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Towson plays Delaware after Timberlake's 25-point game
Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens (20-12, 10-8 CAA) vs. Towson Tigers (25-7, 15-3 CAA)
Washington; Monday, 6 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Towson hosts the Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens after Nicolas Timberlake scored 25 points in Towson’s 68-61 win over the Northeastern Huskies.
The Tigers have gone 12-2 at home. Towson ranks second in the CAA in rebounding with 33.4 rebounds. Cameron Holden leads the Tigers with 8.1 boards.
The Fightin’ Blue Hens are 10-8 in conference matchups. Delaware averages 74.4 points while outscoring opponents by 3.6 points per game.
The teams play each other for the third time this season. Towson won the last matchup 69-57 on Feb. 28. Charles Thompson scored 15 to help lead Towson to the win, and Dylan Painter scored 19 points for Delaware.
TOP PERFORMERS: Terry Nolan Jr. is averaging 10.1 points, 3.8 assists and 1.6 steals for the Tigers. Timberlake is averaging 14.7 points over the last 10 games for Towson.
Jameer Nelson Jr. is averaging 13.9 points, 5.1 rebounds and 1.7 steals for the Fightin’ Blue Hens. Kevin Anderson is averaging 1.2 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Delaware. | null | null | null | null | null |
UNC Wilmington hosts Charleston (SC) following Meeks' 31-point showing
Charleston (SC) Cougars (17-14, 8-10 CAA) vs. UNC Wilmington Seahawks (22-8, 15-3 CAA)
BOTTOM LINE: Charleston (SC) takes on the UNC Wilmington Seahawks after John Meeks scored 31 points in Charleston (SC)’s 92-76 win against the Hofstra Pride.
The Seahawks are 12-2 in home games. UNC Wilmington is seventh in the CAA scoring 71.2 points while shooting 42.0% from the field.
The Cougars are 8-10 against CAA opponents. Charleston (SC) is the CAA leader with 36.5 rebounds per game led by Dimitrius Underwood averaging 6.6.
The teams meet for the third time this season. The Seahawks won 85-79 in the last matchup on Feb. 13. Jaylen Sims led the Seahawks with 27 points, and Meeks led the Cougars with 21 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Sims is scoring 15.7 points per game with 5.6 rebounds and 2.4 assists for the Seahawks. Mike Okauru is averaging 11.1 points and 2.5 rebounds while shooting 47.4% over the last 10 games for UNC Wilmington.
Underwood is averaging 11.3 points, 6.6 rebounds, 3.7 assists and 2.1 steals for the Cougars. Meeks is averaging 10.3 points over the last 10 games for Charleston (SC). | null | null | null | null | null |
SINGAPORE — Jin Young Ko started her LPGA Tour season with a two-shot victory in the HSBC Women’s World Championship, her sixth win in her last 10 starts.
LAS VEGAS — Alex Bowman beat NASCAR champion Kyle Larson in a door-to-door overtime battle at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday that sent Hendrick Motorsports to victory lane for the second consecutive week. | null | null | null | null | null |
Wilson and South Dakota State host South Dakota
South Dakota Coyotes (19-11, 11-7 Summit) vs. South Dakota State Jackrabbits (28-4, 18-0 Summit)
Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Monday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: South Dakota State takes on the South Dakota Coyotes after Doug Wilson scored 22 points in South Dakota State’s 87-79 victory over the Omaha Mavericks.
The Jackrabbits are 15-0 in home games. South Dakota State scores 87.2 points and has outscored opponents by 13.3 points per game.
The Coyotes are 11-7 in conference matchups. South Dakota is fourth in the Summit with 8.0 offensive rebounds per game led by Hunter Goodrick averaging 2.1.
The teams play each other for the third time this season. South Dakota State won the last matchup 89-79 on Feb. 6. Wilson scored 25 to help lead South Dakota State to the win, and Kruz Perrott-Hunt scored 15 points for South Dakota.
TOP PERFORMERS: Baylor Scheierman is averaging 16.3 points, eight rebounds and 4.6 assists for the Jackrabbits. Wilson is averaging 18.0 points over the last 10 games for South Dakota State.
Perrott-Hunt is shooting 41.6% and averaging 14.9 points for the Coyotes. Tasos Kamateros is averaging 14.9 points over the last 10 games for South Dakota. | null | null | null | null | null |
After Moon, who made diplomacy with North Korea central to his foreign policy ambitions, a Yoon presidency would mark a sharp about face on inter-Korean relations. Yoon has called on greater cooperation with Washington to confront the growing nuclear threat posed by North Korea.
He also wants to see South Korea play a greater role in its relationship with the United States by cooperating on “new frontier” issues that are key to the U.S.-China economic competition and would draw on South Korea's advanced technology industry, such as supply chain resiliency through semiconductors and EV batteries, space, and cybersecurity.
Yoon said he would meet with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and to restore the “shuttle diplomacy” of the past, when the leaders would make regular reciprocal visits. Kishida, who helped broker a historic agreement with Seoul in 2015 over the issue of wartime sex slaves, also known as “comfort women,” has also called for a more stable relationship between the two countries. | null | null | null | null | null |
A photo showing then-10-month-old Locklan Samples was posted on Instagram by his mother, Katelyn, in summer 2021. A stranger responded to the post by messaging her with a question about a rare genetic condition she'd never heard of: Did her baby boy have uncombable hair syndrome? (Katelyn Samples)
“I’d never heard of it,” the 33-year-old mother in Roswell, Ga., told The Washington Post in an interview. “I kind of freaked out.”
Although she took him to his pediatrician, uncombable hair syndrome is so rare — scientists know of only about 100 cases, according to WebMD — that the doctor hadn’t heard of it, either, forcing the Samples family to visit a specialist in Atlanta. A pathologist there confirmed the Instagram stranger’s hunch by diagnosing Locklan with uncombable hair syndrome, or UHS.
Samples’s fear dissipated; Locklan was not in danger or pain. Uncombable hair syndrome is a rare genetic condition that shows up in children between the ages of 3 months and 12 years, according to the National Institutes of Health and WebMD. The genetic abnormality produces dry, frizzy locks that are silvery-blond or straw-colored. The hair sticks out from the scalp and can’t be combed flat.
Samples said that each strand of Locklan’s hair has a “crimp” in it.
“It can’t be tamed,” she said. “Nothing can fix it.”
In the six months since Locklan’s diagnosis, Samples started an Instagram account dedicated to her now 17-month-old boy and his hair — “uncombable_locks,” the brainchild of her husband, Caleb. Her ambition is threefold: encourage people to embrace what makes them different, urge those who might have uncombable hair syndrome to get diagnosed so scientists can better understand it, and provide information she wishes she’d had when that stranger first mentioned the condition.
“Because there’s not a lot of confirmed diagnosis out there, there’s in turn not a lot of information,” she told The Post.
When Samples first started scouring the Internet for details, one of the best resources she found was a Facebook group dedicated to the condition. Veteran UHS parents and people with it have shared tidbits about what could happen to Locklan’s hair as he gets older, what hairstyles have worked for them and their favorite products.
“That has been extremely helpful,” she said. “ … It's been comforting.”
Samples said her efforts to inform others about UHS and encourage people to seek diagnoses are working. Parents from around the world are sending pictures of their children’s hair almost every day, wondering if it’s the byproduct of UHS. The photos have come from as close as within Georgia and as far away as Ireland, England, Poland and Australia. One mom, after her brother sent her a news article about Samples and Locklan, had her son diagnosed with UHS. The women have developed a friendship.
“We’ve been able to connect, which has been really cool,” she said.
Aside from the syndrome, Locklan is developing normally, she said. The only possible symptom is his “extremely sensitive skin,” something she said other UHS parents in the Facebook group had encountered. She’s also read that some children diagnosed with the syndrome can overheat, something she’s noticed in Locklan, although she’s not sure whether it’s tied to his condition.
Locklan’s hair gets a lot of attention when he’s in public, Samples said. People are curious and nearly everyone is “just filled with joy and extremely kind,” Samples said. Some even ask to take photos with him, which Samples is fine with “as long as the baby is happy and vibing with it.”
“For the most part, it’s been very, very positive,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Behind U.S. foreign policy toward Venezuela are century-old racist tropes
Understanding this history will be key as the U.S. aims to reengage Venezuela due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
By Timothy M. Gill
Tim Gill is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee — Knoxville. He is the author of the forthcoming book "Encountering U.S. Empire in Socialist Venezuela: The Legacy of Race, Neo-Colonialism, and Democracy Promotion."
Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s president, addresses the National Assembly in Caracas, Venezuela, on Jan. 15. (Gaby Oraa/Bloomberg)
On Saturday, high-level American officials traveled to Caracas to meet with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government. The officials hoped to try to drive a wedge between Venezuela and Russia, while also exploring the possibility of removing sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports. The Biden administration worries that if Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine leads to deepening acrimony between the United States and Russia, having Russian allies in Latin America could be a security risk.
For over 20 years, the relationship between the United States and Venezuela has been tense. U.S. officials cast former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who led the country from 1999 until his death in 2013, as an authoritarian ruler bent on turning Venezuela into a dictatorship. Following Chávez’s death in 2013, Maduro, Chávez’s former minister of foreign affairs, officially took over the Venezuelan government.
Then, Donald Trump’s administration cut off Venezuelan oil supplies from entering the country, and leaders encouraged the Venezuelan military to overthrow the government. The United States and several other governments even recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the Venezuelan president after a controversial 2018 election characterized by unfair conditions and accusations of fraud. Though the Biden administration has dropped Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, many of the same policies remain.
This tense relationship between the United States and Venezuela has been shaped by assumptions and ideas about U.S. dominance of the Western Hemisphere that date back centuries. Indeed, it is worth understanding the mentalities of the U.S. foreign policymakers as they sought to engage Venezuelan officials and citizens. Despite different personnel and stated goals, there has been remarkable continuity across the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. Their efforts remain rooted in a history of U.S. foreign policymaking that has embraced racist and neocolonial visions of American leadership in the hemisphere.
Racism indelibly shaped the origins of the United States as a settler colony. Early settlers and U.S. government leaders, including Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, believed that they were among God’s chosen people and rightfully deserved to remove indigenous peoples from what they termed North America. They were driven by the philosophical tenets of classical liberalism and its champions, namely John Locke, as well as pseudoscientific thought concerning the alleged superiority of White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs).
After the establishment of the United States, and as White settlers expanded westward, leaders and proponents embedded these racist ideas under the banner of “Manifest Destiny,” a belief in the providence and moral rightfulness of their expansionary efforts. In doing so, U.S. leaders engaged in genocidal acts against indigenous people and violently removed them from their ancestral lands to claim ownership of the continent. All the while, the enslavement of African Americans became premised upon this process of settler colonialism.
At the international level, U.S. officials deemed themselves the protectors of the hemisphere under the paternalistic Monroe Doctrine of 1823. In doing so, Americans — not European empires, or the leaders of independent nations south of the U.S. border — positioned themselves as the dominant hemispheric power. By the turn of the century, the U.S. empire gained more formal territory, including Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and further consolidated its claims to territory on the American mainland, including warring with and annexing parts of what was formerly Mexico.
By the mid-century, though, as the United States became a global superpower, formal colonialism became outmoded. Yet, the United States continued to extend its influence by persistently intervening in other country’s politics and economies to serve its own interests.
In justifying this neocolonial exercise of power, U.S. policymakers have depended on many of the same racist ideas as their 19th-century forebears. Analysis of thousands of pages of U.S. government documents and interviews with former ambassadors, high-ranking members of the Department of State and embassy and other State Department staff reveals that the derogatory language used to depict Chávez depended on long-standing White racial mentalities that portray Latin Americans as emotional, irrational and uncivilized.
In diplomatic cables, U.S. diplomats often described Chávez with terms such as “bizarre,” “hysterical” and “hot-headed.” Instead of attempting to understand Chávez’s policies and his rationales, they often dismissed them as innately unworthy of serious attention. In interviews, the same language continued, with individuals describing him, for instance, as “a clown,” motivated by “machismo” and only concerned with wielding power.
They also dismissed Chávez’s appeals to his own country. While Chávez often decried racial and ethnic inequality in the country, some depicted him as manipulating such ideas simply to win support. One high-ranking diplomat, for instance, rhetorically opined, “Is [Chávez] an MLK or Benito Juárez? Or is this a guy that says this would be a great vehicle to ride? This is a guy like others that wanted power.” U.S. officials could only see his politics as power hungry and self-serving.
Even when some were sympathetic to Chávez and the challenges he faced, they often indicated that he was a product of an apparently deficient Venezuelan culture more broadly. One diplomat claimed, “He almost couldn’t be blamed for not understanding democracy, because he grew up in this undemocratic society.” In doing so, such diplomats evidenced a plain form of cultural racism.
U.S. officials similarly imagined Venezuelan citizens as subject to the manipulation of Chávez and thus unable to understand their true interests. This idea echoed the justifications for empire in the late 19th century when the United States and European empires framed non-White people around the world as children in need of a White “civilizing” influence.
One high-ranking diplomat, for instance, cabled back to Washington that to “outsiders Chávez’ long and rambling speeches are semi-coherent and at times laughable.” But, the diplomat continued, “To the average Venezuelan, however, Chávez’ words have meaning, offering hope or fear, depending on the message.” In other words, U.S. diplomats were the only ones sophisticated enough to comprehend the realities of Chávez, unlike average Venezuelan citizens.
Condescension shaped how many U.S. officials thought about the country, and such logic helped justify U.S. intervention. The challenge that Chávez posed to geopolitical and economic power greatly irritated U.S. officials, and they deployed such racist and neocolonial thinking in their attempts to make sense of him and the support he drew from Venezuelan citizens.
Those interventions took the form of programs designed to change Venezuelans’ minds to foster support for the United States and its interests. The U.S. government funded rock bands to write anti-government songs in 2011, and created college courses for poor Venezuelans to show them the alleged ills of socialism and the moral righteousness of a free-market economy, beginning in 2006.
At times, the U.S. government developed community groups in poor neighborhoods using the language of “participatory democracy” to convert supporters of Chávez into opposition members.
The U.S. government even supported student groups leading protests against Chávez in 2009 with guidance and instruction. It was from these protests that Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó initially emerged. In the end, the programs ultimately failed to bring Chávez down as citizens continued to believe in his socialist policies.
Under the Biden administration, the United States has continued its support for Guaidó. What is more, while the administration has indicated it might loosen widespread sanctions imposed on the government by former president Trump, such efforts have yet to materialize. As a result, the new administration has continued with the same policies ramped up under the previous administration, seemingly in an effort to satisfy Venezuelan and Cuban voters in Florida.
Over the last several years, the United States has been gripped by a national debate about the history of white supremacy and racism in our country. Racism also clearly continues to hold sway in the culture of foreign policy. The racist and derogatory language used by foreign policymakers to describe Venezuelan leaders and citizens has in no way remained subtle. Such language harks back to the formations of the United States as a settler colony and remains a testament to how many U.S. leaders continue to view their own country as a chosen nation that must civilize the world. | null | null | null | null | null |
How has Ukraine changed my mind?
Updating my prior thoughts about how the international system works
A Ukrainian soldier stands guard on a road, east of the town of Brovary, on March 6. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)
Social scientists are taught in graduate school that we need to rigorously test our theories and hypotheses. The attempt to falsify is at the core of what we are supposed to do. What we are taught and what we actually do, however, is not entirely in alignment. Social scientists, like everyone else, possess only slightly evolved monkey brains. We are prone to confirmation bias just like everyone else. In a murky, complex information environment, we will often grasp at the pieces of data that confirm our priors and ignore the more discordant bits of information. The system of scientific research still works because of the powerful incentives to falsify the other person’s hypotheses, but you get my point.
As my profession wrestles with who has been right and who has been wrong about the causes of war in Ukraine, Harvard political scientist Joshua Kertzer asks an important question: “What has the war in Ukraine changed your mind about?”
This is an excellent exercise. Last year, I pooh-poohed the possibility that Ukraine would trigger a great-power war. While that still has not happened, I must concede that I underplayed the possibility. So what other expectations of mine have proved to be off?
First, a caveat: given that the war is less than two weeks old, all answers are provisional. This is particularly true because our sources of information are partial at best and skewed at worst. Still, given what we know now, I think there are three aspects of international politics that I need to reevaluate.
The first is that I overestimated Russian power and strategy. In the run-up to the war, I read article after article explaining how Vladimir Putin had modernized and rebuilt the Russian military. Russian successes in Georgia, Crimea, the Donbas region and Syria certainly suggested a trendline of Russian competency in how to use force.
In retrospect, this was like projecting 1990s U.S. military victories onto the likelihood of success in occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. Russia may well still succeed in pulverizing Kyiv and Kharkiv, but with each passing day, it seems a bit more difficult to envisage. What has become increasingly clear is that Russia’s strategy for victory was predicated on a lightning-fast way followed by a decapitation of the Ukrainian leadership. Eleven days later, the cracks are showing in Russia’s military: out-of-date rations, poor fuel logistics and a perplexing inability to establish air supremacy.
Lawrence Freedman’s latest assessment of the situation on the ground perfectly captures the precarious nature of Russia’s position:
Russia might not lose this war, but it is becoming less clear by the day how it wins.
This leads me to my second rethink: the role of leadership in world politics. There has been a renaissance of scholarship in individual leadership over the past decade, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine should turbocharge this research program. It starts with whether anyone other than Putin would have chosen to invade all of Ukraine. (One Russian report suggests no.)
More important, however, is Volodymyr Zelensky’s effect on other countries as the war has proceeded. Despite publicly downplaying the threat for weeks prior to the invasion, his emotional appeals appear to have had a galvanizing effect on European leaders in particular. I cannot remember interpreters getting emotional in the past. The stark contrast between Zelensky’s cogent, social-media-friendly speeches and Putin’s super-weird optics in his televised interactions has also made it that much more difficult for Russia to win the information war.
Finally, my third rethink is that I have underestimated contagion effects in international relations. Most international relations scholars, myself included, are skeptical about the idea that international diplomacy mirrors social media in how actors can be ostracized so quickly. It is difficult to deny, however, that this phenomenon has been on display in the global response to Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
This has been most apparent in two ways. The first has been how many countries have responded to Russia’s bellicosity. This is most apparent in Europe, where E.U. members have fallen in lockstep behind Germany. Even leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the Czech Republic’s Milos Zerman, who had in the past been chummy with Putin, have changed their tune in the last week. Beyond that, however, other countries are taking unprecedented actions against Russia. When Switzerland is announcing sanctions and Japan is announcing that it will accept refugees, you know there has been a sea change in world politics.
The second has been the breadth of the economic sanctions that have been put in place against Russia — not by states, but by other actors on the global stage. Suddenly FIFA and the IOC are staking out political positions. Private-sector firms are going beyond the official sanctions. Boeing and Airbus will no longer sell or service Russian planes. Maersk, MSC and CMA CGM are suspending nonessential deliveries to Russia. Visa and Mastercard will no longer process any cross-border Russian credit card payments. Oil companies are apologizing for selling Russian oil even though they understandably believe that this is what Western governments want.
Putin has declared that sanctions are the equivalent of a declaration of war, but in truth governments are only partially responsible for what has happened. As Dmitri Alperovitch correctly noted, “it is the unilateral decisions of Western companies to pull out of Russia or break their contracts with Russian companies (when the sanctions are not requiring them to do so) that is driving Russian economy into a very deep economic hole.”
It is true that some of these moves are performative more than anything else, and sometimes go too far. The more companies that take these actions, however, the greater the pressure on other companies to act likewise.
As the war proceeds, maybe my opinions will shift again. Russia could learn from its strategic mistakes. Zelensky could still falter. Maybe there is a reverse contagion effect if Ukraine collapses. But for now, these are the issues where my expectations remain in flux. | null | null | null | null | null |
How the left can embrace nationalism while maintaining its values
Nationalism is too mobilizing for the right to monopolize it.
By Justin Gest
Justin Gest is an associate professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government and the author of six books about immigration and demographic change, including his latest, "Majority Minority."
President Biden delivers his first State of the Union address on March 1 in Washington. (Saul Loeb/AP)
For decades, the left has denied itself the energy and persuasive power of the era’s most effective political rhetoric: nationalism.
Often regressive, exclusive and sometimes simply vile, nationalism ostensibly violates many of the universal ideals that define progressivism. For liberals concerned with protecting inclusive, individual rights in diverse democracies, meaningfully establishing a national identity has proven challenging. But nationalism is too mobilizing for the right to monopolize it. Progressive leaders and movements have every reason to redefine national identity in a way that strikes the elusive balance between exceptionalism and inclusivity.
Globalization’s liberal champions have always underestimated the endurance of nationalism. Even as migration, trade and climate change have blurred borders, the concept of the nation has remained essential. Precisely because these global phenomena seem to threaten the sovereignty of the state, many citizens place increased importance on national identity. Nationalism has become key to defining and defending the political community in unstable times.
Nevertheless, the left has been reluctant to invoke the logic of national survival to persuade the public about the virtues of their policy agenda. My research suggests they should.
Last year, my co-authors and I ran a survey of about 21,000 adults across 19 European countries. A subset of these respondents was given a rationale for immigration that stressed its necessity “to maintain the nation’s population.” People in this group were more likely to support increased immigration than those who were not exposed to this rationale. In Western European countries — where elevated minority fertility rates are reducing the effects of demographic aging — respondents were even resistant to far-right fearmongering about “replacement theory” after immigration was portrayed as critical to the nation’s endurance.
Candidate Kamala Harris had a plan to help Dreamers. Why not use it?
Other liberal policies are just as critical to national survival and thus also could benefit from nationalist framing. Universal health care supports economic competitiveness by promoting a healthier labor force and population. Robust public education is an investment in the pipeline of innovation and the sustainability of U.S. economic power. Action to curb climate change quite literally preserves coastal cities and regions vulnerable to fire, drought and tropical storms.
The challenge for liberals is that conservatives have successfully cast the left’s inclusion of minorities as evidence that native-born White people are no longer part of the nation they seek to preserve. It’s all too easy to frame climate change action, for example, as an issue that has more to do with diverse cities like New Orleans or Miami than it does with the precarity of farmers confronting plunging crop prices and skyrocketing insurance costs. Both, however, are true.
Similarly, other policies that help one community often benefit the whole nation: The expansion of health care seems to target minority groups, even though the Affordable Care Act gave new insurance access to more White Americans (about 8.9 million) than Latino and Black Americans combined (approximately 7 million). Investments in American public schools are portrayed as engines of mobility for immigrant children, yet research suggests that having more immigrant peers also increases U.S.-born students’ chances of high school completion and academic achievement.
It is unsurprising, then, that successful liberal leaders such as President Biden and former president Barack Obama have spent less time castigating white supremacists, and more time including White working-class people and White suburbanites in their concepts of the American nation.
At the end of his recent State of the Union address, Biden asserted, “We are the only nation on Earth that has always turned every crisis we have faced into an opportunity. The only nation that can be defined by a single word: possibilities.” Now, Biden is trying to navigate thorny identity politics to pursue a bipartisan “unity agenda.” His predecessor offers a path.
Identity politics keeps American society healthy
Though he invoked identity politics far less than many of his progressive critics wished, Obama inherently understood that the concept of “the people” must be both inclusive and exclusive. Spurred by incendiary remarks made by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s “race speech” in Philadelphia in March 2008 was a frank assessment of America that leveraged nationalist rhetoric to bridge divides.
“We may have different stories,” Obama said, “but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.”
Radical by today’s expectations, Obama acknowledged the “resentments of White Americans” and acknowledged that they were “grounded in legitimate concerns.” And he urged Black Americans to bind “our particular grievances … to the larger aspirations of all Americans.” This conception of the country’s identity both included all of its diverse citizens and used a frame of American exceptionalism that was familiar to all but not too broad.
Of course, Obama was a once-in-a-generation figure who leveraged a personal narrative tailor-made for the moment. But even absent all that, today’s progressives can cultivate new forms of nationalism when they take action to include disparate peoples in a national purpose and in the national story. To compete electorally and fulfill progressive goals, they must instill this shared sense of purpose in every institution and at every opportunity.
Obama’s imprint on our national self-understanding was clear: America evolves. We are neither a monolithic nor a static nation, but rather a moving object.
“What my former pastor too often failed to understand is … that society can change,” Obama lamented in 2008. “That is the true genius of this nation.”
With some effort, the left can build bridges across social and partisan boundaries and articulate an identity that allows all people to see themselves in the eyes of diverse countrymen and to at least listen to each other’s perspectives. To do so they must, like Obama, redefine who “we” are in the face of conservative regression.
The historian Benedict Anderson famously wrote that “nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.” In the face of America’s demographic change and division, liberals must invent the nation anew. | null | null | null | null | null |
For more than a century, Western oil companies have cycled in and out of Russia.
By Michael De Groot
The BP logo. (Neil Hall/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States and its allies have imposed sanctions that are threatening to strangle the Russian economy. The private sector has joined in and begun to impose a shock of its own. Citing revulsion at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of choice, Western energy giants with large investments in Russia have headed for the exits. On Feb. 27, BP declared its intention to unload its almost 20 percent stake in the Russian state-owned company Rosneft. Shell, Exxon and Equinor all soon followed BP out of Russia. Others are probably on the horizon.
Accusing Western governments of manufacturing political pressure on free enterprise, Moscow has announced controls to prevent the companies from taking their capital with them in a desperate attempt to keep the economy afloat. Putin’s government understands that this exodus threatens to undermine the productivity and efficiency of the Russian energy industry — which is the Kremlin’s cash cow.
But this departure of Western companies is just the latest chapter in a familiar pattern. The Russian energy industry has been a revolving door for foreign companies since it emerged in the late 19th century. Repeatedly, the Russian government has thrown foreign companies out, only to invite them back because homegrown companies have failed to match the competence of their Western counterparts. Yet when those companies return and restore productivity, Moscow’s fears about political consequences reemerge and they look to eject the foreigners once again. The main difference this time is that the foreign companies are leaving by choice. But this history indicates that their departure will deal an economic blow to Russia — one that may eventually lead to their return.
The modern Russian oil industry emerged in the 1870s when local companies drilled the first oil wells and established small refineries in Baku, today the capital of Azerbaijan. Led by the Swedish Nobel brothers and the Paris branch of the Rothschild family, foreign companies played a key role in transforming tsarist Russia into a global leader in oil production. They developed fields, built refineries, provided technical expertise and distributed Russian oil around the empire and abroad. Russia even surpassed the United States as the world’s largest producer for a brief window between 1898 and 1902. The Rothschilds sold their Russian holdings in 1912 to Royal Dutch Shell, making the British-Dutch giant a major player in the Russian oil scene.
An inflection point for foreign involvement occurred in 1920 when the Bolsheviks reconquered Azerbaijan and the Baku fields during the Russian Civil War and nationalized private holdings oil holdings. But this created a problem for the Soviets — they did not have the technical knowledge, capital or equipment to keep the oil fields running. Oil production and revenue plummeted.
Aided by the renewed foreign presence, Soviet oil production recovered by the mid-1920s. With the companies having served their purpose, however, the Soviets gradually revoked foreign concessions and forced them to leave once again by the following decade. Cooperation with capitalists did not align with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s push to construct a socialist society.
The Second World War disrupted Soviet production, leaving the Soviet Union a net oil importer until the mid-1950s. As Soviet production accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, oil exports provided a crucial source of hard currency. With technology that lagged far behind the West and lacking the incentives of a free-market economy, Soviet energy production was wildly inefficient and wasteful. Yet the country’s enormous oil reserves still enabled the Soviet Union to become the world’s largest oil producer by the mid-1970s.
Western companies clamored to get a piece of the Russian pie in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For example, BP struck a 50-50 partnership with the Russian company Tyumen Oil Company in 2003, and TNK-BP became the one of the largest oil companies in the world. Buoyed by rising demand for oil in the developing world during the 2000s, the recovery of the energy industry provided a boon for Russia’s new president — Putin — helping to resurrect the country’s economy.
Putin’s forceful opposition to Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s attempt to sell much of Yukos to Exxon and Chevron in 2003 illustrated the limits of what he would allow. For Putin, this deal would have given American companies too great a share of the Russian energy industry. The president also resented that Khodorkovsky attempted to use his wealth to influence Russian domestic politics. So he had Khodorkovsky arrested on manufactured charges that included tax evasion, embezzlement and fraud. Instead of the American companies, Rosneft acquired Yukos’ shares several years later.
Putin’s concerns about foreign control placed the Russian energy industry in a familiar position: once again it sacrificed efficiency for loyalty. Known as “national champions,” large state-owned or state-controlled energy companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft prioritized the Kremlin’s interests over maximizing earnings. Putin used them to rein in the power of foreign companies. After purchasing TNK-BP in 2013, for example, Rosneft reduced BP to a minority stakeholder, leaving the British behemoth with the 19.75 percent share that it is now trying to divest.
The Putin regime has also resorted to bullying Western companies with onerous regulations and taxes. This political environment has dissuaded investments and darkened the optimism of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Western sanctions against Russia for its annexation of Crimea and support of separatists in Donbas in 2014 only added to the difficulties. Yet before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, some companies had stuck it out because Russia’s abundant natural resources meant there was money to be made. | null | null | null | null | null |
What happens when cities say no to growth
Housing costs skyrocket and shortages can negatively affect everything from education to diversity
By Max Holleran
Max Holleran teaches sociology at the University of Melbourne and is author of "Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing" (forthcoming from Princeton University Press, July 2022).
Opponents of making it easier to build duplexes, triplexes and other “missing middle” housing in Montgomery County protest last year in Wheaton, Md. (Katherine Shaver /The Washington Post)
A community group called Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods successfully sued the University of California at Berkeley over its expansion plans, invoking the California Environmental Quality Act. Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods’ position is that students are driving up housing costs, displacing residents and degrading the environment. As a result, a judge ordered UC-Berkeley to reduce its head count by 3,050 students. On Thursday, the California Supreme Court refused to put that decision on hold, meaning that the university will probably need to reduce the number of students offered admission.
A notable example of a proactive approach came in Boulder, Colo., which voted in 1967 to install a protective “greenbelt” around the city edges. The city bought up its iconic mountain backdrop and swaths of land on its eastern edge to make a barrier meant to limit suburban sprawl and provide more recreational opportunities, all done in the name of environmentalism. Fifty-five years later, the results are twofold: The city has the most extensive urban trails in the country, but there has also been a meteoric rise in home prices. This history tells us that limits to growth often involve a loss of economic diversity. Conservation of nature is rarely about protecting the outdoors alone, but gets conflated with other social projects — as in Boulder’s case, a refusal to become an economically and racially diverse city.
In 1976, they passed the Danish Plan that limited housing permits to keep growth to 1.52 percent annually, while also controlling urban density through height limits (begun in 1971). | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden administration gets behind coordinated push to cut off Russian oil
Good morning, Early Birds. Please keep Horace the Asian elephant in your thoughts today. Tips: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us.
🚨: “Two intruders, at least one of them armed, entered Joint Base Andrews on Sunday night, apparently after the return there of Vice President Harris,” our colleagues Martin Weil and Annie Linskey report. “A spokeswoman for the base said one person had been taken into custody. Another person was still being sought at 10 p.m., she said. No shots were fired and there were no reports of injuries.”
“The intruders drove through a security checkpoint at the main gate about 9 p.m., and failed to heed guards’s orders, base officials said late Sunday in a statement.”
“Barriers were deployed … The vehicle was stopped, but two people fled, the base said. As of 11 p.m. Sunday, the whereabouts of the second intruder remained unknown … and the main gate to the base remained closed.”
Feeling Ukraine's pain: Under pressure from lawmakers, the Biden administration appears increasingly amenable to barring the importation of Russian oil to the U.S. in retaliation for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, even if it risks hitting Americans where it hurts: at the gas pump.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki warned on Thursday that banning Russian oil imports “would raise prices at the gas pump for the American people” and could also “pad the pockets” of Russian President Vladimir Putin by raising the price of oil.
But on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there was “a very active discussion” about banning Russian oil imports and suggested that the U.S. could go a step further by coordinating with European countries to boycott Russian oil, too.
“We are now talking to our European partners and allies to look in a coordinated way at the prospect of banning the import of Russian oil, while making sure that there is a still an appropriate supply of oil on world markets,” Blinken told CNN's “State of the Union.”
More and more lawmakers in both parties have pushed for a ban on Russian oil imports in recent days, although they've mostly focused on restricting U.S. imports.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter on Sunday that “the House is currently exploring strong legislation” that “would ban the import of Russian oil and energy products into the United States, repeal normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, and take the first step to deny Russia access to the World Trade Organization.”
Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced a bill of their own late last week, with bipartisan cosponsors.
And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN on Sunday, “It makes no sense whatsoever to continue to buy oil from Russia that they use to fund this war and this murderous campaign that they’re undertaking.”
But Ukraine's government has pleaded with Washington to go beyond barring Russian oil from the U.S.
During a Zoom call on Saturday with more than 280 lawmakers, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for a worldwide ban on Russian oil, our colleagues Todd Frankel and Mike DeBonis report. And Oksana Markarova, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., said on Sunday that Ukraine was “asking for a full embargo on oil and gas.”
The effects of a ban
The push to ban Russian oil imports comes as average gas prices have surpassed $4 a gallon in the U.S. and as the price of barrel of oil has surged to more than $118 a barrel. But it's not clear how much of an effect barring Russian oil imports from the U.S. alone would have on prices — or how much it would hurt Russia economically.
“If I’m being honest, it probably doesn’t have a big impact,” said Nikos Tsafos, the James R. Schlesinger chair for energy and geopolitics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
While Russia is the world's third-largest oil producer, Russia accounts for only a small percentage of U.S. oil imports.
“They’ll send it somewhere else,” Tsafos said. “We’ll buy it somewhere else. I think it’s largely a matter of optics.”
The impact of a ban could also be reduced because many of U.S. refiners have already stopped importing Russian oil.
While full data on Russian oil imports in late February won't be available until next month, most if not all U.S. “refiners have ceased importing Russian petroleum products, making it very likely that total US imports of Russian crude oil and refined products is headed to zero in the very near future if not there already,” according to an American Petroleum Institute official.
‘This is a very delicate situation’
A wider ban on Russian oil imports could have a bigger effect on prices than a domestic one.
“The only way to stop Putin is to ban oil and gas exports,” Scott Sheffield, the chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, told the Financial Times on Friday. "[But] if the western world announced that we’re going to ban Russian oil and gas, oil is going to go to $200 a barrel, probably — $150 to $200 easy.”
Such an approach would echo the strategy the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia used to pressure Iran to negotiate over its nuclear program during the Obama administration. While the sanctions the Biden administration and its allies have deployed against Russia have brutalized its economy, they're still not as broad as the ones imposed on Iran, according to sanctions experts.
“With Iran, pretty much everything is prohibited with the exception of some very limited transactions,” said Antonia Tzinova, a lawyer at Holland & Knight who advises clients on U.S. sanctions.
Some lawmakers say any broader effort to bar Russian oil imports would need to be carefully coordinated with allies.
“This is a very delicate situation,” Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), who favors suspending Russian oil imports to the U.S., told The Early. “You have to be careful and do it in a way that’s gonna harm Russia’s ability to raise money and not hurt ourselves.”
The bride wore fatigues. The wedding party carried rifles and RPGs. By The Post’s Siobhán O’Grady and Kostiantyn Khudov.
Amid the death and rubble, Ukrainian teams hunt for evidence of possible war crimes. By The Post’s Sudarsan Raghavan.
Foreigners who fled Ukraine team up to help others escape. By AP News’s Chinedu Asadu and Cara Anna.
Ukrainians find that relatives in Russia don’t believe it’s a war. By the New York Times’s Valerie Hopkins.
Arming Ukraine: 17,000 anti-tank weapons in 6 days and a clandestine cybercorps. By the New York Times’s David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes and Kenneth P. Vogel.
U.S. working to secure release of basketball star detained by Russia. By Reuters’s Gabriella Borter.
Russia recruiting Syrians for urban combat in Ukraine, U.S. officials say. By the Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold, Nancy A. Youssef and Alan Cullison.
ICYMI: This Russian metals giant might be too big to sanction. By the Wall Street Journal’s Alistair MacDonald.
Bill to overhaul USPS finances faces hefty amendments in the Senate
Keeping the Postal Service reform bill ‘clean’: A $107 billion bill to overhaul the U.S. Postal Service’s finances is set to come up for a cloture vote this afternoon in the Senate, with a final vote likely to come Tuesday, our ace postal reporter Jacob Bogage tells us. It already passed the House in a landslide.
But first, the bill has to make it through a blizzard of some 41 Senate amendments that have the potential to stall the process.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has proposed 12 changes that including eliminating core sections of the legislation — including one deeply unpopular with the Postal Service’s competitors. A amendment from Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) would prohibit the Postal Service from offering direct or indirect financial services. That includes money orders, of which the Postal Service handles $21 billion annually.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), meanwhile, has three amendments that try to force the mail agency to purchase electric delivery trucks, rather than gas-powered vehicles.
The amendments are a problem because the key to winning bipartisan support for the bill, sources tell Jacob, was keeping it narrow. Democrats and Republicans each agreed to set aside their priorities for remaking the Postal Service to focus on fixing its troubled balance sheet.
Now the amendments threaten to revive old battles. Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), the bill’s cosponsors, are whipping hard to pass a clean version of the bill and defeat any poison pills. Follow Jacob on Twitter for updates.
Democrats to introduce covid relief bill paired with Ukraine aid
Happening this week: “Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are set for a showdown over covid-19 relief that threatens to hold up desperately needed aid to Ukraine as the country fights back against Russia’s invasion,” CNN’s Clare Foran and Manu Raju report.
“House Democrats plan to introduce a massive bill as soon as Tuesday that would extend government funding through the end of September – and include roughly $10 billion to help bolster Ukraine … But they are setting up a clash with Republicans over covid relief money expected to be included in the sweeping package.”
National Association of Manufacturers vice president joins Youngkin team
Headed to Richmond: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has hired Rob Damschen as his deputy communications director. He was previously the National Association of Manufacturers' vice president of strategic communications.
White House must go further on new pandemic response, say former Biden advisers, outside experts. By The Post’s Dan Diamond.
‘People’s Convoy’ congested Beltway to protest pandemic restrictions, plans to return Monday. By The Post’s Ellie Silverman, Steve Thompson and Jessica Contrera.
ICYMI: The Roger Stone tapes. By The Post’s Dalton Bennett and Jon Swaine.
Conservative think tank’s exclusive gathering will include Biden official — but not Trump. By CBS News’s Robert Costa.
Cuomo makes first public address since resignation. By the Albany-Times Union’s Lauren Stanforth.
It’s always a good time to play soccer | null | null | null | null | null |
The sign Z and words reading “we don't leave ours” is seen over Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg on March 5, 2022. (AP) (AP Photo/AP)
Ukrainian gymnast Illia Kovtun shook the hand of the silver medalist he’d just beaten as the two athletes stood on the podium Saturday to accept their medals. He did not extend the same courtesy to the bronze medalist on his left.
Ivan Kuliak, a 20-year-old Russian gymnast, was wearing a white “Z” on his chest. While the letter does not exist in the Russian alphabet, it’s quickly emerging as a way for Russians, following “a propaganda campaign,” to show support for invading Ukraine and rally around a new nationalism, an expert said.
The International Gymnastics Federation, the sport’s global governing body, said it will request a disciplinary investigation into what it called “shocking behaviour” from Kuliak. Regardless, the Taishan World Cup Artistic Gymnastics in Doha, Qatar, was one of the last international events in which Kuliak can compete. Starting Monday, all Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from participating in its competitions, the federation announced Friday.
Images of “Zs” have been seen across Russia in recent weeks. In the days leading up to the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, white “Zs” started appearing in photos of Russian tanks and other equipment as the military prepared to attack, Task & Purpose reported.
Some defense experts say the markings are a way for Russian troops to avoid friendly fire by distinguishing their military equipment from Ukraine’s, which has similar looking tanks, according to Task & Purpose. Other experts say the symbol could be used within the Russian military to differentiate where various units were supposed to go after the initial invasion, the Independent reported.
“Often these symbols will be location-based — they will be communicating where a unit is heading,” Michael Clarke, former director of the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank, told the Independent.
Now the “Z” image has become popular among Russians following its use during the invasion, said Kamil Galeev, a former Wilson Center fellow who researched Russian identity politics from Moscow. It follows a state-led “propaganda campaign to gain popular support for their invasion of Ukraine,” Galeev wrote Sunday in a lengthy Twitter thread.
“[This] symbol invented just a few days ago became a symbol of new Russian ideology and national identity,” he added.
Photos published by the Associated Press on Sunday from a pro-military rally in Volgograd, Russia, show cars parked to form the shape of a “Z.” Others show stickers on car windows featuring an orange and black “Z" with the message “For Ours” in support of Russian forces.
The orange and black “Z” marries new and old symbols signifying support for the Kremlin. The color scheme was the informal symbol of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, The Washington Post reported, and was later used in 2014 by separatists as a way to show allegiance to Moscow during Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
How an unlikely PR campaign made a ribbon the symbol of Russian patriotism
The “Z” image now appears on signs and buildings in Russia. On one display in St. Petersburg, the symbol appeared with the message “we don’t leave ours,” according to the AP.
As the investigation into Kuliak centers on a possible pro-invasion message, other Russian athletes have made public displays in opposition of the attack.
A day after the invasion, Russian tennis player Andrey Rublev wrote “No War Please” on a camera lens at a championship tournament in Dubai. Around the same time, a member of the Russian national soccer team voiced his opposition to the invasion in an Instagram post that had racked up more than 140,000 likes.
In the post, Fedor Smolov wrote, “No to war!!!” next to a broken heart emoji and the Ukrainian flag. | null | null | null | null | null |
This photo provided by the United States Border Patrol shows a boat that ran aground in the Florida Keys off Key Largo on Sunday, March 6, 2022. A wooden boat carrying hundreds of Haitian migrants in a suspected human smuggling operation ran aground in shallow water in the Florida Keys, where 163 people swam ashore and many needed medical attention, federal authorities said. (United States Border Patrol via AP) (Uncredited/United States Border Patrol) | null | null | null | null | null |
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! If you live in the D.C. area, we hope you got outside and enjoyed the record-breaking warm weather this weekend without experiencing too much climate anxiety. 🙃 But first:
The head of the Energy Department's loans office is staffing up and hyping hydrogen under Biden
Jigar Shah might be the most important man in America when it comes to boosting the nation's deployment of clean energy and meeting President Biden's ambitious climate goals — at least, besides Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and the president himself.
Shah, a former clean energy entrepreneur, is the dynamic new director of the Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, which helped launch the country’s first utility-scale wind and solar farms a decade ago but went largely dormant under Donald Trump.
Analysts say the office could play a crucial role in financing clean energy technologies and achieving Biden's goal of cutting planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 — regardless of whether Congress passes the president's stalled climate and social spending plan.
Shah, 47, is well known in the clean energy sector, having co-founded the renewable energy company SunEdison and the clean-tech infrastructure investor Generate Capital. His voice is also familiar to fans of the "Energy Gang" podcast, which he co-hosted for seven years. (Full disclosure: Maxine was a guest on the podcast in 2020.)
The Climate 202 recently spoke with Shah about his vision for the Loan Programs Office, including its roughly $40 billion in loan authority and its hiring spree under Biden. The interview came after the office announced a $1 billion conditional loan guarantee to help a Nebraska company scale up production of "clean" hydrogen.
Here are highlights from the conversation:
Staffing up after Solyndra
Under Barack Obama, the Loan Programs Office had a high-profile success when it made a $535 million loan to Tesla, which is now the world's most valuable automaker, to open its first factory in Silicon Valley.
But the office also faced fierce criticism from Republicans in 2009, when the solar panel manufacturer Solyndra filed for bankruptcy soon after receiving $535 million in federal loans, leaving 1,100 people out of work and taxpayers on the hook.
Shah said the office has expanded significantly since the Solyndra scandal — and since Biden took office — allowing employees to closely vet proposals and detect problems early on.
"I think it's important to note that when Solyndra was approved in the office, we had 12 full-time staff. We're now up to 170," Shah said. "We can't say that we're never going to make a mistake. But I would say that our processes and procedures are far more mature today than they were when the program was really ramped up in 2009."
Shah estimated that the Loan Programs Office has 93 full-time staffers and 68 independent contractors, up from 84 full-time employees and 12 contractors when he joined the Biden administration.
Jamie Nolan, a principal at Nolan Strategic Communications and a consultant for the Loan Programs Office, declined to confirm those specific numbers but said the office has increased its headcount by 50 percent in the past year.
Hyping hydrogen and staying out of politics
Since Shah took over in March 2021, the Loan Programs Office has received 77 applications from energy companies, with a total requested loan amount of $70.8 billion, according to Nolan.
In December, the office made its first new award in years, announcing that it would guarantee up to $1.04 billion in loans for Monolith to scale up production of clean hydrogen at an expanded plant in Nebraska.
The political angle: Manchin, the holdout vote on Biden's Build Back Better bill, and other members of West Virginia's congressional delegation are seeking to attract a similar clean hydrogen plant to their own state. The delegation met with Monolith representatives in February, a company executive confirmed.
However, Shah emphasized that the office is not in the business of picking winners and losers based on political considerations — whether Manchin's priorities or the Biden administration's climate policies.
"If you meet the requirements of the statute, we prioritize getting your loan processed," he said. "We're not really picking certain loans that may exemplify the policies of the administration over other loans. Monolith happened to be the project that was farthest along when I came into office."
Monolith plans to use a rare technique for producing hydrogen from natural gas, known as methane pyrolysis. The process creates hydrogen, which can be used in ammonia-based fertilizers, as well as "carbon black," a kind of soot that enhances tires and other rubber products.
Some environmentalists have questioned whether hydrogen made from natural gas, a fossil fuel, is truly “clean.” But Monolith CEO and co-founder Rob Hanson told The Climate 202 that the expanded plant would reduce carbon emissions by 1 million tons a year compared to conventional production methods.
Hanson added that Shah has brought the Energy Department's once-dormant loan program “back to its full force.”
"There's no doubt," he said, "that Jigar has turned the volume up on this program from quiet to very loud."
Exclusive: House Democrats to launch task force on nature, oceans
The House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition is launching a new task force today focused on natural climate solutions and the restoration of oceans and public lands, according to details shared exclusively with The Climate 202.
The Nature and Oceans Task Force will be co-chaired by Reps. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) and Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) and will seek to support nature-based climate solutions such as planting trees, as well as the Biden administration's goal of conserving and restoring 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
The coalition, a group of more than 70 climate-conscious House Democrats, launched three task forces in January focused on climate and agriculture; climate and national security; and power-sector decarbonization, The Climate 202 scooped at the time.
“As Co-Chair of SEEC, I work every day with my colleagues to take a full-systems approach to critical climate and clean energy policies," Matsui said in a statement. “Natural climate solutions and the restoration of our oceans and public lands are central components to these comprehensive solutions.”
The other members of the new task force include Democratic Reps. Chellie Pingree (Maine), Jared Huffman (Calif.), Suzanne Bonamici (Ore.) and Derek Kilmer (Wash.).
Blinken says a Russian oil embargo is on the table
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that the United States and its allies are having a “very active discussion” about banning imports of Russian oil and natural gas, despite concerns that such a move could further raise gas prices for American drivers, The Washington Post’s Steven Zeitchik, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Annie Linskey report.
Blinken said on CNN's “State of the Union” that the United States is talking to allies about "the prospect of banning the import of Russian oil while making sure that there’s still an appropriate supply of oil on world markets.”
The Biden administration had largely played down the possibility that it would block Russian energy imports until Friday, when White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration is “looking at options we could take right now to cut U.S. consumption of Russian energy.”
While the United States imports less than 10 percent of its oil from Russia, a ban could accelerate a global blockage of Russian energy that would further increase U.S. gas prices. Over the weekend, gas prices topped an average of $4 per gallon, according to AAA, the first time that has happened since the 2008 financial crisis.
Several lawmakers echoed Blinken’s remarks on Sunday, including Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.).
Trump reiterated climate falsehoods in address to GOP donors
Former president Donald Trump on Saturday spoke to the GOP’s top donors, focusing heavily on Russian aggression in Ukraine and on his usual list of grievances, including calling global warming “a great hoax,” according to audio obtained by The Post’s Joshua Dawsey.
In his 84-minute speech to about 250 donors in New Orleans, Trump said “the global warming hoax, it just never ends.” He mocked the concept of sea levels rising, disputing widely held science, saying climate change is “great” because it would introduce more waterfront property.
CERAWeek energy conference returns to Houston amid soaring oil prices
The energy industry’s biggest leaders will meet in Houston this week as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine increases the price of oil and executives face growing criticism for the industry’s role in climate change, David Gaffen reports for Reuters.
CERAWeek, a huge oil and gas industry conference, is expected to attract 45,000 attendees this year and will feature presentations on the transition to clean energy, including a Monday discussion with U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry.
Wildfires along the Florida Panhandle force hundreds to evacuate
Hundreds of Florida Panhandle residents evacuated over the weekend while two massive fires scorched an area that is still recovering from the destruction of a Category 5 hurricane more than three years ago, the Associated Press reports.
The Adkins Avenue Fire has burned since Friday and was 35 percent contained as of Sunday morning. The much larger Bertha Swamp Road Fire is spreading more quickly, with only 10 percent contained Sunday morning.
Hurricane Michael in 2018 left behind 72 million tons of downed trees that have provided fuel for the wildfires, the Florida Forest Service said. Strong winds and low humidity have also elevated the threat of fire at the start of the fire season, with 148 wildfires now burning across the state.
Week ahead on the Hill
On Tuesday, members of the boards of directors of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell Oil will testify before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about their companies' commitments to curbing climate change.
Also on Tuesday, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on the government’s vulnerability and preparedness for climate risks. The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands will hold a hearing to consider pending legislation on tribal co-management of public lands. The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy will hold a hearing on American manufacturing of electric vehicles.
On Wednesday, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will hold a hearing titled “Confronting Climate Impacts: Federal Strategies for Equitable Adaptation and Resilience."
Well done, everybody 😂
Well that was easy #climatetwitter, we've won! pic.twitter.com/Nk00JTFvXQ
— Simon Mahan (@SimonMahan) March 6, 2022 | null | null | null | null | null |
Zelensky, in an almost lyrical speech while wearing an olive-green, military-style T-shirt, said Ukraine has been thrust into suffering “that no other European nation has seen in 80 years.” While Ukrainians had “never dreamt of killing,” they had no choice but to “wipe out the enemy from our land and from our life” amid Russia’s invasion, he said.
In recent days, supporters of Ukraine have carried its flag through the streets of countries around the world during antiwar protests from Britain to Malaysia and Japan to South Africa.
Other supporters of Ukraine have embraced its national flower, the sunflower, as a symbol of resistance and hope. Some people are wearing them stitched into their clothing, while others are painting them and planting them. | null | null | null | null | null |
Brian French joins The Post as news multiplatform editor
Multiplatform Editing Chief Courtney Rukan, Deputy Multiplatform Editing Chief Brian Cleveland and News Service Managing Editor Effie Dawson:
We are delighted to announce that Brian French is joining The Post as a news multiplatform editor.
Brian comes to The Post from the National Journal, where he has been a copy editor for seven years, editing content for their website and newsletter. Before that, he was a copy editor and online producer at the Virginian-Pilot and a copy editor for Link, the Pilot’s alternative daily publication aimed at young readers. He has also been a senior writer and editor at the National White Collar Crime Center and was a sports editor for a chain of suburban Richmond newspapers.
In 2013, he won second place in the ACES headline writing competition.
Brian graduated from Old Dominion University with a bachelor’s degree in communication. While his journalism career has not taken him outside of Virginia, it has enabled him to hang out with Ashley Judd in the media center at Richmond International Raceway and interview Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson before he was a global movie star. Brian lives in Arlington.
Please join us in welcoming Brian to The Post. He starts March 7. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rachel Weiner named Washington legal affairs reporter for The Post
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 12: Washington Post staff writer Rachel Weiner, is photographed at The Washington Post on March 12, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Announcement from Local Editor Mike Semel, Deputy Local Editor Maria Glod and Criminal Justice Editor Lynh Bui:
We are thrilled to announce that Rachel Weiner will cover legal affairs in the Washington region, including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
Rachel has a talent for untangling complex legal cases and arguments in a reader-friendly way and finding tales in dense court files. Most recently, she covered federal courts in Virginia, writing about the prosecution of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, ISIS militants accused in the killings of American hostages and domestic terrorists.
Rachel did a deep profile on a former Metro police officer accused of being an ISIS-supporting neo-Nazi, a man who argued he was entrapped by the FBI. And she covered the ongoing legal saga involving WikiLeaks, including charges against Julian Assange and the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning.
Over the past year, she has worked on a team covering the crush of criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and was among the reporters on the Before, During and After project, which recently won a Polk award.
While covering federal court in Virginia, Rachel also reported on local police and courts in Arlington and Alexandria, a job she held previously. Before that, she covered politics in Virginia and worked with The Fix.
Outside work, Rachel enjoys biking, cooking and trying to keep her two cats out of trouble.
Please join us in congratulating Rachel on her new role. | null | null | null | null | null |
No. 1 Sidwell Friends claimed its first D.C. State Athletic Association title with a 28-point win over Georgetown Visitation on Sunday. (Terrance Williams/For The Washington Post)
With league play complete, the D.C. area’s top teams advanced to state tournaments last week. Sidwell Friends, the country’s top-ranked squad, completed its local dominance by winning the D.C. State Athletic Association Class AA championship against No. 7 Georgetown Visitation. No. 6 Paul VI claimed its 15th consecutive Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association Division I title with a 12-point win over St. Anne’s-Belfield.
This weekend features state championships in Maryland and Virginia. No. 9 Clarksburg (4A) and No. 13 Howard (3A) should challenge in the former; No. 8 Madison (Class 6), No. 10 Woodgrove (Class 5) and No. 17 Meridian (Class 3) are potent contenders in the latter.
The Independent School League AA division champion beat No. 7 Georgetown Visitation, 69-41, for the DCSAA AA title.
The Tigers have not played since Feb. 25, when they won the National Association of Christian Athletes Division I championship.
The Washington Catholic Athletic Conference champion fell to No. 7 Georgetown Visitation, 54-43, in the DCSAA Class AA semifinals.
The Forestville private school’s season is over after losing to No. 3 St. John’s in the WCAC championship game.
The Falcons’ season ended against No. 3 St. John’s in the WCAC semifinals.
The Panthers beat St. Anne’s-Belfield, 60-48, for the VISAA Division I championship.
The Cubs fell to No. 1 Sidwell Friends, 69-41, in the DCSAA Class AA title game.
The Warhawks advanced to the Virginia Class 6 semifinals with a 46-30 win over Edison.
The Coyotes advanced to the Maryland 4A semifinals by beating Seneca Valley, Urbana and Blake.
The Wolverines beat Highland Springs, 63-55, in the Virginia Class 5 quarterfinals.
The Yellow Jackets advanced to the Virginia Class 6 semifinals by beating James River (Midlothian), 59-35.
The Frogs lost to No. 1 Sidwell Friends, 70-26, in the DCSAA Class AA semifinals.
The Lions advanced to the Maryland 3A semifinals by beating Mount Hebron, Manchester Valley and Frederick.
The Gophers defeated Arundel, Old Mill and Parkdale to reach the Maryland 4A semifinals.
The Rams topped Langley, 36-32, in the Virginia Class 6 quarterfinals.
The Cardinals fell to St. Anne’s-Belfield, 72-65, in the VISAA Division I semifinals.
The Mustangs will face Lakeland in the Virginia Class 3 semifinals.
The Jaguars beat Bowie, Suitland and North Point to advance to the Maryland 4A semifinals.
The ISL A division champion fell to Bishop O’Connell, 56-53, in the first round of the VISAA Division I tournament.
On the bubble: Georgetown Day, Langley, Pallotti, Virginia Academy | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Model-actress and activist Pamela Anderson appears at the amfAR, Cinema Against AIDS, benefit during the 72nd international Cannes film festival, in Cap d’Antibes, southern France, on May 23, 2019. Anderson makes her Broadway debut, playing Roxie Hart in the musical “Chicago.” She will appear from April 12-June 5 at the Ambassador Theatre. (Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t rely on cyber warfare. Here’s why.
Cyber operations don’t win wars, our research finds.
By Erica D. Lonergan
Shawn W. Lonergan
Brandon Valeriano
Benjamin Jensen
(Kacper Pempel/Illustration)
The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has perplexed observers expecting to see the cyber dimension unfold differently. When Russia began to mass troops along Ukraine’s borders, analysts predicted that cyber operations would be critical to Putin’s military strategy.
One headline offered that the Russian invasion could “redefine cyberwarfare.” Former White House cyber expert Jason Healey hypothesized that, “it will be the first time a state with real capabilities is willing to take risks and put it all on the line.”
Despite these predictions, the expected “shock and awe” Russian cyber campaign in preparation of the invasion of Ukraine never emerged. Moreover, while the conflict will undoubtedly evolve, cyber operations don’t appear to be playing a decisive role on the battlefield.
Surprised? We’re not. Academic research explains why cyber operations are poor tools of coercion — whether used independently or as part of conventional warfighting.
What clues do earlier Russian cyber operations give?
Scholarly research details Russia’s long history of cyber operations against Ukraine. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea included cyber operations in parallel to kinetic ones. Distributed denial of service attacks, for instance, strategically flooded Ukrainian networks to crash operations. In 2015, Russia carried out a cyberattack against Ukraine’s power grid. And in 2017, Russia unleashed the data-wiping NotPetya virus, malware that targeted Ukrainian servers initially but quickly spread around the world.
Yet experts who inferred from Russia’s past behavior that the current conflict would be a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” moment may have been drawing the wrong lesson. There is little evidence that cyber operations provided Russia an operational advantage in 2014 — let alone highly synchronized combined arms warfare. And the power grid attack — in the dead of winter — did not cause any deaths, and service was restored within hours.
Russia’s current cyber efforts have had little impact
Many of the recent cyberattacks aimed to fragment the trust Ukrainians have in their government — and these information operations clearly haven’t been effective. In mid-January, Microsoft and other monitors reported that destructive malware, “WhisperGate,” was targeting Ukrainian organizations.
In a different operation, Russian-linked hackers reportedly defaced 70 Ukrainian government websites. In mid-February, the U.S. and U.K. governments attributed disruptive attacks to Russia, with follow-on attacks Feb. 23. The same day, “HermeticWiper” malware was discovered operating in a number of Ukrainian commercial and government systems.
Hacktivists are engaging
Hacktivists, proxy groups and freelancers jumped in quickly — on both sides. Ukraine, lacking mature offensive cyber capabilities, appealed to the public to help marshal an “IT Army.” The Ukrainian government used Twitter to share a list of Russian targets and, later, Belarusian targets.
But Russian ransomware operators also offered their services, threatening to retaliate against governments that sought to punish Russia. These appear to be loosely controlled proxy groups, not a unified effort. A Ukrainian member of the Russian-linked Conti ransomware group, for instance, reportedly leaked the group’s internal chat logs to counter the pro-Russian effort.
Why isn’t cyberwarfare decisive?
Cyber operations in combat contexts may not be as prolific or decisive as many expect, as demonstrated by evidence not only from Ukraine, but also Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The U.S. military, for instance, discovered that dropping “cyber bombs” on the Islamic State netted ambiguous results.
Cyber operations are a form of modern political warfare, rather than decisive battles. These operations don’t win wars, but instead support espionage, deception, subversion and propaganda efforts.
Here’s why the current cyber operations are neither as easy nor effective as the conventional wisdom would suggest. First, the global tech sector plays a major role in cyberdefense, with firms such as Microsoft, Alphabet and others working overtime to identify threats to Ukraine, patch vulnerabilities and share information. Additionally, in anticipation of Russian cyber action, the U.S. and U.K. dispatched cyber defensive teams to Ukraine in December. Reporting suggests that U.S. cyber mission teams continue to support Ukraine’s cyberdefense from Eastern Europe.
Second, preemptive actions may have boosted Ukraine’s resilience. Ukrainians were downloading encrypted communications applications such as Signal and offline maps — but the Ukrainian military also relied on old-school wired communications.
Third, low-cost cyber operations readily available to hacktivists and proxy groups — like the denial of service attacks or website defacements — disrupt and distract more than they create tangible battlefield gains. In contrast, offensive cyber operations tailored to shut down another country’s command-and-control or air-defense systems, for instance, can be challenging. It takes years of investment and human capital, pre-positioned access points and a mature, well-resourced organization to plan and carry out this type of complex cyber campaign.
And even the most sophisticated offensive cyber operations can’t compete with conventional munitions. It’s far easier to target the enemy with artillery, mortars and bombers than with exquisite and ephemeral cyber power. Notwithstanding any cyber vulnerabilities, it’s much simpler for Russia to launch an artillery barrage at a power substation than to hack it from Moscow. Russia’s airstrikes against a Ukrainian television tower may be a case in point.
Could the cyber game change?
The cyber dimension of this conflict may yet change, of course. But the fact that cyber operations are not always easy, cheap or effective in managing destruction at scale means they’re unlikely to produce the game-changing moment in modern warfare that many anticipated.
Cyberweapons may be used beyond the battlefield, however. There is still a risk that Russia may conduct retaliatory cyberattacks against the United States and its allies. Russia probably has already pre-positioned accesses that it could exploit to conduct disruptive attacks. There is a long history of countries — Russia included — responding in cyberspace to actions like sanctions and indictments.
Most importantly, cyber experts may be missing the forest for the trees, given the large-scale interstate war unfolding at the moment. The success or failure of theories of cyberwarfare have minimal relevance when considering the humanitarian catastrophe and enormous toll that combat inflicts — not to mention the risks of nuclear warfare.
Erica D. Lonergan (nee Borghard) is an assistant professor in the Army Cyber Institute and a research scholar in the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
Shawn W. Lonergan is a U.S. Army Reserve Officer assigned to 75th Innovation Command.
Brandon Valeriano is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a distinguished senior fellow at the Marine Corps University.
Benjamin Jensen is a professor of strategic studies at the School of Advanced Warfighting at the Marine Corps University and senior fellow for Future War, Gaming, and Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). | null | null | null | null | null |
World Stage: Ukraine with Julianne Smith, United States Ambassador to NATO
The Russian invasion of Ukraine tested Western resolve in unprecedented ways. On Friday, March 11 at 11:00 a.m. ET, Julianne Smith, the United States Ambassador to NATO, joins Washington Post Live to discuss the allies’ response to Russia, continued aid for Ukraine and how NATO is working to avoid an escalating conflict in Europe.
United States Ambassador to NATO | null | null | null | null | null |
President Donald Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr and acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf arrive at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., after a trip to Kenosha, Wis., on Sept. 1, 2020. (Evan Vucci/AP)
“I never said ‘You must hate Trump,’ rather, I said ‘If you didn’t see corruption in the Election, of which so much has already been revealed (and massive amounts up until this date), than you are not capable of being Attorney General. You don’t have the energy or backbone to stand up to the Radical Left. Please give me your Letter of Resignation.’”
But notice how Trump gives the game away here. The state of Arizona, he says, is investigating the “disgraceful events” of the election. Has he forgotten that a team of sympathizers spent months and millions investigating the election in Maricopa County and ended up with nothing more than an index of “this looks fishy” statements? (Statements later explained by the county, mind you.) Trump and his allies have spent more than a year trying to prove that rampant fraud happened, and they are neither any closer to doing so or any closer to admitting that it didn’t.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake looked at this letter when it came out — as McSwain was gearing up to run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Pennsylvania, and seeking Trump’s endorsement for the effort. The letter was explicitly seeking an audience with Trump to that end.
Trump’s claims of being ‘spied on’
The important thing here is that mention of the Time magazine article. In a deeply unfortunate effort to increase the saliency of a story about a bipartisan effort to backstop the 2020 election effort, Time chose to describe an agreement by business, labor and nonprofits as a “conspiracy” that “in a way” proved Trump right about the existence of “an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner.”
Except that he called for people to come to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, promising that it would “be wild.” He repeatedly made false claims about the election being stolen, stoking the anger of his base. He and his team helped orchestrate the day’s events. He encouraged the crowd to march to the U.S. Capitol and told them he’d go with them. | null | null | null | null | null |
He left an lucrative law career to become a college basketball coach. Now h...
Longwood's Griff Aldrich celebrates the Lancers' first Division I NCAA tournament bid. (Rusty Jones/AP)
So there were a lot more hugs and some tears when Longwood finished off its 79-58 victory over perennial Big South power Winthrop to claim the conference’s tournament title. The Lancers are 26-6 and have won 19 of their last 20 games. They will be, at best, a 15th seed when the brackets go up this coming Sunday. And no one in Farmville, Va. — about 70 miles west of Richmond — will care very much.
His changed in part because he met his future wife Julie Wareing — who was born and raised in Houston — and because he became so successful and well-established it seemed impossible to leave. He became a partner. He and Julie left their house in a high-end neighborhood and moved into downtown Houston after returning from a four-year stint in London. They adopted three kids from Houston — two boys and a girl — who are now almost 11, just-turned 10 and 7. Eventually he founded an oil and gas company and became the managing director and chief financial officer of a private investment firm.
The Lancers — whose greatest player was the late Jerome Kersey, and who won just seven games the season before Aldrich was hired — improved right away, winning 16 games Aldrich’s first season, including beating High Point, coached by Tubby Smith, twice. “Gotta be one of the great coaching matchups of all time,” Aldrich said before the first of those games. “Tubby with 606 wins and a national title, me with 12 wins and a law degree.”
While Aldrich waited to do the postgame TV interview on Sunday, he noticed the joy on all the faces of Longwood’s players and staffers. “I felt myself starting to tear up,” he said. “Then Julie came out to hug me. That was it. Waterworks. All over the place." | null | null | null | null | null |
LeBron James famously said last year that the NBA’s play-in designer “should be fired” because the Los Angeles Lakers had to fight their way into the playoffs with a play-in win over the Golden State Warriors, while Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban expressed reservations over the added strain on players who now had to fight for seeding down the stretch. The NBA’s decision-makers held firm, arguing that the new format’s positives outweighed its negatives because it “significantly increased the competitive incentive” for teams up and down the standings. A year later, here's a simple method for understanding why the format's proponents have resoundingly won the debate: Imagine how much worse this season would be without a play-in.
Without an expanded field, the Western Conference’s eight-team field would be virtually settled with more than a month remaining in the regular season. The Lakers, who have slipped in the standings without an injured Anthony Davis, would need to make up five games on the Los Angeles Clippers with fewer than 20 games to play if they wanted to sneak in as the eighth seed.
Ditto for the New Orleans Pelicans, who have shaken off an atrocious 1-12 start to move into the West’s 10th seed. With no play-in, the Pelicans would have little reason to consider bringing back Zion Williamson, and they might not have rolled the dice to trade for CJ McCollum at the deadline. Their season would have been effectively over by mid-November, and their impressive run over the last two months would have been a meaningless footnote.
Just like last year, when the play-in round gave Stephen Curry and the Warriors something to play for down the stretch, the Lakers have greater motivation to keep playing James rather than shutting it down. If Davis and Williamson both find their way back to the court, the West’s play-in has the potential to thrill, just like the memorable showdown between the Lakers and Warriors last May.
The new format has delivered secondary benefits higher up the West standings, where the Phoenix Suns have run away from the field. With no chance of catching the Suns, the Memphis Grizzlies, Warriors and Utah Jazz might be content to take their feet off the gas over the next month. Instead, the play-in round has enhanced the race for the No. 2 seed, as the winner will almost certainly get to avoid tougher competition like Luka Doncic’s Mavericks and Nikola Jokic’s Denver Nuggets while enjoying a rest advantage when it hosts a weaker play-in winner like the Minnesota Timberwolves or Clippers. | null | null | null | null | null |
Top Democrats, Republicans say they have reached deal to ban Russian energy imports into the U.S., suspend normal trade relations
The agreement, reached between leaders on House and Senate tax committees, would still need to be approved by full House and Senate.
Senior congressional Democrats and Republicans on Monday announced they had reached a deal on a bill that would punish Russia for invading Ukraine, as they seek to ban U.S. imports of Russian oil while further empowering President Biden to impose tariffs on the country’s products.
The announcement evinced the vast new flurry of legislative activity on Capitol Hill, even as lawmakers began to warn that the U.S. strategy threatened to further raise the cost of gas and other goods.
Unveiled by the top lawmakers overseeing tax and trade on Capitol Hill, the new, bipartisan agreement would limit Russian energy imports, suspend normal trade relations between the U.S. and the Kremlin and task the Biden administration to seek Russia’s suspension from the World Trade Organization. The trade penalties would also apply to Belarus, a key Russian ally in the Ukrainian conflict, according to the four members of Congress who crafted the deal.
“As Russia continues its unprovoked attack on the Ukrainian people, we have agreed on a legislative path forward to ban the import of energy products from Russia and to suspend normal trade relations with both Russia and Belarus,” they said in a joint, bipartisan statement.
“Taking these actions will send a clear message to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that his war is unacceptable and the United States stands firmly with our NATO allies,” they continued, adding that Congress still needs to “do more.”
Oil prices spike above $120 a barrel
Signing the statement were Reps. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) and Kevin Brady (R-Texas), the top lawmakers on the House Ways and Means Committee, and Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who oversee the Senate Finance Committee. The lawmakers did not share the full text of their plan.
The proposed package of punishments is only one prong of a broader congressional response to the rapidly worsening crisis in Ukraine. Democrats and Republicans also hope to approve $10 billion in humanitarian, military and economic assistance, a separate effort that they hope to append to a broader package to fund the federal government’s continued operations. A current spending agreement is set to expire at the end of the week, meaning inaction on the matter could shut down key agencies and programs.
In a letter to Democrats, sent early Monday, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) offered an update on those talks: He said his party had made a “reasonable” offer to Republicans on a longer-term spending deal that accomplishes both tasks. Reflecting on its prospects, Schumer sounded an optimistic note, expressing his “hope that we will reach an agreement very soon.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) similarly pledged swift action in her own note late Sunday, while teasing additional action to come, as the House is exploring “strong legislation that will further isolate Russia.” | null | null | null | null | null |
By Amy Taxin and Nomaan Merchant | AP
LOS ANGELES — When her daughter was diagnosed with cancer, Tetiana Chatokhina didn’t hesitate to make the trip back to Ukraine to help her recover from surgery and care for her 14-year-old grandson.
“Every time we go to bed, we don’t even sleep,” Chatokhina said in whispers in Russian over the phone before the family left the city and headed West toward Poland, hoping to make it across the border. | null | null | null | null | null |
While Sissi was expressing those views, security services were locking up Coptic activists and violating the religious rights of other minorities. Fatma Naoot, a secular poet, was sentenced in January 2016 to three years in jail for mocking the slaughter of sacrificial animals for Eid al-Adha. A month later, another court sentenced four Coptic teenagers to up to five years in prison for also “insulting Islam.” Ramy Kamel, a Coptic rights defender, was arrested in November 2019 and allegedly tortured and jailed in “pretrial detention” for over two years.
It is during Egypt’s democratic experiment that Eissa’s troubles with Salafi Islam deepened, He published a novel that depicted Salafists as ignorant and hypocritical. His disillusionment with Islamists and scorn for inept secularists pushed him to side with Sissi. Falling in and out of grace with Egypt’s dictator, he continued to question the hold of Salafi thought over Islam. In his seminal novel “The Blood Journey,” Eissa tracks down the origin of violence and Salafism in the years following the death of the prophet, depicting the struggle of the prophet’s wives and companions with power, greed, lust and pride. In other words, he portrayed them as mortal.
And here lies the predicament Sissi faces. He is probably genuine in his desire for religious reformation, but his authoritarianism prevents it. In his quest for absolute power, Sissi has decimated the nascent power of liberals, the only group genuinely pursuing it. And while he acknowledges that Salafi thought is the origin of religiously motivated violence, he himself has been fomenting paranoid and militaristic nationalism that feeds it. When Sissi insists that Egypt is targeted by external conspiracies that aim to destroy its culture and its people, Islamists simply add more religious flavor to their “culture.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Longwood’s Griff Aldrich celebrates the Lancers’ first Division I NCAA tournament bid. (Rusty Jones/AP)
So there were a lot more hugs and some tears when Longwood finished off its 79-58 victory over perennial Big South power Winthrop to claim the conference’s tournament title. The Lancers are 26-6 and have won 19 of their past 20 games. They will be, at best, a 15th seed when the brackets go up this coming Sunday. And no one in Farmville, Va. — about 70 miles west of Richmond — will care very much.
His changed in part because he met his future wife, Julie Wareing — who was born and raised in Houston — and because he became so successful and well-established it seemed impossible to leave. He became a partner. He and Julie left their house in a high-end neighborhood and moved into downtown Houston after returning from a four-year stint in London. They adopted three kids from Houston — two boys and a girl — who are now almost 11, just-turned 10 and 7. Eventually he founded an oil and gas company and became the managing director and chief financial officer of a private investment firm.
The Lancers — whose greatest player was the late Jerome Kersey, and who won just seven games the season before Aldrich was hired — improved right away, winning 16 games in Aldrich’s first season, including beating High Point, coached by Tubby Smith, twice. “Gotta be one of the great coaching matchups of all time,” Aldrich said before the first of those games. “Tubby with 606 wins and a national title, me with 12 wins and a law degree.”
While Aldrich waited to do the postgame TV interview on Sunday, he noticed the joy on all the faces of Longwood’s players and staffers. “I felt myself starting to tear up,” he said. “Then Julie came out to hug me. That was it. Waterworks. All over the place.” | null | null | null | null | null |
LeBron James famously said last year that the NBA’s play-in designer “should be fired” because the Los Angeles Lakers had to fight their way into the playoffs with a play-in win over the Golden State Warriors. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban expressed reservations over the added strain on players who now had to fight for seeding down the stretch. The NBA’s decision-makers held firm, arguing that the new format’s positives outweighed its negatives because it “significantly increased the competitive incentive” for teams up and down the standings. A year later, here’s a simple method for understanding why the format’s proponents have resoundingly won the debate: Imagine how much worse this season would be without a play-in.
Without an expanded field, the Western Conference’s eight-team field would be virtually settled with more than a month remaining in the regular season. The Lakers, who have slipped in the standings without an injured Anthony Davis, would need to make up five games on the Los Angeles Clippers with fewer than 20 games to play to sneak in as the eighth seed.
Ditto for the New Orleans Pelicans, who have shaken off a 1-12 start to move into the West’s 10th seed. With no play-in, the Pelicans would have little reason to consider bringing back Zion Williamson, and they might not have rolled the dice to trade for CJ McCollum at the deadline. Their season would have been effectively over by mid-November, and their impressive run over the past two months would have been a meaningless footnote.
Like last year, when the play-in round gave Stephen Curry and the Warriors something to play for down the stretch, the Lakers have greater motivation to keep playing James rather than shutting it down. If Davis and Williamson both find their way back to the court, the West’s play-in has the potential to thrill, just like the memorable showdown between the Lakers and Warriors last May.
The new format has delivered secondary benefits higher up the West standings, where the Phoenix Suns have run away from the field. With no chance of catching the Suns, the Memphis Grizzlies, Warriors and Utah Jazz might be content to take their feet off the gas over the next month. Instead, the play-in round has enhanced the race for the No. 2 seed, as the winner will almost certainly get to avoid tougher competition such as Luka Doncic’s Mavericks and Nikola Jokic’s Denver Nuggets while enjoying a rest advantage when it hosts a weaker play-in winner such as the Minnesota Timberwolves or Clippers. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police offer $25,000 reward for tips on fatal shooting of Maryland man
Police are offering a reward for information on the fatal shooting of a Maryland man. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)
A Maryland man was shot and killed in Prince George’s County over the weekend, and police are offering up to $25,000 for information that leads to an arrest.
Prince George’s County police found Efrain Huerta Moran, of Chillum, on Saturday with multiple gunshots wounds in a parking lot in the 2400 block of Chillum Road. Authorities had been called there at about 8 a.m. to investigate a shooting. Moran, 43, died on the scene, police said.
The police department said anyone with information about the shooting can call detectives at 301-516-2512, or remain anonymous by calling Crime Solvers at 866-411-TIPS (8477). | null | null | null | null | null |
State Sen. Richard Saslaw (D-Fairfax). (Steve Helber/AP)
RICHMOND — State Sen. Richard L. Saslaw is proposing changes to his bill to lure the Washington Commanders to Virginia, addressing two potential loopholes that could have allowed for bottomless taxpayer investment in a sprawling “mini-city” around a new stadium.
Saslaw (D-Fairfax) suggested the new language after The Washington Post reported over the weekend on the legislature’s two bills to create a stadium authority to oversee financing and construction of a National Football League complex for the Commanders.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and wide majorities in the House and Senate have embraced the idea behind Saslaw’s bill and a House version brought by Del. Barry Knight (R-Virginia Beach) — that the state would give up a share of tax revenue from the stadium and a surrounding “mini-city” to finance bonds for the stadium.
But the House and Senate bills define the “facility” eligible for the bonds so broadly that they possibly could be used to finance not just the stadium but also the vast commercial-entertainment-residential development that Commanders owner Daniel Snyder would plan to develop alongside it.
If no changes were made, the Senate version also would allow the stadium authority to issue new bonds in perpetuity — and collect the tax revenue to pay them down — to finance new construction, expansion, repairs and maintenance. The House version would limit the bonds to 20 years.
Saslaw, who sponsored the Senate bill, said he never wanted the bonds to be used for the broader development, which he describes as a “mini-city.” He said he would submit the new language to House and Senate negotiators who are trying to iron out differences between the two bills before the General Assembly session concludes Saturday. Saslaw is one of the conferees, as is Knight.
“It was never our intention that the bonds would be used for anything other than the stadium,” said Saslaw, the state Senate’s majority leader. “This makes clear what we intended.”
New stadium for Commanders is a political football for local leaders
Both bills define “facility” to include things typically associated with a sports venue: the stadium itself, practice fields, team offices, concessions and parking garages. But they also include restaurants and retail without specifying that they be located in the stadium. The definition also covers “lodging,” office space for tenants other than the team and “other properties on a site specified by the team and consented to by the Authority and the county/city [where the facility is located].”
Most of that language had been carried over from state code that created a baseball authority in the hopes of attracting a major league team to Virginia. It was adopted in 1995, when professional sports teams typically built their stadiums in the middle of parking lots.
Saslaw’s new language would specify that the financeable restaurants, retail and concessions be “inside the stadium” and “essential to the operation of the stadium.” It also would remove references to “lodging” and non-team offices.
Neither bill caps the amount of money that can be raised, however, and Saslaw’s proposal would not change that. But it would impose a time limit on the bonding authority, which the Senate version lacks.
Both bills allow the stadium authority to issue bonds “at any time and from time to time,” but the House version says that right ends once the bonds are paid off or 20 years after the team plays its first regular season game in the stadium — whichever comes first.
The Senate version sets a limit of 30 years but from the date of issuance, so the clock would continually be reset with each new issuance. Saslaw’s new language would tie the 30-year deadline to the stadium’s operational date.
Eager to compete, Maryland developing multimillion-dollar deal for Commanders
The Commanders are contractually obligated to play at FedEx Field, in Landover, Md., until 2027, after which they could stay or seek another home. The team has been shopping for a new home for years in Virginia, Maryland and D.C. Maryland and D.C. have stepped up their efforts in recent weeks as the proposal in Virginia has advanced. | null | null | null | null | null |
Letter-shaped candles forming the slogan “Putin come out” are seen on a meadow in front of the Peace Palace in The Hague on March 7. (Remko de Waal/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
“When confronted by such open illegality, is this court utterly powerless to stop it?” asked Harold Hongju Koh, one of the attorneys representing Ukraine, in court Monday.
Ukraine seeks an emergency order that would require Russia to halt its invasion. On March 1, ICJ President Joan E. Donoghue urged Russia’s foreign minister to “act in such a way” that a court order — which may come within days — can “have its appropriate effects.” In theory, any breaches could end up at the U.N. Security Council, which may “decide upon measures to be taken to give effect to the judgment,” according to the U.N. Charter.
But as one of five permanent members of the Security Council, Russia would probably be able to veto any such measures, rendering an ICJ ruling largely symbolic.
The civilian death toll mounted in Ukraine on March 7, as the country entered another round of negotiations with Russia. (Alexa Juliana Ard/The Washington Post)
But that would require the accused to be present in court — and the court to have jurisdiction. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has ratified the ICC treaty, meaning that the court’s jurisdiction could be cast into doubt.
Hannah Knowles and María Luisa Paúl contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Origin: The Nationals needed someone to oversee technology, data and player development strategy — they needed it badly — so the team hired Longley amid a full reshaping of their minor league staff this offseason.
“Using the term ‘progressive’ or ‘progressive hire’ is a bit lazy, I think, cause it’s not that simple,” Longley said in an interview with The Washington Post. “Whatever titles mean in baseball, we don’t really know, but I’m helping with a lot of things and making information more accessible. The operative question is: How do you get it to the field? And if it doesn’t … and I say ‘it’ meaning data, meaning tech, meaning adjustments … does it really matter? That is sort of what I ask myself, where I think we can get wrapped up sometimes in everything we have access to, but if we’re unable to make it practicable, relatable and transferrable, and there are a number of reasons you can and can’t do that, then none of it is effective.”
This is the natural spot to examine Longley’s résumé and why he’s fit for the role. After graduating from Wheaton College in 2012, then from the University of California San Diego with a masters in Latin American studies, he joined the Los Angeles Dodgers as their Spanish interpreter for one year. From there, he spent a year with the New York Yankees as an assistant in amateur scouting and player development. And from there, he began his stint with the Padres, climbing from a coordinator to assistant director in baseball ops (and serving, for a period, as the team’s Spanish interpreter with the media).
When the Nationals overhauled their player development operation this winter, infusing more data and technology was a must. Ownership committed to closing at least some of the gap between what Washington spends on tech compared with more forward-thinking teams. De Jon Watson, their new director of player development, harped on wanting someone — or multiple someones — to operate technology, interpret data and work alongside coaches with traditional baseball backgrounds. That’s where Longley came in.
“He’s an interesting cat because he is versed in both sides of it,” Watson said of Longley. “He’s been around the game quite a bit and at the major league level. I think he understood, when we had our conversations, how we’re trying to roll this out, and really kind of grow and educate our players and staff.
“He’s been a great listening partner for guys who were just curious. And he’s also been able to kind of lay some things out and show them exactly how it plays and pull video and tie the video into the actual numbers, so we can see how it’s matching up to help grow both player and staff. So it’s been wonderful.”
Watson’s offered his assessment during the Nationals’ early minor league camp in late February. When Longley spoke to The Post a week earlier, he’d only been in West Palm Beach, Fla., for a few days, making him cautious to state any big intentions for the role. He thought it would be weird for coaches to read about his plans before meeting him in person. He also explained that players and coaches will dictate specifics, which will evolve over time.
Evolution, as a concept, seems critical to Longley’s task with Washington. It’s no secret the Nationals have been slow to adopt data and technology and [insert modern baseball buzzword of your choice] in player development. Hiring Longley now was sort of like stepping into 2016 in 2022. So does he feel as though, given the organizational history, he has a thin margin for error with suggestions on a player report? Does he feel as if an early success rate is paramount to gaining trust among coaches and a front office led by Mike Rizzo, who was once a longtime scout and built a culture in his image?
“I’d contend to that with another question,” Longley answered. “It’s never one way or the other, right? I think the best teams do a really good job of blending data and scouting, and in terms of margin for error, I don’t necessarily think it’s that black and white. It’s not ‘This is the solution, guys.’ It’s more drawing on everyone’s expertise … So many of these concepts are not new, we just have a better way of measuring them sometimes. There are definitely a lot of core components that have always made baseball players successful that we can perhaps capture in a different way.” | null | null | null | null | null |
This photo provided by the U.S. Border Patrol shows a boat carrying hundreds of Haitian migrants that ran aground in the Florida Keys off Key Largo on March 6, 2022. (United States Border Patrol via AP) (AP)
A battered wooden freighter carrying 356 Haitian migrants ran aground in the Florida Keys Sunday in what authorities described as one of the largest smuggling events in years involving a single boat.
The Haitians who swam ashore were taken to U.S. Border Patrol stations for processing, CBP said, and would face deportation. Those in Coast Guard custody would be subject to an “interagency process" at the Department of Homeland Security to determine whether they would be repatriated to Haiti, said Pintos.
Another boat carrying 176 Haitians was stopped by the Coast Guard as it approached the Florida Keys on January 11.
Desperate conditions in Haiti have fueled an increase in migration since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse last July. Thousands of Haitian nationals attempted to enter the United States across the Mexico border in Del Rio, Texas, last summer, but the majority had left their homeland years earlier and were living in South America before heading north. | null | null | null | null | null |
Since Biden took office, Obamacare has only grown more popular. The White House announced last year that about 31 million Americans now have health-care coverage through the ACA, a record high since the law was enacted in 2010. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Biden ordered an extended three-month enrollment period last year for people to buy health insurance through the ACA’s federal marketplaces at HealthCare.gov. During that special enrollment period, more than 1.2 million additional Americans enrolled in health-care plans through Obamacare, the White House said. | null | null | null | null | null |
ODESSA, Ukraine — The first time in 24 years that I saw my great-aunt, I was wearing my bulletproof vest with “PRESS” stamped on the front.
But while my reporting took me all over Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where the country’s military has been battling Russian-backed separatists since 2014, and to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, just 25 miles from the Russian border, the Odessa trip kept getting postponed.
There’s no doubt the Russians will make a move on this city. And the iconic streets I heard so much about as a kid are now blockaded with sandbags and metal antitank hedgehogs. Armed members of the military and reserve Territorial Defense Forces patrol the streets. The 7 p.m. curfew is strict. One museum I walked by has put razor wire over the gate, looking more like a prison than a place with fine art on the walls.
They left Odessa in 1978. My grandmother was Jewish, and antisemitic sentiments were strong in the Soviet Union at the time. My grandfather was Armenian, but just being married to a Jewish woman was causing him to lose career opportunities. When the Soviet Union lifted its ban on the Jewish refusenik emigration in 1971, my family saw their opportunity to start over in America.
When I asked why that was, she scolded me, telling me to not get distracted from driving. Then she explained that she was born in this city. It’s her home. She visited the United States four times. Four of her siblings moved there, but she returned to Odessa each time. There’s something about this city — with its roots back in imperial Russia, its classic architecture, its appreciation for artists and its Black Sea beaches — that make people romantic about it.
All the roads to my grandparents’ old downtown apartment were blocked, so we parked and tried to set off on foot. We made it 30 seconds before a volunteer with the Ukrainian reserve forces stopped us. The area is being used for defense operations, he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Jamal Alkhaldi a local actor who went to the Ukrainian Embassy in Georgetown this week. (Petula Dvorak for The Washington Post)
They’re coming from New Hampshire, North Carolina, Northern Virginia and more to knock on the modest cream door in Georgetown. They’re ready to fight.
“Oh no, I’m still wearing my Chipotle shirt,” said Diego Presiado, 24, as he stepped through that door into the Ukrainian Embassy’s lobby to volunteer.
Presiado, a Marine Corps veteran, was one of four men who showed up there at 9 a.m. Monday, amped up after a weekend of watching coverage of the Russian attack.
Now we get to see exactly why our parents fled from the Russians
Rarely have we been able to watch a full-scale invasion like this one unfold in real time. We’ve sent aid but not troops. We’re laying bouquets but not taking up arms. These guys want to take action. The Ukrainians, after all, invited them to come.
“I want to join their army,” Presiado said. “I’m in.”
Washington loves political symbolism. From the congressional cafeteria’s rebranded “freedom fries” when France opposed the invasion of Iraq to the District’s streetscape mural for Black Lives Matter to the renaming of the street in front of the Saudi Embassy to Jamal Khashoggi Way, symbolic action is one of the things we’re really good at.
Outside the Russian Embassy, someone planted a bootleg street sign declaring that stretch of Wisconsin Avenue the new “President Zelensky Way.” The Ukrainian president — an actor with a law degree from Kyiv National Economic University, who once played the president on TV — has won Americans over in his role as a real-life David standing up to Russia’s Goliath.
The streets and sewer system burned with discarded Russian vodka. One vodka tonic into my Friday evening, I joined the social media performances and pronounced Texas-made Tito’s my vodka of choice.
Dosvidanya ruska vodka: pic.twitter.com/GexqTb7695
— Petula Dvorak (@petulad) March 4, 2022
But these guys, the ones showing up by the dozens at the Ukrainian Embassy on M Street? They’re a whole other level of passionate.
“I want to fight for freedom. I’m watching this and it’s just not right,” said Jamal Alkhadi, 31, as he stepped up to the front door of the embassy Monday morning, a little nervous.
This stretch of sidewalk outside the embassy smells like a flower shop there are so many bouquets. Yellow and blue balloons bob in the wind and signs proclaim support for the Ukrainian people, reading “Washington DC stand with FREE UKRAINE,” “The soul of FREEDOM is deathless. It cannot and will not perish,” as well as profanities against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Akhadi looked at all the signs and took a deep breath. He has zero military experience. He doesn’t know anyone Ukrainian. He works for Door Dash while waiting for his big break in acting. He was the face of a toy called Smakaball and is a regular on a TV show that reenacts kidnappings. He does a lot of work as an extra.
“This is real, though,” he said, before entering the embassy. “I want to help.”
He came back out quickly, though.
“I don’t have military experience,” he said, showing me the paper they handed him, giving him instructions on how he can help.
“Foreigners willing to defend Ukraine and world order as part of the International Legions of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, I invite you to contact diplomatic mission of Ukraine in your respective countries,” the statement said, with contact information.
Kevin Dula, 37, also got a thanks-but-no-thanks.
“I did work with Red Cross before, so they said I should go to them,” said Dula, who drove up from Charlotte and walked into the embassy Monday morning. His wife is Ukrainian, and her family is reporting horrors that aren’t being told.
“They really didn’t think it would come to this,” Dula said. “But now they’re bombing and it blew up the power supply. It’s been snowing for two days and they can’t keep warm.”
At least five men have shown up a day lately to the Embassy to volunteer, said D.C. police officers stationed outside, who saw that many on Monday morning alone.
A clear picture of what’s happening in Ukraine is difficult to come by. A United Nations monitor said there have been at least 360 civilian deaths, 760 injuries and at least a million citizens have fled the nation after more than a week of shelling, calling it the “fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.”
The situation is devolving, but it’s worth noting that atrocities committed in South Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, Somalia and more didn’t move American men to offer their lives up in this way, for a people they don’t know. Perhaps it’s because, as a former Ukrainian prosecutor allegedly said in an interview, that the world is watching “European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed.”
As Emily Lowe looked at all those bouquets, full of yellow sunflowers and blue irises, on Monday, she thought of the wedding she was supposed to have last weekend. Instead of honeymooning, she was outside the Ukrainian Embassy after driving 430 miles from their home in New Hampshire.
“As soon as he heard what was going on, he said he wanted to join,” said Lowe, who is 19 and works at a bank in their lakefront town. They decided to cancel their small wedding and come to D.C., to say goodbye before he heads to a country he’s never visited.
Her future mother-in-law traveled with her, proud that her son, a construction worker with no military experience, wants to fight. They’re figuring he’ll be of use to the Ukrainian army, with his strength and familiarity with the military — just about every man in his family served.
“I raised him to be a man,” said Sandi Simpson, 53. She picked up a sign that suggested a profanity be done to Putin and waved it around. “They’ve gotta get rid of him.”
We’re watching everyday Ukrainians stand up to a tyrant, a scrappy underdog take on a bully. This is an old rivalry for our young nation, and we’ve been invited to help.
It’s no wonder that amid the divisiveness and confusion of our own political climate, where truckers are currently circling the Beltway in protest of pandemic-era mandates that largely no longer exist, people are reaching for a way to just be heroes again.
“The last week has been really intense,” Emily said. “But we decided that this is the morally right thing to do.” | null | null | null | null | null |
16-year-old boy charged with murder in killing of 15-year-old Kareem Wilson Jr., police say
A 16-year-old boy has been charged with murder in the slaying of 15-year-old Kareem Wilson Jr. in Greenbelt, Md., in early February, Greenbelt police said.
Police said they obtained an arrest warrant for the teen Feb. 24 and found and arrested him on Friday in Baltimore. The boy was taken to the Prince George’s County Department of Corrections. He is charged as an adult, police said.
On Feb. 1, officers responded at about 9 p.m. to the 7800 block of Mandan Road for a reported shooting. Wilson died of his wounds, police said. A 19-year-old man was also wounded, police said.
The 16-year-old is also charged with attempted first-degree murder and related gun charges in the shooting.
Police declined to identify the juvenile on Monday afternoon. | null | null | null | null | null |
Patients and doctors say safety net is unprepared for novel claims stemming from the pandemic
Ever since getting covid in 2020, Laurie Bedell has remained in a state of physical exhaustion. (Jeff Swensen for The Washington Post)
Deepa Singh, 30, of Louisville, has been seriously ill for two years, racked with extreme fatigue, racing heartbeat and memory problems from long covid that she says prevent her from working. Adding to her distress, she says, has been a grueling — and so far unsuccessful — battle for disability payments.
Singh, who worked as a project manager for a Fortune 100 company, is among a cohort of long covid patients who have been denied disability benefits, either by private insurance companies, which operate benefit plans offered by employers, or by the Social Security Administration, which manages government disability benefits.
Tasked with sorting legitimate health claims from fraudulent or marginal ones, these gatekeepers now face a novel challenge as the coronavirus pandemic drags on: a flood of claims citing a post-infection syndrome that is poorly understood by the medical community and difficult to measure.
Mysterious conditions are afflicting Americans after covid. It could signal a looming cardiac crisis.
“I would say some denials are unjustified,” said Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Long School of Medicine and chief of the long covid clinic at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. “Almost every day I’m filling out disability paperwork, writing letters of appeal and talking with people from disability companies.”
Specialized tests can measure a few long covid-related problems, such as a central nervous system disorder called dysautonomia, which affects the body’s ability to regulate itself. But there are months-long waiting lists for the tests, doctors and patients said.
The challenges are similar to those faced for years by people claiming disabilities based on chronic fatigue syndrome. But the pandemic has given rise to such claims on a far greater scale.
“We are seeing a mini epidemic of chronic fatigue syndrome,” said Benjamin Natelson, a neurologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York who specializes in such post-viral disorders.
In the United States, covid has infected more than 79 million people and claimed more than 950,000 lives. Doctors have estimated there are 750,000 to 1.3 million or more Americans too sick with long covid to return to their jobs. A recent analysis published by the Brookings Institution, based on data from various studies, suggested that long covid disabilities and workplace absences could account for 15 percent of America’s 10.6 million unfilled jobs.
Private companies and the Social Security Administration, in response to questions from The Washington Post, declined to disclose the percentages of people with long covid whose applications for benefits have been denied. The industry trade group, the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI), said it did not have data that could document a rise in overall disability applications or illuminate the ratio of denied claims for long covid.
“The true impact of the virus on policyholders and people overall won’t be revealed for some time,” said Jack Dolan, a spokesman for the ACLI. “Still, companies in the [disability insurance] business are paying benefits every day on the wide variety of illnesses and injuries covered in policies.”
The Social Security Administration said it has received about 23,000 disability applications since the beginning of the pandemic that include a mention of covid in some way — less than 1 percent of all annual claims, it said.
Some covid patients are receiving disability benefits, especially those who suffered severe infections. Thousands of people spent weeks on ventilators, followed by long periods in physical and occupational therapy relearning how to walk and perform simple tasks. Many suffered strokes, brain bleeds and organ failure as the virus laid siege to their bodies.
The Post spoke to patients who, with the help of lawyers, won long-term disability benefits from the government. One, an EMT in New Jersey, suffered strokes and uses a wheelchair. Another, a New York doctor, experienced brain bleeds; his speech is frequently interrupted by sobs.
Long haulers, as patients with long covid are known, typically start with milder infections and later suffer symptoms that are not as obviously debilitating.
For many ICU survivors and their families, life is never the same
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledges gaps in medical knowledge regarding long covid. It warns doctors not to rely solely on heart, lung and brain tests to diagnose the syndrome because the symptoms are so difficult to measure. “Lack of laboratory or imaging abnormalities does not invalidate the existence, severity, or importance of a patient’s symptoms or conditions,” the CDC cautions in its official guidance.
But whether someone qualifies for benefits hinges on their physical and mental ability to do their jobs, not on a diagnosis.
“A lot of times the insurance company is just looking at the physical requirements and saying you have a sedentary job, and nothing precludes you from sitting at a desk all day,'' said Mark D. DeBofsky, a Chicago lawyer who represents patients fighting for benefits. “But you have to think, you have to analyze, you have to plan, you have to use judgment. If you are not able to fully exercise those faculties, you can’t work at that job.”
Singh was among the initial wave of long covid cases in 2020, before the medical system had even created a diagnosis code that could be entered into records. She did not qualify for a coronavirus test at the time of her initial infection in February of that year because she had not traveled to China or associated with anyone who traveled to China.
She said she tested positive for coronavirus antibodies in August 2020 (before vaccines were available), proving her infection and the root of her long-term sickness. Doctors dismissed her symptoms as psychosomatic, she said, a common complaint among long haulers.
Throughout 2020, she got sicker and struggled at work as a senior project manager. She said she couldn’t keep up with the job of driving improvements in company business units, unable to multitask or communicate clearly, forgetting what had been discussed with colleagues and failing to recall simple words and phrases.
“It just got to the point where I couldn’t function any more, and people were noticing more and more that I was slipping,” she said.
Singh shared her story on the condition that her employer not be named in this story to avoid negative repercussions. Although the company notified her in a certified letter in November 2021 that it filled her old job, it said she can apply for a different one if her medical condition improves, Singh said.
Singh’s employer contracts for employee disability benefits through a large insurance company called Unum, an international provider of workplace benefits like life and disability insurance. The company reported $12 billion in revenue in 2021.
Singh applied for temporary disability in late 2020 from Unum but was denied, she said, describing conversations with Unum representatives that left her stressed and dispirited. She said she was told by one representative that a “young thing” like her could not be disabled by the virus.
“There were a lot of phone calls that left me in tears with that disability company,” she said.
Masks come off in blue states. Residents wonder: Is it too soon, or long overdue?
Unum eventually approved temporary disability in February 2021, after Singh appealed. She had been sick for a year.
When Singh’s temporary benefits expired in June 2021, she said she was still too wiped out to work, despite regular physical therapy and speech pathology appointments. She applied for long-term disability. That bid was denied, first in September and again in November, in letters that Singh read to a Post reporter over the phone.
Unum told her she was denied because she never had a positive coronavirus test and because an antibody test in February 2021 was negative, Singh said. It did not mention her positive antibody test in August 2020, she said. In the September denial, the company noted that Singh’s new primary care provider, an advanced practice registered nurse in Louisville, had just begun treating her and did not know whether Singh’s ability to work was hampered.
On Oct. 20, the provider wrote an update: Singh “is being treated for post-covid long-term symptoms and continues to experience dysfunction in cognitive abilities which hinders her ability to work/complete tasks in a timely manner,” the provider wrote in case-file notes that accompanied the November denial.
Despite that assessment, the company cited medical tests that did not reveal impairment, including a neurological exam that came back normal. “Her symptoms are out of proportion to the diagnostic and exam findings and are inconsistent with functional impairment,'' the denial letter said.
The company also said Singh had not proved she was disabled throughout a period that ended on Aug. 30 — an “elimination period” in disability rules, when the patient must remain disabled to qualify.
Singh said she is still awaiting a decision on her appeal of the second denial. She likened the process to getting put through a “spin cycle.”
“The process is so difficult you feel like giving up. But what then? You go back to work to a job you can’t do?” she said.
Unum says it does not comment on specific cases. It said it has approved “hundreds of thousands” of additional disability claims since the beginning of the pandemic, with an increase from pre-pandemic levels of 35 percent. The company did not provide raw numbers of benefit awards or denials resulting from long covid.
“During the pandemic, Unum has paid more disability and life claims than in our company’s history. It’s why we exist and reinforces the critical importance of employee benefits,” Unum spokeswoman Natalie Godwin said in an email. “In general, disability and leave claims connected to covid-19 have been primarily short-term events with the majority of claimants recovering before completing the normal qualification period for long term disability insurance.”
The length of time it takes to decide claims depends on individual circumstances and the “timeliness” of medical records and other submissions, Godwin said.
Responding to Singh’s statement that she was told by an Unum representative that a “young thing” like her could not be disabled by covid, Godwin added, “We have been unable to confirm the alleged statement, but we strive to make every customer interaction a learning opportunity to drive better service and support.”
The denial of temporary disability benefits by Mutual of Omaha stunned Eve Efron, 32, a long-haul covid patient from Virginia.
Since her initial illness in January 2021, Efron has struggled with physical and mental exhaustion, headaches, sleep disruption and emotional stress caused by long covid, according to medical records and correspondence she provided to The Post.
Tracking U.S. covid-19 cases, deaths and other metrics by state
She took sick time and reduced her work schedule at Outcast, the public relations agency where she is a senior account director.
In April, as her symptoms worsened, the physician assistant treating her at MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital discussed options with Efron and determined that she should take medical leave to rest.
But Mutual of Omaha, her employer’s disability insurance carrier, in August rejected Efron’s claim for temporary disability insurance totaling $7,500 for the five weeks she was away from work. It said after reviewing the medical records that her illness was not severe enough to interfere with work, according to correspondence Efron shared with The Post. It dismissed her final appeal last month.
Efron’s claim and appeals included emails and notes from the MedStar physician assistant emphasizing the importance of the medical leave.
“Eve’s medical conditions … were inconsistent with the demands of her job and, in my judgment, would improve only if she stepped away from work for a period of time,” wrote Kathryn Pellegrino, the physician assistant. MedStar declined to make Pellegrino available for comment.
During the appeal, Mutual of Omaha reviewed her social media accounts, noting that she had recorded a promotion in September 2021 on LinkedIn. It cited the promotion as evidence that she was able to perform her job satisfactorily. It also cited her clearly written correspondence to the company as an indication that she did not suffer cognitive problems. And it said her medical record lacked any objective test that showed a lack of function that prevented her from doing her job.
“It seems clear that Mutual of Omaha doesn’t trust my doctors … to be able to make a diagnosis. It feels really wild to me to undercut their medical judgment in that way,” Efron said. She said her promotion in September had no bearing on her illness in May and early June, when she took medical leave. She said an uncle who is a lawyer helped craft her appeal letters.
Australia to reopen to vaccinated tourists, two years after it closed international borders
With the final denial of her appeal last month, Efron said she is resigned to not receiving any compensation for the time she missed work. She continues to work now, still plagued by headaches and fatigue, worried that she will never return to normal.
Mutual of Omaha would not comment on Efron’s case.
“Each claim, whether arising from covid or any other condition, is evaluated based on the specific facts of that case,” as well as terms of the insurance policy and state and federal law, Mutual of Omaha said in a statement. The company reported $11 billion in revenue in 2020.
In Los Angeles, lawyers for Wendy Haut, a sales representative for an educational software company, Cengage Learning, have filed suit against insurance carrier Reliance Standard. The suit claims the company improperly denied her long-term disability claim despite symptoms including asthma and chronic cough that she did not have before her coronavirus infection. Several doctors attested to Haut’s disabling symptoms, according to the lawsuit, including her primary care doctor who submitted an assessment in November 2021, the month before Reliance denied Haut’s application for benefits.
“To date she experiences constant mental fog and forgetfulness, especially short term memory, and thought processing,” the doctor, Eric Mizrahi, said, according to the suit. “She is literally incapable of assuming her responsibilities of daily living without assistance.” Mizrahi did not respond to request for comment. Haut’s lawyers also did not respond.
Reliance Standard — a division of a Japanese insurance giant, Tokio Marine Holdings, with more than $45 billion sales in its last fiscal year — declined to comment. Cengage said in an email it plays no role in determining the outcome of disability claims.
How to use at-home covid tests and where to find them
Outside of Pittsburgh, Laurie Bedell received word from the Social Security Administration late last month that her application for long-term disability had been rejected. She caught covid along with the rest of her family at Thanksgiving in 2020. Her father died after a hospitalization. Bedell has remained in a state of physical exhaustion with myriad symptoms. She had to leave her job making more than $100,000 as a nursing supervisor at a home care agency.
Some covid-19 patients taken off ventilators are taking days or even weeks to wake up
She applied for state unemployment benefits but was denied. Because she was too sick to work, she did not meet the unemployment criteria of actively looking for a new job.
Bedell submitted what she said was thousands of pages of medical records from the Cleveland Clinic and doctors in Pennsylvania to the Social Security Administration for her application for disability benefits, including pulmonary function and cognitive tests that she said showed impairment. She continued to submit additional test results after her initial application, with what she said was medical proof of 12 different diagnoses, including post-exertion malaise, chronic fatigue syndrome, dysautonomia, small fiber neuropathy, irritable bowel syndrome, and anxiety and depression.
The Social Security Administration sent her for an independent physical examination before issuing the denial. Bedell said she thought the independent evaluator recognized the severity of her condition.
But according to the written denial she received, sections of which she shared with The Post, SSA determined that “you experience pain, but the evidence shows that you are still able to stand, walk, lift, carry and bend. At times you are depressed. However, this would not prevent you from performing routine work in a low stress environment. You have some limitations on your activities. However, the severity of your condition does not totally disable you.”
Agency spokeswoman Nicole Tiggemann declined to comment on Bedell’s case, citing privacy laws. Social Security requires a finding that a disabling condition will last at least one year or result in death before awarding benefits, she said. In 2016, the agency was criticized by a government watchdog for not conducting timely reviews to make sure people receiving benefits are still disabled.
“Disability evaluations are based on function,” Tiggemann said, “not diagnosis.”
Meanwhile, Bedell said she has cashed out her 401(k) to pay the bills. She said she and her husband may soon be forced to move because they can’t afford their $1,800 monthly rent without ongoing financial help from her mother.
The couple had been hoping to buy the house they are renting. For now, that plan has been scrapped. | null | null | null | null | null |
UPPER MARLBORO, Md. — A Maryland man was shot and killed last weekend, and police are offering a $25,000 reward for leads that result in an arrest.
On Saturday, Prince George’s Police patrol officers were called to a location in Chillum at around 8 a.m. on Saturday for a report of a shooting, a news release said on Monday. They found the victim, Efrain Huerta Moran of Chillum with multiple gunshot wounds. Moran was pronounced dead at the scene, police said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Since then, the White House and the administration have had a few bites at the apple and while they haven’t echoed Pelosi and others, they do appear to be getting closer.
The Biden administration has certainly erred in that direction. But as with banning Russian oil, that also risks looking like you were dragged into a position that many believed was obvious from the outset — or that you weren’t willing to call a spade a spade, like some of your top allies both internationally and domestically were.
And as reports on such conduct proliferate — including a new one from the New York Times that states Russian forces Sunday fired upon a bridge used by evacuees, killing four, which would seem to meet Thomas-Greenfield’s criteria — that posture becomes more and more difficult to cling to. | null | null | null | null | null |
President Biden on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One in Washington, D.C., on March 4. (Oliver Contreras for The Washington Post)
The stakes now are different. The president of the United States lives in the White House because the White House affords him access to safety and information and an ability to quickly respond to crises that’s unmatched elsewhere. What’s more, Biden’s predecessor was regularly criticized for how often he was away from the White House, a criticism that doesn’t seem to bother Biden much.
It was also generally more expensive for the government to shuttle Trump to his properties than it is to get Biden to Delaware, since the properties Trump visited the most — his private clubs at Mar-a-Lago and in Bedminster, N.J. — are substantially further away. Trump did go to his hotel in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House, and regularly to his golf club in Sterling, Va., about 20 miles away. But with the exception of a Thanksgiving trip to Nantucket, Biden has only gone to Wilmington and his house at Rehoboth Beach, both quite a bit closer.
Over Trump’s presidency, I tracked his visits to his private properties. And while it does seem like Biden goes to Delaware a lot — because he does — a casual observer might be forgiven for forgetting how often Trump left Washington for rest and relaxation. Comparing the first 13-plus months of each man’s presidency, it’s clear that Biden is not obviously exceeding Trump’s total departures from the White House.
This analysis certainly risks using a bit of whataboutism to excuse Biden’s time away from the White House, which is certainly unusual for recent non-Trump presidents. But it is the case that the implications and costs of Biden’s travel has been quite different than that occurring during Trump’s presidency. | null | null | null | null | null |
It is illegal to provide false information on a voter registration, and while Americans can have multiple residences, they can only have one official domicile, which is tied to their voter registration. To register to vote in North Carolina, a citizen must have lived in the county where they are registering and have resided there for at least 30 days before the date of the election, according to the state’s board of elections.
There is, however, no real system to check a resident’s credentials when they sign up to vote. Melanie D. Thibault, the director of Macon County’s Board of Elections, told the New Yorker that while she was “dumbfounded” by Meadows’s registration and address, she said he registered by mail and was sent a voter-registration card to a post office box that Meadows had listed as his mailing address.
In December, Michael Pillsbury, a former Trump adviser who helped research some of the fraud claims but ultimately found them without merit, told The Post that Meadows was eager to present Trump with a new theory or new information about election fraud, knowing Trump was hungry for any tidbits that would help him claim victory. | null | null | null | null | null |
Even Russian-speaking Ukrainians don’t want to be evacuated to Russia or Belarus
The research shows that Russian speakers across much of Ukraine identify as Ukrainian
By Michal Bilewicz
A woman and her child wait to get on a bus after crossing the Ukrainian border into Poland at the Medyka border crossing on Monday. (Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images)
Russia announced six new evacuation routes — allowing Ukrainians to flee the conflict by heading to Russia or Belarus. The Ukrainian government decried the suggestion, demanding safe routes to allow Ukrainians to flee to Poland and elsewhere in Europe.
This news is the latest example of Russia’s faulty assumptions about Ukraine and expectations of an easy victory. As Russian troops entered the country just two weeks ago, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations declared, “the people of Ukraine will be happy when they are liberated from the regime that occupied them.”
To justify the invasion and previous occupation of the Donbas region, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly argued that Ukrainians in the eastern parts of the country are ethnic Russians living under Ukrainian occupation.
“People who identify as Russians and want to preserve their identity, language and culture are getting the signal that they are not wanted in Ukraine,” Putin said in a recent address to Russian citizens. Russians seem to believe him, as does Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser to former president Donald Trump, who wrote about “legitimate ethnic problems” in Ukraine.
Research in political psychology shows that Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population does not require rescue by Russia — or even want it. Here’s what we know.
Most Russian-speaking Ukrainians feel Ukrainian
In Ukraine, the language people speak cannot be equated with ethnic identity. A large representative study from 2013 examining the identity of Ukrainians living in various regions of the country found that the vast majority consider their ethnic identity as Ukrainian — the lone exception was in Crimea. More than 90 percent of people living in western and central Ukraine call themselves Ukrainian. But strong Ukrainian identification can be found also in predominantly Russian-speaking parts such as southern, eastern Ukraine and even Donbas — where 70 percent or more identify as Ukrainian.
The study’s authors, Maria Lewicka and Bartłomiej Iwańczak, looked also at other identities: people’s attachment to their place of residence, city, Europe; as well as to their professions and religion. They found two general clusters of identification: one of them is prevalent in places such as Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea, where national or ethnic identities do not play a crucial role; the other, in which national Ukrainian identity dominates, is visible in Lviv, Kyiv and Rivne, but also in mainly Russian-speaking cities such as Cherkasy, Dnipro or Kharkiv. In other words, Ukrainian civic identity is strong even in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking areas.
When Ukrainian political psychologist Vadym Vasiutynskyi asked more than 1,300 Russian-speaking inhabitants of Kyiv, Luhansk, Odessa and Simferopol to choose among several different ways of describing themselves, 37 percent chose “Ukrainian citizen,” while another 34 percent of respondents chose “Russian-speaking citizen of Ukraine.” Only 18 percent declared “Russian” as their main identity.
The identification of Russian-speaking Ukrainians with Ukraine is not unique. There are many countries where two or more languages are commonly used, for example Switzerland or Canada. There are also countries such as Ireland where the Indigenous and official national language became a minority language. Although language is an important transmitter of cultural values and ethnic identity, no one would negate the right of an English-speaking Dubliner to define herself as Irish.
We studied how Russian-speaking refugees identified themselves
This strong commitment to Ukraine among Russian-speaking immigrants is visible also among those who emigrated from the country before the conflict. In a study of two linguistic communities of Ukrainian immigrants in Poland, we found that although people whose native language was Ukrainian expressed stronger Ukrainian identification than Russian-speakers, those who said their native language was Russian also expressed very positive emotions about being Ukrainian, and strong ties to other Ukrainians.
In less than two weeks, since the Russian invasion began, an estimated 1.7 million Ukrainian civilians have fled their country. More than 1 million Ukrainians have recently crossed the border into Poland, while smaller numbers headed to safety in Hungary, Romania, Moldova and Slovakia.
Our studies of past waves of Ukrainian immigration to Poland, including after the 2014 war in the Donbas, found that strong national ties among the arriving Ukrainians have a positive impact on their well-being and psychological adaptation. The Russian-speaking immigrants and refugees who were more proud of their Ukrainian identity, and had stronger ties to Ukraine, expressed lower acculturation stress — they had fewer integration problems based on value incompatibility or discrimination. Acculturation stress can amplify PTSD and cause depression, so this Ukrainian identity probably became a buffer against mental health problems among Russian-speaking immigrants.
Ukraine’s Russian speakers are defending Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a native Russian speaker. Former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a prominent leader of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, was also raised speaking Russian. Both Zelensky and Tymoshenko received enormous electoral support in the Ukrainian-speaking parts of the country. And Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for their country, defending Kharkiv and other cities against the invading Russian army.
Although Ukraine’s constitution identifies the Ukrainian language as the sole national language — and further legislation has made Ukrainian the dominant language in education, law and media — these language policies have not caused Russian-speakers to give up their Ukrainian identity. Ukrainian volunteer battalions during the long-standing separatist war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, for instance, included a large proportion of Russian speakers.
Many Russian-speaking Ukrainians readily switch between Russian and Ukrainian, speaking Russian at home and Ukrainian in public. In a 2021 nationwide survey by the Ilko Kucheriv Foundation, 22 percent of Ukrainians declared Russian as their native language — but 36 percent said that they speak Russian at home.
The fact that many Ukrainians speak Russian at home reflects the dramatic history of eastern Ukraine, including a genocidal famine of the 1930s — and decades of the Soviet Union’s efforts to “russify” the region with the large-scale resettlement of ethnic Russians to eastern Ukraine’s large industrial centers.
In February, the Russian government claimed a need to “evacuate” this region to protect Russians from ethnic violence. But the long history of Soviet-imposed discrimination has made the Russian-speaking population even more Ukrainian, following a well-studied pattern. Today’s Russian-speaking Ukrainians have developed a strong national commitment to Ukraine. This is why the only “liberation” they are asking for today is an end to the Russian violence.
Michał Bilewicz is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Warsaw, where he chairs the Center for Research on Prejudice. In 2021, he received the Nevitt Sanford Award for Outstanding Professional Contributions to Political Psychology. Currently he focuses on the linguistic aspects of Ukrainian immigrants’ well-being as part of LCure project of the Foundation for Polish Science (co-led by Justyna Olko). | null | null | null | null | null |
This year’s Demon Deacons were picked to finish 13th in the 15-team ACC. Instead, Wake Forest (23-8) has its highest win total since the 2008-09 season and holds the No. 5 seed for this week's ACC Tournament in New York, where it opens play in Wednesday’s second round against the Boston College-Pittsburgh winner. | null | null | null | null | null |
Lower courts had disagreed with how to read the statute. In the future, Kagan wrote, they should consider a range of things: whether the offenses were committed “close in time” and in an “uninterrupted course of conduct”; whether they occurred in one place; and whether they shared a common scheme or purpose. | null | null | null | null | null |
Origin: The Nationals needed someone to oversee technology, data and player development strategy — they needed it badly — so they hired Longley this offseason amid a full reshaping of their minor league staff.
“Using the term ‘progressive’ or ‘progressive hire’ is a bit lazy, I think, because it’s not that simple,” Longley said. “Whatever titles mean in baseball, we don’t really know, but I’m helping with a lot of things and making information more accessible. The operative question is: How do you get it to the field? And if it doesn’t … and I say ‘it’ meaning data, meaning tech, meaning adjustments … does it really matter? That is sort of what I ask myself, where I think we can get wrapped up sometimes in everything we have access to, but if we’re unable to make it practicable, relatable and transferrable, and there are a number of reasons you can and can’t do that, then none of it is effective.”
This is the natural spot to examine Longley’s résumé and why he’s fit for the role. After graduating from Wheaton College in 2012, then from the University of California San Diego with a master’s degree in Latin American studies, he joined the Los Angeles Dodgers as their Spanish interpreter for one year. From there, he spent a year with the New York Yankees as an assistant in amateur scouting and player development. And from there, he began his stint with the Padres, climbing from a coordinator to assistant director in baseball operations (and serving, for a period, as the team’s Spanish interpreter with the media).
When the Nationals overhauled their player development operation this offseason, infusing more data and technology was a must. Ownership committed to closing at least some of the gap between what Washington spends on tech compared with more forward-thinking teams. De Jon Watson, their new director of player development, harped on wanting someone — or multiple someones — to operate technology, interpret data and work alongside coaches with traditional baseball backgrounds. That’s where Longley came in.
“He’s an interesting cat because he is versed in both sides of it,” Watson said. “He’s been around the game quite a bit and at the major league level. I think he understood, when we had our conversations, how we’re trying to roll this out, and really kind of grow and educate our players and staff. He’s been a great listening partner for guys who were just curious. And he’s also been able to kind of lay some things out and show them exactly how it plays and pull video and tie the video into the actual numbers, so we can see how it’s matching up to help grow both player and staff. So it’s been wonderful.”
Watson’s offered his assessment during the Nationals’ early minor league camp in late February. When Longley spoke to The Post a week earlier, he had been in West Palm Beach for just a few days, making him cautious to state any big intentions for the role. He thought it would be weird for coaches to read about his plans before meeting him in person. He also explained that players and coaches will dictate specifics, which will evolve over time.
Evolution, as a concept, seems critical to Longley’s task with Washington. It’s no secret the Nationals have been slow to adopt data and technology and (insert modern baseball buzzword of your choice) in player development. Hiring Longley now was sort of like stepping into 2016 in 2022. So does he feel as though, given the organizational history, he has a thin margin for error with suggestions on a player report? Does he feel as if an early success rate is paramount to gaining trust among coaches and a front office led by General Manager Mike Rizzo, who was once a longtime scout and built a culture in his image?
“I’d contend to that with another question,” Longley answered. “It’s never one way or the other, right? I think the best teams do a really good job of blending data and scouting, and in terms of margin for error, I don’t necessarily think it’s that black and white. It’s not ‘This is the solution, guys.’ It’s more drawing on everyone’s expertise. … So many of these concepts are not new — we just have a better way of measuring them sometimes. There are definitely a lot of core components that have always made baseball players successful that we can perhaps capture in a different way.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielus Landsbergis and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hold a joint news conference in Vilnius, Lithuania on March 7. (Olivier Douliery/Pool via Reuters)
“Because otherwise, it will be too late here, Mr. Secretary," he said. "Putin will not stop in Ukraine; he will not stop.”
Blinken was in the Baltic states Monday as part of a European tour to shore up support among Western allies as Russia’s war in Ukraine intensifies. He reassured Latvia and Lithuania, both of which are NATO members, of continued support and said that some 400 additional U.S. troops would soon be arriving in Lithuania.
“Latvians who lived through decades of Soviet occupation understand deeply how wrong this is, and how the world must defend Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign, democratic country, free to choose its own future," he said. "Latvia has done just that.”
But Baltic leaders say that they’ve long expressed fears Russia would target them for invasion, accusing Moscow of frequently violating NATO airspace and pointing to Russian war games featuring mock incursions into all three states.
“Our understanding is more realistic,” Estonia’s Foreign Minister Eva Maria Liimets said in early February, referring to her nation’s proximity to Russia and the memory of occupation. “We really sense the threat here because of our history and our experience.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Since then, the White House and the administration have had a few bites at the apple, and while they haven’t echoed Pelosi and others, they do appear to be getting closer.
A National Security Council spokesperson cited ongoing processes through the U.N. Human Rights Council and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
“We are collecting evidence of possible war crimes, human rights abuses, and violations of international humanitarian law,” the spokesperson said, adding: “We will support accountability using every tool available, including criminal prosecutions where appropriate.”
The Biden administration has certainly erred in that direction. But as with banning Russian oil, that also risks looking like you were dragged into a position that many said was obvious from the outset — or that you weren’t willing to call it like it is, like some of your top allies both internationally and domestically were.
As reports on such conduct proliferate — including a new one from the New York Times that states Russian forces Sunday fired upon a bridge used by evacuees, killing four, which would seem to meet Thomas-Greenfield’s criteria — that posture becomes more and more difficult to cling to. | null | null | null | null | null |
“I still remember very clearly when people were telling us that — including a lot of people with a lot of degrees, were telling us that 15 days to slow the — you know, to stop the spread and other really interesting statements,” Ladaposaid. “And I remember my wife and I were looking at the newspapers and looking at the editorial section of the New York Times thinking, what in heaven’s name are these people thinking? And sure enough, obviously that’s proven to be true that, that these people had no idea what they were talking about.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Lower courts had disagreed with how to read the statute. In the future, Kagan wrote, they should consider several factors: whether the offenses were committed “close in time” and in an “uninterrupted course of conduct”; whether they occurred in one place; and whether they shared a common scheme or purpose. | null | null | null | null | null |
Schools could be left scrambling to try and figure out how to feed students during summer school and next fall
A student holds a milk carton at Burke County High School in Waynesboro, Ga., on Nov. 3, 2021. (Sean Rayford for The Washington Post)
The spat has taken place behind the scenes in recent weeks as lawmakers try to cobble together a deal to stave off a federal shutdown, which is set to occur after midnight Friday unless Congress acts. The fraught process has touched off tough debates over programs enacted earlier in the pandemic — and how much, if at all, they should be funded further.
The Biden administration had urged lawmakers to extend an initiative first enacted in 2020, which gave the Agriculture Department the authority to issue nationwide child nutrition waivers. These waivers have allowed school nutrition programs, local government agencies and nonprofit organizations to keep feeding children despite numerous challenges, including school closures that forced students to learn at a distance.
But the Biden administration’s request — backed by congressional Democrats — encountered resistance on Capitol Hill, according to four people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions. Among the Republican opponents was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the individuals said.
One of the people, an aide to Senate Republican leadership, explained that the program had been meant as a temporary fix — and extending it would have cost more than $11 billion at a time when the party is worried about rising deficits. The aide stressed that schools are reopening anyway and faulted the Biden administration for failing to extend the school lunch programs as part of the roughly $1.9 trillion stimulus that Democrats backed last year.
The aide also said the administration did not include a request to extend these waivers when it asked Congress to approve more than $20 billion in new emergency coronavirus funds last week. But USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack disputed this in an interview with The Washington Post and said he had worked the phones for the program all weekend.
“This weekend, I’ve made a request to speak to Leader McConnell and Leader McCarthy. Now, I realize that they’ve got a lot on their plate. But the failure of Republicans to respond to this means that kids are going to have less on their plates,” Vilsack said. “And there’s no reason for this. There’s no reason for this.”
Multiple individuals cautioned that the talks around a bipartisan funding deal remain unresolved, meaning the discussion could still change. Lawmakers have aimed to finalize work on the bill as soon as Tuesday so that the House and Senate can vote on the broader spending package imminently.
However, without an extension of the waivers, schools are expected to see a dramatic reduction in reimbursements for school meals in the next school year. The USDA is estimating more than 40 percent in decreased funding for school lunches for an average school district. The average reimbursement a school gets for a meal served will fall from $4.56 to an estimated $2.91. And that will happen while schools continue to face higher costs for food, labor and supplies.
Schools could lose the ability to substitute foods to meet requirements when they can’t get what they ordered because of unexpected supply chain disruptions, advocates say. Finally, without waivers, schools could face financial penalties if they do not meet federal requirements as a result of supply chain issues, and by no fault of their own. For example, if they cannot serve a variety of vegetables or obtain whole grain rich products that meet federal standards, states will be required to penalize the districts.
“We’ve had problems getting milk. The manufacturers of the cartons couldn’t make them for us, and sporadically we haven’t had drivers to drive the milk,” he said. “We haven’t had milk since last Tuesday. It wasn’t delivered all week, and it’s a vital component we’re supposed to provide. This is the new normal.”
Many of the pandemic-era safety net programs have a gradual return to normal, Dean said. By cutting off these waivers June 30, schools will have insufficient funds for summer programs and for next school year. Dean said other safety net programs that got pandemic boosts during the crisis, like Medicaid health insurance and SNAP (the supplemental nutrition program formerly called food stamps), have been given more time to ease back down to tighter funding.
“Families have not filled out free and reduced-priced meal forms for the last two years. It will literally be impossible to get this information before the end of June,” Wilson said. “There will need to be a lot of communication and education to get families to understand why this is changing when they are still underwater from the pandemic. School nutrition programs are taking the heat from all of this, and it will only get worse when they have to figure out a way to charge parents again.”
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said that with 90 percent of American schools open and children back in classrooms, it is unfortunate that, rather than using the bipartisan tools available to them to provide meals to students, Republican leadership in Congress “has said no and decided that they prefer to let our kids go hungry. This is a disgrace.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“I still remember very clearly when people were telling us that — including a lot of people with a lot of degrees, were telling us that 15 days to slow the — you know, to stop the spread and other really interesting statements,” Ladapo said. “And I remember my wife and I were looking at the newspapers and looking at the editorial section of the New York Times thinking, what in heaven’s name are these people thinking? And sure enough, obviously that’s proven to be true that, that these people had no idea what they were talking about.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The Supreme Court on Monday refused requests from Republicans in North Carolina and Pennsylvania to block new congressional maps approved by courts in those states, meaning the fall elections will be held in districts more favorable to Democrats than the ones created by the GOP-led legislatures.
North Carolina’s Republican leaders had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to embrace an unprecedented theory that the state’s judiciary could not impose a new map for congressional elections, even though it found the legislature’s version had violated the state’s guarantee of free and fair elections. The U.S. Constitution, they argued, leaves that question in the hands of the legislature, not courts.
The majority that declined the GOP-led requests did not explain its reasoning, which is often the case in emergency petitions before the court.
Three of the court’s dissenting conservatives — Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — said they would have intervened, that they thought the theory advanced by the challengers was likely correct, and they are anxious to consider such a challenge.
Another conservative, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, expressed interest, too. But he said it was too close to the May 17 primaries to take up the North Carolina case now.
In the Pennsylvania case, the court turned down a request to put a hold on the state supreme court’s decision to impose a map. The action by Democratic members of the elected court came after the Democratic governor vetoed a map passed by the legislature, which is controlled by Republicans. The challenge was brought by Republican voters and candidates.
In an unsigned order, the court said action now was premature, since a federal court is still considering the claim.
Analysts said the map created by Republican legislators after the 2020 Census would have given the GOP an edge in 10 of 14 congressional districts. Democratic justices on the elected state supreme court said the redistricting maps had a partisan tilt “not explained by the political geography of North Carolina.”
The court concluded the maps “are unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt under the free elections clause, the equal protection clause, the free speech clause, and the freedom of assembly clause of the North Carolina Constitution.” The map it adopted gives the political parties relatively equal chance to win a majority of the seats, analysts said, as does the map adopted by the court in Pennsylvania.
North Carolina Republican legislative leaders asked the U.S. Supreme Court to find that under the “independent state legislature” doctrine, state courts had no authority to overrule the legislature’s authority to create congressional districts.
The theory comes from the U.S. Constitution’s Election Clause, which says that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
In the election disputes leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh expressed support for the view that state courts could not usurp the role of the legislature in prescribing rules for federal elections.
In Monday’s opinion, Alito said he would block the North Carolina court’s adoption of the new congressional map, and he thought the legislature had the better argument.
“If the language of the Elections Clause is taken seriously, there must be some limit on the authority of state courts to countermand actions taken by state legislatures when they are prescribing rules for the conduct of federal elections,” wrote Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. “I think it is likely that the applicants would succeed in showing that the North Carolina Supreme Court exceeded those limits.”
If adopted by the court, that would be a drastic change in the way the Supreme Court has seen the role of the state courts.
Supreme Court says federal courts don’t have a role in deciding partisan gerrymandering claims
In a 2019 decision, all members of the court — including Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — seemed to envision some role for state courts. In rejecting a role for federal courts in settling partisan gerrymandering lawsuits, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. specified that challenges could go through state courts.
“Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply” in policing partisan gerrymandering, Roberts wrote for the majority in Rucho v. Common Cause.
North Carolina officials defending the state supreme court’s actions said “the claim that state legislatures are solely responsible for state rules governing federal elections — and, thus, that they may ignore requirements imposed by the people of a state through their constitution — simply cannot be the law.”
They also said it would cause chaos to change the congressional maps now, as qualifying already has begun for the state’s primaries
The Supreme Court in the past has expressed a reluctance to intrude in election procedures when campaigns are underway. Just last month, it allowed an Alabama redistricting map that a lower court had said discriminated against Black voters to remain in place.
That was Kavanaugh’s point in his opinion Monday. While he said the court should “carefully consider and decide” the independent state legislature issue next term, “it is too late” in the North Carolina case “for the federal courts to order that the district lines be changed for the 2022 primary and general elections.” | null | null | null | null | null |
There are rumors that she comes back to feed them, but no one is sure.
When she moved in 28 years ago, the building was brand-new, and she and her husband were excited to make their home in the city of Bila Tserkva, 50 miles south of Kyiv. But now windows are blown out and the apartments are filled with debris after a Russian airstrike on a military base next door.
The war in Ukraine has displaced more than 1.7 million people in just 11 days, the fastest-paced refugee crisis to hit Europe since World War II. But there are those such as Petrivna who refuse to leave. They are left in desolate buildings and neighborhoods once filled with children and life.
When she hears Sasha is outside, she comes out. Sasha, 47, is the holdout on the third floor, where he lives with his wife, Natalya, 39. They sent their 13-year-old daughter away to live with Natalya’s sister after the blast. They don’t want their last names published, because they have not told their parents their apartment was damaged in an airstrike.
They don’t want them to worry. They have no place to go. Their parents are both in parts of the east where there is more conflict, so they can’t flee to them.
“Where would we go?” Natalya asks, cooking lentil soup for dinner. The wallpaper in the kitchen is covered with sunflowers. “I’ve always loved them,” she says.
She ran a flower shop with her sister before the war. Sasha was a metalworker. Last week he showed her how to use a gun.
The war has torn apart his family. His cousin lives in Moscow, where she was raised. He has sent her prisoner-of-war videos released by Ukrainian authorities, in which Russian soldiers say they had no idea they were coming to invade. (Such videos, made under implicit or explicit duress, are considered inherently unreliable.) His cousin tells him the Soviet Union wasn’t that bad and says Ukraine provoked the conflict.
She blocked him on Feb. 28, the day the explosion tore through his home. “They just don’t believe the facts on the ground,” Sasha says. They found soil from the potted plants on the windowsill and in the fridge. “But the borscht was okay,” he jokes. “It had a lid on.” | null | null | null | null | null |
But people concerned about the conflict should at least be clear on one thing: Russian President Vladimir Putin, the architect of this bloody war, has nothing whatsoever to do with poutine, the beloved French Canadian dish of fries topped with gravy and cheese curds. This should seem self-evident, but some people have been conflating the two. | null | null | null | null | null |
Intel plans IPO for self-driving business
Intel said its Mobileye self-driving car business has filed confidentially for an initial public offering.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Intel said that the number of shares offered and the price hasn’t been determined yet and that the IPO will occur after the SEC completes its review process.
Mobileye has been a particular bright spot for Intel. The business, acquired in 2017 for about $15 billion, has consistently grown faster than its parent — and it serves a still-nascent industry. Intel has projected that the market for automotive silicon will reach $115 billion by the end of the decade.
Study cites high costs of conversion therapy
New research shows that the financial impact of LGBTQ conversion therapy in the United States creates an economic burden of $9 billion annually.
Researchers said the yearly direct cost of conversion therapy performed on LGBTQ young people — including payment of services, health insurance reimbursements or fees to religious organizations that perform the practice — totals $650 million, according to the study, published by medical journal JAMA Pediatrics on Monday. Indirectly, conversion therapy costs $8.58 billion annually due to treating effects such as anxiety, depression, suicide attempts or substance abuse, the paper said.
Conversion therapy is a discredited practice aimed at attempting to convert people to be heterosexual or cisgender, or both. It is associated with higher levels of mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, research shows.
Cyberattacks targeting EQT, the largest producer of natural gas in the United States, have “gone up significantly” since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to chief executive Toby Rice. The attacks rose in number on Feb. 24, the day of the invasion, Rice told Bloomberg TV on Monday. EQT has been able to identify and block the attacks, he said. “These types of things are routine,” Rice said. “It’s not like we don’t get pinged every day, but the pace of what’s getting pinged has gone up significantly.”
Bitcoin briefly dropped below $38,000 on Monday, its lowest price in a week, as global markets tumbled on concerns that spiraling commodities prices unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have a wider and longer-lasting impact than previously thought. The largest cryptocurrency recovered slightly to gain as much as 1.3 percent to $39,539 in New York trading hours. Ether, on the other hand, declined as much as 5.7 percent to its lowest since Feb. 24, before ticking back up to around $2,600. Other popular tokens such as Solana, Cardano and Avalanche also fell, according to pricing from CoinGecko.
Blackstone has nearly doubled its London headcount to 500 people during the covid-19 pandemic as it bets Europe will keep delivering investment opportunities, according to its chief operating officer in the region. The recruitment spree comes as buyout firms are able to offer an attractive premium to lure dealmakers from investment banks. Blackstone, Apollo Global, Ares, the Carlyle Group and KKR & Co. paid an average compensation per employee just shy of $2 million for 2021. In comparison, the average pay at the five biggest U.S. investment banks was $232,000.
South Africa’s energy minister says the nation must forge ahead with offshore oil and gas exploration, despite legal setbacks to the development of the resources. Environmental and community groups have sued companies including Shell in recent months, winning temporary interdicts that caused searches to be called off. They’ve argued that seismic surveys are harmful to marine life and criticized the process used to consult those who potentially could be affected by the work. Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe, who accuses the groups of deterring investment, said he has been meeting with traditional leaders and residents of the Eastern Cape province to discuss the oil and gas hunt. | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S., other countries decry N. Korea launch
The United States and 10 other countries on Monday condemned North Korea’s latest ballistic missile launch and urged the U.N. Security Council to respond, saying its inaction erodes the credibility of the United Nations’ most powerful body and undermines efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield read a statement from the 11 countries after a closed Security Council briefing on North Korea’s 11th ballistic missile launch since the start of the year, which was detected by its neighbors Saturday. Experts say the launches are an attempt to add new weapons systems to the North’s arsenal and pressure Washington into concessions amid stalled diplomacy.
The 11 countries — Albania, Australia, Brazil, France, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Britain and the United States — said they remain committed “to seeking serious and sustained diplomacy” with North Korea.
They said that the United States and others have repeatedly offered dialogue without preconditions but that the North has chosen to increase its missile launches in violation of Security Council resolutions and international law, “instead of embarking on a path of diplomacy and de-escalation.”
They called on all 15 Security Council members, including China and Russia, “to speak with one voice in condemning these dangerous and unlawful acts.”
400 civilians killed since Taliban takeover
Nearly 400 civilians have been killed in attacks in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, more than 80 percent of them by a group affiliated with the Islamic State, a U.N. report shows, underscoring the scale of the insurgency the new rulers face.
The report, covering the period from August through February, said 397 civilians were killed, mostly in attacks by the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K).
More than 50 people with suspected ties to the militant group had been killed in the same period, it said, with some tortured and beheaded and cast by the roadside.
“The human rights situation for many Afghans is of profound concern,” Michelle Bachelet, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in introducing the report to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
ISIS-K, which first appeared in eastern Afghanistan in late 2014, is thought to have spread in the wake of the Taliban takeover and is blamed for several suicide attacks in recent months, including one at Kabul airport in August.
Bomb blast kills two U.N. peacekeepers in Mali: A United Nations peacekeeping convoy hit a roadside bomb in central Mali, killing two peacekeepers and wounding four, the mission said, while an attack on the Malian military left two people dead. The new violence comes just days after at least 27 soldiers were killed in an attack on a military camp in Mondoro in central Mali. The U.N. logistical convoy was headed to the northern town of Timbuktu when it hit an improvised explosive device north of Mopti. The United Nations said all
the killed and wounded peacekeepers were from Egypt.
Houthi rebels launch missile into Red Sea: Yemen's Houthi rebels launched at least one missile into the busy waters of Red Sea over the weekend, a U.S. official said, raising the risk of the rebels striking one of the many commercial vessels using a waterway crucial to global shipping. The Red Sea connects to the Suez Canal, which sends cargo and energy shipments from the wider Middle East to Europe. Since seizing Yemen's capital in late 2014, the Houthis have launched missiles, deployed bomb-laden drone boats and released mines into the Red Sea.
Palestinian is killed after stabbing in Jerusalem, police say: Israeli police shot dead a Palestinian man after he stabbed two officers at a gate to Jerusalem's Old City, a police statement said. It was the second such incident in two days. Police said the two officers suffered light to moderate wounds and were taken to a hospital. Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza, claimed the attacker as a member. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cain Velasquez, second from left, made an initial court appearance last week with attorney Alexandra Kazarian. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group/AP)
Describing Cain Velasquez’s alleged actions as examples of “extreme recklessness,” a Santa Clara County (Calif.) judge denied bail Monday to the former UFC champion, who is facing attempted murder and a number of other felony charges.
“The facts are clear here that this was an alleged act of violence, according to laws — following an individual, chasing an individual for some miles, ramming individuals with his vehicle, and shooting at the individuals at point-blank range,” stated Judge Shelyna V. Brown. “… It is clear to this court that there is clear and convincing evidence that there is a substantial likelihood that would result in great bodily injury, not just to the named complaint witnesses in this case, but to Santa Clara residents at large.”
Velasquez, 39, is accused of shooting at 43-year-old Harry Goularte, who was recently released under supervised own recognizance without bail after being charged with a felony count of a lewd and lascivious act with a child under 14. A 4-year-old alleged to have been repeatedly molested by Goularte is reportedly a close family relation to Velasquez.
The two-time UFC heavyweight champion allegedly shot from his car into a vehicle containing Goularte; his mother, Patricia Goularte; and his stepfather, Paul Bender. Bender was struck by gunfire and suffered nonfatal injuries.
In a court proceeding last week, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said: “The sad tragedy is that Mr. Velasquez chose to take the law into his own hands, endangering the public and everyone in the truck. This act of violence also causes more pain and suffering to his family.”
After Monday’s arraignment, an attorney for Velasquez, Mark Geragos, said the differing treatment of his client and Goularte was “why people are disgusted, and rightfully so, with the criminal justice system.”
“Is there anybody out there who would say to a father that this is not what you should do?” Geragos declared in comments made outside the courthouse. “Is there anybody out there who finds it beyond the pale that a father was not consulted when they released the perpetrator back into the public with zero-dollar bail, yet they’re holding Cain on no bail?”
An assistant district attorney for Santa Clara County told Bay Area station KGO last week that her office had requested Goularte be detained with bail but was overruled by the court.
According to documents reviewed by KGO, Goularte lived at a home day-care center run by his mother, who also resided there. Velasquez was a client of the day-care establishment, at which Goularte was not an employee. More than 20 children attended the facility, per authorities.
Goularte was ordered to remain in home detention at a location away from the day-care center, as well as to stay at least 100 yards away from children under 14 and wear an electronic monitoring bracelet. Rosen said last week (via the AP) that Goularte was heading to pick up his bracelet when Velasquez chased after him and shot and injured his stepfather.
Prosecutor Brian French read a letter from Patricia Goularte at Monday’s arraignment in which she claimed she was “continuing to remove shards of glass from my arm” following the episode. She also expressed a concern (via the San Jose Mercury News) that any court ruling allowing Velasquez a temporary release “will not prevent him [from] attempting to kill us again.”
In addition to attempted murder, Velasquez was charged with nine other felony counts related to the alleged incident, including assault with a firearm, assault with a deadly weapon, willfully discharging a firearm from a vehicle and carrying a loaded firearm with intent to commit a felony.
“This case involves allegations of extreme recklessness to human life, ramming a vehicle in the middle of the day where our citizens are out driving, going about their business, and shooting out of a car at other individuals, which is reckless by any standard,” said Brown, who noted the many supporters of Velasquez packed into the courtroom Monday.
“Anyone could’ve been injured,” she added. “Anyone could’ve been killed.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: Race in America: Health Disparities with Secretary Xavier Becerra & Santa Ana Mayor Vicente Sarmiento
MR. CAPEHART: Good afternoon, I’m Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Welcome to Washington Post Live and another in our series on race in America. Latinos have been among the communities hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, which revealed long-existing health disparities in the United States. Today, we’re going to focus on the impact of those health disparities on Latino communities. Xavier Becerra is the 25th secretary of Health and Human Services, and he joins me now. Mr. Secretary, welcome to Washington Post Live.
SEC. BECERRA: Jonathan, thanks for having me. And by the way, thanks for everything you've done.
MR. CAPEHRAT: Oh, well, thank you very much. For whatever I've done, I thank you. Well, let's dig into the--let's dig into the health disparities, Mr. Secretary, experienced by Latino communities. First, how have barriers such as a lack of pharmacies, hospitals, and transportation affected health outcomes before and during the pandemic?
SEC. BECERRA: Well, Jonathan, as you know, if you live in a food desert, or if you live in a medical service desert, it makes it far more difficult for you and your family to get the type of services and have the type of health that would be possible if all those things within--were within your reach. In some cases, you could live in a big city and be just blocks away from a nice hospital, but you just can't afford it. You may as well live in a desert. And so that has produced results which today we recognize as social determinants of health. So you grow up poor, that's one of the determinants of what your health will be moving forward. If you grow up without access to health insurance, that's also going to determine a great deal of how your health will look once you're older. And so no one should be surprised when some 40- or 50-year-old presents, more than likely, if you're coming from a community of color, your health isn't as good as someone who's had access to health care all his or her life, who've had the right foods available in grocery stores around the block. And so those are the kinds of things that happen when you have those disparities that persist in America. And pandemic, COVID-19, really exposed those far beyond so--even though most of us knew they were there. Now everyone knows.
MR. CAPEHART: Well, then that anticipates the next question I was going to ask, and that was how has inadequate access to primary care physicians hindered testing, treating, and educating patients about COVID-19 and the vaccines?
SEC. BECERRA: Well, it's like trying to fly a jet plane without having gone to the courses on how to fly to begin with. If you--if you try to go all the way from the start, you're never going to succeed. So, you can't expect communities who haven't had access to have the best outcomes. And the more we prevent communities from having ready, readily accessible access to the things we need, we're going to continue to suffer. The name that comes to my mind most is Deamonte Driver, a young boy in the state of Maryland who had a toothache. But because his parents didn't have insurance, didn't have much money, they--you let the--your child go as long as you can. Well, that toothache turned into an infection, an abscess. And before you know it, that young man actually died because what started off as a toothache became an infection. That's what happens when you don't have health insurance. That's an extreme case, but it happens.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, one of the--I mean, the access to healthcare and insurance is one thing, but in its public education campaigns, how has your department tackled language barriers that can affect Latinos and other communities in terms of accessing healthcare, accessing the vaccines?
SEC. BECERRA: Well, we’ve broken down those barriers, Jonathan. We understand how important it is to communicate. And you who are in media know how important it is to communicate often, repetitively, in order to get a message across. And so that's what we've done. We dedicated a lot of resources to get messages out. We don't wait for people to come to us. We go to them. When it came time for people to enroll in the Affordable Care Act's insurance marketplaces, we didn't wait for people to go onto the website and look for us. We went out to the community and made sure we got to all those communities that didn't get access to care easily and haven't always signed up for coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
And this time, we had a really good product to sell because the president made possible through the American Rescue Plan reduced rates for quality health insurance, so much so that for many people, including folks in the Black and brown community, we were able to offer them health insurance coverage, quality health insurance coverage for less than $10 a month. You can't even go see a movie for $10--in one movie. And so it was a great deal, and fortunately we got a lot of folks who bought in.
MR. CAPEHRAT: You know, Mr. Secretary, nearly one in four homecare workers is Latino. Two in five Latinos are caregivers for family members. So what steps is HHS taking to help the care workforce moving forward?
SEC. BECERRA: Well, we're making major investments, Jonathan, in home and community-based services because we know how critical having access to care is for any family, but if you're a low-income family, even more so. And oftentimes we know that some of these families rely on relatives or close friends to provide some of that care. It used to be done without being able to be reimbursed or compensated. More and more, we're realizing that these folks are providing indispensable care, not just that--just to that family member or friend, but to America, because otherwise those folks would be--end up in institutions where taxpayers probably would have to pay a good portion of that bill. So, we are making a major investment in home and community-based services because we see how important it is. And I say that personally, as the caregiver for my father before he perished. He--my mom and he moved into my home four years before he left us on New Year's Day 2020, and we were with him and we were essentially his hospice caregivers for the most part, those last six months when he was less mobile, unable to care for himself. So, there is such value in it, and I say that personally. Everyone should have the opportunity to let their loved ones live out their lives in dignity.
MR. CAPEHART: Well, Mr. Secretary, my condolences to you on the passing of your father. And it just makes me wonder, how did that experience impact the way you approach your job as the Secretary of Health and Human Services?
SEC. BECERRA: You know, Jonathan, I tell folks, if you want to know where a leader is going to take you, look at where that leader’s come from. And for me, I came from a family where my parents did everything they could for me. They couldn't do a lot, because they didn't have a lot of money. But they did enough that I felt like I thought I was middle class until I started college, and I saw what middle-class folks really--you know, how they lived. And the beauty of that is that I've learned that it was not easy, and it was not free. And for me now, it is so important. And so when my father was in his last years, his last stages of life, it was a no-brainer. We were going to be there. Actually, I learned it best, quite honestly, through my wife and her parents, because she's got a larger family, family of eight kids. They were there every moment for their two parents. And I had never seen death with such dignity as I saw when, Carolina [phonetic], my wife's mother, passed. And I said to myself, if ever my parents get to that stage, that's what I want. You had grandkids, great grandkids in the house. As my wife's mother was getting ready to pass, everyone was going through. It almost was like a party, because no one felt like it was a mournful time. None of the kids were afraid to see their great grandma. That's the kind of thing you want, because it was true love there. And we should make that available. We shouldn't say oh, no, no, we're not going to do that for you because we don't want to reimburse you for some of the costs that you had, instead send them off to an institution where we're paying thousands of dollars that most people can't afford, and therefore we as taxpayers have to cover. It makes no sense.
MR. CAPEHART: You're also the son--you're the son of immigrants. And I'm also wondering how has--how is that part of your life story influencing the way you go about your job at HHS.
SEC. BECERRA: So no barrier going to get in our way, and nothing we can’t accomplish. And that comes because when you're the son of immigrants, you have optimism running in your DNA. And you learn the hard way, but you realize every time you get to climb to that next stage of the mountain, how beautiful it can be. And so I take with me those stories, those experiences, and I try to make sure that I don't let others miss those opportunities that should be there for everyone. And so I was fortunate to have people who worked very hard to give me a chance. I'm the first in my family to get a four-year degree. I am the first one in my family to have a chance to be--get in front of a camera. And I will tell you, this opportunity should be available to anybody, regardless of your income, where you live, or what your immigration status is.
MR. CAPEHART: So, we are in a much different place today than we were two years ago, or even three months ago. Do you believe we’ve finally entered a less dangerous phase in the pandemic?
SEC. BECERRA: Well, Jonathan, we're certainly in a less dangerous phase. But there's still danger. When you still have some 2,000 Americans dying every day from COVID, you still have several thousand in hospitals every day because of COVID, some 60,000-70,000 cases every day because of COVID, you're not out of the woods. But we are in a far different place than we were a year ago, a month ago, even a week ago. And so we’ve just got to continue to see the improvement. The president last week in the State of the Union made that very clear. And we're just going to continue to work because we know everyone wants to get back to those days where it was easy to go to work, kids could play at school, and we all feel pretty good about hugging each other. And so that's what we want to see, but we’ve got work to do. And we have a responsibility to take care of each other.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, late last month Governor Gavin Newsom issued an endemic plan for California, your home state. You used to be the attorney general there. The White House announced on Wednesday an endemic plan of its own, declaring that shutdowns and school closures are over. Your thoughts on those moves.
SEC. BECERRA: Well, it's a sign that we have to say something very important to the American people. Thank you. Thank you for paying attention, for getting vaccinated, for wearing those masks as aggravating as sometimes it could be, of testing when you needed to, of social distancing, of taking care of your kids, washing your hands, doing all the things that the scientists have told us will work. Thank you for that.
And to those who haven't yet, please join us. Help us. Let’s all be responsible. Let's do what we know works so we can really say that COVID is behind us.
MR. CAPEHART: You've recently announced a new mental and behavioral health campaign to deal with the long-term impact of COVID. What's the goal?
SEC. BECERRA: Well, as I said, the president has made it very clear we're leaving no one behind, and that--he could have been a member of my family saying that: We don't leave people behind. You could have been part of that army unit, you know, you don't leave anybody behind. And so when it comes to what we're doing here, it's we're not leaving anyone behind. And so we’ve just got to continue the work we know we need to do. And we're going to make sure that those who are suffering from things like long COVID, those who are experiencing mental distress because of the situation--maybe you lost your job--we're going be there. We're helping our state partners and our local partners make sure we get--put resources out there for the healthcare workforce. They've been resilient. Many of them haven’t had a vacation day in a long time. We're going to make sure that they know we've got their backs because they've been there for us.
And so we're going to do what we can. We have several programs that we're initiating. And if Congress passes a budget that includes the president's request, we'll have more money to deal with mental health needs. And we're going to do whatever we can to let people know that it's important that we treat mental health the same as we would treat physical health.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, one of the things--I should have asked you this earlier--but talk about the difficulty over the last two years of building trust around public health measures against the backdrop of misinformation, political division, and even people questioning science, even though science is constantly changing.
SEC. BECERRA: Yeah, that's a great question, because the misinformation has been out there fast and furious, and it's made it difficult, especially for communities where the information they get sometimes is hard to come by, or it's not clear who they can trust. And so we've tried very hard. That's where I mentioned earlier that we don't wait for folks to come to us. We go to them. And we use trusted voices to make sure we're communicating. Whether it's the priest, whether it's the schoolteacher, whether it's the soccer coach, we're going to use those who really do connect with families, because we want them to know that we want to include them.
I constantly have to say, especially in Spanish language press, that when it comes to vaccines, President Biden wants to make those accessible to everyone, free of charge. Because too many folks in communities that are disadvantaged, they find it hard to believe that they're getting something of quality free of charge. They're used to getting something not of quality for a high price, when they go into those rip-off stores that they’re only--the only thing they can find in the neighborhood. And so when somebody offers you something really good free of charge, you wonder. And so what we have to do is just communicate over and over that we’ve actually got a great product for you that could actually save your life and it's free. And the more we let folks know, the more changes.
And by the way, in May of 2021, about two-thirds of White Americans had received at least one shot of the vaccine on COVID. Black and brown communities, about 54 percent or so--substantially behind the White community. Beginning of this year, we changed that a lot. White Americans, about 83 percent, 84 percent. Black Americans about 82, 83 percent. Latinos, about 84 percent. We worked hard at that. It was no accident.
MR. CAPEHART: And there’s are great stats to learn about.
Mr. Secretary, we have time for one more question. And I’ve got to ask you this because The Washington Post and other news outlets have been writing about--how do you respond to the reports that say that you have taken too passive a role in the pandemic? Is that criticism fair?
SEC. BECERRA: You know, my dad used to say it’s not what you say, it’s what you do. My dad was a construction worker. And it made no difference to anyone, his foreman or the company owner, what he said he would do. It’s what he did. And I’ve got to tell you, my dad was one of the best builders America’s ever seen. He was never a loud guy. He didn’t speak English very well. He was always kind of shy about that. All I learned all my life was perform, get it done, whether it’s laying that asphalt for that highway or was building that concrete driveway for your neighbor, you get it done. And that’s what we’re going to do. And fortunately, we have a president who lets me get things done. I’m going to continue to do them so long as I have an opportunity, because that’s what I learned when I grew up.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, you used a terrific word there, and that was “perform.” And I wonder to your mind, as someone who’s been in politics for years, in Washington, do you think there’s too much emphasis put on perform in terms of performance for the cameras, that as long as someone is performing for the cameras, they must be doing the job?
SEC. BECERRA: Yeah, it’s the show horse versus the work horse. I’ll tell you, here’s where my mom gives me the best advice. She always tells me remember Jimmy [phonetic]. She’s always telling me about the story about this kind Jimmy who would always go to church, always religiously go to church and he’d always say to the Lord, hey, Lord, I’m here. I just wanted to check in with you. And he’s always do that and always do that. And some of his friends would ask, well, you know, why do you do that? You don’t need to go to church all the time. And he’d say, yeah, well, that’s what I do. And of course, as he aged in life and as he was getting ready to leave this place, he had the Lord come to him and say, hey, Jimmy, I’m with you today. And so she always tells me that story. This is a woman who still prays the rosary every night. And all I know is that if I do things the right way, someone will recognize it. You don’t have to be a show horse. Just do your work.
MR. CAPEHART: All right, that’s actually kind of a mantra that I try to live by, just do the work.
One more question for you, Mr. Secretary. The Post reported it can sometimes be unclear who makes final decisions or is in charge of implementing new initiatives. What’s your response?
SEC. BECERRA: Oh, there’s no doubt. The guy at the top, Joe Biden is--he’s the president. He makes the call. When it comes to COVID, if you’re asking about COVID, he set up a team before he even took office officially to deal with COVID. Jeff Zients has been the coordinator out of the White House for that. At HHS, I’m the secretary. We execute on much of what the president wants done. We’re the team that has NIH, FDA, CDC, our H-CORE program is the logistics operation that made sure that those masks, that those tests, those vaccines get where they need to go. But no doubt, the quarterback is in the White House.
MR. CAPEHART: Xavier Becerra, 25th secretary of Health and Human Services. Mr. Secretary, we are out of time. Thank you very much for coming to Washington Post Live.
SEC. BECERRA: Thanks, Jonathan.
MR. CAPEHART: Coming up, the mayor of Santa Ana, California, Vicente Sarmiento.
MS. UMOH: The pandemic has not only devastated communities of color over the past two years, but it's also shined a bright light on health inequities, particularly in Latino communities across the U.S. I'm Ruth Umoh, editor at Fortune, and my two guests today have made it their mission to get to the bottom of this issue by combining findings and best practices gained in and out of the pandemic to build a national model for better health for lower-income communities of color. I'm joined by the chairman and co-founder of SOMOS, Dr. Ramon Tallaj, and co-founder of SOMOS and noted Latino social movement leader, designer, and philanthropist Henry R. Munoz III. Welcome to you both.
MR. MUNOZ: Thank you.
MS. UMOH: Let's kick things off--welcome, welcome. Let's kick things off with you, Dr. Tallaj. Let me start by asking you about your new role. A few weeks ago, New York City Mayor Eric Adams named you one of the co-chairs of his new COVID-19 Recovery Round Table and Health Equity Task Force. Can you talk to us about your goals for this task force and the role health equity plays in moving New York City and really the entire country past the pandemic toward an endemic?
DR. TALLAJ: Thank you, Ruth. As the co-chair of New York City Health Equity Force, we are working with nearly 40 very important experts in the areas of healthcare, education, hospitality, and even homeless services. Leaders who truly know their communities have the skills and talent to get things done. The task force is focused on [unclear] best partnerships and bringing a model not just for New York. We believe it will work for the entire country. We need to learn from that.
We are doing it by addressing the problems that already are affecting Latino Americans and many poor Americans on a daily basis. For instance, in New York City, our public housing developments are full of mold, lead, and below living standards. These are driving factors that led to so many decades of diabetes, hypertension, childhood obesity, and overall asthma--conditions brought on by poverty. So, what this task force is trying to do is that on the country’s recovery mostly focused in improving total condition, healthcare not only by itself. At SOMOS, for example, we are inventing healthcare in the most vulnerable communities, focusing on preventive care with community doctors. This means we are addressing condition before they become emergencies. Let me say this to you. If COVID-19 has taught us something, is that we can no longer ignore all the inequities that were there for many years and is still here. That change must happen. Only that way we can call this recovery. Preventive care, for me, is the key for the future.
MS. UMOH: On this topic of recovery, let me pass the mic to you, Henry. You have designed as many social and political movements as you have designed university campuses, parks and public facilities. Now you're using those same skills to design a major health care intervention. What have you found in talking with Latino voters about their health care concerns? And subsequently, what can we learn from that?
MR. MUNOZ: That’s an important question. You know, one of the things that happens in our community is that we fall through the cracks of data and research. But we at SOMOS have been polling and collecting research since the very earliest days of this pandemic, and the story that it tells us that things have not gotten better for our community. Thirty seven percent of us during this time of the pandemic have gone without insurance, which means we have no access. Sixty-even percent of us don't just believe that there's barriers to health care. We actually believe that there is racism in health care, in a very complex system. Twenty-two percent of us have delayed treatment that we need. Can you imagine the impact that it has on cancer treatment, for example?
And here's the saddest number. Only a third of us today have access to a primary care physician--the very building block of preventative care, as Ramon just said. So, I think the lesson for all of us is that we shouldn't take--nobody should take us for granted, that we need to be heard, and that the roadmap for this midterm election, and in fact for the future health of this country, is through the Latino community.
MS. UMOH: Those numbers, those stats you shared are quite grim and quite damning as well. Dr. Tallaj, you and the thousands of doctors in the SOMOS network are on the ground in low-income communities every day. What concerns are you and your doctors hearing from their patients?
DR. TALLAJ: Let me tell you, I'm in Washington Heights, a poor/middle-class neighborhood, for over 20 years as a medical practitioner. The scene I’m seeing now, all night long, hasn't gotten better. As a matter of fact, they're getting worse. The resources that have been used to improve the health care of our communities are not allocated properly.
I’ll give you an example. They don't address poverty, or total health. This is why the pandemic hit us so hard and so many people died during this pandemic. At SOMOS, we were at that point the only one ready to go. And to act. We were looking for solutions. If you don’t focus on prevention, nothing will change. Our society will continue to be sick. For me, prevention is the solution. That's what we want policymakers to focus on. As we work together to rebuild from the pandemic, we have to come back better than we were. And our country I believe deserves that. We can’t come back to the same.
MS. UMOH: Henry, let's end by looking to the future. What do you want policymakers to know about how to improve health equity for Latinos, and frankly, for all struggling Americans who identify as people of color?
MR. MUNOZ: I want them to understand that the health of the Latino community is the health of the United States of America. We're the fastest growing demographic group in this country. I don't want them to ignore these findings. I want them to listen. I want them to understand that it's important to put prevention in front of profit. I want them to understand that there can be a new model of health care--health care that is closer to the community, health care that is dependent upon the success of the primary care physician, that is delivered in language, that is delivered in culture, and that where people see themselves in the healthcare worker, I want them to understand that when the essential worker has the same quality of health care that the CEO has, then America will truly be healthy. That's what I want them to understand. And I think Ramon and the thousands of doctors who are part of SOMOS have begun that work and are beginning to prove that there can be a new national model.
MS. UMOH: It's great to see the both of you addressing these longstanding systemic health disparities in the Latino community. Dr. Tallaj, Henry, thank you both for your time.
Now back to The Washington Post.
MR. CAPEHART: Good afternoon. I'm Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Welcome back to Washington Post Live again, another in our series on race in America, this time looking at health disparities in Latino communities. We continue the conversation on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Latino communities with Mayor Vicente Sarmiento of Santa Ana, California. Mayor Sarmiento, welcome to Washington Post Live.
MAYOR SARMIENTO: Hi, Jonathan. It's great to be with you. Thank you.
MR. CAPEHART: Sure. So, talk about the demographics of your city, of Santa Ana, and how that factored into how you navigated the pandemic these last two years.
MAYOR: Yeah, so, you know, our city is approximately 330,000 in size, in population, and close to 80 percent of the city is Latino, or Hispanic, and more than 40 percent are foreign born. So, we have a lot of recent arrival immigrants here. And so, you know, we unfortunately suffered a lot of losses, and many people who we lost here in the city as a result of sort of the perfect storm in this pandemic, because we had many families that live in, you know, overcrowded conditions because of, you know, just disparities in rent and not being able to, you know--you know, live in single unit homes.
And we also had many families that, you know, are frontline essential workers, and so couldn't work from home or virtually. And you also had people that, you know, had underlying health conditions pre-pandemic. So, you had people that suffered from diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. So, all these three factors just lent themselves to a proliferation and a spike in in coronavirus cases but more importantly, in a lot of loss of life. So, we suffered about a thousand losses here in Santa Ana, and these were, you know, neighbors, relatives, friends, people in the community that had close ties to everyone. So, it was pretty devastating on our community.
MR. CAPEHART: How--I asked this of the secretary earlier about the impact of misinformation, disinformation, lack of trust, all sorts of issues that have gotten in the way of public officials tackling the pandemic. How have you dealt with those very same issues at the local level as mayor of a city?
MAYOR SARMIENTO: You know, it's really challenging because I think a lot of our community--because many are monolingual Spanish speakers, right?--get their news and get their information from their local press sources. And what the city is pushing out sometimes isn't as effective, because it's done either in Spanish--or excuse me, in English, and not in multi-language efforts. That's something we've now changed and realize that, you know, hitting send on an email and thinking that's the way you message to a community like ours, is not the way to communicate. The way to communicate is embedding yourself in neighborhoods, talking to people and establishing that trust so when you do reach folks, they're able to--you're able to have some credibility. And being able to talk to somebody in their own, you know, language of origin is huge, right?
So, you know, we did battle some of the--you know, some of the media outlets that were really proliferating not only misinformation but dangerous information, you know, and so--folks believes that because that's where they got their--you know, their information. So that is something that was really challenging, because not only are you are--you know, we as government trying to inform and educate people and keep them safe, you know, provide science-based information but you're trying to offset that with a counternarrative that is very, very different and completely contrary to what we're trying to, you know, inform people with.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, you said in your answer about, you know, before hitting send on an email making sure is this the way we should be communicating, but what are you doing to support residents who aren't on, say, social media? Obviously, you have folks in your--in your city who don't speak English. How are you getting--how are you getting messages across to them? Also, folks who don't have access to health information, how--what are all the ways you are getting or at least trying to get health information but also coronavirus-specific information to the people of your city?
MAYOR SARMIENTO: Yeah, so it's not even solely an issue of language disparity, right? We're also talking about households that aren't even connected to the internet. So, you have this, you know, dual problem. So, what we did during 2020, when vaccines weren't even available and weren't developed at that time, we took our information and our resources and embedded ourselves in neighborhoods. So rather than having, you know, sites where people could go to because we knew people had transportation problems as well, we went to more than a hundred neighborhoods and took our mobile, you know, trucks and resources and delivered, you know, about 35,000 tests, and we delivered more than 300,000 facemasks. So those are ways that we realized it is kind of going back to, you know, grassroots efforts, going back to talking to people, going door to door, because these are folks that, again, need to have that--have that contact.
So, it was tricky, because, again, this was prior to the delivery of the vaccine. And you know, we had many of our staff going out and risking their lives, you know, having to go and communicate with our residents. But we knew that that was the only way we could effectively communicate and provide resources because, again, we had problems and challenges with respect to, you know, just access to the internet, problems and challenges with respect to language. So we just felt that this was probably the most effective, although, you know, labor intensive way to do it. But I saw that other communities, once they saw us doing this, starting to emulate and replicate what we did here, because it really was kind of going back to, you know, sort of a maybe, you know, a grassroots more old, less conventional way to do it--but, look, a more effective way to do it, I believe.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, last year, your city got a two-year $4 million grant from the Office of Minority Health to boost vaccination rates and access to accurate COVID-19 information in hard-hit communities of color. Have you seen the impact you hoped for from that funding?
MAYOR SARMIENTO: You know, I did. I think that is one additional element that we had, in addition to receiving Rescue Plan money. So I do need to give, you know, our thanks to, you know, President Biden, and you know, Secretary Becerra, because, you know, with the Rescue Plan money, that, in addition to the--you know, the $4 million grant that we received from the Office of Minority Affairs, you know, we were--you know, at the height of the pandemic, where Santa Ana was hardest hit, we had maybe, you know, one in four people testing positive. And this is, you know, prior to the vaccine being delivered. You know, and so we went through, you know, all the efforts that I just described. And now we have, you know, vaccination rates in those same ZIP codes that were suffering losses of life, you know, upwards of 80 percent, 85 percent. So, we now have some of the lowest positivity rate in our county. So, we are the county seat, you know, here in Orange, and we're 34 cities large. You know, we probably are the most demographically different from Orange County, even though the county is considered, you know, one of the most affluent counties in the country, it's the fifth or sixth largest. But Santa Ana is, you know, sort of the core of that county, and we have some very different problems in our neighboring 33 cities. So, you know, we're real proud of that pendulum that we've been able to swing to the other side, because, again, it took a lot of hard work. But it was--you know, labor-intensive work--but it was work that we know now not just for the pandemic but for other issues having to deal with vital information to, you know, communities of color like ours, immigrant communities, and low-income communities. So, you have those three factors intersecting. And we realize that you can't do things in an easy way. In other words, again, sending out an e-blast and expecting, you know, people to be informed as a result of that, we really do need to do things in a very non-traditional, non-conventional way to have the most impact.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, one thing that we--before the pandemic, one thing we always knew was that there were disparities in health care, in access to health care; if you had a health care, then disparities in the quality of care that you were able to get. And then COVID hits, and those disparities are now too big to ignore, because of who's being impacted. I would love for you to talk about how those disparities manifested themselves in Santa Ana during the pandemic and what steps you've taken to try to address them as a result of COVID.
MAYOR SARMIENTO: Look, I'll give you some really specific examples. When the vaccine was, you know, being delivered, you know, the state sent the vaccine inventory to the counties so the county could deliver them to the cities. Here in Santa Ana, we knew that the epicenter of the--you know, the pandemic was here in our city. Unfortunately, vaccines were going to other parts of the county, more affluent communities, you know, more White communities. And that's when, you know, I think the tide turned, when everybody, you know, especially me, look, started shouting at the top of my lungs, you know, we have to get the vaccine delivered to where the problem is. And so, you know, as I said, many of our residents are frontline essential workers that couldn't take time off. So, they were still going out and doing domestic work, working in, you know, restaurants and in, you know, hospitals and other places. So, we knew that if we could curb, you know, the spike in positivity here, we knew it would help the entire county, but the vaccine was going elsewhere.
You know, Governor Newsom came, and he delivered, you know, a speech here, when he kind of turned the tide and said, he's going to--he's going to stop delivering vaccine to counties that don't get them to the hardest hit communities. So that's where I saw things really change here in our city, in our county, when that was said. But it looked--it took, you know, many of us, you know, just again, getting so frustrated that the logical step of bringing, you know, and delivering vaccine to, you know, communities that were hardest hit wasn't being done. So, we saw that as really a pivotal moment. But again, it shouldn't have to be that way.
And for us, you know, we know that we don't have our own public health--municipal public health department. We rely on the county for delivery of care. They are the agency that's vested with that responsibility. What's unfortunate is that, you know, it's not an equitable way of delivering health care. So, the second thing that we did with some of the Rescue Plan money that we received is we're investing now in a feasibility study to see how our city can separate from the county and create its own public municipal health care department. Because we know that we have such a unique demographic, such a, you know, difficult demographic to identify, to work with, we know that we could do it really well. But again, I think this made us realize we had issues before the pandemic, but, you know, during the pandemic, it just magnified the disparity of delivery of care.
MR. CAPEHART: And then once the vaccines became available, one of the big topics of conversation in the country was about vaccine hesitancy. And it wasn't, you know, a situation that was solely borne by communities of color there. There are lots of people across all sorts of demographics in the United States who were hesitant to take the vaccine. But in Santa Ana, did you have to deal with on a large-scale, large numbers of your--of the people who live in Santa Ana being unwilling initially to take the vaccine?
MAYOR SARMIENTO: Yeah, I mean, we still have some of that, right? I mean, even though we have much better numbers with respect to, you know, vaccination rates, we still have, you know, parts of our community that--you know, again, I think you were talking about trust. Sometimes I think, you know, it's hesitancy but it's also misinformation that's proliferated to them. And we see a lot of, you know, folks that are immigrants that, you know, are undocumented. And you know, they've been told that, you know, by taking the vaccine, you're going to be able--you're going to be tracked, they're going to be able to find you, and you know--and deport you based upon, you know--you know, this vaccine. Well, all those things we've had to dispute, we've had to clarify. But I think, you know, the first step in that is creating trust, because, you know, again, they're receiving this information from news outlets that maybe not--are not as credible. You're receiving them from people that, you know, aren't authorities and aren't public health professionals. So, you know, they're being told a lot of different things. And unfortunately, you know, they--you know, our undocumented immigrant population doesn't have a trusted source of information. So that's where I think communities like ours need to connect, need to be able to establish that relationship where, you know, all things being equal, they need to know that they can trust their local governments to be able to at least protect them, provide accurate information so they can make informed decisions. Because again, it's not a matter of mandating or it's not a matter of forcing anybody, because we understand there are beliefs that are deeply held, especially in immigrant communities that are faith-based, and we completely respect that. But it's a matter of that informed consent or informed decision that really is a challenge for many of us to be able to establish that relationship with folks in the community.
MR. CAPEHART: You mentioned Governor Newsom a moment ago, but late last month, the governor issued an endemic plan for California. The White House announced on Wednesday that--an endemic plan of its own, declaring shutdowns and school closures are over. I would love your thoughts on these moves. And what is your long-term strategy for Santa Ana living with COVID?
MAYOR SARMIENTO: Look, I believe, you know, being responsible and being incremental in the way we transition out of this pandemic. So, I do--you know, I do applaud the governor and the White House for giving us steps that are forecasting how we can, you know, move forward. I think, for communities like Santa Ana, because I think not all policies fit all regions, right? And so I think for those of us that have dealt with this in such an acute, in such a strong way and been so impacted, I think we want to take slow steps out of this. We don't want to just say, okay, it's over, this is an endemic at this point and let's, you know, just forget about all the protocols and all the protective steps that we took. So, for me as mayor, I mean, my hope is that we can transition out. We're seeing that, you know, our schools are now opening up. We see now that, you know, a lot of our facilities now are available to the public to enjoy. And we want to balance that because, you know, Jonathan, one thing I would tell you is that what's hurt me is that I've seen many families and especially, you know, children who've been, you know, impacted emotionally and psychologically by just not being able to connect with peers, not being able to connect with, you know, sort of daily life routines of being in parks, playing, you know, with their neighbors and other kids. Those things have long-term impacts. So that has to be offset and balanced with being protective about making sure nobody continues to get, you know, ill from COVID. But we do have to find a way that our families, especially those families that we have in Santa Ana that don't have many other outlets, and they're living in small spaces, you know, we want them out, hopefully, playing in parks, you know, being able to do things safely, but also transitioning them from this very sequestered, you know, condition that they've been living with into now being able to just develop and grow into young adults.
MR. CAPEHART: So, Mr. Mayor, final question for you. You were elected in 2020. So, you've been sort of halfway through your first term as mayor, right?
MAYOR SARMIENTO: Actually, we have two-year terms. So, we're at the almost at the end of my first term.
MR. CAPEHART: Okay, so almost end of your first term. Asking the question because I want to get to the larger, quick question. What lessons have you learned as mayor guiding a city, guiding your city through a global pandemic?
MAYOR SARMIENTO: Look, the first lesson I think I, you know, learned is that when you're in a crisis, you can't do things in a simple way. You can't do things that seem expedient, that seem efficient. You really have to step back and realize that, you know, nobody signs up for this type of work as mayor, you know, because normally we're doing--dealing with infrastructure and filling potholes and making sure people's, you know, streetlights are operating. But when you're dealing with people who are facing loss of life, loss of a loved one, and just a crisis, what you have to do is just step back and evaluate and realize we have to do everything we possibly can to provide accurate information, resources. And if it takes going into neighborhoods, walking door to door, those are things that now I take away as mayor, and hopefully our entire city realizes that we just have to do things as--you know, as effective as we can, even if it may be more labor intensive, even if it takes more time. But that's something that for communities like ours, we have to define and tailor the way we communicate with folks. So that is something that we are going to take away not just on, you know, delivery of, you know, information, vaccine, and testing, but it is going to go towards rental assistance, towards business grants, towards resources that we know are going to follow this pandemic that is really an economic crisis. You know, people who are just transitioning back to work, you know, transitioning children back to school. We realize that these lessons that we learned during the pandemic, they're going to continue in other efforts as we communicate with our neighbors and residents.
MR. CAPEHART: Mayor Vicente Sarmiento of Santa Ana, California, thank you very, very much for coming to Washington Post Live.
MAYOR SARMIENTO: It's great to be with you. Thank you, Jonathan.
MR. CAPEHART: And thank you for joining us. To check out what interviews we have coming up, head to WashingtonPostLive.com. Once again, I’m Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Thanks again for tuning in to Washington Post Live. | null | null | null | null | null |
It was the the most powerful twister on record so far north this early in the year and the deadliest to strike Iowa since 2008.
The remains of a home are scattered among debris as cleanup efforts are underway in Winterset, Iowa, on March 6. (Bryon Houlgrave/The Des Moines Register via AP)
The National Weather Service confirmed that the tornado that ravaged Madison County, Iowa, on Saturday was an EF4, making it the strongest tornado to hit the Hawkeye State since 2013 and the deadliest there since 2008. Tornadoes are rated based on the damage they cause on the 0 to 5 Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale.
Maximum winds were estimated at 170 mph, qualifying the wedge tornado as the first violent, EF4 or stronger, tornado of 2022. It was also the farthest north confirmed violent tornado on record in the United States so early in the season.
The same areas hardest hit by the tornadoes were blanketed by five inches of snow on the storm system’s backside, with freezing daytime temperatures and overnight lows in the teens complicating cleanup and recovery efforts.
In the immediate aftermath of the tornado, the National Weather Service in Des Moines tweeted that damage appeared commensurate with at least an EF3 rating. It wasn’t until they dispatched personnel to survey the damage that the EF4 rating was assigned. EF4 tornadoes produce winds between 166 mph and 200 mph.
The tornado is the first EF4 in the state of Iowa since Oct. 4, 2013. Eleven tornadoes formed that day, including an EF4 in Woodbury County that tracked 25 miles. That tornado also produced 170 mph winds.
It is the deadliest tornado to occur in Iowa since 2008, when an EF5 in Butler County claimed nine lives on its nearly 16-mile path. Maximum winds peaked around 205 mph.
The tornado had the longest path length of any in Iowa since June 7, 1984. The Winterset tornado traveled a whopping 69.5 miles over the course of an hour and 35 minutes. That gives an average forward speed of 44 mph. The 1984 tornado carved a 117-mile path through southern Iowa.
While March has historically seen a number of infamous United States twisters, many of them either strike well south of Iowa, or much closer to the end of the month. This is because tornadoes require warm, moist air to form, which is generally quite difficult to find in the Midwest so early.
Somewhat reliable tornado records extend back to 1880 in the United States. In that time, only two so-called violent tornadoes, which obtain ratings of at least a four on the Fujita/Enhanced Fujita scale, have been recorded north of 40 degrees latitude before March 6. One F4 struck Ohio on Feb. 18, 1992, and another crossed from Missouri into Iowa on Jan. 24, 1967. But Saturday’s tornado was around 1 degree further north than either of these twisters.
A map of all EF4+ tornadoes in the United States that struck between January and March during the modern record shows that many of the early-year violent tornadoes to strike the U.S. do so much further south than Iowa.
In general, the field of meteorology often has a tougher time predicting HSLC, or “High Shear Low Cape” tornadoes. What that means is that instability, or “juice” to fuel a storm, is meager, but shear, or a change of wind speed and/or direction with height, is astronomical.
A similar thing happened in Middle Tennessee on the night of March 2, 2020, when two dozen people died after an EF3 tornado in Nashville and an EF4 in Cookeville.
HSLC setups are more common early in the season and again in the autumn, when temperatures aren’t quite as warm but the seasonally-strong jet stream is in closer proximity. That helps amplify wind shear. | null | null | null | null | null |
On some strategic thruways, Ukrainians have parked trams and buses to restrict driving access. Checkpoints to inspect IDs have also been established to root out would-be saboteurs. “We have a lot of presents” for the Russians, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in an interview. “It’s not sweet. It’s very painful.”
The British defense ministry supports U.S. officials’ assessment that Russia is trying to correct course to overcome logistical challenges, but it also provides more potential targets for Ukrainians trying to handicap the Russian war effort. | null | null | null | null | null |
HRC’s lawyers wrote that David’s most alarming claims are false, including the alleged statement by a senior HRC executive that David’s public support for racial justice risked alienating White donors and specifically “White gay men.” HRC also denied that David was initially paid less than his predecessor, or that an HRC co-chair told him that he was initially paid less because he is Black and that the organization may not be ready to be led by a Black person.
David, in a statement to The Washington Post, said the response was “yet another sign that HRC’s leadership is out of touch with its organizational reality and woefully blind to the systemic inequities that continue to run rampant within it.”
HRC restated its commitment to diversity in its court filing and in an email to employees Monday from the co-chairs of the group’s two governing boards, Morgan Cox and Jodie Patterson.
“It is extremely disappointing to have a former president of HRC attack our work, values and commitment to diversity, equity inclusion and belonging, of which he was a critical part for two years,” the co-chairs wrote.
A person familiar with HRC’s legal position, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly, said that David did not tell the organization about his prior interaction with the board member until after the subsequent incident with the Black female board member. | null | null | null | null | null |
It was the the most powerful twister on record so far north this early in the year and the deadliest to strike Iowa since 2008
Storm damage in Winterset, Iowa, on March 6. (Bryon Houlgrave/Des Moines Register/AP)
The National Weather Service confirmed that the tornado that ravaged Madison County, Iowa, on Saturday was an EF4, making it the strongest tornado to hit the Hawkeye State since 2013, while it was the deadliest there since 2008. Tornadoes are rated based on the damage they cause on the 0-to-5 Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale.
Maximum winds were estimated at 170 mph, qualifying the wedge tornado as the first violent EF4-or-stronger tornado of 2022. It was also the northernmost confirmed violent tornado on record in the United States so early in the season.
The same areas hit hardest by the tornadoes were blanketed by five inches of snow on the storm system’s backside, with freezing daytime temperatures and overnight lows in the teens complicating cleanup and recovery efforts.
In the immediate aftermath of the tornado, the National Weather Service in Des Moines tweeted that damage appeared commensurate with at least an EF3 rating. It wasn’t until it dispatched personnel to survey the damage that the EF4 rating was assigned. EF4 tornadoes produce winds between 166 and 200 mph.
The tornado was the first EF4 in Iowa since Oct. 4, 2013. Eleven tornadoes formed that day, including an EF4 in Woodbury County that tracked 25 miles. That tornado also produced 170-mph winds.
It was the deadliest tornado to occur in Iowa since 2008, when an EF5 in Butler County killed nine on its nearly 16-mile path. Maximum winds peaked around 205 mph.
The tornado had the longest path of any in Iowa since June 7, 1984. The Winterset tornado traveled a whopping 69.5 miles over the course of an hour and 35 minutes. That is an average forward speed of 44 mph. The 1984 tornado carved a 117-mile path through southern Iowa.
While March has historically seen a number of infamous U.S. twisters, many of them strike well south of Iowa or much closer to the end of the month. This is because tornadoes require warm, moist air to form, which is generally quite difficult to find in the Midwest so early.
Somewhat reliable tornado records extend back to 1880 in the United States. In that time, only two “violent” tornadoes, with ratings of at least a four on the Fujita/Enhanced Fujita scale, have been recorded north of 40 degrees latitude before March 6. One F4 struck Ohio on Feb. 18, 1992, and another crossed from Missouri into Iowa on Jan. 24, 1967. But Saturday’s tornado was around 1 degree further north than either of those twisters.
A map of all EF4+ tornadoes in the United States that struck between January and March according to modern records shows that many of the early-year violent tornadoes to strike the United States do so much farther south than Iowa.
In general, the field of meteorology often has a tougher time predicting HSLC, or “High Shear Low Cape,” tornadoes. What that means is that instability, or “juice” to fuel a storm, is meager but shear, or a change of wind speed and/or direction with height, is astronomical.
A similar thing happened in Middle Tennessee on the night of March 2, 2020, when two dozen people were left dead in the wake of an EF3 tornado in Nashville and an EF4 in Cookeville.
HSLC setups are more common early in the season and again in the autumn, when temperatures aren’t quite as warm but the seasonally strong jet stream is in closer proximity. That helps amplify wind shear. | null | null | null | null | null |
1 dead, 2 injured in shooting near school
Des Moines police said in a news release that gunfire that struck the victims on the grounds of East High School appeared to come from a passing vehicle. Potential suspects have been detained, but no charges were immediately filed.
Sgt. Paul Parizek told KCCI-TV that calls started pouring in about 2:50 p.m., shortly before classes were scheduled to dismiss for the day. The district said in a series of tweets that the school was initially locked down, but later it announced that students were being allowed to go home.
The motive wasn’t immediately released, and he had no details on the potential suspects.
Saudi sent home from Guantanamo prison
Mohammad al-Qahtani was flown back to Saudi Arabia, to a treatment facility, from the U.S. base in Cuba after a review board including military and intelligence officials concluded he could be safely released after 20 years in custody.
The 46-year-old prisoner has suffered from mental illness, including schizophrenia, since childhood, according to medical examinations and records obtained by his lawyers. The United States dropped plans to try him after a George W. Bush administration legal official concluded he had been tortured at Guantanamo.
With his release, there are now 38 prisoners left at the detention center. He is the second released under President Biden, who has said he intends to close the facility.
In August 2001, Qahtani was turned away from the United States at the Orlando airport by immigration officers who were suspicious of his travel.
The lead Sept. 11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, was going to pick him up to take part in the plot, according to previously released documents.
5 hurt as small plane crashes on frozen lake
A pilot for the group SEND North and four passengers were in stable condition at Anchorage-area hospitals, according to a statement dated Sunday and provided to the Associated Press on Monday by SEND North area director Jim Stamberg. The crash happened Saturday.
The Cessna 206 single-engine propeller plane was headed to the small community of Port Alsworth from the community of Levelock.
It crashed on the frozen Lake Iliamna about eight miles southwest of the community of Iliamna, said Austin McDaniel, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Public Safety. | null | null | null | null | null |
Washington Post Live hosts Maria Ressa on International Women’s Day
On International Women’s Day, Washington Post Live will host a conversation with prominent Philippine journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa. Ressa, who has been a vocal advocate for press freedom globally, will discuss her path as a journalist, the threat of what she calls “gendered disinformation,” and the state of democracy around the world.
Register for the livestream which takes place on March 8 at 11am ET.
This program builds on Washington Post Live’s continued coverage of issues and challenges facing women worldwide, including conversations with Every Mother Counts’ Christy Turlington Burns on maternal and infant health equity, amfAR’s Rowena Johnston, PhD on the path to gender equity in fields like research and design, model Emily Ratajkowski on combating the objectification of women, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) on the Black women’s role in the fight for civil and women’s rights, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski on combating ageism, world tennis champion Billie Jean King on her lifelong commitment to equality, and Google CFO Ruth Porat, former TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Philpot-Brown and former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on the need for greater parity at the top of the tech sector. | null | null | null | null | null |
Some stores and restaurants have put up signs in Czech and Russian saying, “We won’t serve Russian and Belarusian occupants.” Others want Russian patrons to pass a kind of moral test. A sign in a restaurant in the Zizkov district of Prague states: “Before I start paying attention to you, you must first state that Putin and Lukashenko are mass murderers. Then you apologize for them and you’ll show remorse. Only then will you be allowed to order.”
Russian expats interviewed by The Washington Post universally emphasized that the abusive comments pale in comparison to what Ukrainians are facing, as victims of war. Russians living in Europe don’t expect to be sent off to camps the way Japanese Americans were during World War II.
“I don’t know if I should say I’m Russian these days,” said Julia Potikha, 28, who has been living in Germany since she moved from Moscow when she was 6. She said she hasn’t experienced recent discrimination but worries that people might treat her differently or blame her for Putin’s invasion — which has prompted a seismic shift in German foreign policy.
“The [Russian] people are not the government, and many do not support the war,” said Potikha, who has been volunteering to assist Ukrainians. Her parents back in Russia, though, are Putin supporters, she said. Most of what they know is from Russian TV. On the phone, they didn’t want to talk about Ukraine.
Russian photographer Alexander Gronsky, 41, just had an upcoming exhibition in the Italian town of Reggio Emilia canceled. He said it wasn’t because of his nationality per se, but rather because the exhibit had been organized in collaboration with St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum.
In a global city like London, where hundreds of accents can be heard on “the tube,” a Russian speaker doesn’t stand out. But places with a visible Russian connection have been called out over the invasion. Mari Vanna, a high-end Russian restaurant in Knightsbridge, has garnered reviews on Google like: “The food was great but unfortunately the war has ruined our appetites.” A receptionist at another Russian restaurant in London, who asked not to be named for fear of further abuse, said his place is receiving 30 to 40 hate messages a day, mostly from Britons and Americans. He passes the worst ones on to the police.
“Do you want to hear one?” he asked before pushing play on a recording featuring a person with a British accent who was shouting: “Get out of our f---ing country before we come burn you down, you f---ing scum.”
Zimin, who has lived in Britain for the past six years, said it isn’t easy being Russian right now. He was speaking to a Post reporter at his restaurant, which serves traditional Russian dishes like borscht and Russian honey cake and has a vast selection of infused vodkas. The staff hail from many countries. One of the hosts is Ukrainian.
“Most of the people I know in London and Moscow are against the war,” he said. “We cannot stop being Russians, war or no war. We are Russians and we will continue being Russians, but we are not Russians who try to kill our neighbors.”
Zimin said there’s much about his motherland he’s proud of but that expressing that pride is not befitting of the moment. | null | null | null | null | null |
Biden faced some strong pushback from allies on Capitol Hill. Late Monday, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the White House not to go forward with any kind of deal.
The decision to extend even a very tepid hand to Venezuela comes with other political risk for President Biden and Democrats. Florida is home to more than 200,000 Venezuelans, including many who have recently fled the regime and resettled in Florida, a perennially important political state. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ask Amy: My boyfriend gets upset when I don’t tell him everything I did during the day
Sometimes I want to get out of the house. I’m a mother of two young boys. My oldest is in school, and I’m at home with my youngest.
I can see that if I was going to places that were inappropriate, this could get me into trouble with him, but I’m not. Sometimes I’ll take my youngest to the Goodwill or up the street to visit my parents’ house.
My boyfriend tells me he feels that I lie to him, because I don’t tell him these things that my youngest and I do while he’s at work.
I trust him, even though I just got out of an abusive relationship with a narcissist a year ago. The guy I’m dating now was the one who brought it to light that I was in an abusive relationship.
I still have a lot of things I need to work out within myself, but I don’t want anyone else to try to control me.
Unsure: “How was your day?” and “What did you guys do today?” are both simple and respectful conversation starters.
Ask him: Does he need or expect a complete accounting of how you spent your time, and if so, why?
You really do need to give yourself time to work on some personal issues, and the person you are with (when the time is right) should not only trust you completely, but also should value your judgment, strength and independence.
Dear Amy: I married in 1980 at age 17, three days after graduating high school.
I have spent all the time since caring for my husband, children and grandchildren.
I’ll be 60 this year, and this will mark two years of living alone for the first time in my life. I’m not a fan. I don’t know the rules of dating, especially in this pandemic.
Can you offer any advice or resource that can help? Going to church to find a date just sounds wrong to me. I don’t drink, so that knocks me out of the bar scene.
Senior: My first idea is for my next business: a new algorithm that somehow prevents the dreaded “ghosting” phenomenon. (Hmmm. “Ghostbusters”?)
In terms of online matching, I am not sure what you mean by an “online ad,” but I suggest you try a variety of dating sites until you find one that results in a better yield for you. (Match.com and eharmony.com both ranked high in a 2021 U.S. News ranking of sites for seniors.)
More important than matching with a romantic partner at 60 is for you to enrich your life beyond your search. Go hiking, biking and birdwatching. Enroll in a class at your local community college. Volunteer to prepare and serve food for the hungry.
Dear Amy: “Stuck with the Memories” needed suggestions for getting rid of items. I enjoy my local Buy Nothing group through Facebook.
Many people in my neighborhood group are crafters and are always looking for things to repurpose.
Avoidant: Several readers have recommended Buy Nothing groups for people looking to downsize. What a great idea! | null | null | null | null | null |
— What to Do
What to Do: That’s the timely question, since you have just about exhausted your list of things not to do.
Cheating is the obvious one, but it’s not the only one, and maybe not even the worst: People do fall out of love with one person and in love with another, and the seams aren’t always as neat as they’re supposed to be. But four years of overlap? That’s not a seam anymore. The rough side of your character is out there for all to see. People may not recognize it for what it is, but you do.
So clean it up. There’s no good argument for trying to pull off both duty and self-indulgence, not unless your plan is to maximize pain while failing to accomplish either of your goals. I can, however, argue for one or the other. Both have merits and drawbacks — the substance of which, not coincidentally, depends on the one variable here. Your wife.
It’s her life you’re weighing here, not just your own, so give her commensurate say. Tell her what you’ve done, why, and why you haven’t just made up your mind to stay or go. If you don’t know why, then tell her you don’t know why. This is no time to be coy; she deserves the best life she can make of her new circumstances, and she can’t judge that until she actually knows what they are.
For all you know, you may come around to see your duty as a privilege; both of you may come to see this as the emotional housecleaning you so badly needed; or, she may want no part of your marriage of “obligation.”
Not that I’m secretly rooting for it or anything, but she also may celebrate her freedom to pursue the true happiness she’s been denying herself out of a sense of duty to you.
Here’s what you do know: 1. You don’t get to decide the outcome here. 2. You decide only what you contribute to it. 3. The better your contribution, the better the outcome.
You aren’t off to an impressive start. That, however, doesn’t preclude a stunning come-from-behind victory for your more honorable self. Start orchestrating it now.
Dear Carolyn: If the categories are: 1. talk things out, 2. try counseling, 3. break up, how do you know which category your relationship problems fall into?
— At a Fork in the Road
At a Fork in the Road: The answer is a different list: 1. Will anything change? 2. Can I accept that? 3. Should I accept that? Patience, honesty, guts. Good luck. | null | null | null | null | null |
Miss Manners: My fiance thinks I should pay for our wedding because I’m a woman
If your fiance is using this argument, Miss Manners advises you to make sure that a lawyer ties up your assets before you marry.
Also, he is older than he claims: That notion is a perversion of the 19th-century custom of having the parents of a young bride, who was presumed to have no financial resources or prospects of her own, give the wedding — on the understanding that it was the bridegroom's responsibility to pay all costs for her upkeep from then on. Is that the deal he wishes to make?
She is their youngest daughter, but not the youngest in the family by a long shot: There are actual children under the age of 10 at this table. I am a college graduate, and we are getting married this summer.
No, you just make the children’s table more fun than the adults’ table. When the adults hear the raucous laughter you elicit from the small ones, whom you have cautioned not to tell why, Miss Manners trusts that there will soon be another seating arrangement.
Or if some passerby found it a generous gesture?
Dear Miss Manners: For many years, I have noticed that invitations — both print and electronic — include the Zip code along with the venue’s street address, city and state. This could be useful when writing a thank-you note after the party, but is it correct to include on the invitation? It is especially odd to see it when the event is not at the host’s home.
The general rule is to omit cluttering invitations with information that anyone of sense would already know. An example is that the year is omitted, because one would not issue an invitation for a year in advance; whether it is for morning or evening is likewise omitted, because parties do not normally begin between midnight and 6 in the morning.
©2022, by Judith Martin. | null | null | null | null | null |
Coach Todd Golden has led a quick turnaround at San Francisco, putting the Dons on the cusp of their first NCAA Tournament since 1998 in his third season. San Francisco is No. 24 in the NCAA’s NET rankings and is one of the nation’s best 3-point shooting teams, led by the sharp-shooting Jamaree Bouyea.
Gonzaga: Faces the Saint Mary’s-Santa Clara winner in Tuesday’s championship game. | null | null | null | null | null |
“It’s an outstanding sports town. We just got to give them a reason to keep coming out,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said. “This is a team a lot of people like to watch play. ... It feels like we got something growing here and we’ve just got to keep building on it.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Seattle forward Viktor Rajkovic (21) reaches for a rebound against Chicago State during an NCAA college basketball game on March 5, 2022, in Seattle. Seattle won and joined New Mexico State and Stephen F. Austin in a three-way tie to share the regular-season Western Athletic Conference championship. More than 50 years since its last NCAA tournament appearance, Seattle needs just two more wins in the WAC tournament in Las Vegas to once again reach the biggest stage of college basketball. (Daniel Kim/The Seattle Times via AP)
SEATTLE — When Seattle University decided 15 years ago to bring its athletic programs back to Division I, it hoped to recapture a piece of its history. | null | null | null | null | null |
ACM Awards 2022: Best and worst moments, complete list of winners
Co-hosts Gabby Barrett, left, Dolly Parton and Jimmie Allen address the crowd Monday during the Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
After much hype, the Academy of Country Music Awards officially became the first major award show to switch from broadcast television to streaming-only on Monday night; the annual ceremony was available only on Amazon Prime Video, airing live from Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
While some have speculated that streaming may be one way to save award shows, given that their TV ratings have plummeted across the board, time will tell — there were certainly some growing pains as the ACMs switched up the format for the first time in years, squeezing the show into two hours without commercials. But producers made sure to bring in the star power, enlisting country icon Dolly Parton to co-host with rising stars Jimmie Allen and Gabby Barrett.
In a rare move for country music award shows, which normally prefer that you don’t talk about anything topical, Parton kicked things off by bringing up Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “I don’t want to be political, and this is not; I’d rather pass a kidney stone than do that,” said Parton, who often shies away from politics. “But I want us to send our love and hope to our brothers and sisters in Ukraine.”
Other than Parton, only Old Dominion lead singer Matthew Ramsey mentioned the invasion, saying in his group’s acceptance speech that it felt weird to be celebratory while “people are fighting for their lives right now.” Everyone else stuck to the typical script.
Carly Pearce continued her career-defining year by landing the trophy for female vocalist, along with music event of the year for her duet with Ashley McBryde. Newcomer Lainey Wilson tied Pearce for wins, taking the new female artist prize, plus a surprise victory for song of the year for her first No. 1 radio hit, “Things a Man Oughta Know.”
And in case it wasn’t already obvious, much of the industry is ready to move on from the controversy surrounding Morgan Wallen being caught on camera saying the n-word last February. In his first award show appearance since the incident, Wallen won album of the year for “Dangerous,” the top-selling record of 2021, and thanked “everyone who has shown me grace along the way.”
Later, Miranda Lambert (who also took home two prizes) became the ninth female artist in the show’s 57-year history to win the biggest award, entertainer of the year — though she had to accept it virtually because she’s touring in Europe. Here were some of the other best and worst moments, with a full list of winners and nominees below.
Carly Pearce and Ashley McBryde’s duet
Something about slowing things down during a live TV performance makes the audience absolutely riveted — and that’s what happened when Pearce and McBryde sang an acoustic version of their hit duet, “Never Wanted To Be That Girl.” (Pearce sings from the perspective of the girl who is being cheated on; McBryde is the girl that the man is cheating with.) Though they performed the same track at the Country Music Association Awards in the fall, they put an entirely different spin on it this time around, and it was easily one of the highlights of the night.
Kelly Clarkson’s cover
Clarkson’s attempt at a country music career didn’t really work, but the pop superstar turned daytime talk show host proved that she can continue to crush any vocal from any genre. Her soaring rendition of “I Will Always Love You” at the end of the telecast was a tad random but brought down the house and led to an onstage hug from Parton, the original songwriter. “I was backstage trying not to cry my false eyelashes off!” Parton exclaimed.
Jimmie Allen and Gabby Barrett’s performance
Hosting is often a thankless job, and Allen and Barrett gamely hung in there, though they clearly knew that their roles were to serve as Parton’s sidekicks. (Which yes, probably legally required Allen to make a joke about how, although Parton has the endurance of the Energizer Bunny, she looks more like a Playboy Bunny. Never gets old!) But the two up-and-coming co-hosts had just the right amount of energy as they jump-started the ceremony with Elvis’s “Viva Las Vegas,” followed by Faith Hill’s “Let’s Go To Vegas.”
Brothers Osborne’s pointed speech
Acceptance speeches can be extremely boring, but the Brothers Osborne know what the people want. “About a week ago, they pulled our single from country radio, so I needed a little wind put in our sails,” T.J. Osborne said when the Maryland siblings won duo of the year. Although his record label probably would have preferred if he hadn’t publicly aired behind-the-scenes issues, that’s the kind of candor that fans love. The duo capped off the night with an electric performance of their song “Skeletons,” followed by a collaboration with fellow Maryland native Brittney Spencer on Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made For Walkin.’ ”
Thomas Rhett’s performance
Rhett, long an industry favorite, continues to grow stronger as a live performer; he threw himself into his latest single, “Slow Down Summer,” starting at the piano. He also added a burst of enthusiasm with an appearance during new artist Breland’s “Praise the Lord,” easily one of the catchiest songs of the night.
Lainey Wilson’s big night
Wilson, who released her first major-label album in 2021, looked as shocked as anyone that she beat the competition in a tough category to win song of the year for “Things a Man Oughta Know.” “Holy moly, y’all,” she said as she accepted the trophy, adding that country music has been her life since growing up in rural Louisiana. She noted that the lyrics should be a lesson for everyone in general, not just men: “This song is about treating people right.”
Chris Stapleton’s performance
Stapleton released “Watch You Burn” — a rage-filled track aimed at the mass shooter at the 2017 Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas — in 2020. But it took the song to another level to see him perform it so close to where the massacre occurred.
Strange production issues
Any new version of an award show has to make adjustments, but there were definitely some bumps — it was jarring to see the show at a stadium, rather than its former home of the MGM Grand Garden Arena, especially because it was still light outside when it started. The sound seemed off on several performances early on, and unfortunate camera angles during Walker Hayes’s walk-and-sing of “AA” and his smash “Fancy Like” made it clear that there were many empty seats; in addition, the shaky camera following him was a recipe for motion sickness. Plus, one of the best parts of celebrity-packed trophy shows is seeing artist reactions while their famous peers perform (such as Carrie Underwood looking awestruck by Kelly Clarkson), but producers mostly focused on random fans dancing in the crowd.
Eric Church’s odd choice of medley
Church was introduced as a superstar with a 16-year career, and while he has plenty of hits, he decided to play snippets of more than a dozen. It was oddly frustrating to start getting into songs such as “Drink in My Hand,” “Springsteen” or “Love Your Love the Most,” only for Church to abruptly stop a few lines in and lead into another.
The confusion over Luke Bryan
Many fans on social media were puzzled to see Bryan perform “Up,” as well as his hit “Buy Dirt” with Jordan Davis, given the “American Idol” judge had a big concert scheduled at the Houston Rodeo on Monday night. A show spokeswoman later confirmed that Bryan prerecorded the performance … but if you’re promoting a live show, it’s probably best to disclose that to the audience. (The spokeswoman added it was mentioned in an earlier news release.)
Miranda Lambert not actually in attendance for her win
This is one of those things that’s not really anyone’s fault (again, Lambert is in Europe on tour) but it certainly ended the show with a thud when the biggest award was accepted via remote screen.
“29: Written in Stone” Carly Pearce
“Country Again: Side A” Thomas Rhett
“Dangerous: The Double Album” Morgan Wallen — winner
“Famous Friends” Chris Young
“The Marfa Tapes” Jack Ingram, Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall
“Buy Dirt” Jordan Davis feat. Luke Bryan
“Fancy Like” Walker Hayes
“Famous Friends” Chris Young and Kane Brown
“If I Didn’t Love You” Jason Aldean and Carrie Underwood — winner
“You Should Probably Leave” Chris Stapleton
“Buy Dirt” Jordan Davis feat. Luke Bryan (written by Davis, Jacob Davis, Josh Jenkins, Matt Jenkins)
“Fancy Like” Walker Hayes (written by Hayes, Cameron Bartolini, Josh Jenkins, Shane Stevens)
“7 Summers” Morgan Wallen (written by Wallen, Josh Osborne, Shane McAnally)
“Things A Man Oughta Know” Lainey Wilson (written by Wilson, Jason Nix, Jonathan Singleton) — winner
“Knowing You” Kenny Chesney (written by Adam James, Brett James, Kat Higgins)
“Never Wanted To Be That Girl” Carly Pearce and Ashley McBryde
“If I Didn’t Love You” Jason Aldean and Carrie Underwood
“Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home)” Elle King and Miranda Lambert — winner
“I Bet You Think About Me (Taylor’s Version)” Taylor Swift feat. Chris Stapleton
“Never Wanted to Be That Girl” Carly Pearce and Ashley McBryde — winner
“Half of My Hometown” Kelsea Ballerini feat. Kenny Chesney | null | null | null | null | null |
Then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and wife, Debra Meadows, walk from the Oval Office to board Marine One and depart for Camp David on May 15, 2020. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
— Mark Meadows, at the time White House chief of staff, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Aug. 16, 2020
“We need to make sure that everybody’s vote is cast. But we also need to make sure that no one else disenfranchises those by creating a fraud on the voting system.”
— Meadows, in an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Aug. 23, 2020
In the run-up to the 2020 election, President Donald Trump repeatedly warned about potential election fraud — as did Meadows. But apparently what’s good for the goose is not always good for the gander.
About a month after Meadows made these statements, Charles Bethea of the New Yorker reported, Meadows and his wife, Debra, submitted voter registration forms that listed as their residential address a 14-by-62-foot mobile home with a rusted metal roof that sold for $105,000 in 2021.
The forms ask for a residential address — “where you physically live” — and are signed “under penalty of perjury.” According to Bethea’s reporting, Meadows and his wife have never lived there — and Meadows himself may have never set foot in the house. But the couple used that address to cast ballots in the 2020 general election, North Carolina voting records show.
Six months earlier, in March 2020, Meadows sold, for $370,000, a house in Sapphire, N.C., meaning the couple no longer had a place of residence in the state. Instead, they lived at the time in a condominium in Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. But that did not stop Debra Meadows from using the old Sapphire registration to cast a ballot in a June primary runoff election for someone she had fundraised for.
These votes appear to be the exact scenario that Meadows and Trump warned about. Indeed, in his memoir, “The Chief’s Chief,” Meadows wrote: “If we could get a few more Republicans to show up in places like Minneapolis and Bemidji in November, we would be able to win not only Minnesota, but the whole election — assuming, of course, the everyone else who votes was alive, a real person, and an actual resident of the state they were voting in. That last part turned out to be a little harder than we thought.”
Were Meadows and his wife actual residents of the state they were voting in? It does not look like it.
When Meadows left Congress to join Trump’s White House, 12 candidates vied in the Republican primary for North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District on March 3, 2020. Lynda Bennett, a friend of the Meadows’, led the pack with 22.7 percent of the vote. In a surprise, political novice Madison Cawthorn finished second with 20.4 percent, edging out Jim Davis, a member of the General Assembly. The fractured showing required a runoff between Bennett and Cawthorn on June 23.
Debra had campaigned heavily for Bennett, attending fundraisers for her across the state. But on March 26, the Meadows sold their home in North Carolina, property records show.
That left the couple with only two undeveloped parcels of land in the state, according to his financial disclosure form.
Nevertheless, Debra voted in the June 23 runoff, using her Transylvania County registration to vote early, voting records show. Mark Meadows did not vote in the runoff, though he did secure an endorsement from Trump for Bennett two weeks before that election. Bennett’s overwhelming loss — Cawthorn beat her 66 percent to 34 percent — was considered a “black eye” for Trump and an embarrassment for Meadows.
Both Mark and Debra Meadows voted in the 2020 general election, with Mark listed as voting by absentee ballot; Debra voted early in person.
Less than two months before the election — and three weeks before the state’s voter registration deadline — Mark and Debra Meadows filed voter registration forms listing the mobile home as their residence. Both forms appear to have been filled out by the same hand; they were released with the signatures redacted.
Interestingly, Meadows’s mother, Mary Gail Garwood, had lived at and voted from the Sapphire property in 2012, 2014 and 2016. She then registered to vote in Georgia on Sept. 12, 2018. Mark listed the property for sale the next day, Sept. 13, 2018.
For many years before, the Meadows lived in and voted from Jackson County in a house they sold in 2016 for almost $1.3 million. They then moved to an apartment in Asheville in 2018, a move Meadows said was temporary, according to local newspaper accounts. The couple even switched party registrations in 2008 to vote in the Democratic presidential primary as part of “Operation Chaos,” a Rush Limbaugh-inspired tactic to keep alive the lengthy presidential primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Now, as the 2020 general election loomed, the couple listed a house four miles north of the border with Georgia that they did not own or live in as their primary residence. To register to vote in North Carolina, a citizen must have lived in the county where they are registering and have resided there for at least 30 days before the date of the election, according to the state’s board of elections.
The former owner (unidentified in the article) told the New Yorker that Debra Meadows had rented the house once but only spent one or two nights there; Mark Meadows never stayed at all. When the house was put on the market in the summer of 2020, she said, Meadows never expressed interest in buying it.
Both Mark and Debra listed a post office box as the mailing address. The director of the county Board of Elections told the magazine that if a voter registration card is not sent back as undeliverable, then the voter goes into the system. Both forms, filed Sept. 19, list the move-in date as the next day: Sept. 20.
Yet the real estate agent still listed the property for sale on Facebook on Sept. 23. The property’s address was later used by Meadows when he requested an absentee ballot on Oct. 1, records obtained by WRAL show. The absentee ballot was requested on his behalf by Debra, the document shows.
The 900-square-foot mobile home, with its modest bedrooms, is a far cry from the family’s old 6,000-square-foot house in Jackson County, which had four bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms and was on a nearly six-acre lot. As the mobile home’s current owner told the New Yorker: “It was not the kind of place you’d think the chief of staff of the president would be staying.”
Indeed, in 2021, Meadows purchased a three-story waterfront home of more than 6,000 square feet in South Carolina for nearly $1.6 million.
Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Mark Meadows, did not respond to text or phone messages. George Terwilliger III, a Meadows attorney, also did not respond to a request for comment. Debra Meadows did not respond to emails sent to her email address at Right Women PAC, where she is executive director, or several personal email addresses. She also did not respond to a phone message.
The Heritage Foundation maintains a voter-fraud database with numerous instances of politicians being charged for filing a false voter registration form.
Steve Watkins, a GOP House member from Kansas, was charged with three felonies in 2020 after he listed a postal box at a UPS store as his residence on a state voter registration form while living temporarily at his parents’ home during a 2019 municipal election. In Pennsylvania, Richard Cummings, a county school board member, moved from Westmoreland County to Allegheny County in 2009, but continued voting at his Westmoreland address through the 2016 general election. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year of probation.
Meadows, of course, had an important job for the federal government — White House chief of staff. Perhaps that’s a possible excuse, but he did sign the form.
Meanwhile, Debra Meadows appears to have voted twice under suspicious circumstances — first in the runoff primary from the address of a home that had been sold three months earlier, and then by signing a form under “penalty of perjury” that her primary residence was a trailer home in the mountains when she did not live there.
Voter fraud is relatively rare. It’s jarring to see such fishy behavior by someone who decried it.
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The Fact Checker is a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles. | null | null | null | null | null |
Yoon Suk-yeol, presidential candidate from the main opposition People Power Party, during a presidential debate at the KBS studio in Seoul, on Wednesday, March 2, 2022. (Lee Young-ho/Bloomberg)
SEOUL — South Korea’s conservative presidential candidate Yoon Suk-yeol walked back an earlier claim describing himself as a feminist in a written interview with The Washington Post, after the campaign’s comment went viral in South Korean media and drew scrutiny from both his supporters and opponents.
Gender equality is a hot-button issue ahead of Wednesday’s presidential election. On the eve of the election — and on International Women’s Day, no less — Yoon’s answer immediately drew attention. Supporters of Yoon, who himself previously questioned the existence of “structural discrimination based on gender,” raised questions about his true stance on gender equality. Opponents accused him of flip-flopping.
The Yoon campaign first blamed an unspecified administrative error, before telling one Korean news outlet that the campaign had released the incorrect version of their answer after internal debate on how to respond to The Post’s question about the candidate’s stance on feminism.
The fierce scrutiny of Yoon’s answer and the campaign’s scramble underscores the heightened sensitivities surrounding gender issues ahead of the election. In a neck-and-neck race, both Yoon and the liberal candidate Lee Jae-myung are working to win over voters in their 20s, who are considered the swing bloc and are deeply divided along gender lines.
South Korea ranks last among developed countries when it comes to the role and influence of women in the workforce, according to data by the Economist’s “glass ceiling index” published Tuesday. While unemployment rates among men in their 20s is higher than their female counterparts, women drop out of the workforce faster in their 30s and 40s — sign of their persistent lack of upward mobility in the workplace once they are expected to have children and raise them.
With the growing anger among many young men toward the current President Moon Jae-in’s policies to increase female participation in the workforce, the conservative party has appealed to them — vowing to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and calling on a return to “meritocracy.”
By contrast, liberal candidate Lee has courted the women in recent weeks, appearing at rallies with young female supporters and proposing changes like protection for sexual violence victims.
In a written interview conducted in Korean, The Post asked both candidates whether they consider themselves feminists. The Post also asked Yoon to respond to criticisms that his policy proposals are viewed as discriminatory toward women.
After his answer went viral, the campaign cited an “administrative error” in providing the answer, and circulated to Korean reporters the “original document” that they intended to send. In a statement to The Post Tuesday, the campaign clarified that Yoon had not approved the answer, which was a “working-level error,” and apologized for creating confusion.
A lawmaker with the liberal minority Justice Party Jang Hye-yeong, who supports the third party female candidate Sim Sang-jung, tweeted: “Dear candidate Yoon, feminism is not Voldemort,” referring to the Harry Potter villain who is so evil that people fear to say his name.
The liberal candidate Lee, when asked if he is a feminist, said: “I do not think that a word can clearly define views about a feminist or feminism. However, I can say that I am a gender-equalist. I stand against gender-based discrimination, including hatred. I also think that our society should present people with equal opportunities regardless of their gender.” He added that he wants to provide more opportunities for growth for both genders. | null | null | null | null | null |
There are simple measures to take: Reduce speed limits on highways; ask consumers to turn down their thermostats a touch; encourage the use of public transportation by reducing the cost of tickers, or letting people ride on weekends for free. The International Energy Agency has been preparing for a crisis like this for 40-plus years and has a 78-page handbook, “Saving Oil in a Hurry,” ready for use. Decisiveness is key. If politicians can’t figure on the way forward, market forces will. And they are unforgiving. | null | null | null | null | null |
In Putin’s Russia, Oligarchs Don’t Matter as Much as They Used to
Well, no — and, of course, yes.
By which I mean: Some things didn’t change; many oligarchs continued harvesting riches in the decades following my 1998 meeting with Potanin. On the other hand, today’s oligarchs are far less important to the inner workings of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And that truth is key to understanding the impact of sanctions against them, because most oligarchs — with, perhaps, one notable exception — just don’t matter as much as the grab-their-yachts crowd thinks.
There’s symbolic value in grabbing oligarchs by their baubles. It has also focused important attention on tightening money laundering rules. But expropriating the possessions of rich expatriates or jet-setting titans is still a weak financial weapon against a country in which one man — Putin — shuffles oligarchs like cards in a deck.
But Putin’s ascent at the turn of the century gave all oligarchs a new taskmaster — one with a strong distaste for their independence and grifting. Some were exiled or imprisoned, while those willing to play by Putin’s rules (such as Potanin) were kept on his leash. All ceased being the power brokers they were in the 1990s.
Sechin is the chairman and chief executive officer of Rosneft PJSC, Russia’s biggest oil producer. It’s safe to say that he didn’t originally get the job because of his expertise managing energy companies. Like Putin, Sechin is a former intelligence operative, and the president simply gave Rosneft to Sechin in 2004. Putin bulked up Rosneft by dethroning one-time oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and folding the assets of his company, Yukos Oil, into Rosneft. He then imprisoned Khodorkovsky.
The truly damaging sanctions against Putin, Sechin and Russia would be ones that go directly after their piggy bank — Rosneft itself. Energy companies are more central to a country’s economic well-being than a collection of yachts and private jets.
It’s all well and good that that the U.S. Justice Department has formed Task Force KleptoCapture to target Russian oligarchs and their enablers. Perhaps it was inevitable that, once Putin invaded Ukraine, Potanin would have to forfeit his relationship with the Guggenheim Foundation and its prestigious Manhattan museum. It all seems like pretty small stakes, however, in the context of war.
We may well be witnessing another end of yet another rich run for Russia’s oligarchs. But the public shouldn’t be distracted by any of that — and the government shouldn’t waste too many resources hunting them down. Real financial warfare requires focusing on much bigger targets.
• Seizing Superyachts Is Not the Best Way to Help Ukraine: Matthew Yglesias | null | null | null | null | null |
SEOUL — South Korea’s conservative presidential candidate, Yoon Suk-yeol, walked back an earlier claim describing himself as a feminist in a written interview with The Washington Post, after the campaign’s comment went viral in South Korean media and drew scrutiny from both his supporters and opponents.
Gender equality is a hot-button issue ahead of Wednesday’s presidential election. On the eve of the election — and on International Women’s Day — Yoon’s answer immediately drew attention. Supporters of Yoon, who previously questioned the existence of “structural discrimination based on gender,” raised questions about his true stance on gender equality. Opponents accused him of flip-flopping. | null | null | null | null | null |
There are simple measures to take: Reduce speed limits on highways; ask consumers to turn down their thermostats a touch; encourage the use of public transportation by reducing the cost of tickets, or letting people ride on weekends for free. The International Energy Agency has been preparing for a crisis like this for 40-plus years and has a 78-page handbook, “Saving Oil in a Hurry,” ready for use. Decisiveness is key. If politicians can’t figure on the way forward, market forces will. And they are unforgiving. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Amos Barshad
Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich has said he will sell the team. (John Sibley/Action Images/Reuters)
NEW YORK — When Chris Bryant stood up in Parliament on Feb. 24 to push for action amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he wasn’t thinking much about English soccer. Bryant, a member of Parliament representing the Welsh constituency of the Rhondda, had long been a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his orbiting oligarchs. Now, Bryant said, he had new reasons to be suspicious of those oligarchs’ influence in the United Kingdom.
“Somebody,” he said, “gave me some leaked documents.”
Dating from 2019, the documents were from the Home Office, the U.K. government body responsible in part for immigration and crime. They dealt with Roman Abramovich, the owner of English Premier League powerhouse Chelsea and likely the country’s most famous oligarch. “Abramovich remains of interest to [the U.K. government] due to his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt activity and practice,” the document said.
“That’s nearly three years ago,” Bryant said of the documents that day in the Commons. “And yet remarkably little has been done. Surely Mr. Abramovich should no longer be able to own a football club in this country?”
Last week, Abramovich announced he was putting Chelsea up for sale. Since he bought the club in 2003, Chelsea has won 19 major trophies. That success has come at a cost of roughly 1.5 billion pounds of Abramovich’s personal fortune. A recent financial report from the club said “the company is reliant on Fordstam Limited,” an Abramovich-controlled holding company that owns Chelsea, “for its continued financial support.”
Abramovich made his money after the fall of the Soviet Union by acquiring billions of dollars of oil and other Russian state assets via self-admittedly corrupt means. Like his fellow oligarchs, he’s widely understood as a cog in a kleptocracy overseen by Putin. As Abramovich rushes to sell Chelsea, the message is clear: Putin’s cronies are no longer safe from scrutiny.
In the Premier League, that could raise questions for clubs beyond Chelsea. Since Abramovich’s arrival, the Premier League has only become friendlier to brazen, spend-happy ownership groups. Whether it’s the Saudi Arabian wealth fund that owns Newcastle or the United Arab Emirates royal family member who owns Manchester City, the story’s the same: No matter where your money comes from, if you spend and win, you become beloved.
But now, under the threat of sanctions, Abramovich is fleeing the Premier League. Undoubtedly, his decades of success changed the sport. Could the sudden and ignominious end of his Chelsea days change it again?
Speaking hurriedly while stepping out from a recent session of the Commons, Bryant clarified that he was not targeting the high-profile Abramovich or his internationally beloved club. It was a practical thing; he just happened to get his hands on documents relating to Abramovich.
In response to his criticism of Putin, Bryant has received online abuse for years, including bot-generated attacks and homophobic abuse. Now a new category has popped up, Bryant said: “Genuine lovers of Chelsea Football Club who can’t imagine Roman doing anything wrong.”
To Bryant, that proves his point. “In the U.K.,” he said, “we’ve been infiltrated by Russian money, and we’ve gotten used to it.”
Trophies over everything
Since buying Chelsea, Abramovich has been a famously distant figure, seemingly happy to do little else but spend money and pose for photos hoisting trophies. That distance has only increased since 2018, when Abramovich gave up an attempt to renew his Tier 1 investor visa and lost legal residence in England.
Over the past week, though, Abramovich has been strangely ubiquitous. Presumably to get ahead of potential U.K. sanctions and the possible freezing of his assets, Abramovich is furiously trying to dump Chelsea. Potential bidders have been told they have until March 15 to put in their offers. Hansjoerg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire and potential buyer, told the newspaper Blick that Abramovich is “trying to sell all his villas in England” and “wants to get rid of Chelsea quickly.”
But it’s not just the fire sale bringing Abramovich new attention. On Feb. 28, a spokesperson for Abramovich claimed the oligarch was aiding talks between the Russians and the Ukrainians. Alexander Rodnyansky, a Ukrainian film producer, later clarified that he was the one who had recruited Abramovich to find a “peaceful resolution,” allegedly with the approval of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In a statement about the sale, Abramovich said he was writing off the 1.5 billion pounds in loans that he had made to Chelsea and that the “net proceeds” of the sale would go to “the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine.” The Guardian later heard from a “key figure” that “the fund is intended for all victims,” meaning the money “could be used to help Russian soldiers hurt in the war.”
This is not the first time Abramovich’s philanthropy has helped serve as self-protection. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, is one of several high-profile Israeli institutions that signed a letter to the U.S. ambassador to Israel asking that Abramovich, a major donor, be spared sanctions.
But above all, Abramovich’s success with Chelsea has inoculated him. In his statement announcing the club’s impending sale, Abramovich said, “This has never been about business nor money for me, but about pure passion for the game and club.” Before the team’s match against Burnley on Saturday, during a minute of recognition for Ukraine, a group of Chelsea fans chanted Abramovich’s name.
“The loyalty that fans show to their club is incomparable with anything,” soccer journalist Flo Lloyd-Hughes said. “It’s blind loyalty. There are often few variables, nuances or distractions. It is all or nothing. This is exactly why ‘sports washing’ is such a lucrative tool and why football is prime for it.”
Boycotting Chelsea?
After the invasion, the national teams of multiple countries, including Poland and Sweden, announced they would refuse to play upcoming World Cup qualifying matches against Russia. After dragging its feet, FIFA suspended Russia from World Cup qualifying. That move raised a question about where threats of boycotts in global soccer should begin and end.
“If you’re going to refuse to play Chelsea,” journalist Barry Glendenning recently said on Football Weekly, a popular podcast, “then you better refuse to play Newcastle, because their owners are bombing the s--- out of Yemen in a conflict that doesn’t get as much publicity.”
Newcastle’s majority owner is the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia; the chairman of the PIF is Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince. The Premier League has said it has been assured that the PIF and the Saudi state are separate entities.
But Glendenning was arguing the realist point of view: Acting with a sense of morality should mean boycotting teams far beyond Chelsea. “We’re going to be left with a very, very small league that will be over in about a month,” Glendenning said, “because there aren’t too many Premier League clubs who can say ‘Yeah, well, our noses are completely clean.’ ”
Last spring, major clubs from England, Spain and Italy announced plans to form a breakaway group called the Super League. Fans protested, and the Super League crumbled. In its wake, the U.K. government tasked a member of Parliament, Tracey Crouch, with investigating the state of English soccer.
Her report included a series of common-sense proposals to better the sport. Among them: pushing clubs up for sale to ask a simple question of a proposed owner. Are they “of good character such that they should be allowed to be the custodian of an important community asset”?
When asked if the hard truths of the Abramovich story might lead to change in the way the Premier League conducts its business, Bryant said: “If only. I’m pessimistic. It took quite a long time to persuade FIFA [to suspend Russia]. A lot of sporting bodies, they see dollar signs everywhere — or ruble signs. Not that the ruble is worth anything.”
Unwittingly, Bryant made himself a target of Chelsea fans who see him as a cause of the end of the trophy-filled Abramovich era. For what it’s worth, Bryant doesn’t have a Premier League rooting interest. “I’m not a football man. I’m a Welshman, so my main interest is rugby,” he said. “But more important than any of that, I’m an anti-corruption man.” With that, Bryant hung up and headed back to the Commons.
Love in the pub
Last week, on the day that Abramovich announced he was selling Chelsea, the club was outside London playing a match against Luton Town, a club in the second tier of English soccer.
Luton Town is owned by a fan-led consortium that, in 2007, donated 50,000 shares, good for about 1 percent ownership, to an organization called the Luton Town Supporters’ Trust. They also gave the trust the club’s image rights. Effectively, they granted the trust real leverage in the club’s future decision-making process. The trust is funded by members’ fees, which range from 5 to 10 pounds per year, and works to ensure that the best interests of Luton Town fans are represented.
Speaking to The Post before the match, Luton Town Supporters’ Trust media officer Kevin Harper said: “I would urge every supporter of every football club to always think of the future. What is going to happen when this particular owner — whether it’s Abramovich or someone else — leaves? While I wouldn’t begrudge Chelsea fans enjoying their success — they are a fantastic side — I would always give off that caution. The now is fantastic, but it doesn’t mean much in the future.”
During the match, a small group of Chelsea fans gathered in Manhattan at the Football Factory, a basement bar across from the Empire State Building full of club scarves and shirts. In his better days, Abramovich, who once owned $90 million worth of townhouses a short subway ride from here, took in a few matches at the Football Factory.
Jack Keane, proprietor of the bar, said every time Abramovich came in, “I was very impressed with the gentleman. He didn’t say much, but he was very obliging to every Chelsea fan that was here. He waited until everybody had a photograph with him. His security were telling people, ‘Don’t put an arm around him.’ And he would go, ‘No, that’s okay.’ ” Abramovich wouldn’t order a drink, but Keane would always insist he have a bottle of Heineken.
With the threat of sanctions looming, it’s unlikely Abramovich will be back at the Football Factory — or in the United States at all — anytime soon.
Chelsea fans, exclusively male at this gathering, busied themselves grumbling as their club trailed 2-1 at halftime. One snapped, “I’m from the old hooligan days — we don’t talk to journalists.” By the time the game ended in a 3-2 Chelsea win, though, they were cheerful enough to chat about Abramovich, offering a window into the power of sports washing and the peril of depriving fans of a winning product.
“He’s a club legend, and he’s been very good for the Premier League,” a 50-something man named Arthur said. “The truth is, I feel sad that Abramovich is being scapegoated. He’s not taking back the enormous amount of money” he put into Chelsea, “and the proceeds are going to the victims of the war.”
To Arthur, Abramovich’s vague statement of support for “victims of the war” was equivalent to a castigation of the Russian invasion. “He’s being dragged through the mud,” he said. “How many people are speaking out against Putin? It’s not a wise decision for your health.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The Olympics got in bed with autocrats like Putin. There will be consequences.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, left, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2019. (Sergey Bobylev/Tass/AP)
If you want to do business with an international killer, be prepared to pay. That’s the lesson the International Olympic Committee and its commercial partners will learn from their roles as financiers and enablers of autocrats with world-destructive designs. Vladimir Putin’s escalating war in Ukraine was preceded by the “Genocide Games” in Beijing, and both were facilitated and encouraged by IOC cover. The organization’s five major American sponsors — Visa, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Airbnb and Intel — have been sleeping with the enemy, wittingly or not. And the dinner check for that will be issued.
The IOC’s Baron Von Ripper-off of a president, Thomas Bach, has been one of the world’s great lobbyists for Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and that won’t be forgotten even as the Olympics rotate with relief to Paris in 2024. The new force and coordination of American-led economic sanctions is not a one-off simply aimed at Putin over Ukraine: It’s a whole new doctrine calculated to clean dictators’ dirty money out of institutions and tear the masks off economic collaborators. The architects of this policy are laser-focused on the behavior of companies in every arena — including the Olympic one — that might aid and abet Putin. “You do business in these places at your own peril,” warns Paul Massaro, a congressional adviser on foreign policy who sits on the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and is a specialist in anti-corruption sanctions.
It used to be that Olympic sponsors merely had to weather a public relations storm as a penalty for engagement with autocrats. That has changed. Now they have massive financial exposure resulting from sanctions isolating Russia. Example: Roughly $1.2 billion of Visa’s annual net revenue comes from Russia and Ukraine. Russia — where wheelbarrows of rubles are now worthless in a dime store.
Then there is the matter of audience recoil from companies that helped contribute to Putin’s war chest. Olympic sponsors, Massaro says, “have absolutely helped prop up the Russian economy and at various times even done the bidding of Putin.” Which raises this question: Can we consider these companies “our own anymore?” Massaro asks.
These are just some of the costs to American sponsors for not bucking the odious leadership of Bach, under whom the Olympics have been the furthest thing from politically or economically neutral. Bach has showed a marked softness on everything from state doping to construction for the Sochi Games. He laughed with Putin over coffee and macarons as corrupt cash flooded into the coffers of Putin allies; murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov estimated up to $30 billion was stolen from Sochi by Putin associates. Bach not only lent legitimacy to the proceedings; in 2019 he awarded the IOC’s Trophy of Olympic Values to now-sanctioned Putin oligarch Alisher Usmanov.
It’s no exaggeration to say all this had a significant and nefarious international impact. For one thing, it contributed to Putin’s air of “I can get away with anything I want,” Massaro observes. Putin came to believe that Western business stakes in Russia would prevent serious sanctions or even much pushback on Ukraine. “It’s absolutely connected,” Massaro says. “It’s all part of a pattern of impunity and enabling Putin’s mind-set.”
It’s crucial to recognize the serious and malignant role the Olympics played, one much broader than merely giving Putin prestige or public relations. The Games are part of what Massaro describes as a strategy of “elite capture” through which actors such as Putin and Xi try to co-opt and compromise Western influencers with various forms of financial entanglement. They’re a cog in “transnational networks that are used by the Kremlin, the CCP and other dictators to pursue their foreign policy goals and exert influence.” Just read Massaro’s breathtakingly prescient argument for severe sanctions in Foreign Policy magazine from December.
Bach is now cowering in a conspicuous silence. Although Russian athletes are for the moment banned from international competition, no one believes for a second that Bach will keep Russia from Paris. “I will be surprised if the IOC takes any action that appears to be stringent or judgmental relative to Russia,” says Rick Burton, former chief marketing officer for the U.S. Olympic Committee and now a professor of sport management at Syracuse University. “I imagine they will be hoping — and that’s always bad strategy, hoping — that this will blow over.”
Jerry Brewer: Olympic leaders need to learn: Inaction isn’t neutral. It’s abdication.
It will not blow over for policymakers for one simple and powerful reason: Taiwan. A similar confrontation with China is looming. And the economics of that will affect American companies on a whole different order of magnitude. According to Bloomberg, 10 of the 12 largest Olympic sponsors — including Intel, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble — generate a combined $110 billion per year in revenue in China.
It’s possible that the IOC and its partners will cruise imperviously on to Paris and consumers will experience the usual ramp-up in Olympic spirit, especially if the war in Ukraine ends. But it doesn’t feel that way — it feels as though a tipping point has been reached. The penalties for poor choices will be new and bigger; these revolutionary sanctions make that clear. And as policy advisers such as Massaro seek a total reset of the landscape for American companies that previously profiteered without worry, those that partner with bad international actors will find themselves in a pressure vise.
“One thing our businesses, universities and sports leagues don’t seem to fully understand is that, to eat at the CCP’s trough, you will have to turn into a pig,” remarked Yaxue Cao, editor of ChinaChange.org, during a congressional hearing Feb. 3.
At the Winter Games in Beijing, companies were mute and self-gagged, and they saw their branding millions wasted in toxic association with genocide and tanked ad campaigns. And that was just a prelude.
“The risk of being associated with dictators is actually much higher than we thought — that’s the huge takeaway of this,” Massaro says. “The private sector needs to realize this. It’s been a long time coming. We should have realized it 10 years ago, and if you’re not recognizing it now, you’re effectively in league with the enemy and it’s going to hurt your bottom line. … That is the risk of having exposure with dictators.”
There is one way for American companies to unspring this Olympic trap: overtly start stressing values ahead of short-term economic gain, with the understanding that, as Massaro once said, “Commerce without rule of law is authoritarianism” and will inevitably jeopardize your enterprise. American companies find themselves in a position “where they’re promoting social issues inside America and genocide outside of America,” Massaro observes. This is untenable. The answer is to reject Bach’s toadying and instead use company sway to force the Olympics to be genuine upholders of human rights — starting with the demand that Russia be banned from Paris, now.
The Games have been an active agent of evil over the past decade under Bach, but that association is now proving to be volatile and even potentially ruinous, given the global recoil to Ukraine and the coming China confrontation. “The effectiveness of sponsorship is built in perception, and these brands are at high risk if they react in the wrong way — or don’t react,” says Norm O’Reilly, dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Maine. “Similarly, there is big opportunity if they react in the right way. There are a lot of pieces here. It goes either way.”
The Olympics retain the potential to be a powerful and profoundly beneficial brand for the same reason that sponsors bought into them in the first place: No other event reaches hundreds of millions of people in all corners of the globe. It’s not just morally right for their sponsors to decouple from dictators. It’s better business. Safer, too. | null | null | null | null | null |
SEOUL — South Korea’s conservative presidential candidate, Yoon Suk-yeol, on Tuesday retracted an earlier claim describing himself as a feminist in a written interview with The Washington Post after the campaign’s comment went viral in South Korean media and drew scrutiny from both his supporters and opponents.
Gender equality is a hot-button issue ahead of Wednesday’s presidential election. On the eve of the vote — and on International Women’s Day — Yoon’s answer immediately drew attention. Supporters of Yoon, who previously questioned the existence of “structural discrimination based on gender,” raised questions about his true stance on gender equality. Opponents accused him of flip-flopping. | null | null | null | null | null |
The vice president will promise aid and support to Eastern European allies as part of an urgent effort to keep NATO united
Vice President Harris waves as she boards Air Force 2 after a diplomatic trip to the Feb. 18-20 Munich Security Conference in Germany. (Andrew Harnik/AFP/Getty Images)
As chaos spreads in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden is dispatching Vice President Harris to Eastern Europe on an urgent mission this week to reinforce Western unity, reassure allies of U.S. protection and promise aid as more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees flee their homes.
Harris will meet with leaders in Poland on Thursday and their counterparts in Romania a day later, in what amounts to an extension of her recent trip to a global security conference in Germany. There, in the earliest days of the Russian invasion, Harris met with an array of European and world leaders, including NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in an effort to hold the Western alliance together.
“It’s clearly an important mission,” said Richard Weitz, a former Defense Department official who is now with the Hudson Institute. “These countries took unprecedented risks in coming to Ukraine’s defense, clearly to the annoyance of the Russian leadership, and so they’re probably looking for reassurance.”
The fractious politics of NATO has been one of the central challenges of the current crisis. The Biden administration has worked hard, with significant success, to unify the military alliance of 30 countries who have a variety of interests and sensitivities. NATO’s easternmost members, such as Poland and Romania, have been especially anxious that Russia will turn its aggression on them next.
Harris is likely to discuss with those country’s leaders such issues as Poland’s desire to supply fighter jets to Ukraine at a time the United States is seeking to avoid anything that the Kremlin could construe as a direct engagement between NATO and Russia. At the Munich Security Conference last month, Harris met with the leaders of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, three other former Soviet bloc nations that asked the United States to send more troops to their territory.
Harris’s outreach suggests Biden is coming to rely on her more for sensitive assignments after a stretch in which she seemed to draw only unenviable, politically perilous tasks such as tackling the root causes of immigration. It is also part of the administration’s larger effort to address the aftershocks of the invasion, from calming Russia’s jittery neighbors to keeping Moscow isolated and managing the world supply of oil.
White House reaches out to Venezuela amid Russia crisis
On Monday, Biden held a call with the leaders of Germany, France and the United Kingdom, where they spoke of how to increase the penalties on Russia and provide an array of assistance to Ukraine. But the sprawling diplomatic needs are requiring reinforcements.
“Joe Biden doesn’t have enough time to do everything, so they need a second senior in the room to double down on the efforts,” said one European diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about a fluid situation. “You can see her trip as a reassurance for the eastern flank [of Europe].”
NATO to send forces to its eastern flank
While Harris offers the administration a force multiplier on the international stage, her talks over the next few days will remain delicate as the United States tries to toe the line between supporting Ukraine and stumbling into direct conflict with Russia. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said Washington is exploring how it might help Poland supply Ukraine with fighter jets, potentially with the United States transferring American planes to Poland to compensate for those given to Ukraine.
In the lead-up to Putin’s invasion, cracks had appeared among NATO allies. France was skeptical of what Britain and the United States insisted was Putin’s determination to invade. And Germany for months resisted publicly abandoning the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a long-planned project that was expected to lower energy prices in Europe. Divisions also emerged on how far to go in sanctioning Russia.
But when the bombs began falling, European nations came together with remarkable speed to apply far-reaching sanctions, dealing major blows to Russia’s economy in combination with unprecedented penalties from the United States. The European Union authorized, for the first time, the financing and export of arms to a nation under attack.
Beyond that, countries such as Poland, an E.U. and NATO member that had been drifting away from Western norms, has thrust itself firmly back into Europe’s embrace, while countries outside the alliance have shown renewed interest in joining the two organizations.
That cohesion is not without fissures, though, and tension has been visible as Ukrainian leaders plead for expanded military assistance, including a no-fly zone and combat aircraft to counter Russian air attacks. In a tour of Europe this week, Blinken ruled out U.S. support for a no-fly zone because, he said, it could require NATO planes to shoot down Russian jets, potentially plunging the continent into a much larger war. NATO chief Stoltenberg also dismissed the idea.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki stressed Monday that Harris would also seek to find ways for the United States to help assuage the humanitarian crisis caused by the war, as some 1.5 million Ukrainians have fled their homes seeking succor in neighboring countries.
“A number of these countries, including the ones she will be visiting, have welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees from Ukraine,” Psaki said. “She’ll also be talking about our ongoing range of options and assistance that we’ve been providing to the Ukrainian people.”
Since Russia’s military buildup around Ukraine began last year, the Biden administration sought to orchestrate a message of NATO unity and strength, one that officials hoped would deter President Vladimir Putin from launching an attack, and now hope will isolate Moscow enough to force a change in course.
Biden sending additional troops to eastern Europe
The months of consultations with NATO partners also offered the administration a chance to illustrate its competence in navigating global challenges following the troubled withdrawal from Afghanistan, which laid bare U.S. intelligence failures and left many allies feeling ignored.
And in many ways, Harris’s trip to Europe — her second in less than a month — is in line with the precedent of previous vice presidents, who often found themselves sent on overseas reassurance missions that their boss was unable or unwilling to do. The first trip Mike Pence took as President Donald Trump’s second-in-command was to the Munich Security Conference in early 2017.
Pence’s role was to comfort nervous European allies with promises of America’s deep commitment to a robust transatlantic defense, and he hit themes not dissimilar from Harris’s speech in Germany last month, calling for an end to the tensions that surrounded Ukraine even then and promising “to hold Russia accountable.”
Later in 2017, Pence journeyed to Estonia, Georgia, and Montenegro for a trip intended to reassure Eastern European nations of the United States’ commitment to NATO in the face of Russian aggression. “Russia’s destabilizing activities, its support for rogue regimes, its activities in Ukraine, are unacceptable,” Pence said at the time, offering the sort of line that Harris could just as easily deliver later this week.
Trump, however, went on to undermine that message throughout his presidency, challenging the NATO alliance, showcasing his disdain for European leaders and expressing admiration for Putin. When Biden took office, he sought to rebuild these alliances, but that has sometimes been an uphill battle as foreign leaders question the United States’ reliability.
Harris is widely considered a potential successor to Biden in 2028, or 2024 if the oldest president in the nation’s history chooses to not seek reelection. But she entered the vice presidency with little foreign policy experience, especially compared with Biden, who boasted of long-standing relationships with many national leaders.
Harris’s supporters were buoyed by her performance in Munich and hope it is a matter of time before she sheds the image of a novice on the international stage. By the end of this week, she will have traveled to five countries in as many months: Paris, Honduras, Germany, Poland and Romania. | null | null | null | null | null |
BRUSSELS — The European Union presented a plan Tuesday to cut Russian gas imports by two thirds this year, steeply reducing — but not severing — energy ties to Moscow.
The E.U. plan comes as the White House prepares to ban imports of oil and natural gas from Russia as early as Tuesday, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Since the invasion, the United States, the E.U. and allies have moved to cut Russia out of the global economy, shutting the government and some banks of out financial markets, restricting exports and freezing assets of oligarchs and lawmakers. But they have been slower to truly tackle energy, which is central to Russia’s economy.
But there will be strong pushback to the E.U. plan, particularly from Germany. Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday dismissed the idea of a boycott as premature. “Europe has deliberately exempted energy supplies from Russia from sanctions,” he said in a statement. “Supplying Europe with energy for heat generation, mobility, electricity supply and industry cannot be secured in any other way at the moment.”
The E.U. has long been hooked on Russian gas. In recent years, the bloc got about 40 percent of its gas and a quarter of its oil from Russia.
An energy crunch last year highlighted the need to reduce this reliance. By mid-February, as Russia continued to amass troops at the Russian border, E.U. officials sounded increasingly nervous about relying on Russian companies and started to sketch out new plans.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine accelerated these plans. Germany quickly halted a controversial project, Nord Stream 2, an undersea pipeline meant to deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany. | null | null | null | null | null |
“How can I be here when my family is there and in such horrible conditions?” said Oleg, a 48-year-old driver from Dnipro, Ukraine, as tears began welling up in his eyes. “I cannot leave my family alone.”
While Dnipro is still relatively safe, Oleg said he wasn’t sure how long that would continue to be the case. But he said he was determined to stay no matter what happened. His parents are there, and his father is prepared to die in Ukraine.
Vyacheslav, a 40-year-old driver from Lutsk, said most of his friends have already gone to fight.
One volunteer heard from friends fighting in Kyiv that they had little food left, only weapons. So the volunteer spent two days cooking, gathering snacks and cigarettes and packaging it all for them. Pashkiuskiy, who plans to drop off the bulk of his load in Zhytomyr,, promised that the volunteer’s friends would receive the care package.
Maria Köster, who has organized a separate but similar effort, said the trucks she’s coordinating have gotten as close as 40 miles from Kharkiv, but haven’t ventured further. “You can’t go there with big trucks,” said Köster, who was born in Moscow. “They’d be bombed in five minutes.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Chuck Klosterman weighs in on Nirvana, the Internet and the ‘ecstatic complacency’ that defined the ’90s
Remember the ‘90s? The last decade of the 20th century wasn’t that long ago, but the historical landscape does at times resemble another world. With the Cold War newly over, the Berlin Wall coming down and Clintonian centrism riding high, political and cultural norms were suddenly up for grabs. Grungy Nirvana kicked sleek Michael Jackson off the top of the charts, ironic skepticism became the house style, and acclaimed movies like “Slacker,” “Clerks” and “Reality Bites” depicted the kind of mouthy eccentrics who until then rarely appeared on the big screen.
Chuck Klosterman, a former staff writer for Spin, Esquire and the New York Times Magazine, takes an amusing and informed look back at that distinct decade in his new essay collection “The Nineties.” If, like him, you came of age during the “end of history,” you might find Klosterman’s fair-minded discussion of Ross Perot’s unexpectedly significant 1992 third-party candidacy and the still-very-strange story of the 2000 presidential election a useful reminder of where our current divisions began to take root.
Chuck Klosterman tries to make sense of our absurd reality in ‘Raised in Captivity’
If, like me, you were born during Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term and are thus too young to be a member of Generation X and too old to be a proper millennial, these essays will vividly bring back some of what we are the last generation to remember. The buzzing static of a dial-up modem, the collective apprehension at the ubiquity of the Internet, having to be at a specific place and time to have a phone call or watch a television show, and knowing exactly where you were when you first heard the words “white Bronco.” Klosterman’s appraisal of the ’90s’ legacy, while limited in some ways (there could have been more about hip-hop, for example, which Klosterman admits), is an engaging, nuanced and literate take on the alternately dynamic and diffident decade.
Q: What made you want to write a book about the ’90s?
A: I was 18 at the start of the ‘90s, so the decade obviously meant a lot to my life. One of my previous books, “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” was in large part about how I specifically experienced the ‘90s. This book uses a different, less subjective approach. I spent a lot of time thinking about the way that moving through time used to feel like traveling down a straight road and observing what passes as you go. Now I think that experience is more like wading into a vast, shallow ocean where anyone can dip their bucket in and get whatever they want.
Review: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
Q: At one point, you write “people inject their current worldviews into whatever they imagine to be the previous version of themselves. There is no objective way to prove that This Is How Life Was. It can only be subjectively argued that This Is How Life Seemed. And this is how life seemed: ecstatically complacent.” Can you explain more about this?
A: Ecstatic complacency, to me, was the unspoken desire to not reflexively engage with any life outside of the one you already had and to focus on the projected interiority of your own existence. I realize that sounds pejorative, but in the ‘90s there was an acceptance that, within certain limitations, you could be who you wanted to be, separate from the rest of society.
People might see this as depressing, but there was also a sense that you had more mental autonomy, and that your thoughts were your own, even if your options were limited. Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t really a Gen X figure but he had a line from a 1991 song that was accidentally relevant: “I don’t want to change the world, and I don’t want the world to change me.” In the ‘90s there was this constant worry about the acceleration of culture and an abstract fear of being force-fed everything.
Q: There’s a line where you point out a very ‘90s attitude: “I think I should feel guilty for enjoying something that I don’t actually care about.” I think people like Kurt Cobain really balked at the idea of mainstream success.
A: Well, on the surface, sure. That was his whole thing. Part of what you’re describing was called the New Sincerity – the idea that it started to feel weird to glorify people who didn’t seem care. I mean, was it somehow problematic to reward a sardonic band like Pavement for making fun of an earnest band like Smashing Pumpkins? It sounds strange to us now, but we all knew what was happening in that “Beavis & Butthead” episode where they watched a Pavement video and Beavis kept shouting “Try! Try!” at the TV.
I think Cobain probably wanted to have it both ways: He wanted to be successful and significant, but he also wanted to exist outside mainstream culture. And that was essentially impossible. And then there was a cultural switch later in the decade, where the attitude shifted toward an acceptance of the mainstream, and people were comfortable enjoying things like boy bands without that fandom having to reflect anything important about one’s own integrity.
It’s a little paradoxical: Once the monoculture evaporates, people become more interested in the handful of things that are still mega-popular. Right now, there’s an amplified media fixation on the small handful of artists who are so massive that everyone knows who they are. I used to say that I liked Poison more than Husker Du, and that was considered a shocking critical stance. Now people tend to think “Well, what everyone else likes is what you should be liking, precisely because it’s popular.”
Q: Having been born in the early ‘80s, I think that people like me fall through the cracks, generation-wise. We were too young to be Gen Xers and too old to be millennials. We’re the last generation to really remember a time before the Internet, who cast their first presidential votes in the chaotic 2000 election and were young adults during 9/11. You allude to this in the book. Can you say more about that?
A: It’s normal to feel like the specific alleged traits of a generation don’t apply to you — it’s like astrology. If you don’t believe in astrology, the concept that all people born in the same month are inherently similar seems insane.
But it wasn’t just the introduction of the Internet that changed everything. It was the sudden philosophical ubiquity of it, launched from an inception point where it initially didn’t matter at all. When I was in college, I knew two people who had email, and all they did was send images of the Batman logo back and forth. It seemed totally impractical. In 1994, I was working for a newspaper and the editors actively didn’t want the newsroom to get the Internet. They didn’t see it as practical. What I tried to capture with this book is that strange window of time where the dissonance between the way things were and the way things are now was invented.
Matt Hanson is a contributing editor at The Arts Fuse and American Purpose. His work has appeared in the Baffler, the Guardian, the New Yorker and elsewhere.
The Nineties
By Chuck Klosterman | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - The American and Chinese flags wave at Genting Snow Park ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 2, 2022, in Zhangjiakou, China. Hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government broke into the computer networks of at least six state governments in the United States in the last year. That’s according to a report released Tuesday by a private cybersecurity firm. The report from Mandiant does not identify the hacked agencies or offer a motive for the intrusions, which began last May and continued through the last month. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
Announcement from Business Editor Lori Montgomery, Deputy Business Editor Zachary Goldfarb, Technology Editor Christina Passariello and Deputy Technology Editor Laura Stevens:
We are thrilled to announce that Naomi Nix is joining The Post’s Tech team to cover Meta and other social media companies, with a special focus on their influence on American democracy and global politics and culture.
Naomi comes to us after four years at Bloomberg News, where she most recently covered Meta. In that role, she wrote about the company's corporate rebrand, its struggles with civil rights leaders, its investment in the metaverse and the revelations surfaced by whistleblower Frances Haugen. She was previously a reporter on Bloomberg’s corporate influence team, where she wrote about the ways tech giants work behind the scenes to sway policymakers in Washington. Her reporting in that role revealed Amazon's efforts to undercut its rivals in the federal cloud market, that Facebook ran a years-long charm offensive to woo state attorneys general, that the White House privately questioned the Pentagon's handling of a $10 billion cloud computing contract, and that Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and other companies coordinated a lobbying campaign to unseat Amazon as the frontrunner for the deal. She also helped land multiple scoops about antitrust regulators' probes into Google, Amazon Web Services and Meta.
Before Bloomberg, Naomi was a general assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, where she wrote about everything from the 2012 teachers strike to the plague of murders in neighborhoods in the South and West sides of the city. After that, she was a city hall reporter for the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, where she covered the campaign to succeed Cory Booker as Newark mayor.
Naomi graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in sociology. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she grew up in Wilmington, Del. But she first fell in love with Washington when she was an intern on The Washington Post’s universal desk in 2010 and is excited to move back to the nation’s capital.
Please join us in welcoming Naomi to The Post. Her first day is March 14. | null | null | null | null | null |
Richard Sherman, shown during a July hearing in King County District Court, pleaded guilty Monday to two misdemeanors. (Ted S. Warren/Associated Press File)
Cornerback Richard Sherman pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges on Monday, the result of his arrest in July in Seattle.
“Richard is grateful to have this matter concluded,” his lawyer, Cooper Offenbecher, said (via the Seattle Times). “He is focused on spending time with his family, and looks forward to the next steps in his career.”
Sherman, who turns 34 on March 30, was arrested last July 14 after driving into a construction site shortly before 2 a.m., crashing his Mercedes sedan, leaving the scene and trying to force his way into his in-laws’ Redmond, Wash., home. | null | null | null | null | null |
Stagflation Is Already Here in the Housing Market
NOVATO, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 12: Signs are posted in front of homes under construction at a KB Home housing development on January 12, 2022 in Novato, California. Homebuilder KB Home will report fourth quarter earnings today after the closing bell. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) (Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America)
If you want to know what stagflation looks like, check out the housing market. The conditions that existed during the 1970’s — high inflation and stagnant output — are happening already in this segment of the U.S. economy, illustrating the challenges ahead for consumers, industry players and the Federal Reserve.
Though homebuilders continue to expand construction in response to elevated demand, the number of homes actually being completed has been stagnant because of persistent supply chain problems. This stagflation is a headache for homebuilders and homebuyers, but it’s a benefit for many existing homeowners — and therein lies the Fed’s predicament as it seeks to lower inflation.
U.S. home prices rose by 18.8% in 2021, according to the Case-Shiller U.S. National home Price Index. Yet real residential fixed investment fell in the second and third quarter of 2021 and was essentially unchanged in the fourth quarter. Homebuilders are trying to build more homes, but the housing supply chain still hasn’t been able to increase production to match. On a seasonally-adjusted basis, completions of single-family homes have been unchanged since August 2018.
There are two ways to address this stagflation. The good way would be to improve the supply of resources like garage doors, cabinets and windows that are holding back the homebuilding market. That’s something policymakers don’t really have the tools to address, at least in the short run. The second way would be to restrict credit or raise mortgage rates high enough to reduce home-buying demand, thus reining in home prices.
But that’s a challenge too. The inventory of new and existing homes for sale is at a record low. And as Bill McBride of the Calculated Risk blog has noted, we’re in the home-buying sweet spot, from an age perspective, for the large Millennial generation, ensuring strong demographic demand for the next several years. Raising interest rates high enough to put a dent in the housing market would throw the rest of the U.S. economy into recession first. We don’t have, or aren’t willing to use, policy tools that would cool off housing demand while leaving the rest of the economy unaffected. At the peak of the credit bubble the housing market was the most fragile part of the U.S. economy. Today it’s arguably the most robust, from a demand standpoint.
That’s a challenge for the Fed as it works to get inflation under control. Home prices don’t feed directly into the calculation of consumer price inflation, though to the extent rising home prices lead to rising rents, there will be an impact. The bigger impact might be the wealth effect for middle-class homeowners.
Sixty-five percent of American households own their homes. Stocks and bonds are held primarily by the rich, but it’s home equity where the middle class has its wealth. And right now that wealth is booming, having risen by more than one trillion dollars each of the past three quarters. At the peak of the mid-2000’s housing boom that number was more like $450 billion a quarter.
That’s wealth that households could tap to push their spending on goods and services higher, which would likely flow through into higher inflation. It’s also wealth they can use as a backstop for their spending as inflation reduces the purchasing power of their incomes, and as higher interest rates raise the cost of borrowing.
Taking out a home-equity loan at a rate of 4% or 5% to support higher spending when your income is being squeezed by inflation might not be the wisest decision, but it’s still a much lower borrowing cost than a credit card. And for a middle-class household that’s gained $100,000 in home equity over the past couple years — not an uncommon scenario in much of the country — it’s easy to see the appeal.
In 2021 the hope was that inflation was a result of short-term factors related to the reopening of the economy and industry-specific shortages of key inputs such as semiconductors that went into automobiles. But as inflationary pressures have broadened over the past several months, our dysfunctional, stagflationary housing market is turning into a relentless wealth-generation machine for homeowners. That’s going to make it much harder for the Fed to rein in the expanding spending that’s pushing inflation higher. | null | null | null | null | null |
BRUSSELS — The European Commission presented a plan Tuesday to cut Russian gas imports by two thirds this year, steeply reducing — but not severing — energy ties to Moscow.
The E.U. plan comes as the White House prepares to ban imports of oil and natural gas from Russia as early as Tuesday, according to two people with knowledge of the matter — potentially putting Europe and the United States at odds.
Since the invasion, the United States, the E.U. and allies have moved in tandem to cut Russia out of the global economy, shutting its government and some banks out of financial markets, restricting exports and freezing assets of oligarchs and lawmakers. But they have been slower to truly tackle energy, which is central to Russia’s economy.
But there has been strong European pushback to the idea of a ban, particularly from Germany. Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday dismissed the idea of a boycott. “Supplying Europe with energy for heat generation, mobility, electricity supply and industry cannot be secured in any other way at the moment,” he said in a statement.
On Monday, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak warned that “a rejection of Russian oil would lead to catastrophic consequences for the global market” and threatened to close a pipeline from Russia to Germany.
But weaning off Russian energy won’t be easy. In recent years, the bloc got about 40 percent of its gas and a quarter of its oil from Russia. “It will be hard, bloody hard,” said the Commission’s Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans. “But it’s possible.”
To accelerate the shift away from Russia, the E.U would focus on finding new gas suppliers and also accelerating the switch to renewables. The plan presented Tuesday amount to an acceleration of broader efforts to move away from fossil fuels and become carbon-neutral by 2050.
Some have warned for years about the risk of relying on Russia for energy. But the warnings started flashing brighter last year. By mid-February, as Russia continued to amass troops at the Russian border, E.U. officials sounded increasingly nervous about relying on Russian companies and started to sketch out new plans.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine accelerated these and other plans. Germany quickly halted a controversial project, Nord Stream 2, an undersea pipeline meant to deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany. | null | null | null | null | null |
What is all this stuff? I frequently go into clients’ homes, and as they show me around, they’ll usually open a few closets and say: “I have no idea what’s in here.” Or they’ll explain that they couldn’t find the box of printer paper they bought last month, or their hammer or stapler, so they bought another one. This seems harmless, but when it becomes a routine, it creates organization problems.
Shop with intention. Our shopping habits are complex. Some people buy items because they’re on sale or because they come highly recommended. Others feel it’s necessary to stock up on almost everything, “just in case,” or because they’re not sure whether they own it already. And other people shop because it makes them happy. Whatever the reason, the excitement usually doesn’t last long. New items make people happy momentarily, then they become part of the mountain of stuff we find overwhelming.
Our consumption habits also affect the environment. Buying less, considering where and how pieces are made, and shopping locally are all ways to help protect the planet. Avoid buying items with the mind-set that you can return them if they don’t work out. Returns require attention, money and energy. The manufacturing, shipping and disposal of the goods we’re all churning through are draining increasingly scarce resources. We should all do our part to minimize our footprints.
Shopping for new items can be fun, and it’s natural to want to have everything you need for you and your family to live comfortably. But many of us have gone too far. How many wineglasses, tablecloths, sweaters, pairs of shoes and beauty products do we really need? Most of us only regularly use a small percentage of what we own. Reaching an equilibrium where we’re all spending less time organizing and keeping track of our belongings and more time enjoying them starts with us buying less. Doing so will benefit us, the next generation and our planet. | null | null | null | null | null |
Pathologist Aaron LeBeau has been studying how nurse shark antibodies could help fight covid-19, cancer and other diseases.
A nurse shark swims in a tank at Aaron LeBeau’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. LeBeau is studying how the sharks' antibodies fight diseases in the hope that the research could help with treatments for diseases in humans. (John Maniaci/UW Health)
Though they might look mean, “sharks are, to put it lightly, misunderstood,” says LeBeau. He’s a professor of pathology (the study of diseases) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nurse sharks — the kind he studies — are “probably the most docile sharks in nature. Pretty much all they do is sleep and eat.”
Virtually indestructible
Before the coronavirus pandemic, LeBeau was researching the antibodies of llamas and alpacas, which have shown potential to treat various illnesses. He studies antibody-based therapies for cancer. (An antibody is a protein immune systems make in response to a foreign substance.)
At his lab, the four resident nurse sharks swim in a tank looking for food to suction up. They eat every other day. Occasionally the menu includes something special, such as lobster for Thanksgiving. Blood is drawn from the sharks each month to look for antibodies. To keep them comfortable during the procedure, they’re placed in a smaller tank with anesthesia mixed into the water.
Compared to human antibodies, shark antibodies are much better at neutralizing invading viruses. Shark antibodies are very small and very flexible, says LeBeau. “So they fit into areas of proteins that human antibodies can’t get to.”
Treating covid-19 and more
The research team found that shark antibodies worked against several coronaviruses, according to a December 2021 study in Nature Communications. In the lab, the antibodies also neutralized the omicron variant of the coronavirus, says LeBeau. Because one of the antibodies being studied binds to a part of the virus that never changes, researchers think the treatment will work against future variants, too.
Antibody therapy can be critical for people with weakened immune systems who may not get protection from vaccinations. “It’s possible that 10 years from now, the first line of therapy for a covid-19 infection will be a shark antibody,” says LeBeau.
The National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland, which includes nurse sharks in its Shark Alley exhibit, has more information about the animal at aqua.org/explore/animals/nurse-shark. | null | null | null | null | null |
Senate candidate Gary Chambers attends annual Zulu Coronation Ball held at New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. (Rita Harper/AP)
NEW ORLEANS — Gary Chambers Jr. walked onto the back patio of his Airbnb carrying a bag of marijuana, stuffed the contents into a blunt, licked it closed, lit it and took a few puffs. The night air filled with a pungent smoke as he prepared to make his debut at the annual Mardi Gras ball celebrating the King and Queen of Zulu that attracts thousands of potential voters, and some of the city’s most powerful political figures.
The event had been canceled last year because of the pandemic, Chambers says, “So I expect it to be lively tonight.”
The Bible-quoting, cannabis-loving, Confederate flag-burning political upstart wants to make history as the first Black U.S. senator from the Bayou State. Chambers, 36, knows it’s a long shot. In addition to two other Democrats, he’s facing Republican incumbent Sen. John Neely Kennedy, who won the 2016 general election with 60.7 percent of the vote, and has amassed $11 million in campaign funds.
But tonight Chambers is focused on a smaller task: Winning over the city’s Black elite at the annual Zulu Coronation Ball.
“I think we’ve warmed on each other,” Chambers says laughing, when asked about his relationship with the state’s Black establishment. Chambers, an ordained minister, has been a local activist and for years used his online magazine, the Rouge Collection, to criticize public officials over their handling of criminal justice and police violence.
“I think the establishment respects the work that we put in and that’s what has earned me a seat at the table,” he says.
It’s his third run for office. In his first, a 2019 state House campaign, he lost to the incumbent by almost 50 points. Chambers was also not the establishment pick when he launched an unsuccessful bid to replace Rep. Cedric Richmond, who left the House to join the Biden administration in 2021, but he came within about 1,500 votes of making the runoff.
“They didn’t want me to run,” Chambers says of the local Democratic Party, but he surprised many with his strong third-place showing.
This time, he’s picked up the endorsement of outgoing state Rep. Ted James, former head of the state’s Legislative Black Caucus, and hired a longtime state political insider, James Gilmore, as his campaign manager. Gilmore was an aide for Baton Rouge Mayor Sharon Weston Broome and special assistant to former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco. “He helps me understand how they talk and do their business,” Chambers says.
Gary Chambers, a Democrat from Louisiana running for U.S. Senate, unveiled a new campaign ad on Jan. 18 in which he is shown smoking marijuana. (Gary Chambers Jr. | YouTube)
“It was like ‘BOOM!” says Cortez. “I saw that ad and thought it was genius, innovative, creative, authentic.” As a marketer, Bryant was excited to see someone injecting the stodgy world of politics with a swagger that he believes can connect with young people. He’s not officially involved with Chambers’s campaign, Bryant says, but “whatever he needs, I want to help.”
He’s already contributed $2,900 to Chambers’ campaign and is planning to throw a fundraiser in March.
Kennedy, meanwhile, called Chambers a “woke activist” and “Nancy Pelosi’s socialist dream candidate” who likes to smoke “the Devil’s lettuce.”
Gary Chambers, a Democrat from Louisiana running for U.S. Senate, unveiled a new campaign ad on Feb. 9 in which he is shown burning a Confederate flag. (The Washington Post)
In his next ad, the camera zooms in on Chambers as he recites the Declaration of Independence. They said we hold these truths to be self-evident… He tells the story of P.B.S. Pinchback, the Black Louisiana governor elected to the U.S. Senate in 1872, but who was denied his seat after opponents claimed election fraud. Then Chambers douses a Confederate flag with gasoline and lights it on fire. As the ad closes, a reflection of the flag burns in his sunglasses.
The 24 hours after the video’s release was his biggest fundraising haul of the campaign. It was a “six-figure day,” Chambers says.
But he also received emails from irate viewers. In one, the writer says, “Come to my house and burn it and it will be the last thing you ever burn.”
Chambers says he’s not scared. “That 9[mm handgun] that was on the table — I don’t know where they moved it to to hide it from you — it ain’t never far,” Chambers says. “The only way we’re gonna change this country is to tell the truth about it. And if it makes you upset that I burned a Confederate flag, you’re part of the problem.”
The commercials cost less than $500 each to make and were written by Chambers’s communications consultant Erick Sanchez, who said he wanted to produce something that would make a splash and give the fledgling campaign some buzz.
It has worked, at least for veteran Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, who called the Confederate flag ad “the most striking primary ad I’ve perhaps ever seen in my life ... Without that ad, we wouldn’t be talking about him.”
Rushing to the Zulu Ball, an impatient Chambers playfully admonishes his driver for not being aggressive enough in avoiding traffic. Mardi Gras has turned the city into a labyrinth of barricades and snarled traffic and he’s growing impatient as the typical 15 minute drive drags on for an hour. The ball has been around for decades and is considered one of the biggest parties of the year, bringing in Black residents from across the state. This year, New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell was on hand to toast the new Zulu king and queen, but that was six hours ago. Chambers is the guest of another insider, Winston Burns, a close associate of former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial.
“I think he’s a sharp young man,” Burns, a former music business promoter, said of Chambers. “And I just wanted to expose him to a large crowd.”
He first came to national prominence in 2020 as the country was grappling with the murder of George Floyd. A video of Chambers speaking during a Baton Rouge school board hearing over changing the name of Lee High School, named in honor of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, went viral after he chastised a board member seen online shopping during the hearing. Chambers interrupted his planned remarks to call the board member “arrogant,” “horrible,” and an “example of racism in this community.”
The video has been seen hundreds of thousands of times and landed Chambers an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Two years later, he is attending the Zulu Ball for the first time. When he finally arrives at the convention center, Chambers opens the SUV door and cranks up the DJ Mustard/Roddy Ricch tune “Ballin.’” A self-described introvert, Chambers appears to be hyping himself up.
It’s the first coronation ball since the coronavirus shut down Mardi Gras last year and the room is packed with 18,000 people in black tuxedos and sparkling floor-length gowns. A dress code is being strictly enforced, and men who show up in any color tuxedo jacket other than black are turned away.
He is finally among “the people,” Chambers says as he makes his way inside. Soon a woman in a silver sequined jacket grabs him for the first selfie of the night.
Chambers begins circulating, making a special trip to the VIP section before heading to the dance floor. The ball is “one of those places where you need to be seen,” he says. “It matters.”
And he wants to be seen by as many of them as possible. He’s being followed by a cameraman collecting content for his YouTube channel, which appears to help.
A giddy woman decked out in a black sequin dress and holding a bottle of Patron gets a photo. So do two young men who greet him as “Mr. Chambers.” The unmistakable synthesizer riff of Boosie Badazz’s Southern rap classic “Wipe Me Down” thumps the room, and now Chambers is nodding and grooving and shouting, “He’s a 2-2-5 boy!” — the area code of his and Boosie’s shared hometown of Baton Rouge.
It’s 1:30 a.m. by the time Chambers decides to make his final lap around the room.
Chambers bumps into New Orleans bounce rap legend Big Freedia, dressed in a blue velvet bodysuit. Freedia was on the Chambers bandwagon early, recording a campaign video and song for Chambers’s ill-fated campaign to replace Cedric Richmond in March 2021. They pose for a quick picture before parting. “We need him!” she shouts in her distinct Louisiana accent while pointing at Chambers. “He gonna tell it like it is.”
Once he makes it to the lobby, he’s grabbed for one final photo. Malik Bartholomew, who runs a local tour company, says he is excited about Chambers’s candidacy and is tired of well-rehearsed politicians who don’t challenge the status quo. “It’s good to have people who we don’t consider the norm,” says Bartholomew.
But most voters haven’t started thinking about Election Day yet. Chambers knows this, too. He is also badly trailing Kennedy in fundraising, $600,000 to Kennedy’s millions. The Black voters Chambers is depending on make up just 31 percent of the state’s registered voters.
Chambers is employing a common strategy for long-shot candidates to build name recognition and get the attention of donors, said Robert Hogan, chairman of the Louisiana State University political science department. (Louisiana has a “jungle primary,” in which all candidates are on the same ballot in November and the top two vote-getters have a December runoff if neither earns more than 50 percent of the primary vote.)
“I have to say, his antics and attention-grabbing stuff is outside the norm,” Hogan said.
But reelection campaigns are usually about the incumbent, and Louisiana appears satisfied with Kennedy, Hogan says. “I think [Kennedy’s] probably doing a very good job of representing his electoral constituency in Washington,” says Hogan.
And the folksy Kennedy has been known to go viral, too, like when he asked Anne Traum, a nominee for the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, nine times if illegal actions should be forgiven “in the name of social justice.” The video was seen more than 1.5 million times on YouTube.
Chambers says he tried to recruit several Democrats to challenge Kennedy but they all refused so he decided to jump into the race himself. “He has been elected almost as long as I’ve been alive in some capacity in this state,” Chambers says of Kennedy.
The Senate seat is winnable for Democrats, Chambers says, citing current Louisiana Democratic governor John Bel Edwards. But he knows that a Black Democrat hasn’t won statewide since Reconstruction. | null | null | null | null | null |
Live updates:Russia-Ukraine live updates: Evacuation attempts resume as U.N. says 2 mill...
Lee C. Shapiro embraces Marta Liscynesky Kelleher during a prayer service and rally at the St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Parma, Ohio, on Feb. 27. (Jeremy Sosin)
The diverse group showed up, one after another, so that when the pews were full, people spilled into the aisles at St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Parma, Ohio.
“It was a standing-room crowd that came to pray and show unwavering solidarity,” said Lee C. Shapiro, regional director of the American Jewish Committee’s Cleveland chapter.
Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine two weeks ago, Ukrainian churches in the United States have been filled with Americans of all faiths — and some who have no religious affiliation — in a show of support for and solidarity with the besieged nation.
“While what’s happening in Ukraine is an international story, it also hits close to home and hearts throughout the country,” said Shapiro, 64, who spoke at a Feb. 27 prayer service and rally at St. Vladimir. “We’re all witnessing the horrific images coming out of Ukraine, and our hearts are heavy.”
“As Jews, we know only too well what can happen when democracy and the rule of law are threatened,” Shapiro added. “We want to reach out and embrace the Ukrainian community in warmth and love.”
It’s a sentiment that has been expressed worldwide since Russia began its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last month. In the United States, in cities including Los Angeles, Milwaukee and Syracuse, N.Y., people of all faiths are sitting together in the same pews, hoping for peace.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine of the Holy Family in Washington to light a candle on Wednesday.
“It’s in the most difficult moments that our faith is tested,” he said at the service.
In western Massachusetts, Kerry Weber found she wasn’t alone in her desire to do something — anything — to show her concern for Ukraine.
Weber, who writes about religion for a living, said when she learned that a Ukrainian Catholic church near her town of East Longmeadow was holding a rosary prayer service for peace on Feb. 28, she drove 15 minutes to the chapel and found an emotional surprise among the 100 people there.
At the end of the service, a church member asked the small congregation whether anyone had something to share, she said.
“This woman who was with a group of 12 adults and children stood up and said, ‘As you can see, we are Muslim,’ ” recalled Weber. “She said that her family wanted to show their solidarity for the people of Ukraine.”
Weber, who is executive editor of America, the Jesuit Review, said the gesture brought her to tears.
“It’s a nice reminder that a lot of grace can happen if you allow an opportunity for solidarity,” she said. “It was so beautiful and moving that as soon as I got home, I knew I had to write about it.”
In Nicholasville, Ky., on the outskirts of Lexington, several hundred people showed up for a parking lot vigil at the Ukrainian Pentecostal Church the day after the Russian invasion began.
Beverly Johnson-Miller, who attends St. Luke United Methodist Church in Lexington, said she organized the prayer vigil a few days before the invasion when she learned that an attack on Ukraine was imminent.
“I couldn’t sleep and was wondering how to help,” said Miller, 66. “We all want to do something to help during this crisis, and it’s important to show support for the Ukrainians in our own communities. I wanted to show them how deeply we all care.”
She said she was a bit nervous about calling Pastor Yaroslav “Jerry” Boyechko at the Ukrainian Pentecostal Church on short notice to ask for permission to hold a public vigil in his parking lot.
“But he was all for it, so I started making calls and put the word out that anyone was welcome to come and encircle the church physically and spiritually,” she said.
Boyechko, who immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union in 1989, said he and his congregation of 1,100 were touched to see people of all faiths holding hands while singing and praying outside their chapel on a chilly evening.
Almost all of the church’s members have friends and relatives who are in Ukraine, he said.
“We really appreciate the support from the American people as this is a very hard time right now for Ukraine,” said Boyechko, noting that his church is urging people to send donations to Hope for Ukraine.
On the same weekend as the prayer vigil in Nicholasville, strangers also gathered at a Ukrainian chapel in New York City’s East Village. Emily Belz, a staff writer for Christianity Today, said she decided to attend a service at the Cornerstone First Ukrainian Assembly of God Church in a neighborhood known as Little Ukraine.
New York City has more than 60,000 Ukrainian immigrants — the largest community in the United States. — and she wanted to observe the Pentecostal congregation’s response to the invasion.
Like Weber, she said she was surprised.
“When I walked in, I thought at first that I was in the wrong place,” said Belz, 35. “I was surrounded by Koreans.”
I went to a Ukrainian evangelical church service today in Manhattan, and the back quarter of the church was full with members of a Korean church that the Ukrainians know. They all just showed up to be with them today.
— Emily Belz (@emlybelz) February 27, 2022
She soon learned that about 30 members of a Korean church in the city had also decided to spend their Sunday at a Ukrainian worship service.
Belz wrote on Twitter: “I went to a Ukrainian evangelical church service today in Manhattan, and the back quarter of the church was full with members of a Korean church that the Ukrainians know. They all just showed up to be with them today.”
Belz said she was touched by the humanity of it.
“To watch them sing together and pray together and cry out to God for help was really moving,” she said. “It was a wonderful feeling of unity.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Tarrio was ordered to stay outside of Washington, D.C., shortly before Jan. 6 as part of his bond conditions after he was arrested for allegedly burning a stolen Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a historic African American church in the city. That incident occured during an earlier Dec. 12 rally by Donald Trump supporters in Washington. He pleaded guilty to burning the banner and to attempted possession of a high-capacity ammunition magazine. | null | null | null | null | null |
The charge against him marks another major move in the multi-pronged investigation by the Justice Department and FBI of the extremist groups who allegedly played large roles in the Jan. 6 violence. From the start of the investigation — the largest in the FBI’s history in terms of charged suspects — agents have focused on the role that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers allegedly played in driving the confrontation between supporters of then-President Donald Trump and police stationed outside the Capitol.
Tarrio was not at the Capitol that day, and has denied that he or his group organized any violence at the Capitol. He was ordered to stay outside of Washington, D.C., shortly before Jan. 6 as part of his bond conditions after he was arrested for allegedly burning a stolen Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a historic African American church in the city. The banner was burned the night of Dec. 12, which was the date of an earlier rally by Trump supporters who did not accept the results of the 2020 election. Tarrio pleaded guilty to burning the banner and to attempted possession of a high-capacity ammunition magazine.
Prosecutors indicted Rhodes in connection with the Capitol attack in January, charging him and 10 other Oath Keepers or associates with seditious conspiracy. The indictment alleges that Rhodes plotted in late 2020 and early 2021 to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president, guiding a months-long effort to unleash political violence that culminated in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
“Rhodes and certain co-conspirators ... planned to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power by January 20, 2021, which included multiple ways to deploy force,” the indictment says.
Rhodes, 56, remains in jail while awaiting trial. He has pleaded not guilty and has said he did not enter the Capitol, denying any wrongdoing.
One co-defendant in the case, Joshua James, on March 2 become the first defendant to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy, a historically rare charge that carries a maximum 20-year prison term.
James, a 34-year-old Army veteran from Arab, Ala., admitted helping lead a group that prosecutors say sent two teams in body armor, helmets and tactical gear into the Capitol and staged a cache of weapons in a hotel just outside the city.
This is a developing story. Peter Hermann contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
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