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Car hits patrons outside Parthenon restaurant on Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase
A car crashed into diners in Chevy Chase on Friday, March 11, 2022. (Dan Morse)
A vehicle crashed into patrons at an outdoor restaurant seating area along Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington at lunchtime Friday and left eight people injured, five of them critically, according to D.C. police and fire officials.
Vito Maggiolo, a spokesman for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services department, said three other people who were injured were treated at the scene and did not need to be hospitalized.
There was no immediate word on what caused the crash, which fire officials said happened at the Parthenon restaurant and an adjoining lounge. The Parthenon, a Greek restaurant, is recognizable by its signature blue-and-white awning that juts out onto the sidewalk. | null | null | null | null | null |
National Health Reporter Lena Sun reflects on two years of pandemic coverage and what’s ahead
Two years since the first wave of covid-19 lockdowns in the United States, the virus continues to impact lives both domestically and around the world. Washington Post national health reporter Lena Sun shared her professional and personal experience covering the coronavirus from its beginnings through the current state of the pandemic and what the future may hold for society as a whole.
Washington Post National Health Reporter Lena Sun shares her early experiences covering the pandemic and looks ahead to what we can expect next. (The Washington Post)
Read the full transcript:
Everybody thought it would behave just like other coronaviruses: SARS and MERS, which only really transmitted very much when people got sick. What we didn’t know is that this virus can transmit asymptomatically when you don’t have symptoms and that was a big indicator that this guy was totally different.
I started covering this pandemic at the very beginning in January of 2020. About four months later, my mom died of covid and it’s pretty tough to be covering an infectious disease that then goes to kill your relative…and I have to think to myself, if the government had done a couple of things, my mother and many millions of Americans would not be having to go through what people have experienced during this pandemic. They didn’t stock enough N95s in the strategic national stockpile, even though the government officials had recommended years ago. They didn’t communicate clearly on masks and people didn’t realize how important it was to wear one to prevent transmission.
And early on in the pandemic, if you’ll recall, President Trump repeatedly referred to this as the ‘Chinese virus’ and a couple weeks after he started saying that, I left the office one day after work downtown and I was crossing K Street to go home and a truck swerved around. A guy rolled down his window – he was driving this big pickup truck – and yelled out a racial epithet that I had not heard since I was in elementary school and I was really shocked. It was really amazing. Of course, this was the start of a lot of attacks against Asian-Americans. One of the big takeaways here is that messaging was so bad, it was so politicized during the Trump administration and it still has not been strong and clear and not confusing to the American public in this administration. As a result, there is a level of politicization that has really undermined trust in government and when you don’t have trust in government, it is hard to get your arms around the pandemic.
This will be over at some point, but where we go from here is I think we have a lull now. There will be more variants and you have two scenarios. The optimistic one is that the next variant is not as transmissible as omicron, not as lethal as delta. The pessimistic scenario is the next one comes and it’s bad and it’s wily and a lot of people will get sick. And we will need to remember do the things – the other things that work, right: get vaccinated, get boosted, wear your mask and you just can’t take your foot off the gas pedal completely. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Katie Meyer had everything to live for. So why couldn’t her suicide have been prevented?
Stanford goalkeeper Katie Meyer guards the goal against North Carolina in the NCAA soccer tournament championship match Dec. 8, 2019, in San Jose. (Jim Shorin/Stanford Athletics via AP)
Last week, just hours after talking via FaceTime with her parents, the 22-year-old was found dead in her on-campus residence, and authorities determined she died by suicide. The death has left her family as well as the university community reeling and in search of answers. “We are struggling to know what happened and why it happened,” her mother said during an emotional interview on NBC’s “Today” show.
Mr. and Mrs. Meyer raised the possibility that a pending disciplinary action against their daughter — about which few details are known — might have been a factor. The “whys” behind the death of this vibrant young woman might never be understood; experts caution that there is rarely any one reason for any suicide but rather a multitude of factors. But that doesn’t lessen the need for Stanford and other universities to develop better strategies for dealing with the struggles of the young people entrusted to their care.
Katie Meyer was reportedly the fourth Stanford student to die by suicide in the past 13 months. There has been a spate of suicides at other colleges, and although there is no definitive data about campus suicides, experts at the Jed Foundation, a national nonprofit that works to improve the emotional health and prevent suicides of young people, say that mental health challenges have steadily grown among college students over the past five years. The pandemic has had a profound impact, forcing students to confront isolation, uncertainty, financial stress and other challenges. The return of students to campuses after two years of remote schooling has overwhelmed some university mental health centers.
Stanford provides a variety of mental health services, including a 24-hour crisis line, and it is in the second year of working with JED in developing a comprehensive approach to the mental well-being of students. The organization believes in a public health strategy, in which everyone on campus has a role to play in supporting student emotional health. It encourages all those who come into contact with students — from security guards to coaches to academic advisers — to be alert to early signs of trouble in a student’s life, and to know how and when to recommend professional help.
Just days after his daughter died, Mr. Meyer urged parents to talk to their children openly about their mental health, no matter their age. “You may have somebody who has been loved to the ends of the earth and back from the day she was born,” he said. “You can love them fully, but you may not understand them fully.” In opening up about their daughter’s death, the Meyers have started a conversation about the need for better communication between colleges and parents about the mental health of students — one that we hope will spare other parents the pain of losing a child to a preventable suicide. | null | null | null | null | null |
Russian musicians, artists, athletes and other cultural figures are facing broad backlash as Russian President Valdimir Putin has continued to press his relentless and increasingly brutal invasion of Ukraine. Much of the world is outraged and repulsed by the assault on a democratic country and is making clear it wants nothing to do with anything Russian. Crippling economic sanctions were imposed by the United States and its allies. Russian vodka was stripped from American liquor store shelves. U.S. companies suspended operations in Russia. Russian teams have been banned from international competition.
We applaud those steps. But there are thornier issues at play when Russian-born individuals are singled out and ostracized. Some, such as Mr. Gergiev, have been cheerleaders for Mr. Putin’s aggressions; they deserve to be shunned by Western institutions. Others, such as the piano prodigy Alexander Malofeev, have seen their engagements cancelled even after they spoke out against the war, simply because they are Russian; that is unjustified. And still other cases are more complex. Ms. Netrebko, a singer with unparalleled talent, posted on social media her opposition to “this senseless war of aggression” and called on Russia “to end this war right now, to save all of us.” But Ms. Netrebko, whose ties to Mr. Putin span decades, including her endorsement of his election in 2012, refused to denounce him. In one post, later deleted, she chided as hypocrites those in the West seeking repudiation of Mr. Putin. “There was no way forward,” said the opera company’s general manager, explaining the organization would no longer work “with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him — not until the invasion and killing has been stopped, order has been restored and restitutions have been made.” | null | null | null | null | null |
One dead after car crashes outside Parthenon restaurant in D.C.
An SUV crashed into the outdoor dining space in Chevy Chase Friday. (Craig Hudson/for The Washington Post)
One person died and at least 10 others were injured when the driver of an SUV crashed into patrons at an outdoor restaurant seating area along Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington at lunchtime Friday, according to D.C. police and fire officials.
A total of eight people were taken to hospitals, including the person who died, according to Vito Maggiolo, a spokesman for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services department.
He said four of those hospitalized were in critical condition and three other people were treated for minor injuries at the scene.
A D.C. police spokesman said there is no indication the crash was intentional, and it is being investigated as an accident. Fire officials said the crash happened at the Parthenon restaurant and an adjoining lounge. The Parthenon, a Greek restaurant, is recognizable by its signature blue-and-white awning that juts out onto the sidewalk.
The SUV ended up diagonal on the wide sidewalk, its back end partially under the awning. It appeared to have slammed into the doorway of a dry cleaning shop, with broken potted plants and chairs scattered about.
Becky Pulles and Christian Borjas were seated at a table outside a Starbucks shop, about 75 feet from the Parthenon. They saw a gray SUV crossing Connecticut Avenue and accelerating. The two could hear the engine gunning.
“It suddenly accelerated,” Pulles said. “It looked like someone hit the accelerator instantly. It was going super-fast, like police-car fast.”
The SUV jumped over a curb, went in between columns of the Parthenon Restaurant’s outdoor awning, and plowed into people, including those seated at tables, they said.
“It was horrific,” Pulles said.
Borjas, a nurse from California who is temporarily working in the area, rushed over. He said that he and several others lifted the SUV off an injured woman, and helped pull her out.
Borjas said he helped open the door for the driver, who he said appeared to be about 80.
“He walked out. He was scared. You could tell it wasn’t intentional,” Borjas said. Police confirmed the driver of the SUV was elderly.
“Connecticut Avenue is where we come to work and play and live,” said Lisa Gore, vice chair of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission for Chevy Chase. “My heart goes out to the community. We pray for everyone who is involved.”
Emily Davies contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
In the past two weeks, the shop has produced hundreds of the caltrops, said the company official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for his safety.
“I saw some of those in Iraq,” Cancian, a retired Marine Corps officer, said. “We’d have the equivalent and put it out in front of a checkpoint so a vehicle couldn’t just roll through.” | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. experts say that — barring any further damage from the fighting — the spent fuel rods could remain safely underwater for weeks, or even months. “The fuel rods have had a couple of decades to cool. So the cooling need is not that acute,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Depending on the outcome of the war, the dangers posed by Chernobyl could be reduced even further. An American company has been hired to transfer the spent fuel into tall dry caskets, large vessels surrounded by steel and concrete. But that transfer had only just started and will take years to complete. | null | null | null | null | null |
However baseball history remembers the collective bargaining agreement that saved the season Thursday, it undoubtedly will look with fascination on the process by which the union agreed to it: The MLB Players’ Association executive subcommittee — made up of eight high-profile, highly paid stars such as Max Scherzer, Gerrit Cole, and Francisco Lindor — voted unanimously against the owners’ proposal that eventually led to a deal.
Player representatives from each team voted 26-4 to approve the offer, thereby ratifying it on behalf of the union even though the players who were most involved with the negotiations had voted against it.
In a low-key news conference Friday morning, MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark and his chief negotiator, Bruce Meyer, addressed the natural questions: Had the players in the negotiation room — six of whom are clients of agent Scott Boras, all of whom could afford to miss a few weeks’ pay given their career earnings — found themselves at odds with the rank-and-file? Was the union, which Meyer said repeatedly was among the most unified he had ever represented, experiencing significant division?
“You call it a division; I call it a healthy dialogue and conversation,” Clark said Friday. “At the end of the day, each player — player reps, the teams they represent, the executive subcommittee — all had a common goal in improving the system … Rest assured, the interests were the same.”
Ultimately, the numbers behind the vote were secondary to the outcome, and membership could look different five years from now when it is time to do the whole thing again. Multiple people who were in the negotiating rooms during the week-plus retreat to Jupiter, Fla. said some of those meetings included so much player input from so many voices that they sometimes felt like brainstorming sessions.
The prevailing thoughts in the hours after the deal was that the players got about as many concessions as they could have from an ownership bloc that had far more leverage. After a series of CBAs they felt tilted economic power firmly toward ownership, the players began these negotiations asking for massive changes such as reducing the tenure required for players to reach free agency and arbitration by a year each, increasing the luxury tax threshold to a point where it would be almost irrelevant to most teams, and using changes to the revenue-sharing system and amateur draft to penalize teams that do not make good-faith financial efforts to compete.
Ultimately, the players were not able to negotiate those massive changes to arbitration and free agency, and their broader proposal to alter revenue sharing was dropped, too. But the league did agree to reward small-market teams that build their own revenue with more revenue-sharing money — an incentive-based shift, rather than punitive one. It also agreed to a draft lottery with limits on how many years in a row a team can qualify for it. They secured a new bonus pool for players who have yet to reach arbitration. They also conceded a fourth luxury tax surcharge, something Meyer admitted later they obviously didn’t want. They may still have to deal with draft pick compensation, the process by which teams who sign top free agents lose a draft pick for doing so, thereby suppressing free agent spending in the players’ view. But while wholesale change was the goal, something that felt more than incremental was the outcome.
“It’s difficult, but we’re never going to give up on some of those things,” Meyer said. “This is the labor process. We had determined adversaries on the other side, all of whom are billionaires and have enormous resources. Our players did an incredible job of sticking together, and ultimately, we’re comfortable with the deal we have. Whether more can be accomplished in the future, we’ll have to see. I think so.”
As players headed for spring training camps that opened on a voluntary basis Friday morning, just etting an agreement in time to play a full season seemed significant. Had the negotiations gone longer, players likely would have had to negotiate how much of their 162-game salaries would have been paid for a shorter season. Service time for curtailed schedule also would have had to have been negotiated. Like so many of the points negotiated over the past few months, those issues affect different player groups differently. Any wedges in the union could have widened. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE — In this image from House Television, David Sackler, a member of the family that owns Purdue Pharma, testifies via video to a House Oversight Committee hearing, Dec. 17, 2020. Sackler, the former Purdue president and board chair, appearing via audio, attended a virtual U.S. Bankruptcy Court hearing, Thursday, March 10, 2022. (House Television via AP, File) (Uncredited/House Television) | null | null | null | null | null |
On Aug. 20, 1968, I was in West Germany as an attache at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn when Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded the rebellious satellite Czechoslovakia. Years earlier, in 1962, I was the overnight duty officer at Fort Niagara in Youngstown, N.Y., when President John F. Kennedy announced the “quarantine” to prevent Soviet shipments of military equipment to Cuba and ordered U.S. military forces into high-alert Defense Condition 3 (Defcon 3). The Czechoslovakia and Cuban crises and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are completely different matters.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, worn down by public opinion and a political casualty of a Vietnam War tearing the country apart, abruptly announced he would not seek reelection. America was bloodied by the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Our cities and towns were engulfed in riots; universities were consumed by antiwar protest. The same month that Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, police and Illinois National Guardsmen went on a rampage outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, clubbing and tear-gassing hundreds of demonstrators, news reporters and bystanders. | null | null | null | null | null |
The first Super Nintendo World opened at Universal Studios Japan in March 2021. (Philip Fong/AFP/Getty Images)
Super Nintendo World, which represents a partnership with the Japanese video game giant and Comcast Corporation, will sit in an expanded section of the Universal park that features Super Mario characters like Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach. A news release promises “a groundbreaking ride and interactive areas” along with themed shopping and food.
In 2016, the same year Universal Hollywood opened the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Universal announced plans to bring Nintendo-themed areas to its parks in Japan, Hollywood and Orlando. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: It’s not equity that’s the problem
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R). (Robb Hill for The Washington Post)
As a resident of Virginia, I was greatly concerned by the March 6 Metro article “Youngkin removes references to ‘equity.’ ” The Office of the Governor and supporting legislators seem to believe that “equity” is a bad thing, because it actually justifies discrimination and eradicates the value of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps. If a person thinks it’s okay to build wheelchair ramps — even require them for government buildings and certain businesses — they have no problem with equity. If a person has no problem with accessibility requirements such as larger type and subtitles for websites, documents and videos to accommodate the elderly, they have no problem with equity. If a person supports and takes advantage of non-merit-based, purely need-based college financial aid, they have no problem with equity. If that same person is okay with all of that but has a problem putting resources toward closing racial performance gaps in schools, then that person doesn’t have a problem with equity. That person has a problem with race. Everything else is just rationalization.
Kathy Rondon, Falls Church | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: A judge’s poor reasoning on Jan. 6 obstruction charges
A mob of Trump supporters fights with members of law enforcement at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Leah Millis/Reuters)
Regarding the March 9 front-page article “Jan. 6 obstruction charge dropped”:
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols was appointed by President Donald Trump and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. That should make his ability to make the decision that obstruction charges are not legal moot. His judgment about this is obviously prejudicial, and he should have recused himself from these cases.
Hundreds of defendants will not be prosecuted because he thinks that planning an insurrection isn’t the same as carrying it out. I guess this is a lead-up to saying that Mr. Trump and his advisers can’t be prosecuted because they didn’t tamper with official documents or records. Does that mean that the fake sets of electors will be prosecuted for signing fake documents but not the people who decided that it was a good idea and laid the groundwork for it to happen? Or does it mean that no one is responsible since the plan didn’t work?
Janet Smith, Herndon | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Missouri is barking up the wrong tree
Missouri state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R) in St. Louis on Dec. 16. (Neeta Satam for The Washington Post) (Neeta Satam /For The Washington Post)
The March 9 Politics & the Nation article “Mo. legislator seeks to prohibit residents from getting out-of-state abortions” reported on Missouri’s “unusual new” approach to preventing residents from obtaining an abortion in a neighboring state: allow private citizens to sue anyone who assists in that effort. In other words, Missouri is exceeding Texas’s statute and is allowing suits aimed at conduct that is legal in another state.
Though the Constitution might not protect Americans from having to be vaccinated against a contagious disease, it certainly protects the ability of Americans to travel to other states to engage in conduct that might be illegal in their own state. The most obvious example of this principle concerns divorce. In the mid-20th century, many states had laws that severely limited the grounds for divorce. Iowa, for example, had a one-year residency requirement that the Supreme Court upheld in 1975. Enter Nevada and Las Vegas, where couples could travel and get a virtually instant divorce. When home states attempted to invalidate those divorces, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause required states to recognize actions legally obtained in other states. The same principle applies to marriage.
Obviously, a Missouri woman could not be prosecuted in Missouri for an abortion she obtained in Illinois. Is it really possible that her parent, friend, spouse or a nonprofit could be prosecuted for assisting in that outcome? We have to wait to see what Justice Clarence Thomas says about this, but for now Missouri appears to be barking up the wrong tree.
George Chuzi, McLean | null | null | null | null | null |
Antiabortion protesters demonstrate outside the Supreme Court in Washington on Nov. 1, 2021, as the court hears arguments over a challenge to a Texas law that bans abortion after six weeks. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
“We conclude that Texas law does not grant the state-agency executives named as defendants in this case any authority to enforce the Act’s requirements, either directly or indirectly,” Justice Jeffrey Boyd wrote in the opinion.
“This is a big victory for the TX Heartbeat Act,” Kimberlyn Schwartz, media director for Texas Right to Life, said in a statement. “We have said from the beginning that abortionists’ lawsuit should be dismissed, and we’re grateful that the law will continue saving thousands of lives.” | null | null | null | null | null |
LOS ANGELES — Kyle Kuzma hasn’t played for the Lakers in more than eight months, but rivalries have a way of working themselves into your bones. Plonk the Washington Wizards’ starting forward back in sunny California, and he will be happy to remind that just because Los Angeles’s two franchises share the not-so-recently renamed Crypto.com Arena does not mean the game day experience is the same.
“It’s a little different,” Kuzma said, generously. “Clipper games ain’t Laker games, so. It’s two separate arenas, really, and now it’s Crypto. We’ll get the real taste of this arena on Friday.”
For Kuzma and Caldwell-Pope, a return to Los Angeles is part business trip, part homecoming. Kuzma stayed at his own home, not the team hotel, during the Wizards’ five-day stay in part so he could oversee renovations on his guesthouse and his pool. Caldwell-Pope and his wife attended business meetings before she ran the kids past their old house for nostalgia’s sake.
When it’s finally game time, expect a little added juice. Los Angeles selected Kuzma with the No. 27 pick in the 2017 draft, molding him into a valuable role player. Caldwell-Pope arrived as a free agent in the same year, three seasons before both helped Los Angeles capture an NBA championship.
Coach Wes Unseld Jr. addressed the matchup with the team, understanding it’s human nature for Kuzma and Caldwell-Pope to want to make the Lakers regret giving them up. Kuzma said he has felt like he has something to prove ever since he arrived in Washington, both to those who follow the NBA and, more importantly, to himself.
“The level of consistency has been there,” Unseld said. “We’ve seen him play at a high level, he’s got to cut down on the turnovers I think is a big piece, but his usage rate has jumped dramatically from where it was a year ago. It’s just an area of growth for him, just, he’s got to get more comfortable.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Bruce Duffy, who explored philosophers’ lives in critically praised debut novel, dies at 70
Novelist Bruce Duffy in 2011. (Stephen Voss)
Mr. Duffy, who lived in the Maryland suburbs his entire life, was 36 when he published “The World As I Found It” in 1987. The novel, nearly 600 pages long, examined the complicated ideas and even more complicated life of Wittgenstein, the Vienna-born philosopher whose studies of logic made him one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.
It took Mr. Duffy more than seven years to do the research and writing. The idea for the novel grew from a few stray facts he learned about Wittgenstein, who was born in 1889, renounced his family’s wealth and, for a 10-year period, gave up the study of philosophy. Three of his brothers died by suicide.
Mr. Duffy had never visited Austria or Cambridge, England, where Wittgenstein spent much of his life. Yet he inhabited that world each day at 4 a.m., when he rose to write before going to his day job at a consulting company.
“You know, you don’t always have a choice of what you’re going to write,” he told The Washington Post in 1987. “So, I said … I don’t care what anybody thinks. Whether it’s publishable or not, I’m going to write it.”
Mr. Duffy sought to bring drama and passion to the heady life of Cambridge philosophers, including Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. Russell, who was Wittgenstein’s mentor and intellectual rival, called his Austrian protege “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived.”
Mr. Duffy took his title from a phrase Wittgenstein had written in the only book of philosophy he published during his lifetime, then painted an elaborate portrait over the known biography: Wittgenstein once worked as an aeronautical engineer, studied at Cambridge, fought on the Russian front during World War I, retreated for long periods to rural Norway and Austria and practiced architecture in Vienna before returning to Cambridge in the late 1920s.
“In the collective memory of those who knew him,” Mr. Duffy wrote of Wittgenstein, "he would become sort of a splatched and angled concatenation of images, wishes, evasions, running feuds, regrets. For some who knew him, his name would evoke pains such as old men feel — sharp, bunionlike pangs that would shoot out at the mention of Witt-gen-stein, that fractious weather system of remembering and forgetting which finally consumes the life of the thing remembered.”
In a review in the Los Angeles Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Richard Eder wrote, “It is hard to know which is more outsized; the talent of Bruce Duffy, the author, or his nerve.”
“By turns wicked, melancholy and rhapsodic,” critic John Leonard wrote in Newsday, " ‘The World As I Found It’ is an astonishing performance, a kind of intellectual opera in which each abstraction gets its own aria.”
Even critics who complained that some passages were overwritten or that the dialogue did not sound realistic, said there was much to salute in Mr. Duffy’s effort.
Mr. Duffy received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award for emerging writers and a two-book contract for his next novels. He appeared on talk shows, lectured on Wittgenstein, and the BBC optioned the novel for a project that never came to fruition.
Critics praised the expansive scope and vision of Mr. Duffy’s first novel, noting that he had defied the standard practice of publishing a loosely autobiographical, coming-of-age story. In 1997, his second novel, “Last Comes the Egg,” came out: a loosely autobiographical, coming-of-age story about a boy from suburban Maryland whose relationship with his father falters after the death of his mother.
The book “crashed and burned,” in Mr. Duffy’s words.
Bruce Michael Duffy was born June 9, 1951, in Washington and grew up in Garrett Park, Md. His father was a carpenter and builder, and his mother was a homemaker who died when Bruce, an only child, was 11.
Mr. Duffy considered his mother’s death, of complications from appendicitis, the formative event of his childhood, leading him to question the purpose and meaning of life. He determined to become a writer and studied English at the University of Maryland, graduating in 1973.
“She said I had to be more conscious about really learning my craft,” Mr. Duffy told Washingtonian magazine in 2011, “and really looking at writers I admired and say, ‘How did they do that? Why does it work?’ It made me look at the alchemy of words, as Rimbaud said.”
Mr. Duffy was overcome by “an incredible sense of mastery,” while writing the book, he told The Post in 1987. “I would feel as if I were standing up in a kind of control tower, and somebody else was writing. I’d be at once feeling emotional about the characters and at the same time feeling a tremendous emotional distance from them, a kind of towering resignation before it all. And that was a wonderful feeling.”
Mr. Duffy’s marriage to Marianne Glass ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 16 years, Susan Segal; two daughters from his first marriage, Lily Duffy and Kate Duffy; a stepson, Sam Kupfer; and a granddaughter.
Shortly before his death, Mr. Duffy completed a manuscript for a new novel about the birth of the atomic bomb. | null | null | null | null | null |
Alphabet, Meta face probes of ad deal
European Union and British antitrust authorities launched parallel investigations Friday into a 2018 online display-advertising deal between Google and Facebook, adding to a long list of regulatory challenges facing the U.S. tech giants.
Alphabet unit Google and Facebook, whose parent company is now called Meta, defended the “Jedi Blue” deal, which the E.U. said may thwart ad tech rivals and disadvantage publishers in online display advertising.
“Header bidding” allows publishers, such as news providers, to offer ad space to multiple ad exchanges and networks simultaneously, potentially generating more ad revenue.
The Jedi Blue agreement enables Meta, via its Meta Audience Network, to participate in Google’s Open Bidding program, which is a rival to header bidding.
“A competing technology to Google’s Open Bidding may have been targeted with the aim to weaken it and exclude it from the market for displaying ads on publisher websites and apps,” E.U. antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
While one angle of the E.U. investigation focuses on the deal, another looks at whether Google abuses its dominance; Facebook could be off the hook if this is found to be the case.
Google — which has been hit with more than $8.8 billion in E.U. antitrust fines in the past decade — and Facebook are both being investigated by the bloc’s executive over other issues and could face fines of as much as 10 percent of their global turnover for breaching its rules.
Britain’s antitrust authority is also investigating the ad deal, and the E.U. competition watchdog said it intends to cooperate closely with its British counterpart.
Texas and 15 other U.S. states have alleged in an antitrust complaint against Google that the deal with Facebook was struck as part of its effort to counter header bidding, which publishers wanted to use to make more money from advertising on their websites.
FedEx contractors demand higher pay
FedEx delivery contractors are demanding higher pay and changes to operations, stung by rising costs and a drop in compensation for the most recent holiday season.
Payments to the small companies that deliver packages for FedEx’s Ground unit were 20 percent higher during the 2020 peak season than last year, according to a petition signed by more than 800 of the operation’s roughly 6,000 contractors.
The decline was largely because contractors last season didn’t hit the thresholds necessary to get the extra fees they usually receive, after FedEx set targets too high, according to the petition. It also said that staffing shortages at sorting hubs delayed loading and that volume predictions by the courier’s new software system were often incorrect.
The petition is the first concerted effort by contractors to demand concessions from FedEx. The move follows changes over the last two years, such as a shift to seven-day service, that have squeezed contractor profits.
“As our industry undergoes new and unprecedented challenges brought on by the explosive growth of e-commerce and rapidly shifting market dynamics, we remain committed to collaborating with service providers to create opportunities for success,” FedEx said.
U.S. consumer sentiment tumbled in early March to the lowest level since 2011, and year-ahead inflation expectations rose to a four-decade high in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The University of Michigan's sentiment index dropped to 59.7, from 62.8 in February, data released Friday showed. The median estimate of economists in a Bloomberg survey called for a reading of 61. Consumers expect prices to rise 5.4 percent over the next year, the highest reading since 1981, according to the data.
Discovery shareholders voted Friday to approve the media company's $43 billion merger with WarnerMedia, moving the deal one step closer to completion. Shareholders approved various measures, such as charter amendments and a share issuance proposal, related to the transaction. They also supported golden-parachute payments to executives in case the transaction fails to close. | null | null | null | null | null |
The board undertook a much-needed review and implemented an overhaul of the admissions process that sought to be more equitable without sacrificing academic rigor. But the reforms, which resulted in a class of 2025 that is the most diverse in recent memory — including more representation of Blacks, Hispanics and low-income students — have now been put in jeopardy by a federal-court decision that has upended the admissions process.
What is given short shrift in the judge’s ruling is that the policy, as attorneys for the school board pointed out, was blind to race, gender and national origin. It jettisoned an anachronistic entrance exam and application fees that were barriers to economically disadvantaged students and put in place a holistic approach that emphasized student grade-point averages and advanced math requirements. Just as prestigious universities have moved away from test scores as an absolute determinant of student ability, so did the Fairfax school board seek to better define the metrics of merit. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ukraine and humanitarian organizations working there have received an outpouring of international support, including donations of cash and critical supplies, in the days since Russia launched its invasion more than two weeks ago.
Ukrainian authorities have accused Russia of shelling humanitarian corridors in violation of temporary cease-fire agreements. Russian attacks have destroyed vital infrastructure, and the port of Odessa — where almost all of Ukraine’s imports by sea arrive — is closed because of the war.
Vice President Harris, visiting Poland on Thursday, announced the United States would donate $50 million to WFP.
The organization plans to assist more than 3 million people inside and outside of Ukraine in the coming months, Taravella said. It has set up operational bases in three locations — Lviv in western Ukraine and two others that he declined to name, citing security reasons. The hubs will supply and organize humanitarian convoys into conflict areas.
The Red Cross said it had delivered supplies to two hospitals in Mariupol and provided medical assistance in centers for displaced people in the city. The organization partnered with Doctors Without Borders to send surgical materials to three main hospitals in Kyiv, and sent enough insulin to the Odessa and Dnipro regions to cover thousands of people.
The Ukrainian government, meanwhile, collected and delivered more than 400 metric tons of medicines and medical supplies — mostly from European donor countries and U.N. agencies — during the first 11 days of the war, according to the latest update from the health ministry.
On Wednesday, a Russian airstrike struck a maternity hospital in the city, killing at least three people. The attack alarmed “the whole humanitarian community,” said Melki of Doctors Without Borders. “If we know that hospitals will not be bombed, it would be easier to work.”
International aid groups are well-versed at operating in conflict zones. But some have assessed that the dangers in Mariupol and other front line cities are too great for staff to deliver aid. Teams from the Red Cross had a close call on Sunday, when they were exposed “at close range” to fighting as they tried to help facilitate safe passage out of the city, Straziuso said.
High-level talks between Ukraine and Russia in Turkey did not produce an agreement on Thursday. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Ukraine had received no response to its proposals for a 24-hour cease-fire and humanitarian relief for Mariupol. | null | null | null | null | null |
ROME — The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is warning that poorer countries in northern Africa, Asia and the Middle East that depend heavily on wheat imports risk suffering significant food insecurity because of Russia’s war in Ukraine. A report from the agency Friday noted that Ukraine and Russia together account for one-third of global grain exports. The conflict risks driving up already soaring food prices globally. The U.N. agency says it’s unclear if other countries can fill the gap left by Russia and Ukraine, warning that wheat inventories are already low in Canada. It says the U.S., Argentina and other wheat-producing nations are likely to limit exports as governments seek to ensure domestic supply.
BRUSSELS — British and European regulators have threatened to crack down on an agreement between Google and Facebook parent Meta for online display advertising services, saying the deal may breach the bloc’s rules on fair competition. The EU’s competition watchdog opened a probe into a 2018 ad bidding pact between Google and Facebook. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said the deal may be part of an effort to exclude ad tech services that compete with Google’s Open Bidding program — which would harm publishers and consumers. Google said the allegations are false and Facebook said it was a non-exclusive agreement that increases competition.
VERSAILLES, France — European Union leaders on Friday agreed to phase out our dependency on Russian gas, oil and coal imports “as soon as possible.” They also decided to soon draw a plan to support the continent’s economies as they face skyrocketing energy prices amid a crisis aggravated by the war in Ukraine. Heads of state and government gathered for a two-day summit at the Versailles palace, west of Paris. They said in a statement the strategy will involve accelerating the reduction of our overall reliance on fossil fuels diversifying supplies and routes for gas and oil and speeding up the development of renewable energy. Europe was already facing a tricky test before Russia’s invasion because of an outlook for slowing economic growth accompanied by surging inflation, driven by energy prices.
NEW YORK — Stocks fell again after another bumpy day of trading on Wall Street Friday, marking the fourth losing week in the last five. Uncertainty about the war in Ukraine and persistently high inflation have continued to knock markets around. The S&P 500 gave up an early gain and ended 1.3% lower. Oil prices ended 3.1% higher after flip-flopping earlier. They’re the latest swings for global markets, which have been rocked by dramatic hour-to-hour reversals in prior weeks amid uncertainty about where inflation and the global economy are heading. The Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates at its meeting next week.
VERSAILLES, France — The European Union says it will continue applying pressure on Russia by devising a new set of sanctions to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine while stepping up military support for Kyiv. French President Emmanuel Macron said all options are on the table for a fourth package of coercive measures targeting Russia if President Vladimir Putin escalates his war efforts. Meanwhile, the EU’s top diplomat said he proposed that the EU injects an extra €500 million euros into the fund for military aid to Ukraine, as Russia widens its military offensive.
BEIJING — China’s No. 2 leader says the government hopes to generate as many as 13 million new jobs this year to help reverse a painful economic slump but faces “many difficulties and challenges.” Forecasters say the ruling Communist Party is likely to struggle to meet its official 5.5% economic growth target, the lowest since the 1990s. That would be down sharply from last year’s 8.1% expansion as China contends with a crackdown on business debt, the coronavirus, weak global export demand and high energy prices. Premier Li Keqiang promised “pro-job policies” including tax and fee cuts totaling $400 billion for businesses.
NEW YORK — A new qualitative study of 113 millionaires of color found that nearly all had experienced racial or ethnic bias. “It’s so obvious, but it’s also very profound,” says report co-author Hali Lee, founding partner at Radiant Strategies and a co-founder of the Donors of Color Network. She says the finding demonstrates the ways that racism has affected the lives of millionaires of color — from where they raise their families to the people and causes they support. The study was released Wednesday by the Donors of Color Network, a membership organization for wealthy philanthropists from marginalized backgrounds, along with two consulting companies, Radiant Strategies and the Vaid Group. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - This combination of undated booking photos provided by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office shows, Brent Getz, left, and Gregory Wagner Jr. On Thursday, March 10, 2022, Getz, a former police chief, was jailed after a jury convicted him of raping a child and related offenses in a case that languished for several years after police first learned of the allegations. Codefendant Wagner Jr. pleaded guilty to child rape in November 2020 and agreed to testify against Getz. Both men await sentencing. (Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office via AP, File) (Uncredited/Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office) | null | null | null | null | null |
“We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation,” Young continued. “There is a nexus on this issue.” (Young did not respond to a request for additional comment.)
In attempting to criminalize the ability to seek gender-affirming care and abortion nationwide, both Idaho and Missouri lawmakers have waded into unprecedented territory, experts say. The two bills also illuminate parallels between the two issues that advocates on either side have increasingly drawn comparisons between.
“Before fertility, these youth need to stay alive,” Reed said. “Suicide plagues the trans community.”
The shifting landscape has prompted Reed to develop a map that can help families of trans children identify which states have strong protections for trans people. But even in statehouses with Democratic majorities, there are not many laws explicitly supporting trans people, she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is located in Alexandria. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
A federal judge has denied the request of Fairfax County Public Schools for a stay of his order invalidating the admissions system at prestigious magnet school Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, marking another serious blow for Virginia’s largest school system.
The stay, if granted, would have allowed the school district of 180,000 to proceed with the current admissions system, a “holistic review” process that takes into account factors such as socioeconomic status, for applicants to the Class of 2026.
The Thomas Jefferson admissions cycle for these students is “already well underway,” Fairfax School Board Chair Stella Pekarsky (Sully) said previously, and U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton’s failure to grant a stay would cause “distress and uncertainty” for these students.
But at a hearing Friday, Hilton denied the school board’s request, saying there might be “some minor inconvenience” involved in changing the admissions system immediately but “I just don’t find irreparable harm.” He added that “this is not a new subject” and the school “studied this many times.”
Fairfax schools seek stay of order invalidating admissions system
Asked Friday what Fairfax will do regarding current applicants, school spokeswoman Julie Moult said, “On that specific point, we are looking at options and would hope to have some clarity soon.” She added that school board members have said failing to challenge Hilton’s ruling “would be tantamount to abandoning all race-neutral diversity efforts within our school community as a whole.” She said the board is reviewing its options.
“This ruling is so inconsistent with current law on diversity efforts that we cannot stand by and allow it to go unchallenged,” Pekarsky said in a statement Friday. “We cannot walk away now after making so much progress toward a fair and equitable system.”
In February, Hilton found that Fairfax’s holistic review admissions system at Thomas Jefferson constitutes an illegal act of racial balancing and discriminates against Asian American students. He ordered Fairfax to cease using its revised admissions system.
Hilton was ruling as part of a lawsuit challenging changes to the Thomas Jefferson admissions system, which were enacted in 2020 in hopes of boosting diversity at the school. The school is often ranked the top public high school in the country but has historically enrolled single-digit percentages of Black and Hispanic students.
The lawsuit was brought by the parent and alumni advocacy group Coalition for TJ, which opposes the admissions changes and is being represented pro bono by a California-based conservative legal group with a history of fighting affirmative action.
Fairfax’s revisions to admissions included removing a $100 application fee and a notoriously difficult test. In the first and only year the new system took effect, for the Class of 2025, the admitted class saw its percentage of Black and Hispanic students grow while the percentage of Asian admits fell from a typical 70 percent to about 50 percent.
Earlier this month, Fairfax officials, who have denied all charges of discrimination, filed a court petition asking Hilton for a stay of his order. Pekarsky said at the time that Hilton’s ruling “is not supported by law” and that Fairfax is considering appealing. She also said, “Fairfax believes that our new application process will eventually be proven to meet all legal requirements.”
At the hearing Friday, Sona Rewari, representing the school board, argued there isn’t time to start over this month when 2,500 students have already started applying under the revised Thomas Jefferson admissions system.
Rewari also said “the court’s decision breaks new legal ground,” and that “the Fourth Circuit could well reach a different conclusion in this case.” Hilton said there was some “likelihood of success” for the school board on appeal, but that the possibility wasn’t enough to convince him to grant the stay.
Erin Wilcox, representing the Coalition for TJ, said in court that if the school board was struggling now it was because they “ignored this court’s warning” six months ago that an alternative might be necessary.
Asra Nomani, a founder of Coalition for TJ and an alumni parent, said outside court that many admissions tests exist that would in no way be discriminatory. She was responding to Fairfax school officials asserting they cannot go back to administering the admissions test offered before the 2020 changes because that test is no longer available.
“Just pick another test,” Nomani said. She called the ruling “remarkable” and “wonderful,” while adding it was “unconscionable” that the Fairfax school system is continuing to defend an admissions process deemed unconstitutional by a federal court. “This is what civil rights are about,” she said. “The school system has been engaging in systemic racism.” | null | null | null | null | null |
But he ended that day riding a golf cart out of Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with a black brace on his left 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.
Now, the Washington Commanders have bet on Wentz after he played relatively well for the Indianapolis Colts last season — at least until an epic, end-of-season collapse. The Colts traded him away without a clear plan to replace him, a signal of how far his stock has fallen since 2017. In Washington, Wentz is a clear upgrade over Taylor Heinicke, and at the cost of two third-round picks, he’ll be expected to have a major impact on the offense.
Football analysts say it’s more complicated than that. At the most basic level, Wentz is a good fit for offensive coordinator Scott Turner’s vertical scheme, ESPN’s Matt Bowen said. Even though the quarterback turns 30 in December, even though he’s dealt with back, knee and foot injuries, Bowen said Wentz still has strength and talent to make the deep, difficult, tight-window throws the Commanders have lacked since Turner arrived with Coach Ron Rivera in 2020.
Kevin Cole, a data analyst for Pro Football Focus, argued Wentz shouldn’t be judged against his 2017 performance because he overperformed in key situations that year, such as third down. By the metric Expected Points Added, Wentz had the fourth-best third-down season of any NFL quarterback in the past decade, according to TruMedia. Cole said a more realistic target is his 2018-19 form, when Wentz was a “fringe top-10, fringe top-12” player.
The turnovers, after his improvement last season, are not his only persistent mistakes. Wentz’s commitment to extending the play gets him sacked often. In the past two years, he’s been sacked 82 times, second only to Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow (83). Of those sacks, only 33 — about 40 percent — happened in less than three seconds, according to TruMedia.
Despite the potential pitfalls, despite the unlikelihood of Wentz returning to 2017 levels of production, Cole argued Washington is better with him than it was with any other quarterback from the past two seasons. The variance roller coaster may be difficult to ride, and the public opinion of Washington’s trade will likely depend on whether Wentz can ever recapture his form from 2018-19, which Cole said might be more a realistic expectation. | null | null | null | null | null |
LOS ANGELES — Kyle Kuzma hasn’t played for the Lakers in more than eight months, but rivalries have a way of working themselves into your bones. Plunk the Washington Wizards’ starting forward back in sunny California, and he will be happy to remind that just because Los Angeles’ two franchises share the recently renamed Crypto.com Arena does not mean the game day experience is the same.
“It’s a little different,” Kuzma said. “Clipper games ain’t Laker games, so. It’s two separate arenas, really, and now it’s Crypto. We’ll get the real taste of this arena on Friday.”
For Kuzma and Caldwell-Pope, a return to Los Angeles is part business trip, part homecoming. Kuzma stayed at his own home, not the team hotel, during the Wizards’ five-day stay, in part so he could oversee renovations on his guesthouse and his pool. Caldwell-Pope and his wife attended business meetings before she ran the kids past their old house for nostalgia’s sake.
When it’s finally game time, expect a little added juice. Los Angeles selected Kuzma with the No. 27 pick in the 2017 draft, molding him into a valuable role player. Caldwell-Pope arrived as a free agent in the same year, two seasons before both helped Los Angeles capture an NBA championship.
Wizards Coach Wes Unseld Jr. addressed the matchup with the team, understanding it’s human nature for Kuzma and Caldwell-Pope to want to make the Lakers regret giving them up. Kuzma said he has felt like he has something to prove ever since he arrived in Washington, both to those who follow the NBA and, more importantly, to himself.
“The level of consistency has been there,” Unseld said. “We’ve seen him play at a high level. He’s got to cut down on the turnovers, I think is a big piece. But his usage rate has jumped dramatically from where it was a year ago. It’s just an area of growth for him. Just, he’s got to get more comfortable.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Warhawks 38, Yellow Jackets 29
Madison guard Grace Arnolie led her team with 11 points in the Class 6 girls’ basketball championship Friday in Richmond. (Ryan M. Kelly/For The Washington Post)
RICHMOND — On Friday afternoon at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Madison Warhawks had the look of a high school basketball dynasty.
They entered the Class 6 championship game lugging around weighty expectations, and then met them with confidence and poise. With a 38-29 win over No. 11 Osbourn Park, the No. 8 Warhawks earned a third consecutive state title and finished off another season in which all Northern Virginia public programs looked up in their direction.
On Friday, the Warhawks (27-2) won with defense, as they have all year. They came into the state title game having held public school opponents to 28.9 points per game. So as they worked their way through a physical and disjointed first half in which twin sisters Grace and Alayna Arnolie — the team’s two leading scorers — went scoreless, they relied on their defense to keep the game in hand. At the half, the Warhawks led 15-8.
“You focus on defense and let the offense come to you,” Grace Arnolie said. “That’s something we say before every single game and every single practice.”
The offense picked up in the second half as Madison pulled away from the Yellow Jackets (23-3). In their postgame news conference, Madison players espoused the joy of defense.
“Playing defense is fun,” senior forward Mia Chapman said. “The rebounds, the steals, the turnovers — it’s exciting.”
Coach Kirsten Stone listened with a smile on her face.
“I brainwashed them,” Stone said afterward.
Grace Arnolie led the Warhawks with 11 points, and Chapman added 10. Osbourn Park’s Hailey Kellogg finished with a game-high 15 points.
Friday’s game was a rematch of last year’s Class 6 championship, in which Madison beat Osbourn Park, 54-48, to earn the program’s second consecutive championship. The program claimed a share of the title in 2020’s pandemic-shortened season.
Coming off last year’s title, the Warhawks quickly established themselves as the best public school team in Northern Virginia again this winter. They beat every public school opponent on their schedule by double digits, including an 18-point victory over Osbourn Park in late December. They tested themselves against some of the best private schools in the area, going 3-2 against teams from the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference and Independent School League.
Those efforts led them to VCU’s Siegel Center, where in many ways they faced an unfamiliar stage. The program’s last two titles were won in the tempered environment of a pandemic, and each lacked the bright lights and large arena of a standard state championship. So on Friday afternoon, they soaked up the scene as they lifted a large championship trophy to a wall of supporters.
“Our entire team is like a family,” Alayna Arnolie said. “So to be able to come here and get the full experience — the huge student section, the whole thing — and be able to do that as a family, it makes it mean that much more.” | null | null | null | null | null |
ORONO, Maine — Morgan Haney scored 20 points and Albany hit its last seven free throws in the final minute to defeat Maine 56-47 in the championship game of the America East Conference tournament on Friday night to advance to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in five years. | null | null | null | null | null |
On Aug. 20, 1968, I was in West Germany as an attache at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn when Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded the rebellious satellite Czechoslovakia. Years earlier, in 1962, I was the overnight duty officer at Fort Niagara in Youngstown, N.Y., when President John F. Kennedy announced the “quarantine” to prevent Soviet shipments of military equipment to Cuba and ordered U.S. military forces into high-alert Defense Condition 3 (Defcon 3). The Czechoslovakia and Cuba crises and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are completely different matters.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, worn down by public opinion and a political casualty of a Vietnam War tearing the country apart, abruptly announced he would not seek reelection. America was bloodied by the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Our cities and towns were engulfed in riots; universities were consumed by antiwar protests. The same month that Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, police and Illinois National Guardsmen went on a rampage outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, clubbing and tear-gassing hundreds of demonstrators, news reporters and bystanders. | null | null | null | null | null |
Russian musicians, artists, athletes and other cultural figures are facing broad backlash as Russian President VladimirPutin has continued to press his relentless and increasingly brutal invasion of Ukraine. Much of the world is outraged and repulsed by the assault on a democratic country and is making clear it wants nothing to do with anything Russian. Crippling economic sanctions were imposed by the United States and its allies. Russian vodka was stripped from American liquor store shelves. U.S. companies suspended operations in Russia. Russian teams have been banned from international competitions.
We applaud those steps. But there are thornier issues at play when Russian-born individuals are singled out and ostracized. Some, such as Mr. Gergiev, have been cheerleaders for Mr. Putin’s aggressions; they deserve to be shunned by Western institutions. Others, such as piano prodigy Alexander Malofeev, have seen their engagements canceled even after they spoke out against the war, simply because they are Russian; that is unjustified. And still other cases are more complex. Ms. Netrebko, a singer with unparalleled talent, posted on social media her opposition to “this senseless war of aggression” and called on Russia “to end this war right now, to save all of us.” But Ms. Netrebko, whose ties to Mr. Putin span decades, including her endorsement of his election in 2012, refused to denounce him. In one post, later deleted, she chided as hypocrites those in the West seeking repudiation of Mr. Putin. “There was no way forward,” said the opera company’s general manager, explaining the organization would no longer work “with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him — not until the invasion and killing has been stopped, order has been restored and restitutions have been made.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress and the author, most recently, of "You're Leaving When?: Adventures in Downward Mobility," now in paperback from Counterpoint. She is a national spokesperson for the Lung Cancer Foundation of America.
Side effects flared up, but they were staggeringly capricious, allowing for fleeting moments of invincibility. One day, I couldn’t summon the energy to take even one more step a few blocks from my front door after my daily walk stretched into a satisfying but punishing uphill hike. I collapsed on a grassy median, lying there, inert, until I rallied the strength to shuffle home. If this level of enervation persisted, it could take years to make it through all three seasons of “Succession.” I dialed back my overly ambitious exertions, but not everyone in my life found it hilarious that I had (with apologies to Elaine May) “Not dead, just resting” piped onto my birthday cake. | null | null | null | null | null |
E.U. announces Russia sanctions and aid for Ukraine but only symbolism on membership
European Council President Charles Michel, French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speak at a news conference after the crisis summit at the Palace of Versailles on Friday. (Ludovic Martin/Getty Images)
In response to an urgent appeal from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for fast-track European Union membership, E.U. leaders concluded a two-day crisis summit at France’s Palace of Versailles with talk of Ukraine being part of the European family, but the E.U. did not appear ready to substantively depart from what is typically a years-long process, a reminder that Western support for the Ukrainian fight has limits.
In a statement coordinated with the White House, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Friday that the E.U. and Group of Seven countries will revoke Russia’s World Trade Organization benefits and work to suspend its membership rights in organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
The E.U. and allies will also introduce measures to stop the Russian state and its elites from using crypto assets to circumvent the sanctions, ban the export of E.U. luxury goods to Russia, stop new E.U. investment in the Russian energy sector, and block the import of key products in the iron and steel sector.
“Russia cannot grossly violate international law and, at the same time, expect to benefit from the privileges of being part of the international economic order,” von der Leyen said in the statement.
To support the defense of Ukraine, Josep Borrell, the top E.U. diplomat, said the E.U. executive body had proposed earmarking an additional 500 million euros, or about $545 million, for a first-of-its kind effort to finance the supply and delivery of weapons. The money would still need to be approved by heads of government.
“I am sure the leaders will provide this money,” Borrell said. “And it is going to be immediately so it flows quickly.”
E.U. leaders also discussed a plan announced earlier this week to cut Russian gas imports by two-thirds this year. Though the move falls short of the total boycott announced by the United States, Europe imports far more Russian energy, meaning it could have a significant impact, both in Russia and within the E.U.
At the summit, it was clear that Europe remains deeply divided on the plan, with some countries arguing that it goes too far and will crush their economies, and others casting it as a cop-out and a gift to Putin. Von der Leyen said the European Commission was looking at ways to limit the impact on consumers and businesses and to prepare for next winter.
European Union plans steep cut in Russian gas imports this year
The leaders said surprisingly little on the issue of refugees. The E.U. last week announced it would offer Ukrainians up to three years of “temporary protection,” allowing them to avoid a lengthy asylum application process. Those fleeing the war who are not Ukrainian citizens have been left in a more murky status.
Von der Leyen said the European Commission was setting up a “solidarity platform” to coordinate the reception of refugees and would use parts of the E.U. budget to finance housing, schooling and counseling to the tune of “several billion euros in the coming years.”
“We commend European countries, notably at the borders with Ukraine, for showing immense solidarity in hosting Ukrainian war refugees,” read a summit statement published Friday morning. The E.U. and its member states “will continue to show solidarity and provide humanitarian, medical and financial support to all refugees and the countries hosting them.”
European Union offers warm but temporary welcome to Ukrainians
In a speech to the European Parliament last week, Zelensky delivered an impassioned plea to be allowed to join the bloc of 27 nations, saying Ukrainians are not just fighting for their lives, but for European values.
The virtual address made an E.U. interpreter emotional and was greeted with a standing ovation. Some E.U. countries, such as Lithuania, expressed support for the idea, while others, notably the Netherlands, opposed it. Most seemed content to say little either way.
In the end, the statement from E.U. leaders “acknowledged the European aspirations and the European choice of Ukraine” and promised to “strengthen our bonds and deepen our partnership to support Ukraine in pursuing its European path” without offering specifics on what that means. | null | null | null | null | null |
At least one staff member at a Texas foster care facility designed to help young girls who are victims of sex trafficking is accused of trafficking them all over again, according to state officials and court documents.
Nine current and former employees at the Refuge Ranch, a state-contracted rehabilitation facility in Bastrop are accused of criminal activity amid allegations of neglect, physical and sexual abuse, and exploitation of seven girls at the facility about 30 miles southeast of Austin. The girls were left at the facility for more than a month after the abuse was first reported, officials said Thursday during an emergency court hearing, the San Antonio Express-News reported.
“Our hearts are broken and we are outraged by the actions of former employees whose intent was to harm, not help,” Brooke Crowder, founder and CEO of the Refuge for DMST, said in a statement to The Post. “While we are limited in what we can say in order to protect the confidentiality of the girls, I know that the truth will prevail. We are looking forward to a positive resolution from these investigations, and we are confident that we will be providing child survivors of sex trafficking with excellent care for years to come.”
Despite the repeated reports of alleged child abuse, it appears that the allegations were not reported to the court or the governor-appointment DFPS commissioner until earlier this week.
“This is a tragic and shameful situation,” he told The Post. “Even worse than what’s happening to these girls is the fact that the state took six weeks to report it to the court. Beyond that, the state kept these girls in the same facility for six weeks before they finally moved them out. Who knows what sort of additional abuse happened during that time.”
“The state of Texas’ child welfare system has been broken for 30 years, and it remains broken,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
In pursuit of perfection, Woodgrove hits a wall in Class 5 championship game
Monarchs 59, Wolverines 36
Menchville's defense made life difficult on Sadie Shores and Woodgrove. (Ryan M. Kelly/For The Washington Post)
RICHMOND — Sadie Shores wove between multiple defenders, looking for space to breathe let alone run an offense. It was midway through the second quarter of Friday night’s Virginia Class 5 championship game, and already Menchville’s defense had made baskets hard to come by for Shores and her Woodgrove teammates.
The sophomore guard spun out of the beginnings of a double team, found some open court and streaked to the hoop. There, she met three purple-clad defenders eager to block her shot. She went up once, twice and then a third time, her series of offensive rebounds cut short by the referee’s merciful whistle. As she went to the free throw line, Shores checked her left eyebrow for blood.
It was that kind of start for the No. 10 Wolverines, and it wouldn’t get any easier as the physicality and athleticism of the Monarchs were too much to handle. Woodgrove saw its undefeated run end with a 59-36 loss at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Siegel Center.
“Compared to the regular season, that team was very fast, very physical, and we definitely struggled against that,” Shores said.
The Purcellville program was making its first state championship appearance, the reward for a dominant local campaign that went to the next level in the postseason. In the state quarterfinals, the Wolverines (29-1) made a statement by holding off Richmond power Highland Springs.
But it was in that game that the team’s perfect season took a less-than-perfect turn. Senior center Ashley Steadman went down with an injury. A two-year captain and the program’s all-time scoring leader, Steadman was forced to watch from the bench as her team engineered a thrilling comeback victory over Briar Woods in the state semifinals and then lost steam in Friday’s meeting with Menchville (24-3).
“Everybody had to adjust to that, and it’s part of the game,” Woodgrove Coach Derek Fisher said. “But mostly we’re just sad for Ashley and disappointed she wasn’t able to experience this after four years of being a major reason for the team’s success.”
Without their center, the Wolverines were outscored 30-12 in the paint. They never found a way to overcome the long arms and quick reflexes of a talented Monarchs defense. Woodgrove trailed by 11 at the end of the first quarter, and the margin grew from there. The 36 points represented their lowest scoring outing of the season.
“It wasn’t anywhere near our best, but we didn’t give up,” Fisher said. “And there have been so many accomplishments [this year]. One day is not going to ruin a season’s worth of accomplishments. There are not a lot of teams, not a lot of schools that have a 29-win season.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Vegas Golden Knights goaltender Laurent Brossoit (39) blocks a shot by Pittsburgh Penguins’ Bryan Rust (17) during the first period of an NHL hockey game in Pittsburgh, Friday, March 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh Penguins general manager Ron Hextall began the day by saying he believes the pieces are in place for a long playoff run even if he opts not to be a major player at the trade deadline. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man, 60, slain in the District, police say
Victim is shot Friday afternoon in Southeast.
A man was shot and killed Friday afternoon in Southeast Washington, the D.C. police said.
Donnell Henderson, 60, of Southeast, was shot about 2:20 p.m. in the 3800 block of Alabama Avenue SE, the police said.
The site is near the intersection with Pennsylvania Avenue, in the Fairfax Village area, not far from Fort Davis. A commercial center at the crossroads includes a post office. A service station is nearby.
Among the aspects of the shooting that made it distinctive was the age of the victim. National crime figures indicate that only a small minority of homicide victims are 60 or older. One year the proportion of victims in that age group was about 5 percent.
No information was available about a suspect or motive. | null | null | null | null | null |
“We played better,” Young said of the difference from the first two meetings against North Carolina. “We didn’t alter anything. We just did it better. A little better connectivity, a little quicker to the ball.”
“I think just because we’re desperate doesn’t mean that we’re not confident,” Aluma said of the Hokies’ mentality coming into this week. “Everybody’s locked in, works hard, is in the gym, and I think everybody’s confident. We just know we have to win.” | null | null | null | null | null |
An earlier version of this article misstated some of the National Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaints involving Aidvantage. The article has been corrected with additional information.
The National Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has received nearly 100 complaints from federal student loan borrowers involving Aidvantage, with concerns such as receiving bad information about their loans or incorrect account details. Others involved issues related to payment or different topics. | null | null | null | null | null |
“Our hearts are broken and we are outraged by the actions of former employees whose intent was to harm, not help,” Brooke Crowder, founder and executive director of the Refuge for DMST, said in a statement to The Post. “While we are limited in what we can say in order to protect the confidentiality of the girls, I know that the truth will prevail. We are looking forward to a positive resolution from these investigations, and we are confident that we will be providing child survivors of sex trafficking with excellent care for years to come.”
“This is a tragic and shameful situation,” he told The Post. “Even worse than what’s happening to these girls is the fact that the state took six weeks to report it to the court. Beyond that, the state kept these girls in the same facility for six weeks before they finally moved them out. Who knows what sort of additional abuse happened during that time?”
“The state of Texas’s child welfare system has been broken for 30 years, and it remains broken,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
SMU Mustangs play in AAC Tournament against the Memphis Tigers
Memphis Tigers (20-9, 13-5 AAC) vs. SMU Mustangs (23-7, 13-4 AAC)
Fort Worth, Texas; Saturday, 5:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: The SMU Mustangs face the Memphis Tigers in the AAC Tournament.
The Mustangs have gone 16-0 at home. SMU is third in the AAC with 30.0 points per game in the paint led by Marcus Weathers averaging 6.1.
The Tigers are 13-5 against AAC opponents. Memphis leads the AAC scoring 76.4 points per game while shooting 47.4%.
The teams meet for the third time this season. SMU won 73-57 in the last matchup on Feb. 20. Kendric Davis led SMU with 27 points, and Lester Quinones led Memphis with 13 points.
TOP PERFORMERS: Weathers is averaging 12.7 points and 7.5 rebounds for the Mustangs. Davis is averaging 12.4 points over the last 10 games for SMU.
Alex Lomax is averaging 5.8 points, four assists and 1.8 steals for the Tigers. Jalen Duren is averaging 9.8 points and 6.1 rebounds while shooting 62.1% over the past 10 games for Memphis. | null | null | null | null | null |
SAN ANTONIO — Gregg Popovich became the winningest coach in NBA regular-season history, getting his 1,336th victory when the San Antonio Spurs rallied to beat the Utah Jazz 104-102.
LOS ANGELES — LeBron James scored 50 points for the 15th time in his career and helped rally the Los Angeles Lakers in the second half to a 122-109 victory over the Washington Wizards.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — A day after owners and players reached agreement to end a 99-day lockout, all 30 spring training camps opened across Arizona and Florida. Now the four-week sprint begins in earnest to get ready for an April 7 opening day.
NEW YORK — Major League Baseball and the players’ association resumed drug testing after an absence of nearly 3 1/2 months.
HOUSTON — A grand jury declined to indict Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson following a police investigation sparked by lawsuits filed by 22 women who have accused him of sexual assault and harassment.
TAMPA, Fla. — Tyrece Radford scored 19 points and Quenton Jackson made five throws in the final minute as Texas A&M beat fourth-ranked Auburn 67-62 in the quarterfinals of the Southeastern Conference Tournament, a loss that could wind up costing the Tigers a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
NEW YORK — Paolo Banchero had 18 points and 11 rebounds and No. 7 Duke held off Miami with free throws in the final minute as the Blue Devils — and retiring coach Mike Krzyzewski — beat the Hurricanes 80-76 to advance to the Atlantic Coast Conference championship. | null | null | null | null | null |
Whether the people who claim “grooming” understand that their rhetoric is overheated is beside the point. Even the suggestion of preying on children is potentially very dangerous. In 2016, a man entered Comet Ping Pong in Washington and fired a gun. He had been misinformed on conspiracy-riddled messageboards that the pizza restaurant was harboring a ring of pedophiles, and he drove several hundred miles to save the children. | null | null | null | null | null |
A 1972 Black political convention offers a road map for fighting climate change
Climate change is a civil rights issue. Addressing it is essential to the survival of Black Americans.
By Ashley D. Farmer
Ashley D. Farmer is an associate professor of history and African & African diaspora studies at the University of Texas-Austin. She is the author of "Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era" and the forthcoming biography, "Queen Mother Audley Moore: Mother of Black Nationalism."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) rallies hundreds of young climate activists in Lafayette Square near the White House to demand that President Biden work to make the "Green New Deal" law. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The recent climate strikes and President Biden’s 2021 decision to join the 2015 Paris climate accord reveal that organizers and world leaders are intent on approaching the climate crisis as a global issue. Yet this progress overshadows the persistent prevalence of environmental racism at home: The Flint water crisis has yet to fully be resolved, and few know about “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile, predominantly Black area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where residents are 50 times more likely to develop cancer due to local chemical plants.
This is why the lesson proclaimed in the National Black Political Agenda by thousands of Black people who gathered in Gary, Ind., 50 years ago still matters for climate groups from the Environmental Defense Fund to the National Wildlife Federation. The climate crisis is a racial crisis, and it requires putting the “living environment before profits” and environmental morality before political expediency. Solutions will need to address both crises to be successful.
On March 10, 1972, thousands of Black Americans packed into a gymnasium in Gary to debate the future of Black Americans. Among the attendees to the National Black Political Convention were writer and nationalist Amiri Baraka, Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, Black politicians like Rep. Charles Diggs (D-Mich.) and community organizer and reparations activist “Queen Mother” Audley Moore. People came to the convention with different hopes and ideas for the three-day meeting. But in his opening speech, newly elected Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher made their collective goal clear: “We must emerge from this convention with an independent, Black political agenda, a dynamic program for Black liberation that in the process will liberate America from its current decadence.”
Many herald what is now known as the “Gary Convention” as the start of a new political moment and ground zero for the precipitous rise in Black elected officials in the post-civil rights era. Indeed, much of the focus in Gary was on whether Black people should be beholden to the two-party political system or create an independent Black political party.
An underappreciated but prescient aspect of the convention was participants’ environmental protection platform. Even as they disagreed on the best political path forward for Black Americans, the activists in Gary asserted that climate change was a civil rights issue and that addressing it was essential to Black survival.
Gary organizers recognized that environmental matters were of concern to the wider American public given the creation of Earth Day in 1970. Yet the group expressed concerns about the motivations behind its creation. They suggested that Earth Day was a calculated move on the part of lawmakers to diffuse the antiwar and civil rights movements and compel White liberals to organize around a common, less contentious issues.
Many of the delegates who came to Gary had direct experience with environmental racism because toxic waste dumps, chemical plants and sewage outlets were purposely located in their communities.
So conference leadership tasked a cross-section of activists with using the meeting to highlight the intersections of climate change and racial justice. In state caucus groups they discussed the disproportionate effects of “noise, air, solid waste, sewage, rodents and pests, and lead poisoning” had on Black residential communities and denounced the industrial plants and government agencies that left Black people to “suffer the atrocities of pollution.”
They correctly predicted that cars were major sources of pollution and that “food products with excessive chemical additives” — the main nutritional options for low-income communities — would foster food insecurity and create another facet of environmental injustice.
Participants built a plan for a racially conscious climate change action. They tasked the environmental research team, a five-person collective that included grass-roots organizers, Black doctors like Alvin Poussaint and researchers from universities across the country, with creating a platform to be included in the National Black Political Agenda — a 68-page published document that delicately combined the priorities of various constituencies. The agenda included six action items for Black people looking to shape climate change discussions, including “educat[ing] Black community residents on the causes and effects of pollution” and setting community standards for maximum amounts of pollutants in their areas. Gary organizers also encouraged participants to explore how to reduce air pollution in inner cities and support those who “bring suit against corporations and other entities” that were responsible for polluting Black residential areas.
Thinking long-term, convention attendees advised local groups to try to “provide technical training and public service employment” in their communities to promote Black people’s “entry into environmental protection occupations.” Their ultimate goal was to install organizers in formal government positions to help create community-controlled programs to mitigate climate change. Finally, they called on all Black people to create “action groups” to combat the major polluters in their areas.
Those who came to Gary knew that there would be no progress for Black people unless they made protecting the planet a central part of their efforts to safeguard Black rights. Convention-goers ranging from Jessie Jackson to Black student organizers recognized White lawmakers’ efforts to de-racialize and de-radicalize environmental justice despite the fact that Black people’s experiences revealed a clear connection between environmental deterioration and racial discrimination.
When the convention closed, thousands of Black organizers returned to their homes equipped with action items to support climate change initiatives in their area. In Gary for example, a group of Black residents joined forces to support a bill to curb emissions of the U.S. Steel Corp., the primary polluter of the city. A few years later, environmental-justice organizing gained national attention when Black residents in Warren County, N.C., protested the state’s effort to dump thousands of truckloads of toxic soil in Afton, a rural, Black community.
Convention organizers’ environmental action platform was prescient. Indeed, their fears about “the policies and actions” of “industrial plants, motor vehicles, slumlords, and governmental agencies” polluting Black areas through poor housing conditions, toxic waste dumping and tax breaks for chemical plants and factories, are coming to fruition today.
Even more perceptive was organizers’ assessment that the focus and face of climate justice was and would continue to be White. Just as Earth Day whitewashed the Gary organizers’ environmental concerns, so too does the environmental justice movement in America remain segregated today. White environmental interests and dollars tend to focus on preserving wildlife and green spaces, while activists of color focus primarily on preventing industrial plants and chemical waste from uprooting or polluting their communities. Meanwhile the most recognizable climate change activists, like Greta Thunberg, are White, and activists of color remain relatively unknown and underappreciated.
That’s why we need to remember their solutions as well, particularly their calls to integrate environmental justice into all aspects of organizing. The Gary organizers left us a road map before they left West Side High School 50 years ago this month. Most important, they left us with one of the biggest lessons of this historic meeting: climate justice is racial justice. | null | null | null | null | null |
However baseball history remembers the collective bargaining agreement that saved the season Thursday, it undoubtedly will look with fascination at the process by which the union agreed to it: The MLB Players Association executive subcommittee — made up of eight high-profile, highly paid stars such as Max Scherzer, Gerrit Cole and Francisco Lindor — voted unanimously against the owners’ proposal that eventually led to a deal.
Player representatives from each team voted 26-4 to approve the offer, thereby ratifying it on behalf of the union even though the players who were most involved with the negotiations voted against it.
In a low-key news conference Friday morning, MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark and his chief negotiator, Bruce Meyer, addressed the natural questions: Had the players in the negotiating room — six of whom are clients of agent Scott Boras, all of whom could afford to miss a few weeks’ pay given their career earnings — found themselves at odds with the rank-and-file? Was the union, which Meyer said repeatedly was among the most unified he had ever represented, experiencing significant division?
“You call it a division; I call it a healthy dialogue and conversation,” Clark said. “At the end of the day, each player — player reps, the teams they represent, the executive subcommittee — all had a common goal in improving the system. … Rest assured, the interests were the same.”
Ultimately, the numbers behind the vote were secondary to the outcome, and membership could look different five years from now when it is time to do the whole thing again. Multiple people who were in the negotiating rooms during the week-plus retreat to Jupiter, Fla., said some of those meetings included so much player input from so many voices that they sometimes felt like brainstorming sessions.
The prevailing thoughts in the hours after the deal was that the players got about as many concessions as they could have from an ownership bloc that had far more leverage. After a series of CBAs they felt tilted economic power firmly toward ownership, the players began these negotiations asking for massive changes, such as reducing the tenure required for players to reach free agency and arbitration by a year each, increasing the luxury tax threshold to a point that it would be almost irrelevant to most teams and using changes to the revenue-sharing system and amateur draft to penalize teams that do not make good-faith financial efforts to compete.
Ultimately, the players were not able to negotiate those massive changes to arbitration and free agency, and their broader proposal to alter revenue sharing was dropped, too. But MLB did agree to reward small-market teams that build their own revenue with more revenue-sharing money — an incentive-based shift rather than punitive one. It also agreed to a draft lottery with limits on how many years in a row a team can qualify for it. The players secured a new bonus pool for those who have yet to reach arbitration. They also conceded a fourth luxury tax surcharge, something Meyer admitted later they obviously didn’t want. They may still have to deal with draft pick compensation, the process by which teams who sign top free agents lose a draft pick for doing so, thereby suppressing free agent spending in the players’ view. But while wholesale change was the goal, something that felt more than incremental was the outcome.
“It’s difficult, but we’re never going to give up on some of those things,” Meyer said. “This is the labor process. We had determined adversaries on the other side, all of whom are billionaires and have enormous resources. Our players did an incredible job of sticking together, and ultimately we’re comfortable with the deal we have. Whether more can be accomplished in the future, we’ll have to see. I think so.”
As players headed for spring training camps that opened on a voluntary basis Friday morning, just getting an agreement in time to play a full season seemed significant. Had the negotiations gone longer, players probably would have had to negotiate how much of their 162-game salaries would have been paid for a shorter season. Service time for curtailed schedule also would have had to have been negotiated. Like so many of the points negotiated over the past few months, those issues affect different player groups differently. Any wedges in the union could have widened. | null | null | null | null | null |
First step: Acknowledge it, together
A serious illness is many things — terrifying, painful, life-altering. The prospect of losing a loved one, or your own life, becomes an unspeakable agony. It’s also isolating in a way I never could have imagined. I’ve been the one in that sickbed, and I’ve also done some time sitting beside it. I wouldn’t wish either experience on anyone.
Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about what memoirist Meghan O’Rourke has called “the long goodbye” and trying to focus on the one gift it does give us: the gift of time. Time to plan, but mostly time to unearth and process our feelings. And then, if we’re fortunate, to be able to share these deep-seated fears with those we love.
This is not easy. When my mother learned she had lung cancer several years ago, we both turned to humor to help absorb the meaning of her diagnosis and to deflect the pain. One afternoon, many months before she died, Mom said with a wry smile, “I think I’m really dying.” To which I replied, “You mean today? Because I’m going to the market, so if you really think so, I won’t shop for you.” “That’s hilarious,” Mom countered, a hungry smile now on her face. “What’s for dinner?” Very adroitly, pretty much reflexively, we had avoided the elephant in the room.
Mom’s health deteriorated over the next several weeks. Again, she raised the question of her death, but now without the smile. “Will dying be painful?” she asked. In that moment, I knew I needed to confront my own feelings about her mortality and not sidestep the conversation with facile banter.
I took Mom’s hand in mine and said, “Don’t worry, it won’t be painful.” I told her hospice had provided a “comfort kit,” which contained medications for restlessness, confusion, anxiety, sleeplessness, constipation and, of course, pain management. I could feel Mom’s hand relax. Finally, she said, with a palpable sense of relief, “Thank you.”
End-of-life conversations can be helpful for patients and familiies
In the weeks after that, we began a new chapter. I hadn’t realized how much effort had gone into my denial. I thought about the many times I had said, “if you die …,” which denied what we both knew was inevitable. After I dropped the subjunctive and began to talk about when she died, a barrier was eliminated. She knew. I knew. Now, we knew together.
I don’t think Mom suffered in her final days. After she became “unresponsive” (considered part of “active dying”) I returned to that comfort kit at the direction of a nurse. I removed the liquid morphine and gently squeezed one drop, then a second into her mouth. When the end came a few hours later, my sister, brother and I sat on her hospital bed, holding hands with each other and our mother as she died. What a gift, I thought, as we helped her to let go honestly, openly, and — most importantly — together.
Three decades earlier, when I was newly in remission from my own cancer, I had so many worries — about recurrence, additional treatments, more surgery. But at its core the fear was always about dying, which I never acknowledged, which meant no opening for others to broach the topic. I tried hard to keep those anxieties buried away, mostly by taking anti-anxiety medications. I’d pop a Klonopin and for four hours I’d be “fine,” as I often repeated. Still, I felt detached from others, even myself, but in my mind, that was better than feeling. Or worse: talking about feelings with others.
I chose to be alone.
Every time when I returned to the hospital for follow-up labs and scans, I’d medicate. But drugs, it turns out, can do only so much. I’d still taste the fear in my throat, or notice the shallowness of my breathing. A few times I vomited — spontaneously — the associations too strong. No matter how hard I tried, I could not effectively lock away that demon, that fear.
Then I decided to volunteer at the cancer hospital that had given me so much, sharing my cancer “experience” with patients, which invariably included discussions of fear. I realized how helpful these conversations — about hair and weight loss, recurrence and remission, life and death — were to the patients I met in the hospital, either newly diagnosed or undergoing treatment. But these talks changed me, too.
For far too long, my fears had been caged inside me, dense and dark. Laura Wallace, a licensed clinical social worker whose practice focuses on transitions and loss, explained that acknowledging feelings of “loss and longing,” while deeply painful, is a much better alternative than anger, addiction and anxiety. Or denial.
How facing cancer helps you figure out what really matters
Releasing these fears — into the rooms where I had these conversations, into the air outside the hospital when I would walk away — was liberating. Imagine a vial filled with dark blue worry. Release a drop into a small cup of water and it colors the water. Release another drop, this one into a gallon bucket, and it becomes nearly impossible to detect. By acknowledging and sharing my fears openly, I let them go and they began to dissolve. Eventually, I stopped taking those anti-anxiety medications.
In her recent memoir, “Going There,” journalist Katie Couric, whose husband died of pancreatic cancer in 1998 at age 42, tells of feeling trapped between a rock and a hard place. “I was so worried about letting go of hope because I didn’t want Jay to spend whatever time he had left just waiting to die,” she wrote. “I think it takes extraordinary courage to be able to face death, and I think I was too scared, honestly.”
Couric’s words reverberated with me, especially as I’ve tried to take the lessons learned from my mother’s death, and my own illness: How to be present. How to balance today with tomorrow. How to find the courage to embrace what’s so often unspeakable.
A longtime friend, Barry Owen, succeeded in all three ways.
At 66, he revealed his pancreatic cancer diagnosis in a blog post. He knew, as did his husband, Dan, the unforgiving prognosis. (Stage IV pancreatic cancer has a five-year survival rate of 1 percent, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.) “I have no illusions about this disease,” Barry wrote on his Caring Bridge blog, which was read by about 30 of his closest friends, including his two brothers.
Three months after his diagnosis, Barry pushed open the door to a conversation about dying. “Dan and I are starting to talk about planning, planning for my death,” he wrote. “This is not easy to write about.”
It was not easy to read about, either. But we joined the conversation with Barry and Dan, I hope, supporting them if not sharing their pain.
Barry did well enough for a while — long enough to celebrate his 67th birthday, to make a farewell tour to friends, and to enjoy the winter holidays. By spring, all that had changed. Eleven months after diagnosis, one of his caregivers posted the sentence everyone expected, yet dreaded. “So, yes, he is dying.” We understood. Barry’s followers made that final journey together with him.
During those final days I thought of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” one of Barry’s favorites, specifically the final scene where Mary, Rhoda, Lou, Ted and all the rest huddle, and walk offstage together, as one. It’s a tear-jerker, for sure.
What is a good death? How my mother planned hers is a good road map for me.
We leaned in, through the Caring Bridge site. One friend acknowledged the heartbreak of losing Barry. His brother, Jamie, posted: “We all know the inevitable result, but it doesn’t keep me from becoming emotional every day.” I wrote that I’d burst into tears upon reading the news, but that I felt so deeply connected to his friends. Amid all this, a friend reminded us that Barry’s mantra had always been “Only connect,” which to him spoke to the importance of our relationships to help defeat “the isolation” — as novelist E.M. Forster put it — that keeps us apart.
I felt privileged to be among all these beautiful souls, so in touch with their feelings and able to express them. I thought then — as I do now — how rare this gift is. When Barry died, we held onto one another, tightly albeit it virtually. One friend posted, “Although I only know a few of all the friends around Barry, I feel part of you and share your grief.” Another wrote, “How terrible our loss.”
Yes, our loss. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Max Strickberger
Alan Jinich
(Generation Pandemic)
In 2021, as the pandemic showed no signs of abating, young people across the country were dealing with isolation and altered dreams, and were trying figure out what their futures would be like. We were among them — two college students who wanted to see how our generation was coping. For six months, we crisscrossed 23 states and interviewed more than 80 young people suspended in that transitional time between adolescence and adulthood. Some returned to the homes they spent their childhood hoping to escape. Others moved across the country when their jobs turned remote. Each reshaped parts of themselves: a Navajo man became estranged from his lifelong pastor over alt-right politics; a cattle sorter on the U.S.-Mexico border struggled to make time for his newborn daughter; a lonely New Orleans waitress found a community through online gaming; a new teacher in South Dallas scrambled to provide support for her second-grade students. Yet, like us, they hung on to hopes for a future free of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. We asked members of this “Generation Pandemic” to respond to the open-ended statement “After the pandemic, I want to … ” Here is how they responded, in their own writing:
When Grant Williams at age 19 began studying film at New York University in 2020, university restrictions made socializing almost impossible. He spent hours walking the city alone, averaging 30,000 steps a day. He developed severe anxiety, lost 20 pounds and eventually transferred to a university near his family in Dalton, Ga. Nearly two years later, he still thinks about his time in New York every day: “It’s a form of PTSD.” Inspired by the therapist who cared for him, he now studies biology and hopes to become a heart surgeon.
Lindsay Cohen, 20, considered her grandfather her best friend. But when he died by suicide a year into the pandemic, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him in person — they lived in different states. In his honor, Lindsay got a tattoo of her grandfather’s initials. “I just called him Papa though.” Now a sophomore at the University of Alabama, Lindsay is working to raise awareness about men’s mental health issues; a link to related resources is now part of her Instagram bio.
The pandemic accelerated this now 27-year-old woman’s political move to the right. (She asked that her name not be used.) She believes the mainstream media has hyped the threat of covid-19. She got a tattoo of an atom on her hand to show she is not anti-science. When her Dallas catering business dried up because of the pandemic, she moved to D.C., where she says she worked for a conservative group and demonstrated outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She is working as a waitress in Nebraska now, but she hopes one day to launch her own podcast, inspired by a conservative podcast she listens to.
“After the pandemic I want to go out more and spend more time with my family.” After immigrating from Mexico in 2017 at age 18, Fernando Padilla opened a fruit stand in Chicago’s Chinatown. When pandemic restrictions closed his business, he began driving 32 hours to his native state of Jalisco to buy bulldog puppies, which he then sold in Chicago. Fernando reopened his stand in March 2021, but was unsure whether customers would return. On his first day, he sold out in two hours. His puppy business is still his main source of income, but he dreams of opening a brick-and-mortar fruit store like the ones in Jalisco.
Unable to see friends, New Orleans native Caitlin Settle, 21, found a new community online through the messaging app Discord, where she spent hours with strangers playing video games and drinking. “I talk to these people that I don’t know, but I grew very attached to them.” They created a group chat that grew to 17 people who helped her through isolation, Caitlin says. Last year, one of those online friends, from Texas, came to visit her in New Orleans; recently, she traveled to New York City to meet two others. She now works at a mask shop, which was busy this Mardi Gras.
Couvisa Washington, 26, once made hundreds of dollars a week playing drums on a plastic bucket on a highway exit ramp in Chicago. His income evaporated when the pandemic kept tourists away and local traffic home. “You couldn’t see nobody outside.” Sometimes he would play for the whole day only to make $15. Performing was a way for him to keep busy and stay safe, however. Originally from the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago, many of his friends have died of gun violence in the past two years.
Sharon Lemus, 23, grew up in a crowded mobile home in Santa Fe. Until the pandemic, she organized her life to spend as little time there as possible, working two jobs and studying at her local community college. When everything shut down, she had no choice but to stay home. It was noisy, chaotic and stressful. Her brother and his girlfriend had a drug problem that worsened in lockdown and in 2021 they had a son. Eventually, her brother and his girlfriend moved out and Sharon helped her mom assume shared custody of their son. Now Sharon’s looking for a place of her own.
After graduating from North Carolina A&T State University, Kayla Diallo, 23, joined Teach for America (TFA) and was placed in a South Dallas elementary school. The pandemic meant she had a hybrid in-person and online teaching schedule and she struggled to play instructor, counselor and even quasi-parent. When a winter storm hit Texas in early 2021, one of her second-graders lost his home. She took him shopping for clothes and toys. Almost done with her second year of TFA, she is planning to stay in Dallas but isn’t sure if she’ll continue to teach.
This 23-year-old Native American man — whose knitted cap has a tiny bell and feather charm pinned to it that belonged to his late mother — became a father in 2020. But job shortages near his New Mexico Pueblo and a debilitating heroin dependence made parenting difficult. He eventually was able to find part-time jobs but he wasn’t making enough money, so he said he started stealing from stores to support his son: “He’s my little man, my everything."
Micah Estevan, 23, works in an auto body shop near Window Rock, Ariz., the capital of the Navajo Nation. As a child, the pastor at Micah’s church helped install running water and electricity in his family’s mobile home. Micah sometimes called him grandfather. But during the pandemic, Micah says the pastor became increasingly political and far right, going after Democrats and denigrating minority groups including Native Americans like Micah. So he stopped going to church and now explores his religious identity through books by Russian novelist Feodor Dostoevski, Japanese writer Shusaku Endo and others.
Jamie Galicia and her boyfriend, AJ, met on the first day of school at Central Wyoming College in 2019. They started dating until the school sent people home because of the pandemic in March 2020 — AJ to an apartment in Colorado without WiFi and Jamie to her family home in Idaho. They drifted apart. Months later, AJ released a song on YouTube about Jamie. They began talking again. When Jamie got covid-19, they would fall asleep on FaceTime. Eventually, AJ found a job near Jamie and they’ve shared a home with her family since then. “Sometimes I wonder if covid never happened, would we still be together?” she says.
When the pandemic reached Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, facilities there shut down. Many park employees stayed, however. One of them was Luxianna Watkins, 25. Over a thousand miles away from her older parents in rural Illinois, Luxianna felt isolated and homesick — and stuck. She worried she might never see her parents again: “They could die and I’d be stuck in Wyoming.” Luxianna expressed gratitude for her parents by writing them a six-page letter. She wanted nothing left unsaid. She now visits them every six months.
Three weeks after Shay Scott’s human resources job in Virginia turned fully remote in 2021, she decided to move to New Orleans. Shay, 26, had spent much of her childhood moving — some 40 times before college, sometimes in and out of homeless shelters. During the pandemic, however, she slowed down and had a chance to deal with an eating disorder and childhood pain: “Instead of watching everybody else, I watched myself.” At first, New Orleans felt like home but her remote work has made it hard for her to make new friends so she’s thinking of moving back to the East Coast, maybe Philadelphia. Shay says she misses the cold.
Chase Hansen, 23, is a punk rock drummer from Los Angeles who has worked as a professional welder since he was 17. In January 2020, he enrolled in community college for the first time. Pandemic stimulus checks helped him stay in school but he dropped out after three semesters: “I missed working with my hands.” He recently formed a new band and is in talks to sign a record deal. “I feel like I’ve made it in life,” he says. “I just wish there was more financial security being in a punk band. I don’t really care though, as long as I’m happy.”
These stories are adapted from Generation Pandemic, an online oral history archive that can be read in full online at www.generationpandemicproject.com or on Instagram at www.instagram.com/generationpandemic_
Max Strickberger and Alan Jinich are seniors at the University of Pennsylvania, studying English and neuroscience respectively. They have been close friends since childhood and grew up on the same street outside of D.C.
Handwritten cards by Generation Pandemic. | null | null | null | null | null |
Peace Corps member from Maryland reflects on time in Ukraine
By Lindsay Renner-Wood, Cumberland Times-News | AP
CUMBERLAND, Md. — While she’s currently far from the place she loves so much, Cumberland native and Peace Corps member Leah Chaney maintains close ties and concern for Ukraine, the country she’s called home in recent years.
Chaney reflected on her time spent in Ukraine, the people who entered her life during that time and Russia’s ongoing invasion and its effect on the people of her adopted home in a recent written interview.
“During my time as a volunteer, I met my current partner of almost 3 years, Oleksandr, who is a Ukrainian citizen,” Chaney wrote. “Over the past year of 2021, I have traveled in and out of the country but always calling Ukraine my home.”
While she and Oleksandr are currently in Lisbon, Portugal, where Chaney is in school pursuing a master’s degree, the couple left Ukraine just ahead of the Russian invasion Feb. 24. They’ve maintained daily virtual contact with family and friends who remained in the country, she said.
“On Wednesday, February 23rd, my partner and I decided it was finally time for us to leave Ukraine and head to Poland as a result of the increasing concern and alerts coming from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine,” Chaney wrote. “At that time, we still both believed that a full-out war was never going to happen and definitely not at the scale that had, and is currently taking place. We took a train and crossed the Ukraine-Poland border Wednesday (Feb. 23.) afternoon.”
While in Tulchyn, Chaney wrote, she stayed with an “amazing” host family consisting of a mother and her two sons.
“My host family accepted me into their home and hearts immediately,” Chaney said. “I had the option to move into my own place after about two months of living with them but decided to stay because I couldn’t imagine living in Tulchyn without them.”
“I would spend my time after teaching at school all day with my two host brothers playing outside in the snow or helping them with their homework,” she said. “We were a real family.”
Her host family’s love and generosity, Chaney said, were not unusual among the people she met in Ukraine.
“The hearts of the Ukrainian people are bigger than you can imagine,” she wrote. “I feel that it’s difficult for others to understand people who speak such a different language and have a different culture than ours, but none of this matters when it came to making real connections with Ukrainian people. All of the people I met, my host family and their extended family, the local teachers and students, people from the community, and even Ukrainians I still call my good friends today, have always welcomed me with warm tea and an open heart.”
Ukrainians’ love of country and one another is a powerful example, Chaney said.
“The sense of community and concern for others will always blow me away,” Chaney wrote. “We can all witness, all over the world, how the Ukrainian people are fighting to keep their country safe and free from attack. They are coming together to help provide shelter and aid to those in their community that need it, teaching and crafting Molotov cocktails to defend themselves and their cities, and even eagerly volunteering to serve for their country when their president calls.”
While she and her partner are safe in Lisbon, Chaney said, it’s hard not to be scared for those they love back in Ukraine.
“My partner and I are very blessed to be safe, but we left behind our friends, our family, and our home (as many other Ukrainian people have done over the last few days),” she wrote. “Personally, I feel helpless and just heartbroken witnessing all of these missile strikes and seeing all the Ukrainian citizens hiding underground in bunkers. It’s difficult for everyone watching to continue with our jobs and schoolwork while entire cities are being attacked with such vicious crimes.
“As an American citizen, I hope that our government will step up and provide necessary aid to this amazing country that I hold so close to my heart,” Chaney said. “I hope that my fellow American citizens understand how horrible this situation is and can find empathy for all the Ukrainian people.”
Since the Russian invasion of the independent nation began, Chaney wrote, “innocent civilians in peaceful cities” have lost their loved ones, as well as large swaths of the country’s history and culture with the destruction of historic buildings.
“What is happening right now in Ukraine is a tragedy, and we should all be opening our eyes and doing what we can for innocent people in danger,” Chaney said. “Even if what you do is as small as posting that you stand with Ukraine, or you decide to physically donate to a cause, either way, you are helping end this senseless war. If this was our hometown of Cumberland under an unjustifiable attack, I would hope someone would come to our aid in any way possible.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Strong winds and cold temperatures
Those cold temperatures will come riding in on northwesterly wind gusts topping 40 mph, with gusts over 50 mph likely in the high terrain of the Blue Ridge, Alleghenies and pockets of the Appalachians. The Blue Ridge is under a blizzard warning for the first time in March since at least 2009; it’s the first time the National Weather Service office that serves Baltimore and Washington has issued a blizzard warning since 2016. That’s where wind gusts will combine with falling or freshly-fallen snow to reduce visibilities below a quarter mile.
Subfreezing air may spill all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday morning, with cities like Mobile, Ala., Pensacola, Fla., New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., all under freeze warnings.
Ahead of the front, southerly winds were helping a sliver of mild air to reach up to the extreme eastern Carolinas, where a tornado watch was in effect until 1 p.m. Locally damaging winds were the main concern, though a brief, isolated spin-up tornado can’t be ruled out.
Despite temperatures in the 60s and sufficient instability, or “juice,” to get thunderstorms rumbling, storms have largely clumped and clustered together. That has mitigated the tornado threat, since twisters usually form from more discrete, isolated storms that can tap into the atmosphere’s full dynamics. Still, with the marked change in wind speed and/or direction with height that’s present, one or two rogue storms might go tornado-warned at some point during the late morning or very early afternoon. | null | null | null | null | null |
Strong winds and low temperatures
Those cold conditions will come riding in on northwesterly wind gusts topping 40 mph, with gusts over 50 mph likely in the high terrain of the Blue Ridge, Alleghenies and pockets of the Appalachians. The Blue Ridge is under a blizzard warning for the first time in March since at least 2009; it is the first time the National Weather Service office that serves Baltimore and D.C. has issued a blizzard warning since 2016. That’s where wind gusts will combine with falling or freshly fallen snow to reduce visibilities below a quarter mile.
Subfreezing air may spill all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday morning, with cities including Mobile, Ala., Pensacola, Fla., New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., under freeze warnings.
Ahead of the front, southerly winds were helping a sliver of mild air to reach up to the extreme eastern Carolinas, where a tornado watch was in effect until 1 p.m. Locally damaging winds were the main concern, although a brief, isolated spin-up tornado can’t be ruled out.
Despite temperatures in the 60s and sufficient instability, or “juice,” to get thunderstorms rumbling, storms have largely clumped and clustered together. That has mitigated the tornado threat, since twisters usually form from more isolated storms that can tap into the atmosphere’s full dynamics. Still, with the marked change in wind speed and/or direction with elevation that’s present, one or two rogue storms might go tornado-warned at some point during the late morning or very early afternoon. | null | null | null | null | null |
Thousands protest in Melitopol after Russian forces reportedly abduct mayor with a hood over his head
Large crowds gathered in the southern port of Melitopol on Saturday to protest the alleged abduction of the city’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov, by Russian troops, an act that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described as “a crime against democracy.”
Kirill Timoshenko, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, posted a video to his Telegram account of what he said was a group of Russian soldiers taking Fedorov away on Friday through a town square, with what appears to be a hood over his head. Footage captured by closed-circuit television spread on social media Friday. Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, corroborated Timoshenko’s claim, saying Fedorov refused to cooperate with the Russian forces occupying the city and was taken away by 10 soldiers.
“The detention of the mayor of Melitopol is a crime against democracy,” he said at a news conference Saturday in Kyiv, adding that Russia should be ashamed of its actions.
The Ukrainian president said the alleged abduction of Fedorov, which he called “simple terrorism,” is the latest of a number of actions against mayors across the country who do not cooperate with the Russian forces occupying their cities and towns. Melitopol, with a population of about 150,000, has been under Russian control for two weeks. Despite the Russian occupation of the city, Fedorov, who is ethnic Russian, had encouraged recent demonstrations in Melitopol against Russia.
“They are not ashamed of that video,” Zelensky said of the Russians allegedly abducting Fedorov, asserting that the invading forces were “moving to a new stage of terror.”
The mayor’s alleged abduction prompted roughly 2,000 people on Saturday to protest outside the city hall building occupied by Russian forces, Zelensky said. Bundled-up against the cold, protesters in Melitopol chanted for Fedorov’s release.
The demonstration took place against a backdrop of an intensifying Russian assault on Ukraine. Russian troops advanced Saturday into the eastern outskirts of Mariupol, a strategic port on Ukraine’s southern coast, and several cities across the country, from Kyiv, the capital, to Mykolaiv, another key city on the Black Sea, continued to face withering bombardments. Ukrainian officials are accusing Russia of striking a hospital in Mykolaiv and a mosque in Mariupol.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian disaster is mounting, with nearly 2.6 million Ukrainians fleeing the country since the start of the invasion, according to the United Nations. After local officials in Poland, to which 1.5 million refugees from Ukraine have fled, warned that they were struggling to cope with the arrivals, Germany said Saturday that other countries must “step up” to help with the massive influx of Ukrainian refugees.
Zelensky said Saturday that any peace negotiations with Russia and Putin can begin only with a cease-fire agreement. Speaking to reporters in Kyiv, Zelensky said that he is open to negotiations with Putin and that he has discussed the possibility of negotiations being held in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett as facilitator. But Zelensky emphasized that real negotiations for peace could not begin until the two sides agree to a cease-fire.
Melitopol, a city where Russian is commonly spoken, is about 145 miles northeast of the Crimean Peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. While the city came under assault at the start of the invasion and was quickly taken over, Fedorov had remained defiant, saying, “We are not cooperating with the Russians in any way.”
As residents took to the streets of Melitopol last weekend to wave the blue and gold colors of Ukraine, Fedorov encouraged the demonstrations, even amid the Russian occupation.
Now, Ukrainian officials are trying to find where he is being held. Ukrainian diplomat Olexander Scherba wrote Saturday on Twitter that Fedorov was still alive. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: How South Korea’s election was fueled by ‘anti-feminism’ and gender wars
By Haeryun Kang
Over 200 female protesters gathered in central Seoul on Feb. 27, calling for women's representation in South Korea's presidential election. (Min Joo Kim for The Washington Post)
Haeryun Kang is a journalist and filmmaker based in Seoul.
This week, Yoon Suk-yeol was elected the next president of South Korea, after leading a campaign that capitalized on “anti-feminist” policies and rhetoric. His win signals a major threat to women’s rights over the next five years and could herald increasing governmental and social backlash against feminist movements.
This presidential race was unique in South Korean history because of the way it weaponized feminism. Never before had gender politics been used by mainstream candidates to define key campaign strategies — and incite division between men and women. Profiting from hate and division is not new in politics; the South Korean example shows just how quickly the tides can turn against a progressive movement.
As women’s rights have grown in popularity and awareness in South Korea, backlash against feminism has also expanded. Yoon was notoriously at the forefront of this trend, catering to a swing bloc of young male voters that his right-wing party, People Power, identified as “anti-feminist.” Under the umbrella of youth strategy, he created buzz and influence by targeting this loud, aggressive subgroup. Missing in his strategy were the voices of women.
The Post's View: South Korea makes a welcome turn toward the U.S. — just when it is really needed
People Power, like the current ruling Democratic Party, has a poor track record on women’s rights. After a catastrophic loss in the 2017 elections — following the impeachment and imprisonment of President Park Geun-hye — the conservative party (then the Liberty Korea Party) desperately needed new strategies, especially to expand to a younger base. Merging with others to start People Power, it found one of its answers, unfortunately, in misogyny.
A crucial turning point was the Seoul mayoral by-election last year: 70 percent of male voters in their 20s voted for People Power’s winning candidate, in significant part fueled by the growing popularity of 36-year-old “anti-feminist” politician Lee Jun-seok. Lee then became the youngest leader in the party’s history and has been a key aide to Yoon’s campaign.
Many of Lee and Yoon’s young male supporters argue that men face “reverse discrimination” in South Korea, which has the highest gender pay gap among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries and a mere 19 percent female representation in the National Assembly. Jumping on the misogyny bandwagon, members of People Power have called feminism “unconstitutional,” comparing it to extremism and fascism. Yoon himself has denied that structural gender inequality exists.
Yoon’s platform includes stronger penalties against false complaints of sexual crimes — though these constitute a negligible fraction of cases — and abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. The ministry, founded in 2001, supports and funds various women’s programs, including for oft-stigmatized single mothers, survivors of sex crimes, female laborers and migrant women. The ministry also champions broadening the legal definition of family.
Yoon — whose policies concerning women problematically center on traditional roles of motherhood within wedlock — has indicated he wants to replace the current ministry with a new institution focused on children and family, though his camp has said the specifics will be discussed after the election. It’s not clear how far he will go, or how far he can go. The National Assembly is currently dominated by the Democratic Party. Even Yoon’s own party is divided on the policy.
After Yoon’s victory was confirmed, the response from advocates of women’s rights was grim. “This is a heartbreaking and painful outcome,” said Kwon In-sook, a prominent feminist politician and Democratic lawmaker.
Admittedly, the Democratic Party wasn’t exactly a haven for feminists either. Lee Jae-myung, its presidential candidate, initially tried to appeal to “anti-feminist” male voters, including by acknowledging the existence of reverse discrimination and the need to reorganize the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Only when it became clear that Yoon had a stronghold on these votes did Lee cater more forcefully to feminists and young women.
Haeryun Kang: Another digital sex-crime scandal leaves South Koreans reeling — and waiting for justice
The final outcome doesn’t indicate a clear-cut triumph for anti-feminists. Lee lost to Yoon by just 0.73 percent, the closest ever margin in a Korean presidential race. Online news website Pressian pointed out that the more crucial voting trend for Yoon was likely increased support in Chungcheong province and Seoul’s expensive real estate districts (failing to control the real estate market is seen as one of President Moon Jae-in’s key failures).
Lee’s last-minute pivot also seems to have succeeded in attracting female voters to the Democratic Party. After the race was over, it reported a near 20,000 increase in membership in two days, largely from women in their 20s and 30s. Within People Power, many supporters, disappointed by the closeness of the race, are calling to oust Lee Jun-seok, criticizing his gender war strategy for galvanizing more women into voting for Lee Jae-myung.
“I have never tried to divide genders,” Yoon said after his win. “I’ve been misunderstood and attacked throughout the race; what reason do I have to divide men and women?”
Such feigning of innocence isn’t good enough reason to hope that Yoon’s bite will be softer than his bark where women’s rights are concerned. So much damage has already been done: The gender wars fueled by this race, from both leading candidates, have led to widespread misunderstanding of feminism, while setting the grounds for long-term, institutional backlash.
If there is a reason to hope, it is that South Korean feminism has solid roots, filled with rich civic debate and tireless proponents of gender equality. It has weathered decades of storms — and will outlive this one.
North Korea’s rogue behavior won’t end on its own
Novak Djokovic can’t play the Australian Open, and he has no one but himself to blame | null | null | null | null | null |
The pandemic evolved quickly. At the recommendation of President Donald Trump and medical experts, business and social interactions were halted. Scientists soon confirmed that face coverings reduced the spread of the virus and mask-wearing became a recommendation — and, at times, a mandate. By the end of the year, an unprecedented effort to develop a vaccine, spurred by government investment and encouragement, resulted in safe, effective preventive measures. By the time March 11, 2021, rolled around, the pandemic seemed like it was getting under control.
But it wasn’t. Trump’s initial embrace of methods to control the spread of the virus had been quickly scuttled in favor of rapidly returning the economy to normal before Election Day. He elevated skepticism of expert opinions and scoffed at mask-wearing. His watchword was almost uniformly that the virus was not something to fear, something for which miraculous cures were available and that would evaporate in short order.
The pandemic might have become partisan without Trump and without the amplification of the conservative media ecosystem; it’s hard to know. But particularly now, at the two-year mark, it’s inescapably the case that the second year was worse than the first because of America’s partisan divide.
Consider the change from the first year of the pandemic (until March 11, 2021) to the second (since March 11, 2021). The number of cases in blue counties is understated given that lack of testing. But the number of population-adjusted deaths in blue counties fell in the second year while it rose in red counties. At the same time, blue counties easily outpaced red ones on vaccinations.
This raises another important point: While pandemic responses and effects overlap with party, they also correlate to party more broadly. As I wrote Sunday, there’s an overlapping set of beliefs that intertwine with party. That the virus doesn’t pose much risk, that we can’t trust medical experts, that vaccination isn’t useful. All of those views are more common among Republicans as polling has shown since nearly the outset of the pandemic — and all of them overlap with the rhetoric that Trump injected into the conversation in the first months the coronavirus was spreading. | null | null | null | null | null |
Covid concert
In a supreme irony, Juan Gallastegui, the director of the Rockville Concert Band — the subject of Thursday’s column — has tested positive for covid. That means the March 13 concert will be conducted by Len Morse and will not include “The Year 2020,” the composition written by Johan de Meij in honor of those lost to covid. That piece of music will be part of the band’s April 10 performance. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mr. Delgado joined the show in 1971, during its third season, and remained a mainstay of the cast for more than four decades. His character, Luis Rodriguez, owned the Fix-It Shop and proved as skilled at repairing toasters as he was at singing and dancing.
From the start, “Sesame Street” was notable for the racially diverse cast of live actors who appeared on-screen with Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch and other Muppets created by Jim Henson.
A Mexican American whose early life straddled the U.S. southern border, Mr. Delgado served for Latino children as a television role model at a time when Hispanic actors, in his words, were largely consigned to playing “banditos, gang members, lowlife characters and sleeping Mexicans under a cactus.”
“I’d been trying all my professional life to be somewhere I can change that, whether I was talking about it or trying to get into a project that showed Latinos in a good light,” Mr. Delgado told the Houston Chronicle in 2020. “That’s why ‘Sesame Street’ was such a good thing. For the first time on television, they showed Latinos as real human beings.”
“We weren’t dope addicts. We weren’t maids or prostitutes, which [was] the way we were being shown in television [and] film,” he added. “Here, on ‘Sesame Street,’ there were different people who spoke different languages and ate interesting foods, and they were all Americans.”
Mr. Delgado, who often accompanied himself in song on the guitar, gave many English-speaking children an introduction to Spanish. He referred to Big Bird, the canary-yellow avian played for many years by puppeteer Caroll Spinney, as “pájaro,” the Spanish word for “bird.”
Mr. Delgado “did a really good job at erasing the boundaries between ethnicities … but not in a way that erased the culture,” Kathryn A. Ostrofsky, a scholar of media history who has studied “Sesame Street,” said in an interview.
He “used Chicano culture,” she added, “and made it part of the common … experience that all American children had watching ‘Sesame Street’ for generations.”
“Sesame Street,” still airing today, became the longest-running children’s program on American television. One of its most memorable episodes remains the 1988 installment in which Luis marries his on-screen love, Maria, who was played by actress Sonia Manzano. In an episode during their courtship, Luis dons a tuxedo to dance with an elegantly dressed Maria in the manner of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to a song about the Spanish greeting “Hola.”
Luis and Maria later had a daughter, Gabriela, who was played for a period by Manzano’s real-life daughter by the same name. “Sesame Street” writers used her arrival to explain to young viewers how a baby develops but not — in deference to many parents — how one is conceived.
Mr. Delgado was born May 8, 1940, in Calexico, Calif., the eldest of six children raised by a single mother. He spent part of his upbringing with his mother’s family in Mexicali, Mexico, crossing the border by foot every morning to attend school in Calexico.
Mr. Delgado was interested in theater from an early age and was encouraged in his artistic pursuits by his mother. When he was in high school, he moved to Glendale, Calif., where he participated in musical groups and the theater club.
Mr. Delgado served for six years in the California National Guard before enrolling at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita to study theater. He appeared on the TV drama “Canción de la Raza,” about a Mexican American family, before receiving an invitation to try out as Luis on “Sesame Street.”
At the time, he said, he was out of work, with a young child to support, and saw the opportunity to join the cast as evidence that an angel was “looking out” for him.
“I had been staring at my last unemployment check when someone from ‘Sesame Street’ called to ask if I would like to audition for the show,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2018. “There was no agent involved. It came out of nowhere.”
Interviewed for the book “Street Gang: The Complete History of ‘Sesame Street’ " by Michael Davis, Mr. Delgado said he was given little instruction in how to portray Luis on-screen.
“Therefore, there’s a lot of Emilio in Luis,” he said. “They wanted reality, and that’s what they got from the cast.”
In addition to his role in “Sesame Street” and the program’s related live performances, Mr. Delgado had a recurring part as newspaper editor Rubin Castillo on the TV series “Lou Grant” starring Ed Asner. Mr. Delgado also appeared on programs including “Hawaii Five-O,” “Quincy, M.E.” and “Falcon Crest” and, more recently, the “Law & Order” franchise and “House of Cards,” playing Ambassador Davila.
Before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, he performed onstage in Octavio Solis’s play “Quixote Nuevo,” an adaptation of “Don Quixote” by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes.
Mr. Delgado’s marriages to Barbara Snavely and the actress Linda Moon Redfearn ended in divorce.
At the Fix-It Shop, ready with a screwdriver in hand, Mr. Delgado repaired radios, clocks and flashlights. Sometimes an object arrived that could not be made whole, and on those occasions, he explained why and what lesson could be drawn from that truth.
However honest his portrayal of Luis, Mr. Delgado confessed to the Chronicle there was one fundamental difference between him and his character.
“I will admit it,” he said. “I am not a fixer in real life. My wife is a better fixer than I am. She can fix anything.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Disney suspends all political donations in Florida in the wake of ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill
In contrast with public efforts to woo LGBTQ visitors and moviegoers, the company has long funded politicians who support anti-LGBTQ policy.
A crowd rallied at the Walt Disney Company in Burbank, spearheaded by advocates from AIDS Healthcare Foundation, on March 3. (Dan Steinberg/AP Images for AIDS Healthcare Foundation)
Disney announced on Friday that it would pause all political donations in Florida in the wake of a controversial state bill that restricts discussion of LGBTQ issues in public schools. Over the last few weeks, the company had received criticism for remaining silent about the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which passed in the state Senate this week and is expected to be signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
In a statement sent to employees on Friday, Disney CEO Bob Chapek also announced that the company would increase support for advocacy groups fighting similar laws elsewhere (such as one recently introduced in Georgia) and reassess Disney’s political donation policies. Chapek apologized to the company’s workers for not making a statement sooner, writing, “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down.” In response, DeSantis criticized what he called the company’s “woke” ideology.
Disney’s slow response stands in contrast to its branding as LGBTQ-friendly. In recent years, the company has featured openly gay characters in films; Disney stores sell LGBTQ pride-themed merchandise; and its theme parks have a loyal LGBTQ fan base. More than 150,000 visitors come to Orlando’s Walt Disney World during what are known as annual “gay days.”
Ellis noted that Disney was nominated for seven GLAAD awards this year in categories specific to LGBTQ representation in children’s and family programming, pointing to the 2021 film “Eternals” as an example. The movie features a major gay character, the superhero Phastos, who is shown kissing his husband.
They employees also criticized Disney’s claim that it had long supported the LGBTQ community, noting the company did not officially host a public Pride event until 2019 and once removed gay couples from the park for dancing together.
“Disney is one of the largest employers Florida, so all eyes are on Disney to see what they are doing, and then others follow,” she said. Ellis also hopes that Disney will double down on LGBTQ storylines, which can enlighten viewers to the prejudices that allow bills like the one in Florida to pass. “People receive information differently through entertainment than they do when they’re reading a newspaper or hearing someone’s position. It has such unique power,” she said “That’s where you humanize us and use these stories to tell why this stuff is going on.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Video sparks outrage, promise to investigate
Ethiopian authorities say they will prosecute individuals seen in a gruesome video in which armed men appear to burn at least three people alive. The video has sparked anger among many in this country facing war in its northern region as well as ethnic strife in other areas.
Authorities didn’t say when the incident happened. It also was not immediately clear whether any suspects had been taken into custody. The Associated Press was not able to verify the authenticity of the video.
New strict coronavirus measures instituted
China instituted new coronavirus restrictions Saturday that included urging the public not to leave Beijing and closing schools in Shanghai while the leader of Hong Kong warned that its coronavirus outbreak has yet to reach its peak.
Nearly 50 children killed in Yemen strife, U.N. says: At least 47 children were killed or injured in war-torn Yemen in the first two months of the year as fighting escalated between government forces and the Houthi rebels, a U.N. official said. Yemen has been convulsed by civil war since 2014, when the Iran-backed Houthis took control of the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country's north, forcing the government to flee to the south, then to Saudi Arabia.
At least 19 missing from boat in Mediterranean: A boat carrying about two dozen migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, leaving at least 19 people missing and presumed dead, authorities said. Libya's coast guard said that a group of 23 migrants — Egyptians and Syrians — set off from the eastern city of Tobruk earlier in the day. Three migrants were rescued and taken to a hospital. Only one body was retrieved and search efforts were ongoing, the agency said.
Iraq to again host talks between Iran, Saudi Arabia: Iraq will host another round of talks between regional foes Iran and Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry in Baghdad said, without giving further details. The talks will be the fourth round hosted by Baghdad between officials from its two neighbors and mutual adversaries, according to local media. Diplomats hope the opening of direct channels between Iran and Saudi Arabia will signal an easing of tensions across the Middle East after years of hostilities that have brought the region close to a full-scale conflict.
Man with knife injures three French police officers: A French man with a knife injured three police officers in the southern city of Marseille, before being fatally shot by police, authorities said. The reason for the attack was unclear. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, speaking from the site of the attack, said the attacker was not known to police and had no police record. | null | null | null | null | null |
Daniil Medvedev, of Russia, returns a shot to Tomas Machac, of the Czech Republic, at the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament Saturday, March 12, 2022, in Indian Wells, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Daniil Medvedev beat Tomas Machac 6-3, 6-2 on Saturday in the second round of the BNP Paribas Open, the Russian’s first tournament since ascending to No. 1 in the world. | null | null | null | null | null |
There are outspoken supporters of his regime, yes, but there are also artists who risk their livelihoods whether or not they denounce him.
By Simon Morrison
Simon Morrison is a professor of music and Slavic languages at Princeton University.
Russian President Vladimir Putin presents the People's Artist of Russia award to opera singer Anna Netrebko in 2008 at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. The Metropolitan Opera in New York recently ousted Netrebko from performances when she refused to renounce Putin. (Dmitry Lovetsky/AP)
With the invasion of Ukraine, everyone and everything associated with Russia, the aggressor, is newly measured by their position on the war. Western institutions are canceling Russian artists, sometimes for being too close to President Vladimir Putin — sometimes regardless. Music providers like Sony are suspending their Russian operations, laying off hundreds of employees. The Royal Opera House in London scrapped a summer season featuring the Bolshoi Ballet. The Montreal Symphony Orchestra just postponed three shows by 20-year-old pianist Alexander Malofeev, despite the fact that he has stated publicly, “Every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence and predict.” Long-dead artists, too, are under scrutiny. The Cardiff Philharmonic in Wales pulled the 19th-century liberal homosexual Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky — hardly a nationalist — from its repertoire.
What is the purpose of these cancellations, beyond signaling moral solidarity against Putin’s war? Some benefit presumably accrues to companies and cultural organizations that respond to popular sentiment and fashionable trends; participating in the antiwar movement by demanding anti-Putin statements from Russian artists can help bottom lines. Yet these acts of protest, symbolic and emotionally satisfying for us, deprive vulnerable artists of livelihoods, place them at risk and don’t otherwise accomplish much. What’s more, they play into Putin’s hands by treating artists not as individuals but as cultural ambassadors for his grandiose vision of Russia. This affirms his sense that Russians have been wronged by the world — that Europe and the United States are out to get them, as he has long argued — and therefore justifies further draconian clampdowns and stronger fortifications for Holy Rus.
As for the artists, there’s no easy way to navigate this treacherous terrain, whether they work outside or inside Russia, or consider themselves ambassadors of higher causes and blanch at the conflation of art and politics. Touring artists can make a lot of money, so many of them tend to choose silence to protect their personal brands even in the most compromised circumstances. But now they face pressure to speak out, which can cause trouble for them or their families back home, and in any case doesn’t inoculate them against cancellation.
For Russian artists based at home, it’s even riskier. Protesting annuls their careers, ensures harassment and hastens the closing of the public sphere by the authorities. Ivan Velikanov, the music director of the Nizhny Novgorod State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, was one of the risk-takers. He was supposed to have conducted “The Marriage of Figaro” at the State Academic Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, but his appearances were axed after he gave a brief antiwar speech and led a performance of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” according to the Russian magazine Music Life. The decision to remove Velikanov from the podium was made at the presidential level; the Bolshoi’s general director, Vladimir Urin, couldn’t do anything about it. Urin has personally come out against the war, but he won’t cross the red line of having his organization do so: “All Bolshoi artists in Russia are performing without being forced to express their political opinion,” he told me. The Bolshoi’s press officer, Katerina Novikova, added that it’s “tragic” to lose the genuine dialogue that cultural exchanges, such as music and sports competitions, have traditionally facilitated. In a mournful post on Facebook (a site Russia is now blocking access to), Velikanov shared his regret that he hadn’t told the singers in advance about his antiwar protest in Nizhny Novgorod and lamented the stress he had caused them: “The voice is a fragile thing.”
Some star Russian attractions have either been supportive of Putin or hesitant to explicitly distance themselves from him. The acclaimed conductor Valery Gergiev, who was fired from the Munich Philharmonic after the invasion, is a well-documented Putin backer. He himself has been an autocrat at the helm of the Mariinsky Theater, becoming fabulously well-to-do conducting the traditional imperial repertoire of 19th-century operas that dehumanize Russia’s enemies and ballets that tell us who’s in and who’s out from an ethnic nationalist standpoint. He is one of more than 500 artists, from all spheres, who signed a letter of support for Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The letter was an act of propaganda. Even inside Russia, there are many who would not lament the termination of his engagements.
Soprano Anna Netrebko, who has donated money to an opera house in the separatist region Donbas, has also been scorned for her pro-Putin sentiments. The Metropolitan Opera in New York severed ties with her recently after she failed to speak out against Putin. The eminent ballerina Svetlana Zakharova, who was born in Lutsk, Ukraine, identifies as a Russian artist and once held a seat in the Russian parliament as a member of Putin’s United Russia party. Zakharova’s politics cost her a connection to the ballet school in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, where she trained.
For these artists seemingly complicit in the aggressive expansion of the Russian state at home and abroad, the horrors in Ukraine might prompt them to reconsider their allegiance. If past is precedent, however, it won’t. The Ukrainian-born choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, who had been working in Moscow before the war, isn’t shy about holding them in contempt. “It is because of the support of the most visible figures of Russian culture that Putin gained his unlimited power and is now using it against humanity in this bloody war that destroys my beautiful country,” he wrote to me.
Ratmansky is not wrong about their reach. Putin’s government has been calculatedly generous in supporting artists and artworks that reflect a conservative, imperialist, nationalist vision of Russia while suppressing iconoclasts. I attended a cultural forum in St. Petersburg a few years ago and heard Putin speak as a defender of “traditional values.” He was preceded onstage by actor and filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, who insisted that traditionalism didn’t amount to censorship. But it does: Exhibitions have been closed, poets silenced and rappers removed from the airwaves for challenging the rhetoric of the self-proclaimed protectors and purifiers of Russia.
This has led some artists, particularly in Russia, to silence themselves rather than be silenced by the government. These artists refuse to perform, expressing resistance by rejecting the public sphere. “I can’t entertain you while rockets are falling on Ukraine,” the hip-hop artist Oxxxymiron informed his fans on Instagram. The rock band Mumiy Troll has also joined the silence, stating: “We have decided to cancel all our concerts. For more than two decades our task has been to write songs that unite listeners in Russia, Ukraine, and other countries. This music is ruined.”
Some artists who could protest don’t, because of cynical indifference and many decades of hardwiring. Older Russians, those reared as subjects of the state, express pride in the achievements of the Russian and Soviet empire and revulsion at its atrocities: “I’m so ashamed of my country” is a common refrain. Collective shame is different from collective responsibility, however, which younger Russians — those whose hopes for civil society vanished with the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov seven years ago — acutely feel. Taking to the streets, beaten by the police, they have their agency fully realized, activist Maryana Petyaskina told me — a shameful contrast with the artists who have been hectored into compromise and have profited as a result.
The Russian canon offers apocalypse in its literature and considerable tug-of-war between subhuman and superhuman impulses in its music and dance. Conformists are condemned, dissidents extolled. Tchaikovsky, among others, expressed fears about implacable fate and the violence of the state. Putin’s war in Ukraine represents a total moral collapse — a monstrously uncivilized act by the ruler of an outsize nation that has made an outsize contribution to culture. He dreams of restoring Catherine the Great’s empire with the policies of Czar Nicholas I and Stalinist-Nazi tactics. Protest is brave but costly, and silence is purgatory. Support is simply abhorrent. If artists reconcile themselves to a violation of the values they are supposed to represent, then they are not artists at all. | null | null | null | null | null |
In aiding Ukraine, why are missiles fine but fighter jets unthinkable?
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 (whose military doctrine includes a lower threshold than NATO’s for the use of nuclear weapons). 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). | null | null | null | null | null |
Here’s how he compares to others, such as Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un and Ayatollah Khomeini
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, left, speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2020 in Damascus. (Alexei Druzhinin/AP)
A new poll from the Wall Street Journal on Friday reinforced that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned Putin into what can only be described as a pariah. Fully 90 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the Russian president (86 percent “very unfavorable”), while just 4 percent have a favorable one.
That’s down from a 75-to-13 split last week in another poll. And both polls show negative views of Putin are exceedingly bipartisan now.
In some cases, like with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, polls did ask what people thought of them, but not in a straight favorable/unfavorable way that allows for a direct comparison. (Amin seems to have been modestly more popular than Putin is today shortly before his death in 1979, for what it’s worth.)
Putin is now more unpopular in the United States than former Cuban president Fidel Castro generally was. He also outpaces some lesser-known figures like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, who was viewed unfavorably 76-to-3 shortly before he in 1999 became the first sitting world head of state to be charged with war crimes — a prospect Putin faces.
And perhaps most interestingly, Putin is now significantly more unpopular than Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev was in 1982. (Brezhnev presided over the most intense periods of the Cold War, and the poll available came a few years after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. But Brezhnev had largely faded from public view by then and died that year.) | null | null | null | null | null |
They are among a wide array of critics targeted since Ortega’s government crushed a student-led national rebellion in 2018. Civil-society organizations, academics, the Roman Catholic Church and independent media have faced raids, threats and legal restrictions. The Biden administration and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Nicaraguan leaders, and a top State Department official, Brian A. Nichols, tweeted Saturday that the conviction of the two Chamorros represented “a grave injustice.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The company’s slow response stands in contrast to its branding as LGBTQ-friendly.
A crowd rallied at the Walt Disney Co. in Burbank, Calif., on March 3. (Dan Steinberg/AP Images for AIDS Healthcare Foundation)
In a statement sent to employees on Friday, Disney CEO Bob Chapek also announced that the company would increase support for advocacy groups fighting similar laws elsewhere (such as one recently introduced in Georgia) and would reassess Disney’s political donation policies. Chapek apologized to the company’s workers for not making a statement sooner, writing, “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down.” In response, DeSantis criticized what he called the company’s “woke” ideology.
Disney’s slow response stands in contrast to its branding as LGBTQ-friendly. In recent years, the company has featured gay characters in films; Disney stores sell LGBTQ pride-themed merchandise; and its theme parks have a loyal LGBTQ fan base. More than 150,000 visitors come to Orlando’s Walt Disney World during what are known as annual “gay days.”
According to Popular Information, an independent accountability journalism newsletter, the company has given nearly $300,000 to backers of the Florida bill in the last two years, and the Orlando Sentinel reported that since 2019, Disney has given more than $100,000 to the Friends of Ron DeSantis PAC.
Ellis noted that Disney was nominated for seven GLAAD awards this year in categories specific to LGBTQ representation in children’s and family programming, pointing to the 2021 film “Eternals” as an example. The movie features a gay character, the superhero Phastos, who is shown kissing his husband.
The employees also criticized Disney’s claim that it had long supported the LGBTQ community, noting the company did not officially host a public Pride event until 2019 and once removed gay couples from the park for dancing together.
“Disney is one of the largest employers in Florida, so all eyes are on Disney to see what they are doing, and then others follow,” she said. Ellis also hopes that Disney will double down on LGBTQ storylines, which can enlighten viewers to the prejudices that allow bills like the one in Florida to pass. “People receive information differently through entertainment than they do when they’re reading a newspaper or hearing someone’s position. It has such unique power,” she said “That’s where you humanize us and use these stories to tell why this stuff is going on.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Yulia Karaulan awaits a Red Cross humanitarian convoy in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on March 12 in an attempt to enter Mariupol, a city under Russian attack and where her husband, daughter and mother have moved to a shelter. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)
Mariupol, the port on the Sea of Azov where Karaulan grew up, is under a stranglehold from Russian troops. For the past week, a convoy laden with food and essential medicines has repeatedly set off from Zaporizhzhia, 120 miles to the northwest, attempting to reach the city. In addition to the 10 trucks carrying food and medical supplies that left Saturday, there were 20 empty buses, optimistically readied for evacuating civilians.
The death toll is impossible to verify, but city officials say it amounts to more than 1,500 people — above the number of civilian deaths the United Nations has verified in the entire country. This past week, a massive explosion destroyed parts of the maternity and children’s hospital. Swaths of the city have been laid to waste. There is no drinking water, and desperation has led to looting and lawlessness, according to accounts.
Karaulan was on a business trip to Parma, Italy, when the invasion began. Her photo gallery is a reel of pizzas and frivolity. The war rhetoric had been building for weeks but “nobody believed it,” she said. “We hoped he wasn’t crazy,” she said of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It was only on March 2 that the seriousness of the situation sank in. Her husband and daughter were forced to move from the apartment the family bought two years ago. They relocated to a community shelter to escape the shelling and explosions.
“How are you?” she messaged her husband. But the message didn’t go through. Communications had been cut.
Journey into Ukraine’s Irpin: Death, devastation and a tide of people fleeing Russian attacks
Karaulan quit smoking a decade ago when she was pregnant, but started again that day. Eight days later, gripping a slim menthol cigarette between her baby-pink manicured nails, she shivered in the cold outside a performance space turned welcome center in Zaporizhzhia for Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s advance.
“I will stop when I see my family again,” she said. She crossed the Polish border on March 4 and made her way southeast to as close as she could get to Mariupol. She has been coming to the center every day to volunteer. Anything to distract her mind.
“I go to bed every night hoping I will see my daughter the next day, but then every day realize that’s not going to happen,” she said. She’s dissociating, she said, and is watching her life pass by like it’s a movie. She can’t look at photos of them. It’s too hard.
She messaged details to her husband about where to go to meet the buses that were supposed to arrive via a humanitarian corridor supposedly hashed out between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators. That message also didn’t get through.
It wasn’t until a week after communications were cut that she knew whether her family members were alive or dead. When the call came on a faint phone connection, it was her daughter who spoke first.
“Don’t, please. It’s hell here,” he told her. “Please don’t come, you can’t imagine.”
He described the shelter where they were trapped with 4,000 other people. He said food was running out. Because it’s a large group, some water is delivered when possible amid the bombing.
But the water isn’t good to drink, she said.
And then her mother’s voice came over the phone. “If God allows it, we will meet,” her mother said.
Her mother, a Russian national, is sheltering with her husband and child. “I never divided Russians and Ukrainians. For me it’s like one nation,” Karaulan said. “It’s Russian people bombing Russian people. It’s crazy. I thought we were all brothers.”
“It’s the most senseless and unfair war,” she said. “It’s not my story. It’s not the story of my husband.”
A friend called on Wednesday. She told Karaulan that her family was lucky to be in a community shelter where there are some supplies. Her friend and her family are trapped in the basement of their home.
For drinking water, they melt snow or gather water from pools. There is no electricity.
“They bought liver and meat before the war,” she said, but it has gone bad. “They now salted it, and tried to cook it somehow, the spoiled food, at least to try to eat something.”
And rats are everywhere.
Her words are urgent and tumbling: “While we are talking here. They are simply dying.”
The city she loved is in ruins, but there is still a chance to save lives, she said.
“Today they are alive,” she added, “but what will be tomorrow, we don’t know.”
They exchanged numbers. Later that evening, the woman called to tell Karaulan that a bomb had fallen on the shelter where her family had sought refuge. She told Karaulan that her family was killed. At that moment, Karaulan was in the apartment where she was being put up in Zaporizhzhia, with friends of a colleague. She collapsed in the corridor.
“What is the news?” he asked. “Please do something, everything is very bad, people are dying.”
The call ended.
Since that Thursday morning she’s had no contact.
“But I understand that if I do that, I’ll probably be dead, and my child will still be alive,” she said. “It’s not a solution. I’m just trying to understand what I can do in this situation.”
Yulia Karaulan left on a humanitarian convoy in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine on March 12, seeking to reunite with her family in the besieged city of Mariupol. (Loveday Morris)
She managed to get on the humanitarian convoy for the first time on Friday afternoon. Speaking by phone en route, she described her mission as if she were doing a quick school run: “I just want to pick up my family.”
Friday’s convoy made it only a few miles. They parked on the highway for hours. She was told the route was not safe, that there was shelling. They turned back. She cried all the way to Zaporizhzhia.
Karaulan, though, said she feels no fear. Wearing a faux-fur-lined coat and a top with the slogan “Best Runner” across the front in diamanté studs, she waved goodbye as her truck pulled out toward the highway. | null | null | null | null | null |
Attack rocks northern Iraq
The attack in Irbil “spread fear amongst its inhabitants is an attack on the security of our people,” Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi said on Twitter.
Disagreements yet to be settled between the United States and Iran also likely contributed to the setback, officials have said, including over the extent to which the Biden administration is willing to drop terrorism designations for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other groups, and the terms for an expected prisoner exchange. | null | null | null | null | null |
Missile strike occurs near U.S. consulate in northern Iraq, regional official says
Disagreements yet to be settled between the United States and Iran also likely contributed to the setback, officials have said, including over the extent to which the Biden administration is willing to drop terrorism designations for the Revolutionary Guard Corps and other groups, and the terms for an expected prisoner exchange. | null | null | null | null | null |
Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld at the last in-person CEO summit in December 2019 in New York. (Yale School of Management)
The list, updated hourly by his research team, has grown to more than 330 as of Friday.
His latest list started with a dozen corporations spanning oil giants BP, Shell and ExxonMobil, consulting firms McKinsey, Bain and BCG, as well as Big Tech companies IBM, Dell, Meta, Apple and Alphabet, right after the Ukraine invasion on Feb 24.
As a young Harvard Business School professor, Sonnenfeld wrote his first book, “Corporate Views of the Public Interest,” about the broader role of business leaders in society. In the 1980s, Sonnenfeld said the withdrawal of 200 Western companies from South Africa in protest of apartheid galvanized him. He recently argued in a Fortune column that such divestment should provide a “powerful road map for why and how CEOs should affirm American values amid global challenges.”
He started the first school for CEOs in his 30s, amid skepticism from senior Harvard Business School faculty that executives would want to spend their time listening to each other. He moved the enterprise to Emory University in Atlanta in 1989, the start of regular powerhouse gatherings of business leaders to address social issues and business challenges.
Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, a civil rights leader alongside Martin Luther King and former ambassador to the United Nations, told CEOs at an early Sonnenfeld summit that the business community held more influence over doing the right thing than clergymen or activists. “He was my inspiration,” Sonnenfeld said.
Since then, Sonnenfeld has convened chief executives, virtually for the past two years, to take a stand. Business Insider has dubbed him the “CEO Whisperer.” After the 2018 Parkland school shooting, executives discussed their plans to sever ties with the NRA and promote gun safety.
Corporate America makes a $50 billion promise on racial justice
The Post had just published the transcript of a call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, in which Trump repeatedly urged Raffensperger to alter the outcome of the 2020 election in the state. The CEOs discussed suspending donations to members of Congress who had said they would not certify the votes for President Biden.
At another Sonnenfeld meeting, held over Zoom last April, two Black executives, Frazier and Ken Chenault, former chief executive of American Express, launched their drive to get fellow CEOs to sign onto a letter opposing restrictive voting rights bills being considered in dozens of states. Hundreds did in full-page ads published in the New York Times and The Washington Post. Some Republicans derided them as “woke CEOs.”
The voting rights campaign was Sonnenfeld’s highest-profile effort until now. His next forum will be held in Washington on March 21. At the top of the agenda is Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who will address the corporate response to Russia.
“Fortifying world peace, just like fortifying democracy, is absolutely a part of corporate duty,” Sonnenfeld said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hunter Cattoor's hot shooting helped Virginia Tech to its first ACC tournament title. (John Minchillo/AP)
Keve Aluma added 19 points, including a layup with 2:11 left for a 78-64 lead at Barclays Center that all but sealed the outcome. That brought the Virginia Tech faithful to their feet as Cattoor, named the tournament’s most outstanding player, raised both arms and urged the crowd to join him in celebration. Virginia Tech was about to become the first No. 7 seed to win the ACC tournament.
At the final buzzer, Hokies players mobbed one another at center court, dancing to “Enter Sandman” as orange confetti floated down to the court and Duke players walked to the locker room, unable to give retiring coach Mike Krzyzewski an ACC tournament title in his final appearance.
Freshman Paolo Banchero led the Blue Devils (28-6) with 20 points, and Wendell Moore Jr. added 11 as Duke shot 4 for 20 on three-pointers and committed 10 turnovers that led to 16 Hokies points.
“I’m very proud of these guys,” Virginia Tech Coach Mike Young, in his third season, said during a television interview while on the stage to receive the championship trophy. “They stayed the course.”
Holding a 59-51 lead midway through the second half, the Hokies fended off bids from Duke to whittle its deficit to less than two possessions. After Moore’s three-pointer made it 59-54, Justyn Mutts scored on a contested turnaround jumper in the lane.
Darius Maddox then sank consecutive jumpers after the Blue Devils had pulled within six. The sophomore guard hit the most memorable shot of this year’s tournament, a three-pointer at the overtime buzzer to beat Clemson in Wednesday’s second round.
Earlier, Virginia Tech opened its first double-digit lead following Cattoor’s sixth three-pointer without a miss and a three-point play in which he stole the ball, passed to Storm Murphy and then got the ball back while cutting into the lane for a layup and drawing a foul.
Cattoor made the free throw, and the Hokies were ahead 55-45 with 15:44 left in the second half. He finally missed from behind the arc a few seconds later, but Cattoor’s layup with 14:19 to play preceded Duke starting center Mark Williams picking up his fourth foul.
An 8-0 run late in the first half paved the way for the Hokies to lead 42-39 at halftime. Virginia Tech had been in front by as many as seven several times, including after Aluma’s layup to close a stretch when he scored 11 of the Hokies’ 13 points.
Making its first four three-point attempts sparked Virginia Tech to an early lead. Cattoor sank two in a row, and his third of the half followed by a three-point play tied the score at 22. Moments later, Cattoor made another three-pointer to give the Hokies a 27-26 lead with 7:04 to go. His three-point barrage snapped a 10-game skid in which he had made went 14 for 47 (29.8 percent) from behind the arc. | null | null | null | null | null |
Today at 11:05 p.m. EST|Updated today at 12:13 a.m. EST
Virginia Tech Coach Mike Young takes the net after his team won the ACC tournament title Saturday. (John Minchillo/AP)
Keve Aluma added 19 points, including a layup with 2:11 left for a 78-64 lead at Barclays Center that all but sealed the outcome. That brought the Virginia Tech fans to their feet as Cattoor, named the tournament’s most outstanding player, raised both arms and urged the crowd to join him in celebration. With four wins in four nights, Virginia Tech was about to become the first No. 7 seed to win the ACC tournament.
At the final buzzer, Hokies players mobbed one another at center court, dancing to “Enter Sandman” as orange confetti floated down and Duke players walked to the locker room, unable to give retiring coach Mike Krzyzewski an ACC tournament title in his final appearance.
Freshman Paolo Banchero led the Blue Devils (28-6) with 20 points and Wendell Moore Jr. added 11 as Duke shot 4 for 20 on three-pointers and committed 10 turnovers that led to 16 Hokies points.
“Pretty big, man,” Hokies Coach Mike Young said. “I referenced it last night. We have a box, and we put all these cool things in it. It’s a process, and at the end of the season we’ll pull it all out, and we’ll savor and we’ll congratulate and pat one another on the back. It’s significant. We’re going to play in the NCAA tournament.”
Holding a 59-51 lead midway through the second half, the Hokies fended off bids from Duke to whittle its deficit to fewer than two possessions. After Moore’s three-pointer made it 59-54, Justyn Mutts scored on a contested turnaround jumper in the lane.
Darius Maddox then sank consecutive jumpers after the Blue Devils had pulled within six. The sophomore guard hit the most memorable shot of this tournament, a three-pointer at the overtime buzzer to beat Clemson in Wednesday’s second round.
Earlier Saturday night, Virginia Tech opened its first double-digit lead following Cattoor’s sixth three-pointer without a miss and a three-point play in which he stole the ball, passed to Storm Murphy and then got the ball back while cutting into the lane for a layup and drawing a foul.
Cattoor made the free throw, and the Hokies were ahead 55-45 with 15:44 left in the second half. He finally missed from behind the arc a few seconds later, but his layup with 14:19 to play preceded Duke starting center Mark Williams picking up his fourth foul.
An 8-0 run late in the first half paved the way for the Hokies to lead 42-39 at halftime. Virginia Tech had been in front by as many as seven several times, including after Aluma’s layup to close a stretch in which he scored 11 of the Hokies’ 13 points.
Making its first four three-point attempts sparked Virginia Tech to an early lead. Cattoor sank two in a row, and his third of the half followed by a three-point play tied the score at 22. Moments later, Cattoor made another three-pointer to give the Hokies a 27-26 lead with 7:04 to go. His three-point barrage more than made up for a 10-game skid in which he went 14 for 47 (29.8 percent) from behind the arc.
“I was going through a shooting slump, and every time in practice, every time in the games, my teammates would tell me I’m the best shooter in the gym,” Cattoor said. “So just having that mind-set and that trust from my players, it’s welcoming to hear that.” | null | null | null | null | null |
In double-OT thriller, Eleanor Roosevelt boys edge Churchill to claim fifth state title
Maryland 4A: Raiders 54, Bulldogs 49 (2OT)
Eleanor Roosevelt players hold the trophy high after they beat Churchill in double overtime Saturday in College Park. (Doug Kapustin for The Washington Post)
With 2.5 seconds remaining in one of the most exhausting games they have ever played, the Eleanor Roosevelt boys’ basketball players stood on the opposite side of the Xfinity Center court and watched teammate Gio Sanford shoot free throws.
They felt tense throughout Saturday night’s game, but when Sanford made a free throw, that all changed — Roosevelt’s players hugged and chest-bumped one another on the other end of the court. Moments later, Sanford sprinted over to hug his teammates as the bench stormed the court, a player hung on a rim and students threw rolls of toilet paper onto the floor.
In a Maryland 4A title game that became an instant classic, Roosevelt outlasted Churchill, 54-49, in double overtime. The Raiders, who had won the most recent 4A title in 2019, claimed their fifth state championship.
“I was worried what a year-and-a-half off would do,” Roosevelt Coach Brendan O’Connell told his players after the game. “The basketball program that has been built here has been a powerhouse, and you guys just kept it going.”
Back in 2019, Roosevelt closed a dominant season by routing Broadneck in the title game. But after Roosevelt’s third-round playoff exit in 2020 (which came before the tournament was halted ahead of the semifinals), Prince George’s County canceled the 2020-21 season amid the pandemic.
When Roosevelt returned in November, the Raiders (21-5) didn’t look like a powerhouse. They started 2-2 before the county suspended sports for a month.
Roosevelt usually has a high-profile offense. This season, the Raiders learned to win with defense and toughness.
“It’s the same tradition every time,” said Roosevelt guard James Rice, who scored a game-high 18 points Saturday. “Our offense is worse than [in 2019], but it’s the same mentality all the time: defense, defense, defense, next play.”
Last month, Roosevelt lost to Douglass in double overtime in the Prince George’s County championship game. That result was disappointing, but it prepared the Raiders for Saturday.
Roosevelt and Churchill (24-2) traded three-pointers in the final seconds of regulation to send the game to overtime. Each team scored one point in the first OT, but in the second, Roosevelt took control in the final minute.
With 56 seconds to go, Rice finished a layup that gave his team a 49-48 lead. The Raiders didn’t allow Churchill to score another field goal, and with 17 seconds left, guard Fani Lewis gave the Raiders a three-point cushion with a pair of free throws. Moments later, Sanford began another March celebration.
“That game right there defined [our culture],” Lewis said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. We just had to keep believing and being tough. That’s what it’s all about right there.”
Tre Stott and Andrew Silver had 11 points apiece for Churchill, and Stott added nine rebounds. | null | null | null | null | null |
Missiles strike near U.S. Consulate in northern Iraq, officials say
Today at 9:40 p.m. EST|Updated today at 1:24 a.m. EST
A dozen ballistic missiles struck the northern Iraqi city of Irbil early Sunday, officials said, falling near a U.S. Consulate and television news agency and drawing sharp condemnation from the Iraqi and U.S. capitals.
The attack at 1:30 a.m. local time caused no casualties, and the missiles were fired from outside Iraq’s borders, according to Lawk Ghafuri, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government.
He said some of the strikes had landed near a sprawling U.S. compound that is under construction. It was unclear whether that location was specifically targeted.
The U.S. State Department condemned the attacks in Irbil as “outrageous.” No U.S. troops were injured by the strikes in Irbil, according to an initial assessment provided by a senior defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. U.S. military and intelligence personnel operate at a complex at Irbil’s international airport.
U.S. officials told the Associated Press that Iran launched the missiles. In a statement, a State Department official said no U.S. government buildings were damaged and no Americans hurt. The Pentagon deferred questions to the State Department, which did not respond to them.
Masrour Barzani, the prime minister of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, of which Irbil is the capital, described the attack as “cowardly.”
“I strongly condemn the terrorist attack on Irbil and call on its resilient people to keep calm and follow the guidance of the security services,” he wrote on Twitter.
The strikes resembled attacks carried out by Iran directly or through military groups it backs. They came at a sensitive time for Iraqi politics and a pivotal moment in the United States’ relationship with Iran.
In Baghdad and Irbil, delicate and drawn-out negotiations over who will form the country’s new government appear to be drawing to a close. Iran, traditionally a kingmaker, has struggled to assert itself over the process as Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has tried to exclude its allies, Iraqi officials and analysts say.
On the international stage, talks between the United States and Iran focused on reviving the 2015 nuclear deal were suspended indefinitely earlier this week after Russia, which is a participant in the negotiations, sought concessions related to its commercial dealings with Tehran.
Disagreements yet to be settled between the United States and Iran also probably contributed to the setback, officials have said, including over the extent to which the Biden administration is willing to drop terrorism designations for the Revolutionary Guard Corps and other groups, and the terms for an expected prisoner exchange.
Iraqi militia groups backed by Iran have frequently launched rocket and drone strikes on U.S.-linked targets in Iraq and Syria. A spate of attacks in January did not cause casualties among U.S. service members and were clustered around the second anniversary of a U.S. decision to assassinate revered Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani with a drone strike as his convoy left Baghdad’s airport.
Although U.S. officials initially claimed that attack had legal basis, citing Soleimani’s alleged role in imminent attack planning, no further evidence was provided, and the strike pushed Washington and Tehran to the brink of war on Iraqi soil.
That operation triggered an Iranian ballistic missile attack on an Iraqi air base, with dozens of U.S. troops suffering brain injuries. The strike on Soleimani’s convoy sparked outrage in Iraq, prompting parliament to urge the expulsion of U.S. forces as street protesters decried the role of Washington and Tehran in turning their country into a proxy battleground.
Loveluck reported from Baghdad. | null | null | null | null | null |
Multiple injuries reported after explosion at Orthodox monastery, Ukrainian officials say
Photos: In Ukraine’s Irpin, death, destruction and a tide of people seeking safety
By Bryan Pietsch1:49 a.m.
A centuries-old Orthodox Christian monastery in eastern Ukraine was damaged in an airstrike Saturday evening, leaving several people hurt, Ukraine’s parliament said.
More than 500 refugees — including 200 children — were sheltering at the monastery, the Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra, in the Donetsk region. The refugees and monks were evacuated to the monastery’s basement Saturday, the parliament said in a post on Telegram.
The monastery posted a similar statement on its website.
The airstrike happened about 10 p.m. local time, according to the statements. No one was killed in the attack. The injured were treated at a nearby hospital or in the monastery.
“Window frames flew out as a result of the terrible force of the explosion in the Lavra’s temples,” according to the parliament’s statement. “An explosive wave smashed all the windows and doors in the Lavra hotels.”
The monastery is at least 495 years old, with the first mention of its existence recorded in 1526, the parliament said.
By Heidi Levine1:43 a.m.
IRPIN, Ukraine — For days, I have witnessed the scenes of nightmares: frightened people fleeing in snow flurries, the elderly carted in wheelbarrows, desperate children clinging to stuffed toys, frightened families cuddling their pets. And on Thursday, bodies of the dead from both sides of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. | null | null | null | null | null |
United States tsunami warning system needs major overhaul, report says
The current system is rife with outdated software, delayed alerts and poor communication to the public.
Debris from damaged building and trees are strewn around on Atata Island in Tonga, following the eruption of the underwater Hunga Tonga volcano on Jan. 15 and subsequent tsunami. Every single home on the island was destroyed by the tsunami. (POIS Christopher Szumlanski/AP)
The United States’ tsunami system is in need of a major update, with ongoing problems that include outdated software, delayed alerts and poor communication to the public, according to a panel of tsunami experts. Now, a recent report by the panel sees “an urgent need for action” for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to overhaul aspects of the system to fix these and other pressing issues.
Tsunamis are a series of very long ocean waves generally caused by undersea earthquakes or other events that disrupt a significant amount of ocean water. The U.S. West Coast, Hawaii and Alaska are particularly tsunami-prone, with potential threats found around the Pacific rim. At least 30 reported tsunamis have caused at least one death or $1 million in damage to the U.S. as of January 2018, according to NOAA.
“Every tsunami is very tricky … we learn something new every time,” said Rick Wilson, co-chair of the Tsunami Science and Technology Advisory Panel (TSTAP), a group of nonfederal scientists who issued the report and is an arm of the NOAA Science Advisory Board. “However, we feel that these recommendations going forward will not only save lives but potentially millions of dollars in the future for commerce and protection of the coastline from tsunami hazards.”
While the 32-page report outlines several areas for improvement, the most pressing matters involve NOAA’s tsunami warning program and its two tsunami warning centers, located in Honolulu and Palmer, Alaska. Namely, the report points out “perceived gaps and inconsistencies throughout the tsunami forecast and warning process.” Some of the changes recommended are extensive and described as an “overhaul” to ensure accurate, timely and clear warnings of impending tsunami waves.
This year’s report builds on a sweeping 2011 assessment by the National Academy of Sciences, which found numerous gaps the nation’s tsunami preparedness and much room for improvement, detailed in a long list of recommendations spanning nearly 200 pages.
The panel looked closely at the overarching warning system: from the tsunami source, to the forecast to the messaging going out to the public.
For example, the two tsunami warning centers in Alaska and Hawaii are relying on outdated software and methods, which limits improving the warning process — including estimating wave-generating potential from earthquakes and other sources. As new and complicated warning issues have arisen over the years, a series of patchwork or “band-aid” fixes have been applied.
The Jan. 15 Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption in the South Pacific and resulting tsunami exposed an issue that the panel had already identified: that NOAA should improve its ability to detect and warn about tsunamis from non-earthquake sources, such as volcanic eruptions and landslides.
For example, because the system is currently set up to estimate tsunamis generated by earthquakes, tsunami advisories were issued for Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast relatively late in the game, Wilson said.
For example, panel co-chair Rocky Lopes suggested that the centers could have their alerting capability unified under the umbrella of the National Weather Service and brought into its advanced warning platform (known as AWIPS), which is used to issue timely alerts for all weather events. In analyzing earthquake events, the panel recommended greater collaboration with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which uses more up-to-date earthquake analysis software than is currently available at the warning centers.
NOAA’s two tsunami warning centers cover two separate regions. The National Tsunami Warning Center (NTWC) serves Alaska, Canada and the continental United States, while the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) covers the Hawaiian Islands, U.S. and British territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, and international coastlines in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
However, a long-standing problem is that the two centers are not coordinated and do not speak with one voice. It is also difficult for one center to step in and perform the duties of the other if one center is temporarily out of service.
As a result, they may interpret the same event differently or offer different products to their respective regions. For example, the NTWC provides estimated wave heights to Alaska and the West Coast, which states and communities have found valuable for response efforts and better gauging tsunami hazards. The PTWC, however, does not provide this information to its service areas.
Tsunami.gov, the website that serves as the official warning depot for all tsunami events, was established in 2016 and collects warning information from each center in a series of bulletins in near real-time. But when a large earthquake happens, the nature and reach of any potential tsunami threat is far from clear.
According to the report, an overall update to the Tsunami.gov website is needed, and it could, for example, provide a single national message to summarize the scope of each event. Lopes indicated that the lack of attention to Tsunami.gov is likely due to insufficient staffing, which the panel hopes that NOAA will address in its response to their report.
The warning centers issue initial alerts about possible tsunamis within 5 minutes of an earthquake. However, it can take up to three hours to produce a full forecast with estimated wave heights for coastal areas farther from the wave source. That’s a problem for coastal emergency managers who need to make important evacuation decisions quickly.
“What we found is that a lot of emergency managers still need about 3 or 4 hours at a minimum to pull off their evacuations and their response activities,” said Wilson of the California Geological Survey.
On July 28, 2021, following a Magnitude 8.2 earthquake off the coast of Alaska, the threat to the U.S. West Coast was listed as “being evaluated” for several hours, leaving little time to initiate evacuation plans, if they had been needed.
The panel recommends that NOAA provide some estimate of likely impacts to states much earlier. They also point to newer technologies that may quickly detect tsunamis in the open ocean, such as Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), which could help to speed up the warning process and may be more cost-effective than the network of ocean buoys currently used.
The NOAA administrator has one year from the receipt of the report in January 2022 to respond to the recommended changes. In a letter sent a day after its receipt, administrator Spinrad wrote: “Please pass my thanks on to the TSTAP for their diligence and careful attention to this important topic. We will give this report the attention and follow up that it so well deserves.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Current system is rife with outdated software, delayed alerts and poor communication to the public, according to expert panel
A view of the damage on Atata Island in Tonga after the underwater Hunga Tonga volcano erupted in January, triggering a tsunami. Every home on the island was destroyed. (Christopher Szumlanski/POIS/AP)
The United States’ tsunami system is in need of a major update, with ongoing problems that include outdated software, delayed alerts and poor communication to the public, according to a panel of tsunami experts. Its recent report sees “an urgent need for action” and advises the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to overhaul aspects of the system to fix these and other pressing issues.
Tsunamis are a series of very long ocean waves generally caused by undersea earthquakes or other events that disrupt a significant amount of ocean water. The U.S. West Coast, Hawaii and Alaska are particularly tsunami-prone, with potential threats found around the Pacific rim. At least 30 reported tsunamis have caused at least one death or $1 million in damage to the United States as of January 2018, according to NOAA.
“Every tsunami is very tricky … we learn something new every time,” said Rick Wilson, co-chair of the Tsunami Science and Technology Advisory Panel (TSTAP), a group of nonfederal scientists that issued the report and an arm of the NOAA Science Advisory Board. “However, we feel that these recommendations going forward will not only save lives, but potentially millions of dollars in the future for commerce and protection of the coastline from tsunami hazards.”
The Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption and resulting tsunami Jan. 15 in the South Pacific exposed an issue that the panel had already identified: that NOAA should improve its ability to detect and warn about tsunamis from non-earthquake sources, such as volcanic eruptions and landslides.
For example, the panel’s co-chair, Rocky Lopes, suggested that the centers could have their alerting capability unified under the umbrella of the National Weather Service and brought into its advanced warning platform (known as AWIPS), which is used to issue timely alerts for all weather events. In analyzing earthquake events, the panel recommended greater collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which uses more up-to-date earthquake analysis software than is available at the warning centers.
NOAA’s two tsunami warning centers cover two separate regions. The National Tsunami Warning Center (NTWC) serves Alaska, Canada and the contiguous United States, while the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) covers the Hawaiian Islands, U.S. and British territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, and international coastlines in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
As a result, they may interpret the same event differently or offer different products to their respective regions. For example, the NTWC provides estimated wave heights to Alaska and the West Coast, which states and communities have found valuable for response efforts and to better gauge tsunami hazards. The PTWC, however, does not provide this information to its service areas. | null | null | null | null | null |
Let’s make college admission fair, while celebrating unselective college products like my brilliant new boss
Universities that admit nearly everyone still have plenty of talent
(Avosb/iStock)
Karin Klein of the Los Angeles Times is one of the best people writing editorials about education. But last month she so deeply analyzed one topic — the unfairness of college admissions — that it made me a little sad.
The SAT and the ACT are going away, at least at the massive University of California, she noted. Entrance tests must be made better. She suggested an overhaul of the college essay requirement since the more sophisticated writing is “even more tightly correlated with family income.” Colleges could require that students attest to having no help in their composition. Or applicants could submit “only essays that have been written in class and sent by the high school,” she said.
She had more ideas. Preferences for children of alumni have to go. She doesn’t believe that applicants should get extra points for participating in sports mostly available to privileged kids.
It felt stifling to me, but that may be my middle-class upbringing. I would mourn the end of official encouragement of sunny afternoons playing tennis or softball.
The federal courts seem to be moving toward the day when usual ways of selecting college applicants might be replaced by accepting various ethnicities in the same proportions found in the applicant pool. Schools in the future might even have to admit students based solely on reading and math test scores as the only quantifiable measures of academic ability.
So you’re bummed because your favorite college said no. Read this.
We shall see. What bothers me most about our current obsession with college admissions is that it overlooks the glorious power of what happens when those new admits actually get to their campus, whichever one it is. They get off the bus, pull into the parking lot or hug their parents goodbye. Suddenly they are free. No matter what the college, their choices are many. They begin a life of new friends, new interests, love, talk and who knows what else.
Instead of trying so hard to regularize how students are admitted, we might consider why U.S. colleges, both famous and obscure, work so well for so many people. Even some of America’s greatest adversaries, such as Chinese leader Xi Jinping, have been unable to resist having their own children enroll in U.S. campuses to soak up their depth and variety.
We Americans should celebrate more than we do the many successful people coming out of colleges that don’t get top rankings from U.S. News and World Report and don’t reject the vast majority of their applicants.
Here at The Washington Post we have our first female executive editor, Sally Buzbee. It’s nice finally to have a woman running the newsroom, but I haven’t seen anyone mention something special about her background. No one in that big job has ever graduated from a college as unselective as hers.
Here are the executive editors I have worked for, and the latest acceptance rates at their alma maters: Ben Bradlee (Harvard, 5 percent), Leonard Downie Jr. (Ohio State, 68 percent), Marcus Brauchli (Columbia, 6 percent) and Martin Baron (Lehigh, 50 percent). Some of those places are not so selective, but Buzbee beats them by a wide margin with an undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas. In 2020 it accepted 91 percent of its applicants.
Do ultra-selective colleges change lives? I say usually not, but this much richer author says yes.
Seventy-four percent of American college students attend public institutions, many of them underappreciated like KU, with 28,000 students. A lot of those undergraduates have great potential, just as Buzbee did. Public campuses also include community colleges like Pasadena City College, just down East Del Mar Boulevard from my house. PCC has 25,000 students. Its alumni include Jackie Robinson, Kenny Loggins, Octavia E. Butler and Jaime Escalante.
Klein at the Los Angeles Times is right to be concerned about unfairness in selective college admissions. But why not pause to give thanks for the exhilaration young people find in also-ran schools? They are usually located in college towns or neighborhoods full of books and music and restaurants jammed at night. They have their own brilliant professors, raucous dorm debates and deafening Saturday night basketball games. All that enriches American culture. Drive through Davis, Calif., Tuscaloosa, Ala., Grand Forks, N.D., Burlington Vt., or Lawrence, Kan., and see what I mean.
People like my new boss who come from more welcoming educational institutions will often be smarter than I am and, I suspect, happy to help me improve my work. They might not have gotten into the most selective schools, but what difference does that make? | null | null | null | null | null |
Two years after Breonna Taylor was killed, activists say protests inspired life changes
A women kneels in front of a makeshift memorial in honor of Breonna Taylor at Jefferson Square Park in Louisville on Sept. 24, 2020. (Darron Cummings/AP)
It’s been two years since Breonna Taylor was killed in by Louisville Metro Police Department in a botched police raid in March 2020.
In the months following, thousands of people marched the city streets and occupied Jefferson Square Park — which they renamed Injustice Square — protesting Taylor’s death and a grand jury’s decision that no officers would be charged in her shooting. (One officer was charged with endangerment for firing into a neighboring apartment.)
For some Louisville activists, Taylor’s death, and the movement for justice in her name, was a turning point, both professionally and personally.
Savvy Hughes was 20 years old when the protests began. She said she felt a moral obligation, especially as a White woman, to join in the fight for police accountability.
“I’ve never seen a community come together in such a way, where it didn’t matter who you were, your background, or how much money you had,” Hughes said. “We were all fighting together for one purpose.”
Hughes drove to Louisville almost daily from Elizabethtown, Ky., her hometown about 45 minutes south, where she helped with outreach, distributing food and water, and organizing marches and other events.
Before then, Hughes said, she never thought much about her future or a career. But she was so inspired by the activists in the square that she found a sense of direction.
“I come from generational poverty. I was told I would work in a factory or sell drugs or be on drugs,” Hughes said. “But being at the square gave me a purpose for life. I want to put strong Black women into positions of power.”
Two years later, Hughes is working on behalf of campaigns in some of the city’s most high-profile political races, including that of Shameka Parrish-Wright, a primary organizer of Injustice Square and now a candidate for Louisville mayor.
Brett Hankison found not guilty of endangering Breonna Taylor’s neighbors in shooting
Parrish-Wright said she decided to run for political office after Erika Shields — the former chief of the Atlanta Police Department who resigned after unarmed Black man Rayshard Brooks was killed by a police officer in June 2020, just months after Taylor was killed — was hired as the new chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department.
“I looked up the qualifications for mayor, and I thought, ‘I can do this,’' Parrish-Wright said. “I represent the new leadership that we need. “There’s a lot that I can do as mayor to let Louisville know that we’re ready to heal and to move forward.”
State Rep.-Elect Keturah Herron, the first openly LGBT member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, said that, similar to Hughes and Parrish-Wright, the community she helped organize at Injustice Square and the fight for justice for Taylor clarified her personal path.
“It’s completely changed my life,” Herron said. When fellow Democrat State Rep. Reginald Meeks announced he was retiring from his seat last year, Herron realized that political office was the next step for her in affecting change.
“I definitely think the movement set up the path for me to run,” Herron said. “When I go out and do this work, I think about a young Black woman who had her whole life ahead of her. Now I feel like it’s up to me to change what I can for her and her generation.”
Herron said she believes Taylor’s death made people pay attention in a way they hadn’t before.
“I remember being down at the square and asking people who their elected officials were. And they didn’t know,” Herron said. “And now I think that answer would be different. People are paying a different kind of attention.”
Activists say the past two years have been characterized by both small wins for justice and police reform, as well as disappointment in city and state government.
Herron cited the formation of the Civilian Review and Accountability Board, which will have the authority to investigate alleged incidents of improper conduct by the police department, as a big step in the direction of police accountability.
A former policy strategist with the ACLU of Kentucky, Herron was also instrumental in passing Breonna’s Law, banning no-knock warrants in Louisville, in 2020.
But many say the corresponding legislation banning no-knock warrants statewide fell far short. The bill, which was altered significantly to pass a Republican-controlled legislature, still allows no-knock warrants in some instances.
Despite some wins in the past two years, ultimately they still want accountability for the officers involved in Taylor’s death.
“We never saw the cops be held accountable. Not even for the bullets fired into the other apartments,” Hughes said, in reference to the acquittal this month of former police officer Brett Hankison, who was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment when bullets he fired went through a shared wall into a neighboring apartment that night.
“We want to see the government try something different,” Hughes said. “We won’t ever see true justice for Breonna until we see a system that is more equitable and fair, and provides resources and support. That’s what real change is going to look like.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The importance of an unambiguous report that can’t be weaponized by Trump supporters.
By Stephen A. West
Stephen A. West is associate professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he is writing a book about the history of the 15th Amendment in American memory and political culture.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), left, is joined by members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, speaks before a vote on a contempt charge against former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark on Dec. 1. (Stefani Reynolds/For The Washington Post )
In a court filing in early March, lawyers for the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection charged that former president Donald Trump and key allies engaged in two potential crimes: conspiring to defraud the United States and obstructing an official congressional proceeding. The claim is the latest chapter in the extensive — and ongoing — congressional investigation into the insurrection and offers some early clues as to the committee’s thinking and what its eventual report will look like.
If history is any guide, that report will be an incredibly important document. After the Civil War, defeated ex-Confederates turned to terrorism to limit the possibilities of freedom for formerly enslaved people. The violence only grew after Black men won the right to vote. Congressional Republicans — members of the party of Abraham Lincoln, emancipation and Black men’s enfranchisement — responded by forming a joint House-Senate committee to investigate “the execution of the laws, and the safety of the lives and property of the citizens of the United States” in the former Confederate states. Its report, submitted 150 years ago, holds sobering lessons for the Jan. 6 Committee about what comes next: that is, how such an inquiry can succeed or fail in influencing policy and in shaping later understandings of a perilous chapter in the nation’s history.
Republicans outnumbered Democrats 13 to eight on the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States — popularly known as the Ku Klux Committee, named after the secret terrorist organization responsible for much of the violence. The Democratic minority, however, included racist and outspoken opponents of Reconstruction. One was Sen. Frank Blair, Jr. (D-Mo.), who had once denounced African Americans as an “alien race of semi-barbarous men.” Republicans did their best to uncover the Klan’s goals and the extent of its terrorism, but Democrats on the committee rejected the proceedings from the outset, creating a partisan spectacle. They worked to put biracial democracy itself on trial, badgering and belittling Black witnesses and calling White witnesses to complain of the incompetence and venality of officials whom Black voters helped elect.
The committee’s reports and supporting evidence totaled 13 volumes and over 8,000 pages, at the time the longest published congressional investigation in history. It contained the testimony from 600 witnesses, about one-third of them African Americans, who told of violent assaults and murders, rapes and arson committed by the Klan. The report from the Republican majority highlighted harrowing stories of political terror, including the account of Elias Hill, a disabled teacher, Baptist minister and grass roots political leader who was brutally beaten outside his South Carolina home by six Klansmen.
The Democratic minority, however, submitted its own report shot through with racist and inflammatory language. It denounced “Negro supremacy” and called the enfranchisement of Black men “one of the most terrible blunders ever committed.” Democrats minimized the Klan’s “alleged outrages,” claiming that the Klan was not a political force and thus could not be responsible for political terror, but also, simultaneously, excusing Klan violence as a just political response — “the legitimate offspring” — of Republican power in the South.
In the short term, little came of the investigation. The Republican majority recommended extending an existing law that allowed the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to effect mass arrests. President Ulysses S. Grant had put it to good use a few months earlier, employing the U.S. Army to help quash terrorism in South Carolina. But with a presidential election approaching, congressional Republicans chose instead to moderate their approach on the “Southern question” and let that provision lapse. It was a step in the national Republican Party’s retreat from Reconstruction and weakened the federal government’s ability to respond to future violence.
In the longer term, the Democrats’ minority report served as a kind of rough draft for the “tragic era” interpretation of Reconstruction that cast White Southern Democrats as victims and Black and White Republicans as imbeciles and villains. This view took firm root in historical scholarship. The “Dunning School” — named after Columbia University historian William Dunning and his graduate students — portrayed Black men as unfit voters and Radical Reconstruction as a national failure. In “Reconstruction Political and Economic” (1907), Dunning cited the Klan Report as proof that the Reconstruction-era governments of the South were in “all the states bad, and in some of them a mere travesty of civilized government.” Black witnesses like Hill disappeared in Dunning’s account.
The “tragic era” mythology also pervaded American popular culture, providing a useful narrative for justifying the Jim Crow laws, codes and racist ideas that limited the economic, political and social advancement of Black Americans. For instance, White supremacist Thomas Dixon touted his research in the congressional Klan Report as proof of the historical accuracy of “The Clansman,” his 1905 novel glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. It reached the silver screen in 1915 as D.W. Griffith’s blockbuster silent film, “The Birth of a Nation.” The film’s racist plot turned on the Klan’s lynching of a Black man who attempted to rape a White woman — the kind of behavior that Hill’s attackers falsely accused him of inciting.
The voices of Hill and other Black witnesses, to be sure, were never entirely silenced. W.E.B. Du Bois included an account of Hill’s testimony in his 1935 work “Black Reconstruction in America.” Many White scholars at the time ignored Du Bois’s work. But the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s — called a “second Reconstruction” by some — drove a reconsideration of the period. Historians adopted Du Bois’s emphasis on the centrality of the Black experience and agency during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In 2017, Hill was honored with a wayside marker near his former home in York County — the first state marker in South Carolina to reference the Klan and its Reconstruction-era reign of terror. Still, signs of the “tragic era” view of Reconstruction remain. A study by the Zinn Education Project found its vestiges in the curriculums of more than 12 states.
For much of the last 150 years, Reconstruction’s critics trivialized Black witnesses’ testimony in the Klan Report and used it instead to discredit the period’s democratic possibilities. Can the Jan. 6 Committee protect its work against such willful and perverse misreadings? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took one step when she rejected two of the five Republican appointees to the committee, leading Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to withdraw the rest. As a result, the Jan. 6 inquiry does not have what the Ku Klux Committee had: a minority that sympathizes with the goals, if not the tactics, of violent insurrectionists. That hasn’t, of course, stopped Trump’s supporters from criticizing the investigation as a partisan witch hunt or perpetuating the “big lie.” But it means they can’t use the committee’s investigative resources to do so, nor will they be able to write that version of events into the committee’s final report — the kind of official record favored by historians.
In a larger sense, however, there are no guarantees of how future generations will read this or any other historical evidence. The misuses of the Klan Report arose not from any fault of the investigators or the witnesses, but from the nation’s abandonment of the promise of Reconstruction. The reactionary and racist tendencies of the late 19th century gave birth to the Jim Crow era which White Americans justified in the stories they told about the post-Civil War years.
If we might find some comfort in the reassessment of Reconstruction over recent decades, the hard truth is that it took a long time. The ultimate — if unsettling — lesson of the Klan Report is that it gives the lie to platitudes that “history will judge” and “the evidence speaks for itself.” It’s a lesson to bear in mind about the work of the Jan. 6 Committee as well. | null | null | null | null | null |
President Joe Biden announces Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to the Supreme Court at the White House in Washington on Feb. 25, 2022, left, and President Vladimir Putin speaks during a visit to the construction site of the National Space Agency at Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Centre, in Moscow, Russia, on Feb. 27, 2022. The invasion of Ukraine has rapidly returned echoes of a Cold War mentality to the United States, with a familiar foe in Russia. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP) | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Distinguished persons: It took a village to create a fairer congressional map
Reggie Weaver speaks outside the North Carolina legislature in Raleigh on Feb. 15 at a news conference to address redistricting in the state. (Gary D. Robertson/AP)
Gerrymandering is a blight on democracy, a method by which politicians choose their own voters and thereby avoid accountability to a reasonable cross section of voters. And in this election cycle, with Republicans conducting an organized voter suppression and voter subversion drive, Democrats, Republicans, pundits and pollsters figured that gerrymandering alone could flip the House to GOP control next fall. The good news: That sort of partisan redistricting largely didn’t occur, producing one of the fairer congressional maps in recent history.
David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report writes: “On Monday, the Supreme Court denied Republican appeals to block court-ordered congressional maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The decision likely clears the way for Ohio’s Supreme Court to invalidate a GOP gerrymander in the coming days as well, ensuring Democrats will come out a few seats ahead in the 2022 redistricting cycle.” Maps in North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania alone created "eight to ten more Democrats to Congress this fall than they otherwise would have, erasing the GOP skew of the entire House map,” Wasserman adds. The result: Among the districts drawn in 45 states to date, “President Biden would have carried 211 of these 376 seats in 2020, up from 203 of 376 under the current lines in the same 45 states.”
A New York Times analysis also confirms the unusually balanced map “with a nearly equal number of districts that are expected to lean Democratic and Republican for the first time in more than 50 years.” The change is historically significant:
However, any conclusion that this is “something of an accident,” as the Times puts it, utterly ignores the virtual village of lawyers, democracy advocates, individual citizen activists, courts and independent commissions that collectively resisted GOP efforts to deliver them the House majority simply by virtue of clever redistricting.
Marc E. Elias, one of the Democrats’ strongest voting-law litigators, tells me, “At the beginning of this redistricting cycle, most pundits predicted a GOP rout. Instead, as a result of preparation and execution, Democrats have outperformed expectations.”
He reeled off the long list of wins he and his colleagues (in conjunction with voting rights groups) achieved. “We defended Oregon’s map from a Republican attack. In Ohio and Wisconsin, we won lawsuits before majority-GOP state supreme courts,” he recounts. “In North Carolina, we won a remedy map in a lawsuit before a majority-GOP trial court panel. And, of course, in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, we successfully opposed Republican efforts for a stay before a 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court.”
As he puts it, “These results were not a given, and it was not luck.” There are still Republican-controlled states such as Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Florida where he and other voting rights advocates are challenging GOP-drawn maps.
All of this is especially impressive given the Supreme Court’s systematic attack on the Voting Rights Act, depriving litigators of a pre-clearance process for the first time since the Shelby County case in 2013 dismantled Section 5 of the VRA.
Nate Persily, a voting rights guru at Stanford Law School, concurs that “because of successful litigation, divided governments and increased use of redistricting commissions, the national congressional map appears less biased than it was 10 years ago.”
The lesson here is threefold. For starters, federal voting rights legislation failed this year, but federal legislation is just one tool in defending free and fair elections. Democracy defenders’ overreliance on the federal government (both Congress and the Supreme Court) would have been foolhardy. Only by going state-by-state and case-by-case were they able to create a more level playing field.
Ian Bassin, head of Protect Democracy, says: “It’s the result of citizens who care about democracy doing their civic duty and fighting for fairness — citizens like Katie Fahey, who organized a grass-roots effort in Michigan to create a people-over-politicians redistricting commission that should be a model for all states; citizens like the mathematicians and computer scientists who successfully litigated for maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania designed to be statistically fair.”
Second, the expense, confusion and acrimony surrounding redistricting could have been greatly reduced had the Supreme Court not dismantled Section 5. Some maps would have never come to light if Republicans knew they would have to pass Justice Department scrutiny. In other cases, a fair resolution would have been obtained without need for any litigation. The further we get from Shelby, the worse the decision looks; it opened the floodgates to a slew of voter suppression and subversion legislation.
Third, although the map might look more balanced, gerrymandering still poses a threat to democracy. “Truly competitive districts continue to dwindle, making members more and more accountable solely to their district’s most extreme primary voters and less representative of the overall population,” Bassin tells me. "Healthy democracy needs better competition and fuller representation, and it’s going to take even more active citizenship to get there.”
In sum, the encouraging result of all this redistricting activity embodies the truism that democracy can survive only through the hard work and dedication of Americans. To all of those (litigators, judges, commissioners, lawmakers, governors and citizens) who contributed to a fairer map and a more democratic election system, we can say: Well done. | null | null | null | null | null |
The White House is seen amidst a section of “In America: Remember,” an art installation that features flags representing every death from covid-19 in the United States on the National Mall on Sept. 24, 2021. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Excess mortality differed around the world. In the United States, the researchers said the two-year official death toll was 824,000 but the estimated excess deaths were 1.1 million. Undoubtedly, those estimates are higher today after the omicron surge. The official U.S. covid death rate was 130.6 per 100,000 population, but the estimated excess mortality rate was 179.3 per 100,000. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The U.S. should not rush into a digital dollar
A bitcoin token on top of U.S. dollars arranged in Montreal on March 2. (Christinne Muschi/Bloomberg News)
The highly anticipated executive order came as many Russians waited in long lines to withdrawal U.S. dollars and other foreign currency from ATMs. That was a reminder that the U.S. dollar is still the world’s most popular and trusted currency. People turn to dollars even in countries where leaders such as Vladimir Putin are actively demonizing the United States.
That the U.S. dollar remains the global reserve currency underscores the need for a thoughtful and flawlessly executed introduction of any digital dollar. The United States does not need to be first to issue a digital currency; it needs to be the best. The careful approach the Biden administration and Federal Reserve have taken here is the right one. The fact that about 100 countries are exploring some form of a central bank digital currency, according to the International Monetary Fund, is largely irrelevant. China’s digital yuan might have a lot of users, but the reason it does not take off globally is the same reason most businesses still prefer to transact in dollars instead of yuan: The U.S. dollar comes with well-established legal protections. The demand will be there when the United States makes its digital move.
There are many compelling reasons to have a digital dollar. At the top of the list are much faster transaction times, easier access to money for many, and less risk of fraud. If executed smoothly, it would help ensure the U.S. dollar remains the world’s most favored currency. As the Fed wrote in January, adding an official U.S. government digital currency is “a means to expand safe payment options, not to reduce or replace them.”
But there are also serious concerns and practicalities that must be worked out. How will people access the digital dollar? Will there be government-run “digital wallets,” or will those digital wallets occur only in the private sector? The Fed has indicated it does not particularly want to become a consumer bank. Similarly, would a digital dollar use blockchain technology, like bitcoin and other e-currencies? That would help prevent fraud, but it would be a huge expansion of blockchain usage. Finally, how will the government use all of the new data it collects from digital dollar users, and what privacy protections will be in place? China offers a cautionary tale, as its government can track all transactions and seize digital yuan assets. Launching a digital currency will also be expensive, especially because of the need to ensure the system is not hacked.
Innovation is fundamental to the U.S. economy, but so are security and rule of law. A digital dollar is coming, but it would be foolish to rush it. | null | null | null | null | null |
After feeling numb, Hunter Cattoor, center, of Virginia Tech celebrated defeating Duke. (Mike Stobe/Getty Images)
In forcing those changes, it helps to be self-aware rather than in denial. That was the Hokies in late January, individually and as a group. Sure, things were happening to them that were hard to take, and Moore’s shot was the cruel exclamation point that could have left them feeling the victim. But this wasn’t all dumb luck or misfortune. Be frank: This was a team playing below its potential.
“We were a lot more talented than we were playing,” third-year coach Mike Young said. “Take that to heart. That’s hard to stomach.”
The Hokies’ response to Moore’s shot: six straight wins, and nine of 11 to close the regular season. They rose from last in the conference to the seventh seed headed into this tournament. And now, just viscerally, they’re about to be a tough out in the NCAA tournament.
“I think they’re the team they thought they were going to be at the beginning of the year,” Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski said.
If Cattoor shoots as he did against Duke, and if forward Keve Aluma continues to play the kind of all-around game he brought to Brooklyn — with 19 points, 10 boards and seven assists in the title game — then maybe they’re better than the team they thought they would be.
Keep in mind, too, who the Hokies are at their core, because it makes them even more appealing. Young was hired from Wofford, the South Carolina school where he spent three decades as an assistant and then head coach in the tradition-rich Southern Conference. But he is of southwest Virginia. He was born in Radford. He played at Emory and Henry College, further south on Interstate 81 toward the Tennessee border. Those are earnest, humble beginnings. He has an earnest, humble program.
When Young was hired to replace Buzz Williams — who took his misplaced arrogance to Texas A&M — the Hokies program immediately got a homier, more regular-guy feel. Young brought Aluma with him as a transfer from Wofford. He brought Cattoor, a shooter from Orlando who had committed to the Terriers but became a Hokie as a freshman. And this season, he brought Murphy, who played two seasons for Young at Wofford, then two more for the Terriers before winding up in Blacksburg, where, in Krzyzewski’s estimation, everything the Hokies do “really starts with the energy that Murphy gives them.”
Young, though, provides the blueprint. When Cattoor assessed the Hokies’ accomplishment here thusly — “It speaks about Coach Young and how he can coach,” he said — Aluma and Murphy, sitting beside him, nodded instinctively and emphatically. Over four days here, their blue-collar, Southern Conference roots showed up against the blue bloods of the ACC. Their scare came against Clemson in Wednesday’s second round, a one-point win in overtime. But they were in control in the entirety of what became a seven-point victory over Notre Dame. They effectively blew out North Carolina, a 13-point final margin in which they led by 20. And with 5½ minutes left in the first half against the top-seeded, lottery pick-laden Blue Devils, they took the lead — and never relinquished it.
“His teams play hard, together,” Krzyzewski said of Young. “They don’t make many mistakes, and they don’t beat themselves. … He’s one of the better coaches, and they’re a together group. They have great poise. They’re very difficult to beat.”
Barry Svrluga: As Coach K’s exit nears, the storied Duke-North Carolina rivalry prepares for a seismic shift
On Saturday, Cattoor made them just about impossible to beat. He hadn’t made more than three baskets or two three-pointers in a game in more than a month, a 10-game stretch in which he shot 30.4 percent overall and 24.6 percent from behind the arc. But just as the Hokies honestly assessed their collective struggle, Cattoor didn’t shy from what he was going through.
“The really, really cool thing about Hunt is that over the last month or whatnot, he hasn’t shot it so great,” Murphy said. “And he’s owned that struggle. And he’s talked about that. He’s embraced that. He hasn’t hid from it.”
Cattoor had totaled 10 made field goals in his previous five games, and he needed 30 shots to do it. Saturday night, he made 11 on just 16 attempts. “Kind of a blur,” he called it, which seems about right. But behind that performance, there is the kind of support in practices, at meals, on bus rides that the public doesn’t see. It matters so much. His teammates, through all of that, kept telling him: “You’re the best shooter in the gym.”
Saturday night, that’s what Hunter Cattoor was, the best shooter in the gym on the best team in the tournament. That’s a season — a living, breathing season that isn’t fully formed when it’s halfway over, that can’t be assessed in midstream. The Hokies were 2-7 and in last place in the ACC. Now, they’re ACC champions.
“I knew when it came together it was going to be a beautiful thing,” Young said. And it came together. I didn’t think it would culminate in this. Here we are, and we’re not giving it back.”
Not ever. They earned it Saturday night. But they earned it, too, over the course of a season that took time to fully form. Be careful not to drop a final verdict on it now. The Hokies have more games ahead, and who knows? | null | null | null | null | null |
Fed Expectations Don’t Add Up In the Debt Market
Jerome Powell, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, smiles during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, March 3, 2022. Powell left open the possibility of 50-basis-point hike, the first since 2000, at his testimony Tuesday, even as he poured cold water on the idea that it could come this month. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
Something doesn’t quite add up in the debt markets. Traders are betting that the Federal Reserve will increase interest rates seven times within the next 12 months, starting this week. This makes sense given the rate of inflation, which, according to the latest consumer price index reading of 7.9%, is the highest since 1982. But here’s the part that doesn’t make sense: many investors seem confident the U.S. can avoid a recession despite the expected amount of monetary tightening and the drag on the economy from surging food and energy prices.
The news last week was again dominated by the images wrought by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The conflict has spurred a humanitarian crisis in Eastern Europe. Many are concerned about food shortages in Africa and other nations dependent on the region’s production of wheat and other grains. The U.S., U.K. and other nations have stopped buying Russian oil products, sending the price of crude and energy prices higher.
Almost all commodities have become very expensive in a short period of time. The Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index is up 27% this year. West Texas Intermediate crude reached $130.50 barrel on May 7 before ending the week at $109.33. Global food prices are at a record high, according to the United Nations, and are likely headed even higher. Wheat prices are up about 44% this year, while corn and soybeans have surged more than 25%. Consumers are having a harder time keeping up, with wage increases falling short of the rise in inflation rates.
So how do central banks respond? When the war in Ukraine began, rates traders considered that perhaps policy makers might not tighten policy as much as first anticipated. But they’ve abandoned such notions, especially after the European Central Bank sounded a hawkish tone last week by saying it plans to end its pandemic-era bond purchase program early. The message from central bankers is that they are more concerned about repeating their mistakes of the 1970s and letting inflation fester than torpedoing the economy.
Yields on 2-year U.S. Treasury notes climbed to almost 1.75% on Friday, to the highest since 2019 and reversing the declines seen in late February and the first few days of March. Inflation expectations as measured by the bond market in the next two, five and 10 years surged to the highest in decades. The latest University of Michigan sentiment survey released Friday showed that U.S. consumers expect inflation to rise 5.4% over the next 12 months, the highest reading since 1981.
More analysts have started forecast a greater likelihood of the Fed raising its target for the federal funds rate beyond where they thought was likely in this economic cycle. Morgan Stanley now sees six 25-basis-point rate increase this year, followed by four in 2023 to end that year at 2.625%, according to a research note issued on Friday by the firm’s economists led by Ellen Zentner. Bank of America Corp. strategist Savita Subramanian noted that her firm is still looking for seven rate increases this year, the same as before the Ukraine war. “What’s important to remember is that seven rate hikes doesn’t even get us to a neutral rate,” she said in a Bloomberg TV interview last week. “We’re still at a super low, relatively accommodative level for short rates.” Even Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has shifted her tone, with her expectations for “very uncomfortably high” inflation to persist for at least the next year. Just months ago, she was still calling the rapid price increases transitory.
And yet, despite the expected Fed actions, the yield curve as seen in the gap between 2-year and 10-year Treasury rates, has narrowed but hasn’t inverted, which would be a sure sign by traders that they expect a recession. Perhaps this is because the exodus out of credit looks to be controlled, tied more to the outlook for higher interest rates than a rapid deterioration in the credit quality of borrowers. Investment-grade rate corporate bonds have lost almost 8% this year, outpacing the 5.6% drop in junk bonds, according to Bloomberg bond indexes.
Many investors believe that six or seven rate hikes in 2022 has been fully priced into markets. Perhaps that’s the case when it comes to simply how much higher rates will get. But it doesn’t factor in the likelihood that Fed policy actually works to dampen lending and slow commercial activity, which is one of the main transmission mechanisms of monetary policy.
Three outcomes seem plausible. The first is that the Fed will boost rates fewer times than the consensus expects as inflation slows. The second is that the Fed will raises rates as much as expected but the moves won’t cause financial conditions to deteriorate more than they already have, which will raise questions about whether monetary tightening is even effective at constraining inflation. The third is that the Fed hikes six or seven times this year, the yield curve inverts and traders of all types gird for recession.
Given the double whammy of a Fed-induced economic slowdown paired with stagflationary headwinds, it’s hard to see how the selloff in riskier securities can remain as shallow as it’s been.
• Take-It-or-Leave-It Gas Prices May Be Our Future: Justin Fox | null | null | null | null | null |
Inflation Stings Most If You Earn Less Than $300K. Here’s How to Deal.
A driver returns a fuel nozzle to a gas pump at a Chevron gas station in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, March 7, 2022. The average price of gasoline in the U.S. jumped above $4 a gallon for the first time since 2008 in a clear sign of the energy inflation that’s hurt consumers since Russia invaded Ukraine. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
If your income is more than $289,000 a year, the run-up in gas prices may be alarming — but it’s unlikely to hammer your overall finances. After all, Americans at that level spend no more than 1% of their take-home pay on gas and oil, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For those earning much less, it’s a different story. Those at the median, with income of about $50,000, spend more than 3% of it on gas and motor oil. Low-income households making between $7,000 and $19,000 spend about 9%. The latest inflation numbers show gas prices jumped 6.6% in February from a month earlier — even before President Joe Biden banned U.S. imports of Russian oil.
Economists say the overall share of income spent on gas is lower than it used to be, and despite the increases, prices are still relatively low by historical standards. That’s true, but it offers little consolation these days for someone on the lower end of the income distribution who drives to work.
Food prices are also up, posting their biggest monthly increase since April 2020. There, too, those making less than $19,000 spend much more of their income — almost 15% — compared with higher earners, whose total food spending is just 4% of their income. Households with income of about $50,000 spend 8.5% of it on food.
The most recent barometer of consumer sentiment showed the highest-ever share of Americans expecting their finances to worsen in the coming year. About 54% think their incomes will lag behind inflation in the year ahead — a pretty high percentage historically.
I expect those most affected will adjust to inflation in the classic way by shifting away from relatively expensive items toward close substitutes. Here are some ideas on how to reconfigure consumption and lessen the blow. But again, adjustment is hard for people without savings or choices.
First, you have to know your budget to control your budget. Budgeting takes effort, but it gives you power. And that power is even more important in inflationary times.
And stay away from buying in bulk — you usually don’t save any money by buying more. Sure, there may be great deals, but most consumers wind up falling for the tricks that entice them to spend more — things like offering free samples, which often leads to impulse buying, or placing discounted big-ticket items near the entrance. If you absolutely must buy in bulk, try to do it with a friend, so you can split some of the costs and ensure everything gets eaten or used.
Aside from being more thoughtful about purchases, it’s also prudent to think about unnecessary charges. So review your credit card to make sure there aren’t any unwanted recurring ones.
Coping with inflation could mean drastic actions or small ones. There are lots of ways people can duck and dance around relative price changes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found people in recessions hold off on buying cars, furniture and appliances. Though they don’t cut back on travel, they do cut back on restaurants.
Try to be as flexible and creative as possible. Scientists tell us our brain plasticity will improve by trying novel things. There’s an advantage to mixing up what you consume to cope with unusual price spikes: You become more resilient as you create a locus of control and interrogate your habits. | null | null | null | null | null |
If You Already Hate Your New Job, It’s Fine to Quit
By Kathryn Minshew | Bloomberg
There’s always another train. (Photographer: Bloomberg)
When Devin Tomb was 24, she began a new role as an editor at a teen magazine. “I knew by my second day that I’d made the wrong decision,” she said. “Behind closed doors, the editor-in-chief didn’t match the warm, friendly persona she displayed in public. It got so bad that our executive editor tried to console me one day by saying this EIC was ‘just hazing me.’”
I had a similar experience at 23, when I took a job that promised international travel — but in reality, mostly involved trips to Ohio. And it turns out this phenomenon is more common than many people realize.
According to a new survey of more than 2,500 respondents from career site The Muse, which I founded, 72% of American workers said they too have experienced starting a new job and realizing — to their surprise or regret — that the position or company was very different from what they were led to believe. 30% said both the position and the company were very different. I call this unpleasant surprise “shift shock” to distinguish it from ordinary new-job jitters. It’s normal to feel nervous starting a new job, but it can be a big problem to be hired into a role with one set of responsibilities and then be expected to perform another, or to join a company culture that turns out to be cliquey when you were sold on the idea of camaraderie.
Over the last two years, as job candidates and employers have assessed each other over Zoom, I suspect a lot of people have ended up with that did-I-just-make-a-huge-mistake feeling. And while Devin, who is now Director of Editorial and Brand at The Muse, waited a year to leave her not-as-advertised position at the teen magazine — largely due to an old-fashioned, unspoken rule that that’s how long you “should” give a new job — 41% of our survey respondents said they’d give a new job only 2-6 months before quitting. 80% agreed it’s acceptable to leave a new job before six months if it doesn’t live up to your expectations.
This is a generational shift, driven by Gen Z and Millennial candidates who are more likely to believe the employer-employee relationship should be a two-way street. For many, the pandemic has only emphasized that life is short, making people less likely to stick around in unfulfilling jobs. While that may sound flighty to some older workers, younger employees are probably right to leave. When they do stay, employees who experience shift shock are less likely to be engaged or to become high performers, per the Society of Human Resource Management. That can limit career growth.
On the other hand, quitting can be expensive — for both the company and the employee. An article in Harvard Business Review estimated that employers spend an average of $4,129 per hire in the U.S. For new hires, losing health benefits alone can be costly, as the average cost of health insurance in the U.S. is $541 per month. An employee who quits might also have to dip into savings, as it usually takes at least two months to go through a new job hunt and interview process.
Before deciding to quit, employees who find themselves in a surprisingly bad situation should talk with their managers. Bryn Panee Burkhart, a coach and career management expert, suggests they keep a work diary for two to four weeks, allowing them to discuss patterns with their hiring manager. “Tee up the conversation in a positive manner so it does not sound like complaining,” she says. “Take emotion out of it and come with logic and facts.” She recommends a question-statement framework to keep it congenial. Example: “I’m finding it a challenge to stick to the working hours that were agreed upon when I accepted the offer. Some important weekly meetings are scheduled outside of those hours. Can we work together to address this?”
At the same time, begin the search for a new job. (If you truly liked your old one and regret leaving, consider asking your former boss about returning to the company — many companies are thrilled to welcome former employees back.) Saving as much money as possible will make it easier to move on if a few months go by and nothing has improved. When it’s time to quit, Eloise Eonnet, a coach and expert in communication and leadership skills, says to “make it about yourself” when you tell your manager you’re leaving. “Let them know that you were really excited about joining the team, but that you now realize that you will not be successful in the position. Keep your reasoning professional and high-level: ‘I can contribute meaningfully when I have more responsibility and autonomy in decision making. I know this about myself and need to find a role that better aligns with how I thrive.’” If you feel like the relationship warrants it and feedback would be appreciated, this can also be an appropriate time to share some of the gaps between the expectations that were set during the interview process and the reality of the position.
Given how common shift shock is, it may not always be preventable. But talking with current and former employees and asking questions designed to elicit candor (“What’s your favorite and least favorite thing about working here?”) reduce the odds of it happening again. Your sense of fulfillment at work depends on it.
Gen Z Is Too Compliant to Achieve Greatness: Allison Schrager
How Worried Should I Be About Soaring Inflation?: Erin Lowry
Your First Job Won’t Be Your Dream Job. And That’s OK.: Teresa Ghilarducci
Kathryn Minshew is CEO and co-founder of job search and career advice site the Muse, as well as co-author of “The New Rules of Work: The Modern Playbook to Navigating Your Career.” | null | null | null | null | null |
What If the Constitution Keeps Eroding American Democracy?
WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 17: The U.S. Capitol is seen at sunset on September 17, 2021 in Washington, DC. Security in Washington, DC has been increased in preparation for the Justice for J6 Rally, a rally happening this weekend in Washington for support for those who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to protest the 2020 presidential election outcome. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images) (Photographer: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images North America)
Partisan gerrymandering in the computer age has undermined majoritarian democracy — that much is clear. Using algorithms to give one party a numeric advantage over another is more effective than old-fashioned gerrymandering done by hand, and reduces the number of competitive districts for the House of Representatives.
It’s equally clear that no solution to the problem is in sight. As statistical modeling becomes more sophisticated, things could conceivably even get worse. The Supreme Court flirted with ruling that partisan gerrymanders were unconstitutional, but ultimately opted against intervening. It won’t take up the issue again under the court’s current composition.
Congressional Democrats tried to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would have outlawed partisan gerrymandering by requiring neutral districting methods. The bill foundered for lack of support from centrist Democrats.
Recently, state supreme courts in North Carolina and Ohio have bravely weighed in to block particularly egregious Republican gerrymanders. The good news is that the U.S. Supreme Court can’t reverse those decisions, since they are based on state constitutional grounds. But with 50 such courts around the country, many of them controlled by the same party that runs the state’s politics, reliance on state justices isn’t an adequate solution, either.
In response, Democrats are adopting the time-honored strategy of “if you can’t beat them, join them” in the states where they hold power. New York’s legislature is adopting a gerrymander aimed at grabbing several seats for the party. Illinois Democrats are doing something similar. Once both parties are relying on aggressive computer-assisted partisan gerrymanders for their safe seats, national legislation requiring neutral districting will become a utopian fantasy.
Can our constitutional democracy withstand this troubling new reality? To hear voting-rights advocates tell it, the answer sounds as if it should be no. Partisan gerrymandering clearly contradicts the principle of one person, one vote, in which everyone’s vote has equal value. If it is now permanent, then it would seem to erode the very possibility of fair voting.
On closer examination, however, we have cause to think that constitutional democracy can survive. It’s not that partisan gerrymandering won’t continue to undermine majority rule. It will. The reason is that our democracy is, and has always been, far less predicated on majority rule than we imagine.
The U.S. Senate is an extreme departure from one person, one vote. The Supreme Court has the power to be counter-majoritarian, and exercises it. The Electoral College disempowers millions of voters in states with large partisan majorities.
Partisan gerrymandering has existed since earliest days of the Republic, even before Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts involuntarily lent his name to it in 1812. While computer-aided gerrymandering makes the partisan bias worse, it is different only in degree, not in kind.
In other words, our constitutional democracy co-exists with a pretty radical lack of respect for majority rule. We would do well to reduce that where we can. But when we fail, we shouldn’t resort to the rhetoric of existential threat. We should look in the mirror — not through Instagram filters — and recognize the truth, which is that we don’t have a majoritarian Constitution. We never did. And we never will.
Madison’s Nightmare
We are accustomed to being told that the framers of the Constitution were suspicious of popular majorities. That’s true in some ways. Certainly the framers did not choose a popularly elected president, preferring to leave the selection of electors up to the states, which at the time relied on their legislators to choose the electors. Some framers wanted only propertied white men to vote — although, again, they left the decision of who could vote to the states.
Yet that narrative is also too simple, at least when it comes to their greatest anti-majoritarian institution, the Senate. James Madison, primary architect of what became the Constitution of 1787, wanted the Senate to be established on the basis of state populations, like the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. True, state legislatures were to choose the senators, and they were imagined as nature’s aristocrats, not men of the people. Their numbers, however, were supposed to reflect the actual distribution of the population, allowing for the morally repugnant three-fifths compromise.
Madison was therefore astonished and outraged when the small states, led by New Jersey, insisted on the equal representation in the Senate that they had in the old Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and that they also had at the Constitutional Convention. He and other large-state delegates to the convention tried to cajole, reason with and ultimately threaten the small states with inevitable war unless they relented.
In response, the small states walked out of the convention. That sufficed to force the large states, including Madison’s Virginia, to agree to the so-called Great Compromise. The small states were so worried that majoritarianism would eventually be used against them that they wrote in a guarantee that they could never lose their equal Senate representation without their consent. That effectively made the provision unamendable, and it’s why we are stuck with the Senate as long as we keep the U.S. Constitution.
Despite his enormous influence in Philadelphia over the long summer of 1787, Madison left the convention dejected. He knew the structure of the Senate deviated wildly from the way a democratic republic should be designed.
He was not similarly worried about the Electoral College because it wasn’t yet an obvious distortion of popular will. In the first presidential election, some state legislatures chose the electors, while others ran popular elections. It was only as all states started running popular elections that the Electoral College system began to disempower voters in states with large one-party majorities. In this sense, one of our most notably non-majoritarian institutions is the result of an accident.
The Electoral College’s effect in suppressing majority rule is reversible, constitutionally speaking, without an amendment. States don’t have to use winner-take-all as the principle for choosing electors. Maine and Nebraska don’t, in fact. Or the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact might conceivably kick in some day, so that the president is chosen by genuine popular vote.
By contrast, what’s striking about the Senate is how unchangeable it is. In the U.K., Parliament became more representative through the extension of the vote to more and more people during the 19th century. In the U.S., the franchise was extended to Black Americans and then to women roughly over the same period of time. But the Senate never changed. It now stands as a permanent anomaly of U.S. democracy.
The One Person, One Vote Myth
The people who made the American Revolution rallied around the slogan “no taxation without representation.” But it was not until 1964 that the principle of “one person, one vote” came to be considered part of U.S. constitutional norms.
In that year of civil rights signs and wonders, the Supreme Court first held that congressional districts should be of the same population size. Then it decided that the same rules apply to state legislative districts — even for state senates, some of which were districted by state constitutional law the same way as the federal Senate.
The court’s language was more cautious than the “one person, one vote” adage would suggest. It said that the Constitution “means that, as nearly as is practicable, one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s.”
Recognizing that the Senate did not fit this description, the court said that any other outcome “would defeat the principle solemnly embodied in the Great Compromise — equal representation in the House for equal numbers of people.” This equivocal formulation asserted that equality in the House of Representatives was as much part of the 1787 compromise as inequality in the Senate.
But that had not been true as a historical matter. The original compromise gave state legislatures discretion to design congressional districts, and those legislatures had not rigorously adhered to the numerical guidance that the Supreme Court of the civil rights era was now imposing on them. And it was an extraordinary reach to apply the one-person-one-vote rule to state senates, contradicting as it did the constitutional norm that applied to the U.S. Senate.
For three decades, the courts treated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as providing binding rules for how districts should or should not be drawn with respect to racial equality. Designed to implement one person, one vote, the law prohibited states from intentionally dividing up Black voters into different districts where they would not be a majority and their votes diluted.
The tables turned in the 1990s. In 1993, the Supreme Court construed the Constitution to prohibit the practice of designing districts with a focus on the racial composition of the voters. The twist was that the case involve a district designed to elect a Black candidate. The shape of the district, the court said, was so “bizarre” that it offended the idea of equal protection of the laws, even though the population of the district was the same as the population of all other districts.
That put the Supreme Court in the business of reviewing the constitutionality of new districting — so long as the question was whether the districts were being gerrymandered by race. The litigation that followed helped give rise to the creation of a new field of law, sometimes called the “law of democracy.”
Logically, the Supreme Court might then have gone on to outlaw partisan gerrymandering. Yet despite liberal efforts to get it to do so, the five votes necessary never materialized. The current state of the law is that it is ordinarily unconstitutional for a state legislature to account for race in drawing congressional district lines, but permissible to target partisan affiliation.
The takeaway is that the reforms in the civil rights era were more limited than is popularly imagined. Some of the worst excesses of the use of districting to disenfranchise Black voters were eliminated. More Black members of Congress were elected as a result.
But the conservative Supreme Court substantially limited the effects of the Voting Rights Act. From the standpoint of pure democratic representation as it is understood around the globe, today’s arrangements in the U.S. are woefully backward.
The Enduring Reality
Originally, the emerging use of computer programs to draw political boundaries was seen as a tool to encourage nonpartisan districting. The reality turned out to be the opposite: State legislatures can design partisan boundaries more successfully than they could in the old days. The number of competitive U.S. House districts continues to decline.
It is therefore time to acknowledge that the U.S. Constitution, as written and as interpreted by the courts, does not mandate pure representative majority rule, or anything like it. The U.S. system is not parliamentary — not even close. It does not express the will of the people by giving each person an equal say in who is elected. And if the Senate is taken into account, it never will.
To win the presidency and control the Senate, Democrats must win substantially more than half the votes of the voting public. That’s not fair. But it’s a feature of our system, not a bug. While we should work to find ways to change it — the fight for equality is unceasing — we should also realize that Republicans will fight those changes out of self-interest. Fundamental constitutional transformation is not in the cards.
Probably no one would want to design a democratic system from scratch this way today. Our constitutional arrangements are the result of events that go back to the way Britain chartered colonies in the Americas. They incorporate theories of politics that resonate with the late 18th century more than the early 21st. Not only are they not perfect. They aren’t even just, seen through the lens of contemporary conceptions of equality and equal voice.
They are also what we have. So while it is valuable to insist that some political arrangements are bad and need to be improved as much as possible, we should be able to do this without simultaneously and apocalyptically claiming that, if they don’t change, the entire constitutional system will collapse.
Someday it will crumble and die — all political systems do. But the odds are that it won’t fail for the foreseeable future. And that’s the only future that needs to worry Americans alive today.
• The Bill That Could Save America From Another Jan. 6: Noah Feldman
• Global Democracy Is Doing Fine. U.S. Democracy Is in Trouble: Niall Ferguson
• The Left Is Losing the World’s Culture Wars: Pankaj Mishra | null | null | null | null | null |
A research project seeks the public’s help to learn about the nation’s first tuberculosis medical facility for Black patients
In Hyderabad, India, a relative adjusts the oxygen mask of a tuberculosis patient. The number of people killed by the disease has risen for the first time in more than a decade, the World Health Organization said in an Oct. 14 report. (Mahesh Kumar A./AP)
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, tuberculosis patients sought refuge in sanitariums.
But in states with Jim Crow segregation laws, those places of respite weren’t out of racism’s reach.
An ongoing research project is uncovering the stories of the nation’s first sanitarium for Black patients — and is looking for the public’s help.
A Virginia mental institution for Black patients, opened after the Civil War, yields a trove of disturbing records
Built in 1918, the Piedmont sanitarium in Burkeville, Va., was the first facility of its kind in the nation. It served tuberculosis patients barred by law from TB facilities that served White people. Over 12,000 patients were treated at the state-sponsored sanitarium.
Researchers at Virginia Tech and the University of Central Florida are delving into Piedmont’s four-decade history and uncovering stories of patients and the nurses who treated them.
Health disparities were a fact of life for Black Virginians, and tuberculosis was no different. State figures from 1920 show that Black people died of tuberculosis nearly twice as often as their White counterparts.
In an age before antibiotics, treatment options were limited. Sanitariums were a way to isolate patients and reduce community spread. Black patients who “took the cure” at Piedmont were put on a medically supervised regimen of rest, fresh air and exercise.
Racism in care leads to health disparities, doctors and other experts say as they push for change
They were assisted by a unique set of nurses — Black women pursuing advanced training at Piedmont. As they honed their skills, these nurses grappled with inequity, “eugenicist policies, and paternalistic assumptions,” the researchers write for Nursing Clio, a peer-reviewed blog project on the history of gender and medicine.
In the mid 1960s, the state shut down the sanitarium. A state-run geriatric hospital is now on the site.
Today, tuberculosis rates have fallen dramatically, and in 2020 there were just 8,916 reported cases in the United States.
Tuberculosis is a major worldwide threat and the pandemic could make it worse, WHO says
Inequality still casts its shadow over TB. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 89 percent of all new cases occur among racial and ethnic minority groups. In 2020, 3.4 percent of new patients were Black, compared with 0.4 percent of White patients.
The historians are in search of more information. They’re asking people to contribute details about nurses, patients and associated community members at their website.
Do you know anything about a past Piedmont resident? Visit bit.ly/PiedmontTB to learn more about the site and pass along tips.
Piedmont Tuberculosis sanitarium
Virginia Tech and the University of Central Florida | null | null | null | null | null |
It’s not just about flavor, according to one milk expert.
Milk that people in the United States drink traditionally has come from cows, but that's not the case everywhere in the world. (istock)
Finally, there’s the matter of taste. “Goat and sheep milk has a sharp odor,” Valenze says. “And I’ve never tasted reindeer milk, but I’ve heard that reindeer cheese is tasteless.”
Bittel is a freelance journalist who often writes about animals. He is also the author of “How to Talk to a Tiger . . . and Other Animals.” | null | null | null | null | null |
By Saleen Martin, The Virginian-Pilot | AP
NORFOLK, Va. — There’s something eerie at the Barry Art Museum.
Tucked away on the second floor are machines that, when wound up, come to life. These automatons are designed to follow specific instructions; as spectators walk through, eyes follow their every move, including those of a jockey smoking a pipe, a banjo player and a child.
Chilling music plays from a 19th-century jewelry box, and one automaton carries flowers, coaxing passersby to purchase a few.
The pieces are part of “Motion/Emotion: Exploring Affect from Automata to Robots,” an exhibition that focuses on the emotional qualities of those machines and how they evoke emotion in people. Automatons and robots differ in that robots can perform multiple tasks, while automatons are designed to perform just one.
Other parts of the exhibition include an educational area for children, as well as scenes looped on display from robot films, including the 2004 movie “I, Robot,” starring Will Smith.
Also included are robots used in military training and a robotic prototype that is intended to help children confined to hospital rooms. The machines could allow children to visit friends in other rooms, using cameras, and potentially other parts of the hospital to pick out lunch, or toys from the playroom.
The show will run until December and will include a lecture series on the first Thursday of each month, including a virtual one on April 7 featuring artist Elizabeth King with Jeremie Ryder, Guinness Collection conservator at New Jersey’s Morris Museum.
The show includes pieces dating to the 1800s as well as present-day machines.
Sara Woodbury, a doctoral candidate in American studies at William & Mary, curated the show. She was invited because she’d worked on a collection featuring historical automatons at Vermont’s Shelburne Museum.
“I think this smoking jockey guy is terrifying,” she said. The Jockey Smoker, made in 1880 by French mechanical toymaker Jean Roullet, gives her the creeps because he has no music box.
When he is wound up using a crank on his side, his left arm moves up and down, bringing the pipe to his mouth. His jaw opens and closes, as do his eyes. Real tobacco can be inserted into the piece and a bellows in his arm pumps air to his mouth, making it appear as if he’s inhaling and exhaling smoke. He also opens and closes his eyes, turns his head from side to side, and taps a riding crop against his leg, Woodbury said.
Automatons normally have music boxes, but not the jockey and others that emit smoke. There isn’t enough space for a music box when they are constructed this way, Woodbury said.
The show was put together using some pieces from the museum’s collection. The museum has pieces that span multiple genres, such as the automatons, which are related to dolls. The exhibition examines them as historical objects and products of their time — many were made in 19th-century Paris. As a result, some contain problematic or inaccurate representations of foreign cultures, said Charlotte Potter Kasic, executive director of the Barry Art Museum, which is housed at Old Dominion University.
One piece, Chinese Tea Server, incorporates three cultures. The automaton pours tea using a European tea service, while her hair is styled like that of a traditional Japanese hostess and her costume is Chinese, Kasic said.
Woodbury said the show has given them the chance to look at the pieces as complex, aesthetically interesting objects, but also to recognize that they are colonial pieces.
“They need to be understood as products of their climate and the museum itself doesn’t condone those beliefs,” Woodbury said.
The pieces don’t move during the show, but a video montage is looped in the exhibition so visitors can watch them move. On Tuesdays, people can stop by and watch as staff put them in motion. One automaton scurries across the floor.
“They’re really weird and wonderful,” Kasic said.
Also included are works from contemporary artists, including King and Joseph Morris. His pieces are made of plastic, steel and other materials; the pieces expand and collapse, mimicking lungs.
Morris uses everyday objects from hardware stores such as Home Depot. Even the concept of time plays a role in his work: The pieces will eventually disintegrate.
“They will go until they can no longer, just like our own bodies,” Kasic said.
King is based in Richmond. In 1991, she made a wooden jointed sculpture. She worked with director Richard Kizu-Blair, photographing the piece in different positions and merging the images into a stop-motion film. Viewers will see the specimen peer at its own hands in “self-discovery.”
Woodbury likes the show’s variety.
“Over the course of this show, I’ve read about robotic artworks, robots making art, artists collaborating with robots to make art, artists becoming cyborgs to further their artistic practice and more,” she said. “The hardest part about this exhibition was figuring out how to narrow it down to something we could coherently discuss within a single gallery. There is so much interesting, exciting and important work happening out there. It was hard because any single one of these topics would have made for a great show.”
When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through Dec. 31.
Where: Barry Art Museum, 1075 W. 43rd St., Norfolk
Tickets and parking: Free; parking available in the Constant Center Garage on West 43rd Street; follow signs for Barry Art Museum parking.
Details: tinyurl.com/ODURobots, barryartmuseum@odu.edu or 757-683-6200 | null | null | null | null | null |
By Craig Horleman, Delaware State News | AP
MILLSBORO, Del. — Security camera footage of her two dogs recently made a Millsboro woman richer by $10,000 courtesy of a long-running network TV show.
Carol Billardo and her husband, Chris Modesto, were checking in on their two dogs, Tinkerbell and Odin, through their security cameras right after they moved in to their house in September 2021 when they decided to talk to them. Their commands completely bamboozled the two pooches, not knowing where the disembodied voices were coming from, causing them to peer into the camera for a closer look.
The dogs’ expressions elicited gales of laughter from the two adults and those who later saw the video.
“My husband’s aunt recommended submitting (the tape) to (‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’),” Ms. Billardo said via email.
The video was shown on a recent episode of the ABC program. It was called “Camera confuses canines” when it aired Feb. 27.
Not only was the video shown, but it was chosen to win the episode’s grand prize of $10,000 through a vote of the studio audience.
“We heard in January that the video had been accepted but were completely surprised. We were even more surprised that we won the money,” Ms. Billardo said.
The victory gives her and her husband a chance to win $100,000 later in the season and then an opportunity to win a trip for 10 to Walt Disney World at the end of the season.
Ms. Billardo said this is the first time they had ever submitted a video to “AFV.”
“We don’t really get the chance to watch anymore now that the kids are all grown,” she said.
Hosted by Alfonso Ribeiro, “America’s Funniest Home Videos” is the longest-running primetime entertainment show in the history of ABC. Each week, the “AFV” team evaluates thousands of user-submitted home videos to showcase America’s real-life funny moments.
In its 32 seasons and 700 episodes to date, “AFV” has given away over $16 million in prize money and evaluated over 2 million video clips from home viewers.
On the episode, Ms. Billardo and Mr. Modesto were shown briefly talking to Mr. Ribeiro from their home in Millsboro with Tinkerbell, a pitbull/bulldog mix, and Odin, a Cane Corso mastiff.
Normally, pre-COVID, the two would have been flown to Hollywood for the taping.
“We were a little bit (disappointed) maybe, but being home has been the norm for almost two years so we weren’t that disappointed,” Ms. Billardo said.
Told in January, they had to keep their big win a secret.
“We told friends and family we were going to be on the show but did not tell anyone the outcome until it aired,” Ms. Billardo said.
“Most people DVR’d the show or watched it themselves. We did receive a ton of text messages once it aired and we are still getting texts and messages about the show.”
Having moved to Millsboro fairly recently, she said the money will be used for home updates.
“I have been coming to Millsboro since I was 10 years old, since my parents had a summer home here. Chris and I decided to move down here permanently in September 2021 to be closer to family,” she said.
The episode can currently be seen on Hulu.
“America’s Funniest Home Videos” airs Sundays at 7 p.m. on ABC. | null | null | null | null | null |
For the first time, the women’s tournament will have 68 teams. The field will be announced on Sunday night with 32 teams already in the field courtesy of automatic bids from winning conference tournaments. The other 36 at-large teams are chosen by the NCAA selection committee. The last four at-large teams chosen for the field will play in the First Four games Wednesday and Thursday. The winners of those games will advance to the first round of the tournament.
The schedule this year will be back to normal with the first round taking place Friday and Saturday and second-round games will be Sunday and Monday. Those sets of games will be played at the campus sites of the top four seeds in each region.
The Sweet 16 (March 25-26) and regional finals (March 27-28) will be played in Bridgeport, Conn., Greensboro, N.C., Spokane, Wash., and Wichita, Kan. The Final Four (April 1) and national championship game (April 3) will be played in Minneapolis at the Target Center. | null | null | null | null | null |
American defeats Bucknell to win its first Patriot League women’s title since 2018
American defeated Bucknell in the Patriot League final, 65-54. (Terrance Williams for The Washington Post)
Three years ago, American and Bucknell met for the 2019 Patriot League Championship and the top-seeded Bison came out on top at their home arena, keeping the Eagles from back-to-back NCAA tournament bids.
The Eagles watched from the stands as Bucknell celebrated the Patriot League title with confetti raining from the ceiling. Taylor Brown and Maddie Doring, freshmen then, walked up to Coach Megan Gebbia.
“They put their arms around me and they said 'Coach that’s going to be us some day,” Gebbia said. “And I said, ‘I’m gonna hold you to it.’”
That day came on Sunday.
Brown scored 18, and senior guards Jade Edwards and Emily Fisher — the tournament’s outstanding player — dropped 21 and eight respectively as the second-seeded Eagles got revenge, beating No. 5 seed Bucknell 65-54 to win the Patriot League.
With the win, American (23-8) has now won three Patriot League titles since 2015, the most of any conference program during that stretch. Bucknell (23-9) came up just short as the Bison tried to return to the tournament for the first time since they won in 2019.
“The atmosphere was great, the fans are great,” Brown said. “Our team had so much energy and that was probably one of the most fun games I’ve ever played.”
Early on, Bucknell came out as the aggressor on both ends of the floor. The Bison led 16-6 with just over three minutes remaining, getting easy baskets that weren’t contested by the American defense.
But by the end of the first quarter, the Eagles had picked up their defensive effort. Bucknell didn’t score in the final three minutes, allowing American’s offense to score 10 points to knot the game at 16 after one quarter despite being outplayed for most of the first quarter.
American jumped ahead 22-20 midway through the second quarter with a jumper from Fisher — the team’s first lead since 2-0. Fisher scored eight first-half points, Edwards added nine and the two senior guards combined to shoot 8-for-11 in the first half to give American a 29-26 halftime lead.
“Both times we played Bucknell this year, we’ve been behind at the half,” Gebbia said. “So looking at the scoreboard and seeing us ahead made me relax a little bit, too.”
The two teams traded buckets in the third quarter and in the first five minutes, there were six lead changes. The final lead change of the quarter was a three-point play by Brown that jump-started her offensive output and sparked a 10-0 run for American that helped the team go ahead by five in the fourth.
Bucknell trimmed the Eagles’ lead to one point with just under nine minutes remaining in the game, but a 9-0 run by American capped by a Edwards’s three-point play sent the home arena into a frenzy as Edwards screamed under the basket. The Bison couldn’t catch up, bringing the score to within four points but never any closer.
American and Bucknell both knew that Sunday’s battle would be a low-scoring, defensive battle. The two teams ranked in the top three of the conference in scoring defense (Bucknell — 54.1, American 56.1) during the season. Sunday’s battle lived up to the billing, especially for American down the stretch.
The Eagles shot 45.5 percent from the field, but held Bucknell to 36.2 percent for the game, 16.7 percent from deep and 22.2 percent in the fourth quarter. Gebbia said the team’s game plan was to keep Bucknell out of the paint and the Eagles did in the second half, holding the Bison to 12 second half points in the paint. Still, both defenses forced the opposing offenses into empty possessions by forcing mistakes. The two teams finished with a combined 25 turnovers.
The Patriots kept themselves in the game by taking advantage of runs to end the first and second quarters. The team looked stagnant and disjointed early, causing the Eagles to fall behind by 10 in the first. But the Eagles went on a 10-0 run in the final three minutes of the opening quarter, a scoring outburst started by a three-pointer by Emily Johns that Gebbia said calmed the team down.
“Sometimes you need that energy off the bench to get you back into it, somebody that’s not afraid of the moment,” Gebbia said. “And she is not afraid of the moment, so I think that was big.”
The Eagles carried that momentum in the second quarter and after an evenly-matched first few minutes, American went on a 7-2 run to end the first half and push themselves ahead by three.
Senior forward Taylor Brown scored nine points in the third quarter to help American push ahead, while Bucknell scored 15 in the quarter as a team. American went 7-for-15 from the field in the third quarter and Brown hit four of the team’s shots. She finished with 18 points on Sunday, keeping her senior season alive for at least one more week.
“I think my teammates got me the ball at a good time when I was sealing,” Brown said. “I tried to reward the assist and make a layup.” | null | null | null | null | null |
New DNA testing requested in ‘Serial’ case
Baltimore prosecutors signed on to a motion with Syed’s attorney Thursday, asking a judge to order the Baltimore City Police Lab to retest certain items collected as evidence in the 1999 killing of Hae Min Lee, using the latest DNA technology. Lee was strangled and discovered in a clandestine grave in Leakin Park.
Authorities have maintained that Lee struggled with Syed, her ex-boyfriend, in a car before she was killed. Syed’s attorney argued in the latest motion that strangling someone, and dumping their remains, requires the killer to be near the victim. The motion requests testing the evidentiary items for the presence of DNA.
Now 41, Syed has maintained his innocence for more than 20 years. Incarcerated at the Patuxent Institution in Jessup, Syed was sentenced in 2000 to life in prison plus 40 years. That penalty was handed down after his second trial on charges stemming from Lee’s killing.
In the spring of 2021, Suter contacted prosecutors about Syed’s case, she said in a statement.
Becky Feldman, the prosecutor in charge of the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office Sentencing Review Unit, wrote in her portion of the motion calling for more DNA testing that the new tests would “assist greatly in evaluating [Syed’s] post-trial claims.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Julia Alekseeva
Thousands of Ukrainians who fled to Poland after the Russian invasion are now going back. For most, the journey home begins at the train station in Przemyśl. (Zoeann Murphy, Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)
PRZEMYSL, Poland — Two days after fleeing to Poland from a war that has devastated their city, three generations of Sinitsyna women boarded a train back into Ukraine on Saturday night.
Zhanna Sinitsyna, the grandmother, was afraid to return home to Mykolaiv, one of several Ukrainian cities under fierce bombardment by Russian forces. But the trio had been unable to find a place to sleep in Poland, and she hadn’t felt right since she left.
“In my soul, Mykolaiv is my home,” said the 49-year-old woman, who was wrapped in a blue shawl to keep warm while waiting for a delayed train from Kyiv outside the Przemysl train station, near the Poland-Ukraine border. “And I need to be home.”
The Sinitsynas would join the 220,000 Ukrainians who have returned to the country in the past two weeks, according to Ukraine’s border guard. On Saturday evening, the Sinitsynas were three of more than 100 people, mostly Ukrainians, waiting in line at the station to board a train for Kyiv.
Their reasons for heading back to Ukraine varied. Some happened to be traveling abroad when the war started and were eager to get back. Others lived abroad and had wanted to get paid one more time before returning to their homeland. After hearing President Volodymyr Zelensky’s calls for foreign fighters and Ukrainians to enlist in the war, many were going to fight.
As they stood in line, the three women were surprised that so many people were also heading straight into a brutal war.
The two younger Sinitsynas — Nadiia, 30, and her 12-year-old daughter, Kira — didn’t want to go home. On their journey out of Ukraine, the family saw explosions and heard shootings. Nadiia said she was scared for Kira’s safety, and she hoped to find work in the western Polish city of Poznan so she could send money home to Mykolaiv, where there is none.
But the only free places to sleep were far from the city, which meant they would also be far from any work. Everything else was too expensive. Kira enjoyed being abroad for the first time in her life and had hoped to wait out the war for a couple of months in Poland.
The eldest Sinitsyna persuaded them to go back.
Still, Zhanna worried about returning home near the country’s second-largest nuclear power plant, which Ukrainian officials warned could become a Russian target. But her 19-year-old son and husband were still there, defending the city, and she wanted to be there to support them and her community however she could.
A few people down from the three generations of women, 52-year-old teacher Vira Lapchuk chatted with her friends. Lapchuk also fled after the war started, when her school paused class in the western Ukrainian city of Rivne. Her son in Poland convinced her it was safer to come stay with him, even though the war had not yet arrived in her city, so she did.
After more than a week away from her home, she realized she needed to return.
“I feel no fear,” Lapchuk said, though she does feel “despair” for her city and country. Shivering slightly, Lapchuk said she hoped to return to her work with her students, who she felt needed her to bring a sense of calm.
So far, no one she knows has been hurt or injured in the war. While her city remains safe, she said she feels it is her duty to help those in danger or children who are afraid. She wasn’t sure exactly what that would look like as she headed back Saturday night, but she said she would be expecting the unexpected.
Scattered throughout the line of mostly women and children were young and middle-aged men traveling by themselves. One carried a big hiking bag on his back. Another leaned over the railing of the stairs to the station, scrolling endlessly through his phone. A third, Oleksii Zvieriev, wore a head-to-toe blue and yellow Ukrainian tracksuit, shoes and hat.
Zvieriev is from Brovary, a suburb of Kyiv. The day Russia invaded Ukraine, he was working, driving a truck across Europe. But he made up his mind: He was going to go back to fight as soon as the job was done. Saturday was that day.
“It’s hard to talk about the emotions of going back into a war,” Zvieriev said. “I have friends sitting in basements telling me they’re hearing explosions all the time. I can’t stop worrying.”
In the early days of the war, he heard that two of his friends who had joined the fight were killed. One was 25. The other was 40.
He agonized from his truck about not being there for them. But more so, he said, he worried that he wasn’t there for his family as their world fell apart. He worried about the people in Mariupol, who were running out of food and water.
He said he couldn’t wait to get back to join the national guard.
As the train delay continued, a baby cried from the cold. Kira Sinitsyna clasped her hands tightly around a hot chocolate. An aid worker started to sing and play the guitar.
Zhanna Sinitsyna, Kira’s grandmother, looked at the line, then at the waves of people coming off the train she would soon board. They looked exhausted. She was, too. It had taken them one day to get from Mykolaiv to the Polish border not so long ago. As she reenters the war zone, she’s concerned not only for her own family, but for Russian mothers, too. She doesn’t want them to worry about their sons like she and so many of her friends are.
She just wants it to end.
Zoeann Murphy contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Russian missiles strike Ukrainian military range near Poland, killing dozens. Moscow promises further attacks.
Today at 9:51 a.m. EDT|Updated today at 12:32 p.m. EDT
Medics assist wounded soldiers after an attack on the Yavoriv military facility in Ukraine on March 13. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
At least 35 people were killed and 134 injured early Sunday when a barrage of Russian missiles slammed into a military facility in western Ukraine about 15 miles from the border with Poland, bringing the fighting ever closer to NATO’s borders.
The strike came a day after the Kremlin warned that it viewed Western weapons shipments as “legitimate targets,” heightening the possibility of a direct conflict with the West. It left more than 134 people injured, the regional governor, Maksym Kozytskyi, said on Telegram.
On Sunday, Russia’s Ministry of Defense issued a statement that was at odds with the Ukrainian account and threatened more such attacks. “At these facilities, the Kyiv regime deployed a training center for foreign mercenaries before being sent to the areas of hostilities against Russian military personnel, as well as a storage base for weapons and equipment coming from foreign countries,” the statement said.
“As a result of the strike,” the statement added, “up to 180 foreign mercenaries and a large consignment of foreign weapons were destroyed. The destruction of foreign mercenaries who arrived on the territory of Ukraine will continue.”
It was not immediately clear if the Russian claims about foreign forces being at the center were true. Westerners, including military veterans, have begun to arrive as volunteers to fight alongside Ukrainian forces, and Russian officials have taken to calling them mercenaries.
NATO troops have for years deployed to the military facility, also known as the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, for training alongside Ukrainian troops, with Americans on-site as recently as February.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that no U.S. service members were killed in the attack. A NATO official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said the military alliance had no personnel inside the country.
Sunday’s attack hit a region in Ukraine’s west that had so far seen less fighting than eastern cities closer to the frontier with Russia, which have been pummeled by airstrikes and choked off by sieges since Russian tanks rolled across the border more than two weeks ago. Waves of people seeking refuge from violence further east have poured into Lviv, which has become a hub for the internally displaced.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the bombing of a military base in western Ukraine did not come as a surprise to the American intelligence and national security community. Sullivan noted that the United States had been warning “well before the invasion got underway” that Putin planned to attack all of Ukraine — “southern Ukraine, eastern Ukraine, and yes, western Ukraine.”
Sullivan reiterated President Biden’s insistence that U.S. military forces would not be fighting Russian troops in Ukraine but that they would “defend every inch of NATO territory.”
The Lviv regional governor accused Russia of firing 30 missiles at the Yavoriv facility from the direction of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, warning that “the shelling is approaching the borders of NATO countries.” Ukraine’s air defense system shot down many of them and authorities had put out fires at the site, he added.
“Do you understand that war is closer than you imagine?” the Lviv mayor said in a Telegram message, addressing the United States and the European Union.
Ukrainian officials have called for NATO to implement a “no-fly” zone. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said Sunday that the attack wouldn’t change U.S. opposition to instituting a no-fly zone.
When asked by “This Week” correspondent Martha Raddatz what the United States would do if Russian attacks moved into Poland, Kirby reiterated the U.S. commitment to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which pledges to defend any member of the alliance that is attacked.
He added that steps would be taken to de-escalate. “We have a deconflicting mechanism set up so we can talk to the Russian Ministry of Defense. That system is working, that line is working and we will absolutely not hesitate to use it if we need to,” he said.
The center in western Ukraine had been home to a rotating presence of U.S. troops who were training and advising Ukrainian forces about a half-hour’s drive from the Polish border. The unit, Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine, most recently included about 150 members of the Florida National Guard, who were reassigned elsewhere in Europe.
Among the center’s facilities that appear to be hit are trailers where U.S. troops lived while deployed and a U.S.-funded simulation center used to train Ukrainian soldiers, said a member of the Illinois National Guard who was deployed there from June 2020 to April 2021 and reviewed available imagery Sunday.
An active-duty U.S. soldier who worked at the center on and off from 2014 through 2017 said it has been used for several training programs and was a likely Russian target. “I’m surprised it took them this long,” the soldier said. “Expected it much sooner.”
The Guardsman and the soldier both spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Western-led military training at the center went back even before the establishment of the rotational unit, with U.S. and other forces deploying there to train Ukrainian forces after Russian forces annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
At the time, the move was seen as an initial response by the Obama administration that fell short of sending weapons to the Ukrainians.
The facility is indeed the “main training center where U.S. and Canadian troops have been working with our Ukrainian partners for the last 6-7 years,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who served as commander of U.S. Army Europe during the Obama and Trump administrations, said via text.
“It was already an existing training center from Soviet days,” he said. “We and the Ukrainians put a lot of effort into turning it into a modern training area and center that the Ukrainians were now running themselves.
“The significance of this strike on Yavoriv to me is that it demonstrates that the Russians have the capability to reach that far,” he added, and “probably intended it as a warning to future logistics efforts.”
Annabelle Chapman, Rachel Pannett, Amy B Wang and Gerry Shih contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
The good on Sunday was that Stephen Strasburg is progressing toward the season, not still rehabbing from surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome last summer, and is expected to face hitters in a live batting practice session Tuesday. The bad was General Manager Mike Rizzo’s announcement that Joe Ross will be out for at least the next six to eight weeks after having a bone spur removed from his elbow on March 7. The latest move was signing 38-year-old Aníbal Sánchez, he of 2019 lore, to a minor league deal with a nonroster invite to spring training.
Cishek was at camp Sunday, throwing on the agility field next to the bullpen. Yet it was far more notable when, a short time later, Strasburg took to the same field and tossed with bullpen catcher Brandon Snyder. The righty threw more innings during the 2019 postseason (36⅓) than he has since signing a seven-year, $245 million deal that December (26⅔ across two seasons). The reasons? Surgery for carpal tunnel neuritis in August 2020, then for TOS in July 2021. So naturally, any positive steps for the 33-year-old need to be measured with his injury history.
“All reports are he’s in spring training mode, preparation for the season, and not in rehab mode of any type,” Rizzo said Sunday. “He’s going to get into his regular program. [Pitching coach] Jim Hickey and Davey [Martinez] are going to get with all the pitchers and schedule their live BPs. There’s a progression. You throw a bullpen and a live BP and then we’ve got games right around the corner. I think he’ll be in that progression somewhere.”
“The one thing I can [tell you] is the circulatory problems are no longer with us. So that’s a good thing,” the GM said. “That was the main reason for the surgery. We don’t have a whole lot of knowledge on pitchers with the thoracic outlet surgery, but I do know he looks in great shape and he feels good with his throwing program. He’s on pace. But you never know until you let it let it loose for 32 starts to see where you’re at health-wise.”
The Nationals’ first exhibition is against the Miami Marlins in West Palm Beach on Friday. Asked about his starter for that game, Manager Dave Martinez laughed and shook his head, indicating that he and Hickey were just trying to get through the afternoon. But Martinez did float young arms such as Cade Cavalli or Jackson Rutledge as possibilities, since both top prospects have been throwing in minor league camp since late February. The manager has otherwise spent the weekend seeing what his pitchers and players did while he couldn’t contact them during the 99-day owners’ lockout.
For Ross, this is another setback after undergoing Tommy John surgery in July 2017 and ending last year early with a partial tear of the ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow. The 28-year-old, who is entering his final season of arbitration eligibility, mixed flashes of promises with duds in 2021. He underwent the latest elbow procedure in Texas, where he trained this offseason and felt a sharp pain earlier this month.
For Sánchez, Ross’s rotation mate for parts of the title season, here’s what could be his final shot at pitching in the majors. His last appearance was for the Nationals on Sept. 26, 2020, capping the pandemic-shortened season with a 6.62 ERA. His most recent gem was a near no-hitter in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series in 2019. If nothing else, his experience and affability — not to mention his seven pitches, at least two change-ups among them — could help some young guys in camp.
“We talked and he wants to attack spring training as if it was just a normal spring training,” Martinez said. “That’s an indication for me that he’s feeling pretty good.” | null | null | null | null | null |
KATY, Texas — Tiana Gardner scored 20 of her career-high 22 points after halftime, Jaaucklyn Moore hit the go-ahead jumper with 27 seconds left in overtime and Incarnate Word beat Southeastern Louisiana 56-52 in the championship game of the Southland Conference tournament on Sunday to earn its first NCAA Tournament bid. | null | null | null | null | null |
Live updates:March Madness: Men’s and women’s brackets revealed on Selection Sunday
Virginia Tech secures No. 11 seed, faces No. 6 seed Texas in round of 64
Less than 24 hours after celebrating an 82-67 upset of Duke, the ACC’s regular season champion, the Hokies learned they would be a No. 11 seed in the East Region and face No. 6 seed Texas on Friday in Milwaukee, extending the program’s record streak of consecutive NCAA tournament berths to five.
Virginia Tech (23-12) is seeking its first win in the NCAA tournament since 2019, when it reached the regional semifinals as a No. 4 seed. Last season in Indianapolis, the 10th-seeded Hokies lost in the round of 64 to No. 7 seed Florida, 75-70, in overtime.
Because of travel complications, Young, his staff and players had to scramble to catch the announcement about their NCAA tournament opponent and destination. The team was unable to get a flight out from Newark, until late Sunday afternoon and boarded a bus in Blacksburg back to campus as the selection show began.
By most projections, Virginia Tech entered the ACC tournament on the outside of the NCAA field and even the Hokies’ run to the final did not assure them of a berth. But their victory over the Blue Devils rendered the speculation moot, as they secured their first ACC tournament title in school history Saturday night at Barclays Center behind a career-high 31 points (including 7 of 9 three-pointers) from Hunter Cattoor.
The junior guard sank his first six three-pointers in a row to springboard the Hokies to their first conference tournament championship since winning the Metro title in 1979. Virginia Tech, the No. 7 seed, also became the lowest-seeded team to win the ACC tournament and the first team since Virginia in 1976 to beat each of the top three seeds along the way.
Cattoor was named the tournament’s most outstanding player, breaking out of an extended shooting slump and joining Keve Aluma as members of the all-tournament first team. Storm Murphy and Darius Maddox were selected to the second team in the Hokies’ first appearance in the ACC tournament title game.
Cattoor had gone 14 for 47 from behind the arc over his previous 10 games going into the ACC tournament final and had not made more than three three-pointers in a game since matching the program’s single-game record with nine against Florida State on Jan. 29.
“It’s amazing,” Cattoor said. “I feel like the past two months, our next game has felt like a must-win game, so just having that mentality going in and out. We knew going into [the ACC] tournament that we’re going to have to win a couple, and then once we won our first one, we were just saying, ‘Why not the whole thing so we won’t have to worry about waiting on Selection Sunday to see if our name is called.’ ”
Even before winning four games in as many nights, including 76-75 in overtime in the second round against No. 10 seed Clemson on Maddox’s three-pointer at the buzzer, the Hokies had been making their case to be included in the NCAA tournament.
They closed the regular season winning nine of 11, recovering from a 2-7 start in the ACC that had them in last place in the standings, and were regularly in the top 35 in the NET rankings, one of the metrics the NCAA tournament selection committee considers when awarding at-large bids.
Excluded from the NCAA tournament this season was Virginia, ending a streak of seven consecutive appearances, including winning the national championship in 2019. The Cavaliers were expected to receive a bid to the NIT after losing in the ACC tournament quarterfinals to No. 3 seed North Carolina on Wednesday night. | null | null | null | null | null |
In a long-running career, Hurt was three times nominated for an Academy Award, winning for 1985’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” After his screen debut in 1980’s Paddy Chayefsky-scripted “Altered States” as a psychopathologist studying schizophrenia and experimenting with sensory deprivation, Hurt quickly emerged as a mainstay of the ‘80s. | null | null | null | null | null |
The White House is seen Sept. 24, 2021, amid a section of “In America: Remember,” an art installation on the National Mall that features flags representing every death from covid-19 in the United States. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Excess mortality differed around the world. In the United States, the researchers said the two-year official death toll was 824,000 but the estimated excess deaths were 1.1 million. Undoubtedly, those estimates are higher today after the omicron surge. The official U.S. covid death rate was 130.6 per 100,000 population, but the estimated excess-mortality rate was 179.3 per 100,000. | null | null | null | null | null |
Quarterback Tom Brady’s retirement from the NFL lasted for a little less than six weeks. The seven-time Super Bowl winner announced Sunday that he will continue playing and will return to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the 2022 season.
The speculation about a prospective return intensified this weekend after Brady posted photos and a video to social media of him attending Manchester United’s soccer game Saturday with his family. The video showed Brady hesitating and giving a non-definitive answer, accompanied by a quizzical look, when he was asked by soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo if he actually was done playing.
The Buccaneers had not replaced Brady as their starter at quarterback, and team officials had said they would leave open the possibility of a return by Brad.
Brady led the NFL in passing attempts, completions, passing yards and touchdown passes last season. The Buccaneers went 13-4 during the regular season but lost to the Los Angeles Rams in the divisional round of the NFC playoffs. They’d won the Super Bowl in the 2020 season in Brady’s first season with the Buccaneers after leaving the Patriots in free agency.
Brady turns 45 in August. He’s often spoken of playing to age 45 or perhaps beyond. But retirement speculation increased as the Buccaneers’ season neared its conclusion. Three days before his retirement announcement, Brady’s health and wellness company announced that he was done playing, then backtracked. | null | null | null | null | null |
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