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Trump demands Washington Commanders change name or lose stadium deal
Trump demands Washington Commanders change name or lose stadium deal

The Australian

timea day ago

  • Politics
  • The Australian

Trump demands Washington Commanders change name or lose stadium deal

A proposed new $US3.7 billion ($5.67b) stadium for the NFL Washington Commanders is under pressure from US President Donald Trump, who has threatened to scuttle the deal without a team nickname change. The former Washington Redskins, who dropped the controversial nickname many saw as racist in 2020, adopted Washington Football Team before rebranding to the Commanders in 2022. Trump said he wants to see the team restore the old nickname and called upon Major League Baseball's Cleveland Guardians to revert to their old nickname of Indians in weekend social media posts. 'I may put a restriction on them that if they don't change the name back to the original 'Washington Redskins,' and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, 'Washington Commanders,' I won't make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington,' Trump posted. The Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Stadium which is planned to be turned into a new stadium for the NFL's Washington Commanders. Picture: Brendan Smialowski/AFP Washington's City Council is studying plans before voting on final approval for a deal struck by the club and Mayor Muriel Bowser to build a new 65,000-seat domed venue on the site of RFK Stadium, the club's former home before it moved to the Maryland suburbs. Asked Monday about Trump's threat, Bowser said a name change by the club would not alter her support of the deal. Instead, she ripped the council for delays on approving the stadium deal that would rely on about $1.1 billion in taxpayer funds. 'What I'm concerned about is we haven't done our part and so we need to complete our part so that the team can get to work so that local businesses can get hired so that we can start earning the tax revenue that will come when we deliver the Commanders' stadium,' Bowser said. Phil Mendelson, chair of the DC Council, said in a statement that Trump's threat would not push the council's timeline for considering all aspects of the deal, including at a hearing next week. 'I am focused on getting the best deal for District taxpayers and getting the deal across the finish line,' he said. 'I have heard from no — zero — District residents complaining about the name change or saying this is an issue in connection with the stadium.' The RFK Stadium site for the proposed new stadium is on federal land but US lawmakers gave control of the site to the city last year. Trump, who said the team would be more valuable by reverting to its prior nickname, could impact the deal through US federal committees that approve DC construction projects. Read related topics: Donald Trump

D.C.'s weirdest lawsuit involves sports gambling and a British monarch
D.C.'s weirdest lawsuit involves sports gambling and a British monarch

Axios

time2 days ago

  • Business
  • Axios

D.C.'s weirdest lawsuit involves sports gambling and a British monarch

An anonymous group of lawyers is suing D.C.'s sports gambling companies under an obscure 300-year-old law, hoping to win hundreds of millions of dollars. Why it matters: The story gets weirder from here — including a quiet push for the D.C. Council to quash the lawsuit. State of play: D.C. Gambling Recovery LLC, registered in Delaware, calls itself a group of "several public-interest oriented lawyers." They're suing Caesars, FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, and Fanatics over a D.C. law that originated with Britain's Queen Anne in the early 1700s. Context: The Statute of Anne, as first reported by 51st News, makes it illegal for a bettor to lose $25 or more in a game of chance. The original law was intended to discourage gambling. Similar laws exist in other states. The intrigue: If successful, half of the lawyer group's payout would go to the District. The anonymous lawyers estimate that to be more than $300 million — not bad, especially in a tough budget year. Yes, but: Since suing in April, Mayor Muriel Bowser quietly inserted a provision in next year's budget that would make the law not apply to legalized sports gambling. It would apply retroactively, quashing the lawsuit. And barring last-minute changes, the D.C. Council is expected to approve the budget on Monday, despite the lawyers' pleas to scrap the provision. What they're saying: "The D.C. Council is quietly working to bailout big gambling corporations that owe the District over $300 million," says the lawyers group's campaign website. "Why? It's anyone's guess," the group says. Similar cases include a $1.2 billion verdict in Kentucky against online operator PokerStars, the group's legal counsel told the D.C. Council in a letter earlier this month. They want the provision to be removed, or at least not apply retroactively. Lawyers representing the sports betting companies didn't immediately return Axios' request for comment. The other side: The sports betting companies want the federal judge to throw out the case, per the 51st. In court filings, the groups say that suing under a 1710 law is "absurd as a matter of common sense."

The summer of 2020 — when America went mad with rage
The summer of 2020 — when America went mad with rage

Times

time3 days ago

  • Politics
  • Times

The summer of 2020 — when America went mad with rage

Of all the many strange moments I experienced as a correspondent in America, the last weekend of May 2020 was perhaps the oddest. On Friday, May 29, Mayor Muriel Bowser's pandemic 'stay-at-home' order for Washington expired. Yet by Sunday, May 31, we were ordered to stay in our homes once more, this time as part of a curfew being enacted across dozens of American cities to curb the violent protests that followed the death of George Floyd, who had been murdered by a Minneapolis cop that month. I began to wonder if I would ever leave the house freely again. That evening and the next, I went out anyway and watched in alarm as rubber bullets and tear gas were used on peaceful protesters to clear a path for President Trump (remember him?) to have a photo op with a Bible outside St John's Church, just opposite the White House. As those strange 48 hours demonstrated, the intensity of the George Floyd protests can't be separated from the claustrophobic mania of the pandemic. One midwifed the other into being. But they were also a reflection of a much older trauma that goes all the way back to America's birth in 1619: the unresolved legacy of slavery and its racist aftermath. Five years later, how should we reflect on that wave of protest that coursed through America and then the world? Was it a righteous revolution that ultimately fizzled out in the face of a reactionary backlash? Or was it a well-intentioned and sincere uprising that was co-opted, misdirected and ill-conceived, leading to counterproductive violence, ideological excess and an orgy of corporate arse-covering that did little to address the fundamentals of racial inequality in America? Thomas Chatterton Williams leans towards the latter position. Chatterton Williams is one of America's more interesting intellectuals. A 44-year-old academic, author and journalist of mixed race heritage, he has long sought to defend traditional liberal values — pluralism, free speech, a belief in progress — even as the American left and some of its leading black figures, writers such as Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X Kendi, have veered into pessimism, radicalism and intolerance, or what is colloquially known as 'wokeism'. As cancel culture reached its apogee in 2020, Chatterton Williams helped to organise and became the face of the Harper's Letter, a public statement published in Harper's Magazine by a group of writers ranging from Noam Chomsky to JK Rowling. The letter made a fairly uncontroversial defence of free speech, but such was the demented nature of public debate that year, it generated a wave of fury on the left and made Chatterton Williams an object of hate. In truth he's a more ambiguous and engaging figure than his caricaturists suggest. Chatterton Williams's three books to date have used his biography to delve into questions of colour in America, arguing that the entire concept of race is invented and black and white are meaningless, unscientific categories that can and should be transcended. • The anti-racism books everybody should read, from Malcolm X to Candice Carty-Williams This fourth book again uses memoir as a prism and builds on his previous positions, restating the case for liberalism (and against identity politics) in the wake of 2020's excesses. 'We must resist the mutually assured destruction of identitarianism,' he argues, 'even when it comes dressed up in the seductive guise of 'antiracism' — and really believe in the process of liberalism again, if we are ever to make our multiethnic societies hospitable to ourselves and to the future generations we hope will surpass us.' It's easy to forget just how bizarre some of the things that happened in the latter part of Trump's first term really were, but Chatterton Williams does an able job of reminding us. For those of us who follow digital discourse closely, there are some oddly nostalgic moments here: the Jussie Smollett hoax (the actor reported a hate crime that he had staged against himself), the Tom Cotton op-ed (a New York Times opinion piece that called for the use of the military against protesters), the Covington kids controversy and that time a University of Southern California professor nearly lost his job for using a common Chinese word that sounds like the n-word. For those of you who don't wallow daily in online melodrama, I envy you — but sadly this stuff matters anyway. Chatterton Williams rightly points out that not only did these flashpoints permanently reshape US public life, but that the rest of us in America's cultural imperium live inexorably downstream from them. Take the Covington kids controversy, for example, when much of the American media had a frothing meltdown over a clip of a confrontation between a Trump-supporting teenage boy appearing to intimidate a Native American drummer in Washington, only for more footage to emerge showing that the situation was vastly more complex. (Before the footage was taken, the teenagers had been taunted by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites.) That display of mindless partiality did incalculable damage to mainstream media credibility in America. And the leading beneficiary of this shattering? Donald Trump, of course. • Gen Z think UK is racist and would not fight for their country Covington, Chatterton Williams suggests, was just one egregious example of how 'basic liberal norms came to be jettisoned, first by the right and then — in reaction — increasingly by the left', as the Trump era unspooled. Being a liberal himself, Chatterton Williams tends to view the Trumpian right as irredeemable and instead mostly punches left, pleading with the social justice radicals to rediscover the art of nuance and reasonable debate. The alternative, he argues, is a kind of wilfully blind, morally incoherent partisanship that only energises the radicals on the other side. This mindset allows the US left to accuse the state of Georgia of conducting 'an experiment in human sacrifice' for reopening hair salons in April 2020, but also lets it demand that millions of people be allowed to gather and protest for racial justice in the middle of the pandemic because their cause was righteous. 'In the space of two weeks,' Chatterton Williams recalls, 'without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street.' This is a clever and compelling book that embraces complexity. Chatterton Williams's style is a touch rarefied for my taste, his language inflected by the stodge of academic jargon, but his thinking is dextrous and his insights are acute. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List I also admire his rejection of fashionable pessimism. For example, he shares the good news that America is actually less blighted by racial inequality than ever. According to the US Census Bureau, 'poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics reached historic lows in 2019'. Black high school completion rates, meanwhile, are now at 88 per cent, close to the national average and 'an enormous gain considering that in 1940, when the organisation began collecting data, only 7 per cent of blacks achieved a high school degree'. Of course, many chronic problems endure. But economically at least America is heading in the right direction. Or ought to be at least, Chatterton Williams argues, if it could just get out of its own way. However, tortured by its demons and unresolved divisions, America also seems to have forgotten the 'fragile blessings of the liberal society', instead 'deliberately swerving from the path of incremental improvement onto a Sisyphean cycle of exhaustion'. Trump is back, bigger than ever, and the madness of 2020 is infecting its public life once more. America may not have seen its last curfew. Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse by Thomas Chatterton Williams (Constable £25 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

Mayor: D.C. Super Bowl is a "lock," if new stadium is built
Mayor: D.C. Super Bowl is a "lock," if new stadium is built

NBC Sports

time5 days ago

  • Politics
  • NBC Sports

Mayor: D.C. Super Bowl is a "lock," if new stadium is built

D.C. Council went from dragging its feet to clicking its heels on the deal for a new Commanders stadium. And the person who struck the initial agreement — Mayor Muriel Bowser — did an early media victory tour on Thursday. The new stadium means many things. One thing it means in particular is that D.C. will host a Super Bowl. Appearing on 106.7 The Fan in D.C., Bowser called a Super Bowl in he new stadium a 'lock.' That's how it usually goes with most publicly-funded stadiums. It's the loose quid pro quo. If you build it, the Super Bowl will come. In most cold-weather cities, a dome is a necessity. MetLife Stadium in early 2014 was the lone exception. But from Minneapolis (twice), to Detroit (twice), to Indianapolis, a covered venue constructed with taxpayer money gets a Super Bowl. And the new Commanders stadium will have a dome. Which means it will have a Super Bowl.

Adjusted D.C. stadium deal could be approved soon
Adjusted D.C. stadium deal could be approved soon

NBC Sports

time5 days ago

  • Business
  • NBC Sports

Adjusted D.C. stadium deal could be approved soon

The deal could soon be done. Apparently without anyone squeezing the Commanders to change their name. Via D.C. Council chairperson Phil Mendelson reached an agreement with the team to adjust the financial terms of the deal struck between the Commanders and Mayor Muriel Bowser. The revised agreement opens the door for D.C. Council to vote on the stadium proposal in 'a matter of days.' The vote is expected to happen after public hearings set for July 29 and 30. Bowser separately said she has no problem with the changes to the deal. Having a vote and having a successful vote are two different things. But implicit in the new reports is the notion that the changes to the deal are more likely to get it done. The goal is to get the stadium open by 2030. If the deal is approved by the end of the month, that timetable likely remains very realistic. Coincidentally or not, progress has been made in the aftermath of President Trump insisting that the team change its name, and then suggesting that he may refrain from helping the team get a deal done if it doesn't. Through it all, the Commanders have remained quiet. And while it appears a stadium deal may be finalized without the team being squeezed to change its name, it's safe to assume that the Commander-in-Chief will periodically rattle the R-word cage. If only to distract from the E-word.

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