a sped-up, two hour concert-like format without commercials. (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
For years, right-wing nationalist politicians pronounced a dewy-eyed admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a strongman they couldn’t resist. It wasn’t only Donald Trump who rhapsodized about Mr. Putin’s supposed "strength” and “traditional” values. It was also leaders of similarly inclined movements in France, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic and elsewhere.
Her eyes having been opened, she now asserts the invasion is “unjustifiable.” Another French right-winger, Éric Zemmour, who also scoffed at the odds of a Russian invasion, and made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Putin, has undergone a similar awakening. | null | null | null | null | null |
PARIS, FRANCE — FEBRUARY 03: In this photo illustration, the Facebook logo is displayed on the screen of an iPhone in front of a Meta logo on February 03, 2022 in Paris, France. (Chesnot/Photographer: Chesnot/Getty Imag)
The Roskomnadzor, the country’s Internet censorship agency, announced the decision in a Telegram post, where it accused Meta-owned Facebook of violating laws by blocking the free flow of information to Russia and Russian media on its platform. It was unclear whether the ban would extend to Meta’s other platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
The move is an escalation from last week, when the agency said it would slow traffic to the platforms. Throughout the week, the Roskomnadzor has been publicly putting Facebook on notice. It said it sent the company multiple letters demanding it remove restrictions on Russian media, accusing the company of trying to “form a one-sided picture.” In one letter, it called the company to lift its ban in Europe on RT and Sputnik, two Russian state media outlets. | null | null | null | null | null |
Lights illuminate the Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery, operated by Rosneft, in the Samara region of Russia. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg News)
This is not the position of President Biden, however. Not only has the White House repeatedly declined to halt imports of oil from Russia but the drastic sanctions Moscow has faced since last week’s invasion have excluded the oil and gas industry. In a news briefing Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki offered the administration’s position.
The “factor we’re looking at here is the impact on the gas pump for Americans and reduction of supply in the marketplace,” she said. “A reduction of global supply would have an impact on raising prices. So that’s the prism we look at it through.”
This is a not-uncommon distillation of the debate: righteous annoyance at giving Russia money as it invades an allied state vs. concern about the economic effects of a surge in gas prices. But this distillation, like most distillations, excludes nuance that can help explain the challenge more fully.
In short, ending Russian imports is certainly possible, but it would probably cost consumers more. A key, often overlooked point, though, is that oil is not endlessly fungible, which complicates the picture — and reinforces that reducing dependence on oil overall would help avoid similar situations in the future.
Russia accounts for only a small part of the United States’ crude-oil imports. In December, the most recent month for which data is available from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), Russian imports of crude oil were only about 1.4 percent of total imports. What’s more, the United States was producing more than 128 barrels of crude oil domestically for every barrel of crude imported from Russia.
If you’ve been tracking this, you’ll notice that this figure seems low: Doesn’t Russia account for something like 8 percent of imports? It does — because crude oil is not the sole component of the petroleum economy.
There are a wide array of oil and petroleum products that are imported to and exported from the United States. Where Russia contributes most is in what’s called “unfinished oil products,” a different category than the crude oil we’re most familiar with. More than half the country’s imports of unfinished oil products — oils requiring further processing, in the EIA’s definition — come from Russia. While this is only a small part of the petroleum economy, about 4.5 percent in December, it’s where Russian imports are most essential.
So the question becomes why we import this oil from Russia and whether we can do without it. For that, we’ll turn to an excellent explainer from the Wall Street Journal’s Collin Eaton. A central factor is that it’s less expensive for coastal refineries disconnected from oil networks in the middle of the country to import oil from overseas.
“The U.S. buys Russian oil in part to feed refineries that need different grades of crude with a higher sulfur content to make fuel at top capacities,” Eaton writes. “U.S. refineries were designed decades ago to use heavier grades of crude, often with higher levels of sulfur, when domestic supplies were lower.” About three-quarters of Russian imports go to refineries on the East and (primarily) West coasts to be refined, he adds.
What we’re talking about here isn’t really feasibility but profitability. Despite the lack of pipelines from Texas and Oklahoma to refineries on the East and West coasts, we could ship domestic oil to the coasts, at higher cost. Since the White House’s stated goal is to keep costs down (certainly in part because of the political fallout from seeing prices start to climb again), that is a less appealing option.
But costs are increasing anyway. The price of a barrel of crude oil spiked after Russia invaded Ukraine (as marked by the vertical line on the graphs below). The price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States also rose as the crisis in Ukraine loomed. This despite the lack of sanctions on Russian oil broadly and despite the fact that Russian oil is still being imported to the United States.
The desired outcome of sanctioning Russian oil, of course, is to limit the resources flowing into the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But, again, context. About 60 percent of Russia’s crude-oil exports go to Europe. An additional 20 percent go to China — Russia’s biggest customer and a sympathetic partner in Russia’s current efforts. Limiting imports to the United States would have an effect, but a limited one.
What the situation reinforces is an aspect of fossil-fuel usage that we often gloss over or ignore in these debates: One way to reduce the need to import oil is to reduce the need to use oil at all. As critics of the administration tried to use the Russia situation to criticize Biden’s canceling of the Keystone pipeline (an issue that is also complex), it was hard not to notice that many of them were also advocates of expanding fossil-fuel usage broadly. If we used less oil overall, we’d need less oil — but that is not the desired outcome of the oil industry or of the politicians who support it. Of course, it is also not a good short-term solution.
Polling from The Washington Post and our partners at ABC News found that about half of Americans support additional sanctions even if energy prices (as opposed to gasoline prices) increase, with a wider split by party on that response. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) attend a White House event Thursday. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
For the second time in two nights Thursday, viewers of Fox News’s prime-time programming were greeted with a call to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin. First came Sean Hannity saying we need to “cut the head of the snake off” amid Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Then Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) appeared on the same show Thursday and suggested that Russians themselves should do the deed. “I’m begging you in Russia … you need to step up to the plate and take this guy out,” Graham said.
Graham’s call was greeted with bipartisan condemnation, and The Washington Post’s Julian Mark laid out the many pitfalls of the approach after Hannity’s call the night before. Thus far, both of them remain on an island, despite allegations that Putin has engaged in war crimes. (NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg accused Putin on Friday of “a blatant violation of international law.”)
Instead, though, this led to a hugely deadly power struggle, which included several civil wars — and ultimately culminated in Rome installing its first emperor, Augustus. Some believe Caesar’s assassination prevented a separate and extremely deadly conquest by Caesar, but it certainly went a long way to birthing the Roman Empire.
Stauffenberg in July 1944 hid a bomb in a briefcase and tried to detonate it near Hitler. It wound up merely injuring Hitler and killing several others. Stauffenberg was soon executed, along with as many as 5,000 others amid Hitler’s purge. He wound up continuing to lead the country the better part of a year, ultimately killing himself when Allied forces closed in on him.
The plot coincided with a necessary attempt to launch a coup after Hitler’s death — to prevent someone like Heinrich Himmler from assuming power. But it’s not at all clear that it would have succeeded, especially given the nationalistic fervor that still existed in the country. What’s more, it had already become clear by 1943 that Allied forces were closing in on Hitler, and the final year of his reign wound up being exceptionally deadly.
A separate 2006 paper from Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher J. Zorn argued that countries in which there is a “regularized” means of succession — which there is in Russia, in contrast to many countries that have seen assassinations of leaders — the effects of assassination are “muted”: | null | null | null | null | null |
President Biden sent a powerful message at his State of the Union, proclaiming: “We, the United States of America, stand with the Ukrainian people.” The White House has been quick to send humanitarian and some military aid and to enact punishing sanctions on Russia to cut off Vladimir Putin’s ability to easily finance this war. But there is something else the White House must do soon: offer to take in refugees from Ukraine.
But TPS does nothing to help with the swell of refugees crossing the Ukrainian border daily. It’s heartening to see so many nations in Europe taking in people fleeing Ukraine. Poland alone has taken in more than 500,000 with many Polish people offering rooms in their homes to the refugees and helping to rebuild a critical train route to make it easier for Ukrainians to flee. After years of Poland lurching away from democracy and the European Union, it’s a rapid turnaround that Mr. Biden and top E.U. leaders should be quick to support, along with ensuring that non-White refugees leaving Ukraine are also welcomed.
Beyond money, it would send a strong signal to Poland, Hungary and other nations taking in refugees if Mr. Biden would announce that the United States would accept tens of thousands of Ukrainians as well. (Mr. Biden allowed entry to about 76,000 Afghan refugees last year.) Mr. Biden can do this on his own, without Congress. This is yet another way to truly stand with the brave and industrious Ukrainian people and our allies around the world. It would also provide more workers for the U.S. economy. | null | null | null | null | null |
For years, Republicans have prided themselves, and lectured others, about the primacy of local control. Yet in prohibiting counties and cities from enforcing mask mandates regardless of community conditions, Mr. Youngkin has neutered local authority.
He did so, ostensibly, in the name of parental choice. Yet parents do not get to decide whether their children can legally go to school without a host of vaccines, or sit unbelted in a moving vehicle. Parents cannot determine that their children are safe to drive a car on the highway at age 12, or carry a concealed weapon at age 14. Parental choice is a facile argument in the context of public health and safety.
No one likes wearing masks, and Americans are rightly fed up with restrictions of all kinds arising from the pandemic. But exasperation, even the sort put to use in eliciting hearty cheers on the campaign trail, is not a rational basis for public health policy. It’s a recipe for more sickness and suffering. | null | null | null | null | null |
One week ago, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found a 67 percent majority of Americans supported the U.S. and European allies imposing sanctions on Russia for its military invasion of Ukraine. But that finding came with a caveat: Support dropped to 51 percent if the sanctions led to higher energy prices in the United States.
That survey found 69 percent of U.S. adults supporting sanctions even if it results in higher energy prices, significantly higher than 51 percent in the Post-ABC poll last week. The two polls used nearly identical language in this follow-up question, giving confidence that this reflects a real shift in opinion. | null | null | null | null | null |
Fox Sports television, which employed Mr. Warne as a commentator, quoted a family statement saying the cause was a suspected heart attack at his villa in Koh Samui. Police in Thailand said Mr. Warne’s body was transferred to a hospital for an autopsy. Police added that they did not find any wounds on Mr. Warne’s body.
Known as “Warnie,” Mr. Warne took 708 test wickets in 145 matches for Australia from 1992 to 2007, second only to Sri Lanka great Muttiah Muralitharan’s 800 test wickets from 133 matches.
He was banned for a year in 2003 for taking a prohibited substance, which he blamed on his mother giving him a diuretic to “improve his appearance.” But he returned in 2004 and in the third Ashes test of 2005 he became the first bowler in history to take 600 test wickets.
In 1998, the Australian Cricket Board admitted that Mr. Warne and Mark Waugh had been fined for providing information to an Indian bookmaker during Australia’s tour of Sri Lanka in 1994.
Mr. Warne’s exploits off the field took their toll on his marriage, and he split from wife Simone, the mother of his three children. He later had a relationship with and became engaged to English actress Elizabeth Hurley in 2010. The pair eventually split in 2013. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Phil Klay
President Biden delivers remarks during his State of the Union address at the Capitol on March 1. (Jim Lo Scalzo/AP)
Phil Klay is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and a member of Veterans for American Ideals.
The last time we spoke, the Afghan engineer I’ll call “Omar” was still stuck in Kabul, still trying to navigate America’s broken immigration system, still fearful for his family’s safety. Years ago, he worked for the United States as a young idealist believing in the promise of a new Afghanistan. But that connection led to death threats, including a bomb threat at his oldest daughter’s school. Now, with the U.S. troops gone and the Taliban in power, he told me, “My smallest daughter asks about the future. And I don’t know. We are looking for God."
Omar is one of 78,000 people still desperate to leave Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where their work for the United States has put them at risk. And though Tuesday’s State of the Union address could have been an opportunity to address the issue and offer some hope that our government still cared about those who had trusted us, President Biden, shamefully, didn’t mention Afghanistan at all.
In an hour-long speech that ranged from Ukraine to insulin prices to veterans' health care, there wasn’t a single sentence about the end of America’s longest war or the desperate humanitarian crisis that followed our abrupt withdrawal just seven months ago.
“Without the pressure of it being in the news, it seems like everything has come to a standstill,” said Amy Robertson, program director at the nonprofit Hearts and Homes for Refugees. Rescue flights out of Afghanistan have stopped. Families separated during the evacuation still struggle to be reunited. Humanitarian conditions in overseas refugee camps remain abysmal. And without passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would offer refugees a pathway to permanent status here, many of those who made it to the United States live under a cloud, uncertain of whether they’ll be able to stay. “It’s possible to make things happen if there’s enough pressure,” Robertson told me.
counterpointKim Reynolds shows the true face of the GOP — but not the one she intended
Meanwhile, a small army of volunteers, many of them veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, continue working on our former allies’ behalf. And it’s taking a toll. “Being on the sidelines and feeling impotent because of our government’s lack of caring, it’s worse than it felt when I was in Baghdad during the height of sectarian cleansing,” said Steve Miska, a retired U.S. Army colonel who works with the advocacy coalition Evacuate Our Allies.
“Everybody’s burned out,” Robertson told me. “We receive graphic videos and images of people who have been beaten. Or somebody stops answering and you don’t know what happened to them and sometimes you find out they’re dead. There’s such a feeling of helplessness.”
In the past, the refugee issue has tested the limits of Biden’s famous empathy. In April 1975, as the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam fell, he said on the Senate floor, “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” Fortunately, President Gerald Ford felt otherwise, and since then hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese have become citizens and valued members of communities across America. Decades later, when the diplomat Richard Holbrooke asked then-Vice President Biden about dealing with a possible humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan following our exit, Biden reportedly responded, “We don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it."
It’s a narrow, nationalistic way of thinking, one that many voters thought they’d left behind when they voted Donald “America First” Trump out of office. And it’s shortsighted even from a narrow view of U.S. interests. We currently have troops deployed around the world, conducting counterterrorism and counter-insurgent missions that heavily rely on local allies, and our treatment of Afghans is all the proof our enemies could ever need that America’s promises are not to be trusted.
More to the point, it’s dishonorable. Does our president think Americans will simply forget that we finally lost a 20-year war this past August? Does he think we should just walk away? Does he think U.S. veterans can ignore the suffering of those who trusted us?
If he does, Omar will have to keep looking to God. Because there will be no hope in America. | null | null | null | null | null |
The move, coupled with the broader tech blockade underway as a result of Western sanctions and corporate decisions, will deprive Russia of key tech tools that are vital to its economy.
Key U.S. provider of Internet to Russia cuts service there
Computer-chip manufacturers have begun halting deliveries to Russia to comply with U.S.-led sanctions, while Apple this week said it is pausing product sales in Russia and has limited Apple Pay within the country. Google said it would stop selling ads in the country, and paused all search, YouTube and display network ads after the Russian government asked it to block ads related to Ukraine.
Microsoft declined to give further details on business suspensions in Russia.
But it’s likely that companies with existing deals to use Windows and other products will not immediately lose use of the services. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said he expects to see more restrictions to come from Microsoft in Russia.
“It’s a first step to them ultimately having more of a scorched-earth policy and getting totally out of Russia,” he predicted.
U.S. dominance of many tech sectors gives the country powerful leverage in geopolitical conflicts. It’s a lever U.S. officials have deployed before, to punish the Chinese tech giant Huawei, which the United States has deemed a threat to national security.
The tech companies’ restrictions will have more of an impact on consumers and businesses within Russia than on the tech giants themselves. Russia’s market does not make up a huge part of their revenues.
“For tech companies, it’s breadcrumbs,” Ives said.
Some critics of the approach have cautioned that it can backfire, however, if it encourages rivals such as Russia and China to develop alternative technologies. | null | null | null | null | null |
Key U.S. provider of Internet to Russia cuts service there, citing ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine'
Cogent Communications alerted Russian customers that it would begin terminating connections at noon Eastern time on Friday
Cogent chief executive Dave Schaeffer said the company did not want to keep ordinary Russians off the Internet but did want to prevent the Russian government from using Cogent’s networks to launch cyberattacks or deliver propaganda targeting Ukraine at a time of war.
“Our goal is not to hurt anyone. It’s just to not empower the Russian government to have another tool in their war chest,” Schaeffer said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Cogent, based in Washington, D.C., is one of the world’s largest providers of what’s known as Internet backbone — roughly comparable to the interstate highway system, providing the primary conduit for data flows that local companies then route to individual domains. Schaeffer said Cogent’s networks carry about one-quarter of the world’s Internet traffic. Cogent has several dozen customers in Russia, with many of them, such as state-owned telecommunications giant Rostelecom, being close to the government.
“We’re pretty confident that we’re not interfering with anyone’s ability to get some information,” he said, though he acknowledged the likelihood of slowdowns and other disruptions with Russia.
In a letter sent Thursday to one of Cogent’s Russian customers and obtained by The Washington Post, the company wrote, “In light of the unwarranted and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Cogent is terminating all of your services effective at 5 p.m. GMT on March 4, 2022. The economic sanctions put in place as a result of the invasion and the increasingly uncertain security situation make it impossible for Cogent to continue to provide you with service. All Cogent-provided ports and IP address space will be reclaimed as of the termination date.”
“This move by Cogent is misguided. Cutting the Russian people off from the global internet harms those who seek to obtain and share truth,” tweeted Rebecca MacKinnon, vice president at the foundation that hosts Wikipedia. “Including many Wikpedians contributing to the page about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite govt threats.”
News of the looming Cogent action began spreading on Thursday after Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society, which advocates for digital freedoms in Russia, posted a copy of Cogent’s termination letter to a Russian client to his Telegram channel.
“Very bad news,” Klimarev wrote in his Telegram post. “I will be glad if it is not confirmed.”
But soon it was. Telecommunications analysts were closely tracking events on Friday to see how extensively Cogent’s action was affecting Internet service in Russia. Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for the Web monitoring firm Kentik, wrote in a blog post, “A backbone carrier disconnecting its customers in a country the size of Russia is without precedent in the history of the internet.”
Network security researcher Barrett Lyon said Cogent’s move alone would immediately affect traffic from North America, causing connections across the Atlantic to lag, especially in video. Russians trying to watch streaming video from the United States are expected to see the deterioration first.
“Cogent is usually seen as a lower-cost network option. As a result, they end up carrying a lot of traffic for video and low-cost packets,” Lyon said. “That traffic will reconverge to other networks and redistribute, causing a huge network load across networks willing to carry traffic for Rostelecom.” | null | null | null | null | null |
When I listed Arbery in a June 19, 2020, column among the names of unarmed Black people killed in America, I only knew enough to state that he was a jogger who was chased down and shot by White men in Glynn County, Ga. That isn’t to say suspicion of racial violence did not hang over the case. | null | null | null | null | null |
On Wednesday, the House committee investigating the riot that day filed a legal document articulating how it believed Trump was probably culpable in the commission of several crimes. A central part of that articulation was that Trump had every reason to know that his claims of election fraud — as false as they were incessant — were dishonest. Over and over, people close to him told him that he was elevating unproven nonsense, but he kept elevating it anyway. The Washington Post walked through the legion of realists who confronted Trump’s claims, from Justice Department staffers to a data analyst on Trump’s campaign team. None managed to drag Trump to reality.
But, of course. Some career Justice Department guy, a Deep Stater, says they don’t have evidence of fraud? I bet. Or some guy who looks at campaign data? How’d that work out in 2016?
There is the unusual case of Attorney General William P. Barr, who says that he was essentially fired as soon as he spoke out publicly about fraud. He’d been a loyal ally of Trump’s and was now going against the president’s feverish claims. There must have been some moment where a flicker of doubt passed through Trump’s brain; Barr was his guy, but here he was taking the enemy’s side! And then the flicker passed and the conflict resolved. Barr must be the enemy.
Because, again, everyone who wanted a piece of Trump’s power and influence, including the attention and money of his base of support, was echoing Trump’s claims without hesitation. Footage obtained by The Post shows how this worked for Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Trump’s who has spent his professional life undercutting the idea that he is strongly committed to maintaining a thoroughly honest approach to politics. Soon after Election Day in 2020, Stone ginned up the “stop the steal” movement, something that he said would be a simple conduit for fundraising. As it was.
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Trump made false claims so often, even after they were corrected, that The Post had to invent a special category of dishonesty to describe it. Trump was always impervious to reality, and in the weeks after the election he and his allies had far more motivation to ignore reality than they did to try to confront Trump with it. | null | null | null | null | null |
Gas prices are displayed on a sign at a gas station March 3, in Hampshire, Ill. Increasing demand and global supply uncertainty driven by the war in Ukraine have driven gas prices over $4 per gallon in many parts of the country. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The added expenses could have sweeping impacts for U.S. consumers, experts say. Recent wage growth has insulated some consumers from climbing prices, but gasoline alone contributed to a quarter of the 6.1-percent increase in inflation over the past 12 months.
And rising oil prices have rippling effects. As diesel prices increase, so does the cost of shipping goods through the country’s already rattled supply chains.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday said she supported banning Russia energy imports to the U.S., a proposal that’s gained bipartisan momentum in both chambers of Congress. The Biden administration has so far avoided imposing energy sanctions, largely over concerns about rising fuel prices.
The White House announced Tuesday that the U.S. and other world powers would tap 60 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves to tamp down oil prices. But the release is a stopgap measure that international authorities say is only enough to stabilize the energy market for 30 days.
In a normal year, retail gas prices increase 50 cents per gallon from the end of February through their peak midsummer, said Jeff Lenard, a spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, a trade group whose members sell close to 80 percent of the U.S.'s retail gasoline. That’s because of combination of rising consumer demand and the increased costs associated with summer blends, he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The program will start in hundreds of locations next week with the goal of increasing access to lifesaving treatments, Biden officials say
Walgreens stores like this one in San Francisco may be offering "test to treat" services by the end of March. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News)
Consumers will be able to walk into a clinic at a CVS or Walgreens, get tested for the coronavirus and, if the results come back positive, go home with a free course of antiviral medicine under a “test to treat” program announced by President Biden this week as part of his new pandemic road map.
“At this point, we have enough Paxlovid and molnupiravir to provide the medications,” said Tom Inglesby, senior adviser to the White House coronavirus response team, referring to the two antiviral drugs.
The one-stop approach to disseminating the pills is crucial, because the medications must be taken within five days of the onset of symptoms to be effective against covid.
“We have a therapeutic window [that] closes every day you let it go by,” said Gerald Harmon, a family medicine specialist in Georgetown County, S.C., and president of the American Medical Association.
Inglesby said that by the end of March, the administration anticipates thousands of test-to-treat spots will be set up in pharmacy-based walk-in health clinics, where patients can see a licensed health-care provider, as well as in community health centers and long-term care facilities.
Participating providers will be listed on a website by the end of next week, so users can search to find the nearest location offering test-to-treat services, he said. That website, which hasn’t yet launched, will be continually updated as more pharmacy locations join.
Many doctors praised the idea of the program but worried about how it would be executed. For starters, the antiviral medications cannot be prescribed for everyone. Only people 12 or older with underlying health conditions that put them at heightened risk for severe infection are eligible for Pfizer’s pill, and only those 18 or older with underlying health conditions can receive Merck’s drug.
Both pills also have contraindications. Pfizer’s pill cannot be taken alongside several common medications, including some that treat heart conditions and control cholesterol. It is also not recommended for people with severe kidney or liver problems. Molnupiravir does not have known drug interactions, but it is not recommended during pregnancy or for those younger than 18 because it could affect bone and cartilage growth.
Under the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization, the pills must be prescribed only by licensed physicians, advanced practice registered nurses, and physician assistants because of the complexity of the medications. But Inglesby said the pharmacy-based clinics have licensed health-care providers on-site who can screen patients for possible contraindications before prescribing the pills.
After the FDA authorized the drugs in late December, both Pfizer and Merck began ramping up production but struggled to meet demand during the peak of the omicron wave in January. Since then, doctors say the pills have become more widely available but can still be tough to obtain because of pharmacy staffing shortages and weekend closures.
This month, Inglesby said, 1 million additional courses of Paxlovid will be sent to pharmacies, including those that will be participating in the test-to-treat program. In April, an additional 2.5 million courses of Pfizer’s drug will be shipped out. In addition, Pfizer has indicated it can deliver 10 million treatment courses of Paxlovid by June.
Meanwhile, the availability of rapid coronavirus tests, in short supply as recently as January, has also increased in pharmacies and other stores as cases have declined. The number of tests now on the market should be sufficient to meet the needs of the test-to-treat program, said Wilber Lam, a physician and biomedical engineer at Emory University who runs the lab tasked by the National Institutes of Health with evaluating the rapid tests.
Topol said he hopes the program will succeed. “It’s definitely the bold type of move we need," he added. "This is what we want to have in place to be ready for a surge.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“We are watching in slow motion the murder of thousands of people,” Temnycky said as Russia President Vladimir Putin’s forces continued their assault on several cities in Ukraine. “I don’t see how he is going to stop.”
Marina Shepelsky, 45, a Ukrainian-born lawyer in Brooklyn, said her fiance is a Soviet Jew who escaped persecution as a child and has flatly refused to return. Her family left Ukraine, fearing antisemitism, when she was 12, but her friends are there, her grandparents are buried there. And she believes the country had changed: President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish.
“He keeps asking me, ‘Why are you so upset? We are fine here in America,’” Shepelsky said, her voice catching as she clicked through photos of her 2012 trip home, where she visited historic sites in Kjiv, sampled dumplings with cherries and sour cream, and strolled through Odessa, on the Black Sea.
At a courier service nearby, Nelya and Ihor Andrusiv called customers to tell them to pick up packages to Russia because they cannot be delivered during the war. In between calls, they checked on Nelya’s younger sister, Mariya, who was hiding in a basement in the city of Kharkiv with her husband and 7-year-old daughter. The family had lost electricity and had some milk and bread, her sister told her on their last call. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: World Stage: Ukraine with John Bolton, Former U.S. National Security Advisor
MR. DUFFY: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Michael Duffy, opinions editor at large here at The Post. Our guest this morning is John Bolton, an influential voice in American foreign policy for the last three decades, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a former national security advisor and a top official in both the Department of Justice and the Department of State. Welcome back to Washington Post Live, Ambassador Bolton.
MR. BOLTON: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
MR. DUFFY: Great to have you. And remember, we will always want to hear from you, our audience. You can share your thoughts and questions for guests on Washington Post Live by tweeting @PostLive.
Ambassador Bolton, it’s been just almost two weeks since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. What so far has surprised you the most?
MR. BOLTON: Well, I think certainly we can all admire the heroism, the bravery of the Ukrainian defense forces. They’ve done a terrific job under enormous pressure. Second, it’s really remarkable some of the failures of Russian strategy. We can debate the reasons, but I think they went after too many targets. They didn’t concentrate their forces. I think that accounts for a good part of the gridlock we've seen. And their logistical support certainly has fallen well below the standards that we would have expected from them given all the efforts at modernization and improvement that Vladimir Putin had undertaken over the last 20 years or so.
I think there has been, on our side, some considerable demonstration of NATO strength. How resilient that will be what our real resolve is, remains to be seen. But fundamentally, the tragedy that we see unfolding now, eight or nine days into this war, stems from the failure of deterrence, stems from the failure of the U.S.-led effort to persuade Putin not to launch military action to begin with. And how it plays out, there's plenty to discuss there. But the main problem, the real issue I think that we need to understand and evaluate for the future is the breakdown of deterrence.
MR. DUFFY: What would a more strong or more robust deterrence have looked like in your view?
MR. BOLTON: Well, I think there were two problems to the deterrence that the Biden administration undertook, one that it lacked credibility, and second, it was insufficient. It lacked credibility in Putin's mind, I think, because he had seen the consequences when he invaded Georgia in 2008. Almost nothing happened. When he invaded Ukraine for the first time, annexed Crimea and inserted Russian forces into the Donbas, almost nothing happened. He saw the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was a catastrophic strategic mistake. And I think he judged that threats about future punishment, if Russia crossed the line again, we're not credible.
But maybe more important than the lack of credibility was that we can obviously see the threats were not sufficient, and it didn't change Putin's cost benefit analysis. I said at the time, others did as well, that you had to begin imposing costs on Putin before he went in. And here I would highlight a phrase that the administration was very proud of. They used it over and over again. They patted themselves on the back for it. They said, if there's a further invasion--note the word further invasion--then bad things will happen. That was the fundamental--it wasn't a linguistic problem. It was a fundamental conceptual flaw in the way they approached the crisis. It was the earlier invasion of Ukraine that needed to be rolled back as well as preventing another one. So, I would have imposed costs on Russia in real time until they withdrew from the Donbas, and frankly from Crimea. I would have cut Nord Stream off earlier. I would have begun the imposition of sanctions because of the threat that they were posing. People say, but that would just provoke him to invade. Well, guess what? He invaded? So it seems to me that by not being tough enough earlier, including as you--as you showed in that clip, I'd--I said before that I think some kind of American presence there was needed.
Now I understand how controversial that is. But let me say that obviously everybody understands the difference between the obligations of the NATO treaty, that an attack on one is an attack on all. Our relationship with Ukraine is not a treaty relationship. But the NATO treaty itself contemplates, as you might expect, that a threat to a non-NATO member can constitute a threat to NATO itself. That's what the Baltic republics have been saying when they've asked for consultations under Article 4. They, Poland, others in Eastern and Central Europe recognize that this tragedy unfolding in Ukraine is a threat to them, too.
MR. DUFFY: Do you think this all means Putin has time on his side now, or has his cost-benefit analysis, as you put it, changed since he went into Ukraine?
MR. BOLTON: I think he is probably surprised at some of the sanctions that have been put into place. Certainly, the German reversal on Nord Stream 2 I think he would have found surprising. But look, I've been one of--one of America's greatest proponents of economic sanctions. And we have imposed very stringent sanctions on Iran, on North Korea, on the Maduro regime in Venezuela, in many cases comparable to or greater than the sanctions on Russia, and those regimes are still rocking along. I don't think any of the sanctions that we've seen now are going to stop any significant military decisions that Putin might make. They may have longer-term effects. But that depends on the resolve of the West, which I think still remains to be tested. I think what we need to do is go further. I think you need to drive a stake through the heart of Russia's energy sector. I think that's what's going to get their attention. It's 30 percent of their GNP, 60 percent of their export earnings. And we've been reluctant to touch it. Well, you don't get this stuff for free.
MR. DUFFY: Do you think that's a step that the Biden administration and its allies will have to take soon, in a few weeks, months down the road? How far off is that decision about energy?
MR. BOLTON: I think the president--yeah, I think the president has shown some movement. Originally, he said it's--we're going to exclude it, then he said it was--it was on the table, I guess. But you know, I think America's experience with sanctions over many different scenarios shows that if they're going to succeed--and that's the question, if--the best way to do it is to impose them massively, all at once, with as little advance notice as possible. I think part of the reason the sanctions against Russia are not going to be effective is we've been telegraphing it for months now. And if Russian institutions, Russian oligarchs weren't smart enough to get their assets out of vulnerable countries beforehand, they certainly deserve to lose them. And I think the threats against the oil sector--the oil and gas sector are already pretty visible. So I'm not sure what waiting is going to do. I think the sooner we do it, the better. Every day that goes by is hell in Ukraine. And if we just sit and watch it happen, there's nobody to blame but ourselves at this point
MR. DUFFY: Is there other steps the U.S. and NATO can take at this point in your view that--to help the Ukrainians and the resistance there in particular?
MR. BOLTON: Well, I think certainly we can give them more weapons. President Zelensky is pleading for airplanes. I think if we gave them more drones, more capacity to go after things like that huge Russian convoy outside of Kiev, which is the very definition of a sitting duck, perhaps that would help.
Zelensky has also called for a no-fly zone. I mean, on this one, I take President Biden at his word. I don't think there's any chance of any use of American military force here. And I think this is a big mistake in many respects. You know, if Putin’s mere threat gets us to do something that he wants, he is getting it for free. It's a serious matter. It requires careful consideration. But there's it--but you're saying there's no difference between some use of force and all-out nuclear warfare is just wrong. One possible--
MR. DUFFY: I’m sorry, I was going to just--go ahead.
MR. BOLTON: One possible thing to do would be to--I’m sorry--one possible thing to do would be to have a no-fly zone simply over Western Ukraine. No Russian troops are present. We can draw a line in the sky and say we're here to help stabilize the Ukrainian population. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates this morning something like 1.3 million refugees already across Ukraine's borders, perhaps another million displaced persons inside Ukraine. This is a huge humanitarian tragedy unfolding right in front of us. If we could provide security in the West, that might help mitigate this human tragedy. Otherwise, we are going to be spectators. And I think we've all got to ask ourselves from a strategic point of view what the implications are not just in Moscow, but in Beijing and other adversary capitals as we watch Ukraine potentially being ground into the dust.
MR. DUFFY: This morning, NATO I guess decided, rejected a proposal to institute a no-fly zone over Ukraine. And I'm taking, obviously, from what you're saying that you think that was a mistake.
MR. BOLTON: Yes, but I think this mistake goes back well before Russia crossing the border. I mean, your questions are perfectly fair. But there--many are in the nature of okay, 20 moves into this chess game what would you do now? And that's a question we all have to answer. And I'm simply trying to say, I think about the past 15 moves have been wrong. And I think a more solid posture of deterrence by NATO months ago, together with other more economic related sanctions could have had a big effect. And that's why for future purposes the failure of deterrence here is so important. We are not today in a position of equanimity, because, well, deterrence failed and Ukraine's being invaded, but we're certainly hitting the Russians with very tough sanctions and we're okay with that. We're not okay with that. The point was to stop the invasion before it happened, and we failed.
MR. DUFFY: In addition to instituting the no-fly zone over part of Ukraine, are there other steps you would take now to further deter the Russians?
MR. BOLTON: Well, as I say--
MR. DUFFY: You mentioned the no-fly zone and you mentioned the energy sanctions. I’m just wondering other steps.
MR. BOLTON: Yeah. I would have a complete visa ban. I would allow no Russians into the United States or Western Europe. I’d consider expelling the ones who are here back into Russia. People say but that causes pain to Russian citizens, and my response to that is, you bet. Let me just quote Woodrow Wilson, an eminent figure in the Democratic Party, really the father of American thinking about economic sanctions, who called sanctions a peaceful, silent, deadly remedy, and also said that sanctions were a hand upon the throat of the offending nation. Now is that too much to ask, that we put more and more pressure on?
And I think this is important as well. A lot of the efficacy of sanctions depends on the vigorous enforcement of those sanctions. It’s one thing to say we’re putting the sanctions in place. Sanctions’ targets don’t sit there and simply feel the effect. They are constantly trying to evade and mitigate the effect of the sanctions. This is not a one-time action when we impose sanctions. We’ve got to be going after everything we can constantly, and we’ve got to do everything we can to show continuing resolve. So for example, Germany has said you know that commitment we made in 2014 to spend 2 percent of our GDP on defense, this time we really mean it. Start spending the money. Start buying new tanks. Buy more American F-35s. All of these things have got to get beyond the level of rhetoric and get into concrete action sooner rather than later.
MR. DUFFY: You said a minute ago that you thought NATO had not yet been tested. What tests are you expecting first or next, or are you concerned about?
MR. BOLTON: Well, you know, we had said throughout NATO’s history correctly that no foreign military power has ever crossed the NATO border. But if Ukraine or some substantial part of Ukraine falls to Russia--and I really don’t think they want the whole thing, but leaving that aside--let’s also bear in mind that Belarus in the course of this crisis has drawn even closer to Russia and may now be enough in Putin’s grasp that they’re never going to get away. And this is what raises the alarm in Eastern and Central European NATO members: Will Putin go next?
But on that point that nobody’s ever crossed a NATO border, in the 2011-2012 period and thereafter, the Baltic republics were subject to cyberattacks by Russia, and in a sense that is--in hybrid warfare terms that is crossing a NATO border. They crossed our border too, by the way, in 2016 and later in attacking our elections and taking other offensive actions in cyberspace. So this challenge, the potential for this challenge is already out there. And I think we’re behind. It’s not a catastrophic failure at this point, but I think since NATO is not going to be involved in any military action with respect to Ukraine, I think people ought to be 24/7 on what our reaction is going to be if we see some kind of hybrid warfare in the aftermath of the resolution in Ukraine, whatever that turns out to be.
MR. DUFFY: Put yourself in Vladimir Putin’s shoes this morning, if you can. Tell me what you think he might be thinking and whether he thinks this is going well and he’ll just, you know, continue to make slow but steady progress, or is he having second thoughts in you--you know, as you guess.
MR. BOLTON: Yeah, well, I’ve encountered him many times over the years going back to October of 2001 when I was the State Department guy. I went along with Donald Rumsfeld to meet with him in the aftermath of 9/11. I think he’s a cold-blooded rational thinker. I reject these ideas that he's lost a screw and that things are going badly. And I note that an exile from Russia, Andrei Illarionov, who was a close advisor to Putin back in the early 2000s says he doesn’t think Putin is doing anything but his normal routine. I think Putin is obviously--he’s got to be disappointed in the performance of the Russian military, and I think what that means is they’re going to double down to recoup the prestige that they’ve lost due to the insufficiency of the attack so far.
I have believed for a long time--I might as well repeat it here; if I’m wrong, I can’t ignore it anyway--I don’t think his ultimate objective was the conquest of the entire country. I think if he--if he had an alternative plan, it was to go after the Eastern and Southern portions of Ukraine. If you look at maps of the distribution of predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainians, culturally affinitive Ukrainians, Eastern Orthodox faith, that’s largely in the Eastern and Southern parts of the country, and I think he wants complete control over the north coast of the Black Sea. He’s getting very close to that already. He needs to capture Odessa, which may be next. And then he also links up with Moldova, and I think we may soon hear more about the Transnistria Republic, which is a breakaway part of Moldova where there are still Russian troops 30 years after the end of the Cold War--not many. But if Putin can connect from Ukraine up to Moldova, he can run up the southwestern border of Ukraine, getting behind a lot of Ukrainian forces, getting closer to Kiev from the south. So these are the things I think that at some point Putin may declare a victory and say I only wanted this part of Ukraine anyway, and now I’ve got it. He might like a puppet regime in the rest. He may not be able to get that.
But here’s where the test of NATO’s resolve will come in. If Putin stops short of taking the whole country, will our friends in Europe, and frankly will many Americans say is that all there is? Gee, that’s not as bad as it could be, and we snap back to business as usual. This is what I think we should fear, because it would teach Putin and Xi Jinping all the wrong lessons.
MR. DUFFY: All right. That would also be a test for NATO as well.
MR. BOLTON: Yes, it would. I mean, that would--would we then see the German government still spend at the level that they had committed to? Will we see the resolve we've seen from others? With the French presidential election over by then perhaps, would we see France back to trying to recreate a European Union defense force and undercut NATO? I mean, all these things I hope are not going to occur. But we do have a historical record here that we can at least ask about.
MR. DUFFY: So talk to us a little bit about what we're to make of these periodic mentions of diplomacy from Moscow. Are we--are they just ruses, opportunities to buy time? When do we start taking those seriously, or do we ever?
MR. BOLTON: Well, I would not take them seriously now. I think this is theater. I think this is Putin showing, look, I’m a reasonable person, I'm open to conversations. I would not be providing offramps at this point. I think Putin respects strength. We haven't demonstrated enough. I go back again to the central failure, the failure of deterrence. So, we've got to try and make up for that. And even when you get partial agreements, as the negotiators have apparently reached for allowing convoys of civilians out of contested areas, I think--I think that's great, obviously, from a humanitarian point of view--but it also gives the Russians more leeway in grinding those cities into the ground since there are fewer civilians that they can be accused of causing to be casualties.
MR. DUFFY: And talk to us a little bit also about what you think in Beijing they make of this and what lessons they're taking, both with respect to the robust nature of the--of the Western sanctions, but also with respect to their own plans or putative plans about Taiwan.
MR. BOLTON: Yeah, well, I think Russia and China have an entente going, to use that French diplomatic word. I don't think it's a full-scale alliance. But I think China's got Russia's back here and perhaps in terms of [unclear].
MR. DUFFY: Marriage of convenience, maybe.
MR. BOLTON: Well, yeah, or more. I mean, they would love to get oil and gas from Russia through a pipeline rather than shipping it out of the Persian Gulf and vulnerable--and sea lanes and the rest of it. But I think the Chinese are very carefully watching the Western reaction, and I think they're trying to put that into their computer as they analyze what they may want to do with Taiwan and the South China Sea along their long land border--Vietnam, India. There are a whole range of possibilities there. You know, and this is where this debate we're having over sanctions I think is especially interesting. The bulk of the Russian interaction with the West is oil and gas. There's other trade as well, of course, but that's the bulk of it. And we're seeing so far the West’s inability to take a really strong step against that sector and not taking particularly strong steps against other sectors. I mean, with the Europeans that kicked the number-two Russian bank out of the SWIFT system and the number-one and number-three Russian banks are still in there. How hard is it to figure out to get around the problem with bank number two?
And Russia's economy--and here's the main point for China--is really trivial compared to China's, and the economic interaction between the West and Russia doesn't compare to the level of interaction between the economies of the U.S. and Europe, the European Union, Great Britain, and Japan. So, I am very worried that this hesitancy to bear any pain in inflicting sanctions on Russia says to the Chinese that Western resolve is not going to be strong, not strong enough to really impose much economic pain on us, if it comes to it. That would be a very bad lesson for China to learn.
MR. DUFFY: When you were Donald Trump's national security advisor, his administration had its own stop and start, stop and go, certainly confused handling of its relationships with Ukraine. Looking back on it--
MR. BOLTON: You’re certainly being polite.
MR. DUFFY: Could you have done more to help the Ukrainians prepare for this moment, or are you satisfied with how that administration handled its Ukrainian portfolio?
MR. BOLTON: Well, I think it went very badly. It was hard to have discussions on geostrategic issues when the president's main interest was getting Donald--was getting Rudy Giuliani in to see Zelensky so they could go find Hillary Clinton's computer server. And I think that by interjecting Ukraine into the maelstrom of American presidential politics in 2019 and 2020 made it impossible for Zelensky to establish the kind of relationship that he needed with Ukraine's potentially most important supporter. And I don't think it was a dispositive factor in the circumstances we have now, but it was--it was certainly a net negative. And you know, this was a policy, Donald Trump cared one thing about Ukraine, which was how does it affect his political future. And I can say that every other senior national security advisor--Mike Pompeo, Mark Esper at Defense--all of us felt that we needed to bolster Ukraine’s security and were appalled at what Trump was doing. And finally, it got resolved in the near term on the security assistance, but the significant negative consequences for Ukraine I think were real.
MR. DUFFY: One last question. And in your memoir, you wrote that the president--President Trump wanted to leave NATO in 2018. How close did that come to reality? And we have just a minute left.
MR. BOLTON: Yeah, I had my heart in my throat at that NATO meeting. I didn't know what the president would do. He called me up to his seat seconds before he gave the speech. And I said, look, go right up to the line, but don't go over it. I sat back down. I had no idea what he’d do. I thought he’d put his foot over it, but at least he didn't withdraw then. In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO. And I think Putin was waiting for that.
MR. DUFFY: Ambassador Bolton, thank you for giving us so much time this morning. We're out of time. We’ll have to leave it there. Thank you for coming to Washington Post Live and have a good day.
MR. BOLTON: Well, thanks for having me.
MR. DUFFY: I'm Michael Duffy. | null | null | null | null | null |
While definitely an isolationist with an exceptional ability to withstand both cold and darkness, you appreciate fresh starts. Unfortunately, you always come to the conclusion that this so-called “fresh start” is really just a continuation of the last start’s ending. You also Google “Polar Vortex” a lot.
No one knows your interests, or the type of person you are, not even you. You will inevitably tweet about how you hope next year is better than this year, but you also like tinsel and gift wrapping. You want to be outside in front of a fire pit, but you’d like someone else to stoke that fire. The only reason you don’t mind shorter days is because, “It’s festive.” Noble, but also a little weird too. | null | null | null | null | null |
A worker changes the numbers of a price at the Lukoil fuel station, after local officials voted to suspend the business license of local Lukoil gas stations following the Russian's invasion of Ukraine. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
One week ago, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found a 67 percent majority of Americans supported the United States and European allies imposing sanctions on Russia for its military invasion of Ukraine. But that finding came with a caveat: Support dropped to 51 percent if the sanctions led to higher energy prices in the United States.
The conflict in Ukraine will have expected and unexpected consequences - from oil production to the cost of sunflower oil used in food. (Lee Powell/The Washington Post)
That survey found 69 percent of U.S. adults supporting sanctions even if they result in higher energy prices, significantly higher than 51 percent in the Post-ABC poll last week. The two polls used nearly identical language in this follow-up question, giving confidence that this reflects a real shift in opinion. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Anaheim Police Department has refused to disclose reports concerning Moynihan’s death to The Post. An autopsy report released by the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner showed that Moynihan’s death was determined to be a suicide via “ligature hanging.”
Following the filing of the DFEH lawsuit, which alleged a “frat boy culture” at the company, the Wall Street Journal reported in November that Kotick failed to inform its board of directors about incidents of sexual harassment. The company has for decades been helmed by Bobby Kotick, a pugnacious magnate with a reputation for big profits leaving behind a trail of aggrieved employees. Kotick is expected to resign when the sale to Microsoft closes next year.
Activision Blizzard is also currently under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its handling of allegations of sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination, and the company was sued last year for alleged worker intimidation and union busting. | null | null | null | null | null |
In the past two days, Russia’s warships have been spotted near Odessa’s Chernomorsk and Zatoka beaches, where an amphibious landing is most likely due to favorable geographical conditions, said Alexander Velmozhko, the press secretary of the local Territorial Defense forces.
Heavy fighting continues in Mariupol, the main port city in the Sea of Azov near Crimea, which Russia’s forcibly annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The nearby port of Berdyansk is now in Russian hands.
Russian forces from the Crimean Peninsula advanced northwest to Melitopol and also northeast to Kherson, a city of about 300,000 people about 90 miles from Odessa.
The pride of its fleet, the Hetman Sahaidachny flagship, was undergoing repairs in Nikolayev, a port Russian forces are advancing on. The ship’s commander gave the order to sink it so it “would not be captured by the enemy,” Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov wrote on Facebook.
The city’s 7 p.m. curfew is strict. Its downtown streets, know for stunning, delicate architecture, are now lined with stone barriers and antitank “hedgehogs” fashioned out of metal bars. Throughout the city, the now famous response from the nearby Snake Island border guards — “Russian warship, go f--- yourself” — is posted on billboards around the city. | null | null | null | null | null |
Chicken producers face antitrust probe
The U.S. Justice Department is investigating employment practices of Pilgrim’s Pride and other chicken producers to determine whether the companies violated antitrust laws.
Pilgrim’s, the second-biggest U.S. poultry company, disclosed the civil investigation in a securities filing.
Perdue Farms said it received a letter from the Justice Department, a company spokeswoman said. Perdue is the fourth-biggest U.S. chicken producer.
The investigation comes as the highly concentrated meat sector has been under scrutiny from the Biden administration and others for the high prices consumers pay for chicken and beef and the relatively lower prices paid to farmers raising animals.
Slaughterhouse employees have recently been winning higher wages amid a worker shortage, with the labor squeeze limiting meat output and boosting prices.
The Justice Department declined to comment. Tyson Foods, the top U.S. poultry producer, didn’t reply to a request for comment.
The Justice Department’s antitrust division has stepped up scrutiny of companies over practices that hurt competition in labor markets, limit employment options for workers and hold down wages.
While the investigation of the chicken companies is civil, it has opened a criminal investigation into hiring practices by Raytheon Technologies Corp. In July, DaVita Inc., an operator of kidney dialysis centers, and its former chief executive officer were charged with colluding with other companies not to recruit one another’s employees.
Honda, Sony partner on electric vehicle
Two big names in Japanese electronics and autos are joining forces to produce an electric vehicle.
Sony Group and Honda Motor agreed to set up a joint venture this year to start selling an electric vehicle by 2025, both companies said Friday.
The joint venture will develop and design the product, but will use Honda’s plant for manufacturing. Sony, which makes the PlayStation video game console and owns movie and music businesses, will develop the mobility services platform.
Sony showed an electric car concept at the CES trade show in Las Vegas two years ago.
Walt Disney, looking to accelerate growth of its flagship streaming service, will offer a lower-priced version of Disney-plus with advertising later this year. The new service will begin in the U.S. in late 2022 and expand internationally next year, Disney said Friday. The company plans to release details at a later date. The move follows other media companies offering various plan options for their online video services. Comcast's Peacock and AT&T's HBO Max both come with ad-supported and ad-free versions. Disney's own Hulu streaming service has turned commercials into a $1 billion revenue stream.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it rejected a petition from General Motors over about 725,000 U.S. sport utility vehicles that do not comply with federal headlight rules. The Detroit automaker argued the issue — a narrow reflection area — did not impact vehicle safety and petitioned NHTSA in 2019 to declare the issue inconsequential for GMC Terrain vehicles from the 2010 through 2017 model years. NHTSA said in certain weather such as snow and fog the headlight issue could cause "glare to other motorists driving in proximity" to the noncompliant vehicles. | null | null | null | null | null |
At a bond hearing later in the day, a prosecutor reading a proffer detailing the crime spree, said that Tellez’s daughter, after hearing her father scream, saw one of the men beat her father in the head with the bat before the two ran away.
Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy said that the evidence against the men includes Tellez’s DNA profile on the crowbar and Mendiola’s fingerprints.
Blood evidence and fingerprints were part of a mountain of evidence that prosecutors say link the two to the crime spree and say that many of the victims’ personal belongings, including cell phones, credit cards and other items were found in the car they had been driving.
Prosecutors in the proffer also said that Barrios admitted that he was the driver of the car but denied his involvement in the crimes. Mendiola admitted to detectives that he took part, contending that it was Barrios’ idea that he went along with because he needed money for Christmas presents for his children. | null | null | null | null | null |
INDIANAPOLIS — Former University of Georgia D-lineman Jordan Davis said that despite all the star power boasted by the Bulldogs last season, “we wanted to call ourselves a no-name defense.”
“It’s not about the stars,” Davis insisted. “... That was one of the things that drove us as a defense. We wanted to call ourselves the no-name defense because even though we had all the stars there was really nobody above each other and we all played for each other.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Some were famous, such as Coretta Scott King, the widow of the civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and her sister, Edythe Scott Bagley. Others, such as the Green sisters — Bloomie, Dotty and Minnie, who never lived more than 10 minutes away from one another — were not.
In an interview with CBS’s “The Early Show” in 1994, after the release of a 10th-anniversary edition of “Sisters,” Ms. Wohlmuth reflected on her relationship with her own sister, eight years her junior, and how it had evolved since their schoolgirl days when Ms. Wohlmuth made her walk eight or nine steps behind her. | null | null | null | null | null |
While definitely an isolationist with an exceptional ability to withstand both cold and darkness, you appreciate fresh starts. Unfortunately, you always come to the conclusion that this “fresh start” is really just a continuation of the last start’s ending. You also Google “Polar Vortex” a lot.
No one knows your interests, or the type of person you are, not even you. You will inevitably tweet about how you hope next year is better than this year, but you also like tinsel and gift wrapping. You want to be outside in front of a fire pit, but you’d like someone else to stoke that fire. The only reason you don’t mind shorter days is because, “It’s festive.” Noble, but also a little weird, too. | null | null | null | null | null |
INDIANAPOLIS — A year after the surgery that could have prevented him from being at the NFL scouting combine, Carson Strong finally was facing his toughest tests. The Nevada quarterback shuffled from room to room, with each full of team doctors seemingly whispering amongst themselves about him and his right knee.
“Everyone’s got a different opinion, but I know I’m ready to go,” Strong said. “Everybody’s judging me based on the tape that I put out last season, which makes total sense, but I wasn’t healthy. I had a surgery that required a year for recovery; I came back in six months. My dad tried to get me to not play the first part of the season, but I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ I have to go out there and play for my team.”
Not only did Strong’s commitment to the Wolf Pack pan out — he had one of the best years in program history with 4,186 passing yards, 36 touchdown passes, eight interceptions and a 70 percent completion rate — it boosted his NFL draft stock. Strong believes that he probably wouldn’t have been invited to the combine if he hadn’t pushed to play. Many draft analysts rank the pocket passer in the second tier of this muddled quarterback class with North Carolina’s Sam Howell, Mississippi’s Matt Corral and Cincinnati’s Desmond Ridder.
This week, Strong may have had more to gain than any passer. For players such as him, who have significant injury histories, the combine is crucial because NFL teams care much more about interviews and medical tests than the basic, televised drills.
In July 2017, doctors used eight biodegradable nails to reattach the cartilage. Strong missed his senior year at Will C. Wood High, instead taking classes at a local community college to enroll early at Nevada. He spent a redshirt year recovering, and in 2019, he became the starter.
Instead, Strong had to beat teams with his mind. Nevada put the offense in his hands, giving him full autonomy to change plays, protections or routes at the line of scrimmage. He focused on improving his decision-making and led Nevada to an 8-4 finish. In the last game of the year, he played without a knee brace for the first time.
In February, at the Senior Bowl, Strong tried to show teams how much his mobility on bootlegs and in the pocket had progressed. He played well, showcasing his arm strength and an ability to pick up a new offense quickly. To reporters, Strong detailed the intricacies of his surgeries and said that, if his body were going to reject his new knee cartilage, it would have happened already.
This offseason, he has been training with quarterback guru Jordan Palmer and Ridder, the passing prospect from Cincinnati. Palmer pointed out Strong developed bad mechanical habits while he compensated for his knee, and he has had to relearn how to drive off his right foot when he throws. To Strong, this illustrates why he has untapped power and potential he will realize in the NFL. | null | null | null | null | null |
Liliia Akhaimova, Viktoriia Listunova, Angelina Melnikova and Vladislava Urazova celebrate after winning the team gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics. (Natacha Pisarenko/AP)
Russian and Belarusian gymnasts and officials were banned from international competition indefinitely, the sport’s global governing body announced Friday, citing “the massive escalation of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.” The International Gymnastics Federation’s decision, which takes effect Monday, follows numerous other major sports that have barred Russian and Belarusian athletes from events.
Some gymnasts from Russia and Belarus are competing this weekend at a World Cup event in Doha, the last major international competition in which they will be allowed to compete. Russia’s Viktoria Listunova, who was part of the gold medal team at the Tokyo Olympics, won the bars at this competition, followed by fellow Russian Maria Minaeva in second. Ukraine’s Daniela Batrona won the bronze medal on the apparatus. The gymnasts were recognized in separate medal ceremonies. | null | null | null | null | null |
56 killed at mosque; ISIS claims attack
The Islamic State in a statement posted to the group’s media outlet claimed an attack on a Shiite Muslim mosque in central Peshawar that killed at least 56 people Friday in the deadliest assault in the northwestern Pakistani city in more than seven years.
A blast struck the mosque during Friday prayers and gunmen stormed inside, opening fire on worshipers packed into the main hall, officials said. In addition to the 56 dead, more than 194 people were wounded, according to Muhammad Asim, a spokesman for a city hospital.
Within hours of the assault, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted, “We now have all info regarding origins of where the terrorists came from & are going after them with full force,” but he did not specify which group was behind the attack.
Pakistani security forces have been put on high alert, Pakistani Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Washington Post. “We will thwart the designs of those who want to create unrest and instability in Pakistan,” he said.
Ahmed also told a local news outlet that the blast was carried out by a suicide bomber.
Pakistani police tweeted that at least two assailants first fired on police officers guarding the mosque, killing one and critically wounding a second.
— Haq Nawaz Khan and Shaiq Hussain
Bishop defended by pope guilty of abuse
An Argentine court on Friday sentenced a Roman Catholic bishop to 4 ½ years in prison for the sexual abuse of two seminarians, in a major setback for Pope Francis, who had defended Gustavo Zanchetta after the initial allegations.
The prosecutors’ office in the northern province of Salta reported the conviction and sentence on its Twitter account and said Zanchetta had been ordered arrested.
The conviction in the pope’s homeland hits at Francis’s personal credibility since he had initially rejected accusations against Zanchetta, the former bishop of Orán, and created a job for him at the Vatican.
Local authorities began to investigate after the allegations emerged publicly in early 2019, when the newspaper El Tribuno de Salta reported complaints about Zanchetta’s conduct as bishop in Orán. Zanchetta has denied the accusations and said he is a victim of revenge by priests in Orán with whom he had differences.
The pope had ordered a church trial in the case, though the results of that are not known.
Colombia's ELN rebels declare cease-fire: Colombia's National Liberation Army (ELN), the leftist guerrilla group founded by radical Catholic priests, declared a six-day cease-fire for upcoming legislative elections and presidential primaries. Colombians go to the polls March 13 to elect members of Congress and choose presidential candidates for three political coalitions. The ELN, which consists of about 2,400 fighters, is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union. Defense Minister Diego Molano dismissed the cease-fire as a political stunt.
Greece reports stopping 5 migrant boats: Greece's coast guard said it had prevented five boats carrying more than 120 people in total from illegally entering Greek waters in the eastern Aegean Sea from Turkey. A coast guard statement said that patrol boats from the European Union's Frontex border agency helped in the operation and that Turkish coast guard boats eventually arrived off the island of Kos to pick up the migrants. Greece's eastern Aegean islands are a major destination for people fleeing conflict or poverty in the Middle East, Africa or Asia who are seeking a better life in the European Union.
Thousands flee South Korean wildfire: Nearly 4,000 South Koreans fled their homes as a large wildfire ripped through an eastern coastal area and threatened a nuclear power station before being driven away by winds. As of Friday evening, about 1,000 firefighters were battling the blaze amid strong winds and focusing their efforts on preventing it from reaching a liquefied natural gas facility near the city of Samcheok. The fire began early Friday on a mountain in the nearby county of Uljin and destroyed at least 22 homes, according to the National Fire Agency and the Korea Forest Service. There were no immediate reports of injuries. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Mike Feinsilber and Calvin Woodward | AP
Associated Press Pulitzer Prize-winning political journalist Walter R. Mears, shown March 12, 1999 in Washington. Mears, who for 45 years fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns and elections for The Associated Press and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it, has died. He was 87. (AP Photo, File) (Uncredited/AP) | null | null | null | null | null |
The Aircraft Ownership Transparency Act, a bill Lynch first introduced in 2017, is meant to address that. It requires the FAA to obtain the identity of a plane’s “beneficial owners,” meaning the people who actually control the entity seeking to register the plane, or those who have an interest in its assets.
Kalman said there are also exemptions to those new requirements, including for some trusts, that would still allow abuse in aircraft registrations — loopholes that should be shut with Lynch’s bill. | null | null | null | null | null |
The complaint, dated Thursday and filed by the parents of Kerri Moynihan, a 32-year-old finance manager at Activision Blizzard when she was found dead during a company retreat in 2017, claims that sexual harassment was a “significant factor” leading to her death.
The Anaheim Police Department has refused to disclose reports concerning Moynihan’s death to The Post. An autopsy report released by the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner showed that Moynihan’s death was determined to be a suicide.
Following the filing of the DFEH lawsuit, which alleged a “frat boy culture” at the company, the Wall Street Journal reported in November that CEO Bobby Kotick failed to inform its board of directors about incidents of sexual harassment. Kotick, a pugnacious magnate with a reputation for big profits leaving behind a trail of aggrieved employees, is expected to resign when the sale to Microsoft closes next year.
Activision Blizzard is also currently under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its handling of allegations of sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination, and the company was sued last year for alleged worker intimidation and union-busting.
According to her parents’ lawsuit, Moynihan, a Massachusetts native and licensed certified public accountant, had worked at Activision Blizzard since 2011. During the corporate retreat on the early morning of April 27, 2017, the suit claims, Moynihan spoke with Restituito in the lobby of the Grand Californian. According to the suit, Restituito then texted her: “Please don’t do that. Not tonight. Think about it and make your decision when your mind is clear.”
Moynihan died in her hotel room roughly a half-hour later, the suit claims.
The suit refers to an ensuing “coverup” by Restituito and Activision. The complaint claims that Retituito’s hotel key card was found in Moynihan’s room, but that when he was interviewed by detectives, he “concealed the fact that he had been having a sexual relationship" with her, and also lied about why he had a key to her apartment.
The suit claims that Moynihan’s parents were unaware of the alleged sexual harassment of their deceased daughter until the California DFEH filed its lawsuit last summer and that Activision supervisors including Restituito “knew or should have known” that she was being sexually harassed but “failed and refused to take immediate corrective action.”
“The harassment to which Kerri was subjected was a substantial factor in causing harm to Kerri... tragically culminating in Kerri’s death at the age of 32,” the suit reads.
The lawsuit also criticizes Anaheim police for a “perfunctory and incomplete investigation" — including allegedly failing to dust for fingerprints or question Retituito about the text message preceding her death — "that left many unanswered questions.”
“We stand by our investigation," Anaheim PD spokesman Sgt. Shane Carringer said. | null | null | null | null | null |
“It’s time to remind the government, not just here in the U.S. but across the world, that they work for us.” Brian Bass, one of the organizers, said. “This convoy, and these truckers, believe in freedom and your right to do, to think, to act and say what you feel. At this point, it is the civic duty of the American people to stand up. Freedom takes sacrifice, and since it’s been lost, it is this convoy that will begin to stand up and take it back.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“We don’t necessarily tell you exactly what, where, when and how," one British official said.
“There are stockpiles in Poland,” where much of the weaponry coming from outside is being gathered, said Ed Arnold, a research fellow of European security at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute. From there, “there are only two main supply routes to Kyiv,” one near the Belarus border, and a second farther south.
Internal Ukrainian logistics “have been okay thus far but need to improve rapidly,” Arnold said. “They might have three days of ammunition left in some areas.”
At least 22 NATO nations and a handful of others have said they will send military assistance to Ukraine, including antitank missiles, artillery ammunition and Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Last week, the United States announced $350 million in new shipments that it says are already arriving.
“It’s a fluid situation, but we’re getting it into a good groove right now,” the official said. But “it would be misleading if I left you with the impression this is a perfectly well-organized operation. … We’ve been at this for a week, with things coming constantly. We’re just working as fast as we can.”
A senior U.S. defense official said Friday that the United States was accelerating ammunition deliveries and has facilitated the transfer of Mi-17 helicopters but no fixed-wing aircraft. Since the attack started last week, 14 countries have sent supplies, the official said. On the U.S. side, a handover process that typically takes weeks or months has been compressed to hours and days.
Britain hosted a 25-nation conference this week to discuss and coordinate meeting Ukraine’s needs, Arnold said, but so far, “it’s not a question of overlap. It is a question of volume.” At the moment, he said, the need is for “food, water, ammunition, and then what we refer to as small arms — rifles, ammunition, grenades, especially shoulder antitank and anti-helicopter aircraft missiles. They’re the things that are most effective … they’re quite light, and anyone can use them.”
Some of Ukraine’s asks are more difficult to provide. Despite reports that the United States, or NATO, is considering sending Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries, a U.S. official said that was not likely. “They don’t come flat-packed with an Allen wrench. You need years of training and a whole infrastructure for sustainment,” the State Department official said. “Right now, that’s not an option.”
“The challenge that we have is, it’s the actions that we could have done before from this administration to make sure today wasn’t happening,” McCarthy said Tuesday on Fox News. “We could have supplied the weapons to Ukraine. They’re not asking for American troops; they’re just asking for the ability to fight.”
The aid and how to get it to where it is needed have become sensitive subjects for a NATO alliance that is fearful of getting drawn into a direct confrontation with Russia. Those worries helped persuade Hungary not to allow its border to be used to ship military support to Ukraine.
“I don’t think Russia can accuse us simply about deliveries — simply because it cannot be interpreted as a war between NATO and Russia,” Pabriks said. “But, of course, if they would like to interpret something in a negative way, Putin can always imagine something.” | null | null | null | null | null |
As Ukraine struggles to count war casualties, families bury the dead one by one
Oksana Shlonska and a family member at the funeral of her husband, Volodymyr Nezhenets, in the Church of the Holy Supreme Apostles Peter and Paul in Kyiv, Ukraine, a week after the invasion. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
“The Russians shelled even the cemetery,” said Shlonska, 52. “They fear even our dead.”
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service has reported that more than 2,000 civilians have been killed since the invasion began, but that number has not been independently corroborated. Ukraine’s army said Friday that more than 9,000 Russian soldiers have died in fighting, but Moscow has announced that 498 of its troops have died and 1,597 were injured.
Russia, in turn, claims 2,870 Ukrainian troops have been killed and more than 3,500 wounded. Ukraine disputes those numbers, providing the numbers of their casualties in the scores, data provided by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in public statements. Ukraine’s military has been reticent to share figures on its own military casualties.
On Friday, the director of the state-run morgue declined to discuss with Washington Post journalists the numbers of bodies received since Russia began its attacks.
‘Morgues are full’
On Feb. 24, the day Russia invaded, Volodymyr Nezhenets gave up his practice. In 2014, the father of three was wounded fighting in eastern Ukraine and had left the military. Now, he enlisted again as a contractor, said his wife.
Three days later, Nezhenets was driving a white car in a convoy that included a bus carrying remnants of Russian weapons — that Ukraine believed could be used to make later allegations of war crimes before the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He called his wife at close to 7.30 pm to say he’d be home soon, said Shlonska.
At 10 p.m., she got a phone call from the territorial defense forces. Her husband was dead.
The family was told that Russian “saboteurs” had infiltrated the capital and ambushed the convoy. When she heard the news, Shlonska went numb.
(Members of territorial defense forces gave a different explanation for the bloodshed that night. They said Ukrainian forces fired up on each other, thinking the other side were Russian infiltrators. A senior military comrade of Nezhenets, who was at the funeral, said the incident was under investigation.)
“It seems like after that there was nothing,” she said. She then showed a photo on her cellphone of a badly damaged white Skoda that Nezhenets drove that night.
“This is our Skoda,” said his wife. “It’s not a military car.”
They took her husband’s body to the morgue to get a death certificate. It took several days to do an autopsy and determine the cause of death. The results were available Thursday. “Police stations and morgues are overwhelmed,” said Shlonska, adding that her husband had died of “multiple gunshot wounds.”
“In wartime some procedures take a bit longer than usual,” said Dmytro.
After getting her husband’s death certificate, Shlonska, her son and family and friends went to the Berkovets Cemetery to prepare his burial.
Then shelling began. The cemetery’s office began to shake, recalled Klymniuk.
“I ran out and tried to hide behind the tombstones,” he said. “The explosions were happening for two minutes. They were the loudest things I have heard in my life. Some tree branches were sliced off by the rockets.”
Mother and son also took cover by the tombstones. After the attack, the gravediggers were too afraid to continue.
Nezhenets's body was returned to the morgue and placed in a freezer.
‘Not going to leave’
On Friday morning, morgue workers placed Nezhenets’s body in a casket. It was carried to a large white van. Shlonska and her son followed in their black sedan.
About a mile from the Ukrainian Orthodox church, where a service was scheduled, they passed a large purple bus riddled with bullet holes parked on the street. It was not far from several burned-out vehicles.
This was where Nezhenets was killed.
The van stopped in front of the Church of the Holy Supreme Apostles Peter and Paul, painted in yellow. Several military comrades of Nezhenets, including one tall soldier limping on crutches, were waiting to carry his coffin inside. The injured soldier was sitting in the passenger seat of Nezhenets’s car when the gunfire erupted.
That’s when the first of a series of outgoing artillery shells began. An air raid siren also went off. But no one was running for cover. Everyone wanted to pay their respects to Nezhenets.
The priest began the funeral under the church’s ornately painted domed ceiling. Dressed in a long cream robe, his melodic prayers echoed off the walls as the mourners held candles. The sounds of more shells vibrated through the walls.
Shlonska clutched her husband’s portrait, tears welling in her eyes. Mourners kissed her husband’s forehead, one by one.
They carried out his coffin, placed it back in the van, and drove to the site of his grave. Near the gravesite were pieces of the rockets that had fallen the day before.
As the coffin was placed inside the grave, mother and son stood together, trying to fight back the tears.
Shlonska now plans to volunteer at a hospital and help the wounded. Like her husband, she too is a psychologist. This will be her way, she said, of helping her homeland. | null | null | null | null | null |
It’s the first of two storm systems that will affect large parts of the country through Tuesday
The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center has hoisted a Level 2 out of 5 slight risk of severe weather across Iowa on Saturday, with rotating thunderstorms or supercells likely in a narrow corridor during the evening hours. Damaging winds, hail and a couple of tornadoes are possible.
Temperatures will drop 30 degrees or more behind the storm, the fledgling taste of spring soon to be replaced by a bitter air mass, with readings in the single digits and teens by Sunday in parts of the northern Plains and Upper Midwest.
Meanwhile, temperatures will swell into the 70s and 80s from the Southern Plains to the Mid-Atlantic on Sunday and Monday ahead of the second system, which will bring stormy weather and, by Tuesday, a drop in temperatures.
On Friday morning, the GOES West weather satellite was peering down on a swirl of cloud cover working ashore into Southern California. That marked an energetic high-altitude disturbance, or pool of cold air and low pressure aloft, set to work northeast over the Four Corners region before intensifying over the Colorado Rockies on Friday night.
A “string of pearls,” or a broken line of low-topped rotating thunderstorms, will probably form near the Missouri River somewhere in the stretch from Omaha to Sioux City, Iowa. Temperatures will probably be in the mid-60s in west central Iowa to the lower 70s in southwestern parts of the Corn Belt. Humidity won’t be through the roof, but the combination of springlike warmth and subtle humidity may prove just enough to get pockets of air to rise.
If that happens, an abrupt change in wind speed and direction with height, known as “wind shear,” will foster rotation within the storms. Any cells that form will have the propensity to produce damaging winds to 60 mph, quarter-size hail and a few brief tornadoes. Storms will rapidly move to northeast Iowa, probably affecting areas such as Fort Dodge, Jefferson and Des Moines, before weakening with the setting sun as they progress east.
The deepening, or strengthening, low-pressure system will swirl south a shot of frigid Arctic air in its wake, the cold coming in multiple waves. The first will yield a 30-degree temperature drop along the cold front Saturday evening before a reinforcing cold air mass slides southeast on Sunday.
A second storm system will eject out of the Southwest on Sunday night into Monday night, bringing a swath of heavy rain and some embedded thunderstorms from the Southern Plains all the way to the East Coast along a cold front. A narrow area of snow will probably develop from the Great Lakes to the interior Northeast. By Tuesday, the front will push away record-challenging warmth in the 70s and 80s from the South to the Mid-Atlantic on Sunday and Monday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, told the Security Council on Friday that the discussion about the Zaporizhzhia plant was “a false information attack, as if Russia had fired against the power plant.” The “plant and the surrounding areas have been placed under the protection of the Russian military.”
One nuclear expert said there needs to be some sort of negotiated agreement under which workers can have shift changes and undertake maintenance unimpeded if there is an extended conflict. | null | null | null | null | null |
Katie Benzan, left, went scoreless for the first time at Maryland in a loss Friday to Ali Patberg and Indiana. (Robert Scheer/Indianapolis Star/AP)
The Terrapins earned a double-bye as the No. 4 seed with a win over Indiana in the final game of the regular season. The Hoosiers got the No. 5 seed and defeated 13th-seeded Rutgers on Thursday. They did not seem like a team that had played a tournament game the day before. | null | null | null | null | null |
The phrase has become a rallying cry. A journalist for the Guardian in the region said on Twitter that the slogan can be seen emblazoned on highway signs, painted on checkpoints and written in dust on trucks. At a pro-Ukraine gathering in San Francisco last weekend, Zina Pozen, a 49-year-old woman in Oakland, Calif., who left her native Ukraine 30 years ago, heard the taunt leap out of a toddler’s mouth (with their parent’s full approval) in Russian. | null | null | null | null | null |
President Biden sent a powerful message at his State of the Union address, proclaiming: “We, the United States of America, stand with the Ukrainian people.” The White House has been quick to send humanitarian and some military aid and to enact punishing sanctions on Russia to cut off Vladimir Putin’s ability to easily finance this war. But there is something else the White House must do soon: offer to take in refugees from Ukraine.
But TPS does nothing to help with the swell of refugees crossing the Ukrainian border daily. It’s heartening to see so many nations in Europe taking in people fleeing Ukraine. Poland alone has taken in more than 500,000, with many Polish people offering rooms in their homes to the refugees and helping to rebuild a critical train route to make it easier for Ukrainians to flee. After years of Poland lurching away from democracy and the European Union, it’s a rapid turnaround that Mr. Biden and top E.U. leaders should be quick to support, along with ensuring that non-White refugees leaving Ukraine are also welcomed.
Beyond money, it would send a strong signal to Poland, Hungary and other nations taking in refugees if Mr. Biden would announce that the United States would accept tens of thousands of Ukrainians as well. (Mr. Biden allowed entry to about 76,000 Afghan refugees last year.) The president can do this on his own, without Congress. This is yet another way to truly stand with the brave and industrious Ukrainian people and our allies around the world. It would also provide more workers for the U.S. economy. | null | null | null | null | null |
From left, Vladislava Urazova, Angelina Melnikova, Viktoria Listunova and Lilia Akhaimova celebrate after winning the team gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics. (Natacha Pisarenko/AP)
Russian and Belarusian gymnasts and officials are banned from international competition indefinitely, the sport’s global governing body announced Friday, citing “the massive escalation of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.” The International Gymnastics Federation’s decision, which takes effect Monday, follows numerous other major sports that have barred Russian and Belarusian athletes from events.
Some gymnasts from Russia and Belarus are competing this weekend at a World Cup event in Doha, Qatar, the last major international competition in which they will be allowed to compete. Russia’s Viktoria Listunova, who was part of the gold medal team at the Tokyo Olympics, won the bars at this competition, followed by fellow Russian Maria Minaeva in second. Ukraine’s Daniela Batrona won the bronze medal on the apparatus. The gymnasts were recognized in separate medal ceremonies.
The FIG also governs rhythmic gymnastics and trampoline, the other Olympic disciplines of the sport. At the Tokyo Games, the ROC finished second in the group event in rhythmic gymnastics and Dina Averina of Russia won the silver in the individual competition. Ivan Litvinovich of Belarus won the gold medal in men’s trampoline. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Aircraft Ownership Transparency Act, a bill Lynch first introduced in 2017, was meant to address that. It would have required the FAA to obtain the identity of a plane’s “beneficial owners,” meaning the people who actually control the entity seeking to register the plane, or those who have an interest in its assets. Updated legislation he introduced last year seeks to achieve many of the same goals.
Kalman said there are also exemptions to those new requirements, including for some trusts, that would still allow abuse in aircraft registrations — loopholes that should be shut with legislation such as Lynch’s. | null | null | null | null | null |
Emma West (24) and Georgetown Visitation beat St. John's on Friday in the DCSAA semifinals, setting up a meeting with top-ranked Sidwell Friends. (Doug Kapustin for The Washington Post)
Less than a week ago, Georgetown Visitation saw its conference tournament run end in tears. The Cubs had been upset by Maret in the Independent School League semifinals, snapping the program’s streak of 14 straight conference titles.
“Everybody’s crying, sitting there knowing we could have done a lot better,” Cubs sophomore Toby Nweke remembered. “Talk quickly became about the D.C. states.”
The D.C. State Athletic Association tournament, the only event remaining on the team’s postseason calendar, provided a balm. It was a chance to bounce back, an opportunity to end the season on a better note than a locker room full of tears.
On Friday afternoon at Georgetown’s McDonough Arena, the No. 8 Cubs made the most of their second opportunity by upsetting No. 3 St. John’s, the defending Washington Catholic Athletic Conference champion, 54-43, in a DCSAA Class AA semifinal.
Visitation will face top-ranked Sidwell Friends, conference rival and the winner of that ISL tournament, in Sunday’s championship. The Quakers beat Maret, 70-26, on Friday night.
The Cubs punched their ticket to Sunday’s final with stifling defense. After trailing by four at halftime, Visitation came out of the break with a reenergized zone and held the Cadets to three points in the third quarter.
For Wilson, the shoes fit in the DCSAA boys' basketball semifinals
“I told them at halftime: ‘We want to be playing on Sunday. This is it. Season’s over if we lose this,’ ” Cubs Ccoach Mike McCarthy said. “They responded with some great defense.”
The defensive effort gave the offense plenty of time to get back into the game and then build a lead. Nweke got hot in the third quarter and finished with a game-high 19 points.
The Cubs and the Cadets are familiar DCSAA foes, and their matchup often represents the pinnacle of basketball in this district tournament. Traditionally the top two seeds, these two programs have faced off in the DCSAA championship game six times in the game’s eight years of existence. St. John’s won five of those matchups.
But this year, the tournament’s top seed and main attraction is Sidwell Friends. Widely ranked as the best girls’ basketball team in the country, the Quakers put on a show in the second semifinal of the day. Playing a Maret team they had just defeated by 34 points in Sunday’s ISL final, the Quakers looked calm and confident from the tip Friday. By the end of the first quarter, Sidwell led 24-0.
It was a pleasant finish to a celebratory week for the program. On Thursday, senior guard Kiki Rice was named Naismith girls’ high school player of the year and Coach Tamika Dudley earned Naismith coach of the year honors.
“It’s surreal,” Dudley said. “It’s always so nice for people to recognize the work that’s being put in by players like Kiki.”
For the Quakers, a loss to St. John’s in the 2020 DCSAA title game represented a big step forward for a young roster. Rice was a sophomore coming into her own, junior star Jadyn Donovan was just a promising freshman. The championship appearance meant they were ahead of schedule, a program with a bright future.
Nearly two years and a period of unimaginable change later, the Quakers will have the chance Sunday to finally lift that trophy.
“That appearance probably shocked a lot of people and meant a lot to our program,” Donovan said. “So the idea of getting back and winning it all? That would be a huge thing for us.” | null | null | null | null | null |
INDIANAPOLIS — A year after the surgery that could have prevented him from being at the NFL scouting combine, Carson Strong finally was facing his toughest tests. The Nevada quarterback shuffled from room to room, with each full of team doctors seemingly whispering among themselves about him and his right knee.
“Everyone’s got a different opinion, but I know I’m ready to go,” Strong said. “Everybody’s judging me based on the tape that I put out last season, which makes total sense, but I wasn’t healthy. I had a surgery that required a year for recovery; I came back in six months. My dad tried to get me to not play the first part of the season, but I was like, ‘There’s no way — I have to go out there and play for my team.’ ”
Not only did Strong’s commitment to the Wolf Pack pan out — he had one of the best years in program history with 4,175 passing yards, 36 touchdown throws, eight interceptions and a 70 percent completion rate — it boosted his NFL draft stock. Strong believes that he probably wouldn’t have been invited to the combine if he hadn’t pushed to play. Many draft analysts rank the pocket passer in the second tier of this muddled quarterback class with North Carolina’s Sam Howell, Mississippi’s Matt Corral and Cincinnati’s Desmond Ridder.
This week, Strong may have had more to gain than any passer. For players such as him who have significant injury histories, the combine is crucial because NFL teams care much more about interviews and medical tests than the basic, televised drills.
In July 2017, doctors used eight biodegradable nails to reattach the cartilage. Strong missed his senior year at Will C. Wood High, instead taking classes at a local community college to enroll early at Nevada. He spent a redshirt year recovering, and in 2019 he became the starter.
So Strong had to beat teams with his mind. Nevada put the offense in his hands, giving him full autonomy to change plays, protections or routes at the line of scrimmage. He focused on improving his decision-making and led Nevada to an 8-4 finish. In the last game of the year, he played without a knee brace for the first time.
At the Senior Bowl in February, Strong tried to show teams how much his mobility on bootlegs and in the pocket had progressed. He played well, showcasing his arm strength and an ability to pick up a new offense quickly. To reporters, Strong detailed the intricacies of his surgeries and said that if his body were going to reject his new knee cartilage, it would have happened already.
This offseason, he has been training with quarterback guru Jordan Palmer and Ridder, the passing prospect from Cincinnati. Palmer pointed out that Strong developed bad mechanical habits while he compensated for his knee, and he has had to relearn how to drive off his right foot when he throws. To Strong, this illustrates why he has untapped power and potential he will realize in the NFL. | null | null | null | null | null |
Katie Benzan went scoreless for the first time in her Maryland career in a loss Friday to Ali Patberg and Indiana. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
The Terrapins earned a double bye as the No. 4 seed with a win over Indiana in the final game of the regular season. The Hoosiers got the No. 5 seed and defeated 13th-seeded Rutgers on Thursday. They did not seem like a team that had played a tournament game the day before. | null | null | null | null | null |
“We are watching in slow motion the murder of thousands of people,” Temnycky said as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces continued their assault on several cities in Ukraine. “I don’t see how he is going to stop.”
Marina Shepelsky, 45, a Ukrainian-born lawyer in Brooklyn, said her fiance is a Soviet Jew who escaped persecution as a child and has flatly refused to return. Her family left Ukraine, fearing antisemitism, when she was 12, but her friends are there and her grandparents are buried there. And she believes the country had changed: President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish.
“He keeps asking me, ‘Why are you so upset? We are fine here in America,’” Shepelsky said, her voice catching as she clicked through photos of her 2012 trip home, where she visited historic sites in Kyiv, sampled dumplings with cherries and sour cream, and strolled through Odessa, on the Black Sea.
At a courier service nearby, Nelya and Ihor Andrusiv called customers to tell them to pick up packages to Russia because they cannot be delivered during the war. In between calls, they checked on Nelya’s younger sister, Mariya, who was hiding in a basement in the city of Kharkiv with her husband and 7-year-old daughter. The family had lost electricity and had some milk and bread, her sister told her on their most recent call. | null | null | null | null | null |
China state media censors Paralympics opening ceremony speech on Ukraine
By Eva Dou2:10 a.m.
China’s state-run broadcaster censored part of the Winter Paralympics Opening Ceremonies in Beijing on Friday, when an official speech turned critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Speaking emphatically, International Paralympic Committee president Andrew Parsons said he “must” begin with a message of peace.
“As the leader of an organization with inclusion at its core, with diversity celebrated and differences embraced, I am horrified at what is taking place in the world right now,” Parsons said in English. “The 21st century is a time for dialogue and diplomacy, not war and hate!”
The China Central Television announcer cut in, saying in Chinese that Parsons had said the IPC aspired to a better and more inclusive world, free from discrimination, hate and ignorance.
It was the latest effort from China to avoid direct criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even as Beijing has expressed alarm over the growing violence. One Chinese national was hit by gunfire while trying to leave the country. | null | null | null | null | null |
Who Wants to be a State Secretary of State? Everyone.
The once-sleepy, down-ballot elected office has suddenly become one of the most vital roles in the nation
In the turbulent weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger faced the media so many times that he felt he must have worn a groove in the marble between his office in a corner of the state Capitol in Atlanta and the grand atrium where he held news conferences. Now it was January 2022, a little more than a year after the infamous phone call in which defeated incumbent Donald Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in the state. And Raffensperger was making the same walk again.
Unlike those earlier tense encounters, when the fate of the nation seemed in the balance, today’s announcement was blessedly underwhelming. It was more in line with the dry, pre-insurrection secretary of state fare of normal times: Georgia was getting a new voter registration system. The change was administrative: It could help shorten lines at the polls, Raffensperger said, but otherwise voters would hardly notice a difference. It was called the Georgia Registered Voter Information System, “but that’s a mouthful, so we’re going to call it GaRVIS,” he added.
The other thing Raffensperger wanted to tell the public this week was that an entity impersonating his office was sending emails as part of a corporate registration phishing scam, trying to get people to click on suspicious attachments. In Georgia, the secretary of state does, in fact, handle such registrations. He also oversees investment securities, charities and cemeteries. He processes licenses for boxing and mixed martial arts. As in most states, the job evolved over two centuries from performing secretarial chores to being a jack of all bureaucratic trades — including elections, which in many years count for less than half the office’s annual budget, compared with all the other responsibilities.
“It’s a down-ballot ticket,” Raffensperger told me of his job later, back in his office. “It’s in the weeds, and a lot of people, before 2020, didn’t understand the importance of having a person of character, integrity and resolute determination to follow the Constitution, to follow the law.” A conservative Republican and a structural engineer by trade, Raffensperger voted for Trump, but he duly certified Biden’s victory. Trump called him an “enemy of the people.” “The challenge that you have is when you choose cause over character, you end up with neither,” Raffensperger continued. “And right now, people are so committed to their cause that they’ve thrown character out the window.”
Although the job has the same name in nearly every state, nowhere are the duties alike. In addition to supervising elections, depending on the state, the secretary may oversee bingo and raffles, take care of museums and libraries, or serve as chief protocol officer, schooling legislators on how to behave during missions abroad. In 10 states the secretaries don’t supervise elections.
One of Raffensperger’s responsibilities is to serve as Georgia’s keeper of the Great Seal. A giant likeness hangs in his office. The real seal is the about the size of a hockey puck, and Raffensperger uses it to emboss official documents as a glorified notary public. An antique press once used for the purpose stands prominently at the front of the office, but the real seal itself is no longer on display: Raffensperger put it in safe keeping when protesters were rallying at the Georgia Capitol after Trump lost the election. “It wasn’t as secure as it needed to be,” he told me. “We had a gentleman that actually broke into the Capitol.”
The day after our conversation, this week of routine bureaucratic announcements ended with another jarring reminder of how secretaries of state have emerged from their obscure shells to become the reluctant new superheroes — or villains — of democracy: The Justice Department announced the arrest of a Texas man for allegedly posting a message online on Jan. 5, 2021, that it was “time to kill” Georgia election officials.
The tumultuous past two years of American politics have made the job of secretary of state arguably a risky one — and one that’s suddenly coveted by both political parties, which see it as key to their future electoral success. These sleepy, paper-pushing positions were often dismissed by ambitious politicos as unreliable steppingstones to higher office (notable exceptions: Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp). But now they have become partisan battlegrounds, drawing a slew of competitors and a gusher of campaign cash for the posts on the ballot this year in 27 states. The winners, in most cases, will be strategically placed to supervise the 2024 presidential contest.
Some of the hottest races are in swing states Trump lost in 2020 — Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin — and feature candidates who deny Biden’s victory. (Pennsylvania doesn’t elect its secretary of state; nor, for that matter, do Florida or Texas, among others.) Trump has already endorsed primary candidates in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan — almost certainly the first time in history a former president has thrust himself so heavily, and so early, into these once-afterthought races.
“What’s at stake is the future of democracy in this country,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, told me. “Secretary of state races boil down to a very simple choice in 2022: Do we as a nation believe that American voters should be able to choose their elected officials?”
Griswold’s counterpart chairing the Republican Secretaries of State Committee, Tre Hargett of Tennessee, says: “Americans want to know that their elections are being run with the utmost of integrity. As Republicans we’re committed to making sure that we continue to make it as easy as possible to vote while also making sure it’s hard to cheat.”
Recently I sought out current and former secretaries of state, as well as candidates for the job, to understand the breathtaking transformation of this quirky but decisive role, one embedded almost by accident within American democracy. The ongoing dramatic politicization of the job — in widespread perception if not always in fact — highlights an inherent tension: We elect partisans to supervise elections in a nonpartisan way. That tension now threatens to tear the job apart, and raises a vital question that’s on the ballot in these races: Will we ever be able to believe an election again?
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger voted for Donald Trump, but he duly certified Joe Biden’s victory. Trump called him an “enemy of the people.” (Brynn Anderson/Associated Press)
In 2000, as Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris, a Republican, moved to certify the results of the Al Gore-George W. Bush presidential election before recounts could be completed. (Lucian Perkins)
LEFT: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger voted for Donald Trump, but he duly certified Joe Biden’s victory. Trump called him an “enemy of the people.” (Brynn Anderson/Associated Press) RIGHT: In 2000, as Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris, a Republican, moved to certify the results of the Al Gore-George W. Bush presidential election before recounts could be completed. (Lucian Perkins)
The origins of the position go back to the American Revolution, when Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress, certified the authenticity of documents, including the Declaration of Independence. As states entered the Union, they eventually hired secretaries. Here’s how the Maine Constitution of 1820 describes the job: “The records of the State shall be kept in the office of the Secretary. … He shall carefully keep and preserve the records of all the official acts and proceedings of the Governor and Council, Senate and House of Representatives, and, when required, lay the same before either branch of the Legislature. …”
It was “a pretty light lift,” says Matthew Dunlap, who served 14 years as Maine’s secretary of state, interrupted by an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate. “I mean, you just put the journals of the House and Senate on a shelf, and if they say, ‘Hey, do you happen to have the journals?’ you bring them over. That was really what it amounted to.”
But there was one additional note to the job description, as written in Article V, Part Third of the state Constitution: The secretary shall “perform such other duties as … shall be required by law.” There it was, the marvelously vague carte blanche to basically make the secretary of state do anything. In Maine, says Dunlap, when corporate formation acts got adopted after the Civil War, the secretary was tasked with keeping track of corporations. After automobiles were invented, the secretary kept the records. Ditto elections, as the state centralized and modernized election tabulation.
A similar pattern of piling on tasks was followed in other states. “It was a functionary job for two centuries,” says Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer in the Georgia secretary of state’s office. “Essentially, if you go around the country, it’s like, ‘We have something we want to do with government. … Let’s give it to the secretary of state. We gave him everything else.’ That’s literally how most states have dealt with secretaries of state.”
The job remained a quiet bureaucratic backwater until November 2000, when Katherine Harris of Florida burst into the nation’s consciousness. George W. Bush’s Florida margin over Al Gore was 537 votes; whoever won the state would become president. Harris insisted on sticking to the state deadline for certifying the results — effectively derailing a chaotic recount process. At the time, she said that she was using her “discretion” to deny requests to extend the deadline for amending county tallies, saying there was insufficient justification to grant an exception — despite widespread ballot problems in Democratic strongholds. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Gore’s attempt to continue the recounting.
When I reached Harris in Florida, she was reluctant to talk about that election, or make comparisons to 2020. “I guess the clearest point I could say to you and for any secretary of state … is that your only safe harbor is following the law,” she said. The certification deadline was the law, she said. “I had just as much pressure from Republicans to take things one way as I did Democrats in those first few days.” She says she resisted the pressure. When I reminded her that she had been perceived as partisan in part because she was co-chair of Bush’s campaign in the state, she said that was an honorary function that Florida secretaries of state had filled before. As for 2020, without commenting on particular secretaries’ conduct, Harris questioned whether changes in voting procedures during the pandemic were enacted with proper authority — a critique that tracks with Trump supporters’ complaints.
Some Democrats had flashbacks to Florida 2000 in 2004, when they saw how John Kerry lost Ohio to Bush. They placed some of the blame on Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell — co-chair of Bush’s Ohio campaign — for long lines, insufficient voting machines and controversial policy decisions, which they said suppressed the vote, especially in African American precincts. On Jan. 6, 2005, 32 Democrats in Congress objected to Ohio’s electoral votes — not to overturn the election, they said, which Kerry (unlike Trump today) had conceded, but to raise the issue of “electoral justice.”
We elect partisans to supervise elections in a nonpartisan way. That tension raises a vital question that’s on the ballot in these races: Will we ever be able to believe an election again?
The perceived motivations of Harris and Blackwell, and the Democrats’ reaction, marked the beginning of the job’s politicization. Democratic activists and funders formed the Secretary of State Project to try to elect Democratic secretaries in key states. By 2009, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State was formed with similar aims.
The Republicans responded in kind, formalizing a loose association of secretaries into the Republican Secretaries of State Committee, housed within the larger Republican State Leadership Committee.
Heightened partisan attention meant a certain loss of innocence over the person who was simply supposed to supervise clean elections — when they weren’t registering corporations or regulating bingo. “There was this sort of [realization], like, ‘Huh, the rules might matter,’ ” says Trey Grayson, former Kentucky secretary of state. “And who’s [secretary of state] matters, because sometimes the rules aren’t clear.”
“I tried to be nonpartisan in the work, and it didn’t make me a lot of friends,” says Dunlap, a Democrat. “I can remember many Democratic legislators literally hissing at me as I walked down the hall. ‘You’re supposed to be helping us!’ No, I’m supposed to be supporting the efforts of the little blue-haired old ladies at the county fair, collecting signatures on a petition. You make policy; I run the process.”
Over the past two years, the politicization of the job went into overdrive — a result of pandemic-forced voting adjustments, narrow margins in multiple battlegrounds, and Trump’s attacks on the process before and after the election. Across the country, secretary of state races have turned into expensive, marquee showdowns — not over who’s the most competent administrator, but who’s on the correct side of the bitter national divide over the last presidential election and fundamental civil rights. The Democratic secretaries group raised a record $4.5 million last year and set a goal of $15 million for this election cycle. The Republican state leadership group — which bills itself as “America’s only line of defense against socialism in the states” — and an affiliated foundation raised $33.3 million, an unspecified portion of which will be pumped into secretary of state races. Meanwhile, individual candidates are raising record sums on their own, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.
The transformation of the job into a prized partisan trophy has consequences, David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me. “I am very concerned that in the future — and this is not going to be solely limited to Republicans — but that as chief election officials, as secretaries of state, start using more partisan rhetoric, making it appear as if the job is really important to be held in a particular political party’s hands toward the good of the country, that there will be a natural delegitimization of the work of those offices. That perception is likely to be false, but the risk of it is real.”
It wasn’t long ago that simply being impartial was the most partisan thing a secretary of state could do: Their competence spoke well of their party. “I was a Republican, I wanted Republicans to win, but I also thought it was good politics for me to do a good job and be perceived as doing a good job,” Grayson says. “The guidepost now is, you know, pleasing a former president or doing the party’s bidding. … I look at some of the candidates who are running, and it does bother me because some of what they’re saying leads me to think that if they don’t like the count, or they don’t like the law, they might not do the job.”
A man in a white cowboy hat strode to the lectern in an outdoor arena in Florence, Ariz., and invited the audience to gaze west and behold another gorgeous desert sunset. “Look at the welcome Donald Trump is getting from God!” Mark Finchem told the cheering crowd at Trump’s Save America rally in mid-January. Finchem, a term-limited Arizona state legislator and former public safety officer was granted the honor of opening for Trump because Finchem is running for secretary of state.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we know it and they know it: Donald Trump won!” he declared, provoking more cheers. Finchem is unpersuaded by multiple analyses and rulings debunking claims of fraud in Arizona, including a 93-page report issued 10 days before the rally by GOP officials in the state’s largest county. “I look forward to the day that we set aside an irredeemably flawed election,” Finchem continued. “With all the evidence we have, the Arizona election should be decertified with cause by the legislature. … This is how the people can get justice.”
When it was Trump’s turn to speak, he pointed to Finchem seated in the front row. “The next Arizona secretary of state — a man who’s tough and smart and loves our country. A man who you must get elected,” Trump said. “He’ll get to the bottom of everything. Do you think you’ll get to the bottom of it, Mark?” Finchem leaped to his feet and waved two thumbs up.
Finchem, who attended the protest Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, is a leading example of a new category of candidate drawn to the job: the election deniers, those who dispute Trump’s defeat. If elected to the seat being vacated by Democrat Katie Hobbs, who’s running for Arizona governor, Finchem favors using paper ballots with currency-style protections, making ballot images a public record, and making it easier to audit elections, according to his campaign website and interviews he’s given to conservative media. (He didn’t respond to my requests for an interview.) He’s a strong contender for the post, having raised nearly $700,000 — more than any of the Democratic candidates, and more than all but one of the Republicans, according to state campaign finance records. In mid-February, the congressional Jan. 6 investigation committee subpoenaed Finchem for information on efforts to overturn the election. Finchem responded in a tweet: “Kangaroo court speaks. LOL.”
As of late January, at least 21 election deniers were running for secretary of state in 18 states, according to new research by States United Action, a nonpartisan election protection advocacy group co-chaired by former Republican New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman. “It’s important that we pay attention, and early, to the rhetoric about our election system happening in these down-ballot races,” she said in a statement upon releasing the report in early February.
When election denialism gets injected into campaigns for secretary of state, the job itself can be undermined. “It’s certainly okay from a policy perspective to advocate different levels of voter ID or whether people need to request a mail ballot,” says Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “What we have now is several candidates … who seem to be running on a platform of election denial, on the idea that their role as the state’s chief election officer is not to give voice to the voters of their state, regardless of whether they agree with it or not, but rather to ensure that their preferred candidate takes office. That we’ve never seen before, and to see it on a scale like we are right now, where it’s a feature of their campaign, not a flaw … is an entirely new thing that’s very concerning.”
The election deniers argue that they are the true democracy defenders who want to pick up the pieces after a botched election. “I have been aware of, and fighting against, election fraud here in Nevada for a long time,” Jim Marchant, a Republican candidate vying to succeed the term-limited Barbara Cegavske, told me. Cegavske, a Republican, was censured by her party after she certified Biden’s victory. Added Marchant: “Once I get in there, I can start to whittle away at the ways that they cheat, to the point where the people that get elected here in Nevada are who the people of Nevada really want. We haven’t elected anybody here since 2006. They have been installed and selected by the cabal.”
Marchant is a former member of the state legislature who ran for Congress in 2020 with Trump’s endorsement. He lost the race by about 5 percentage points and sought a revote, alleging election fraud. A judge denied his request. So far Trump hasn’t endorsed him in the secretary of state race. But he told me he was asked by people in the “Trump orbit” last year to help form a coalition of like-minded secretary of state candidates from around the country. Dubbed the America First Secretary of State Coalition, the candidates listed on its website include Marchant, the three candidates endorsed by Trump — Finchem, Kristina Karamo in Michigan and Rep. Jody Hice in Georgia — plus candidates in Colorado and California. Marchant said he is meeting candidates in other states to add to the coalition.
Several states with election deniers on the ballot also have more traditional Republican candidates seeking the GOP nomination, making this year’s races the most unpredictable in history, says the dean of secretary of state political handicappers, Louis Jacobson. For about 20 years Jacobson has been reporting on down-ballot races; for the past 10 he’s been writing tipsheets on secretary of state races for various publications. It was lonely work, but he owned the beat. “My stories on secretaries of state … were really obscure,” Jacobson, who’s also a senior correspondent for PolitiFact, told me. “Up until very recently, it’s been pretty hard to get enough people to focus attention on the secretary of state.”
Now his expertise is in demand, and he’s been engaged to write regular analyses of down-ballot contests for the newsletter Sabato’s Crystal Ball out of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. In a recent piece Jacobson described how election denialism could boomerang against the GOP contenders: “Will the Republican simply coast to victory based on party affiliation alone, especially in a midterm election that is looking favorable to the GOP? Or will voters be turned off by a strongly Trump-aligned candidate whose opponent is painting them as a threat to democracy?”
The Republican secretary of state establishment is cool to the election deniers but reluctant to challenge them head-on. (A spokesman for the Republican State Leadership Committee didn’t respond to my question about the America First Coalition of candidates.)
Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, vice chair of the Republican Secretaries of State Committee, pointed to his efforts to expand voting while ensuring security as a Republican model of making it easy to vote and hard to cheat. “Republicans for the moment have a better message because what you see on the Republican side … is we are talking about election integrity, we’re talking about verifying voter accuracy,” Adams told me. “But we’re also talking about ease of voting. … The Democrats are really focused almost exclusively on the easy-to-vote part, and I think that leaves them a weakness because voters do care about election integrity.”
As for campaigns built on claims that Trump won, speaking for himself and not the committee, Adams said: “I think it’s really hard for someone to run on a platform like that and then be able to win the confidence of not just the Republicans who vote in the primary, but also all of the voters who vote in the general election. I just think it’s a bad message. Even if you personally believe that, most people don’t. And that’s a great way to lose the election and not ever make a difference.”
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, went to law school with the purpose of becoming a voting rights attorney and enforcing the Voting Rights Act. (Paul Sancya/Associated Press)
Republican Mark Finchem, who was at the Jan. 6, 2021, protest in D.C., has raised nearly $700,000 in his campaign to be Arizona’s secretary of state. (Steve Helber/Associated Press)
LEFT: Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, went to law school with the purpose of becoming a voting rights attorney and enforcing the Voting Rights Act. (Paul Sancya/Associated Press) RIGHT: Republican Mark Finchem, who was at the Jan. 6, 2021, protest in D.C., has raised nearly $700,000 in his campaign to be Arizona’s secretary of state. (Steve Helber/Associated Press)
Just as Republican election deniers depart from the stolid administrator types who used to aspire to these positions, a new profile of Democrat is jumping into the races: voting rights advocates who, in another era, might have pursued their passion as civil rights lawyers or state legislators.
“I consider it the chief democracy officer,” says Reginald Bolding, one of the Democrats running in Arizona. “In 2020, had Arizona not had a Democratic secretary of state, there is no guarantee that the rightful electoral votes from Arizona would have been awarded to Joe Biden.”
Bolding, who serves as Democratic leader in the state House of Representatives, is the founder of what his campaign says are the largest Black-led voting rights and community engagement groups in the state. They registered more than 50,000 voters and filed federal lawsuits to protect voting rights. Bolding told me he thinks the secretary of state’s office is the most effective place for him to continue his work seeking to expand access to the polls while ensuring the people’s voice is heard.
The battleground state of Nevada, too, has several Democrats who feel called to defend democracy as secretary of state. “I started to see who was running in that field on the Republican side, and it’s not your normal Republican. It’s the extremist,” says Cisco Aguilar, a former state athletic commissioner and sports management lawyer who’s the founding chairman of a Catholic high school for economically marginalized students in North Las Vegas.
He began to see secretary of state as a perch where he could move the needle on societal problems he wanted to solve. “I can continue to spin my wheels doing the work we’re doing as a community, but we are never going to get anywhere if we don’t have access to the polls,” he told me. “And I thought: Here I am fighting for the fundamental right of education, when the fundamental right to vote is being challenged.”
In Michigan, another swing state targeted by Trump, incumbent Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was a pioneer of the new wave of aspiring Democratic secretaries. She went to law school with the express purpose of becoming a voting rights attorney and enforcing the Voting Rights Act. But after she saw the power secretaries of state had in elections in Florida and Ohio in the early 2000s, she had an epiphany. “Instead of trying to sue secretaries of state to compel them to do the right thing, what if I just ran for the position and tried to do the right thing?” she told me in a telephone interview.
“I tried to be nonpartisan in the work, and it didn’t make me a lot of friends,” says Democrat Matthew Dunlap, who served 14 years as Maine’s secretary of state.
Benson lost her first try for the job in 2010, the year she published a book profiling estimable Democratic and Republican secretaries of state titled “State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process.” She was elected in 2018 and is running for reelection against Kristina Karamo, the Trump-endorsed Republican. Karamo’s campaign denied my request for an interview but referred me to her website, which includes an interview in which she claims Benson was “strategically placed” in office by liberal interests to get their friends elected. Since Trump’s defeat in Michigan, Benson has endured similar evidence-free attacks on what she says was “the most high-turnout and secure election in our state’s history.” This year around the country, she adds, “Democracy is on the ballot in November.”
In Colorado, Jena Griswold became the nation’s youngest elected secretary of state, at 34, in 2019, and the first Democratic one in Colorado since the early 1960s. Griswold ran in response to rhetoric about voter fraud that Trump started using three years before he faced reelection. “It just became clear to me at that point that the foundation of the country as we knew it was being shaped in a different way,” she told me. “And so I decided to run.”
Now she’s being challenged by several Republicans. “We see in every swing state, including in Colorado, someone who … says 2020 was taken from President Trump, in the face of all the facts to the contrary, running to oversee elections,” she says. “That’s like giving a bank robber the keys to the vault.”
However, Democratic advocacy for voting rights and against ballot suppression can shade into what might sound like a liberal form of election denialism. Stacey Abrams initially refused to concede her 2018 loss in the Georgia governor’s race to Brian Kemp — in part because of actions Kemp had taken as secretary of state overseeing the very election he was competing in, such as purging more than a million voters from the rolls. Kemp argued that the pruning, conducted over several years, was a routine part of keeping the rolls up to date. The following year Abrams told the New York Times that, while Kemp got enough votes to win, she still had “legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election.”
In January during a news conference, Biden cast potential doubt on the reliability of the 2022 elections if stalled voting rights measures, which Democratic secretaries of state also support, weren’t passed. (Senate Republicans later blocked the measures.) “I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit,” Biden said. “The increase and the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these — these reforms passed.”
The idea that elections might be unreliable unless Democrats get their way — or unless Democrats get elected secretary of state — is a strain of the same poison being peddled by people who say Biden didn’t win.
The White House later tried to recast Biden’s remarks as saying what would happen if the states do in 2022 what Trump wanted them to do in 2020. Either way, the damage was done. Back in Georgia, Raffensperger tweeted: “President Biden should not be undermining the integrity of our elections. Pushing these claims is a threat to the security of American democracy.”
Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), now in his fourth term in Congress, has been endorsed by Trump in the race for secretary of state in Georgia. (Emil Lippe)
Jena Griswold became the nation’s youngest elected secretary of state, at 34, in 2019, and the first Democratic one in Colorado since the early 1960s. (David Zalubowski/Associated Press)
LEFT: Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), now in his fourth term in Congress, has been endorsed by Trump in the race for secretary of state in Georgia. (Emil Lippe) RIGHT: Jena Griswold became the nation’s youngest elected secretary of state, at 34, in 2019, and the first Democratic one in Colorado since the early 1960s. (David Zalubowski/Associated Press)
The last time a Georgia secretary of state had to hide the Great Seal was in 1947, when Ben Fortson held the job. The governor-elect died before he could be inaugurated, and three rivals claimed the position, prompting the so-called Three Governors Controversy. One of the pretenders seized the governor’s office and changed the locks. While the courts sorted out the crisis, Fortson knew that none of the ersatz governors could sign legislation without the Great Seal. So Fortson, who used a wheelchair, hid the seal under his cushion and sat on it for two months until a legitimate governor was named.
Fortson is Raffensperger’s role model for a secretary of state rising above the political fray and maintaining “unquestioned integrity.” Now Raffensperger finds himself in a lonely reelection battle with challengers on the right and the left questioning his impartiality.
Trump has endorsed Rep. Jody Hice, now in his fourth term in Congress. That a sitting member of Congress would leave to run for secretary of state shows how the political gravitas of the job has spiked. “Yes, I believe Trump won,” Hice told me in a telephone interview. “If we were to get an accurate count of the votes in Georgia, I believe absolutely Trump won Georgia.”
Hice maintains that steps Raffensperger took during the pandemic opened the election to fraud. When I asked about the multiple recounts, the spot check of signature matches and other reviews that found no evidence of fraud, he said: “If you have a hundred dollars of counterfeit money and you recount them over and over and over, you may get the same count, but you still have counterfeit money. The question was not the count. The question was whether or not the ballots were legal.”
The other main Republican challenger is lawyer David Belle Isle, who lost to Raffensperger in a primary runoff in 2018. We met in his office in Alpharetta, a small city outside Atlanta, where he had been mayor. He told me he’s not in a position to identify the specific tainted votes that gave Biden the victory but added: “I believe on statistics alone that Trump won Georgia.” As proof, he points to what he says is a sharply higher rejection rate for absentee ballot signatures in past elections compared with 2020. (Raffensperger’s office disputes that there is such a large discrepancy.)
“Brad had a colossal failure to be curious,” Belle Isle says. “He came up with a conclusion just two days after the election that it was the fairest, most secure election in Georgia’s history. … His conclusion came first, and everything that has happened after that has been to support the conclusion.”
On the other side of the aisle, Raffensperger obliterated much of the goodwill he may have enjoyed with Democrats when he supported an election bill passed in Georgia last year that addressed many of Trump supporters’ complaints. “I recognized it was the same man who I’ve always known, who would always come to committee and not be a friend for voting rights,” says Bee Nguyen, a state legislator who is one of the top Democrats seeking Raffensperger’s job.
Nguyen holds Stacey Abrams’s old seat and is an outspoken advocate for voting rights. She told me running for secretary of state “was not part of my plan” until the aftermath of the 2020 election, when she saw how decisive the job could be in securing the right to vote. To her, Raffensperger now merely wants “to placate this base that has rejected him — this base that continues to double down on the ‘big lie.’ ”
If none of the Republicans prevail in the primary in May, there will be a runoff in June. Hice and Belle Isle say Raffensperger can’t win a one-on-one Republican runoff. Raffensperger, for his part, says he’s the only Republican who can win the general election against Nguyen or another Democrat.
As I surveyed the secretary of state landscape, I kept bumping into examples of how this infinitely elastic job has been shaped and tugged and sometimes twisted to meet the needs of the moment. Given the intense partisanship of today, we probably should have expected the job to be hammered into its latest incarnation: crusader.
Near the end of my exploration, seeking the consolation of experience, I consulted America’s longest-serving secretary of state currently in office, who, until recently, thought he had seen it all. Doug La Follette, 81, was elected to the job in Wisconsin in 1974; except for a four-year break, he’s held it ever since. He imagined it might be a steppingstone to higher office but, predictably — nope. He lost races for lieutenant governor, U.S. Senate and U.S. House. So he settled in for the long haul, trying to modernize the office, using it as a bully pulpit for his environmental activism as one of the organizers of the first Earth Day.
Before he took office, the legislature removed election authority and handed it to an outside election board. Then, during Democrat La Follette’s long tenure, Republican governors stripped away nearly all the remaining grab bag of duties. In the early 1970s, La Follette had nearly 50 employees. Today he has two and is relegated to a tiny office in the basement of the state Capitol.
“How do I feel?” La Follette asked during a Zoom call. “To be quite honest, I feel damn s---ty about it, because it means that in my tenure, the office has been emasculated.” The main thing he does now is authenticate documents for foreign transactions. “I can do the office with both hands tied behind my back, and it’s not a very exciting thing if you like to do stuff.”
Then the 2020 election happened. Trump supporters refused to accept Biden’s 20,000-plus vote victory in Wisconsin. That December, someone delivered to the basement office a list of electors — in support of Trump. One of La Follette’s other duties, every four years, is to authenticate the official list of electors transmitted by the governor to Congress. In 2020, of course, it was a list of Biden electors.
“They said, ‘We met and we chose these electors supporting President Trump’s reelection,’ ” La Follette recalled. “Of course, it didn’t come from the governor, and it wasn’t authentic. So I just kind of smiled. … I put them in a drawer and forgot about it.” Now the Jan. 6 committee in Congress and other investigators are digging into the scheme to submit Trump electors from multiple swing states. “People have now gotten interested in those fake electors,” La Follette said. “So I got them out of the drawer.”
Suddenly his job looms larger than it has in decades. For the first time in memory, the race for Wisconsin secretary of state really matters. Four Republicans and a Libertarian candidate have signaled interest. At least two of the Republican candidates want to restore election authority to the office after all these years. That defies the trend in some other swing states, where Republican legislatures have sought to weaken the secretary of state. But it perfectly fits the politicization of the office: Since Trump’s loss in Wisconsin can’t be blamed on the secretary of state, but allegedly on the outside election commission, why not give power back to the secretary of state and elect a Republican?
“The biggest applause line I get is when I say the Wisconsin Elections Commission has to be fired,” Jay Schroeder, one of the Republicans campaigning for the nomination, told me. He calls himself an America First candidate, and he’s a serious contender in the race. When he ran against La Follette in 2018, he got 47 percent of the vote. “The secretary of state was a sleepy position, kind of in hibernation — but it isn’t now.”
After more than 40 years in office, La Follette could easily consider retiring, but now he’s not so sure. “If they can elect a Republican secretary of state, and if they can elect a Republican governor this year, and we’re going to have a Republican legislature — that’s fixed in stone by gerrymandering … then they can fuddle with the election the way Trump might like them to,” he says.
With his statewide name recognition, La Follette would be a strong candidate, but when we talked in late January, he still hadn’t decided on running. What gave him the most pause was the requirement to get thousands of signatures for his candidacy. That’s a risky activity for an 81-year-old during the pandemic. But then, serving as secretary of state these days is a risky activity. Like everyone aspiring to be secretary of state in 2022, Republicans and Democrats, La Follette thought the state — and the nation — just may depend on his taking the chance.
David Montgomery is a staff writer for the magazine. Washington Post researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Fresno State hosts Maldonado and Wyoming
Fresno State Bulldogs (18-11, 8-8 MWC) at Wyoming Cowboys (23-7, 12-5 MWC)
Laramie, Wyoming; Saturday, 4 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Wyoming hosts the Fresno State Bulldogs after Hunter Maldonado scored 22 points in Wyoming’s 64-57 loss to the UNLV Rebels.
The Cowboys have gone 13-1 in home games. Wyoming is sixth in the MWC in team defense, allowing 65.8 points while holding opponents to 41.3% shooting.
The Bulldogs have gone 8-8 against MWC opponents. Fresno State ranks fourth in college basketball allowing 58.1 points while holding opponents to 40.8% shooting.
The teams square off for the second time this season in MWC play. Wyoming won the last matchup 61-59 on Feb. 7. Maldonado scored 21 points points to help lead the Cowboys to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Drake Jeffries is shooting 42.6% from beyond the arc with 2.9 made 3-pointers per game for the Cowboys, while averaging 10.6 points and 5.3 rebounds. Graham Ike is averaging 13.4 points and 7.2 rebounds over the past 10 games for Wyoming.
Orlando Robinson is scoring 18.7 points per game and averaging 8.2 rebounds for the Bulldogs. Isaiah Hill is averaging 7.6 points and 1.5 rebounds over the last 10 games for Fresno State. | null | null | null | null | null |
Gainey leads South Carolina Upstate against Longwood after 20-point performance
South Carolina Upstate Spartans (14-15, 10-6 Big South) vs. Longwood Lancers (24-6, 15-1 Big South)
Charlotte, North Carolina; Saturday, 12 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: South Carolina Upstate plays the Longwood Lancers after Jordan Gainey scored 20 points in South Carolina Upstate’s 72-62 win against the Charleston Southern Buccaneers.
The Lancers have gone 16-1 in home games. Longwood leads the Big South with 76.2 points and is shooting 45.2%.
The Spartans are 10-6 in Big South play. South Carolina Upstate ranks third in the Big South shooting 36.4% from 3-point range.
The teams square off for the second time this season. Longwood won the last matchup 85-72 on Feb. 11. DeShaun Wade scored 23 to help lead Longwood to the victory, and Gainey scored 16 points for South Carolina Upstate.
TOP PERFORMERS: Justin Hill is scoring 14.3 points per game and averaging 4.6 rebounds for the Lancers. Wade is averaging 2.8 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Longwood.
Bryson Mozone is shooting 43.4% and averaging 15.1 points for the Spartans. Gainey is averaging 13.9 points over the last 10 games for South Carolina Upstate. | null | null | null | null | null |
Gardner-Webb visits Winthrop after Hightower's 21-point game
Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs (18-12, 11-5 Big South) vs. Winthrop Eagles (22-8, 14-2 Big South)
BOTTOM LINE: Winthrop takes on the Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs after Cory Hightower scored 21 points in Winthrop’s 68-51 victory against the High Point Panthers.
The Eagles are 13-0 in home games. Winthrop is ninth in the Big South with 7.3 offensive rebounds per game led by Kelton Talford averaging 1.6.
The Runnin’ Bulldogs are 11-5 against conference opponents. Gardner-Webb averages 13.2 turnovers per game and is 7-4 when turning the ball over less than opponents.
The teams meet for the third time this season. The Eagles won 81-70 in the last matchup on Feb. 17. Hightower led the Eagles with 16 points, and Lance Terry led the Runnin’ Bulldogs with 21 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: D.J. Burns is averaging 15.1 points for the Eagles. Sin’Cere McMahon is averaging 1.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Winthrop.
Terry is scoring 14.4 points per game with 3.4 rebounds and 1.2 assists for the Runnin’ Bulldogs. D’Maurian Williams is averaging 13.1 points and 3.7 rebounds while shooting 38.1% over the last 10 games for Gardner-Webb.
Runnin’ Bulldogs: 8-2, averaging 64.6 points, 35.4 rebounds, 11.7 assists, 6.8 steals and 3.8 blocks per game while shooting 43.0% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 61.1 points. | null | null | null | null | null |
Drake Bulldogs (23-9, 13-5 MVC) vs. Missouri State Bears (23-9, 13-5 MVC)
BOTTOM LINE: Missouri State will attempt to prolong its three-game win streak with a victory over Drake.
The Bears have gone 12-4 at home. Missouri State is 1-2 in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Bulldogs have gone 13-5 against MVC opponents. Drake averages 73.8 points while outscoring opponents by 7.9 points per game.
The teams square off for the third time this season. Missouri State won the last matchup 66-62 on Feb. 10. Gaige Prim scored 21 to help lead Missouri State to the win, and Garrett Sturtz scored 12 points for Drake.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jaylen Minnett is shooting 39.7% from beyond the arc with 2.4 made 3-pointers per game for the Bears, while averaging 8.8 points. Prim is averaging 14.4 points and 5.3 rebounds over the last 10 games for Missouri State.
Tucker DeVries averages 2.0 made 3-pointers per game for the Bulldogs, scoring 13.6 points while shooting 33.5% from beyond the arc. Sturtz is shooting 58.1% and averaging 7.3 points over the past 10 games for Drake. | null | null | null | null | null |
Murphy and the South Florida Bulls take on conference foe Temple
South Florida Bulls (8-21, 3-14 AAC) at Temple Owls (16-11, 9-7 AAC)
Philadelphia; Sunday, 2 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Temple takes on South Florida in a matchup of AAC teams.
The Owls are 10-3 in home games. Temple averages 12.2 turnovers per game and is 6-4 when it has fewer turnovers than its opponents.
The Bulls are 3-14 in conference play. South Florida is third in the AAC allowing 64.7 points while holding opponents to 41.5% shooting.
The teams play for the second time this season in AAC play. South Florida won the last matchup 52-49 on Feb. 8. Jamir Chaplin scored 14 points to help lead the Bulls to the win.
TOP PERFORMERS: Zach Hicks averages 2.1 made 3-pointers per game for the Owls, scoring 8.0 points while shooting 37.7% from beyond the arc. Khalif Battle is averaging 21.4 points over the past 10 games for Temple.
Caleb Murphy is averaging 11.4 points and 3.3 assists for the Bulls. Russel Tchewa is averaging 8.1 points over the past 10 games for South Florida.
LAST 10 GAMES: Owls: 5-5, averaging 63.0 points, 31.3 rebounds, 9.4 assists, 7.3 steals and 3.1 blocks per game while shooting 39.3% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 76.7 points per game. | null | null | null | null | null |
New Hampshire Wildcats and Binghamton Bearcats play in America East Tournament
Binghamton Bearcats (11-16, 8-10 America East) at New Hampshire Wildcats (15-12, 10-8 America East)
Durham, New Hampshire; Sunday, 1 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: The New Hampshire Wildcats play in the America East Tournament against the Binghamton Bearcats.
The Wildcats are 10-3 on their home court. New Hampshire is fourth in the America East with 29.5 points per game in the paint led by Nick Guadarrama averaging 0.7.
The Bearcats are 8-10 against conference opponents. Binghamton ranks third in the America East scoring 30.4 points per game in the paint led by Ogheneyole Akuwovo averaging 0.3.
The teams play each other for the third time this season. New Hampshire won the last matchup 66-62 on Feb. 26. Guadarrama scored 16 to help lead New Hampshire to the victory, and Christian Hinckson scored 15 points for Binghamton.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jayden Martinez is averaging 14.9 points and 5.5 rebounds for the Wildcats. Marco Foster is averaging 2.3 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for New Hampshire.
Jacob Falko is averaging 12.6 points and 3.2 assists for the Bearcats. John McGriff is averaging 12.6 points over the last 10 games for Binghamton. | null | null | null | null | null |
No. 22 Murray State plays Morehead State, looks for 70th win of season
Morehead State Eagles (22-10, 13-5 OVC) vs. Murray State Racers (29-2, 18-0 OVC)
Evansville, Indiana; Saturday, 8:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: No. 22 Murray State will try to earn its 30th victory this season when the Racers play the Morehead State Eagles.
The Racers have gone 15-0 at home. Murray State is the OVC leader with 36.1 rebounds per game led by K.J. Williams averaging 8.5.
The Eagles are 13-5 against OVC opponents. Morehead State is 3-1 in one-possession games.
The teams meet for the third time this season. Murray State won 57-53 in the last matchup on Feb. 12. Williams led Murray State with 21 points, and Johni Broome led Morehead State with 14 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Williams is averaging 18.5 points, 8.5 rebounds and 1.5 steals for the Racers. Tevin Brown is averaging 10.5 points over the last 10 games for Murray State.
Tray Hollowell is shooting 37.4% from beyond the arc with 2.6 made 3-pointers per game for the Eagles, while averaging 10.4 points. Broome is shooting 51.7% and averaging 12.9 points over the last 10 games for Morehead State. | null | null | null | null | null |
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