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The amount of gas that has escaped from the Alpine oil development on Alaska’s North Slope is unknown
Pipelines extend across the landscape outside Nuiqsut, Alaska, on May 29, 2019. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
For nearly a week, natural gas has been leaking from a ConocoPhillips project outside an Alaska Native American village in the Arctic, prompting the company to evacuate nonessential personnel and some residents to flee.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management is revising its environmental analysis of the Willow project after a U.S. District Court judge found that the federal government failed to adequately analyze the climate impacts of the project, among other deficiencies.
The North Slope Borough Mayor Harry K. Brower Jr. sent a letter to Nuiqsut residents on Tuesday telling them that “there is no need to leave the community.”
“Other than potential noticeable nuisance odors outside of town and near the facility or when shifts in the wind occur, there is no impact or risk to the surrounding community,” Brower wrote. “No evacuation was ever considered or needed.”
ConocoPhillips has been testing the air quality at the site of the leak and in the community using portable sensors known as “sniffers” and other canisters that capture air and must be sent out of state for analysis, said Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for Alaska’s division of homeland security and emergency management.
“The gas was not detectable by those portable detection units a short distance from the well houses where it was present,” Zidek said. “The gas dissipates very quickly in the atmosphere.” | null | null | null | null | null |
In the north, Russian forces continued to build up forces near Kharkiv and the capital, Kyiv. A column of Russian military vehicles that was previously stalled north of Kyiv inched closer, with leading elements about 9 miles from the city center, down from about 12 for the last several days, according to a Pentagon assessment shared by a senior U.S. defense official.
Fewer than 2 million people remain in Kyiv after around half of its residents fled, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a live broadcast on Thursday. In defiant remarks, he said the city has become a fortress, adding that its people “won’t give up the mission, and the enemy won’t get through.”
Citing the horror in Mariupol and elsewhere, Zelensky has repeatedly pressed for more Western help, though U.S. and other officials have been reluctant to be fully drawn in to a conflict with a fellow nuclear power.
Poland earlier proposed a deal to send Soviet-made jets to an air base controlled by the U.S. and NATO for use in Ukraine — in return for American F16s — a plan that was apparently made without consulting Washington. The Pentagon rejected the deal, saying it would only serve to further escalate the war. However, U.S. officials are examining options to send the Ukrainian military more complex weapons, a senior U.S. defense official said Thursday. Those include air-defense systems that could target Russian drones and planes at a higher altitude than current “man-portable” missiles supplied by the United States and allies.
At a news conference in Poland Thursday, Vice President Harris and Polish President Andrzej Duda sidestepped questions about the matter and presented a united front, pledging to coordinate on how best to assist Ukraine.
Harris’ visit came amid tit-for-tat accusations between Russia and the United States over the potential use of biological or chemical weapons in Ukraine. Russia’s Foreign Ministry earlier claimed that Ukraine is running chemical and biological weapons labs backed by the United States, but did not cite any evidence. The White House warned that the Russian claims could be a false flag, and that Moscow could seek to use similar weapons itself.
White House Press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that Russia has a history of “inventing outright lies,” and reiterated warnings that Russia has the capacity to use chemical and biological weapons. | null | null | null | null | null |
In this conflict, the musicians who remained in Kyiv have endured shells and missiles landing close to their homes, nights hiding in underground bunkers, waiting in long lines to stock up on food and medicine. Many remain split apart from their relatives elsewhere in Ukraine, including some behind Russian lines.
“This event is to show the entire world that we are not afraid to have this concert in the heart of Kyiv,” Loutsenko said. “We play it under the open sky.”
The musicians at the square performed even as their academy has been gripped by loss, fear and uncertainty. Two students, a Ukrainian and a Chinese national, were killed in the Russian bombardment of Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, Maksym Tymoshenko, the academy’s president, said. Roughly 50 students and junior staff, he added, remain inside the academy’s dormitory, waiting out the war in their rooms or the basement when the air raid sirens go off.
“Some have lost contact with their families, who are in places like Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel, where the worst fighting is taking place,” Tymoshenko said. “They don’t know if their homes still exist. So it’s safer to stay in Kyiv than go anywhere else.”
A crowd of about 100 people also gathered, mostly journalists wearing flak vests and holding cameras and phones. About 25 Ukrainians were among them, some clutching the nation’s blue-and-yellow flag. Explosions in and around the center of the city had subsided in recent days, but most Ukrainians still worried about spending too much time in open areas.
The concert began with an uplifting Ukrainian composition. Makarenko was waving his wand rapidly, providing the rhythm to the ensemble, some wearing winter beanies. Ukraine’s national anthem came soon after, and people swayed their flags. Also played was Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and “Lileya,” a ballad by Konstantin Dankevich, one of Ukraine’s most well-known composers.
The father’s two children are in Bulgaria, and he lives alone in the capital. He hears explosions and shelling from his home, he said, but he has no plans to flee. “I still have dreams that we will keep our capital and Ukraine and that we will kick the Russians out as soon as possible,” he said.
“It’s my duty, it’s my destiny,” Alyeyev said. “If I can push our spirits up, I have to do it.”
But she remained to take care of her 86-year-old bedridden grandmother.
Some musicians at the academy, including students and teachers, have signed up to fight the Russians, joining the nation’s territorial defense units, Tymoshenko said.
Alyeyev was considering picking up a gun as well. But his friends who joined the civilian militia ordered him not to risk his life. “They told me, ‘You must stay at home. We will need you after all of this is over. We will save your life, and you will play music for us after.’ ” | null | null | null | null | null |
Poland earlier proposed a deal to send Soviet-made jets to an air base controlled by the U.S. and NATO for use in Ukraine — in return for American F-16s — a plan that was apparently made without consulting Washington. The Pentagon rejected the deal, saying it would only serve to further escalate the war. However, U.S. officials are examining options to send the Ukrainian military more complex weapons, a senior U.S. defense official said Thursday. Those include air-defense systems that could target Russian drones and planes at a higher altitude than current “man-portable” missiles supplied by the United States and its allies. | null | null | null | null | null |
Republicans warned that rejecting Youngkin’s nominees would leave the state without a functioning parole board, because Youngkin fired every member of the body on his first day in office. The firings fulfilled a campaign promise, stemming from controversy over the board’s release in 2020 of a man serving a life sentence for the 1979 killing of a Richmond police officer. | null | null | null | null | null |
Facebook refused, arguing that its services are critical for activists and everyday Russians to communicate with their families. But last week, Russia’s Internet censor said it was blocking Facebook anyway. Facebook, which recently changed its name to Meta, said Russia’s crackdown on its service was retaliation for the company’s fact-checking of content published by Russian state media.
Russia notably did not block WhatsApp and Instagram, which are owned by Facebook but are more popular than Facebook in the country.
Facebook frequently changes its content moderation rules, and has been criticized by its own independent Oversight Board for having rules that are inconsistent. The company for example created an exception to its hate speech rules for world leaders, but was never clear which leaders got the exception or why. After it suspended the account of President Donald Trump in the wake of violence on Jan. 6, the Oversight Board said the decision was correct but that Facebook did so without a clear rationale or plan.
The company has generally tried to avoid the appearance of taking sides in armed conflicts or differing sets of rules in different places. Creating specific new policies like on Thursday is extremely unusual, although it has chosen to do so several times during the recent conflict.
Last week, the company said it was changing its rule to allow people to praise a neo-Nazi battalion in Ukraine that was now part of the country’s attempt to repel the invasion.
While it’s unclear what prompted Facebook’s policy change, policing content posted by billions of people during the chaos of wartime is challenging, despite over 10,000 content moderators and algorithms to enforce its rules.
In Iran last year, a Vice report said that the company was prompted to change its policy after mistakenly taking down posts in which people had legitimately expressed dissent against their government. And during the brief war between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas last year, Facebook and Twitter were criticized by activists for mistakenly taking down millions of posts from Palestinians.
Facebook’s AI treats Palestinian activists like it treats American Black activists. It blocks them. | null | null | null | null | null |
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee House Republican lawmakers say they were betrayed by one of their own after they hired a shadowy political consulting firm talked up by a colleague who has since pleaded guilty to fraud in an alleged kickback scheme that also implicates a former House speaker and others. | null | null | null | null | null |
NEW YORK — An 83-year-old ex-convict who served two decades in prison for fatally shooting a girlfriend, got out, and then went back to jail for killing another girlfriend a year later, is now charged in a new crime: The dismemberment of a woman whose head was found in the parolee’s apartment. | null | null | null | null | null |
ISIS confirms death of chief, names successor
The Islamic State on Thursday confirmed for the first time that its leader was killed in a U.S. strike in northwestern Syria last month and named his successor.
It was the first official comment from the militant group about the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. U.S. officials said he blew himself up along with members of his family as American forces raided his hideout in the northwestern Syrian town of Atma, near the border with Turkey, on Feb. 3.
In an audio message released Thursday, Islamic State spokesman Abu Omar al-Muhajer confirmed the death, as well as that of the group’s former spokesman, Abu Hamza al-Qurayshi, in the raid.
Muhajer also said that the Islamic State has named Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi as the leader’s successor. There was no immediate information about the new leader.
None of the Qurayshis are believed to be related. Qurayshi is not their real name but part of a nom de guerre.
King, Israeli diplomat discuss Jerusalem
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Jordan’s King Abdullah II met in the Jordanian capital Thursday in an effort to calm tensions in Jerusalem ahead of holy celebrations for Muslims, Christians and Jews.
The two spoke ahead of the anniversary of clashes between Israeli police and Muslim protesters in Jerusalem that helped fuel an 11-day Israel-Gaza war in May. Tensions have been rising again. On Monday, a Palestinian stabbed two police officers in Jerusalem’s Old City before he was shot and killed by police. It was the second such incident in as many days.
This year, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan coincides with the Jewish holiday of Passover and the Christian celebration of Easter. Jordan administers the al-Aqsa Mosque, built in a contested Jerusalem hilltop compound that is a frequent flash point.
“We agreed that we must work together to calm tensions and promote understanding,” Lapid said after the meeting.
Lift 'unjust' sanctions on Turkey, Erdogan tells Biden: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told President Biden in a phone call that it was past time to lift all "unjust" sanctions on Turkey's defense industry. According to Erdogan's office, he also told Biden that Turkey expected its request to purchase 40 new F-16 fighter jets and modernize its existing fleet to be finalized as soon as possible. Ankara had ordered more than 100 F-35 fighter jets, but the United States took Turkey off the list of nations that would receive the more advanced planes in 2019 after the NATO member also acquired Russian S-400 missile defense systems.
Parliament-backed premier seeks to enter Libyan capital: Rival Libyan armed groups mobilized in Tripoli without clashes as the parliament-backed prime minister sought a way to take office in the capital despite the incumbent's refusing to cede power. A large armed convoy affiliated with Fathi Bashagha, whom lawmakers swore in a week ago, moved toward Tripoli from Misurata, military sources said, but did not immediately try to move into the city. Any effort to install Bashagha in the capital could ignite fighting between factions that support him and others that back Abdulhamid Dbeibah, who was installed a year ago to head a U.N.-backed interim unity government.
Sudan in 'grave danger,' envoy says: Sudan needs a new political agreement by June, U.N. and African Union envoys warned, as medics said two protesters had been killed in the latest anti-military protests, bringing the toll since an October coup to 87. "The country is in grave danger," African Union envoy Mohamed Hassan Lebatt said as he announced a push for talks in partnership with the United Nations. | null | null | null | null | null |
Poland earlier proposed a deal to send Soviet-made jets to an air base controlled by the U.S. and NATO for use in Ukraine — in return for American F-16s — a plan that was apparently made without consulting Washington. The Pentagon rejected the deal, saying it would only serve to further escalate the war. However, U.S. officials are examining options to send the Ukrainian military more complex weapons, the senior U.S. defense official said Thursday. Those include air-defense systems that could target Russian drones and planes at a higher altitude than current “man-portable” missiles supplied by the United States and its allies.
Goldman Sachs announced Thursday that it was “winding down” its business in Russia to comply with regulatory and licensing requirements. Google said it will stop accepting cloud customers in Russia, following similar moves by Amazon and Microsoft, while American fast-food chain Burger King said it is suspending all corporate support for roughly 800 franchise stores in Russia. | null | null | null | null | null |
Smollett, who declined to speak before receiving his sentence, loudly repeated after the fact that he was “not suicidal” and warned that if anything happens to him in jail, it was not self-inflicted. He repeated that he was “not suicidal” while walking out of the courtroom with his fist raised and maintained his innocence in the case.
While delivering the sentence, Cook County Judge James Linn noted that “this case received as much attention — and was gone over, every little bit, with a fine-toothed comb — as any case I’ve ever seen before.” He likened the number of pretrial motions filed to that seen with death penalty cases.
The defense called numerous witnesses, including Smollett’s paternal grandmother, Molly Smollett; his older brother, Joel Smollett Jr.; and Rich Daniels, a music supervisor who worked with him on “Empire.” His attorneys also read letters of support written by a Black Lives Matter organizer; Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP; actors LaTanya and Samuel L. Jackson; and actress Alfre Woodard, who stated that she would “fear for [Smollett’s] safety” were he sentenced to prison time.
In January 2019, Smollett, who is Black and gay, told Chicago police he was physically attacked late at night in the city’s Streeterville neighborhood. He said his assailants poured an unknown chemical substance on him, referred to him using racist and homophobic slurs, and yelled, “This is MAGA country,” referring to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. | null | null | null | null | null |
Smollett, who declined to speak before receiving his sentence, loudly repeated after the fact that he was “not suicidal” and warned that if anything happens to him in jail, it was not self-inflicted. He repeated he was “not suicidal” while walking out of the courtroom with his fist raised and maintained his innocence in the case.
While delivering the sentence, Linn noted that “this case received as much attention — and was gone over, every little bit, with a fine-toothed comb — as any case I’ve ever seen before.” He likened the number of pretrial motions filed to that seen with death penalty cases.
The defense called numerous witnesses, including Smollett’s paternal grandmother, Molly Smollett; his older brother, Joel Smollett Jr.; and Rich Daniels, a music supervisor who worked with him on “Empire.” His attorneys also read letters of support written by a Black Lives Matter organizer; Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP; actors LaTanya and Samuel L. Jackson; and actress Alfre Woodard, who stated she would “fear for [Smollett’s] safety” were he sentenced to prison time.
In January 2019, Smollett, who is Black and gay, told Chicago police that he was physically attacked late at night in the city’s Streeterville neighborhood. He said his assailants poured an unknown chemical substance on him, referred to him using racist and homophobic slurs, and yelled, “This is MAGA country,” referring to former president Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. covid response may be scaled back amid congressional inaction, White H...
With $15.6 billion in coronavirus aid stripped from deal to fund government, Democrats scramble to find money for effort
Workers organize pandemic supplies at a warehouse in Oklahoma City in April 2020. (Sue Ogrocki/AP)
The United States is poised to run out of tests, treatments and vaccines to fight the coronavirus after a $15.6 billion funding plan collapsed in Congress on Wednesday, alarming health-care advocates and raising concerns about the fate of President Biden’s broader covid response plan.
“Testing capacity … will decline this month. In April, free testing and treatments for tens of millions of Americans without health insurance will end. In May, America’s supply of monoclonal antibodies will run out,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a briefing on Thursday.
With coronavirus aid stripped from a deal to fund the government, Democrats this week were left scrambling, unsure as to how they would advance a tranche of spending they see as critical. The House set in motion a plan to vote next week on a new bill that would provide $15 billion for testing, treatment and vaccines. But the proposal appeared likely to falter in the Senate, where Republicans have demanded that lawmakers redirect existing stimulus funds, or find some other way to pay for it.
Taking to the Senate floor on Thursday, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) did not offer a plan forward — though he emphasized the need for swift action to ensure that the country is “prepared.”
“We will keep working on covid relief,” he said. “It is very much needed.”
While U.S. coronavirus cases have fallen to their lowest levels since July 2021, more than 9,000 Americans per week continue to die of covid-19, according to The Washington Post’s virus tracker. The White House — which formally asked for about $22.5 billion to address public health needs earlier this month — also has warned that new variants could emerge and cause havoc again, a message echoed by advocates.
Without new funding, administration officials say that key parts of the U.S. covid response will need to be scaled back or halted.
Biden officials have said they plan to buy 20 million doses of Pfizer’s antiviral pills, a highly effective treatment touted as a game-changer when it was authorized late last year because it enables people at high risk of severe covid to take pills at home to avoid getting worse — but the administration is still reviewing whether it will have the funds to do so. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are expecting to exhaust their supply of antivirals by September, and they warn that other countries will soon place orders for those treatments that could push the United States further toward the back of the line.
Officials also said they must begin placing orders in coming weeks to acquire a possible fourth shot of vaccine for adults in the fall and possible booster shots for children older than 5, should federal officials determine those necessary.
Therapeutics and vaccination are the keys to bringing the virus under control, according to a senior Biden official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal estimates. “We’ve had tremendous success. To stop now makes no sense.”
Meanwhile, the administration has launched a global vaccination campaign, focused initially on increasing shots in 11 sub-Saharan African countries. But officials warned that funding will be exhausted within months and they need additional support to expand the plan to other countries. Hill Democrats have repeatedly called for at least $17 billion for the global response.
“We feel it was irresponsible for Congress to pull the $5 billion for global covid-19 response. It’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the U.S. budget and of that omnibus package, that it’s penny-wise and monumentally pound-foolish,” Ritu Sharma, a vice president at CARE, a global humanitarian organization, told reporters on Thursday. “Our economy is going to suffer so much more than $5 billion in damage if we have another variant that causes shutdowns … [and cost] thousands of more lives.”
The collapse of the covid funding plan on Wednesday sparked frustration inside the administration and elsewhere. Some Democratic aides on the Hill questioned why the White House had not pursued the funds more aggressively earlier in the year, rather than formally submitting a request last week.
The problem loomed large as House Democrats gathered in Philadelphia on Thursday for a retreat that began late as a result of the standoff over coronavirus aid. Speaking Thursday morning, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) lamented the failure to coalesce around pandemic assistance, saying she and other lawmakers only learned about the plan to fund the covid response with money pledged to the states when the bill was unveiled early Wednesday.
Although Biden officials in early January had privately concluded that they needed as much as $80 billion in additional covid aid for vaccines, therapeutics and other supplies, they did not indicate that the need was urgent.
But by early February, top administration aides told lawmakers that key coronavirus funds were dwindling. They felt the U.S. government could manage the omicron wave but worried that it might not be prepared for a new variant, after a flurry of spending to respond to the case surge.
Soon after, the administration outlined about $30 billion in covid aid needs during briefings with top lawmakers. The formal request from the Office of Management and Budget arrived in early March, calling for $22.5 billion in emergency spending, with acting OMB director Shalanda Young adding that she “anticipate[d] that additional funding will be needed to support the COVID-19 response.”
Democrats united in attributing much of the blame to Republicans, who had demanded in letters that they redirect existing stimulus money to pay for the new request. GOP lawmakers did not require the same for aid set aside for Ukraine, which was part of the same funding package.
Seeking a solution, Democratic leaders opted to tap a $350 billion fund included in the American Rescue Plan enacted last year, which gave city, county and state officials vast flexibility to use the money as they saw fit. But the plan essentially backfired, angering rank-and-file Democrats and state officials, who warned that the approach would claw back money that some were already using for pandemic response.
Govs. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Phil Murphy of New Jersey, who lead the National Governors Association, wrote in a letter to congressional leaders that any attempt to rescind the money “would jeopardize our shared goals of mitigating, responding to and fostering a transformational recovery from this unprecedented national pandemic.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Samantha Ramadani, whose husband, A.J., a staff sergeant, is awaiting news of when he may be deployed, said she can’t feel nervous because she knows what they all signed up for. “You join the Army to make a difference. You don’t join it to be on this duty at home, right?” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
In a report released Monday and titled “Getting to and Sustaining the Next Normal: A Roadmap for Living with Covid,” the experts caution that the United States is still in the grip of the pandemic. With 330 million people, they say the U.S. transition to the “next normal” will be when direct mortality from major respiratory illnesses is 165 deaths per day and 1,150 per week; the death toll from covid-19 going into this month was 10 times higher. And they caution that a new, concerning variant could emerge. At the same time, they suggest that the death toll will decline sharply from the disaster of the past two years, thanks to vaccine and natural immunity.
If the outlook is cautiously optimistic, however, the report makes an important plea for policymakers and politicians not to fall back into complacency and inaction, as they have in the past. It comes from two dozen epidemiologists, pharmacologists, virologists, immunologists and policy experts, shepherded by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice provost of lobal initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania.
What needs to be done? A major recommendation is that the United States should build a comprehensive testing and surveillance system for the coronavirus and other respiratory viruses, which does not yet exist in the nation’s patchwork of testing technology and reporting. The report suggests such a system should make rapid tests “both ubiquitous and affordable, which means less than $3 per test,” and swiftly link those who test positive — whether through a PCR or rapid test — to suitable treatment. The experts also suggest building a real-time disease surveillance network that would rely on viral, environmental, genetic, immunological and zoonotic sampling to provide early warning and data about outbreaks. These will be even more useful if linked to a modernized, comprehensive health-data system, which the pandemic showed is desperately needed. Other common-sense suggestions include measures to improve indoor air quality; a strategy to deal with burnout among health-care workers; sustained investment in vaccine and therapeutics research and development; a better understanding of long covid; and improvements on the confusing pandemic communications evident over the past two years.
All of this won’t be easy or cheap. The report calls for an estimated $100 billion investment the first year, about $30 billion for the second and third, and $10 billion to $15 billion annually thereafter. But the economic and other damages of the pandemic were in the trillions. Investing in the future of public health systems to avoid such a disaster in the future would be prudent and farsighted. | null | null | null | null | null |
Now, it’s not just Ukraine experiencing firms’ worker-evacuation efforts
“It’s like an exodus of people who don’t support this war, and there are a lot of them,” said a Russian émigré who has lived in Switzerland for 10 years and is now an executive at one small software company and an investor in others. He, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity and that his company not be named because he still has ties to Russia.
But anecdotal evidence suggests the number is at least in the tens of thousands, amid reports of burgeoning Russian-speaking émigré communities arising in Dubai, Istanbul and other places where air service from Russia still exists. More than 20,000 Russians have entered Georgia in recent days, the country’s economic minister said Monday. | null | null | null | null | null |
The town of Beenleigh, Queensland, on Feb. 28 compared with after flooding on March 2 in images captured by a camera system attached to planes. (Nearmap)
Compared with two weeks ago, portions of eastern Australia look almost unrecognizable. Over 16 days, unprecedented amounts of rain flooded Queensland and New South Wales. Blue waters became muddy brown and homes turned into swamps. The flooding event forced thousands to evacuate and caused at least 20 deaths.
“The flooding disaster across Southeast Queensland and NSW is absolutely devastating,” Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison tweeted. On Sunday, he wrote that the federal government has paid around $193 million to those affected by the floods.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said flood impacts were expected to continue through Thursday across southeast Queensland and New South Wales, as multiple flood warnings remain. Severe thunderstorms in Queensland are expected to move into the southwest region of the state by the weekend.
For many locations, the recent flooding was a once-in-a-lifetime event, as rainfall totals set records. Sydney had its wettest 16-day period on record, accumulating 24 inches from Feb. 22 to Wednesday. Rain filled creeks and rivers, which brought soil and mud to Sydney waterways.
Brisbane set a new three-day record, receiving 26 inches from Feb. 25 to Feb. 28. The probability of so much rainfall in Brisbane within 72 hours is just between 0.5 and 0.2 percent in any given year. Brisbane also set a new weekly rainfall record of 31 inches, the highest observed since records began in 1840.
The village of Dunoon received the second-highest daily rainfall ever recorded in New South Wales at 30 inches in 24 hours on Feb. 28.
The small rural town of Doon Doon in New South Wales received 41 inches in 48 hours, which is calculated to be greater than a 1-in-1,000-year event (meaning there is only a 0.1 to 0.05 percent chance of it occurring in any given year).
In many regions, rivers also flowed out of their banks to record levels. The Wilsons River at Lismore reached 46.6 feet on Feb. 28 — eclipsing the previous record from 1954 by 6.5 feet.
Since November, the Bureau of Meteorology declared that the nation was under a La Niña weather pattern. La Niña, which is characterized by cooler waters in the central eastern tropical Pacific, can affect weather patterns around the world.
During a La Niña, the average December to March rainfall in eastern Australia is 20 percent higher than the long-term average. The 2010-2011 devastating floods in Queensland also took place during a La Niña.
Chiew said determining how much of this instance of extreme flooding can be attributed to climate change will take more time to analyze, considering there are a number of other factors that can exacerbate rainfall and flooding. However, he stated that “we know that under a warmer climate, flood risk in general is likely to increase.” | null | null | null | null | null |
By Michael R. Blood and Mary Clare Jalonick | AP
LOS ANGELES — The top Republican on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee said Thursday that he has received “numerous credible allegations” that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti was aware of sexual harassment and assaults of city employees committed by his close friend and adviser, but did nothing to stop the misconduct, documents showed Thursday. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - This 2018 portrait released by the U.S. Department of Justice shows Connecticut’s U.S. Attorney John Durham. A judge handling the case of a lawyer charged with lying to the FBI during its probe into 2016 Russian election interference is reminding attorneys that their legal filings are under a “microscope.” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper says he is the only audience that should matter to them. (U.S. Department of Justice via AP, File) (Uncredited/U.S. Department of Justice) | null | null | null | null | null |
In this undated photo provided by the North Korean government on Friday, March 11, 2022, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visits the Sohae Satellite Launching Ground in Tongchang-ri, North Korea. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: “KCNA” which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP) (Uncredited/KCNA via KNS) | null | null | null | null | null |
Republicans warned that rejecting Youngkin’s nominees would leave the state without a functioning parole board, after Youngkin issued an executive order removing every member of the body on his first day in office. (Anticipating the move, the members had actually resigned prior to his inauguration.) The move fulfilled a campaign promise, stemming from controversy over the board’s release in 2020 of a man serving a life sentence for the 1979 killing of a Richmond police officer.
Once the General Assembly adjourns, Youngkin will be able to appoint new board members who will be able to serve without confirmation until 30 days into the next regular legislature reconvenes. | null | null | null | null | null |
An Afghan man carries his one month old baby as he arrives in Poland after crossing a border check point on Feb. 27, 2022 in Kroscienko, Poland. (Omar Marques/Getty Images)
“It was a nice place to live, to settle. It was great,” the engineering student said of Kharkiv, where he moved more than a year ago. But, he added: “I left everything behind.” He asked for his full name not to be published as he worried it may affect his asylum prospects in Europe.
Russia’s onslaught in Ukraine has brought stark choices for some people who had already left one war — only to wind up in another, and have to flee again.
They have joined more than 2 million people driven from Ukraine since the invasion, Europe’s fastest exodus since World War II.
One of them is an Afghan data analyst who fled to Kyiv from Kabul after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and found herself on the run for the second time in six months. Masouma Tajik escaped the Ukrainian capital with a backpack she had carried from Kabul, some clothes and her laptop.
And the family of an 11-year-old Ukrainian boy who reached Slovakia alone, with a phone number scrawled on his hand, had already fled years ago from Syria — where Russia intervened in a brutal war with airstrikes to back President Bashar al-Assad.
For Ahmed, it took three days to cross the Polish border. When he managed to speak to his parents in Yemen, he did not want them to worry. “I made them think I was in a five-star hotel,” he said with a laugh.
Mohamed, who asked that his last name not be published as he applied for asylum in Europe, once left his home on Yemen’s western coastline. He made it out of Ukraine after waking up to the sounds of sirens in the central city of Poltava. So began a journey through train and bus stations filled with crowds, involving a 15-hour trek to the border on foot and the help of strangers.
Mohamed first crossed into Poland and eventually met a Polish family with signs offering help. He was grateful they drove him, with an Iraqi friend he made along the way, to Warsaw before he moved on to another location. “Honestly, they did not spare any effort … They fed us. They gave me new socks,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
George Washington gets punched in the mouth in A-10 tournament loss to UMass
George Washington guard Brayon Freeman is helped up by forward Qwanzi Samuels after being called for a foul during an Atlantic 10 tournament game against Massachusetts. (Terrance Williams for The Washington Post)
The end of George Washington’s basketball season echoed how it began. Which is to say, poorly.
The seventh-seeded Colonials offered little defensive resistance in a 99-88 loss to 10th-seeded Massachusetts in the second round of the Atlantic 10 tournament Thursday, never leading in a postseason game played just a few Metro stops from George Washington’s Foggy Bottom campus.
“All year long, when we had a moment to lean into or step into and an opponent to play against, we just did not step up as a group,” Coach Jamion Christian said.
Joe Bamisile scored 25 points for the Colonials, who lost four of their last five games. They were torched in the first half for 56 points, the most they allowed in any half this season.
They committed 18 turnovers, leading to a 31-13 deficit in points off takeaways.
And they had a lesson first delivered during a 2-8 start and again in two ugly losses to begin A-10 play administered yet again.
“Don’t get punched in the mouth first,” Bamisile said. “We did that starting the season, we did that starting halves, and we always found a way to claw back a little bit. But you can’t get punched in the mouth first.”
Noah Fernandes scored 29 points, his second consecutive game with a career high. The junior also had seven steals — one shy of the A-10 tournament record set by Temple’s Pepe Sanchez in 1999 against Virginia Tech — and seven assists.
The Minutemen (15-16), who snapped a nine-game losing streak against George Washington, will face second-seeded Dayton (22-9) in Friday’s quarterfinals.
Massachusetts is 3-0 since it announced it would fire fifth-year coach Matt McCall, who agreed to remain on the job until the end of the season, and there was little doubt from the opening minutes that McCall would get at least one more game with his team.
Massachusetts opened the scoring with three-pointers by Trent Buttrick and T.J. Weeks Jr., quickly establishing the theme for the night.
“We started off giving up wide-open threes,” junior guard James Bishop said. “Once they started getting wide-open threes, they were able to attack, get in the lane, finish, get switches and get matches that were favorable for them. It’s super-frustrating when you work on something for three or four days and you come out and don’t execute the right way.”
The Colonials never again got within a possession, though they did score nine points in a row in the middle of the first half to close within 25-20.
The Minutemen answered with a Rich Kelly layup and a C.J. Kelly four-point play, and George Washington never seriously threatened again. Massachusetts led 56-36 at the break, shooting 9 of 16 from the outside in the first half.
“To give up nine threes in the first half is completely unacceptable,” Christian said. “That’s not who we are.”
It was the most points scored in the first half of an Atlantic 10 tournament game since Massachusetts had 57 against Rutgers in the 1992 quarterfinals.
Fernandes had 17 points in the second half for the Minutemen, who fell just shy of scoring 100 points in their Atlantic 10 tournament opener for the second year in a row.
“He’s one of the best guards in the league,” McCall said. “I’ll continue to say it long past my tenure at UMass.”
Christian believes he has a few guys on his roster who could claim that honor moving forward.
The group includes Bishop, who entered the day fourth in the league in scoring and had 15 points against the Minutemen. It also includes freshman Brayon Freeman, who had 18 points and seven assists, but was also pickpocketed by Fernandes near midcourt on several occasions and finished with six turnovers.
It also includes the explosive Bamisile, who played sparingly at Virginia Tech last season but improved considerably as he logged more time on the floor. He posted his sixth 25-point outing of the season Thursday, including his third in his last five games.
But getting from the beginning of the season to the end was uneven for him and the entire George Washington program, something Christian hopes will lead to growth in his fourth season with the Colonials.
“I feel like we played inexperienced, we played young,” Christian said. “We played emotionally and allowed the emotions of the game to dictate how fast we could play physically and how smart we could play physically. It’s something we have to get better at. Experience is the best teacher. I’m sure by the time we meet again next year, these guys will be tired of hearing about the experience of this one.” | null | null | null | null | null |
High school student injured, another arrested after gun goes off on basketball team bus
A high school student serving as a trainer for her Dallas school’s boys’ basketball team was injured Wednesday when a gun went off on the team bus. She was subsequently discharged from a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, while a member of the team was arrested.
The incident took place in San Antonio after Dallas Kimball arrived ahead of Thursday’s semifinal game at the Alamodome in the Texas state championships. The rest of the team was allowed by University Interscholastic League officials to play in the game.
The student was shot in her lower left ankle after a gun that had been brought onto the bus in a bag discharged, according to San Antonio’s WOAI-TV.
The Dallas Morning News reported that the Kimball player arrested is an 18-year-old who also played on the school’s football team and had committed to West Texas A&M as a wide receiver. He has reportedly been charged with two gun-related felonies and was being held Thursday at the Bexar County Jail on $40,000 bail.
Spokespeople for the San Antonio Police Department and the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At a news conference Thursday, Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said it was his understanding that a “random discharge” of the gun occurred on the bus. He said Kimball players, coaches and staff went to San Antonio on a chartered bus, held a practice and were on their way to dinner when the trainer was shot in her ankle.
The trainer underwent a surgical procedure but was out of the hospital and on her way back to Dallas with her parents as of Thursday, according to Hinojosa.
Dallas ISD superintendent Michael Hinojosa confirms the victim was a trainer on Kimball's team, and that she was with her parents Thursday and headed back to Dallas. https://t.co/UeV0arpbhm
— Shawn McFarland (@McFarland_Shawn) March 10, 2022
“I am saddened that one of our own students chose to take a firearm on a team bus,” said the superintendent. “That is just unexplainable and inexcusable.”
Hinojosa told reporters that the Kimball player who was arrested will be subject to discipline from the Dallas ISD “to the full extent of our policies” but has greater concerns given that he is 18.
“There are much bigger things he has to worry about,” said Hinojosa, “that are legal matters and criminal matters.”
The superintendent added that he was grateful the UIL let the semifinal game go forward. “They agree with us that you shouldn’t punish the entire team for the actions of a few or an individual,” he said.
The UIL said in a statement (via the Morning News) that it worked with the Dallas ISD to ensure that “students involved in the incident will not be participating in the state tournament,” adding that it has “full confidence in Alamodome security.” Per existing protocols, all bags will be checked upon entry to the arena, Hinojosa said.
Kimball has a matchup with Beaumont United, which defeated the Dallas school in last year’s Class 5A final on a late shot in overtime.
Hinojosa said those circumstances heightened the “emotional” stakes for the rematch, and asserted that the shooting and arrest on the eve of the semifinal game should not “stain the entire team, because they’re an outstanding team.”
“This is extremely disappointing that we’re here, on the verge of another championship [game],” he said, “and we have to endure this situation at our own doing.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Kathleen Scarpone, left, and Cheryl Juaire, second from left, protest in April 2019 in front of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University. Scarpone, who lost her son to OxyContin addiction, addressed three Sackler family members during a virtual U.S. Bankruptcy Court hearing on Thursday. (Josh Reynolds/Associated Press)
“4,804. That is how many days have gone by since I made that horrifying phone call — a call that I never ever dreamed of making,” she said. “A call that I would not have had to make if it weren’t for your unlawful behavior and obsessive greed.”
Kristy Nelson, her husband Bill and 26 other people whose lives were upended by the opioid crisis got their long-awaited chance to confront the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, in a bankruptcy hearing. The historic moment came as Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain tentatively approved a key part of the plan for the Sackler family to contribute up to $6 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits against Purdue over the toll of opioids, providing funds to aid in the fight against the epidemic. As part of the brokered deal that would grant Sackler family members protection from lawsuits, three Sacklers attended Thursday’s unusual hearing, listening to people selected to participate who spoke in the virtual session about losing children, battling addiction and caring for babies born with opioid dependency.
“The Sackler families are pleased to have reached a settlement with additional states that will allow very substantial additional resources to reach people and communities in need," the statement said. "The families have consistently affirmed that settlement is by far the best way to help solve a serious and complex public health crisis. While the families have acted lawfully in all respects, they sincerely regret that OxyContin, a prescription medicine that continues to help people suffering from chronic pain, unexpectedly became part of an opioid crisis that has brought grief and loss to far too many families and communities.”
Ryan Hampton, who took OxyContin to treat knee pain before a decade-long addiction, spoke directly to Richard Sackler, the former chairman and president of Purdue. Hampton, now in recovery for seven years, spoke of the people he knew and loved who died from their addiction.
Ed Bisch, who lost his 18-year-old son Eddie to an overdose in 2001, called the bankruptcy proceedings “a scam,” saying the family should be in criminal court, not bankruptcy.
After playing the 911 call, Kristy Nelson told the Sacklers her son, Bryan, would turn 34 in 12 days. She planned to visit his grave site.
“I understand today’s your birthday, Richard," she said. “How will you be celebrating? I guarantee it won’t be in the cemetery.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Virginia Tech tops Notre Dame in ACC quarterfinals, boosting NCAA tournament outlook
Keve Aluma helped Virginia Tech advance to the ACC tournament semifinals for the fourth time and the first since 2011. (John Minchillo/AP)
NEW YORK — The Virginia Tech men’s basketball team’s uncertain NCAA tournament fortunes received a considerable boost Thursday night, after the Hokies forged an early double-digit lead and blunted a late Notre Dame rally in an 87-80 triumph in an ACC tournament quarterfinal at Barclays Center.
Keve Aluma led a balanced scoring attack with 20 points on 8-of-12 shooting for seventh-seeded Virginia Tech (21-12), which won for the 11th time in 13 games and advanced to the ACC semifinals for the fourth time and the first since 2011.
The Hokies beat No. 2 seed Notre Dame (22-10) for the first time in the ACC tournament to earn the right to play either No. 3 seed North Carolina or sixth-seeded Virginia Friday night — with an opportunity perhaps to remove a layer of drama from Selection Sunday.
“We haven’t talked about it,” Hokies Coach Mike Young said of an NCAA tournament berth that would extend a program-record streak to five in a row. “We know we put ourselves in a tough spot, but I’m going to worry about [Friday. We’re playing a really good opponent in a wonderful postseason tournament.”
Barry Svrluga: Why Jim Boeheim’s first losing season at Syracuse was also his favorite
Leading by double figures for much of the game, Virginia Tech could breathe somewhat easy only when Storm Murphy made consecutive three-pointers, the second with 1:51 to play for a 79-68 lead. Before that, the Fighting Irish had gotten within five points, the closest margin in the second half.
The Hokies missed two front ends of one-and-one chances but sealed the outcome by sinking six consecutive free throws over the final 47 seconds to end Notre Dame’s streak of seven straight wins in its opening game of the ACC tournament.
Five players scored in double figures for Virginia Tech, which shot 57.4 percent, got 19 points from reserves and committed just six turnovers. Murphy had 16 points on 5-of-7 shooting, and Sean Pedulla had 11 of his 13 points during the first half.
The victory came one night after Virginia Tech was in front of Clemson by 11 with a little more than seven minutes left in the second half but allowed the lead to evaporate. The Hokies survived in overtime, 76-75, on Darius Maddox’s three-pointer at the buzzer.
“I mean, [Notre Dame] came back, and that was something we kept saying on the bench,” said Aluma, who added two rebounds, two assists and a steal. “We just wanted to keep them at a distance, so we did that.”
Virginia Tech ran much of its offense through Aluma in the later stages of the second half, and the second-team all-ACC selection obliged by scoring or assisting on 13 consecutive points, including a three-point play to grow the lead to 69-59 with 6:41 to go.
His soft touch led to baskets on floaters and midrange jumpers while his power resulted in a two-handed dunk that brought teammates to their feet and Hokies fans out of their seats. Aluma also demonstrated keen court awareness by attracting defenders and passing to an open Justyn Mutts for a layup.
The first 10 minutes of the second half had Notre Dame threatening to get within single digits more than a half dozen times, but in each instance the Hokies countered with a basket.
The highlight during that stretch was Nahiem Alleyne’s four-point play when he sank a three-pointer from the right corner while drawing a foul on Notre Dame’s Cormac Ryan. Alleyne’s free throw pushed Virginia Tech’s lead to 52-38 with 15:20 left.
The Fighting Irish finally managed to draw within 58-50 with 10:20 to play following Paul Atkinson Jr.’s two-handed dunk and a pair of free throws from Ryan, but Virginia Tech got the lead back to double-digits on Murphy’s reverse layup after a hard cut and a pass from Aluma.
Prentiss Hubb, a native of Bowie, Md., led Notre Dame with a game-high 23 points on 8-of-12 shooting and five assists.
A 42-31 halftime advantage for Virginia Tech featured scoring from eight players and elevated attention to defense that had the Fighting Irish repeatedly attempting contested shots with the shot clock in single digits.
During one exchange the Fighting Irish’s Blake Wesley found himself with the ball well beyond the top of the three-point arc and the shot clock at three seconds. The freshman guard, who grew up in the shadow of Notre Dame, released a jumper, but Mutts blocked the shot, triggering a fast break.
The Hokies stormed to a double-figure lead early in the first half behind a blistering shooting performance, crisp ball movement and a lift off the bench from Pedulla, who had eight point over four minutes.
The largest lead of the half reached 16 points, but Virginia Tech at times labored for clean looks after Notre Dame switched to a zone defense.
“We just had a such a great look about us,” Young said. “We got Aluma started on the first possession of the game. Justyn was awfully, awfully good throughout. We got a couple shots down and I thought put Notre Dame on their heels a little bit, which is very unusual.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Loudoun County loses steam, falls to Varina in Class 4 boys’ title game
Varina's Alphonzo Billups blocks a shot by Loudoun County's Joseph Fitzpatrick during the Virginia Class 4 boys' state championship. (Ryan M. Kelly/For The Washington Post)
RICHMOND — As two Varina players pulled away from the pack into open space, the crowd at VCU’s Siegel Center started to buzz with anticipation. The Loudoun County Captains, who had struggled to keep up with the Richmond power for much of Thursday afternoon’s Class 4 championship game, could only watch the emphatic finish to this fast break.
Blue Devils point guard Kennard Wyche threw the ball off the backboard, and Alphonzo Billups, Varina’s 6-foot-7 star, grabbed the alley and provided an oop. He turned to the large contingent of Varina fans now on their feet and told them where he was from.
“This is my city,” Billups screamed.
It was that kind of day for the Captains, who fell to Varina, 61-35, in their first state championship appearance. A promising start had devolved shortly after the break as the length and athleticism of the Blue Devils was just too much to handle.
By the fourth quarter, the game had turned into a celebration of County’s opponent.
“They were bigger than us, faster than us,” junior forward Nicholas Alexander said. “We thought if we could run our stuff we could compete. We did that for a little bit, but we lost some steam.”
On the defensive end, the Captains (23-7) fared better than most against a Blue Devils offense that dropped 106 points in its state quarterfinal win. But the Varina defense proved to be impenetrable, a fortress of long arms that stifled the Captains all game. Boasting a distinct size advantage, the Blue Devils also dominated the boards, outrebounding Loudoun County 47-25.
After leading by just five at halftime, Varina (26-1) pulled away with a 17-0 run to start the third quarter.
“I knew after we did some good things in the second quarter that they were going to come out with force,” Captains Coach Mark Alexander said. “They knew they were in a game and turned it up a notch.”
Billups, a VCU commit, finished with a game-high 18 points. Alexander was the only Captains player to score in double figures, finishing with 12.
“As a senior, it’s good to go out with a state championship game,” guard Jimmy Daughtrey said. “Not satisfied with how we finished, but even being here is crazy.”
Loudoun County, which opened in 1954 and is one of the older public schools in Northern Virginia, has had plenty of opportunities to reach this stage. But it was this year’s team — a group that had just four seniors, started the season at 2-2 and didn’t even win its district tournament — that made it all the way.
“The game wore us down, but the guys gave it everything,” Mark Alexander said. “They have all year. . . . They’re an incredible group, and they should be proud of how they played today.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Meridian girls’ run of dominance comes to an end in loss to Carroll County in Va. Class 3 title game
Meridian guard Bella Paradiso, left, and forward Megan Tremblay leave the court after losing the Class 3 girls’ state championship to Carroll County in Richmond. (Ryan M. Kelly/For The Washington Post)
RICHMOND — It was unclear whether it was a blessing or a curse, but the Meridian Mustangs entered this season knowing they could win a girls’ basketball state championship.
The program had returned the entire rotation from a 2021 team that went undefeated en route to a Class 3 title, making the goal for this season both extremely simple and extremely challenging: Do it again.
On Thursday night at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Mustangs came up just short of completing that task, falling to Carroll County, 51-47, in the Class 3 final.
“That’s all you want: a state final game decided by a couple of points. It’s a good way to go out,” Mustangs junior forward Elizabeth Creed said. “Win or lose, it’s a good way to go out.”
The loss provided a disappointing and somewhat surprising finish to a dominant season for the Mustangs (24-2). With an experienced roster and up-tempo style of play, Meridian poured on the points all winter, winning by an average of 31.9. The Mustangs’ only loss came in early December against Yorktown, a Class 6 program.
But Thursday’s final was not like any of those two dozen freewheeling blowouts. It was a tense, possession-by-possession game against a Cavaliers team that had the talent to match the Mustangs. Whereas Meridian was going for the sixth state title in program history, Carroll County was chasing its first and every Cavaliers basket drew a deafening response from the southwest Virginian crowd.
“This was one of two games that was remotely close for us this year,” said senior guard Zoraida Icabalceta, who finished with 11 points. “So for me, it was fun. I like the pressure of every possession.”
The Cavaliers held a slim lead for much of the second half, but Meridian appeared to make its move midway through the fourth. The Mustangs led by four with three minutes remaining, but missed free throws and turnovers proved costly down the stretch.
“Toward the end of the game we had our chances,” Mustangs Coach Chris Carrico said. “That’s all you can ask for.”
A season that had been played with such remarkable speed and success ended slowly and painfully for the Mustangs as Carroll County sank one free throw after another to put the game away.
“These girls have set a standard for our program,” Carrico said. “This was our second loss in two years. Not only on the court but also off the court — the basketball program at Meridian has been in good hands with this group.” | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a news briefing after a weekly Senate Democratic policy luncheon at the U.S. Capitol March 8, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
And the emergency package further empowers Washington to enforce the significant, crippling sanctions it has levied on Russia and its political elite in recent weeks. The money underscores a broader, global strategy to maximize economic pressure on the country and its leader, President Vladimir Putin, in a bid to force him to rethink the war.
The total, $13.6 billion in assistance arrives days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered an emotional plea to U.S. lawmakers, urging them to act swiftly and decisively to help his war-torn country. The U.S. government has not provided the fuller range of military support that Zelensky seeks, as Washington scrambles to steer clear of a direct confrontation with a fellow nuclear superpower. But the aid that lawmakers did approve still amounts to a significant sum, which the Biden administration previously said it could look to augment further if the conflict continues to worsen.
The sweeping endeavor paves the way for major funding increases at top federal agencies overseeing health care, science, education, labor and defense. It replaces a series of patchwork agreements that had essentially kept federal agencies’ normal operating budgets flat in the first year of Biden’s term, denying the White House an opportunity until now to translate some of its broader policy ambitions into reality. And it reauthorizes the Violence Against Women Act, a law that lapsed three years ago that aids and protects women in response to sexual assault, domestic violence and other crimes.
In providing aid to Ukraine, lawmakers overcame the initial partisanship that had divided their response to the conflict, after they failed to muster sufficient support to adopt their own sanctions package earlier this year. The shifting political winds reflected the harsh reality of Russia’s military invasion, which has ravaged Ukrainian cities with deadly attacks that have intensified by the day.
“This is not a way to run a railroad,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) in a speech, lamenting that many members had little time to review the entire, roughly 2,700-page bill before the vote. “But we all know democracy is under attack in the world, and that means we need to do everything we can to provide for our defense and support our friends and allies.”
Democrats and Republicans signaled this week there are a wide array of additional measures on the horizon, including new legislation to punish Russia. That includes a growing, bipartisan push in the House and Senate to end normal U.S. trade relations with the country, opening the door for tariffs on Russian goods. The idea initially had been included as part of a bill approved in the House on Wednesday to ban U.S. imports of Russian oil, affirming a policy Biden enacted on his own. But Democrats removed the trade section at the request of the president’s aides, who felt it needed to coordinate more with its allies.
Republicans, meanwhile, have pushed aggressively for additional lethal aid to Ukraine — including more military equipment. Taking to the Senate floor earlier Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blasted the Biden administration for failing to provide aircraft and other materiel to the fight. A broader group of Republicans led by Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa later called on the president to “provide urgently needed airport that will bolster the ability of the Ukrainian armed forces to defend their country and help save civilian lives.”
In total, it sets federal domestic, discretionary spending at a level of $730 billion, an amount that covers significant boosts at agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor and the Department of Education. The money allows the Biden administration to proceed with a series of key initiatives, including the work to implement a $1.2 trillion infrastructure law adopted last year to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections.
With it, lawmakers agreed to spend more on the Defense Department, with funding levels slated to rise to $742 billion under the soon-to-be enacted law. That includes new money to finance a planned pay increase for U.S. troops. Republicans demanded the budget boost at the Pentagon in marathon talks with Democrats, who had fought for long-sought cuts — but conceded the increases at DOD anyway to achieve their domestic priorities. It prompted Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) to herald the trajectory of the talks at a time when he said “political compromise has become more and more difficult here.”
The Senate adopted the overall package after a series of sharp exchanges on the chamber floor, punctuated by votes over politically minded amendments. Once again, Republicans led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah tried defund federal vaccine and testing policies in response to the coronavirus — and once again the GOP gambit failed.
Another GOP amendment by Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) would have canceled billions of dollars in earmarks, since lawmakers for the first time in a decade could request and obtain money for local infrastructure improvements and other pet projects. But Democrats and Republicans defeated that proposal as well, a reflection of their shared satisfaction with the return of a process that allows them to bring money home to their states and districts.
“The bottom line is, if you wanna help the Ukrainian people out,” Tester said, “then pass the omnibus bill that’s in front of us.” | null | null | null | null | null |
This article was published more than 5 years ago
How a blogger in Ohio discovered a runner in Florida cheating in a half-marathon
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For a fleeting moment, she had everyone fooled.
And why not? After all, 24-year-old Harvard graduate Jane Seo is a food and fitness writer in New York City, penning such pieces as “How I Learned to Love Running, One Race at a Time” and “Four Reasons Why I Keep Running Obstacle Races, One After Another” for the Huffington Post. So when she finished second among the women in Sunday’s Fort Lauderdale Half Marathon with a bright smile on her face, one couldn’t help but be impressed.
After all, she finished in 1 hour and 21 minutes, meaning she ran a blazing 6:15 mile. The women’s world record is held by Florence Kiplagat, for a time of 1:05:09.
What was even more incredible — and what tipped race timer Josh Stern off to the fact that something fishy was afoot — was that Seo ran faster miles in the second half of the race. Though runners often try to maintain a steady pace for the whole shebang, exhaustion forces most to slow down as they near the finish line.
As noted in the Miami New Times, Stern voiced his concerns to race director Matt Lorraine, but Seo convinced him that all was on the up-and-up. Her second place finish stood.
Someone, though, wasn’t convinced and tipped off Derek Murphy, an independent marathon investigator. Murphy, a former distance runner himself, has dedicated his time away from work trying to bust cheating road warriors by using the 21st century’s best tools: data collected in our interconnected world. He posts his findings to his blog, Marathon Investigation, which he maintains from his home in Ohio.
The work has real world consequences, too — he has caught several runners who qualified for the Boston Marathon by cheating, taking spots from honest runners.
“I think most people aren’t aware of how much cheating goes on in marathons,” Murphy told NBC last month.
Murphy began investigating and quickly learned that Seo had, indeed, cheated by skipping about a mile and a half of the race. As a result, she has been retroactively disqualified from the half-marathon and was expelled from the Dashing Whippets, the team with which she raced.
“As some of you may be aware, one of our members intentionally cut the course at a Half Marathon this past weekend. The member in question has admitted to cheating, has been officially disqualified from the race, and has apologized to the DWRT Board,” the organization said in a statement.
In a lengthy blog post, the sleuth explained how he exposed the runner.
Murphy began by examining the official results from the race tracker — a small electronic chip runners wear that incrementally tracks their time during a race — that caught Stern’s attention. Her pace during the first 10 kilometers was 7:09 per mile. During the last 11.08 kilometers, it increased tremendously to 5:25 per mile.
Seeking further data, he turned to her account on Strava, a social media app where runners and cyclists post their times. She had posted but rather than let the app pull her info from GPS data, she manually entered just her time, distance and pace.
Stranger still, later that day, she posted the full entry showing more information: her path, splits, cadence and heart rate. Though it showed that she completed the entire course, something struck Murphy.
He wrote, “She had this labeled as a run, and the total time *almost* matches her original time for the 1/2 marathon. The cadence data is more consistent with what you would expect on a bike ride, not a run.”
The app includes a (somewhat hidden) feature that indicates what time a run (or bike ride) took place. When Murphy checked this, he found this second posting showed “that she actually covered this course in the afternoon — long after the race was complete.”
Next came the bombshell. He observed in official post-race photos that a Garmin 235 fitness tracking watch was wrapped around Seo’s wrist. So he purchased the high resolution photographs and zoomed in.
It displayed close to the proper time, 1:22:07.
But the incorrect mileage: 11.65 total miles.
Murphy wrote, “This shows about 1-1/2 miles were cut. Her total time on the watch is 22 seconds longer than her initial finishing time — showing that she did indeed start the watch when she crossed the starting line.”
He told the Miami New Times that he informed Seo of his findings Monday, but she continued claiming her time was legitimate. Until later that night, when she posted an Instagram post she’s since removed. Murphy grabbed a screenshot, though.
“I made a HORRIBLE choice,” it read. “I wasn’t feeling well so I CUT THE COURSE and headed to the finish line. I got swept away in the moment and pretended I ran the entire course, when in fact I CHEATED and should have DISQUALIFIED myself.”
Murphy told the Miami New Times that Seo finally admitted to riding her bike along the course later in the day to cover her tracks. He concluded:
Whether the decision was pre-planned or spur of the moment, her actions after she crossed the finish line are what cannot be justified. This wasn’t a case of getting tired and calling it a day. This was an intentional act of deception as evidenced by her admission that she biked the course to try to cover her tracks.
Had she just gone straight back to her hotel, she would have been initially disqualified and the correct runners would have received the awards.
“Had she just admitted what she did, I never would have heard of her, nor written about her,” Murphy told the Miami New Times. “But going back and biking the course to cover up … that’s unheard of.”
Seo appears to have disabled her social media accounts. | null | null | null | null | null |
INDIANAPOLIS — The Maryland Terrapins refused to let go — all season and here in their last game. They trudged through this mostly disappointing campaign after their coach stepped down in December, and then in this Big Ten tournament matchup against Michigan State, they held onto hope through the final moments of a 76-72 loss, even when a 20-point deficit in the second half suggested defeat was inevitable.
The 10th-seeded Terps earned a chance to take the lead in the waning moments after video review ruled that a Michigan State inbounds pass had gone out of bounds off the hand of a Spartan. Down two with 15 seconds remaining, Maryland point guard Fatts Russell missed a step-back three-pointer. Michigan State’s Max Christie secured the defensive rebound. The Terps had to foul, Christie made his free throws and the Spartans survived.
But now Russell’s college career is over. After the final buzzer, he placed his hands on his head and paused on the court. He walked to the back of the handshake line and hunched over while receiving a few consolation pats on his back. Russell scored 20 points, including seven in the final three minutes. His three-pointer with 1:33 remaining cut Michigan State’s lead to 68-65, making it a one-possession game for the first time since the first half. Fellow senior Eric Ayala scored 17 points on 5-of-17 shooting and contributed a key layup with 16 seconds to go to trim the deficit to two.
The Terps fell into the large hole because they had few defensive answers against the Spartans, who shot 57.1 percent from the field in the first half and made 7 of 11 three-pointers. Michigan State cooled a bit after the break, finishing with a 50 percent mark from the field, as Maryland managed to narrow its deficit. Throughout the game, the Terps couldn’t get much out of its frontcourt. Starting center Qudus Wahab and freshman forward Julian Reese combined to go 0-for-5 from the field and didn’t score.
The Terps entered the postseason far from the NCAA tournament field, but the players held onto hope that they could make a run in Indianapolis. Heading into this game, Manning mentioned “the magic of March,” and the players dreamed of extending their season.
This season began with lofty expectations, and an influx of transfers believed they had arrived at a school that would compete for championships. Instead, this group of seniors — three newcomers and a four-year starter in Ayala — found themselves weathering a turbulent few months after Mark Turgeon stepped down as coach in December. Since then, they’ve tried to salvage memorable moments amid the chaos. | null | null | null | null | null |
The emergency package further empowers Washington to enforce the significant, crippling sanctions it has levied on Russia and its political elite in recent weeks. The money underscores a broader global strategy to maximize economic pressure on the country and its leader, President Vladimir Putin, in a bid to force him to rethink the war.
The total $13.6 billion in assistance arrives days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered an emotional plea to U.S. lawmakers, urging them to act swiftly and decisively to help his war-torn country. The U.S. government has not provided the fuller range of military support that Zelensky seeks, as Washington scrambles to steer clear of a direct confrontation with a fellow nuclear superpower. But the aid that lawmakers did approve still amounts to a significant sum, which the Biden administration previously said it could look to augment further if the conflict continues to worsen.
The sweeping endeavor paves the way for major funding increases at top federal agencies overseeing health care, science, education, labor and defense. It replaces patchwork agreements that had essentially kept federal agencies’ normal operating budgets flat in the first year of Biden’s term, denying the White House an opportunity until now to translate some of its broader policy ambitions into reality. And it reauthorizes the Violence Against Women Act, a law that lapsed three years ago that aids and protects women in response to sexual assault, domestic violence and other crimes.
In providing aid to Ukraine, lawmakers overcame the initial partisanship that had divided their response to the conflict, after they failed to muster sufficient support to adopt their own sanctions package this year. The shifting political winds reflected the harsh reality of Russia’s military invasion, which has ravaged Ukrainian cities with deadly attacks that have intensified by the day.
“This is not a way to run a railroad,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) in a speech, lamenting that many members had little time to review the roughly 2,700-page bill before the vote. “But we all know democracy is under attack in the world, and that means we need to do everything we can to provide for our defense and support our friends and allies.”
Democrats and Republicans signaled this week that there are a wide array of additional measures on the horizon, including new legislation to punish Russia. That includes a growing bipartisan push in the House and Senate to end normal U.S. trade relations with the country, opening the door for tariffs on Russian goods. The idea initially had been included as part of a bill approved in the House on Wednesday to ban U.S. imports of Russian oil, affirming a policy Biden enacted on his own. But Democrats removed the trade section at the request of the president’s aides, who felt it needed to coordinate more with its allies.
Republicans, meanwhile, have pushed aggressively for additional lethal aid to Ukraine — including more military equipment. Taking to the Senate floor earlier Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blasted the Biden administration for not providing aircraft and other materiel to the fight. A broader group of Republicans led by Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa later called on the president to “provide urgently needed airport that will bolster the ability of the Ukrainian armed forces to defend their country and help save civilian lives.”
In total, it sets federal domestic, discretionary spending at a level of $730 billion, an amount that covers significant boosts at agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Labor Department and the Education Department. The money allows the Biden administration to proceed with key initiatives, including the work to implement a $1.2 trillion infrastructure law adopted last year to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections.
With it, lawmakers agreed to spend more on the Defense Department, with funding levels slated to rise to $742 billion under the soon-to-be enacted law. That includes new money to finance a planned pay increase for U.S. troops. Republicans demanded the budget boost at the Pentagon in marathon talks with Democrats, who had fought for long-sought cuts — but conceded the increases at the Defense Department anyway to achieve their domestic priorities. It prompted Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) to herald the trajectory of the talks at a time when he said “political compromise has become more and more difficult here.”
The Senate adopted the overall package after sharp exchanges on the chamber floor, punctuated by votes over politically minded amendments. Once again, Republicans led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah tried defund federal vaccine and testing policies in response to the coronavirus — and once again, the GOP gambit failed.
Another GOP amendment by Sen. Mike Braun (Ind.) would have canceled billions of dollars in earmarks, since lawmakers for the first time in a decade could request and obtain money for local infrastructure improvements and other pet projects. But Democrats and Republicans defeated that proposal as well, a reflection of their shared satisfaction with the return of a process that allows them to bring money home to their states and districts.
“The bottom line is if you want to help the Ukrainian people out,” Tester said, “then pass the omnibus bill that’s in front of us.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Kent Waldrep, right, with racecar driver Bob Hurt, left, and jockey Ron Turcotte, announce the formation of a foundation for spinal cord research in 1979. All three men were injured in sporting events. (Kupper/AP)
“The next thing I remember is the turf coming at me and then a sensation that will always be with me,” Mr. Kent recounted. “At the moment my head hit the artificial turf, I sensed I was upside-down and then floating in a horizontal position. Then there was nothing. It was as if my head had been amputated from the rest of my body.”
The university’s insurance carrier appealed, however, and in 1997 a Texas jury found that Mr. Waldrep was not an employee of TCU and thus was not entitled to workers’ compensation benefits. Mr. Waldrep appealed but lost. | null | null | null | null | null |
Oakdale's Alex Hawkins pulls down a second-half rebound over Huntingtown's Jayden Holland during the Maryland 3A boys' state title game at Xfinity Center. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)
After Coach Tobias Jenifer and his Huntingtown boys’ basketball players were seated behind a table in Xfinity Center’s interview room, a Maryland athletic association employee asked Jenifer for an opening statement following a 61-40 loss to Oakdale in the Maryland 3A boys’ state championship game.
“Just looking at the stat sheet,” Jenifer said after an 18-second pause. “They were better than us tonight.”
Jenifer paused again.
“I feel like I let these guys down,” Jenifer said after another 20 seconds while fighting back tears. Guard Kyle Jones, sitting next to him, placed his hand on Jenifer’s left shoulder.
Jenifer and Huntingtown needed time to process what had transpired in College Park. The Hurricanes were strong all winter, contending in the Southern Maryland Athletic Conference and qualifying for their first state championship game.
On the biggest stage, however, Huntingtown (21-4) never found a rhythm.
“We just didn’t come out like we wanted to play, as a whole team,” Huntingtown forward Jayden Holland said. “Once you’re in the state finals, and you let a team come out and just punch you in the mouth like that, it’s hard to come back. That’s exactly what we let them do.”
Huntingtown has long prided itself on defense. When the Calvert County school opened in 2004, basketball coaches posted a blue-and-white sign in the gym that reads “THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS.” But Huntingtown trailed 32-13 with 2:30 remaining in the first half.
The Hurricanes capped the half with a 10-0 run, cutting the deficit to single digits. Oakdale (21-6) opened the third quarter with back-to-back three-pointers and led by 20 points with just under four minutes remaining.
Jenifer said his team was still feeling the effect of playing 48 hours earlier, when the Hurricanes upset Baltimore City College in double overtime, rallying from a fourth-quarter deficit.
“If we could have had an extra day to recover and get our legs back under us,” said Jenifer, who graduated from Huntingtown in 2009, “maybe there’s a different result or maybe the margin isn’t as big.”
After Huntingtown pulled its starters, forward Roger Jones Jr. converted Huntingtown’s second three-pointer of the game with about five seconds remaining. Huntingtown’s fans erupted in cheers, but they grew quiet moments later when the buzzer sounded and Oakdale players stormed the court.
“I’m proud of my team at the end of the day,” said Jones, who scored a team-high 12 points. “They might feel some type of way; they might feel hurt. But at the end of the day, I feel like we had such a successful season. You can’t even hang your head that much.” | null | null | null | null | null |
INDIANAPOLIS — The Maryland Terrapins refused to let go — all season and here in their last game. They trudged through this mostly disappointing campaign after their coach stepped down in December, and then in this Big Ten tournament matchup against Michigan State, they held on to hope through the final moments of a 76-72 loss, even when a 20-point deficit in the second half suggested defeat was inevitable.
The 10th-seeded Terps earned a chance to take the lead in the waning moments after video review ruled that a Michigan State inbounds pass had gone out of bounds off the hand of a Spartan. Down two with 15 seconds remaining, Maryland point guard Fatts Russell missed a step-back three-pointer. Michigan State’s Max Christie secured the defensive rebound. The Terps had to foul, Christie made his free throws, and the Spartans survived.
But now Russell’s college career is over. After the final buzzer, he placed his hands on his head and paused on the court. He walked to the back of the handshake line and hunched over while receiving a few consolation pats on his back. Russell scored 20 points, including seven in the final three minutes. His three-pointer with 1:33 remaining cut Michigan State’s lead to 68-65, making it a one-possession game for the first time since the first half. Fellow senior Eric Ayala scored 17 points on 5-for-17 shooting and contributed a key layup with 16 seconds to go to trim the deficit to two.
The Terps fell into the large hole because they had few defensive answers against the Spartans, who shot 57.1 percent from the field in the first half and made 7 of 11 three-pointers. Michigan State cooled a bit after the break, finishing with a 50 percent mark from the field, as Maryland managed to narrow its deficit. Throughout the game, the Terps couldn’t get much out of its frontcourt. Starting center Qudus Wahab and freshman forward Julian Reese combined to go 0 for 5 from the field and didn’t score.
The Terps entered the postseason far from the NCAA tournament field, but the players were determined to make a run in Indianapolis. Heading into this game, Manning mentioned “the magic of March,” and the players dreamed of extending their season.
This season began with lofty expectations, and an influx of transfers believed they had arrived at a school that would compete for championships. Instead, this group of seniors — three newcomers and a four-year starter in Ayala — found themselves weathering a turbulent few months after Mark Turgeon stepped down as coach in December. Since then, they have tried to salvage memorable moments amid the chaos. | null | null | null | null | null |
“Certainly a disappointing loss,” said Bennett. “Credit to Carolina for how hard they played and how hard they guarded us. When we did get some decent quality looks and we didn’t hit them, that kind of gets in you, and then it puts a lot pressure on our defense. We didn’t have an answer for stretches.”
“What’s going through our mind is we have to get stops to keep us in the game when shots aren’t falling," said Shedrick. "Hopefully, eventually they will fall. They didn’t, but keep shooting good shots. I think we were getting good looks.” | null | null | null | null | null |
After centuries of pogroms and emigration driven by antisemitism, followed by the devastation of the Holocaust in World War II, and then Soviet repression, recent decades brought a flourishing of synagogues, Jewish schools and community centers. Estimates of how many Jews remained vary, in part because of differences in how Jewish communities define who is Jewish. But Jewish aid organizations estimate that 200,000 Ukrainian Jews — some religious, many more not — were integrated into the life of the country. The most notable part of secular President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewishness was that it was barely considered a factor in his 2019 campaign.
With an exodus from Ukraine underway — more than 2 million people, mainly women and children, have fled — Ukrainian Jews are pouring out of the country or digging in to fight, and the turmoil could spell the beginning of another ending for what was so meticulously rebuilt.
“Over 30 years we built an amazing community,” said Avraham Wolff, 52, a rabbi who moved from Israel to Odessa, Ukraine, in 1992, as an emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which is known for global outreach. “And it’s a shame that it has come to this.”
A consortium of Jewish groups at six border crossings has shepherded at least 3,000 Ukrainians who identify as Jewish into neighboring Moldova and an estimated 3,000 more into Poland, Hungary and Romania, Michael Geller, the director of media relations for the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief organization involved in the effort, said Sunday.
In addition, the Jewish Agency for Israel, which supports Jewish migration to Israel; the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a Jerusalem-based organization; and Chabad, which is headquartered in New York, are among those who have teamed up to help Jews fleeing the war in Ukraine.
Like most Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60, Jewish men are being conscripted and barred from leaving. Others of Jewish heritage are making the choice to stay and fight or help otherwise. And for some, including many of the elderly, the exit journey would be too arduous. But thousands more are still trying to reach safety.
But a subset will travel on to Israel: Some will become citizens under a law allowing all Jews to immigrate. About 5,000 will be able to stay temporarily if they do not meet the criteria, under revised rules that Israel announced Tuesday.
As of March 9, the Jewish Agency said it had vetted and helped more than 1,000 Jews migrate to Israel so far. Overall, some 2,000 Jewish Ukrainians had come to the agency’s Israeli immigration centers set up along borders in partnership with IFCJ. The agencies rented over 4,000 beds near the borders to temporarily accommodate refugees.
Many more may pursue that route over the course of the conflict: Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said Tuesday that Israel also was preparing to absorb up to 100,000 Jews and non-Jewish close family members from Ukraine, Russia and other Eastern European countries who may flee as the war deepens.
Odessa, Ukraine’s third-most-populous city, once was a pillar of European Jewish life. In the city of Uman, a shrine to a famous early-19th-century rabbi remains a pilgrimage site.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, pogroms — riots incited to terrorize and kill Jews — led many across the Russian Empire to emigrate.
Periods of relative calm did not last. During World War II, Nazi Germany and its allies killed an estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews, out of the 6 million Jews who died across Europe. One of the Holocaust’s worst massacres occurred in 1941 in a ravine called Babyn Yar on Kyiv’s outskirts. In several days, Nazi death squads killed more than 30,000 Jews as part of campaigns across the Soviet Union.
Zelensky’s family was among the few hundred thousand Jews who stayed in the hope that they would have more opportunities in the new Ukraine.
In the post-Cold War decades, Chabad and other Orthodox Jewish groups made an effort to help revive Jewish and religious life in Ukraine.
Last week, the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro emerged as a tentative haven from Russian shelling. The city’s massive, decade-old Menorah Center, a complex hailed as a symbol of persistence after centuries of challenges, reportedly became a warehouse for food stores as the people of the city braced for whatever came next.
In an address to American Jewish organizations Monday, Zelensky likened the threat posed to Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin to that posed by Nazi Germany. Putin has claimed falsely that Zelensky and his government are Nazis, a refrain that resonates with parts of the Russian public. | null | null | null | null | null |
A jury in the northern city of Darwin found that officer Zachary Rolfe, 30, had acted properly when he fatally shot 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker in the remote Outback town of Yuendumu in late 2019. He was also found not guilty of two alternative charges; manslaughter and engaging in a violent act causing death.
The verdict, which came a few days after a similar police shooting in Darwin, sparked dueling scenes of sadness and joy. Rolfe hugged his parents and high-fived supporters after the verdict.
“Obviously I think that was the right decision to make,” he said, acknowledging that “a lot of people are hurting today."
As he spoke, Walker’s family and members of the Aboriginal community wailed and wept inside the courthouse.
“We are deeply disappointed and though we have been given a trial, I can’t with honesty say that it has been fair,” his cousin, Samara Fernandez-Brown, told reporters as tears rolled down her face. Defense attorneys had falsely portrayed Walker as a dangerous person, she said.
“They saw only his flaws and wished to put him on trial for his own death,” she said. “That’s disgusting.”
Fatal shootings by police are relatively rare in Australia, a nation of 25 million people. Only six people were shot dead by officers in the fiscal year that ended in June. But the case has also dovetailed with growing concerns over deaths of Indigenous people in custody in a country still reckoning with race and its colonial past.
After about a day of deliberation, the court announced Friday morning the jury had reached a verdict. Signs of stress within the 12-member panel began to appear the day before, when Justice John Burns read a note from a juror saying another member was “extremely emotional,” crying, and “not focusing on the facts but rather what-ifs.”
Burns had previously warned the jury not to let “emotion or sympathy” guide them.
As the foreperson delivered the verdict, scores of people crowded inside the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, including relatives of Rolfe and Walker. The defendant, who would have faced a minimum of 20 years in prison if convicted of murder, was stone-faced as she said “not guilty” three times.
Surrounded by news cameras outside the courthouse, Rolfe would not say whether he planned to return to duty as a police officer. He and his attorneys quickly left.
Yuendumu elder Ned Hargraves couldn’t contain his anger at the verdict.
“When are we going to get justice!” he shouted from his wheelchair, adding that police should not bring guns into remote Aboriginal communities. “We do not want to see another black young fella or a girl to be shot.” | null | null | null | null | null |
About 80,000 have recently fled areas under Russian siege, Ukraine official says
Air raid sirens sounded repeatedly across numerous Ukrainian cities overnight, as people continue to flee the Russian military assault. More than 2.3 million refugees have departed Ukraine since Feb. 24, according to the United Nations, with 80,000 alone fleeing from areas north and east of Kyiv through humanitarian corridors in the last two days, according to a senior Ukrainian official.
While Ukrainian refugees have been welcomed across the continent, the European Union has held off on instantly granting Kyiv membership. European leaders said late Thursday that they had asked the E.U.'s executive arm to review Ukraine’s application, but that the bloc would also immediately “further strengthen our bonds and deepen our partnership to support Ukraine in pursuing its European path.”
Meanwhile, the lumbering Russian military convoy that was stalled for days on the outskirts of Kyiv appears to be dispersing and redeploying, according to satellite images taken Thursday. Some equipment from the convoy was seen repositioned about 20 miles from the capital, with artillery set up in firing position. Britain warned that Russia could be seeking to re-posture its troops and launch operations against Kyiv.
When asked at a news conference alongside the Polish President if Washington would support an international investigation into alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Vice President Harris said “absolutely.”
Her remarks came as Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Russia’s aggression against Ukraine constituted war crimes during an appearance on the BBC’s “Newshour.” Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, also told lawmakers Thursday that Russian forces were “at the very least, operating with reckless disregard for the safety of civilians.”
The International Criminal Court can investigate and prosecute people accused of war crimes such as genocide. Although Ukraine and Russia have not ratified the Rome Statute, the court’s foundation document, Kyiv has twice said it would accept the court’s jurisdiction in its territories for alleged acts committed from November 2013. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Sara Cline | AP
City of Seattle workers remove tents, trash, and personal belongings from a stretch of sidewalk across from City Hall that had been used by people experiencing homelessness, on March 9, 2022, in Seattle. For years, liberal cities in the U.S have tolerated people living in tents in parks and public spaces, but increasingly leaders in places like Portland, Oregon, New York and Seattle are removing encampments and pushing other strict measures that would’ve been unheard of a few years ago. (The Seattle Times via AP) (Uncredited/The Seattle Times) | null | null | null | null | null |
More than 40 Republican U.S. senators on Thursday called for President Biden to aid “the transfer of aircraft and air defense systems” to Ukraine after officials quashed Poland’s offer to send fighter jets with American help.
The senators said in a letter that they “strongly disagree” with the Biden administration’s stance on Poland’s proposal, and that the Ukrainian military is in “dire need of more lethal aid” as it fights Russia’s invasion. They urged the president to work with NATO allies on providing those resources — uniting behind a step that U.S. officials worry could pull the Western alliance into war.
American officials have criticized Poland’s proposal to transfer MiG-29 jets through the United States as risking escalation without significantly changing the situation in Ukraine, given that Ukraine’s air force is largely intact. Asked about the senator’s letter Thursday evening, White House spokesperson Sean Savett noted comments from the Pentagon and the U.S. military commander in Europe expressing those views.
The GOP lawmakers’ letter increases pressure on the Biden administration to go further and underscores the party’s support for major actions against the Kremlin. The White House announced a ban on Russian oil and natural gas imports this week with bipartisan support, and Congress passed a multibillion-dollar aid package for Ukraine that would provide military and humanitarian support and help NATO allies.
Speaking earlier at a news conference, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) dismissed concerns about provoking Russia and said the United States should fulfill a specific request from Ukraine. “It’s time … for [Putin] to fear what we might do," Romney said, referring to the United States and NATO.
Many nations have responded to Russia’s invasion with sanctions, but they have been unwilling to join Ukraine’s fight with a superpower. The United States is wary of military aid that Russia could interpret as more direct involvement in the war.
The United States quickly rejected the idea: “We do not believe Poland’s proposal is a tenable one,” Pentagon’s spokesman John Kirby said. He said such jets “departing from a U.S./NATO base in Germany to fly into airspace that is contested with Russia over Ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance.”
“We believe the most effective way to support the Ukrainian military in their fight against Russia is to provide increased amounts of anti-tank weapons and air defense systems, which is on-going with the international community,” Wolters said in the statement.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said last week that he would work to grant Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “desperate plea” for planes from countries in Eastern Europe. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a letter Monday, urging quick coordination with Poland to “provide Soviet-era jets to Ukraine.” He said the United States and NATO allies should commit to replacing donated aircraft.
Those comments came before Poland’s proposal that its Russian-made MiG-29 jets be placed “at the disposal of the Government of the United States of America" and go to Ramstein Air Base, an American facility in Germany.
Thursday’s letter from GOP lawmakers sharpens a contrast between their posture on Ukraine and comments last month from former president Donald Trump, who called Putin’s actions in separatist regions of Ukraine “genius” while repeating the Russian president’s claims of sending a “peacekeeper” force.
Speaking more recently to top GOP donors, Trump struck a different tone, rejecting suggestions that he is a “Putin apologist” and mocking Biden for ruling out military engagement with Russia. | null | null | null | null | null |
Alcorn State puts home win streak on the line against Alabama A&M
Alabama A&M Bulldogs (12-17, 10-8 SWAC) vs. Alcorn State Braves (16-15, 14-4 SWAC)
Birmingham, Alabama; Friday, 9:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Alcorn State hosts Alabama A&M looking to prolong its five-game home winning streak.
The Braves have gone 6-3 in home games. Alcorn State is 3-9 against opponents over .500.
The Bulldogs are 10-8 in SWAC play. Alabama A&M has a 3-3 record in one-possession games.
The teams play each other for the second time this season. Alcorn State won the last meeting 78-71 on Jan. 8. Keondre Montgomery scored 27 to help lead Alcorn State to the victory, and Garrett Hicks scored 22 points for Alabama A&M.
TOP PERFORMERS: Lenell Henry is averaging 8.3 points and 5.4 rebounds for the Braves. Justin Thomas is averaging 9.8 points over the last 10 games for Alcorn State.
Jalen Johnson is averaging 15.8 points and 7.2 rebounds for the Bulldogs. Cameron Tucker is averaging 10.8 points, 5.3 rebounds and 3.8 assists over the last 10 games for Alabama A&M. | null | null | null | null | null |
Fordham hosts Loyer and Davidson
Fordham Rams (16-15, 8-10 A-10) vs. Davidson Wildcats (25-5, 15-3 A-10)
Washington; Friday, 12 p.m. EST
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Davidson -11; over/under is 131.5
BOTTOM LINE: Davidson plays the Fordham Rams after Foster Loyer scored 25 points in Davidson’s 82-76 loss to the Dayton Flyers.
The Wildcats have gone 13-1 in home games. Davidson is third in the A-10 with 14.7 assists per game led by Loyer averaging 3.4.
The Rams are 8-10 against A-10 opponents. Fordham ranks second in the A-10 with 25.4 defensive rebounds per game led by Chuba Ohams averaging 8.7.
The teams meet for the third time this season. The Wildcats won 66-45 in the last matchup on Feb. 26. Sam Mennenga led the Wildcats with 17 points, and Ohams led the Rams with 15 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Loyer is averaging 16.8 points and 3.4 assists for the Wildcats. Hyunjung Lee is averaging 11.4 points over the past 10 games for Davidson.
Antrell Charlton is averaging 7.5 points, 5.4 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 1.7 steals for the Rams. Ohams is averaging 11.3 points over the last 10 games for Fordham. | null | null | null | null | null |
Grand Canyon visits New Mexico State after Allen's 20-point showing
Grand Canyon Antelopes (24-7, 12-5 WAC) vs. New Mexico State Aggies (25-6, 13-4 WAC)
BOTTOM LINE: New Mexico State faces the Grand Canyon Antelopes after Teddy Allen scored 20 points in New Mexico State’s 62-46 win against the Utah Valley Wolverines.
The Aggies have gone 13-2 in home games. New Mexico State has a 3-2 record in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Antelopes have gone 12-5 against WAC opponents. Grand Canyon is ninth in the WAC scoring 68.9 points per game and is shooting 42.8%.
The teams play each other for the third time this season. New Mexico State won the last meeting 82-66 on Feb. 20. Allen scored 30 to help lead New Mexico State to the win, and Holland Woods scored 22 points for Grand Canyon.
TOP PERFORMERS: Allen is averaging 19.4 points and 6.9 rebounds for the Aggies. Jabari Rice is averaging 9.9 points over the last 10 games for New Mexico State.
Jovan Blacksher Jr. is scoring 16.2 points per game and averaging 2.8 rebounds for the Antelopes. Woods is averaging 15.7 points and 2.3 rebounds over the last 10 games for Grand Canyon.
Antelopes: 8-2, averaging 69.4 points, 30.9 rebounds, 9.7 assists, 4.9 steals and 1.3 blocks per game while shooting 42.2% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 61.6 points. | null | null | null | null | null |
Middle Tennessee hosts Walker and UAB
UAB Blazers (25-7, 14-4 C-USA) vs. Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders (23-9, 13-5 C-USA)
Frisco, Texas; Friday, 3 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: UAB takes on the Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders after Jordan Walker scored 26 points in UAB’s 80-66 victory over the Florida Atlantic Owls.
The Blue Raiders have gone 15-0 at home. Middle Tennessee is seventh in C-USA scoring 73.7 points while shooting 44.7% from the field.
The Blazers are 14-4 against C-USA opponents. UAB averages 80.0 points and has outscored opponents by 14.9 points per game.
The teams meet for the second time this season. The Blazers won 97-75 in the last matchup on Feb. 5. Walker led the Blazers with 42 points, and Josh Jefferson led the Blue Raiders with 19 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jefferson is scoring 14.7 points per game with 3.2 rebounds and 1.9 assists for the Blue Raiders. Eli Lawrence is averaging 10.6 points over the past 10 games for Middle Tennessee.
Walker is averaging 19.5 points, five assists and 1.6 steals for the Blazers. Quan Jackson is averaging 11.3 points over the last 10 games for UAB. | null | null | null | null | null |
Norfolk State Spartans face the Morgan State Bears on 4-game win streak
Morgan State Bears (13-13, 7-6 MEAC) vs. Norfolk State Spartans (22-6, 12-2 MEAC)
Norfolk, Virginia; Friday, 6 p.m. EST
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Norfolk State -5.5; over/under is 140.5
BOTTOM LINE: Norfolk State looks to keep its four-game win streak going when the Spartans take on Morgan State.
The Spartans are 12-0 in home games. Norfolk State is second in the MEAC in rebounding averaging 36.2 rebounds. Kris Bankston leads the Spartans with 6.9 boards.
The Bears are 7-6 in MEAC play. Morgan State has a 1-2 record in games decided by less than 4 points.
The teams play each other for the third time this season. Morgan State won the last meeting 85-74 on Feb. 22. Lagio Grantsaan scored 17 to help lead Morgan State to the win, and Joe Bryant Jr. scored 20 points for Norfolk State.
TOP PERFORMERS: Bryant is shooting 33.8% from beyond the arc with 1.8 made 3-pointers per game for the Spartans, while averaging 16.5 points, 5.1 rebounds, 3.3 assists and 1.5 steals. Jalen Hawkins is averaging 13.5 points over the last 10 games for Norfolk State.
Grantsaan is shooting 49.0% and averaging 10.8 points for the Bears. De’Torrion Ware is averaging 1.6 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Morgan State. | null | null | null | null | null |
North Texas hosts Louisiana Tech, looks for 25th win this season
Louisiana Tech Bulldogs (23-9, 12-6 C-USA) vs. North Texas Mean Green (24-5, 16-2 C-USA)
Frisco, Texas; Friday, 12:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: North Texas will look for its 25th win this season when the Mean Green host the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs.
The Mean Green have gone 12-2 in home games. North Texas leads college basketball at limiting opponent scoring, giving up 55.4 points while holding opponents to 41.6% shooting.
The Bulldogs are 12-6 in C-USA play. Louisiana Tech is eighth in C-USA with 32.2 rebounds per game led by Kenneth Lofton Jr. averaging 10.5.
The teams meet for the third time this season. North Texas won 56-49 in the last matchup on Feb. 26. Abou Ousmane led North Texas with 13 points, and Lofton led Louisiana Tech with 13 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Tylor Perry is shooting 43.6% from beyond the arc with 2.3 made 3-pointers per game for the Mean Green, while averaging 13.8 points. Thomas Bell is shooting 53.3% and averaging 10.9 points over the past 10 games for North Texas.
Lofton is averaging 16.4 points and 10.5 rebounds for the Bulldogs. Keaston Willis is averaging 11.6 points over the last 10 games for Louisiana Tech. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ohio aims for 25th win of season in matchup with Kent State
Ohio Bobcats (24-8, 14-6 MAC) vs. Kent State Golden Flashes (22-9, 16-4 MAC)
Cleveland; Friday, 7:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Ohio will aim for its 25th win this season when the Bobcats face the Kent State Golden Flashes.
The Golden Flashes are 11-4 in home games. Kent State scores 71.7 points while outscoring opponents by 7.2 points per game.
The Bobcats are 14-6 against conference opponents. Ohio ranks seventh in the MAC shooting 34.0% from 3-point range.
The teams meet for the third time this season. Kent State won 75-52 in the last matchup on Feb. 19. Giovanni Santiago led Kent State with 14 points, and Jason Carter led Ohio with 12 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Sincere Carry is shooting 35.7% from beyond the arc with 2.4 made 3-pointers per game for the Golden Flashes, while averaging 18.6 points, 4.9 assists and 1.5 steals. Malique Jacobs is shooting 41.1% and averaging 11.0 points over the last 10 games for Kent State.
Mark Sears is averaging 19.5 points, six rebounds, 4.3 assists and 1.7 steals for the Bobcats. Ben Vander Plas is averaging 11.7 points over the last 10 games for Ohio. | null | null | null | null | null |
Quinnipiac hosts Ndefo and Saint Peter's
Quinnipiac Bobcats (14-16, 7-13 MAAC) vs. Saint Peter’s Peacocks (17-11, 14-6 MAAC)
Atlantic City, New Jersey; Friday, 8:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Saint Peter’s hosts the Quinnipiac Bobcats after KC Ndefo scored 20 points in Saint Peter’s 77-63 win against the Fairfield Stags.
The Peacocks are 9-4 on their home court. Saint Peter’s averages 13.1 turnovers per game and is 6-4 when it turns the ball over less than its opponents.
The Bobcats are 7-13 in conference play. Quinnipiac has a 1-2 record in one-possession games.
The teams meet for the third time this season. Saint Peter’s won 83-74 in the last matchup on Feb. 5. Daryl Banks III led Saint Peter’s with 16 points, and Matt Balanc led Quinnipiac with 17 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Banks is shooting 36.6% from beyond the arc with 1.6 made 3-pointers per game for the Peacocks, while averaging 11.3 points. Ndefo is shooting 50.5% and averaging 11.8 points over the past 10 games for Saint Peter’s.
Tyrese Williams is shooting 39.7% from beyond the arc with 2.1 made 3-pointers per game for the Bobcats, while averaging 8.4 points. Dezi Jones is shooting 51.9% and averaging 12.6 points over the last 10 games for Quinnipiac. | null | null | null | null | null |
Saint Louis visits Saint Bonaventure after Adaway's 21-point game
Saint Louis Billikens (22-10, 12-6 A-10) vs. Saint Bonaventure Bonnies (20-8, 12-5 A-10)
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Saint Bonaventure -1.5; over/under is 139
BOTTOM LINE: Saint Bonaventure hosts the Saint Louis Billikens after Jalen Adaway scored 21 points in Saint Bonaventure’s 72-65 victory against the Richmond Spiders.
The Bonnies are 13-2 in home games. Saint Bonaventure ranks third in the A-10 with 33.8 points per game in the paint led by Osun Osunniyi averaging 9.5.
The Billikens are 12-6 against conference opponents. Saint Louis is the A-10 leader with 35.6 rebounds per game led by Francis Okoro averaging 8.0.
The teams square off for the third time this season. Saint Bonaventure won the last meeting 83-79 on Feb. 14. Osunniyi scored 21 to help lead Saint Bonaventure to the victory, and Jordan Nesbitt scored 18 points for Saint Louis.
TOP PERFORMERS: Adaway is scoring 16.0 points per game with 6.4 rebounds and 1.1 assists for the Bonnies. Dominick Welch is averaging 9.1 points over the last 10 games for Saint Bonaventure.
LAST 10 GAMES: Bonnies: 8-2, averaging 60.4 points, 27.9 rebounds, 11.2 assists, 9.2 steals and 5.4 blocks per game while shooting 42.2% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 62.8 points per game. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sow and UCSB host Long Beach State
UCSB Gauchos (17-10, 8-5 Big West) vs. Long Beach State Beach (19-11, 12-3 Big West)
Henderson, Nevada; Friday, 9 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: UCSB faces the Long Beach State Beach after Amadou Sow scored 21 points in UCSB’s 78-69 win over the UC Irvine Anteaters.
The Beach are 11-3 on their home court. Long Beach State leads the Big West averaging 74.2 points and is shooting 43.8%.
The Gauchos have gone 8-5 against Big West opponents. UCSB is the top team in the Big West scoring 11.6 fast break points per game.
The teams play each other for the third time this season. UCSB won the last meeting 84-71 on Feb. 20. Ajay Mitchell scored 20 to help lead UCSB to the victory, and Colin Slater scored 28 points for Long Beach State.
TOP PERFORMERS: Joel Murray is averaging 16.5 points and 1.5 steals for the Beach. Jadon Jones is averaging 12.8 points over the last 10 games for Long Beach State.
Ajare Sanni is shooting 31.8% from beyond the arc with 1.3 made 3-pointers per game for the Gauchos, while averaging 10 points. Sow is averaging 15.5 points and 8.5 rebounds over the past 10 games for UCSB. | null | null | null | null | null |
Temple Owls play in AAC Tournament against the Tulane Green Wave
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Temple -1; over/under is 136.5
BOTTOM LINE: The Temple Owls play in the AAC Tournament against the Tulane Green Wave.
The Owls are 11-3 on their home court. Temple has a 5-6 record in games decided by 10 or more points.
The Green Wave are 10-8 in AAC play. Tulane is 5-3 in games decided by less than 4 points.
The teams square off for the third time this season. Temple won the last matchup 75-70 on Feb. 27. Damian Dunn scored 19 to help lead Temple to the victory, and Jaylen Forbes scored 19 points for Tulane.
TOP PERFORMERS: Zach Hicks averages 2.2 made 3-pointers per game for the Owls, scoring 8.1 points while shooting 38.1% from beyond the arc. Khalif Battle is averaging 21.4 points over the last 10 games for Temple.
Jalen Cook is averaging 18 points, 3.5 assists and 1.6 steals for the Green Wave. Forbes is averaging 11.7 points over the last 10 games for Tulane. | null | null | null | null | null |
Texas A&M-CC visits Nicholls State after Gordon's 36-point performance
Texas A&M-CC Islanders (21-11, 7-7 Southland) vs. Nicholls State Colonels (21-10, 11-3 Southland)
Katy, Texas; Friday, 6 p.m. EST
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Nicholls State -5; over/under is 147.5
BOTTOM LINE: Nicholls State hosts the Texas A&M-CC Islanders after Jitaurious Gordon scored 36 points in Nicholls State’s 92-85 victory over the New Orleans Privateers.
The Colonels are 11-1 on their home court. Nicholls State scores 79.6 points while outscoring opponents by 8.2 points per game.
The Islanders have gone 7-7 against Southland opponents. Texas A&M-CC is 9-9 against opponents with a winning record.
The teams meet for the fourth time this season. The Colonels won 86-75 in the last matchup on March 3. Gordon led the Colonels with 21 points, and De’Lazarus Keys led the Islanders with 17 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Gordon is scoring 21.6 points per game and averaging 3.3 rebounds for the Colonels. Latrell Jones is averaging 15.1 points and 6.4 rebounds over the last 10 games for Nicholls State.
Terrion Murdix is averaging 9.6 points, 3.6 assists and 1.9 steals for the Islanders. Trey Tennyson is averaging 11.0 points and 2.2 rebounds while shooting 35.3% over the last 10 games for Texas A&M-CC. | null | null | null | null | null |
Texas Southern and Grambling meet in conference matchup
Grambling Tigers (12-19, 8-9 SWAC) vs. Texas Southern Tigers (16-12, 13-5 SWAC)
Birmingham, Alabama; Friday, 3 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Cameron Christon and the Grambling Tigers visit John Walker III and the Texas Southern Tigers in SWAC play.
The Texas Southern Tigers have gone 7-2 at home. Texas Southern leads the SWAC in rebounding, averaging 34.3 boards. Brison Gresham leads the Texas Southern Tigers with 7.0 rebounds.
The Grambling Tigers have gone 8-9 against SWAC opponents. Grambling ranks fifth in the SWAC with 9.0 offensive rebounds per game led by A.J. Taylor averaging 1.8.
The teams meet for the third time this season. The Tigers won 68-65 in the last matchup on Feb. 12. John Jones led the Tigers with 15 points, and Christon led the Tigers with 14 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Walker is averaging 9.4 points for the Texas Southern Tigers. Bryson Etienne is averaging 9.3 points over the last 10 games for Texas Southern.
Tra’Michael Moton is averaging 10.5 points, 3.6 assists and 1.5 steals for the Grambling Tigers. Christon is averaging 11.3 points over the last 10 games for Grambling.
LAST 10 GAMES: Texas Southern Tigers: 8-2, averaging 66.8 points, 33.3 rebounds, 9.8 assists, 6.1 steals and 5.8 blocks per game while shooting 41.9% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 63.0 points per game.
Grambling Tigers: 3-7, averaging 65.0 points, 35.3 rebounds, 11.7 assists, 5.9 steals and 2.3 blocks per game while shooting 41.0% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 66.7 points. | null | null | null | null | null |
Weber State visits Montana State following Jones' 23-point performance
Weber State Wildcats (21-11, 13-7 Big Sky) vs. Montana State Bobcats (25-7, 16-4 Big Sky)
Boise, Idaho; Friday, 7:30 p.m. EST
FANDUEL SPORTSBOOK LINE: Montana State -2; over/under is 143
BOTTOM LINE: Weber State visits the Montana State Bobcats after Dillon Jones scored 23 points in Weber State’s 68-56 victory against the Montana Grizzlies.
The Bobcats have gone 14-1 at home. Montana State ranks second in the Big Sky with 13.4 assists per game led by Xavier Bishop averaging 4.2.
The Wildcats have gone 13-7 against Big Sky opponents. Weber State has a 0-1 record in games decided by less than 4 points.
The teams meet for the third time this season. The Bobcats won 78-57 in the last matchup on Feb. 6. Bishop led the Bobcats with 18 points, and Seikou Sisoho Jawara led the Wildcats with 14 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Bishop is averaging 13.8 points and 4.2 assists for the Bobcats. Jubrile Belo is averaging 11.8 points and 6.2 rebounds while shooting 63.8% over the last 10 games for Montana State.
Koby McEwen is shooting 45.8% and averaging 18.2 points for the Wildcats. Jawara is averaging 1.8 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Weber State.
Wildcats: 4-6, averaging 71.2 points, 28.7 rebounds, 9.3 assists, 7.1 steals and 2.0 blocks per game while shooting 49.2% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 66.9 points. | null | null | null | null | null |
Williams and VCU host Richmond
Richmond Spiders (20-12, 10-8 A-10) vs. VCU Rams (21-8, 14-4 A-10)
BOTTOM LINE: VCU hosts the Richmond Spiders after Vince Williams scored 26 points in VCU’s 69-65 loss to the Saint Louis Billikens.
The Rams are 11-4 on their home court. VCU is sixth in the A-10 shooting 34.2% from deep, led by Jimmy Nichols shooting 100.0% from 3-point range.
The Spiders are 10-8 in A-10 play. Richmond leads the A-10 with 15.1 assists. Jacob Gilyard leads the Spiders with 5.6.
The teams meet for the third time this season. The Rams won 77-57 in the last matchup on Feb. 19. Williams led the Rams with 15 points, and Tyler Burton led the Spiders with 13 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Williams is averaging 13.3 points, 5.6 rebounds, 3.1 assists and 1.6 steals for the Rams. KeShawn Curry is averaging 9.1 points over the last 10 games for VCU.
Burton is scoring 16.4 points per game and averaging 7.5 rebounds for the Spiders. Grant Golden is averaging 8.9 points and 3.8 rebounds over the last 10 games for Richmond. | null | null | null | null | null |
Wright, North Carolina Central Eagles take on the Coppin State Eagles
Coppin State Eagles (8-22, 6-8 MEAC) vs. North Carolina Central Eagles (16-14, 8-5 MEAC)
Norfolk, Virginia; Friday, 8:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Justin Wright and the North Carolina Central Eagles host Nendah Tarke and the Coppin State Eagles in MEAC action Friday.
The North Carolina Central Eagles have gone 9-2 at home. North Carolina Central is third in the MEAC at limiting opponent scoring, giving up 68.0 points while holding opponents to 42.3% shooting.
The Coppin State Eagles have gone 6-8 against MEAC opponents. Coppin State ranks fifth in the MEAC with 32.1 rebounds per game led by Tyree Corbett averaging 8.8.
The teams meet for the third time this season. The Eagles won 77-74 in the last matchup on Feb. 15. Kris Monroe led the Eagles with 21 points, and Mike Hood led the Eagles with 17 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Monroe is averaging 10.5 points and six rebounds for the North Carolina Central Eagles. Eric Boone is averaging 13.2 points over the last 10 games for North Carolina Central.
Kyle Cardaci is shooting 30.8% from beyond the arc with 2.0 made 3-pointers per game for the Coppin State Eagles, while averaging 7.8 points and 1.5 steals. Tarke is averaging 12.5 points, 7.4 rebounds, 3.3 assists and 2.9 steals over the last 10 games for Coppin State.
LAST 10 GAMES: North Carolina Central Eagles: 6-4, averaging 68.5 points, 33.2 rebounds, 10.0 assists, 7.2 steals and 1.6 blocks per game while shooting 44.1% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 67.8 points per game.
Coppin State Eagles: 4-6, averaging 64.3 points, 29.4 rebounds, 11.8 assists, 7.9 steals and 3.2 blocks per game while shooting 38.7% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 68.5 points. | null | null | null | null | null |
Wyoming hosts Akot and Boise State
Wyoming Cowboys (25-7, 13-5 MWC) vs. Boise State Broncos (25-7, 15-3 MWC)
Las Vegas; Friday, 9:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Boise State faces the Wyoming Cowboys after Emmanuel Akot scored 22 points in Boise State’s 71-69 victory over the Nevada Wolf Pack.
The Broncos have gone 13-3 at home. Boise State is the MWC leader with 9.0 offensive rebounds per game led by Mladen Armus averaging 3.2.
The Cowboys have gone 13-5 against MWC opponents. Wyoming is eighth in the MWC with 6.9 offensive rebounds per game led by Graham Ike averaging 2.8.
The teams play each other for the third time this season. Wyoming won the last matchup 72-65 on Feb. 4. Ike scored 33 to help lead Wyoming to the victory, and Abu Kigab scored 26 points for Boise State.
TOP PERFORMERS: Akot averages 1.9 made 3-pointers per game for the Broncos, scoring 10.8 points while shooting 40.5% from beyond the arc. Kigab is averaging 14.6 points and 5.8 rebounds over the past 10 games for Boise State.
Ike is shooting 50.9% and averaging 19.6 points for the Cowboys. Drake Jeffries is averaging 1.3 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Wyoming. | null | null | null | null | null |
NEW YORK — Major League Baseball’s players and owners ended their most bitter money fight in a quarter-century when the players’ association accepted management’s offer to salvage a 162-game season that will start April 7.
LOS ANGELES — Since the disappointing end to last season, Los Angeles Chargers general manager Tom Telesco and coach Brandon Staley have discussed upgrading a defense that didn’t live up to expectations.
NEW YORK — Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Boeheim shook hands as they usually do after the two Hall of Fame coaches faced off on the court for the final time.
RALEIGH, N.C. — Ethan Bear scored the game’s first goal with 5:40 left and Sebastian Aho added an empty-netter to help the Carolina Hurricanes beat the Colorado Avalanche 2-0.
INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Naomi Osaka made a winning return to the BNP Paribas Open, rallying to beat Sloane Stephens 3-6, 6-1, 6-2 in a first-round meeting of former major champions. | null | null | null | null | null |
Anti-trans policies run counter to Texas’s rich transgender history
The hidden history of transgender Texas
Gregory D. Smithers is professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, a British Academy global professor, based with the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster at University of Hull and the author of "Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America."
Demonstrators speak against transgender-related legislation bills being considered in the Texas legislature May 20 in Austin. (Eric Gay/AP)
A Texas judge will decide whether to block the enforcement of Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) directive and Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) legal opinion labeling gender-affirming medical care for transgender children as child abuse. In addition to directly investigating families over gender-affirming medical care, Texas has also called for “members of the general public” to report the parents of transgender children suspected of seeking such care.
Texas’s targeting of LGBTQ communities, especially trans people, comes amid a torrent of similar efforts, including in Alabama, Iowa, Idaho and Indiana. The Human Rights Campaign is tracking “147 anti-LGBTQ bills across the country, including 73 explicitly anti-trans bills.”
In Texas, however, anti-transgender lawmakers are swimming against a tide of history that predates European colonization. This history of Texas is in no small measure a transgender Indigenous history. It is also a rich and inclusive historical narrative unlike anything learned by generations of Texas schoolchildren. This history is critical to recognizing the colonial antecedents of anti-trans violence and their connection to anti-trans lawmaking and violence today.
In the centuries before European colonialism upended life in Texas, Native Americans lived in societies that included children with fluid gender identities. They were neither male nor female, but both. Throughout the Southwest, Indigenous children with fluid gender identities were nurtured and grew to become important members of kinship communities.
In West Texas, Apache communities included individuals known as Nde’isdzan, which means “man-woman.” Farther south, the Karankawa, whose homeland abutted the coastline at Galveston Bay, embraced people referred to as Monaguia, a term for a transgender person who was assigned a male identity. All along the Gulf Coast, gender-fluid people occupied important roles as knowledge keepers, medicine people and spiritual leaders.
In the 1560s, the French artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues claimed that he saw Native American men dressed in female clothing and performing work he assumed was female labor. He described these people as “hermaphrodites” — a dismissive and offensive term that did a disservice to the important social responsibilities they performed. According to Le Moyne, these individuals tended to the burial needs of recently deceased warriors. Throughout eastern North America, funerary rites carried enormous religious significance. Only spiritual leaders possessing highly specialized skills and knowledge carried out such rites. This is what Le Moyne observed — spiritual leaders, who we today would recognize as transgender, performing a sacred responsibility. Many Indigenous communities considered it a sign of a healthy society for such people to carry out these roles, to mediate between the worlds of the living and the dead and to help community members bridge disagreements or overcome social challenges.
While tribal nations coined their own terms for people who took on transgender roles and identities, today the umbrella term Two-Spirit is often invoked to refer to Native American people who embody male and female spirits or adopt a gendered identity different from that assigned at birth.
But colonialism became a direct threat to transgender people in Texas. In the early 1500s, the Cuchendado people of southwestern Texas lived in tightly knit communities. They hunted, grew crops, shared spiritual knowledge and cared for each other. Their communities included cis and trans people.
By the late 1520s, an ominous change loomed on the horizon. The regional trade networks that connected the Cuchendado to the outside world started bringing news of violent intruders. One of those intruders was the Spaniard Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. In 1527, Cabeza de Vaca led Spanish conquistadors on an invasion through the Caribbean and the mainland Americas. Starting at Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, Cabeza de Vaca and his men moved quickly to Cuba before arriving on the Gulf Coast of mainland North America.
When he reached southwestern Texas, he wrote of seeing “a devilish thing.” Perhaps it was his Catholic sensibilities, his machismo or his view of Native people as “savages,” but Cabeza de Vaca was appalled by what he saw. Unable to conceal his disgust, he wrote that Cuchendado men “go about dressed as women, and do women’s tasks.” Such people, Cabeza de Vaca surmised, were “impotent, effeminate men.”
His description of “effeminate men” was the product of European cultural and legal invention. Spaniards of his era often referred to “effeminate men” as bardaxa or bardaje, terms derived from the Persian barda and used to describe a captive, enslaved person or sodomite. In 16th-century Spain, male effeminacy — which included male-male sexual activity — was viewed as a sign of weakness.
There was nothing natural about the theological precepts and legal structures of such rigid ideas about gender and sexuality. They were creations of the church and state. But they did serve a purpose: to naturalize hierarchies of gender and sexual power and disempowerment.
For Spaniards like Cabeza de Vaca then, the sight of cross-dressing men solidified a general impression of Native Americans as “savages” who were an affront to the Christian “civilization.” The Spanish were determined to remove these obstacles to their power throughout the Americas — whether by the Bible or the sword.
The legal mechanism that the Spanish used to terrorize Native people was known as the Requerimiento (or “Requirement”). Written by the Council of Castile and first issued in 1513, the Requerimiento demanded that Indigenous people renounce their religious beliefs, accept Catholicism and submit to Spanish rule. Failure to comply invited the possibility of enslavement, war or death.
In time, the Spanish, like other European colonizers, devised a multitude of strategies to sever gender-fluid people from their Indigenous communities — from the proselytizing of Christian missionaries and coerced labor to violent dispossession. The human cost of such practices was manifold: the loss of tribal knowledge, the death of elders and fractured kinship ties. The early years of European colonialism in North America laid the foundations for centuries of transphobia to come.
Those foundations grew into open hostility and prejudice by the 19th century. Some White Americans went so far as to express genocidal attitudes. The American painter and travel writer George Catlin said as much when reflecting on his travels through the American West in the 1830s. Referring to the fluid gender conventions of the Sauk and Fox people, Catlin wrote that he wished such traditions “might be extinguished before it be more fully recorded.” Catlin’s desire to willfully erase cultures that he found distasteful reflected a broader self-deception among White Americans at this time: a determination to convince themselves of the “manifest destiny” of the “White man’s republic” and the inevitable “doom” of Native Americans.
Yet in Texas, a rich transgender history persisted even after colonization. That history began in Native American communities. It also continues to unfold today. Indeed, a long list of talented transgender people hail from Texas. Reed Erickson, born Rita Alma Erickson in El Paso in 1917, became a billionaire philanthropist and used his position as a prominent transgender man to educate Americans on transgender issues. Phyllis Randolph Frye overcame transphobia to become one of the country’s first openly transgender judges. And Monica Roberts, an African American transgender journalist and activist, devoted her career to exposing violence against Houston’s transgender community. These and countless other stories warrant our attention.
Recognizing the lives of dignity and accomplishment of trans Texans also helps us see how moral panics and hysteria about transgender people isn’t new. It’s as old as European colonialism in North America. In 17th-century New England, colonists fretted about Native Americans altering their physical appearance. During subsequent centuries, public officials displayed a determination to order society along a male-female binary by passing laws against impersonation and cross-dressing.
Throughout the 20th century, states including Texas enforced these cross-dressing laws. By the 1970s, and with evangelical Christianity becoming an increasingly influential force in conservative politics, a renewed series of moral panics harnessed centuries of transphobia. Conservative politicians and social activists deployed nebulous terms such as “Christian values,” or “traditional values,” to express their sense of political grievance by vilifying trans people.
These efforts continue to harm trans people, who experience homelessness and violence at disproportionate rates. But despite the persistence of anti-trans activism, it is not succeeding. Today, Texas has the largest transgender population in the country behind California. Transgender people are, in other words, everywhere and going nowhere. They live full lives despite elected officials and other groups vilifying them. Importantly, transgender people in Texas are part of long and diverse history — a history that’s not yet finished. | null | null | null | null | null |
Targeting marginalized communities for political gain is nothing new for Texas conservatives
Texas’s anti-trans policy is the latest in a long history of attacks on women’s and LGBTQ rights
By Nancy Beck Young
Nancy Beck Young is professor of history at the University of Houston and author of multiple books including "Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World War II" and "Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle between Liberalism and Conservatism."
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his wife, Cecilia, attend a primary election night event March 1 in Corpus Christi, Tex. (Eric Gay/AP)
On Friday, a judge will consider whether to block enforcement of a letter that Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Tex.) issued Feb. 22 related to transgender minors. After the precedent established in 2021 by the state’s restrictive abortion law, Abbott called for members of the public to report the names of Texans suspected of providing certain medical treatments, such as puberty-blocking hormones, to the Department of Family and Protective Services. The governor’s directive followed a legal opinion issued Feb. 18 by State Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-Tex.) that classified such treatments as child abuse.
If Abbott’s directive remains in effect, Texans risk losing their children to the foster-care system for providing gender-affirming health care. Neighbors could soon turn on neighbors, as the newest iteration of McCarthyism weaves its way through the medicine cabinets of teenagers in Texas.
While restricting the rights of transgender individuals and youths in the state is a relatively recent phenomenon, the discriminatory intent behind these efforts is not. There is a long history in Texas of “otherizing” people in marginalized communities for political gain, with little regard for the truth.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, for example, conservative Christian activists targeted feminists, the LGBTQ population and eventually AIDS patients — people they thought were violating God’s preference for the heterosexual nuclear family and its traditional gender roles.
In 1977, Houston hosted the federally funded National Women’s Conference (NWC), which drew approximately 22,000 participants, 2,000 of whom were delegates, with the rest observing. Conservatives found the conference horrifying. One journalist writing for a right-wing John Birch Society publication denounced the event for encouraging “militant lesbianism” and permitting participation by “old-line Stalinoids” and “active enemies of the United States.”
Anti-feminist, conservative activists — who adopted the moniker “pro-family” for their movement — sought to undermine and disrupt the conference. Some did so from inside the conference itself as delegates, including a few from Texas. One “pro-family” delegate from the Lone Star state complained that the delegate selection process had occurred before conservatives in the state could mobilize, meaning that “pro-lib, pro-ERA, pro-lesbian minority group[s]” outnumbered “the majority traditional American women who are concerned about the moral fiber, and the families, of the United States.”
But most conservative activists either were not elected to the NWC, did not know about the conference in time to apply or eschewed attending the main event in favor of a counter-conference also held in Houston at the old Astro Arena.
Prominent anti-feminist organizer and conservative Republican Phyllis Schlafly is often credited for organizing this “pro-family” counter conference, but equal if not greater credit goes to local activist Lottie Beth Hobbs of Fort Worth — who pulled off what colleagues on the right believed to be impossible. Hobbs secured sufficient funds and organized the wildly successful counter rally, which drew 15,000 people. Christian conservatives arrived by the busload from around the state and the nation.
Hobbs played a significant role in shifting Texas rightward on social issues such as legal abortion, LGBTQ rights and “traditional family values” more generally. Vitriolic attacks on those Hobbs said to be a threat to the traditional family — chiefly, feminists and lesbians — helped fuel this rightward shift in Texas that mirrored broader national trends afoot by 1980. Hobbs argued that the “barriers” feminists wanted removed from the nation’s laws to ensure more equality for women and men, gay and straight, were actually important “safeguards” that “wise men and women of the past [had] carefully built … into our system,” without which the country would “plunge … into social and moral destruction.”
In the years that followed the competing conferences in Houston in 1977 — at both the local and national level — the political parties continued to diverge on the cultural issues driving the dueling movements. The Democratic Party increasingly embraced policies and rhetoric from the feminist and LGBTQ rights movements, while conservative activists continued to gain a greater foothold in the Republican Party.
These opposing forces soon collided again in Houston, first in a battle over an anti-discrimination ordinance in 1984 and then in the city’s 1985 mayoral race.
In 1984, liberal Democratic Mayor Kathy Whitmire, the first woman to hold the position, championed an anti-discrimination ordinance that would have protected the LGBTQ community against employment discrimination. The fight happened at the height of the AIDS crisis, when incendiary anti-LGBTQ rhetoric became commonplace across the nation. One opinion columnist called for all people with AIDS to be tattooed and another suggested that AIDS was nature’s “retribution” against gay people for “declar[ing] war upon nature.”
By conflating a fear of AIDS with equal rights for the LGBTQ community, conservatives achieved victory, with voters rejecting the anti-discrimination ordinance in a referendum by a four-to-one margin in January 1985.
Later that year, Republican Louie Welch, who had served as the pro-business mayor of the city from 1964 through 1973 — before the rise of family values politics took hold in his party — tried to resurrect his political career by challenging Whitmire. Welch campaigned by merging the boosterism of his past political style with the newer social conservatism of the modern Republican Party. Welch made AIDS the main issue in his campaign, and he attacked people with the disease, not the disease itself. In a far cry from the city and business boosterism that had marked his prior terms as mayor, he was caught on a hot mic boasting that he would solve the AIDS crisis by “shoot[ing]” LGBTQ people.
Though not a literal threat, the spirit behind Welch’s remark resonated with those who resented Whitmire’s push for the anti-discrimination ordinance. And he was not the only candidate in Houston that year to make the anti-discrimination ordinance a major issue. A group of conservatives sought election to the city council by running on what they proudly termed the “Straight Slate.” Welch and the Straight Slate candidates said they would require food service workers, day-care workers, teachers and employees of blood banks to carry health identification cards and be tested every six months for HIV, tuberculosis and leprosy.
They claimed to be “trying to return [Houston] to a community oriented to traditional family values.”
This time, however, voters in Houston rejected Welch and the Straight Slate. Whitmire bested Welch 57 percent to 43 percent. Welch’s gamble that political extremism was the ticket for reviving his political career failed.
Today, Abbott and Paxton are adhering to this longer history and tradition of targeting a marginalized group to advance their political careers. Both faced primary challenges from the right. While Abbott won, Paxton will face Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush in a runoff. The playbook for both men is to appease the right wing on cultural issues, while making voting incredibly difficult for minority and marginalized communities that might include or be sympathetic to the plight of transgender youths and their families.
Will Texas parents lose their children to reelect Abbott? Will transgender children and teens in Texas lose the right to gender-affirming health care? If the past really is prologue, the answer is maybe, but this history also shows that hate can be stopped when politicians go too far. | null | null | null | null | null |
Would WTO members change the rules?
By Timothy Meyer
Todd N. Tucker
The port in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Feb. 23. (Sergei Grits/AP)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants the world to boycott Russian goods. And he’s asked that countries suspend Russia’s participation in the World Trade Organization (WTO), which would make it far more difficult for Russian goods and services to compete in the global marketplace.
Russia has responded to Ukraine’s call for its ouster by arguing that WTO members “should refrain from discussing in the WTO … issues and events, which are out of the scope of the WTO,” and arguing that WTO rules do not permit its suspension.
This may become the newest front in the world’s unprecedented economic response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There are precedents, though not within the WTO. Mercosur, the South American trading bloc, suspended Paraguay in 2012 and Venezuela in 2017 — in both cases over failure to maintain democratic order.
The U.S. House of Representatives is exploring legislation that would “take the first step to deny Russia access to the World Trade Organization.” But would such a maneuver be legal under WTO rules? It’s hard to formally expel Russia — but individual WTO members could probably break off preferential trade relations.
WTO members could change the rules. They probably won’t.
The WTO Agreements don’t include a provision explicitly authorizing expulsion, nor do they establish criteria, such as maintaining democratic order, that might provide grounds for suspension. There is, though, a complex process that might be used to expel Russia from the WTO, according to James Bacchus, a former member of the WTO’s Appellate Body.
Article X of the WTO Agreements allows WTO members to adopt amendments that “alter the rights and obligations” of members if they are accepted by two-thirds of the WTO membership (and meet certain other criteria). Initially, these changes apply only to countries that accept them. However, by a three-fourths vote, WTO members can set a time frame for holdout members to accept the amendment, withdraw from the WTO or get the other members’ permission to remain.
Withholding that permission from a member that refused to accept an amendment would have the same result as expelling that member. This procedure could be used to expel Russia directly — or to establish specific conditions, such as the invasion of another WTO member, under which a member could be expelled or suspended.
While theoretically possible, this is unlikely to succeed. To be sure, 141 members of the United Nations voted to condemn the invasion. If that many countries in the 164-member global trading framework voted to expel Russia, it would amount to 86 percent — easily clearing both the two-thirds and three-quarters voting thresholds.
But it is unlikely that so many countries would vote to change the rules. Why? Doing so would establish a precedent that a supermajority of the WTO membership can penalize members for policy decisions they dislike, outside of the WTO’s usual dispute settlement process.
Fears like this explain why WTO members generally make decisions by consensus. Consensus decision-making means that even one objection — say, from Russia — would stop the amendment from passing. WTO members are so reluctant to break consensus that they have thus far refused to employ similar novel voting procedures to undo the deadlock on appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body. U.S. policymakers would be especially likely to be opposed. Political scientists have argued that consensus requirements allow powerful countries to ensure they are not outvoted in international organizations.
WTO members could act on their own
Even if WTO members do not act collectively to suspend or expel Russia, they can act individually to effectively remove Russia’s WTO privileges. Indeed, Ukraine and Canada have already done so. Canada has imposed a 35 percent tariff on all Russian imports. President Biden has now prohibited the import of Russian oil and energy products, and members of Congress have suggested repealing normal trading relations with Russia. The European Union is considering similar measures.
In fact, such actions are allowed under the national security exceptions in the WTO Agreements. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) — the main WTO agreement governing trade in goods — allows measures that a WTO member “considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests . . . taken in time of war or other emergency in international relations.”
Similar exceptions appear in both the WTO’s agreement on trade in services (GATS) and its agreement on intellectual property (TRIPS). WTO dispute panels recently interpreted these provisions for the first time in two disputes — one between Russia and Ukraine arising from Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and a separate case related to Saudi Arabia’s 2017 economic blockade of Qatar.
Check out all TMC’s analysis of the Russia-Ukraine crisis in our new topic guide: Russia and its neighbors
WTO adjudicators did require the countries invoking the exception to provide objective evidence that an emergency exists, explain how the emergency affects their essential security interests, and demonstrate that the measures they imposed plausibly related to the protection of those interests. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine easily meets this test — it’s a war, not a “special military operation,” as the Russian president claims. And WTO members invoking the exception do not need to be participants in the war.
Furthermore, the situation in Ukraine is sparking further emergencies in international relations. Russia’s violation of U.N. rules on the use of force except in self-defense and its use of force against its neighbors over the past 15 years provoke legitimate worries about whether Russia might invade other countries in Eastern Europe. Russia has also set its nuclear forces on alert. Because past conflicts in Eastern Europe sparked both World Wars, it is reasonable for other countries to worry that the spread of this conflict might undermine their security — and result in a staggering humanitarian crisis across Europe.
However the WTO reacts, the usual assumptions about global trade don’t work anymore. The modern WTO came into being in the 1990s, when many people thought that open trade would lead to open societies. It’s hard to make that case today. Over time, economic relations between nations are likely to depend much more directly on shared values than in the past, perhaps transforming the multilateral trading system into a patchwork of more deeply integrated regional blocs (like in North America) and transatlantic and Indo-Pacific clubs.
Timothy Meyer (@Tim_L_Meyer) is a professor of law and the director of international legal studies at Vanderbilt University Law School.
Todd N. Tucker (@toddntucker) is the director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute. | null | null | null | null | null |
In Women’s History Month, these African groups can offer lessons to feminists everywhere
What is gender equality, exactly — and who gets to define what it should look like?
By Adryan Wallace
A woman holds a banner protesting legislative bias against women on International Women's Day in Abuja, Nigeria, on March 8. (Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters)
The theme for International Women’s Day 2022 was #BreakTheBias. As the official IWD organization wrote:
That kind of rhetoric is important. Discussing diversity, equity and inclusion in the mainstream, it acknowledges that disparities exist and can be eliminated.
But simply talking about the importance of change does not itself change structures or systems that produce inequalities. Often, there’s a backlash when advocates try to reform organizations, employers and governments to reduce those inequalities.
Even professed advocates of eliminating bias can argue with one another about what to do. Two large questions trouble the discussion: First, how to define the desired change, and second, how to create it. After 10 years of researching Muslim women’s organizations in Nigeria and Ghana, I’ve identified some ways that advocates may wish to begin answering these questions.
What is gender equality, exactly?
Around the world, visions of what gender equality might look like vary dramatically — as dramatically as do women’s experiences in different political, cultural, economic and social contexts. While women from the global north are often able to shape global, regional and domestic discussions and policies about gender equality, that power itself comes from greater access to resources and often centers the experiences of one group of women to the exclusion of others.
African Muslim feminist scholars like Amina Mama, Ayesha Imam and others have written about how to cultivate broader and more representative global feminist theories and agendas by examining how women create local feminist agendas and activities. Their approaches make it possible to influence larger movements and political systems. Lacking that, global feminist movements may end up, for instance, viewing Islam as a constraint on gender equality rather than a resource women can interpret and use to promote equality, much as other foundational religious and political texts can be reinterpreted.
In Africa, local feminist movements often have to argue with conservative claims that feminism is a Western construction, a kind of cultural colonialism. Feminist Africa features gender studies work by academics and activists in the region, including a wide range of perspectives from African Muslim feminists — and can disrupt that narrative. These scholars refuse both Western liberal feminism’s and Islamic conservativism’s efforts to treat them as homogenous and passive. Instead, they offer arguments from feminist viewpoints drawn from a deep understanding of their own cultural contexts.
Africa has had 8 coup attempts in recent months. What’s behind the ‘coup epidemic’?
How different kinds of groups can truly collaborate, without the more powerful dominating
Women heading international nongovernmental organizations tend to have more economic resources than women involved in local, nongovernmental and community-based organizations. My research examines umbrella organizations that include several groups, including large international and locally grounded organizations, and other research has helped organizations develop strategies for better understanding and acting on their various constituents’ needs.
For instance, I’ve worked with the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations of Nigeria (FOMWAN), whose membership includes both kinds of organizations. Nigeria is a presidential federal republic like the United States, with similar relationships among different levels of government: federal, state, local. FOMWAN was established in 1985 and has chapters in all 36 Nigerian states. FOMWAN offers programming focused on basic needs, such increasing access to education through building schools, feeding programs for students and increasing retention and graduation rates. It also works on voter registration drives, vaccination campaigns and other programs and policies.
The umbrella group creates its agenda through consensus among all its members, so that women who are economically vulnerable have an equal say with those with more resources.
All these women’s groups function independently, outside the umbrella group. When working together, using consensus to decide which programs and activities the umbrella group should undertake requires members to discuss and negotiate with one another to agree on priorities rather than letting a majority rule. FOMWAN tries to prevent disagreements within its purview from hurting other areas where its member groups might collaborate. Of course, none of this works perfectly. But these strategies can be replicated and modeled.
How to turn decisions into action
Of course, agreeing on the agenda is just one step. Next comes deciding how to put it into action. In northern Nigeria, many of the groups and women working on gender equality through civil society organizations at times partner with the local, state and federal government authorities, allowing the government to monitor how effectively the groups work to increase access to health-care facilities, clean water and sanitation and address other types of inequalities.
Not all organizations partner with the government to accept its oversight; some instead pressure the government through sensitization campaigns from the outside, lobbying for such things as maternal health care, fiscal accountability and transparency, and protections for vulnerable groups. Still other women run for the state and national legislatures. Of course, legislating requires winning agreement from others, limiting what elected officials can achieve — especially because those with more economic, political and social capital are better positioned to win and serve and may not support legislation that would redistribute their power. But having women represented and visible matters nevertheless because it normalizes seeing women as key decision-makers.
Working both within and outside of institutions can help change them. For instance, FOMWAN collaborated with other women’s organizations and legislators to work on passing a free maternal and child health-care bill in Kano, a state in northern Nigeria. The umbrella organization helped to frame key provisions and identify the logistical barriers that prevent economically vulnerable women from accessing care. Other groups set up meetings where female leaders from underserved communities met with local Health Ministry officials to communicate obstacles women encountered accessing facilities.
What can be learned
The examples of African Muslim feminist scholars, activists and local organizations can be useful in showing others around the world how to define equality and put it into action — recognizing and addressing the diversity of women’s needs as they themselves define those needs.
Adryan Wallace (@AdryanWallace1) is an assistant professor of Africana studies and affiliated with political science and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man fatally shot in Prince George’s County
A man was fatally shot Wednesday in Prince George’s County, authorities said.
Prince George’s police said the shooting happened around 2:15 p.m. in the 7400 block of Hill Burne Drive in the Landover area. Officers found a man on the ground with gunshot wounds, and he was taken to a hospital, where he died.
The victim was later identified as Marvin Scutchings Jr., 58, of Landover. | null | null | null | null | null |
Toby Price with his wife, Leah. (Toby Price)
When a guest who was scheduled to read to second-graders over Zoom this month didn’t show up, Toby Price, the assistant principal at a Mississippi elementary school, improvised.
The events leading to Price’s firing began March 2, when he organized a Zoom event for second-graders at the Byram, Miss., elementary school. The gathering was to celebrate Read Across America Day, which is Dr. Seuss’s birthday and a day dedicated to encouraging children to read. The plan was to have a special guest read a book to them.
When the guest did not arrive, Price’s boss asked him to read to the students. Price said the second-graders loved the book, which is about a boy who thinks he needs a new butt after noticing his has a large crack.
Fifteen minutes after the event, Price said, the principal at his school called him into her office. According to Price, she told him that he shouldn’t have chosen that book and that parents might complain. Soon after the meeting, he said, he was told the superintendent wanted to see him at the district office immediately.
“They kind of just let me have it,” Price said. “She said, ‘Is this the kind of thing you find funny and silly? Fart and butt and bulletproof butts?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I did until I walked in.’ ”
Since the firing, Price said, he has not been allowed back into his office to collect his personal items. And though he wants the district’s decision overturned, he’s unsure about returning to the job, since he fears he’ll be scrutinized by senior administrators. He is more concerned with ridding the termination from his record.
“The man absolutely loved reading and actively encouraged it,” the former student wrote. “Even lending books from his own office for kids to read.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Congress passed an important anti-lynching bill. But the U.S. is still fertile ground for vigilantes.
Despite popular fascination with figures from the Lone Ranger to Batman, vigilantes are never simply trying to protect public safety
By Regina Bateson
A supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse celebrates the teen's acquittal outside the Kenosha County Courthouse on Nov. 19, 2021. (Paul Sancya/AP)
Earlier this week, the Senate passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act — roughly two weeks after the vigilante killers of Ahmaud Arbery were convicted of a hate crime.
Yet at the same time, Americans continue to take the law into their own hands. Militia activity is surging, and “stand your ground” laws are increasingly common. Some states are even delegating the prosecution of alleged crimes to private citizens, in a unique new form of law enforcement with a vigilante twist.
A comparative, global perspective on vigilantism can help us understand these trends.
What is vigilantism?
In a recent academic journal article, I define vigilantism as the extralegal prevention, investigation or punishment of offenses. Vigilantism goes beyond the law, and it addresses crimes and norms violations that may be real or perceived.
Despite popular fascination with figures from the Lone Ranger to Batman, vigilantism is neither an identity nor an ideology. Vigilantism is a behavior or a practice, something people do. And the United States offers fertile ground for more of it.
Here are three takeaways from my research.
1. Vigilantism is never just about security.
Vigilantes invariably claim to be providing security. Either they're concerned about crime, or they say the government is so weak or illegitimate that it cannot be trusted with policing.
And to be sure, many incidents of vigilantism are precipitated by crime or a lack of state-provided policing. But that's not the whole story.
For instance, in my research in Guatemala, I've found that the most spectacular forms of vigilantism are concentrated in the lowest crime areas of the country.
In addition, the government often plays a role in vigilantism, ranging from toleration to encouragement to active participation. In Brazil, for example, Graham Denyer Willis has documented police collaboration in extrajudicial killings of alleged criminals.
With surprising frequency, vigilantes even target government figures like police or judges. That's because vigilantism is more than just a functional response to insecurity or state failure; it is about power.
As Eduardo Moncada and I have both argued, vigilantism allows individuals to set the agenda, to flex their muscles and to exert control over others. Vigilantism is also a means of making claims within and against the government, often through dramatic public displays of violence.
Congress finally passed an anti-lynching bill -- after 120 years of failure
2. Vigilantism is not “popular justice.”
Vigilantes typically say they are carrying out the people's will, asserting legitimacy through popular sovereignty. And researchers often study public support for vigilantism, perhaps because it seems reasonable to assume that widespread support for vigilantism leads to vigilantism.
But popular support is neither necessary nor sufficient for vigilantes to strike.
Researchers in Europe have documented high levels of support for vigilantism even in places where vigilantism is rare, like the Netherlands.
Similarly, in 2014, the AmericasBarometer survey asked nationally representative samples from 25 countries whether they approved of people taking the law into their own hands. In several low-vigilantism countries like Canada and Costa Rica, the public supported vigilantism at about the same rates as in countries where it’s much more common, like Guatemala and Mexico.
On the flip side, Brazil is a hotbed of lynching. Yet Brazil recorded the second-lowest level of support for vigilantism in Latin America, with fewer than 25 percent of Brazilians approving of the practice.
It helps to remember that vigilantism is inherently undemocratic. Vigilantism violates the rights of its targets, and vigilantes' actions are not decided by majority vote. Rather, vigilantism advances the interests of certain individuals or groups at the expense of others.
So when vigilantes claim to be acting on behalf of “the people,” they really mean some people, not everyone. Or alternatively, vigilantes may think that most people agree with them, even if that's not the case.
After all, bystanders can turn up at lynchings for reasons ranging from curiosity and boredom to fear and coercion. When the instigators of vigilantism include violent and powerful people, it's hard to distinguish between true enthusiasm and mere compliance.
Why can't the U.S. prosecute someone for torture?
3. Vigilantism is not easy.
Around the world, conditions that would seem to favor vigilantism are common, yet vigilantism is not.
In part, that's because being a vigilante is hard. Either individuals have to take risky, decisive action alone, or they have to band together with others — which can be even more difficult.
So why do some aspiring vigilantes manage to move forward, while others flounder and fail?
Emerging research points to two factors. First, do people have prior experience with similar types of violence? Or can historical memory provide a template for vigilantism? If so, then as Lee Ann Fujii has observed, would-be vigilantes have some idea what to do, and how to do it.
The second factor is institutional. Preexisting structures and relationships can help would-be vigilantes find collaborators and get organized. Illustrating the dark side of social capital, these repurposed institutions and networks can range from business associations to the remnants of long-ago rebellions.
In Guatemala, I’ve documented how wartime militias — called civil patrols — have morphed into extralegal vigilante groups. The patrol I studied most intensively still walks the same routes as during the Guatemalan civil war, using old strategies, structures, and relationships to hunt gang members instead of guerrillas.
A century ago, Prohibition was about expanding liberty. Then our definition of liberty changed.
A vigilante nation
Unfortunately, comparative research suggests that the United States offers a favorable climate for vigilantism.
Most Americans disapprove of vigilantism, but majority opinion is unlikely to constrain a determined minority. A more promising avenue for accountability lies in the courts, though even there, the record is decidedly mixed: While Ahmaud Arbery’s killers were convicted, Kyle Rittenhouse was not.
Meanwhile, Americans are well-equipped to engage in vigilantism. From racial terror lynchings to the Minuteman Project, U.S. history provides multiple frameworks for what vigilantism looks like, and how to execute it.
And do Americans have the networks and leadership necessary to coordinate vigilantism? Yes, they do, thanks to militias and extremist groups plus encouragement from elected officials and media figures. Throw in access to weapons, recent experience with violent collective action and intense race-based grievances, and it’s a dangerous mix.
Regina Bateson is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. She is currently finishing a book called “Beyond Security: Vigilantism in Postwar Guatemala.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Kent Waldrep, right, with racecar driver Bob Hurt, left, and jockey Ron Turcotte, announces the formation of a foundation for spinal cord research in 1979. All three men were injured in sporting events. (Kupper/AP)
“The next thing I remember is the turf coming at me and then a sensation that will always be with me,” Mr. Waldrep recounted. “At the moment my head hit the artificial turf, I sensed I was upside-down and then floating in a horizontal position. Then there was nothing. It was as if my head had been amputated from the rest of my body.”
The university’s insurance carrier appealed, however, and in 1997, a Texas jury found that Mr. Waldrep was not an employee of TCU and thus was not entitled to workers’ compensation benefits. Mr. Waldrep appealed but lost. | null | null | null | null | null |
Supporters cheer on and wave flags as the "People's Convoy" arrives at the Hagerstown Speedway on March 4, 2022. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Since early February, Washington Post local reporter Ellie Silverman has been covering the “People’s Convoy,” a group of activists protesting vaccine mandates in the United States. The group was inspired by the self-styled “Freedom Convoy,” which occupied downtown Ottawa for several weeks in January.
The People’s Convoy, made up of about 1,000 vehicles, made its way to Hagerstown, Md., a city two hours outside of D.C. last week and has been making loops around the Beltway, the highway that circles D.C. They recently met with several Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), to share their concerns about federal vaccine restrictions. Cruz joined convoy leaders on Thursday and rode in one of its lead trucks. The group’s leaders say they will continue their protest until vaccine mandates are lifted.
We spoke to Silverman, who covers protests and activism as part of her beat, about the convoy and getting to know some of its members. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you first get in touch with the People’s Convoy?
Ellie: I talked with Brian Brase, one of the organizers, on the phone in February. I wanted to hear more about what he was planning, what his goals were and hopes were for this group. They arrived in Hagerstown, Md., on March 4, and since then, I have been in the Hagerstown speedway every day, walking around, chatting with people about where they came from and what motivated them to protest for such a long period of time.
Tell me about some of those interactions. Who are some of the people you’ve met?
Ellie: At the Hagerstown speedway, there are big rigs, campers, pickup trucks, as well as people in passenger vehicles. There’s been so many trucks that even the gravel going into the speedway has started to get potholes. At times, it feels like a festival — over the weekend, there was a funnel cake stand, people hanging out around a fire pit and launching fireworks. Then, other times, there are rallies where they talk about vaccine mandates and their demands. Despite the fact that many pandemic-related restrictions have been rolled back at the local and federal levels, they still are upset about vaccine mandates. Brase has called to end the national state of emergency for the coronavirus, which [President] Trump declared first in 2020, and that [President] Biden has expanded. Those demands are specific to the pandemic, but when people hop up onto the stage, other things come up: People bring up the election and that they believe that the election was rigged or stolen and that Trump really won. They bring up broad concerns about what they call government overreach.
How do you approach people and introduce yourself, especially in a big crowd?
Ellie: If I’m just going up to someone who may be standing around chatting with friends or listening to a speech, I just say, “Hi, how’s it going? My name is Ellie Silverman. I’m a reporter for The Washington Post. I’ve been at the speedway since Friday night, and I would love to talk to you about why you’re here.” For the most part, people have been really receptive to that, and they’re more than willing to share where they’re coming from and why they feel the way that they feel, right?
In one of your stories, you mention that some of the motivations have been a little murky. For instance, one person said they weren’t here to do anything political. How do you try and dig into these motivations further?
Ellie: Something that organizers have said a lot is that this is not right or left issue. It’s an issue of the American people and that this is for Republicans and Democrats. But at the speedway, there are a ton of Trump flags, everything from Trump 2020 to Trump 2024. I’ve seen signs that say “Let’s go Brandon,” calls to arrest Dr. Fauci or a citizen’s arrest of Biden and [Vice President] Harris. I brought that up to organizers, and the responses I’ve gotten is that, even if the organizers want to paint this as bipartisan, they’re also not going to tell someone what to do. They feel like that’s contradictory to their message.
I talked to one man who said that he saw someone flying a Confederate flag and thought to himself, “This isn’t the place for that,” but again — that’s still there, right?
‘Freedom Convoy’ spinoff aims for D.C. region this weekend. Here’s what you need to know.
I think that’s something really interesting about covering activism and protests. Oftentimes, you just see a big mass of people, but there are so many individuals within it. What’s something that’s been surprising to you about the convoy that people might not realize seeing it from afar?
Ellie: The convoy organizers have emphasized that they’re working with law enforcement to have a minimal disruption on traffic and that the Beltway loop is to show lawmakers they’re here and that they’re not going anywhere. The people I’ve talked to are kind of surprised that their goal isn’t to clog up the Beltway, at least not yet. It’s also just that this is really evolving every day. I’m not sure what they’re going to do tomorrow. I don’t know what they’re going to do the next day. I don’t know what this movement and protest will look like and how it will end — and I’m not sure that the people there know how it’s going to end either.
Something else I found surprising — the other day, this woman got on stage and was wearing a costume that was red, white and blue full of American flags. It had Trump written on it and the letter Q, for the conspiracy theory QAnon. She got on stage and she started talking about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and saying that she was there that day and it was what she called the most patriotic day of her life. And then she started sharing more about her thoughts, about conspiracies, and QAnon, and eventually someone cut the mic on her. I don’t know why they cut the mic on her and she was upset about that.
But it does seem like this movement is very much attracting people with extreme views, and when those people speak up, the organizers also try to pivot back to their message that this is not a right or left issue and this is about government overreach. That’s something that I will continue to pay attention to — the ways that this broad group of people interact, who has power within this movement and the direction that it goes.
I want to step back and talk about your beat, which is protests and activism. What do you think about as you cover these protests — what do you think is most important to focus on, and what do you see as your role?
Ellie: I think my favorite part of being a journalist is how we get to meet new people and learn about perspectives different than our own. I just always try to connect with people on a more human level and ask supporters of a movement about the life experiences that led them to this.
I’ve covered everything from voting rights protests to instances of police shootings. In 2017, I covered the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Last fall, I covered the federal civil trial on behalf of plaintiffs who were emotionally or physically injured that day against some of those white supremacist organizers. This beat takes me from the streets covering criminal justice issues to talking with local D.C. residents to covering the March for Life. It’s a whole range. I see my job as covering social movements, the people in them and what motivates them to keep trying to make change. I also think it’s important to hold people account for the effects of the movement as well.
We spoke to Ellie on March 9. Read some of her reporting on the convoy as well as her previous reporting on protests:
Jordan White recorded the D.C. police fatal shooting of An’Twan Gilmore. Here’s how it changed her.
She feared she would die at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. In court, she faced the white supremacists who were there. | null | null | null | null | null |
After the horror of Sandy Hook, an assault on truth began
By Barbara Demick
Barbara Demick is a former correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the author of three books, most recently “Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town.” She is a visiting professor of journalism at Princeton University.
Outside the Dec. 17, 2012, funeral for 6-year-old Noah Pozner, who was killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., three days earlier. Noah was the youngest victim. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)
On Dec. 14, 2012, a troubled young man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and gunned down 26 people, most of them children, before killing himself. One might say the massacre was the culmination of years of untreated mental illness in the gunman, Adam Lanza — a 20-year-old recluse who had long harbored violent fantasies. But in many ways this was merely Act 1, Scene 1 in a drama of escalating madness.
More horror was yet to come.
In the ensuing decade, the families of the murdered children have been mercilessly tormented and stalked. They’ve been repeatedly doxed, their home addresses, credit records, Social Security numbers and private telephone numbers publicized online for the use of crank callers spewing racist and antisemitic obscenities. Their tormentors have dug through their trash, vandalized their homes and accosted them as they walked down the street. Memorials to the dead have been defaced. A video of a dead child with a pornographic soundtrack was smeared all over the Internet.
The harassment is a result of a sprawling web of false claims that the massacre was an elaborate hoax, the children merely “crisis actors” whose deaths were staged to promote gun control — most likely by the administration of the first Black president, Barack Obama. Popular mostly among the far right, the hoax theory was propagated in Facebook and YouTube videos that garnered millions of clicks, and by conspiracy-exploiting showmen like Alex Jones, who told his listeners on Infowars, a news site he runs out of Austin, “Yeah, so Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors.’’
This is the madness that is explored in Elizabeth Williamson’s “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth,” a meticulously reported book about a decade-old tragedy that is more relevant than ever. Williamson does not dwell on the mental illness of the gunman who committed the unspeakable violence. Nor does the book tackle the weightier questions about gun policy; Remington, the now-defunct manufacturer of the AR-15-style weapon used in the massacre, agreed recently to pay $73 million to families who alleged that the gunmaker’s advertising targeted the violence-prone Lanza. (The weapon was purchased legally by his mother, who was shot dead in her bed that same morning.)
Williamson’s topic is the assault on truth. The author, a reporter for the New York Times, draws a direct line between the “Sandy Hook truthers” — as they called themselves — and subsequent conspiracy theorists whose delusions spilled from the confines of the Internet into real-world violence. Among them the man who drove from North Carolina to Washington with an assault rifle, believing he would rescue children he thought were held captive in a pizza parlor by a Democratic-led pedophilia ring — the “Pizzagate” conspiracy. (He was arrested after firing three shots into the restaurant.) It is not too much of a leap to see the line extending all the way to the Americans who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, believing that the presidency had been stolen from Donald Trump, despite the mounting weight of court rulings that it was not. “The struggle to defend objective truth against people who consciously choose to deny or distort it has become a fight to defend our society, and democracy itself,” Williamson writes.
Trump never endorsed the Sandy Hook hoax theory, but he helped to amplify its spread with his unabashed enthusiasm for Jones; he appeared on Jones’s show in 2015.
Even before 2012, conspiracy theorists liked to seed doubts about mass shootings, but Sandy Hook was the first to go viral. By 11 a.m. Texas time, barely two hours after the shooting, Jones told his listeners: “There is a reported school shooting, ah, in Connecticut, one of the states that has draconian restrictions on gun ownership. … The media will hype the living daylights out of this.”
Then soon after: “Why do governments stage these things? To get our guns!” By the time of the funerals, Jones was openly deriding the parents, mocking their appearance and gestures, claiming their children didn’t exist.
It wasn’t merely talk. Wolfgang Halbig, a retiree who often appeared on Infowars, made nearly two dozen trips to Newtown from his home in Florida. He harassed parents, teachers, police officers, Newtown officials, even unrelated children he thought had played the part of crisis actors. Halbig was later arrested for unlawful possession of the personal identification of one of the parents.
A Virginia man, Andrew David Truelove, drove up to steal memorial signs erected in playgrounds to commemorate the murdered children. He later called the children’s parents and said they shouldn’t mind because their children never existed. Facebook memorials to the children were defaced with profanities.
The threats were vile, obscenity-laden. An unemployed waitress from Florida, Lucy Richards, messaged the father of murdered first-grader Noah Pozner: “You’re going to die. Death is coming to you real soon” — the only portion of the message that is printable here.
Eventually most of the parents left Newtown, removed their social media presences. They changed phone numbers and moved frequently to escape harassment.
One father decided to fight back hard: Lenny Pozner, who emerges as the protagonist of Williamson’s book. The father of the youngest victim, his 6-year-old son, Noah, he attracted the most vitriol, perhaps because he was openly Jewish and because his wife, Veronique (from whom he is since divorced), had been vocal about gun control. But Pozner was tech savvy and in the past had been an occasional listener of Infowars, giving him what he thought was insight into the subversive appeal of conspiracy theories.
At first, Pozner tried reasoning. He joined the hoaxers’ websites and chatted with them online. He released Noah’s death certificate, the medical examiner’s report describing the horrific injuries inflicted on his boy — three gunshots, one that destroyed his lower lip and jaw.
For those who insisted that Noah didn’t exist, Pozner released his son’s birth certificate and kindergarten report card. To no avail; they demanded instead that he exhume Noah’s body.
In the minds of the truthers, any fact that disproved the conspiracy was interpreted as part of the conspiracy, which seemed to grow ever larger, swallowing all reality.
Eventually, Pozner gave up on the trolls. He decided that his real enemies were the technology companies, hiding behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from liability for content posted by users. With a network of volunteers, he filed countless complaints with Facebook, YouTube and Google to get the most egregious content removed — for example, a diagram showing where he lived with directional arrows indicating a balcony door, as though targeting him for a sniper.
Gradually, after multiple complaints, the offensive content was removed. In 2018, Jones was finally deplatformed when Facebook, Apple, Spotify and YouTube removed Infowars on the grounds that it incited violence.
In the past year, lawsuits against Infowars filed by Sandy Hook parents have progressed in Texas and Connecticut. Judges in both states have entered default judgments against Jones for failing to provide evidence, making it likely that he will pay dearly for the torment inflicted on the families.
The book ends on a triumphant note. “I’m ready to move on. … I’ve won,” Pozner tells Williamson.
Williamson has produced heartbreaking portraits of the parents, people who suffered the greatest loss imaginable, that of a child, only to be victimized again by years of abuse. Could there be any greater cruelty?
As for the trolls, it was clearly harder to make sense of what made them tick. Good journalists always try to empathize with the people they write about, to get inside their mind-set even if they don’t agree with them. My sense is that Williams struggled to understand them — just as I did when I wrote about Sandy Hook in 2017.
There were those, like Jones, who were in it for profit and acclaim. Others were mentally ill, but as Williamson aptly notes, “Dismissing all conspiracists as mentally ill would itself be a form of denial.” Grasping for an explanation, Williamson turns to Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in which she describes the early adherents as “atomized, isolated individuals … obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects.”
The Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists were impervious to facts and evidence, acting against their own self-interest and that of their loved ones. Halbig, the Florida retiree, told me when I interviewed him in 2016 that he’d spent more than $100,000 and that his family had been “fighting with me from Day One to let it go.”
Even inside Infowars, staff advised Jones to drop it. “This Sandy Hook stuff is killing us. It makes us look bad to align with people who harass the parents of dead kids,” read an email by an Infowars editor that Williamson dug up in her research.
Despite the recent courtroom victories of Sandy Hook’s parents, it is hard to read this book without being utterly terrified — in many ways, it’s the scariest I’ve ever read. The book speaks to the persistence of delusion and the elusiveness of truth. It doesn’t bode well for the future.
An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
By Elizabeth Williamson
Dutton. 482 pp. $28 | null | null | null | null | null |
By Lisa Birnbach
Lisa Birnbach is a writer in New York. She co-wrote and edited "The Official Preppy Handbook" and wrote "True Prep."
The Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Ky., features a 500-foot-long reproduction of Noah’s ark. Sarah Krasnostein talked to scientists at the attraction who believed that dinosaurs were among the pairs of animals on the biblical vessel. (Luke Sharrett/For The Washington Post)
When she spent time at Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark Encounter — where “a full-size Noah’s ark . . . [rests] on an endless expanse of grass in the middle of nowhere” (just off I-75 midway between Cincinnati and Lexington) — her heritage wasn’t well appreciated, nor was her belief that dinosaurs became extinct millennia before people existed. The evolution-denying scientists she interviewed at these giant theme parks were believers all right, theorizing about how Noah and his family fed the dinosaurs that arrived in pairs — who knew? — aboard his 510-foot-long ark, if their math is correct.
We meet Katrina, a beautiful young mother who is dying of cancer. Krasnostein was introduced to her through Annie, a death doula and monk who had been married multiple times. It is hard to determine who is more interesting — the social activist mother of three in end-stage cancer who is trying to do everything right for her kids, or Annie, who as part of her introduction to Krasnostein shared the suicide notes she had written while deeply depressed 20 years earlier. Annie had once been declared dead (for three minutes in her 20s after an overdose) and came to view every setback and trial in life as an opportunity for learning and growth.
Krasnostein skips from subject to subject and returns, with the fluidity of a string wound for a game of cat’s cradle — in and out and back where she started. She takes us to Vlad Dubaj, a PhD in biomedical imaging who likes to visit haunted houses where he communicates with “spooks.” And we get to know Lynn, a grandmother in her 70s who spent 35 years — half of her life — in prison for murdering her ex-husband after he threw their 2-year-old son down the front stairs. Now living in a homeless shelter in New York, Lynn spends her days working and volunteering at Trinity Church as a devout Episcopalian.
Faith in something can garner a community for its adherents, and it can separate those people from the larger community. What becomes clear pretty early on is that people who believe in things that are considered “fringy” often share those ideas only in private. They live both among us and apart from us. We learn that believers in the paranormal and in UFO abductions often choose not to share their experiences or opinions with most strangers, lest they lose the other party’s respect. But the author judges no one. Her empathy fills her pages. She even acknowledges: “I hadn’t previously thought of anxiety as an autoimmune disease. But of course it is.”
You will meet no skeptics in “The Believer.” Take Rhonda, who began dating Fred when she was 16 and he was 19. His dream was to become a commercial airline pilot. Their dream was to get married and raise a family together. Unfortunately, Fred did poorly on his necessary exams, and his path to his certification was long. Fred’s last communication was on Oct. 21, 1978, when he made a flight over the water one night before he was to meet Rhonda for a date. Audiotapes from the control tower reveal that he was having difficulties aboard his Cessna. He told the controller in Melbourne that there was an unusual object flying just above his craft. It was causing problems with his equipment and his radio. He disappeared that night, and no traces of his plane or his body were ever recovered.
In Australia, where vast expanses of land and sky seem to host a large number of mysterious sightings, Fred became famous and almost idolized, particularly by the communities that take UFOs seriously. To this day, Rhonda puts on her engagement ring once a year on their anniversary. She thinks of him every day — as the love of her life — despite the other relationships she’s formed since Fred’s disappearance. Rhonda’s life was stunted that day in 1978. She is a believer in love, and she is a believer that somehow corporeal Fred’s demise is linked to something mysteriously extraterrestrial, which through her eyes is more of a good thing than a bad one.
Lisa Birnbach is a writer in New York. She co-wrote and edited “The Official Preppy Handbook” and wrote “True Prep.”
Encounters With the Beginning, the End, and Our Place in the Middle
Tin House. 397 pp. $27.95 | null | null | null | null | null |
Harry Truman’s surprising successes and overlooked flaws
By Michael Bobelian
Michael Bobelian teaches journalism at Columbia University and is the author of “Battle for the Marble Palace: Abe Fortas, Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Forging of the Modern Supreme Court.”
On April 12, 1945, Harry Truman stepped into the Oval Office wholly unprepared for the moment. A college dropout and unsuccessful businessman, Truman owed his political career to Missouri’s corrupt Pendergast machine. Though he had served admirably on a wartime Senate committee, his experienced advisers — Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall and James Byrnes — outshined him. Relatively unknown before landing on the 1944 presidential ticket, he had no national following. A wooden public speaker, he could never hope to replicate FDR’s magnetic charisma. Kept in the dark about foreign affairs and unaware of the Manhattan Project, he nevertheless had to contend with the increasingly adversarial Joseph Stalin and forge a path for a nation thrust into a central role in the world.
Succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt, a mythological figure with unmatched popularity, would have been a herculean task for anyone. For Truman, it seemed nearly impossible. “Here was a man who came into the White House almost as though he had been picked at random from off the street,” a reporter recalled, “with absolutely no useable background and no useable information.”
The fixation on the dramatic events of his presidency — the tight 1948 election, his standoff with Gen. Douglas MacArthur over Korea, and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan — has masked some of Truman’s worst attributes. Emblematic of his propensity to tap close associates for government postings, none of the four cronies he appointed to the Supreme Court left a lasting mark. Far more troubling was his administration’s initiation of the loyalty oaths, blacklists and other tactics that would come to define the Red Scare, a black mark that, overshadowed by McCarthyism, has also gone overlooked.
America’s slide since the demise of the U.S.S.R. has contributed to Truman’s lofty standing among historians who consistently rank him as one of the nation’s best presidents. Though more educated, more experienced and better prepared for the job than Truman, the two presidents presiding over the end of the Cold War — George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton — failed to establish a new vision for the nation. Compounded by the inconsonant and foolhardy foreign ventures of their successors, their missteps contributed to America’s decline on the world stage.
A well-functioning and bipartisan Congress proved to be just as essential. Yes, Truman jousted with Republicans, vetoing more bills than all but two other presidents and badly losing the 1946 midterms before his come-from-behind triumph in the 1948 presidential race. Despite these squabbles, Republicans and Democrats governed — if not always in solidarity — as opponents working toward common goals, particularly in foreign affairs. Arthur Vandenberg, the GOP foreign policy leader, exemplified this mind-set: Instead of indiscriminately sabotaging Truman’s agenda for political gain, the senator discarded his isolationism to back the president’s international aspirations.
The Trials of Harry S. Truman
The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953
By Jeffrey Frank. Simon & Schuster. 528 pp. $32.50 | null | null | null | null | null |
Her heart was broken — so she turned to science
By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak is the editorial operations director of the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones, a ghostwriter and book doctor, and author of “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary."
(grafvision/iStock)
Who hasn’t asked themselves the same aching question framed by the Bee Gees in their plaintive 1971 masterpiece, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” Broken hearts seem in vast supply these days, as we engage in individual and collective grieving for so many and so much lost during the cataclysm of the pandemic.
But then there is the very specific subgenus of heartbreak that is untethered to a particular historical moment and has probably existed since the Neanderthals: the sheer, abject misery of being rejected by someone to whom you are still deeply attached. You’ve lived a life together and envisioned that life would continue. How is it possible to exist without this person? How is it possible that this person suddenly finds it impossible to exist with you? Often what happens is the worst of both worlds: Their presence weirdly endures in the form of immense physical and emotional anguish, impossible to ignore, like a kind of phantom limb.
This is the situation that science writer Florence Williams found herself thrust into as she tried to cope with the emotional and physical wreckage following her divorce from a man she had met and fallen in love with during their freshman year at Yale. They had married, parented two children and loved until she was at the cusp of 50, when he “decided to live on his own after three decades of togetherness,” leaving her feeling as if she’d “been axed in the heart.” “Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey” is a raw and exhaustively reported exploration of her suffering, the kind of reportage engaged in by Michael Pollan as he looked at his diet and his brain, or Ross Douthat when coping with his chronic Lyme disease; the kind when a journalist lands on a rich subject because he or she happens to be living it.
Williams brought to this life-exploding event two important areas of expertise having nothing to do with her family life. First is her profession as a science writer and reporter, at home with placebo-controlled double-blind studies, scientific literature and interviewing a range of experts — biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, endocrinologists and others — while translating technical parlance into layman’s language. The second is that the natural world is almost her second home. In one of her earlier books, “The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative,” she immersed with professionals around the world who used the curative and regenerative powers of nature to help all sorts of people, including those with PTSD, ADHD and other disorders.
In “Heartbreak” she reprises that kind of determined, deep-dive reporting, this time seeking the same healing for her shattered self. Her quest takes her to conferences, wilderness programs for sex-trafficked women, universities, medical specialists, countless studies, an epic paddle down the Green River and even a Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. She discovers that even though heartbreak may be thoroughly explored in literature and art, few scientists have studied it beyond the grim health and wealth outcomes for divorced people. In teasing out aspects of her own experience, she assembles scattered pieces of a vast puzzle of research, dissecting her pain so it fits into areas experts have examined — for instance, her heart, her brain and her leukocytes, which are blood cells that help the body fight infection and other diseases.
She writes eloquently of her misery. Sleepless, agitated, anxious, she lost enormous amounts of weight, developed heart problems, and had a depressing and infuriating affair whose appeal vanished when she became aware of his creepy sexual proclivities and many other women. (“‘Here’s the safe word,’ he said, and he whispered it to my ear below the blindfold elastic.” You get the idea.) Eventually, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes from having so stressed her pancreas. This discovery leads her to research how “stress influences our immune systems” and wondering if “divorce diabetes” was “a thing.” By this time, Williams had already spoken to psychologists, neuroscientists, cardiologists, physiologists and biologists, packing each chapter with the results of their many studies. This is one of the joys of reading a gifted science journalist: You learn so much stuff without having to study it yourself. At the same time, she enlists a dizzying, and sometimes distracting, number of people — not just all those researchers but historical figures: William James! Simone Weil! — in her attempt to understand why she was so miserable and what it would take to feel better.
When she learned about her incipient diabetes, for instance, off she went to have a conversation with a molecular geneticist (and, conveniently, a midlife diabetic) at Stanford. In three paragraphs we speed from his explanation of how stress can encourage our DNA to “start expressing diabetes promoter genes,” to Ohio State researchers’ discovery that adults, like her, “who were struggling emotionally with their recent divorces . . . produced fewer natural killer cells, which are important for fighting cancer and other diseases,” to a pithy quote from a psychologist at the University of Arizona: “There is an inflammation story related to divorce.” Impressive mastery of the material, to be sure, but sometimes the density feels as if we are racing past one billboard after another, each offering respite at the elusive next rest stop.
To rediscover her competence and autonomy, Williams took a solo trip down the Green River in Utah, “the largest tributary of the Colorado River.” She started at its headwaters in Wyoming and spent two weeks going down the river with friends and family, and another two weeks on a solo journey in a canoe, hoping she might craft “a new story” for herself. She faced her solitude and the physical demands, and the landscape comes alive in her telling, but in the end, the metamorphosis she had hoped for never materialized. It did, however, when she took a page from Pollan and sampled some magic mushrooms. “Maybe I could both assuage my hurt,” she writes, “and have a bang-up awe experience.” (Awe, it turns out, is another essential ingredient for helping us heal.)
Many others have sought answers to the Bee Gees’ question. Nora Ephron cooked, Anna Karenina leaped, and Bridget Jones drank and smoked. Others obsessively talk about the former beloved (to her immense credit, Williams is admirably discreet about her ex-husband), wallow in misery, indulge in mind-bending substances, write poetry, lie awake, consult with therapists and friends, plot revenge, and of course cry — a lot. Once when I was recovering from a fickle college boyfriend, one of my (oft-married) old Hungarian aunties consoled me with her own tried-and-true strategy: “Best cure for old love is new love.” But, as Williams concludes in this wise and brave book, after having explored so many options, “the best heartbreak cure of all” is something we cannot control but on which we can rely: the simple passage of time.
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak is the editorial operations director of the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones, a ghostwriter and book doctor, and the author of “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary.”
A Personal and Scientific Journey
By Florence Williams | null | null | null | null | null |
For mixed-descent people on America’s frontier, acceptance and suspicion
By H.W. Brands
H.W. Brands is the author of various works on American history, including his newest, “Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution.”
In the late 19th century, Frederick Jackson Turner lit up the historical world with his frontier thesis of American history. He asserted that American democracy owed its distinctiveness to the existence of an advancing frontier, where American institutions reinvented themselves every generation. By no means did all historians accept Turner’s views, but his approach framed debate on the subject far into the 20th century.
More recently the concept of frontier has given way to the idea of borders and borderlands, where peoples and cultures have intermingled and interacted. In “Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West,” Anne F. Hyde examines family life in the borderlands; her carefully wrought portrait of five families reveals the peculiar challenges faced by these quintessential people of the border.
A historian at the University of Oklahoma and the author of the highly regarded “Empires, Nations, and Families,” Hyde commences her story before the arrival of Europeans. Among the different Indian tribes, marriage fostered trade connections and cemented alliances, she explains. Romance often had little to do with it. “Marriage, because it was strategic, could be violent,” she writes. “Marriage, sex, and trade operated in tandem with war, captivity, and slavery.”
The Europeans at first were treated like another tribe. Hyde’s book doubles as a history of the North American fur trade, which brought French and British explorers and merchants into contact with Indian tribes of Canada and the Great Lakes region. The French and British were nearly all males, and the great majority of their liaisons were with Indigenous women. Hyde provides illuminating detail on the family networks the outsider men married into and the benefits and costs to the various parties.
She notes that the Indians’ concept of marriage was more flexible and less central to a woman’s identity than was common among Europeans at the time. “For an Ojibwe woman,” Hyde writes, “marriage was only one relationship in a mesh of kin, far less important than her relationships with her father and her brothers.” Marriages were often temporary; a woman might marry several times in her life and bear no stigma for it.
Sometimes the women terminated the marriages; sometimes the men did. Successful fur traders received promotions that pulled them out of the field and away to Montreal or London. In such cases, the leavers often had as little desire to take their “country wives” with them as those wives had desire to go. Commonly but not always, an arrangement was made whereby the woman received the equivalent of alimony and child support.
Hyde’s research is impressive throughout; it is hard to imagine a pertinent document that has escaped her scrutiny. Yet her characters often remain elusive. It is in the nature of social history that the subjects leave few traces for the historian to work with. In some cases they never wrote anything down, lacking literacy or incentive. In other cases, what was written down was subsequently lost.
As a result we often observe Hyde’s subjects from a distance. At times she is compelled to extrapolate. “We don’t know much about the courtship of Marguerite Waddens and Alexander McKay,” she writes of one couple, “but we can surmise some details from others’ accounts.” Sudden gaps can occur in the coverage. “We don’t know what happened to Marguerite immediately after her father’s death,” she writes. “No longer part of a European man’s life, she and her mother disappeared from the record.”
Yet Hyde makes good use of one woman who did create a written record — an elegantly poetic one. Jane Schoolcraft was the Ojibwe-descended wife of Henry Schoolcraft; when she and her husband enrolled their children at boarding school in Princeton, N.J., and Philadelphia, she composed an elegy titled “On Leaving My Children John and Jane at School in the Atlantic States.” The first line was written in Ojibwe, and translated: “My heart fills with pleasure and throbs with a fear.”
Hyde describes the rigidity that crept into perceptions of people of mixed descent during the 19th century. Some of the change reflected the growing number of non-Indians in what had been Indian country; the surging White population was able to impose its views upon the existing residents. Much was owed to the sharpening color line consequent to the increasing assertiveness of the enslaving South.
Amid the shift, people of mixed descent found themselves peculiarly betwixt and between. Special parcels of land — “half-breed tracts” or “mixed-blood reserves” — were set aside for them, affording them refuge both from Whites who considered them Indians and from Indians who judged them sellouts or spies.
In her emphasis on women, Hyde leaves to other historians the careers of certain noted chiefs of mixed descent. William Weatherford of the Creeks, John Ross of the Cherokees and Quanah Parker of the Comanches guided their peoples during the painful transition to life under the government of the United States. All three survived the transition to become prominent under the new regime.
Modern America has often been unkind to people of mixed descent. “Half-breed and mixed-blood became toxic words, racial slurs aimed at denigrating and separating,” Hyde observes. “Until the 1970s, main streets of western towns welcomed visitors with signs reading ‘No Indians or Breeds Allowed.’” While Hyde approves the retirement of the offensive language — “Removing half-breed from the names of places and people feels right in the present,” she writes — she concedes that something is lost in the scrubbing. “Renaming Half-Breed Lake in Minnesota and Montana, and Half-Breed Road in Iowa and Nebraska, also covers up a long history of intermarriage,” she says. This fine book will help ensure that that history isn’t lost.
H.W. Brands is the author of “Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West” and, most recently, “Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution.”
Born of Lakes and Plains
Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West
By Anne F. Hyde | null | null | null | null | null |
During the tense meeting, the school district also released data showing a high rate of arrest for Black students.
After a year filled with controversy over the relationship between Alexandria City Public Schools and the city’s police department, the school system is considering creating an advisory group to propose reforms to its partnership with police.
But, in May 2021, the Alexandria City Council voted in a surprise reversal — over the protests of school officials — to stop funding the SRO program, effectively ending it. The school system of 16,000 began the academic year without SROs — until early October, when Alexandria City High School went into lockdown because a male student had a firearm to school. The lockdown followed a run of troubling incidents in which police were called to the school over fights at least four times.
The safety incidents, not all of which involved police, included 41 fights or assaults, 34 instances of injuries or medical assistance, 13 weapons incidents (founded and unfounded), 12 threats made verbally or online and one sexual assault allegation.
“The 12 members does not seem to be large enough or inclusive enough,” said board member Michelle Reif.
Hutchings responded that, “You can’t have work completed with 20, 30, 40 people,” although he noted that he is willing to take the board’s feedback and incorporate it into future proposals for the advisory committee. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: How America became a nation of the woke and the wary, walking on eggshells
Law shapes as well as reflects culture, and Gail L. Heriot of the University of San Diego School of Law argues in her essay “The Roots of Wokeness” that those new Title VII damage remedies propelled the nation’s downward spiral into identity politics, speech regulation and an epidemic of irritability. After the change, Heriot reports, there was “a dramatic increase in the number of harassment charges filed” and in the monetary stakes. In the final quarter of 1991, the number of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) harassment charges increased 71 percent over the same period in 1990. | null | null | null | null | null |
The battle over casualties in the Ukraine war is just beginning
By Jessica Trisko Darden
A view of street barricades in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 10. (Zurab Kurtsikidze/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, claimed this week that Russian forces were engaged in “the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians.” In her open letter to the media, Zelenska focused on child casualties of the war, some of whom died as a result of Russian shelling of Ukrainian cities.
Zelenska argued that Ukrainian civilian casualties proved that Russia’s narrative of a military operation launched to save civilians from “genocide” was false.
The competing claims being made by Ukraine and Russia about the war’s casualties don’t end there. Casualty estimates have varied widely since the war began about two weeks ago. The government of Ukraine claims that at least 11,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the war. Russia has admitted that 498 Russian troops have died and 1,597 more have been injured. The United States also weighed in, estimating that between 2,000 and 4,000 Russian military personnel may have been killed. For its part, Ukraine has not reported any military casualties, despite international media coverage of soldiers’ funerals.
In any conflict, the outside world relies on the participants — both victims and perpetrators — to report casualties. Both have reasons to distort those numbers to support their view of events. And it is practically impossible to tell whose numbers are accurate. Governments can manipulate information about casualties because there are ambiguities built into how we define whose lives matter in wartime.
Who counts as a casualty of war?
As of March 10, the United Nations reports that 549 civilians have been killed in Ukraine, with an additional 957 people verified as injured in the conflict.
“Casualty of war” is an all-encompassing category, including people injured or killed as a direct result of armed conflict. Casualty counts include injuries as well as deaths, which means that the overall number of civilian casualties in Ukraine is going to be significantly higher than fatalities — the number of people killed as a result of the conflict.
There are limits to what we can learn from casualties of war data. Casualty counts, for example, don’t tell us how badly any one individual is injured. Sustaining a long-term disability impacts someone differently than recovering from a superficial wound. Counting individuals physically affected by war also ignores invisible harms, such as post-traumatic stress, and cannot capture the experiences of those who are affected in multiple ways, such as displacement following injury.
What is a civilian casualty?
It’s also difficult to distinguish between military casualties — members of the armed forces who are killed during the course of the conflict — and civilian casualties. The 1949 Geneva Conventions define “civilians” as “people taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause.”
Essentially, under international law anyone who is not actively participating in the conflict by bearing arms is a civilian, even if they are or were formerly members of a military. An injured soldier, not capable of fighting back, would qualify for protection as a civilian, for instance.
But in Ukraine, as in many conflicts, the distinction between military and civilian is not straightforward. The term “civilian” is often used interchangeably with “noncombatant” — but in many contexts civilians can provide important support for combatants, such as shelter, food and intelligence.
Thousands of Ukrainians who are not official members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are now taking part in this war. In Kyiv alone, the government distributed more than 25,000 automatic rifles and 10 million bullets, raising questions about who has civilian status.
Assumptions about gender complicate the military-civilian distinction as well. Women have historically been excluded from armed combat and analysts typically assumed all female deaths were civilian casualties. This is rapidly changing around the world, as my book explains. In Ukraine, many women have joined both the Ukrainian Armed Forces and various militias since 2014.
In past conflicts that saw widespread civilian mobilization, like the current situation in Ukraine, the concept of “men of military age” was used to identify whether an individual was a legitimate military target. Ethnic Serb forces killed roughly 8,000 people, primarily men and teenage boys, in Srebrenica, Bosnia, and justified these deaths according to this logic.
Why are casualty counts so political?
Civilian casualties matter — these counts are part of the evidence of potential war crimes occurring in the Ukraine war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described a Russian airstrike that killed at least three people in a Mariupol hospital as proof of genocide. However, as I discuss in my research with Izabela Steflja, documenting civilian casualties requires sometimes difficult decisions about the roles that different individuals play in conflict.
Ukraine and Russia are likely to differ on how they define an individual who mobilizes for self-defense in response to the Russian invasion. Are the women who made Molotov cocktails in the city of Dnipro civilians or legitimate military targets? What about the 79-year-old grandmother receiving weapons training? Differences in how people and institutions on opposite sides of the conflict answer these questions leads to the politicization of competing civilian casualty numbers and the overcounting or underestimation of casualties.
These numbers are important. Pledges to minimize the impact on civilians or allow safe passage for civilians through a humanitarian corridor, for instance, rely on a very clear definition of who is a civilian. Casualty counts can also greatly affect the amount and types of resources devoted to shaping postwar outcomes. For example, putting the psychological effects of war on par with physical injuries would not only capture more of the long-term consequences of wartime violence, it would likely greatly expand the amount of funding for mental health services in post-conflict countries.
Jessica Trisko Darden is an assistant professor in the department of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and co-author of Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice (Stanford University Press, 2020) and Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown University Press 2019). | null | null | null | null | null |
“The stuff that you’re hearing about chemical weapons, this is straight out of their playbook,” Johnson told Sky News. “They start saying that there are chemical weapons that are being stored by their opponents or by the Americans. And so when they themselves deploy chemical weapons — as I fear they may — they have a sort of a maskirovka — a fake story — ready to go.”
Talks between top diplomats of Ukraine and Russia on March 10 failed to reach an agreement on a cease-fire, while Mariupol, Ukraine, raced to bury the dead. (Alexa Juliana Ard, Julie Yoon/The Washington Post)
White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted that Russia "has long maintained a biological weapons program in violation of international law” and cited its military intervention in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its suspected poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny in 2020 with a Novichok-like nerve agent.
She also said during a White House news briefing Thursday that Russia has the “capacity” to use such weapons against its neighbor. When asked what evidence the United States has to back the claim that Russia has these types of weapons, Psaki said she wouldn’t “get into specific intelligence” but repeated that Russia "is the country that has a chemical and biological weapons program.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Images of Fox News personalities appear outside News Corp. headquarters in New York on July 31, 2021. (Ted Shaffrey/AP)
Since nearly its founding, there’s been a tension at play at Fox News. There’s the opinion side, now most obviously manifested in the nightly homilies and hysterics of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. And there’s the news side, the mid-day hours helmed by faces you recognize with names you can’t place. It’s long been clear that the former group carries most of the weight at Fox, both in terms of driving viewership that can be sold to advertisers and in setting the tone for the day’s coverage.
His attack began with a lengthy and heavily cherry-picked presentation evaluating Russia’s claims that the United States government is funding bioweapons research in Ukraine. This is something that’s been alleged for a long, long time and for which there’s no credible evidence. But as part of his truthteller-combatting-the-status-quo shtick, Carlson simply strung together a few “just asking questions” and then declared that the Biden administration (and past administrations that have similarly rejected the claims) had been “lying” about the Ukrainian work.
“It is a long program that has existed where the Pentagon has partnered with these biolabs,” Griffin said. She reminded viewers of the post-Cold War effort to contain former Soviet weaponry. The U.S.'s work in Ukraine is “part of this effort to try to clean up those Soviet-era labs and make sure that nothing escapes from those labs. And so the U.S. has been very open about its involvement there with that. But what Russia does is they take that information, distort it, turn it around, and turn it into disinformation.”
That itself is a thinly veiled criticism of Carlson. He’d elevated that specific disinformation on his show on Tuesday. So Carlson promotes the debunked theory, Griffin rejects it and Carlson punches back.
Normally, this same tension at Fox simply leads to the news side rolling over. But in the context of the Ukraine war, Griffin has pushed back. Last month, The Post’s Jeremy Barr noted several occasions on which she had fact-checked guests who’d offered false or misleading claims on opinion shows. She was particularly harsh in assessing the credibility of Douglas MacGregor, a retired military officer and Trump administration official.
“Unlike so many of the TV generals you see all day long, MacGregor is not angling for a board seat at Raytheon,” he said. “Unlike so many of the so-called reporters you see on television, he is not acting as a flak for [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin at The Pentagon.”
What Griffin has been doing, to some extent, is fighting fire with fire: turning the one-sided opinion panels that are the network’s forte into actual debates, albeit time-shifted ones. Fox’s opinion hosts aren’t generally interested in presenting a balanced picture; Griffin has been trying to force them to. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Despite carjackings, D.C. shouldn’t revert to ineffective tough-on-crime policies
By Jody Kent Lavy
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) speaks alongside D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III in October. (Michael Blackshire for The Washington Post)
Jody Kent Lavy is co-executive director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth.
As a mom living on Capitol Hill, I have been alarmed by recent reports of carjackings taking place nearby — sometimes committed by children. Those reports also trigger memories of being robbed at gunpoint in D.C. more than 15 years ago. These random acts of violence are terrifying, and the heightened fear in the media and neighborhood listservs is to be expected. But it is incredibly important that we resist letting our fear rationalize support for tough-on-crime responses, especially when it comes to our children. There are better, safer and more lasting solutions.
The tough-on-crime approach fails to keep us safe, and, equally dangerous, it requires us to accept the notion that some children are unworthy of being seen and treated as children. Violent crimes are most often linked to economic insecurity and past trauma and victimization (and their rates are often reported incorrectly or without nuance). The pandemic wrought unprecedented job loss and social isolation, particularly on communities that were disenfranchised before it hit. Health professionals have documented the adverse effects of the enormous pressure put on our children, especially those most vulnerable, in the past two years. It comes as no surprise that some children (and adults) are turning to the streets out of desperation.
To be clear: These things do not excuse violent crimes. They do, however, offer some insights into how we should respond to them, especially when it comes to the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society. Therein lies the good news: We can keep our communities safe and uphold the dignity of our children by looking to the root causes of crime and responding accordingly. Especially given the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic on low-income communities and children in particular, we must look to trauma-informed, restorative approaches to accountability.
D.C.’s top prosecutor recently called for restorative justice as an appropriate response to violence committed by youths. Restorative justice programs require people who cause harm to become proximate to those they harmed to understand the impact of their actions and together decide how harm will be repaired. These approaches work because they ensure accountability, get to the root causes of crime and offer a path to healing for all involved.
There are grave risks in accepting tough-on-crime approaches, such as those laid out by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). Not only have these measures been proved not to work, especially in response to youth crime, but they also can make us less safe. They are also leveled disproportionately against children of color. In addition, victims of crime widely favor rehabilitative responses over punitive ones. Meanwhile, calls for more police on the streets fail to acknowledge the dangers that come with them. As The Post recently reported, fatal shootings by police nationwide reached a record high in 2021. Police stops alone are shown to cause harm, particularly to children, exacerbating the causes of violence rather than effectively mitigating them.
The dominant narrative about those committing violent crime in the media and public discourse is also cause for concern. It is disturbingly reminiscent of the superpredator myth of the 1990s. The superpredator theory emboldened our country’s long-held narratives criminalizing Black youths and predicted a “juvenile crime wave” committed by “Godless, fatherless monsters.” The impacts were disastrous. This theory dehumanized Black and Brown children and rationalized a surge of tough-on-crime policies that ultimately sent hundreds of children to prison for life. The myth disregarded what we know about children both instinctively and empirically through brain science research: that they can be impulsive and reckless, and they have a capacity for positive change.
Today, I work for an organization dedicated to ending the draconian youth sentencing laws that took hold in the wake of the superpredator theory, and we’ve seen a groundswell of bipartisan-backed reforms to these laws across the country in recent years. As a result, I have the unique advantage of knowing hundreds of adults who were once considered “superpredators” or “throwaways” and are now members of our Incarcerated Children’s Advocacy Network (ICAN). The vast majority experienced trauma as children. They made grave mistakes and carry deep remorse in their hearts. They’ve turned their lives around, despite being told as children they were worth nothing more than dying in prison. They are some of the best people I know, and, thanks to recent reforms, they are free and giving back to their communities.
For example, ICAN members James Carpenter, Anthony Petty and Michael Plummer are all members of D.C.’s Credible Messenger Initiative and serve as mentors to vulnerable youths. They guide, empower and listen to them. They model ways of living their mentees say they never knew were possible. Because of their own life experiences, ICAN members know programs such as these prevent crime.
It is now widely agreed that the policies that stemmed from the superpredator theory didn’t make us safer. And the crime wave that was predicted? It never materialized. But the policies enacted in its wake and the criminalization of children of color continue to cause great harm. Knowing all of this, we must reject failed punitive approaches that declare some children throwaways. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Instead, let’s embrace solutions that ensure all children are treated as children and, when they commit harm, respond in restorative ways that address the root causes of crime. Mother Teresa said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” Let this be a moment when we remember.
Downtown will survive without commuters
A bit off the top for the D.C. Business Improvement Districts | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Larry Hogan shows how judicial appointments are done
By Steven M. Klepper
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Steven M. Klepper is a Maryland appellate attorney and the founder and editor in chief of the Maryland Appellate Blog.
Just 30 miles apart, Annapolis and Washington are different worlds when it comes to judicial nominations. President Donald Trump appointed 57 judges to the Supreme Court and federal appellate courts, but not one of them was Black. Now, as President Biden follows through on his campaign pledge to appoint the Supreme Court’s first Black woman, the backlash is ugly.
On Twitter, a Georgetown law lecturer, Ilya Shapiro, praised an Indian American judge as the “objectively best pick for Biden” but said the judge “doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.” Shapiro apologized for his “inartful” tweet and deleted it.
Weeks later, Judge James Ho, a Trump-appointed appellate judge, reignited the controversy during an address to Georgetown’s chapter of the Federalist Society. “I stand with Ilya on the paramount importance of colorblindness,” Ho said, adding that if “Ilya Shapiro is deserving of cancellation, then you should go ahead and cancel me, too.”
That supposedly “colorblind” approach to judicial nominations resulted in Trump becoming the first president since Richard M. Nixon to serve at least one full term without nominating any Black appellate judges.
Contrast that situation with Maryland, where Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, has had the chance to transform Maryland’s appellate courts. He soon will have appointed six of seven judges on the Court of Appeals, which is Maryland’s high court, and seven of 15 judges on the state’s intermediate appellate court.
As of this past fall, Hogan had already named three Black appellate judges, including two women. Two Court of Appeals judges were approaching mandatory retirement age. When 11 lawyers and judges applied for those vacancies in October, all the applicants were White. It would have been easy to accept that the 11 applicants included talented and worthy replacements. After all, both retiring Court of Appeals judges were White men. Instead, the governor extended the application deadline “to attract as broad a field of candidates as possible consistent with his commitment to diversity and outreach.”
The new applicants included Angela Eaves, a Harford County trial judge. Her experience as a lawyer included handling more appeals than most Maryland appellate appointees. In 2018, Eaves won the Harrell Award for Judicial Excellence, one of the highest honors for Maryland judges. Eaves is known for her expertise in family and juvenile issues, areas in which Court of Appeals decisions can have great impact on ordinary families.
Her accomplishments came with the added degree of difficulty that women of color face. Eaves was born in Panama to a Panamanian mother and an African American father. Before her election as a circuit court judge in 2008, no Black candidates had won countywide office in Harford County, which is 78 percent White. Eaves has faced overt and coded racism at many points in her career, persevering and thriving in the face of adversity.
It is telling that, for all of her accomplishments, Eaves did not even apply for the Court of Appeals vacancy until Hogan called for more diverse applicants. Gender and race have a powerful impact on who applies for jobs in the first place. A 2014 study found that women apply for jobs only when they meet 100 percent of the qualifications, compared with 60 percent for men. Since 1990, every Black judge appointed to the Maryland Court of Appeals has first served as a trial judge and then an intermediate appellate judge. Few of their White colleagues did the same.
Hogan appointed Eaves to the Court of Appeals. She is eminently qualified, and she will make history as Maryland’s first Afro-Latina appellate judge. The system worked as it should.
Diversity and merit are complementary goals. If the system were colorblind, the nation’s appellate courts would look roughly like the general population. They do not. That lack of diversity hurts everyone. Appellate judges tend to live cloistered lives, which aren’t conducive to new experiences and new viewpoints. It is critical that their colleagues bring diverse backgrounds and viewpoints to their deliberations as they make decisions affecting all citizens.
Race and gender are imperfect proxies for diverse viewpoints and life experiences, but they still matter. Although Eaves’s appointment won’t fix the toxicity in Washington, it is heartening to see a well-functioning judicial appointment process somewhere in the country. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Maryland’s flawed pretrial detention system can be fixed
By Todd Oppenheim
Todd Oppenheim is a supervising attorney in the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.
It is hardly a stretch to say that a person’s finances should not determine whether they remain incarcerated, presumed innocent, while awaiting a criminal trial. This sentiment even rings true to most people completely outside the parameters of the justice system.
After years of calls for change from advocates, the public seems to understand bail reform. In 2017, Maryland took the historic step of changing its Rules of Court (essentially laws) to disfavor the use of cash bail and guide judges toward using the “least onerous” conditions of release during bail hearings. The rule now says “preference should be given to additional conditions without financial terms.” Along with bail, pretrial supervision, stay-away orders, curfews and personal recognizance comes the possibility of release on home detention. However, before October, if you couldn’t afford pretrial home-detention fees, you generally couldn’t get it, even if a judge allowed it. Once released on home detention, if you missed payments, you could be rearrested. This rewards defendants with more money. That seems to be against the spirit of the aforementioned bail reform, no?
If bills pending in the Maryland General Assembly this session sponsored by state Sen. Shelly L. Hettleman (D-Baltimore County) and Del. Stephanie M. Smith (D-Baltimore City) are not passed, these injustices would reemerge.
The bills, H.B. 1011 and S.B. 704, seek to continue the General Assembly’s successful efforts last year in passing legislation regarding pretrial home-detention inequity. Because of the 2021 law, money became available in October to help pay pretrial home-detention fees for poor defendants. As a lawyer in the public defender’s office (OPD) for 18 years representing indigent adults in all phases of the justice system, I can see that this has been one of the most impactful actions to assist our clients.
The Maryland judiciary took on the difficult task of administering the funding, and the system has been a success for clients in need as well as home-detention companies that want people to use their services. Just as they led efforts last year, local organizations such as the Jobs Opportunities Task Force, Out for Justice and Baltimore Action Legal Team have spearheaded the push to keep the money flowing just to achieve what we all perceive as basic fairness. These groups have community funds, but they can’t keep up with the fees, nor is their intervention a solution. My OPD colleagues and I have also witnessed the injustices. People can pay nearly $6,000 and exhaust their savings over the span of the pretrial process — some only to have their cases dismissed or resolved for sentences that don’t involve incarceration.
The pending bills would offer a fix to the immediate home-detention problem in several respects. First, they would continue funding to indigent individuals to pay private home-detention fees or require localities to waive or cover fees for public home monitoring. This is huge. Make no mistake, home detention is still a mode of incarceration. A judge must order it. An individual cannot leave his or her residence except for any judge-approved allowances programmed into a GPS device. Home detention meant the difference between life and death as the coronavirus made its way through our jails and prisons. We have also seen unprecedented delays in trials across the state, some stretching out to nearly two years. Jury trials resumed on March 7 after the most recent virus-related shutdown. These bills are a humane response to excessive pretrial incarceration.
Additionally, funding home detention is an extremely important step for the General Assembly to take toward revamping the uneven pretrial system throughout Maryland. Perhaps the most unnoticed problem here is that people arrested in jurisdictions such as Kent County or Baltimore City (without free home detention) are subjected to equal-protection violations in that they don’t have the same release options as arrestees in places such as Montgomery, St. Mary’s, Anne Arundel or Prince George’s counties, where home detention is local and, most important, free. Providing funding begins to level the playing field. Also important to consider is that OPD clients across the state struggling with home-detention costs tend to be people of color. Geography, finances and race should not determine people’s freedom as they await a court date.
It only makes sense to continue the successful efforts from last year that funded pretrial home detention for poor people. To do otherwise would be to roll back vital reforms. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mexico’s banking association chief Daniel Becker responded to the comments by saying he supported efforts to give more bank loans, but that a cap on interest rates would stifle competition. Monreal didn’t specify whether his proposal would put a limit on rates.
“I think it’s historically proven that establishing caps to rates doesn’t take you to the correct place and doesn’t generate incentives that people are aiming for,” Becker told Bloomberg Linea. Becker said he plans to discuss the proposal with Monreal.
Bank lending in Mexico as a percentage of gross domestic product is typically one of the lowest among the region’s larger economies and inflation is close to a 20-year high, reducing the purchasing power of Mexican families. Total performing consumer loans by the country’s banks are still about 4% below their pre-pandemic peak, according to Bloomberg data.
It’s not the first time the top senator for Morena, Mexico’s ruling party, has pushed for legislation seeking to impact the banking system. In 2019, Lopez Obrador quashed a bill put forward by Monreal that sought to end various fees levied on consumers. A controversial effort to force the central bank to buy excess dollars held by local banks was also halted last year.
(Updates with comment from banking association chief in paragraph five and six.) | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Maren Morris performs at the 2021 ACM Party for a Cause in Nashville, Tenn., on Aug. 24, 2021. Morris is releasing her third major label album “Humble Quest” this month and heading off on a 41-date tour starting in June of mostly amphitheaters, wrapping with a final arena show in Nashville in December. (Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
We can do more to help Ukraine without escalating the conflict
The U.S. is already providing deadly Stinger and Javelin missiles. Providing fighter jets is not obviously different.
The conventional wisdom is that the United States and other NATO allies can supply lethal weapons such as Javelin and Stinger missiles to incinerate tanks and planes while avoiding an escalation into direct war with Russia (which has a lower threshold for nuclear use than the West does, according to its nuclear and military doctrines). Under unofficial rules worked out during the Cold War, such proxy warfare is deemed acceptable, while any direct engagement — for instance, between a NATO fighter jet and a Russian aircraft — is out of bounds. In rejecting the Polish offer, U.S. and NATO allies also decided that providing jets to Ukraine from NATO territory would be too risky.
We need to make our own judgments about what counts as escalation and what counts as a reasonable step to help Ukrainians, and not defer to Putin on these questions. After all, he has already asserted that economic sanctions amount to a “declaration of war,” (and yet he has not responded as if he believes this). And when considering whether a NATO move would be “provocative,” it is important to remember that Putin provoked all of this — he chose to launch this unjustified war against Ukraine.
Ultimately, we must weigh the dangers of escalation against what is at stake: the real possibility — given the brutal nature of the war so far — of the slaughter of civilians that could rise to the level of genocide. And we should weigh those dangers against what the United Nations calls the “responsibility to protect.” While there are risks in helping Ukraine survive the Russian onslaught, there are also risks in letting Putin’s expansionist aggression go unchecked. If he sees that NATO will sit back and let him take Ukraine, he is likely to turn next to other neighboring former Soviet republics that aren’t in the alliance, such as Moldova and Georgia (which he already invaded once, in 2008). Those grim scenarios suggest that we should be looking for ways to help that go beyond Stingers — yet fall short of direct war. | null | null | null | null | null |
In this handout photo released by Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, right, meets with Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi during the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkey, Friday, March 11, 2022. Qatar on Friday hosted a meeting that saw Taliban’s foreign minister and an American diplomat for Afghanistan in the same room during a summit in Turkey. (Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs via AP) (Uncredited/Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs) | null | null | null | null | null |
Griner’s family, her agents, officials from the WNBA and the Phoenix Mercury and top U.S. government officials have been mostly silent about her situation — a stance that, according to experts on Russian American relations and people familiar with the case, is a strategic one, probably being dictated by a crisis communications firm. A high-profile media campaign for her release, the thinking goes, would only make her situation worse by adding value to her in the eyes of the Russian authorities.
But this much is obvious: With U.S.-Russian relations at their most strained since the Cold War in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions imposed by the United States and its NATO allies on Russia, it is a very dangerous time to be an American, particularly one with as high a profile as Griner, trapped in Russia.
“There’s only so much I can say given the privacy considerations at this point,” Blinken said. Asked for further clarity on Griner’s situation Wednesday, a State Department spokesperson referred back to Blinken’s comments.
Griner’s case also has opened an uncomfortable window into the economics of elite women’s basketball in the United States. From an American-centric viewpoint, Griner’s tenure for UMMC Ekaterinburg — named for the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company, the owners of which also own the team, and the central Russian city where it is located — is typically described as the overseas side-gig that occupies her during her offseason for the WNBA’s Mercury.
But for Griner and other top Americans in the WNBA, the converse is more accurate. By most objective measures, UMMC Ekaterinburg — which has a longer season and pays Griner as much as five times in salary what the Mercury pays her — is her main employer and the WNBA an offseason side-gig. About half of all WNBA players head overseas at the conclusion of each WNBA season, in many cases earning more than the WNBA maximum base salary of $228,094. (By comparison, the highest-paid player in the NBA, Golden State’s Stephen Curry, is earning $45.78 million this season, according to basketball-reference.com.)
“The year-round nature of women’s basketball takes it toll,” Taurasi wrote in an open letter to WNBA fans in 2015 about her decision to skip that WNBA season, “and the financial opportunity with my team in Russia would have been irresponsible to turn down. They offered to pay me to rest and I’ve decided to take them up on it. I want to be able to take care of myself and my family when I am done playing.”
The influence of team owners Makhmudov and Kozitsyn, often described as oligarchs, could be among Griner’s biggest assets during this ordeal and could help explain the relative silence from her family and representatives.
According to game data on the EuroLeague website, Griner last played for UMMC Ekaterinburg on Jan. 29, scoring 15 points in an 89-52 win over Hungary’s KSC Szekszard. Six days earlier, the U.S. State Department issued a Level 4 Do Not Travel advisory for Russia, warning of the potential for “harassment against U.S. citizens” and “the embassy’s limited ability to assist U.S. citizens in Russia.”
All but one American made it out: Unbeknown to the rest of the world, by the time of the invasion, Griner already had spent a week in Russian custody. | null | null | null | null | null |
Images of Fox News personalities appear outside News Corp. headquarters in New York on July 31. (Ted Shaffrey/AP)
Since nearly its founding, there has been a tension at play at Fox News. There’s the opinion side, now most obviously manifested in the nightly homilies and hysterics of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. And there’s the news side, the midday hours helmed by faces you recognize with names you can’t place. It has long been clear that the former group carries most of the weight at Fox, both in terms of driving viewership that can be sold to advertisers and in setting the tone for the day’s coverage.
His attack began with a lengthy and heavily cherry-picked presentation evaluating Russia’s claims that the U.S. government is funding bioweapons research in Ukraine. This is something that has been alleged for a long, long time and for which there’s no credible evidence. But as part of his truthteller-combatting-the-status-quo shtick, Carlson simply strung together a few “just asking questions” and then declared that the Biden administration (and past administrations that have similarly rejected the claims) had been “lying” about the Ukrainian work.
“It is a long program that has existed where the Pentagon has partnered with these biolabs,” Griffin said. She reminded viewers of the post-Cold War effort to contain former Soviet weaponry. The United States’ work in Ukraine is “part of this effort to try to clean up those Soviet-era labs and make sure that nothing escapes from those labs. And so the U.S. has been very open about its involvement there with that. But what Russia does is they take that information, distort it, turn it around and turn it into disinformation.”
That itself is a thinly veiled criticism of Carlson. He had elevated that specific disinformation on his show on Tuesday. So Carlson promotes the debunked theory, Griffin rejects it and Carlson punches back.
Normally, this same tension at Fox simply leads to the news side rolling over. But in the context of the Ukraine war, Griffin has pushed back. Last month, The Post’s Jeremy Barr noted several occasions on which she had fact-checked guests who had offered false or misleading claims on opinion shows. She was particularly harsh in assessing the credibility of Douglas Macgregor, a retired military officer and former Trump administration official.
“Unlike so many of the TV generals you see all day long, Macgregor is not angling for a board seat at Raytheon,” he said. “Unlike so many of the so-called reporters you see on television, he is not acting secretly as a flack for [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon.”
What Griffin has been doing, to some extent, is fighting fire with fire: turning the one-sided opinion panels that are the network’s forte into actual debates, albeit time-shifted ones. Fox’s opinion hosts aren’t generally interested in presenting a balanced picture; Griffin has been trying to force them to do so. | null | null | null | null | null |
The app is remarkably simple. These days, for gamers at least, it’s also basically everywhere. Its ads run on esports broadcasts, and it has become a fixture on the streams of some of the most popular professional players and content creators in the world, which are viewed by millions of fans. In late January, Mackey was astonished to find that a sweater his company made in collaboration with the clothing brand Champion had appeared on a GQ list of best new menswear. It is astonishing reach for a free product with no apparent monetization.
One such practical study, for which several thousand Aim Lab players opted to share the results of their exercises, sought to find the optimal daily practice time. An hour of practice, Mackey said, didn’t seem to provide greater benefit than just 30 minutes. Those results give Statespace valuable information about how to further develop their product, and they’re also helpful to users to boot. | null | null | null | null | null |
While two-thirds of the Russian wheat and barley had already been exported, the remaining is in storage facilities inland and at ports, with some already loaded on ships, according to Rabobank, a Dutch banking firm. Currently in the Azov Sea, there are 30 ships loaded with wheat and sunflower seeds that were expected to sail for Turkey, said Erkut Sonmez, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They cannot sail, since Russia has banned trade ships in the Azov Sea, although Turkey’s leaders have made appeals. | null | null | null | null | null |
Once it was in shape, the challenge was figuring out how to fashion the pillow against my wall (or window). There wasn’t an “ah ha” moment where I felt like I got it right. Nonetheless, it did provide great support not only for my head, but also for my arm. It’s versatile and has the potential to facilitate some snoozing, plus it deflates into the size of a soda can — allegedly. I just shoved it into my backpack without folding it up tightly. | null | null | null | null | null |
Severe thunderstorms and tornadoes are possible from Florida to the Carolinas
Winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories stretch from New Mexico to the Canadian Border ahead of a rapidly-intensifying storm system that will pack snow, strong winds, heavy rain and severe thunderstorms for much of the eastern U.S. At least 22 states are expected to see snow out of the developing “bomb cyclone,” with a growing chance of wintry weather along Interstate 95 in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
Temperatures are crashing behind an Arctic front, triggering the storm’s development, with frigid air now occupying the West. Denver hit minus-7 degrees Thursday morning, the city’s coldest temperature so late in the year since 1886 and the chilliest March temperature on record since 1960. It dipped as low as minus-43 at Yellowstone National Park.
Temperatures will climb into the 60s in the southerly winds ahead of the storm, setting the stage for strong to severe thunderstorms in Florida, southeast Georgia, the Carolinas and extreme southeast Virginia. A few tornadoes are probable before the storms clear the coastline Saturday midday.
Behind the front, temperatures will crash with cold northwesterly winds filtering into the area. That will flip rain to snow, delivering a garnish of white to grassy surfaces from the nation’s capital to Boston and heavier, plowable totals farther inland.
In parts of the interior Northeast, the Weather Service warns that the combination of heavy snow, falling at the rate of at least an inch per hour, and strong winds, will “create difficult to hazardous travel conditions” on Saturday. Scranton, Pa., Albany, Syracuse, N.Y., and Burlington, Vt. are among areas that could be hardest hit with up to 10 inches of snow.
As the storm gets going, parts of the Deep South might even see a hint of snowfall — including northern Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
Nearly 14 million people are under winter storm warnings from northeast Mississippi to northern Maine. An additional 45 million people are under winter weather advisories from New Mexico to parts of the Northeast.
A rapidly-intensifying “bomb”
A storm must exhibit a 24 millibar air pressure drop or more in 24 hours to be classified as a bomb. This low could fall by 68 millibars in 48 hours, with the storm evacuating more than 6 percent of the atmosphere’s mass from its middle. By then it will be in Canada. That disparity in how much air there is outside the storm versus inside the storm is what spurs the strong inward winds; it is the atmosphere’s way of trying to achieve balance (just like how water behind a dam would flow downhill to an even level if the dam was removed).
Light snow was falling in southern New Mexico and along the Interstate 44 corridor in northeast Oklahoma and southwest Missouri early Friday. Snow will expand northeast along the front, stretching from Lake Erie to the Ozarks of Arkansas by Friday night. An influx of moisture will thicken the snow band in the South overnight, with flakes set to fly in northern Louisiana, northern Mississippi and northwest Alabama. Tennessee will see a 3 to 6 hour burst of moderate snow saunter across the state with 1 to 3 inches forecast in Nashville.
Then, after delivering an icy kiss to northwest Georgia, the snow will work up the Appalachians. In its wake, a broad slushy inch or two, mainly accumulating on grassy surfaces, is probable for places like Little Rock, Tupelo and Starkville, Miss., Athens, Al., and areas north of Huntsville, Memphis and Lexington, Ky.
All told, much of Pennsylvania and New York State will wind up with 3 to 5 inches of snow, some 6 to 10 inch amounts are probable in northern and eastern areas and at higher elevations. Some double-digit totals can’t be ruled out, especially in the mountains of northern New England.
On Friday evening, a clustered band of thunderstorms will begin lifting northeast out of the Gulf of Mexico and drifting ashore over the Florida Panhandle as the low’s attendant cold front sharpens to the west. With an abundance of wind shear, or a change of wind speed and/or direction with height, a number of those cells will rotate. Damaging straight-line winds and a few tornadoes are possible. The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center has issued a level 3 out of 5 “enhanced risk” for severe weather, which covers Tallahassee and Panama City, Fla., as well as southern Georgia. | null | null | null | null | null |
These kinds of measures, which place security and self-sufficiency over efficiency, will surely have the effect of raising prices everywhere. As countries search for resilience and move away from excessive dependence on foreign countries, inflation could become a more permanent feature of the new world even if the supply shocks caused by the war are temporary. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hassan Diarra's (5) three-pointer at the buzzer in overtime boosted Texas A&M's NCAA tournament chances and possibly sent Florida to the NIT. (Chris O'Meara/AP)
If Wednesday was about borderline NCAA tournament teams playing their way out of the field, Thursday was defined by those scrambling at the last minute to make up for four months of unevenness.
Texas A&M edged Florida on Hassan Diarra’s buzzer-beater in overtime of a de facto elimination game. Indiana looked like the fast-fading team it’s been since the start of February, then rallied from down 17 in the second half to beat Michigan and to extend its NCAAs hopes another day. Oklahoma and Virginia Tech bolstered their credentials and got a chance to do so even more Friday.
Creighton, Miami and TCU won to eliminate whatever doubt about their NCAA-worthiness existed, though in each case there shouldn’t have been any. Florida, Oregon and Washington State each knew by the end of the night their Sunday plans would almost certainly include the NIT selection show.
And now it’s time to do it again. Friday of conference tournament week is the spot on the calendar when the desperation of improving a postseason resume collides with bid snatching season. Villanova cleared out the last of the Big East’s possible bid thieves when it surged past St. John’s, and Wyoming (which had an at-large argument at the start of the week) could still be at-large material in the Mountain West.
But a whopping seven other leagues could yet produce a team that genuinely squeezes someone else out of the field of 68 by winning a conference tournament. For the BYUs, Wake Forests and Xaviers already sitting at home, those are the developments that mean the most with just three days of action to go before the NCAA brackets are set.
Here’s what to look for in Friday’s action …
Big Ten quarterfinal: No. 1 Illinois vs. No. 9 Indiana (11:30 a.m., BTN)
Just when it seemed safe to write off Indiana (19-12), the Hoosiers defeated Michigan, 74-69, in their conference tournament opener to claim their most high-profile victory since upending Purdue on Jan. 20. Mike Woodson’s team still is just 3-7 in Quadrant 1 games (the top tier of contests the NCAA committee evaluates), but that would improve with an upset of Illinois (22-8).
Bracket impact: It depends on what others do, of course, but Indiana has more work to do to get in. Beating the Illini would be an immensely helpful development; with a loss, Indiana is probably NIT-bound.
SEC quarterfinal: No. 1 Auburn vs. No. 8 Texas A&M (Noon, ESPN)
Streaky Texas A&M (21-11) has won six of seven since Feb. 15, including a pair of triumphs over Florida to ensure it is the choicest of the SEC’s borderline teams. Much like Indiana, the Aggies can’t settle for one victory. Picking off a potential No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament would make a compelling case and perhaps lift A&M into the top 50 in even one of the six metrics on the NCAA team sheets.
Bracket impact: There are No. 1 seed implications if Auburn loses, but the greater point here is whether Texas A&M can continue its late push. A victory over one of the nation’s best teams would make it harder to ignore the Aggies.
Atlantic 10 quarterfinals
No. 1 Davidson vs. No. 8 Fordham (Noon, USA Network) No. 4 St. Bonaventure vs. No. 5 Saint Louis (approx. 2:30, USA Network) No. 2 Dayton vs. No. 10 Massachusetts (6, USA Network) No. 3 VCU vs. No. 6 Richmond (approx. 8:30, USA Network)
At least one bid thief threat (the St. Bonaventure/Saint Louis winner) will make it through no matter what happens Friday in Washington. Davidson is in good shape for an at-large berth even with a loss, and both Dayton and VCU shouldn’t risk dropping their first game in the event (though VCU has a better at-large case in large part due to its 9-2 road record).
Bracket impact: The A-10’s Sunday final means the “don’t-mess-up” mantra that most leagues faced over the last couple days still has value here. Borderline teams elsewhere would love it if Davidson won the league, and Dayton in particular can ill-afford an early exit.
American Athletic quarterfinals
No. 1 Houston vs. No. 8 Cincinnati (1, ESPN2) No. 4 Temple vs. No. 5 Tulane (approx. 3:30, ESPN2) No. 2 SMU vs. No. 10 Tulsa (7, ESPNU) No. 3 Memphis vs. No. 6 Central Florida (approx. 9:30, ESPNU)
Another league with at least one team with no hope of an at-large guaranteed to make the semifinals (the Temple-Tulane winner), the AAC has two teams that look like near-certain selections (Houston and Memphis) and a third (SMU) that has done some good work but really can’t cough up a game it shouldn’t. Losing to Tulsa, whose NET ranking is 171, would fall into that category.
Bracket impact: SMU isn’t playing its way in Friday, but it could play its way out. Teams at the edge of the field will be rooting for Houston and Memphis to go as far as possible.
Big Ten quarterfinal: No. 4 Rutgers vs. No. 5 Iowa (approx. 1:55, BTN)
Rutgers definitely isn’t a metrics darling — it is No. 77 in the NET — but its 6-5 record in Quadrant 1 games stands out compared to other teams scrambling for the last few bids. The Scarlet Knights won at Wisconsin and handled Illinois, Iowa, Ohio State and Purdue at home, so there’s no doubt they can do some damage if they get in. It’s going to be hard to leave them out. If they beat Iowa Friday, it’s going to be really hard to leave them out.
Bracket impact: Rutgers is one of the trickier teams to evaluate this year. Come Sunday, it could pop up on the No. 8 or No. 9 line to make angst over this game look silly. Or it could miss the field entirely. A victory Friday ensures some extra daylight from the edge of the field.
SEC quarterfinal: No. 2 Tennessee vs. No. 10 Mississippi State (6, SEC Network) SEC quarterfinal: No. 3 Kentucky vs. No. 11 Vanderbilt (approx. 8:30, SEC Network)
It’s the same storyline in both games in the SEC’s night session, so they’ll get lumped together for purposes of this rundown. Mississippi State (18-14) might be able to get in as an at-large if it bags two huge victories the next two days, but it probably needs to win the entire tournament. Vanderbilt (17-15) definitely needs to win the entire tournament, and beating Alabama on Thursday was a good start.
Bracket impact: Mississippi State and Vanderbilt still have plenty of work in front of them to make the field.
Big Ten quarterfinal: No. 3 Purdue vs. No. 11 Penn State (approx. 8:55, BTN)
The last power conference team with a losing record still playing, Penn State (14-16) took full advantage of a fading Ohio State team to claim a 71-68 victory Thursday. The Nittany Lions’ only way to reach the field of 68 is to win five games in five days. They’re 40 percent of the way there.
Bracket impact: Borderline teams will root for Purdue to bounce a possible bid snatcher before the weekend.
Pac-12 semifinal: No. 1 Arizona vs. No. 4 Colorado (9, Pac-12 Network)
Colorado (21-10) has one Quad 1 victory … and it was a 16-point shelling of Arizona on Feb. 26. The Buffaloes dispatched Oregon, 80-69, on Thursday to win for the eighth time in nine games, and stand two victories away from landing an automatic berth. For its part, Arizona might be playing to lock up a No. 1 seed; a loss in the final to UCLA or Southern California wouldn’t hurt the Wildcats much on that front.
Bracket impact: An Arizona victory clears out the Pac-12 field of potential bid snatchers.
Mountain West semifinal: No. 1 Boise State vs. No. 4 Wyoming (9:30, CBS Sports Network)
The Cowboys could conceivably get in even without making it to the Mountain West final, but they might not be wise to chance it. Wyoming (25-7) split with Boise State during league play, and picking off the regular season champ a second time — this time on a neutral court — would enhance its postseason credentials.
Bracket impact: Wyoming hasn’t defeated a likely tournament team away from home all season. That’s the counterargument to the Cowboys’ combined 11-5 record in Quad 1 and Quad 2 games. A victory Friday would deflate the case against Jeff Linder’s team.
ACC semifinal: No. 3 North Carolina vs. No. 7 Virginia Tech (approx. 9:30, ESPN)
Even after defeating Notre Dame in the quarterfinals, Virginia Tech (21-12) has only one Quad 1 victory. The Hokies’ profile, littered with blowout victories and tight losses, makes them a predictive metrics darling. But a No. 33 NET ranking isn’t going to get them in. Beating a high-end opponent — and North Carolina counts — could do the trick.
Bracket impact: The thinking here is Virginia Tech needs to win the ACC tournament, but defeating two likely NCAA teams on a neutral floor in the last week of the season would at least make the Hokies a team that would get heavily dissected in the final days of the committee’s deliberations. Beating Notre Dame helped; upending North Carolina would help more.
Big 12 semifinal: No. 3 Texas Tech vs. No. 7 Oklahoma (approx. 9:30, ESPN2)
Oklahoma (18-14) becomes more curious by the game. The Sooners ran their winning streak to four with a 72-67 defeat of Baylor. The Sooners are 4-11 in Quad 1 games, and they were a less-than-stellar 3-8 on the road. In other words, there’s flaws to their profile, but a second victory over Texas Tech (to go with a Feb. 9 rout at home) would make Oklahoma an even more compelling candidate.
Bracket impact: Line up Oklahoma and Michigan, and there isn’t a ton of daylight between them. The Sooners might have a better chance than anyone other than perhaps Wyoming to play their way into the field on Friday.
Last four included: Rutgers, Wyoming, Michigan, Xavier
First four on the outside: Oklahoma, BYU, Wake Forest, Indiana
Next four on the outside: Dayton, Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, Colorado
Moving in: None
Moving out: None
(8) San Diego State vs. (9) TCU
(4) BIG EAST/Providence vs. (13) SOUTHERN/Chattanooga
(3) Tennessee vs. (14) METRO ATLANTIC/Saint Peter’s
(6) Southern California vs. (11) SMU
(7) OHIO VALLEY/Murray State vs. (10) Notre Dame
(2) Purdue vs. (15) COLONIAL/Delaware
It won’t determine who gets in or is left out, but San Diego State’s Mountain West semifinal against Colorado State should be fun. The Aztecs rolled to a 30-point win at home over Colorado State, but dropped a one-point decision in Fort Collins in the return game. … In the least surprising development on Thursday, Providence won a game by a single-digit margin, fending off Butler 65-61. The Friars get Creighton in the Big East semifinals. …
Southern California has a real chance to jump up a line with a victory over UCLA in the Pac-12 semifinals. The Trojans aren’t the easiest team to seed, with a gaudy 26-6 record and 9-3 road mark countered by underwhelming metrics (in the top 25 of one of the six rankings listed on the NCAA team sheets) and just three victories against this projected field (UCLA and Long Beach State at home, San Diego State in Anaheim). … Notre Dame’s resume isn’t the greatest, but the wins over Kentucky and North Carolina should get the Irish in with room to spare. A double-digit seed, though, is plausible after an ACC quarterfinal loss to Virginia Tech.
(1) SEC/Auburn vs. (16) NORTHEAST/Bryant-HORIZON/Wright State winner
(8) Michigan State vs. (9) Miami
(5) Connecticut vs. (12) Michigan-Wyoming winner
(6) Alabama vs. (11) San Francisco
Miami looks better on paper than its NET ranking suggests. The Hurricanes are 5-1 in Quadrant 1 games and have 10 true road victories, and they could get a nice boost with a victory over Duke in the ACC semifinals. … Michigan has victories over Purdue, Iowa and Ohio State (the latter two on the road) and ranks in the top 40 in five of the six metrics on the NCAA team sheets (with a No. 44 strength of record the outlier). The Wolverines aren’t overwhelming at 17-14, but they’re probably getting in. …
Alabama’s eight Quad 1 victories are great; its three-game slide (against Texas A&M, LSU and Vanderbilt) to close the regular season is not. Don’t be surprised if Alabama ends up more like a No. 7 seed, perhaps even landing in an 8/9 game. … Baylor’s chances at a No. 1 seed aren’t gone after Thursday’s loss to Oklahoma, but if Arizona (Pac-12), Kansas (Big 12) and either Auburn or Kentucky (SEC) can claim their respective league tournaments, the Bears will probably be ticketed for the No. 2 line.
(1) BIG 12/Kansas vs. (16) SWAC/Alcorn State-SOUTHLAND/Nicholls State winner
(8) Creighton vs. (9) Memphis
(4) Arkansas vs. (13) MID-AMERICAN/Toledo
(6) Saint Mary’s vs. (11) VCU
(7) MOUNTAIN WEST/Boise State vs. (10) Iowa State
Creighton and Marquette are going to end up within a line or so of each other, and while head-to-head isn’t an end-all-be-all, the teams’ profiles are similar enough that the Bluejays’ three victories over the Golden Eagles should be enough to get them on at least the same seed line. Creighton is a No. 8 in this projection, Marquette a No. 9. … A sneaky-good pair of semifinals in Conference USA: North Texas gets Louisiana Tech, followed by UAB-Middle Tennessee. Any of those teams could win a game in the field of 68. …
Wisconsin’s ceiling this week is the No. 2 seed line, and the Badgers’ floor is probably a No. 4 seed. They get Michigan State in the first of the evening quarterfinals in the Big Ten tournament on Friday. … After a little reevaluation, Duke is the third No. 2 seed and pegged to play a regional in retiring coach Mike Krzyzewski’s hometown of Chicago.
(5) AMERICAN ATHLETIC/Houston vs. (12) Rutgers-Xavier winner
(4) Texas Tech vs. (13) AMERICA EAST/Vermont
(3) BIG TEN/Illinois vs. (14) IVY/Princeton
(7) Colorado State vs. (10) Seton Hall
(2) Kentucky vs. (15) BIG SOUTH/Longwood
North Carolina just played two of its best games of the season, winning at Duke before smothering Virginia in the ACC quarterfinals. The Tar Heels, who weren’t a sure thing as an at-large a week ago, could be on the cusp of avoiding an 8/9 game now. … With only one Quad 1 victory, Houston is no sure thing to hang onto a spot on the No. 5 line. The Cougars will tumble a line, and maybe two, with a loss to Cincinnati on Friday. …
Texas is 21-11 and 5-10 in Quad 1 games. There’s a good case that Murray State or Boise State is more deserving of a spot on the No. 6 line. … Seton Hall falls to the No. 10 line after its loss to Connecticut in the Big East quarterfinals, but the Pirates did enough to leave plenty of distance between themselves and the edge of the field. | null | null | null | null | null |
he winner
Once it was in shape, the challenge was figuring out how to position the pillow against my wall (or window). There wasn’t an “ah ha” moment where I felt like I got it right. Nonetheless, it did provide great support not only for my head, but also for my arm. It’s versatile and has the potential to facilitate some snoozing, plus it deflates into the size of a soda can — allegedly. I just shoved it into my backpack without folding it up tightly. | null | null | null | null | null |
Severe thunderstorms and tornadoes are possible from Florida to the Carolinas.
Winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories stretch from New Mexico to the Canadian border ahead of a rapidly intensifying storm system that will pack snow, strong winds, heavy rain and severe thunderstorms for much of the eastern United States. At least 22 states are expected to see snow out of the developing “bomb cyclone,” with a growing chance of wintry weather along Interstate 95 in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
Temperatures are crashing behind an Arctic front, triggering the storm’s development, with frigid air now occupying the West. Denver hit minus-7 degrees Thursday morning, the city’s lowest temperature so late in meteorological winter since 1886 and the chilliest March temperature on record since 1960. It dipped as low as minus-43 at Yellowstone National Park.
Temperatures will climb into the 60s in the southerly winds ahead of the storm, setting the stage for strong to severe thunderstorms in Florida, southeastern Georgia, the Carolinas and extreme southeastern Virginia. A few tornadoes are probable before the storms clear the coastline Saturday around midday.
Behind the front, temperatures will crash, with cold northwesterly winds flowing into the area. That will flip rain to snow, delivering a garnish of white to grassy surfaces from the nation’s capital to Boston and heavier, plowable totals farther inland.
For parts of the interior Northeast, the Weather Service warns that the combination of strong winds and heavy snow, falling at the rate of at least an inch per hour, will “create difficult to hazardous travel conditions” Saturday. Scranton, Pa., Albany and Syracuse, N.Y., and Burlington, Vt., are among areas that could be hardest-hit, with up to 10 inches of snow.
As the storm gets going, hints of snowfall might appear in parts of the Deep South — including northern Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
Nearly 14 million people are under winter storm warnings in an area stretching from northeastern Mississippi to northern Maine. In addition, 45 million people are under winter weather advisories between New Mexico and parts of the Northeast.
A rapidly intensifying ‘bomb’
A storm must exhibit a 24 millibar air pressure drop or more in 24 hours to be classified as a bomb. For this storm, the pressure could fall by 68 millibars in 48 hours, with the storm evacuating more than 6 percent of the atmosphere’s mass from its middle. By then, it would be in Canada. That pressure disparity indicates how much air there is outside the storm vs. inside the storm, and it is what spurs the strong inward winds; it is the atmosphere’s way of trying to achieve balance (just as how water behind a dam flows downhill to a new, even level if the dam is removed).
Then, after delivering an icy kiss to northwestern Georgia, the snow will work up the Appalachians. In its wake, a broad slushy inch or two, mainly accumulating on grassy surfaces, is probable for places like Little Rock, and Tupelo and Starkville, Miss., Athens, Ala., and areas north of Huntsville, Memphis and Lexington, Ky.
Up to a few inches of snow also could fall in eastern Ohio
The forecast has been trending colder and, as a result, snowier in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Since the snow falls during the daylight hours on Saturday, however, a high March sun angle will cut back on accumulation potential.
Snow will already be falling along the Appalachians at daybreak, but the rain/snow line will shift eastward as precipitation becomes heavier. D.C. may see a flip to heavy, wet snow during the mid- to late morning, and Baltimore could follow suit.
New York City might get an hour or two of snow before precipitation winds down, and the heaviest snow is likely in New England. There will be a sharp northwest cutoff to the precipitation, so although models are rather bullish on snow accumulation across northwestern Vermont and the Champlain Valley of New York state, human forecast intuition suggests reason for skepticism.
All told, much of Pennsylvania and New York state will wind up with 3 to 5 inches of snow. Some 6-to-10-inch amounts are probable in northern and eastern areas and at higher elevations. Some double-digit totals can’t be ruled out, especially in the mountains of northern New England.
For D.C. and Baltimore, the forecast is for an inch or two, with only a few wet flakes in New York City. Hartford might get an inch, while Boston may not see accumulation this time. The potential for accumulation will increase north and west of the cities.
On Friday evening, a clustered band of thunderstorms will begin lifting northeast out of the Gulf of Mexico and drifting ashore over the Florida Panhandle as the low’s attendant cold front sharpens to the west. With an abundance of wind shear, or a change of wind speed and/or direction with elevation, a number of those cells will rotate. Damaging straight-line winds and a few tornadoes are possible. The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center has issued a Level 3 out of 5 “enhanced risk” of severe weather in an area covering Tallahassee and Panama City, Fla., as well as southern Georgia. | null | null | null | null | null |
Together, Ukraine and Russia account for nearly 30 percent of wheat, 17 percent of corn and over half of sunflower seed oil exports. The conflict-induced bottlenecks at Black Sea ports — where cargo vessels have been struck by Russian rockets — and other complications of war have slammed Ukrainian exports. Boycotts of Russian ports by shipping companies and the knock-on effects of sanctions have also disrupted the flow of foods and feeds from Russia — creating problems that could grow as the Kremlin now threatens to impose export controls on some food commodities.
There are signs of food-driven unrest happening again. In Iraq, protests broke out this week in the impoverished south over surging prices, Al Jazeera reported.
Pandemic-era inflation and supply chain woes caused dramatic spikes in food and energy costs even before the Russian invasion, making it more expensive to aid countries in crisis even as millions across the globe fell into poverty and the risk of hunger grew. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of people at the brink of famine rose from 27 million to 44 million, with an additional 232 million people one step behind that category, David Beasley, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), wrote in The Washington Post. | null | null | null | null | null |
Carson Wentz played like an MVP in 2017. Is it possible for him to recapture it?
But he ended that day riding a golf cart out of Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with a black brace on his right knee. Torn ACL. Never the same. Wentz rebounded in 2018 and ’19 — his stats hovered around the top 12, the Eagles gave him a four-year, $128 million extension — but he cratered in 2020, by every measure one of the worst quarterbacks in football. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Long live a free Ukraine, despite its past
People walk past a mural in Odessa, Ukraine, on March 8. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
I was thankful for Yonat Shimron’s March 5 Religion essay on Jews in Ukraine, “For many Jews, memories of pogroms, hate and horror.” She described a Ukraine today very much unlike one with a haunting past for its Jews. The culmination of that torment came during the Holocaust, when 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were murdered at the hands of the Nazis, with collaborators among Ukrainians. The defining moment of the persecution came at the slaughter in the ravine in Kyiv known as Babyn Yar. I knew nothing of it until, in the mid-1960s, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet who wrote an epic poem about it, was invited to lecture at my college. The poem became assigned reading.
I am no stranger to European Jewish persecution. My parents were refugees who were fortunate to have been given sanctuary in the United States. My grandfather was not and was murdered in Munich during Kristallnacht. So, when I saw the onslaught of Russia on Ukraine, I could not help but think of the plight of its Jews and the Ukrainian past. There was cognitive dissonance for me. I saw the naked aggression and human suffering to satisfy Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dubious geopolitical designs. But I also thought of Ukraine’s past. How to resolve the dissonance? I focused on the humanitarian disaster for all Ukrainians. The suffering and hope for peace overwhelm everything. And Ms. Shimron’s words are proof for me that I am right. Long live a free Ukraine.
Rob Klein, Gainesville
Regarding the March 9 front-page article “Democrats embrace risky political strategy”:
President Biden has made diplomatic overtures to autocratic leaders he had previously kept at arm’s length. These leaders are Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The reason is no secret. It is part of Mr. Biden’s strategy to further isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin and simultaneously secure access to greater supplies of oil to reduce our need to import Russian oil and to inflict pain on Mr. Putin.
Fair-minded people can debate the morality of the United States cozying up to these autocrats, but sometimes the end does justify the means. The end in this case is to ratchet up the pressure on Mr. Putin, making the economic pain so high that he might feel compelled to stand down in Ukraine or at least settle for much less than a total capitulation. Though this probably won’t force Mr. Putin’s hand, it is worth trying. Even if Mr. Biden’s coordinated international strategy does not ultimately save Ukraine, it might well dissuade the Russian autocrat from following through on any other expansionist ambitions.
To tweak an old saying, the president's overtures to regimes he once viewed with alarm and disdain validates the notion that geopolitics makes strange bedfellows.
Ken Derow, Swarthmore, Pa.
The Post deserves credit for its consistent support of international human rights norms, but its March 6 editorial calling for seizure of the property of Russian oligarchs, “No escaping on fancy yachts,” forgot that even oligarchs have a right to due process.
There is a difference between imposing sanctions on governments, politicians and companies and depriving individuals of even ill-gotten gains. It is not an international crime to have “significant assets abroad” or to be a member of a kleptocracy, and there is no evidence that even the worst of the oligarchs advocated the invasion of Ukraine or the bombing of its civilians. Both the European Court of Human Rights and the European Union’s Court of Justice have held that there must be a minimum level of due process before a country can lawfully apply even a U.N. Security Council-ordered sanction against an individual terrorist suspect.
If the United States were serious about corruption and money-laundering, its list of targets should include Saudis, Emiratis, Chinese and many others, as well as Russians. No one should have sympathy for oligarchs losing their yachts, dachas or London mansions, and sanctions that result in their losing money are welcome and appropriate. However, being generally supportive of the Putin regime is not automatically equivalent to supporting aggression in Ukraine.
Witch hunts, even if well-intentioned, do not set good precedents.
Hurst Hannum, Cambridge, Mass. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Mary McLeod Bethune’s many firsts continue
Cecil Haney walks past the statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
The March 6 Retropolis article “Famed educator advised Roosevelt on ‘problems of my people’ ” [Metro] was a great piece about an amazing woman, Mary McLeod Bethune. Born in 1875, the 15th of 17 children, a child of former enslaved people, she walked five miles to the only school available to her and became the first person in her family to learn to read. The article did a good job of describing how she went on from the proverbial humble beginnings to incredible accomplishments as an educator, entrepreneur, civil rights leader, and the only woman in Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet.”
Soon, her statue will be installed in the Capitol as one of the two statues representing Florida, replacing a previous Florida statue of a Confederate general. It will be the first statue of a Black American representing any state. But this first is not her only first. There is a wonderful statue of her in Lincoln Park, the first statue of an American woman on public park land in D.C. (Not the first woman — there is a statue of Joan of Arc in Meridian Hill Park.)
Elva Card, Fairfax | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: What we gain when we don’t restrict learning
A historical drawing of the hanging of Bridget Bishop. (Courtesy the Bettmann Archive)
I read Kali Nicole Gross’s Feb. 28 op-ed, “The real truth about women who burned at the stake,” with great interest. Ms. Gross is to be commended for her research uncovering this horror. The practice of burning women of color in colonial America was also documented in Terry Barkley’s book “Eve’s Wail.” Mr. Barkley detailed several burnings of enslaved women in the 1700s. An enslaved woman named Eve was burned at the stake in 1746 in Orange County, Va. She was accused and convicted of poisoning her owner to death. Mr. Barkley listed several such burnings starting as early as 1610 in Jamestown. According to his book, “In South Carolina in 1741 a Negro doctor was burned.” In 1714, about 30 enslaved people were burned or hanged in New York.
I'm sure there is a lot more to uncover, as historical research is always bringing new information to light. We should all be comforted knowing that there are scholars who are doing the difficult work. Of course, if the current push to limit education to what is not “disturbing” is successful, this story will never be told.
Nancy Radcliffe, Lusby | null | null | null | null | null |
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