Latest news with #FrancisScottKey
CBS News
28-05-2025
- General
- CBS News
WJZ wins Regional Murrow Award for Key Bridge collapse coverage
WJZ won a 2025 Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for our breaking news coverage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in 2024. The collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge on March 26, 2024, shook the Maryland community and left lasting impacts on residents and business owners and families who lost loved ones. Covering the Key Bridge collapse The Key Bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River after the container ship Dali crashed into it. The collapse killed six construction workers: Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, Dorlian Castillo Cabrera, Maynor Suazo-Sandoval, Miguel Luna, Jose Lopez, and Carlos Hernandez. The incident catapulted Maryland leaders and first responders into action, along with WJZ's news team. WJZ kept viewers informed as they woke up to find a major commuter thoroughfare destroyed, as the search for victims turned into bodies recovered, and as the Port of Baltimore was reopened four weeks later. The news team spoke with witnesses, gathered video and detailed the extensive federal investigations, some of which are still playing out. As a Regional Murrow Award winner, WJZ will advance to the national round of the competition. National winners will be announced in August.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Opinion - Keeping terrorists off Airbnb shouldn't undermine Americans' privacy
There's a certain irony in completing the financial surveillance procedures the government requires Airbnb to impose on its hosts. Right along with snapping and submitting a selfie for automatic verification against the required government-issued identification, Airbnb occasionally asks for a guest's country of citizenship, too. It is literally the United States, but is it really the United States? In so many ways, we have become a banal pseudo-security state that betrays our founding ideals. Sure, 'the land of the free and the home of the brave' has always been self-flattering and aspirational. The line was lent to our national anthem from Francis Scott Key's poem, 'Defence of Fort M'Henry,' recalling the War of 1812. That war involved actual death, destruction and threats to the territorial integrity of the United States. The English captured Washington and burned the Capitol before American victories at Baltimore and Plattsburgh set the British back. Andrew Jackson led American forces in repelling a British attack on New Orleans. If you could transport the minds and collective spirit of those Americans to this day, would they have meekly submitted their data to administrative security systems that treat them as prospective suspects in relatively pitiable crimes and wrongs? There is a lot packed into such a broad question. Let's sharpen it through the language of risk management. In true wars, the nation-state suffers existential risk, literal threats to control of its territory. How we scope conflicts has a lot to say about such things, but arguably there has not been a threat of that direct significance to the U.S. since, well, the War of 1812. The two World Wars triggered an expansive sense of our national interest, which is now on the outs. Perhaps the threat of nuclear war counted as an existential threat — global annihilation, in that case, until the Soviet Union fell. When terrorism brought itself into sharp focus a quarter century ago, we figuratively declared a figurative war on it, which, for all the incoherence of fighting a strategy, has been a substantial success. Witness the implicit downgrade terrorism has suffered through the addition of drug cartels to the ranks of 'terrorists.' Doing so keeps the category alive. Many meanings can be poured into the recently declassified word salad called the 'Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism.' Mine is that the domestic terrorism threat is low enough that we can use it to push AmeriCorps. Financial surveillance under the Bank Secrecy Act came into existence out of concern for tax evasion through Swiss bank accounts. Because Congress delegated broad authority in that statute, bureaucratic hands have molded financial surveillance to meet every moment, including making it a part of the counterterrorism arsenal when our politics called for that. The title of this post is a risk manager's absurdity. Terrorists don't use Airbnb to gain an advantage over our society, not to an extent worth spending time and compromising America's privacy and digital security. But Airbnb is every bit a part of the financial surveillance infrastructure. Our security state has become utterly banal. With security benefits vanishingly small, the threats are somewhat sizable. Up front might be the identity fraud risk bestowed on every Airbnb host now that they have submitted key identity documents digitally to yet another database. There is the remote but plausible risk that mass financial surveillance will be turned over to the use of government control in our uncertain future. We have only to look to China's 'social credit' system to see what that looks like. There are many ways to think about all this. One is that our society has not matured into its media environment. Access to imagery from every big auto accident is available nationwide. Any urban explosion we can now see from six different angles. Those dynamics make us white-knuckled exaggerators of security risk. Our politicians and bureaucrats have every reason to indulge us and try to drive risk, impossibly, to zero. In their media environment, there is essentially no incentive to man up and put security threats in perspective. I say 'man up' in the non-gender-specific sense, of course, because it could as easily be a leading woman who calls out the absurdities and tells our nation to grow a pair. But I look forward to the day when we put aside false machismo addressed to inflated threats, cancel misdirected domestic surveillance programs and stand tall, the soil under our feet again constituting a land of the free and home of the brave. Jim Harper is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on privacy issues. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
28-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Keeping terrorists off Airbnb shouldn't undermine Americans' privacy
There's a certain irony in completing the financial surveillance procedures the government requires Airbnb to impose on its hosts. Right along with snapping and submitting a selfie for automatic verification against the required government-issued identification, Airbnb occasionally asks for a guest's country of citizenship, too. It is literally the United States, but is it really the United States? In so many ways, we have become a banal pseudo-security state that betrays our founding ideals. Sure, 'the land of the free and the home of the brave' has always been self-flattering and aspirational. The line was lent to our national anthem from Francis Scott Key's poem, 'Defence of Fort M'Henry,' recalling the War of 1812. That war involved actual death, destruction and threats to the territorial integrity of the United States. The English captured Washington and burned the Capitol before American victories at Baltimore and Plattsburgh set the British back. Andrew Jackson led American forces in repelling a British attack on New Orleans. If you could transport the minds and collective spirit of those Americans to this day, would they have meekly submitted their data to administrative security systems that treat them as prospective suspects in relatively pitiable crimes and wrongs? There is a lot packed into such a broad question. Let's sharpen it through the language of risk management. In true wars, the nation-state suffers existential risk, literal threats to control of its territory. How we scope conflicts has a lot to say about such things, but arguably there has not been a threat of that direct significance to the U.S. since, well, the War of 1812. The two World Wars triggered an expansive sense of our national interest, which is now on the outs. Perhaps the threat of nuclear war counted as an existential threat — global annihilation, in that case, until the Soviet Union fell. When terrorism brought itself into sharp focus a quarter century ago, we figuratively declared a figurative war on it, which, for all the incoherence of fighting a strategy, has been a substantial success. Witness the implicit downgrade terrorism has suffered through the addition of drug cartels to the ranks of 'terrorists.' Doing so keeps the category alive. Many meanings can be poured into the recently declassified word salad called the 'Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism.' Mine is that the domestic terrorism threat is low enough that we can use it to push AmeriCorps. Financial surveillance under the Bank Secrecy Act came into existence out of concern for tax evasion through Swiss bank accounts. Because Congress delegated broad authority in that statute, bureaucratic hands have molded financial surveillance to meet every moment, including making it a part of the counterterrorism arsenal when our politics called for that. The title of this post is a risk manager's absurdity. Terrorists don't use Airbnb to gain an advantage over our society, not to an extent worth spending time and compromising America's privacy and digital security. But Airbnb is every bit a part of the financial surveillance infrastructure. Our security state has become utterly banal. With security benefits vanishingly small, the threats are somewhat sizable. Up front might be the identity fraud risk bestowed on every Airbnb host now that they have submitted key identity documents digitally to yet another database. There is the remote but plausible risk that mass financial surveillance will be turned over to the use of government control in our uncertain future. We have only to look to China's 'social credit' system to see what that looks like. There are many ways to think about all this. One is that our society has not matured into its media environment. Access to imagery from every big auto accident is available nationwide. Any urban explosion we can now see from six different angles. Those dynamics make us white-knuckled exaggerators of security risk. Our politicians and bureaucrats have every reason to indulge us and try to drive risk, impossibly, to zero. In their media environment, there is essentially no incentive to man up and put security threats in perspective. I say 'man up' in the non-gender-specific sense, of course, because it could as easily be a leading woman who calls out the absurdities and tells our nation to grow a pair. But I look forward to the day when we put aside false machismo addressed to inflated threats, cancel misdirected domestic surveillance programs and stand tall, the soil under our feet again constituting a land of the free and home of the brave. Jim Harper is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on privacy issues.
Washington Post
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
I'm a veteran. The Orioles' national anthem cheer is fine by me.
When I served in Iraq in 2008 and 2009, I had no shortage of challenges: the heat, the long days and, of course, the possibility of danger. But I never felt homesick — with one exception. One April day after returning to Baghdad after a multiday mission to Iraq's Diyala Province, I caught a few innings of the Orioles playing on Opening Day against the Yankees on the Armed Forces Network. I could almost smell the grass and hot dogs through the grainy television feed. But that's the magic of baseball: No matter the time or place, watching it brings you back home. My mother is from Baltimore, so I was born an O's fan. When I was 5, Eddie Murray hit a grand slam at my first game at Memorial Stadium. Cal Ripken Jr. was a rookie the year I was born, and I lived through his two MVP awards and the incredible feat of endurance that led him to break Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played. I took issue with Matt Ragone's May 13 letter — 'The Orioles' national anthem chant is unpatriotic. Change it.' — that criticized the tradition of screaming 'O!' during the national anthem. Baltimoreans know a little something about the 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' The original poem was written in Baltimore by Francis Scott Key, a Maryland native. In September 1814, aboard an American truce ship, Key was inspired to pen that famous poem the morning after the British bombardment of Fort McHenry. He learned of the Americans' successful defense of the Baltimore harbor after seeing our flag wave by the dawn's early light. It is appropriate that our country adopted Key's words as our anthem. His poem is not a vow (like Canada's), a rallying cry (like France's) or a prayer (like Britain's) — it is a question. When Key penned his poem, America was still in its infancy. It was still unknown whether the American experiment of democratically electing leaders and guaranteeing basic rights such as free speech would survive. Even today, with Americans so divided, these principles are still at risk. Ronald Reagan noted in his inauguration speech when he became governor of California that freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. Perhaps we need to relearn it's okay for us to disagree with each other. I do not expect Ragone to join me in shouting 'O!' during the anthem, but maybe he can recognize that some of us do it to respect the brave Baltimoreans who saved our early republic. Justin Swick, Arlington Matt Ragone's May 13 letter, 'The Orioles' national anthem chant is unpatriotic. Change it.' objected to the 'O!' shout during the national anthem. Rangone said the cheer was unpatriotic and was perhaps disrespectful to veterans. I for one, as the widow of a seven-year veteran of the U.S. Navy, am happy to hear the 'O!' when I see the Orioles play in Nationals Park or Camden Yards, and my late husband would be, too. Betty Booker, Salisbury The 2025 baseball season is barely seven weeks old and already — after too many embarrassing losses to Atlanta, Cleveland and St. Louis — the Nats season is all but over. An anemic offense, a bullpen that lets runs flow like water and a mistake-prone team is becoming a far-too-familiar sight for Washington baseball fans. It's been nearly six years since the Nats won the World Series — every one full of awful baseball. The long rebuild that was supposed to bring them back into contention looks like a failure. The trades of beloved stars Max Scherzer and Trea Turner yielded nothing. The Nats draft record has been woeful, as even 2023's 2nd-overall pick, Dylan Crews, struggles to hit over .200. And this year's crop of free agents has done nothing to help the team. Thank you, General Manager Mike Rizzo and Manager Davey Martinez for bringing Washington baseball the 2019 World Series championship, our first in living memory. But after years of lousy baseball, it's time for the Nats to move on with a new duo at the helm. Brian A. Cohen, Washington I was heartened to see The Washington Post-Schar School poll showing that a majority of District residents support the proposed redevelopment of the RFK Stadium site in the May 9 Metro article 'Poll shows stadium support.' Though I am instinctually skeptical of public financing for professional sports stadiums, I'm choosing to think of this plan as a housing project. Our city is in desperate need of additional units, and the project's pledged 5,000 to 6,000 new homes will represent a meaningful addition to the District's housing supply. I chose to make D.C. my home because it is one of the few places in America with a true urban fabric: our neighborhoods provide a pleasant blend of retail and housing; we have easy access to parks, museums and other amenities; and our robust public transit makes it easy to live without a car. The city's high housing prices illustrate that there is substantial demand for this lifestyle, and development of the RFK site will increase the number of people who can access it. The proposal is not perfect — D.C. taxpayers' dollars shouldn't be used for building roughly 8,000 parking spaces at the site, given that they will presumably be used by mostly non-District residents and contribute to our area's worsening air quality. I hope the potential addition of a second Metro station on the site could eliminate the need for these spaces. However, we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good — and the status quo is unacceptable. As it stands, the rotting stadium surrounded by acres of baking asphalt is a blight on our city, and I'm glad that our leaders are taking action to address the problem. D.C. has a winning formula; residents are rightfully excited to expand our successful, transit-oriented urban layout to untapped areas of our city. I'm excited to see new homes, businesses and parks where there's currently cracked pavement. A couple of Commanders Super Bowl wins would be a nice bonus. Tom Nowlan, Washington A slight majority of D.C. residents support spending about $850 million to bring an NFL stadium to the city, according to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll. But I wish the pollsters had asked different questions. I believe that Mayor Muriel E. Bowser is hiding the full cost of the stadium, and the full extent of her giveaway to the Commanders' billionaire owner Josh Harris. Here are the questions that should be asked: D.C. has proposed more than $2.5 billion in subsidies, almost free land and tax breaks to the Commanders to build an NFL stadium, which one expert says might be the largest public stadium subsidy in U.S. history. Do you support that? The mayor's budget, which has not been released yet, is likely to include notable cuts to core services in light of D.C.'s tight finances. Does that affect your opinion of the stadium subsidy? No wonder the mayor is not explaining the full story: If D.C. residents knew the real costs of the RFK deal — the large subsidies and taking away the opportunity to develop RFK for the community — it's likely that few residents would support it. And because stadiums are used so rarely — and research shows they don't create many good jobs or a lot of tax revenue — the much better approach to the land would be to build out the RFK site as a waterfront residential community with much more housing, including affordable units. That would attract a population base large enough to support new grocery stores, restaurants and other amenities. Ed Lazere, Washington One advantage of buses over trains that was not mentioned in the May 6 Metro article 'Metro's future is on the road' is that riders have the option of 'giving up' if their bus is late. Once a rider enters the Metrorail system, there is a sunk cost. That's because bus riders do not incur a cost until they are actually on the bus. If a bus isn't arriving in a timely manner, sure, it can be frustrating, but riders can opt out and choose to walk, hail a cab, call an Uber or grab a ride using Capital Bikeshare. They are not incentivized to keep waiting because they've already paid. If there's a traffic delay, or other unexpected event, bus riders can usually disembark much sooner than they could while riding the rail. Additionally, if a bus breaks down between stops, riders are not stuck, unlike their unfortunate counterparts in a broken-down Metro car. Also, riders with mobility challenges do not have to play roulette to determine a path that avoids the broken elevators and escalators. Sure, they are sometimes too crowded to accommodate riders who need extra assistance, but again, those riders are not stuck in a system where upon reaching their destination they must backtrack to a station with a functioning elevator. Kevin Cole, Washington
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘It reminds you of a fascist state': Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history
In a brightly lit gallery, they see the 66m-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. In a darkened room, they study the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. In a vast aviation hanger, they behold a space shuttle. And in a discreet corner, they file solemnly past the casket of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in the US south. Visitors have come in their millions to the Smithsonian Institution, the world's biggest museum, education and research complex, in Washington for the past 178 years. On Thursday, Donald Trump arrived with his cultural wrecking ball. The US president, who has sought to root out 'wokeness' since returning to power in January, accused the Smithsonian of trying to rewrite history on issues of race and gender. In an executive order entitled 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History', he directed the removal of 'improper, divisive or anti-American ideology' from its storied museums. The move was met with dismay from historians who saw it as an attempt to whitewash the past and suppress discussions of systemic racism and social justice. With Trump having also taken over the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, there are fears that, in authoritarian fashion, he is aiming to control the future by controlling the past. 'It is a five-alarm fire for public history, science and education in America,' said Samuel Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 'While the Smithsonian has faced crisis moments in the past, it has not been directly attacked in quite this way by the executive branch in its long history. It's troubling and quite scary.' The Smithsonian was conceived in the 19th century by the British scientist James Smithson, who, despite never setting foot in the US, bequeathed his estate for the purpose of a Washington-based establishment that would help with 'the increase and diffusion of knowledge'. In 1846, 17 years after Smithson's death, then president James Polk signed legislation calling for the institution's formation. The Smithsonian now spans 21 museums, most of them in the nation's capital lining the national mall from the US Capitol to the Washington monument, including the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The National Portrait Gallery, which displays a photo of Trump in its presidents gallery, is in downtown Washington. The Smithsonian also encompasses the National Zoo, famed for its giant pandas, and 14 education and research centres employing thousands of scientists and scholars and offering various programmes for schools. Visitors to the National Museum of Natural History's FossiLab can see paleobiologists chipping away at rock to uncover bones buried for hundreds of millions of years. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory played a key role in the Event Horizon Telescope project, which produced the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019. About 60% of the Smithsonian's funding comes from the federal government, but trust funds and private sources also provide money. The institution has known its share of controversies. In 1995, the air and space museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, with accompanying text that critics complained was more sympathetic to Japan than the US. The exhibition was cancelled and the plane put on display with no interpretation. Trump visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture a month after taking office in 2017. His reaction to the Dutch role in the global slave trade was: 'You know, they love me in the Netherlands,' according to the museum's founding director, Lonnie Bunch, who subsequently became the first Black person to lead the Smithsonian. Trump paid little attention to the institution during the rest of his first term, although in 2019 his vice-president, Mike Pence, took part in the unveiling of Neil Armstrong's spacesuit at the air and space museum, marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. As in so many other ways, however, Trump's second term is a whole different beast. The president believes there has been a 'concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth', according to the White House executive order. He argues this 'revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light'. The order also asserts: 'Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.' It cherrypicks examples, arguing that the African American museum 'has proclaimed that 'hard work,' 'individualism' and 'the nuclear family' are aspects of 'white culture''. This refers to content that was on the museum's website in 2020 and later removed after criticism. The order points to the exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, currently on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which states that societies including the US have used race to establish systems of power and that 'race is a human invention'. It criticises a planned women's museum for 'celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women's sports' and aims to ensure the museum does not 'recognize men as women in any respect'. The order stipulates that the vice-president, JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian's board of regents, work with Congress and the office of management and budget to block programmes that 'degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy'. It calls for new citizen members 'committed to advancing the policy of this order'. All of this is in line with his administration's efforts to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in government, universities and corporations. The Smithsonian shut its diversity office soon after the president signed a January executive order banning DEI programmes at organisations that receive federal money. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion It is also of a piece with Trump's longstanding demand for 'patriotic' education. In February, he issued an executive order re-establishing his 1776 Commission, which was a riposte to the New York Times newspaper's 1619 Project – and he has been a strident critic of renaming or removing Confederate statues and monuments. The order bears the hallmark of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which created the influential Project 2025. The thinktank's website has an article that describes the 1619 project as 'yet another attempt to brainwash you into believing your country is racist, evil and needs revolutionary transformation'. Another warns that the Smithsonian's proposed Latino museum would be 'a woke indoctrination factory'. But progressives say the cultural clampdown will only sow further discord. Tope Folarin, a Nigerian American writer and executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, said in an email: 'You cannot 'foster unity' by refusing to tell the truth about our history. Ignorance of the truth is what actually deepens societal divides. 'These museums are important because they tell the full American story in an unvarnished way. We will only achieve unity when we are able to reckon with the truth about how this country was founded, and acknowledge the heroes who worked continuously to bring us together.' On Friday, the mood at the Smithsonian, which has long enjoyed positive relations with both Democratic and Republican administrations, was rife with uncertainty. Many had been bracing for this moment, but it remained unclear what impact the order will have on staffing levels or current and future exhibitions, including plans to celebrate next year's 250th anniversary of US independence. David Blight, a historian and close friend of Bunch, the Smithsonian's secretary, said: 'I haven't talked to him yet. I'm sure he's trying to decide what to do. I hope he doesn't resign but that's probably what they want. They want the leadership of the Smithsonian, the directors of these museums, to resign so they can replace them.' Blight, who is the current president of the Organization of American Historians, was 'appalled, angry, frustrated but not fully surprised', when he read the executive order. 'There have been plenty of other executive orders but this is a frontal assault,' he said. 'I read it as basically a declaration of war on American historians and curators and on the Smithsonian.' The professor of history and African American studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, continued: 'What's most appalling about this is the arrogance, or worse, the audacity to assume that the executive branch of government, the presidency, can simply dictate to American historians writ large the nature of doing history and its content. 'I take it as an insult, an affront and an attempt to control what we do as historians. On the one hand this kind of executive order is so absurd that a lot of people in my field laugh at it. It's a laughable thing until you realise what their intent actually is and what they're doing is trying to first erode and then obliterate what we've been writing for a century.' Trump's previous cultural targets have included the Kennedy Center and Institute of Museum and Library Services. This week he urged congressional Republicans to defund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). He has also threatened to cut funding to universities refusing to bend the knee. Blight regards the moves as drawn from the authoritarian playbook: 'It's what the Nazis did. It's what Spain did. It's what Mussolini tried. This is like the Soviets: they revised the Soviet encyclopedia every year to update the official history. Americans don't have an official history; at least we've tried never to have.' The sentiment was echoed by Raymond Arsenault, a professor of southern history at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg. He said: 'What is written in that order sounds almost Orwellian in the way Trump thinks he can mandate a mythic conception of American history that's almost Disney-esque with only happy endings, only heroic figures, no attention at all to the complexity of American history and the struggles to have a more perfect union. He added: 'It's so chilling. Everything I've worked on in my career is simply ruled out by this one executive order. It's like the barbarian sack of Rome in the level of ignorance and ill-will and anti-intellectualism.' Arsenault, a biographer of John Lewis, who was instrumental in creating the African American museum, said the late congressmen would be 'shocked' by Trump's order: 'It's totalitarian. It does remind you of a fascist state and makes us a laughingstock around the western world. I have to confess in my worst nightmares I didn't think it would proceed this far in terms of willful megalomania.'
