LAWRENCE BROWN,
42, DIRECTOR, BLACK BUTTERFLY ACADEMY
As I argue in my new book “The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America,” the entire Baltimore region must reckon with its 110-year legacy of apartheid.
Baltimore City passed the first residential racial zoning law in December 1910. Since then, the Baltimore region has endeavored to build that wall of urban and suburban apartheid. Governments and institutions have worked to keep those walls standing tall.
Those walls must come tumbling down. Every entity — including the mayor, City Council, city departments, corporations, philanthropy, nonprofits, neighborhood associations, churches, real estate agents, etc. — must wrestle with how they have contributed to building those walls. The next step entails a swift and thorough disassembly.
Given the task before us, I will be spending 2021 calling on Baltimore’s political leaders and civic society to repair the damage inflicted and to desegregate resources.
The time for merely discussing racial equity is over. Now is the time for bold, concrete action to make Black neighborhoods matter.
WASHINGTON — Joe Biden is a month into his presidency and at least one pattern is clear. He doesn’t want to talk about “the former guy.”
That guy is Donald Trump. But if Biden is reluctant to say Trump’s name too much, a lot of what he has been doing has been in direct contrast to his predecessor’s legacy.
On policy, symbolism and style, Biden has been purging Trumpism however he can in an opening stretch that is wholly unlike his predecessor’s first month.
The test for Biden is whether his stylistic changes will be matched by policies that deliver a marked improvement from Trump, and a month is not long enough to measure that. Further, the length of Biden’s honeymoon is likely to be brief in highly polarized Washington, with Republicans already saying he has caved to the left wing of the Democratic Party.
The first time the nation saw Biden in the Oval Office, he sat behind the Resolute Desk wearing a mask. Trump, of course, had eschewed masks, and made their use a culture war totem and political cudgel.
Though Biden wore a mask in the campaign, seeing it on the face of the new president in the Oval Office made for a different message.
Biden wished to make a sharp break with his predecessor while his administration came to own the deep and intractable crises that awaited him.
With executive orders, policy pronouncements and the stirrings of legislation,
Biden set out to unwind the heart of Trump’s agenda on immigration, the pandemic and more.
“The subtext under every one of the images we are seeing from the White House is the banner: ‘Under new management’,” says Robert Gibbs, press secretary for President Barack Obama.
“Whether showing it overtly or subtly, the message they are trying to deliver, without engaging the former president, is to make sure everyone understands that things were going to operate differently now and that hopefully the results would be different,
too.”
In executive actions, Biden reversed Trump’s course on the environment and placed the Obama health law at the center of the pandemic response with an extended enrollment period for the insurance program that Trump swore to kill.
The Iran nuclear deal that Biden’s predecessor abandoned is back on the diplomatic plate. The United States is back in the World Health Organization as well as the Paris climate accord.
But that only goes so far. The world wants to see how far Biden will actually go in
making good on climate goals, whether he will steer more help to poorer countries in the pandemic and whether his words of renewed solidarity with NATO may only last until the next pendulum swing of U.S. politics.
In addition, Biden faces the reality that over the past four years China has moved in to fill the void left by the U.S. on trade, and allies have learned to rely less on the U.S. during the more hostile Trump era.
One month into Trump’s presidency, he had already lost his national security adviser and his choice for labor secretary to scandal.
The revolving door of burned-out, disgraced or disfavored aides was already creaking into motion. Some of his prime initiatives were blocked by courts.
Biden’s first month has been comparatively dramafree, with many of his Cabinet picks approved.
After 40 years in Washington, eight years as Obama’s vice president and two failed presidential campaigns before his successful one, Biden has had a lifetime to think about how to get rolling as president.
There have been challenges: the distraction of
Trump’s post-presidential impeachment trial, a more narrowly divided Senate than his predecessor faced and a nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget who’s been busy deleting years of social media posts assailing Republicans and some on the Democratic left.
The Democrat framed his first month as one to start to “heal the soul” of the nation and restore the White House as a symbol of stability and credibility.
Gone are the predawn Trump tweets that rattled Washington with impromptu policy announcements and incendiary rhetoric. Gone are rosy projections about the virus.
Biden has leveled with the public about the pandemic.
“You had the former guy saying that, well, you know, we’re just going to open things up, and that’s all we need to do,” Biden told his first town hall meeting as president, this month. “We said, no, you’ve got to deal with the disease before you deal with getting the economy going.”
The president and his team have been deliberately setting expectations low — particularly on vaccinations and school reopening — setting up the prospect of a political win simply by exceeding modest goals.
At his town hall, Biden repeatedly talked about how he doesn’t want to talk about the former guy.
“I’m tired of talking about Donald Trump,” he said. “For four years, all that’s been in the news is Trump. The next four years, I want to make sure all the news is the American people.”
That’s a tall order. The ex-president maintains his hold on millions of supporters and his lock on much of the Republican Party, whether he ends up running again or not.
BERLIN — Collective sighs of relief could be heard from many European capitals Saturday after President Joe Biden made clear in his first major foreign policy address since taking office that he rejected “America First” and the transactional approach of his predecessor and urged cooperation among Western allies.
At the same time, politicians and observers cautioned that some of the sources of tension from Donald Trump’s presidency remained and that the allies have serious work ahead of them, once Biden’s honeymoon is over.
“Biden gave exactly the speech that many Europeans wanted to hear — an America that pats you on the shoulders, that doesn’t criticize or demand,” wrote Germany’s influential Der Spiegel magazine after Biden on Friday became the first American president to appear at the Munich Security
Conference, albeit in virtual form.
The annual Munich Security Conference has long been heralded as a gathering where world leaders are able to share and debate ideas in an informal setting.
Biden’s speech highlighted the condensed agenda for this year’s conference, which was held online due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In his keynote address, Biden assured other participants, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, that the United States was “determined to reengage with Europe, to consult with you, to earn back our position of trusted leadership.”
Over the last four years, the NATO alliance was shaken by Trump’s questioning of its relevance and his suggestion that the United States might not come to the aid of members who failed to meet pledges to commit 2% of gross domestic product to defense spending.
But Biden made no mention of Washington’s opposition to the GermanyRussia
joint Nord Stream 2 pipeline project and steered away from criticizing Germany and others for failing to meet NATO defense spending goals. Instead, he emphasized Washington’s commitment to Article 5 of the NATO founding treaty, which states that an attack on one alliance member is considered an attack on all.
It is now important for Germany and the rest of Europe to seize upon the renewed U.S. willingness to engage in dialogue and work hard toward resolving areas of disagreement, said Juergen Hardt, the foreign policy spokesman for Merkel’s parliamentary group.
“The coming months must be used intensively to resolve numerous open issues, such as punitive tariffs, extra-territorial sanctions on Nord Stream 2, or digital tax,” Hardt said.
Merkel told reporters Friday after Biden’s speech that it is up to Europe to take an example from his first days in office, and follow words with actions.
She cited the United States’ return to the Paris climate agreement, its decision to stay in the World Health Organization and
to engage with the U.N. Human Rights Council, to extend the New START treaty and to try to revive the Iran nuclear agreement as “important steps toward more multilateral cooperation.”
In a nod toward Biden’s call for cooperation in addressing economic and national security challenges posed both by Russia and China, several leaders suggested more could be done.
The leader of the European Union’s executive branch, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, noted at the conference that “a more and more assertive China” showed robust economic growth in 2020 despite the pandemic and “a more and more defiant Russia continues
to breach international rules at home and abroad.”
“It is up to us, the United States and Europe, to strengthen our cooperation again as proven and trusted partners, as indispensable allies, shoulder to shoulder,” von der Leyen said. “Because if we lead the way, this is not only about joining forces, this is a signal to the world.”
European Council President Charles Michel underlined the need for a common approach to “defend the rules-based international order from the attacks of autocratic regimes, whether from Russia, China or Iran,” saying “a strong partnership needs strong partners.”
France’s Macron, who has pushed since his own presidency began in 2017 for Europe to do more for
its own defense, suggested that by doing so, it would be strengthening the U.S. ability to focus more on the Pacific region.
Merkel, meanwhile, stressed that “it is very important that we develop a common trans-Atlantic Russia agenda, which on the one hand makes cooperative offers, but on the other hand very clearly names the differences.”
“The second and perhaps more complicated thing is for us to develop a common agenda toward China,” she said, noting that the country is both a systemic competitor and needs to tackle issues such as climate change.
“There is a great deal to do,” Merkel said. “Germany stands ready for a new chapter of the trans-Atlantic partnership.”
CHICAGO — Executioners who put 13 inmates to death in the last months of the Trump administration likened the process of dying by lethal injection to falling asleep and called gurneys “beds” and final breaths “snores.”
But those tranquil accounts are at odds with reports by Associated Press and other media witnesses of how prisoners’ stomachs rolled, shook and shuddered as the pentobarbital took effect inside the U.S. penitentiary death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana. The AP witnessed every execution.
The sworn accounts by executioners, which government filings cited as evidence the lethal injections were going smoothly, raise questions about whether officials misled courts to ensure the executions scheduled from July to mid-January were done before death penalty opponent Joe Biden became president.
Secrecy surrounded all aspects of the executions. Courts relied on those carrying them out to volunteer information about glitches. None of the executioners mentioned any.
Questions about whether inmates’ midsections trembled as media witnesses described were a focus of litigation throughout the run of executions. Inmates’ lawyers argued it proved pentobarbital caused flash pulmonary edema, in which fluid rushes through quickly disintegrating membranes into lungs and airways, causing pain akin to being suffocated or drowned. The U.S. Constitution prohibits execution methods that are “cruel and unusual.”
The discrepancies could
increase pressure on Biden to declare his administration won’t execute any of the roughly 50 federal inmates still on death row. Activists want him to go further by backing a bill abolishing the federal death penalty. Biden hasn’t spoken about any specific action.
During the Sept. 22 execution of William LeCroy, convicted of killing Georgia nurse Joann Lee Tiesler in 2001, the 50-year-old’s stomach area heaved uncontrollably immediately after the pentobarbital injection. It lasted about a minute, according to the AP and other reports.
Executioner Eric Williams stood next to LeCroy as he died. But Williams made only cursory reference to “the rise and fall” of LeCroy’s abdomen in his account. Shortly after serving in five of the recent executions, Williams was named the interim warden of the high-profile New York City lockup where Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019.
“During the entirety of the execution, LeCroy did not appear to be in any sort of distress, discomfort, or pain,” Williams wrote. “A short time after he took a deep breath and snored, it appeared to me that LeCroy was in a deep, comfortable sleep.”
The distinctive jerking and jolting was visible in at least half the executions, according to the AP and other media accounts. Among multiple executioner accounts, none described any such movements. All employed the same sleep metaphors.
When Donald Trump’s Justice Department announced in 2019 it’d resume executions after a 17-year hiatus, it said it would use pentobarbital alone. Manufacturers were no longer willing to supply the combination of drugs used in three federal executions from 2001 to 2003, explaining they didn’t want drugs meant to save lives to be used for killing.
One point of contention
during the litigation was whether, even if pulmonary edema did occur, inmates could feel it after they appeared to be knocked out. Experts for the prisoners said the drug paralyzes the body, masking the pain prisoners could feel as they died.
None of those executed appeared to writhe in pain. But audio from the death chamber to the media viewing room was switched off just prior to the injections, so journalists couldn’t hear if inmates groaned or complained of pain.
William Breeden, a spiritual adviser in the chamber when 52-year-old Corey Johnson was executed Jan. 14 after his 1992 conviction of killing seven people, said in a filing the next day that “Corey said his hands and mouth were burning” after the injection. Federal Bureau of Prisons attorney Rick Winter said in response that neither he nor anyone in a government witness room heard that.
Some pain doesn’t necessarily
mean an execution method violates prohibitions against “cruel and unusual” punishment, the Supreme Court ruled in 2019. The Constitution, the 5-4 majority opinion said, “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death — something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people.”
Government lawyers, eager to carry on and avoid any potential delays, sought to discredit the journalists’ accounts.
In an Oct. 8 filing, government expert Kendall Von Crowns, who didn’t witness the executions, relied on executioners’ descriptions to suggest journalists misperceived what they saw. He noted that LeCroy’s executioner “does not state that there was any irregular or uncontrolled heaving.” It was more likely, he said, that journalists saw “hyperventilation due to the anxiety associated with his impending death.”
The Federal Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on why lawyers representing the agency relied on experts who had not observed executions in person and whether executioners’ statements may have misled courts.
In an evidentiary hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 18, government attorneys objected when inmates’ lawyers asked Crowns about media reports of midsection movements in three of the first five executions.
After Judge Tanya Chutkan overruled them, Crowns suggested reporters saw agonal breathing — involuntary intakes of air in the final moments before death.
“It has nothing to do with they’re drowning in their own fluids or they can’t breathe,” Crowns testified.
All the journalist reports said the movements happened within minutes of injections, never in the minutes before an inmate was pronounced dead.
What media witnesses described was consistent with pulmonary edema, an expert for inmates’ legal teams, Gail Van Norman, argued in a filing after LeCroy’s execution. She said as fluid blocks airways, it throws the chest, diaphragm and abdomen off their rhythm, “giving the appearance of the chest and abdomen rocking opposite of one another.”
Authorities also provided no public access to medical records on when inmates’ brainwaves or hearts stopped, which could have helped determine whether they were conscious when the distinctive motions occurred.
Chutkan was asked to rule on the issue repeatedly. At one hearing, she expressed exasperation with the pace of the executions, saying the unrelenting push by government attorneys accorded her little time to digest filings on often complex scientific issues.
“I am drinking from a firehose here,” she said.
DALLAS — Warmer temperatures spread across the southern United States on Saturday, bringing some relief to a winter weary region that faces a challenging clean-up and expensive repairs from days of extreme cold and widespread power outages.
In hard-hit Texas, where millions were warned to boil tap water before drinking it, the warm-up was expected to last for several days. The thaw produced burst pipes throughout the region, adding to the list of woes from severe conditions that were blamed for at least 69 deaths.
By Saturday afternoon, the sun had come out in Dallas and temperatures were nearing the 50s.
Linda Nguyen woke up in a Dallas hotel room Saturday morning with an assurance she hadn’t had in nearly a week: she and her cat had somewhere to sleep with power and water.
Electricity had been restored to her apartment Wednesday, but when Nguyen arrived home from work the next evening she found a soaked carpet. A pipe had burst in her bedroom.
“It’s essentially unlivable,” said Nguyen, 27, who works in real estate. “Everything is completely ruined.”
Deaths attributed to the weather include a man at an Abilene health care facility where the lack of water pressure made medical treatment impossible. Officials also reported deaths from hypothermia, including homeless people and those inside buildings with no power or heat. Others died in car accidents on icy
roads or from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning.
Roughly half the deaths reported so far occurred in Texas, with multiple fatalities also in Tennessee, Kentucky, Oregon and a few other Southern and Midwestern states.
President Joe Biden’s office said Saturday he has declared a major disaster in Texas, directing federal agencies to help in the recovery.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, tweeted Saturday that she helped raise more than $3 million toward relief. She was soliciting help for a Houston food bank, one of 12 Texas organizations she said would benefit from the donations.
The storms left more than 300,000 still without power
across the country on Saturday, many of them in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
More than 50,000 Oregon electricity customers were among those without power, more than a week after an ice storm ravaged the electrical grid. Portland General Electric had hoped to have service back to all but 15,000 customers by Friday night. But the utility discovered additional damage in previously inaccessible areas.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown ordered the National Guard to go door-to-door in some areas to check on residents’ welfare. At its peak, what was the worst ice storm in 40 years knocked out power to more than 350,000.
In West Virginia, Appalachian Power was working on a list of about 1,500 places that needed repair, as about 44,000 customers
in the state remained without electricity after experiencing back-to-back ice storms Feb. 11 and Feb. 15. More than 3,200 workers were attempting to get power back online, their efforts spread across the six most affected counties on Saturday.
In Wayne County, West Virginia, workers had to replace the same pole three times because trees kept falling on it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met Saturday with legislators to discuss energy prices, Nim Kidd, head of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, told reporters. Some Texans could be facing massive spikes in electric bills after wholesale energy prices skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, a U.S. senator is calling for federal investigations into possible price
gouging of natural gas in the Midwest and other regions following the storms. Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., says natural gas spot prices spiked as high as 100 times typical levels, forcing utilities and other natural gas users to incur exorbitant costs, many of which were passed on to customers.
In a letter sent Saturday to federal regulators, Smith said the price spikes could “threaten the financial stability of some utilities that do not have sufficient cash reserves to cover their short-term costs in this extraordinary event.”
In Winfield, Kansas, the city manager reported that a unit of natural gas that sold for about $3 earlier this month sold for more than $400 on Thursday. City Manager Taggart Wall told KWCH-TV in Wichita that Winfield, which budgets about $1.5 million a year for natural gas, expects to pay about $10 million for the past week alone.
Water woes added misery for people across the South who went without heat or electricity for days after the ice. Snow storms forced rolling blackouts from Minnesota to Texas.
Robert Tuskey was retrieving tools from the back of his pickup truck Saturday afternoon as he prepared to fix a water line at a friend’s home in Dallas.
“Everything’s been freezing,” Tuskey said. “I even had one in my own house … of course I’m lucky I’m a plumber.”
Tuskey, 49, said his plumbing business has had a stream of calls for help from friends and relatives with burst pipes. “I’m fixing to go help out another family member,” he said. “I know she ain’t got no money at all, but they ain’t got no water at all, and they’re older.”
As of Saturday, 1,445 public water systems in Texas had reported disrupted operations, said Toby Baker executive director of the state Commission on Environmental Quality. Government agencies were using mobile labs and coordinating to speed water testing.
That’s up from 1,300 reporting issues Friday afternoon, but Baker said the number of affected customers had dropped slightly. Most were under boil-water orders, with 156,000 lacking water service entirely.
“It seems like last night we may have seen some stabilization in the water systems across the state,” Baker said.
The Saturday thaw after 11 days of freezing temperatures in Oklahoma City left residents with burst water pipes, inoperable wells and furnaces knocked out of operation by brief power blackouts.