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The pandemic is creating a ‘postwar boom’ for luxury carmakers

InternationalMar 28. 2021The $3.6 million Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Hannah Elliott.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Hannah Elliott

Famously reticent to disclose how many cars they sell or at what amount of profit, luxury automakers are finding it difficult lately to avoid crowing-just a little bit-about how well they did in 2020.

“Let’s just say we began 2020 with the strongest order bank since 2003-and we started this January with 50% more orders than last January,” Bentley’s Adrian Hallmark said on a videoconference call with journalists on March 23. The British company delivered 11,206 vehicles in 2020, up 1.8% year-over-year-and the highest output in its 101-year history.

“Our sales right now are some 30% above last year, even bearing in mind last year was a record,” Hallmark continued. “It would take an even bigger asteroid than the Covid one to knock us off track again.”

Indeed, any 2020 sales divots have hardly seemed to register to the highly optimistic chief executive officers of the world’s most prestigious automotive brands. They are already looking to capitalize in the next decade on the “lost year” that gave them their strongest positioning ever.

On a videoconference call on March 15, Bugatti’s Stephen Winkelmann was downright upbeat as admitted he was “surprised” at how well the 112-year-old French brand had weathered the pandemic. “Bugatti did incredibly well,” he said. The brand traditionally does not disclose specific sales results, but Winkelmann characterized 2020 as the company’s “third record-breaking year in a row.”

Even the normally taciturn Germans couldn’t resist a little glow, with Porsche boss Oliver Blume calling Porsche’s results a “fantastic accomplishment” at the end of “an exceptional year” during a March 18 reporter roundtable. Revenue at the 90-year-old brand reached an all-time high of 28.7 billion euros ($34 billion) in 2020, surpassing 2019 by more than 100 million euros.

Meanwhile, annual global profits at Lamborghini, over which Winkelmann also presides, were higher in 2020 than in any previous year. And while sales at most luxury brands dipped from 2019-down 11% at Lamborghini; down 3% at Porsche; down 10% at Ferrari-the drops came from weeks-long forced production and showroom shutdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, factors well out of executive control. Bentley, an outlier, shut down for seven weeks at the cost of $10 million lost per week and still recovered to deliver more vehicles than ever before, Hallmark said.

“We are not seeing recessionary behavior. We are seeing postwar boom,” he said.

While millions of people are facing economic loss with the help of stimulus checks, the rich have been minting money as never before. It’s a post-covid, K-shaped recovery that favors luxury goods, including cars.

As far back as July 2020, analysts at Technavio predicted that the U.S. luxury car market would grow by 6.7 million units from 2020 to 2024. In its 2021 annual report, Statista projected U.S. revenue in the segment to reach $6.9 billion this year alone. It helps that the pandemic is making the overall car market healthier, thanks to streamlined buying processes, reduced redundancies, and executives forced to get flexible (and more practical) about future strategies.

“History suggests demand for super-luxury sports cars will remain robust, despite a covid-19-related global recession,” said Michael Dean, head of automotive analysis for Bloomberg Intelligence in a March 16 analysis. Results such as Ferrari’s 27% share-price gain in 2020 and Lamborghini’s already full order book for the first nine months of 2021 testify to that strength.

Lamborghini performed so well last year, in fact, that close observers such as Dean and others have suggested that parent company Volkswagen may be positioning it for an initial public offering alongside favored-son Porsche, which Bloom recently called an “interesting” option. An emphasis on “limited special series” models, which with multimillion-dollar price tags are highly profitable, mimics the strategy set by Ferrari. The 81-year-old Italian brand went went public with great success in 2015.

Even Aston Martin, which suffered a disappointing IPO in 2018 followed by disruptive executive upheaval, seems to have set itself up for a brighter future. A 1.3 billion pound ($1.79 billion) refinancing in December and recent alliance with Mercedes, combined with the release of the DBX SUV, have set the company up to become free-cash flow positive by 2023, Dean said. “Aston Martin is no longer on the critical list,” he wrote in March.

A positive pipeline of limited editions such as the Valkyrie and Valhalla will also be key in 2021 to improving Aston’s margin trajectory, he said: “Only a few brands are capable of selling high-margin, $1 million-plus-priced limited-edition supercars, and that club includes Aston Martin, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche. The contribution from a single Valkyrie supercar, priced at 2.4 million pounds, is equivalent to selling 19 Vantage V8s, whose disappointing sales in 2019 were a key reason for volumes down.”

Rolls-Royce, meanwhile, may be an exception to the luxury car bonanza, delivering approximately 3,750 automobiles in 2020, down far more than its peers year-over-year at 26%. The decline came in part from unfortunate timing, said Martin Fritsches, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Americas president and CEO, in an email, blaming the transition from the first-generation Ghost (discontinued in 2019) to the second-generation sedan for the bulk of the loss.

“We were gearing up for new Ghost in the midst of Covid shutdowns, however we continued to see strong demand for new Rolls-Royces and ended the year with the highest level of future orders ever for the brand,” said Fritsches. “Orders for commissions today extend well into the third quarter.”

One factor bolstering such success during what for many felt like a global meltdown has been wild growth in China. Bentley sales in China doubled in 2020, according to Hallmark; China will become Lamborghini’s second-biggest market by the end of 2021, Winkelmann said.

General market concentration (Aston Martin partnering with Mercedes, say, or Porsche and Rimac working together) can only help more.

Worldwide, “a significant growth of tangible luxury offerings in vehicles, shifting consumer preferences from sedans to SUVs, and increasing disposable incomes of consumers have been propelling the demand for luxury cars” since the Covid-19 pandemic, Mordor Intelligence wrote in its annual report.

Stock market volatility has also had investors running for hard assets-even the classic car market burgeoned during lockdowns, with auction houses and websites that specialize in collectable cars like the McLaren Senna and Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport seeing peak visitors and rare Italian mid-century exotics selling like gangbusters.

Purveyors of such elite engineering who were curious enough to ask their clients why they’re buying such expensive cars during a pandemic have received a relatively simple and unexpectedly identical explanation-down to the very wording. Call it the covid-19 carpe diem effect.

“I was asking my clients why,” Winkelmann said. “They told me: ‘We had more time to think about our future and what is happening next, we were deciding where to put our money, and-well, why not?’ “

Hallmark said each person who bought the $2 million Bentley Bacalar told him something similar: “After all of this, life is going to get back to some kind of normal, and I’d rather be in the car than not in that car,” Hallmark relayed.

“So, they said, ‘Why not?’ “

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Pandemic shopping habits are giving inflation experts a headache

InternationalMar 28. 2021A woman carries shopping baskets at a grocery store in the Brooklyn borough of New York on Oct. 5, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Mark Kauzlarich.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Alex Tanzi

Financial markets are obsessed with where inflation is headed. Statisticians are struggling to figure out where it’s at.

The pandemic has created major headaches for the people whose job it is to determine the rate of inflation right now, and set the benchmarks that will be used to measure it in the future. They face two fundamental problems.

First, gauges like the Consumer Price Index are based on a “basket” of stuff that Americans typically spent their money on in the past — which looks quite different from what people have been buying in the pandemic year.

Second, the standard way of compiling inflation numbers is to visit stores and check their asking prices. Researchers haven’t been able to do that during lockdown, leaving holes in the data. And a lot of shopping has in any case shifted online, where prices can be tailored to individual shoppers and subject to rapid change — making them harder to measure.

These are more than just technical issues. The incomes of almost 80 million Americans, from recipients of social security and food stamps to workers in collective wage agreements, are tied in some way to the CPI. When it fails to capture changes in the cost of living, their budgets can get squeezed. (The Federal Reserve uses a different measure of inflation, based on more up-to-date spending patterns, so its interest-rate decisions are less affected by the measurement problem.)

The economy’s rapid rebound from the pandemic slump has triggered concern about an accompanying rise in inflation. Data published Wednesday showed measures of prices paid and charged by U.S. business rose to records in March.

For the technicians of inflation, the immediate challenge is the basket problem.

“In effect, CPI weights suffered sudden obsolescence when the pandemic arrived,” Marshall Reinsdorf, an economist in the International Monetary Fund’s statistics department, said in a November presentation.

For example, dining out accounts for 6.3% of the U.S. CPI basket — but Reinsdorf estimates that a measure of spending habits during the pandemic would have lowered that weighting by almost half. Meanwhile, Americans have been spending more on food at grocery stores, where prices accelerated last year.

Economist Alberto Cavallo, who teaches at Harvard Business School, has created a U.S. inflation gauge for the covid-19 era, using a basket based on credit-card transactions that reflect what Americans have been buying. It has consistently delivered a higher reading than the official CPI, and topped 2% last month for the first time since the pandemic began.

In the normal run of things, the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which compiles the headline inflation numbers in the U.S. — would update its CPI basket at the start of next year to reflect 2020 consumption patterns. But that could create new problems — by enshrining untypical spending habits as a benchmark for future inflation.

The bureau is considering adjusting its usual procedures, BLS economist Jonathan Church said by e-mail. Alternatives include pretending 2020 never happened and sticking with data from prior years, or adjusting the Covid-era numbers based on secondary sources, says Randal Verbrugge, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Either way, there’s a risk of introducing further mismeasurements.

Global peers face similar problems. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is due to publish some advice for member states.The second issue revolves around data collection. The BLS employs about 400 researchers who collect information about prices via two main surveys: one is focused on businesses that sell goods and services, and the other asks landlords and tenants about rent payments.

Before the pandemic, more than 70% of data in the first survey — and some 40% of the second one — was compiled during in-person visits, a mix that had been fine-tuned over the years. But last month, 84% of the price data was collected online, with the rest coming from telephone surveys — while the rent survey was conducted entirely by phone.

“These factors resulted in an increase in the number of prices considered temporarily unavailable and imputed,” the bureau said in its latest CPI report. “Many indexes are based on smaller amounts of collected prices than usual.”

The prices of peanut butter, lemons and broccoli were left blank in the national numbers for February. The data on new-car prices in Detroit, known as Motor City, was deemed “inadequate for publication.”

While the price inspectors should soon be able to go back to the stores, consumers may choose not to. The shift to e-commerce accelerated during the pandemic: it accounted for 19% of core U.S. retail sales in the fourth quarter of 2020, up almost 4 percentage points from a year earlier.

Competition between online and traditional retailers is reckoned to put downward pressure on inflation. But Harvard’s Cavallo says his index of online prices has been rising rapidly since November, a shift that hasn’t been reflected in the CPI.

And broader problems with measurement may emerge, because online sellers can easily customize prices for individual buyers and adjust them thousands of times a day via algorithms.”It does pose a challenge for a statistical agency,” says Verbrugge at the Cleveland Fed. “How do they get their hands on the actual prices that consumers are being charged?”

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Korean groups rally on National Mall to protest racism, violence

InternationalMar 28. 2021Members of the Korean American Community Association of Greater Washington hold a memorial service at the Lincoln Memorial. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Will Newton for The Washington Post

By The Washington Post · Ian Duncan

WASHINGTON – Yuchan Kim laid a white chrysanthemum near the foot of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday to honor his mother, Suncha, and the other victims of the Atlanta shooting rampage, as members of the Washington region’s Korean community rallied on the National Mall against racism.

Kim, with tears in his eyes, stood back and watched as community leaders spoke against hate attacks on Asians.

“We should not be intimidated about speaking out,” said Paula Park, the president of the Korean American Community Association of Greater Washington. “By joining and speaking out together, we can stop tragedies like this from happening in the future.”

The white chrysanthemum is a symbol of mourning in Korean culture, and the rally was in part a somber vigil for the shooting victims. But there were flashes of anger and calls for solidarity, too.

The organizers of the rally said the region’s Korean community – numbered at 200,000 by Park’s organization – has rarely spoken up and is now seeking to become more visible in the face of the shootings and other attacks that have targeted the elderly. Three similar rallies were held around the region Saturday, said Julian Min, a community leader in Maryland.

The Atlanta attacks this month, which left eight people dead, including six Asian women, came after one what study concluded was a sharp increase in hate crimes targeting Asians as former president Donald Trump blamed China for the coronavirus pandemic. The incidents have drawn fresh attention to the long history of anti-Asian racism in the United States and President Joe Biden has denounced attacks on Asian Americans.

But Asian American leaders across the nation have been left grappling with what ought to be their path forward.

Anna Ko, a leader of the Korean American Society of Virginia, said many people she knows were reluctant to attend the rally.

“Asians are feeling very scared these days,” Ko said.

Flowers are placed Saturday, March 27, 2021, at the Lincoln Memorial in front of a sign with the names of the Atlanta shooting victims as people hold up signs protesting violence against Asians. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Will Newton for The Washington Post

A few dozen people, most of them older, gathered on the steps at the base of the memorial holding yellow signs with slogans in English and Korean. “I don’t deserve to be mistreated,” one said. Another read: “Protect our Korean elders.”

Speakers addressed the group and onlookers enjoying the spring morning on the Mall. Seyang Jeong described harassment she had faced in the five years she has lived in the United States. Hurtful words matter, she said, because they “they lead to hate and violence.”

“Asians deserve your respect,” she said. “Please stop Asian hate.”

Maryland Del. Mark Chang, D-Anne Arundel, recalled being bullied as a child growing up in Glen Burnie after his parents came to the United States in the 1970s and facing hostility even after being elected to the General Assembly.

“My job is to be a leader and stand up and be a voice,” Chang said. “But you know what, for far too long I’ve been silent because I’m part of the stereotypical Asian tradition of just be quiet and do your work.”

Yumi Hogan, Maryland’s first lady and an immigrant from Korea, sent written remarks in support of the rally. In a recent television interview, her husband, Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, described how she and her daughters have faced discrimination.

But Chang questioned the lack of support from local leaders: “To be honest with you, where are the other elected officials?”

After the group on the steps was led in chants of “Hate is a virus” and “Asian lives matter,” Yuchan Kim approached. He bowed and left.

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Train collision in southern Egypt kills at least 19, injures 185

InternationalMar 28. 2021

By The Washington Post · Sudarsan Raghavan, Adam Taylor

CAIRO – A collision between two trains killed at least 19 people and injured 185 in the southern Egyptian province of Sohag on Friday, according to a Health Ministry statement delivered Saturday, Reuters reported. The ministry had previously reported 32 deaths.

The crash occurred north of the provincial capital, Sohag, with health authorities dispatching 72 ambulances, according to the prime minister.

Videos posted on social media showed passengers coated with dust and debris, walking in a daze inside derailed and mangled train carriages.

“Help us, help us, people are dying,” one man yells in anguish in one of the videos.

Egypt’s Transportation Ministry said the trains collided after passengers pulled the emergency brakes of the first train, causing it to stop and get hit by the second train traveling in the same direction behind it.

Egypt’s public prosecutor has launched an investigation into the crash, while the prime minister has offered roughly $6,300 to the families of the deceased and just over $2,500 for those injured.

Friday’s collision immediately brought scrutiny to Egypt’s rail system, one of the oldest in the world and largest in the region. Construction on the first railway line in Egypt, between Alexandria and Kafr Eassa, began in 1851.

Even with the disruption caused by the coronavirus, 1.4 million passengers per day used the nation’s trains and metro network, Egypt’s Transportation Ministry said last April.

Major accidents with fatalities are common. Data released by Egypt’s official statistics agency showed 1,657 train accidents in 2017, up from 1,249 the year before.

“Rail accidents have plagued Egypt for years as infrastructure has decayed,” said Timothy Kaldas, an analyst with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. “The current government has invested heavily in upgrades, but the scale of the problem is enormous.”

Kaldas noted that the transportation minister was put in place after a rail accident forced his predecessor to resign.

President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi wrote on Facebook that anyone who was found to have caused Friday’s accident through neglect or corruption will be punished, without exception.

“The pain that tears our hearts today cannot but make us more determined to end this type of disaster,” Sissi wrote.

Train crashes resulting in mass casualties have been a regular occurrence in Egypt for decades. The most deadly event took place in 2002, when a fire tore through an overcrowded passenger train traveling through El-Ayyat and killed at least 260 people.

Sissi has repeatedly pledged to upgrade services after accidents and has pushed for new train technology across the country.

In January, Egypt signed a memorandum of understanding with Germany’s Siemens for construction of a $23 billion high-speed train line that would run from Ain Sokhna on the Red Sea to New Alamein on the Mediterranean coast.

The line would pass through a new capital city being built east of Cairo.

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After crime plummeted in 2020, Baltimore will stop drug, prostitution prosecutions

InternationalMar 27. 2021

By The Washington Post, Tom Jackman

BALTIMORE – Something happened in Baltimore last year. The coronavirus pandemic hit, and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that the city would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the deadly virus.

And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot. While violent crime and homicides skyrocketed in most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20% from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36%, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39% fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20% fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.

So on Friday, Mosby made her temporary steps permanent. She announced Baltimore City will continue to decline prosecution of all drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic and misdemeanor cases, and will partner with a local behavioral health service to aggressively reach out to drug users, sex workers and people in psychiatric crisis to direct them into treatment rather than the back of a patrol car.

“A year ago, we underwent an experiment in Baltimore,” Mosby said in an interview, describing steps she took after consulting with public health and state officials to reduce the public’s exposure to the coronavirus, including not prosecuting nonviolent offenses. “What we learned in that year, and it’s so incredibly exciting, is there’s no public safety value in prosecuting these low-level offenses. These low-level offenses were being, and have been, discriminately enforced against Black and Brown people.

“The era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore,” Mosby said. “We have to rebuild the community’s trust in the criminal justice system and that’s what we will do, so we can focus on violent crime.” In a city that still struggles with a high homicide rate and gun violence, even with the decline in crime,she said the policy shift will enable more prosecutors to be assigned to homicides and other major cases instead of misdemeanor court.

The pandemic accelerated an effort already underway by liberal prosecutors across the country to reduce or eliminate the prosecution of minor crimes. Not long after the coronavirus hit, prosecutors in Seattle and Brooklyn announced they would not pursue low-level offenses that don’t jeopardize public safety. In Washington state last month, the Supreme Court ruled that the state’s drug possession law was unconstitutional because it didn’t account for the defendant’s intent. King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg said he already wasn’t pursuing such cases “because we did no good for people struggling with substance abuse disorder.”

In California, prosecutors in Los Angeles and Contra Costa counties have recently stopped taking people to court for drug possession and low-level misdemeanors. “The data suggests,” newly elected Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón said in an email, “that the bulk of misdemeanor caseloads – which represent the vast majority of filings in the United States – involve the prosecution of cases with minimal, and often negative, long-term impacts on public safety. It’s this reality that led to my policy prohibiting the filing of many first time low-level misdemeanors.”

But a number of legal experts said they had not seen an effort like Mosby’s in which behavioral health services were actively brought into the mix from the outset of cases. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, a Democrat, issued a statement Friday lauding Mosby for “working with partners to stem violence in Baltimore and ensure residents have the adequate support services they deserve.”

But Sean Kennedy, a visiting fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute who studies and has written about Baltimore crime and arrest data, said forgoing the prosecutions of low-level crimes is a mistake in a city he called the “murder capital of America.”

“These ‘quality of life’ violations are more than a nuisance, they are precursors and directly proximate to much more serious and often violent crimes,” Kennedy said, such as human trafficking and drug-related shootings. Kennedy said Mosby dismisses violent crime cases “at record rates, rarely secures prison time for gun offenders and has presided over the largest rise in homicides in decades.”

Mosby said her policy decision is unrelated to a federal investigation of her and her husband’s personal and campaign finances. The initial changes in prosecution policy occurred a year ago, and their success caused her to make them permanent, she said.

The decision not to prosecute drug and nonviolent misdemeanor crimes meanta huge paradigm shift for police, Commissioner Michael Harrison said in an interview. Officers who made drug arrests saw prosecutors dismissing the charges at the jail, and so the arrests mainly stopped. Mosby said there were 80% fewer arrests for drug possession in Baltimore in the past year.

“The officers told me they did not agree with that paradigm shift,” Harrison said. He said he had to “socialize” both officers and citizens to this new approach. Harrison expected crime to rise. “It did not,” the chief said. “It continued to go down through 2020. As a practitioner, as an academic, I can say there’s a correlation between the fact that we stopped making these arrests and crime did not go up,” though he cautioned that the coronavirus could have had some impact. Mosby noted that the virus did not keep crime from rising in nearly every other big U.S. city last year. Even with its progress, Baltimore had 335 homicides in 2020 and killings are up in the first months of this year.

Harrison enthusiastically supported Mosby’s move to sign an agreement with Baltimore Crisis Response Inc., a private nonprofit group that provides services to people with mental health and substance use disorders. With the police, BCRI will launch a 911 alternative dispatch where calls for behavioral health issues are routed to BCRI, which can send a two-person mobile crisis team to a scene or immediately refer people to services. The state’s attorney’s office is also collaborating with three Baltimore groups that offer a variety of services to sex workers.

Social workers are “better suited to deal with these issues,” Harrison said. “For generations, we’ve been asked to be all things to all people. That never should have happened.”

The head of the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police union did not return messages seeking comment.

Edgar Wiggins, executive director of BCRI, said that his agency taking a more immediate role in public response “gives us a conduit into a population that, honestly, we’ve not always had access to, and they haven’t had access to us.” He said mobile response teams will have a mental health professional and a registered nurse because “these folks often haven’t managed their health.” Immediate referrals for sex workers can be effective because “more often than not they have problems with substance use disorder and addictions. We want to divert people from involvement in the criminal justice system, which is not going to be helpful for their chronic problems.”

Mosby and others said that the racial justice protests of last summer provided further momentum for the need to revamp the justice system. Kobi Little, head of the Baltimore NAACP, said Mosby had been “responsive to the community’s needs and to calls for equity.” He said the new approach has led to “reduced policing and incarceration of Black people, increased access to crisis services” and “reduction in violent crime.”

Mosby asked public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University to examine the effect of her March 2020 policy shifts on public calls for police service and on rearrests of those who had charges dropped or warrants quashed. The number of 911 calls for drug or intoxication situations dropped from 131 per day before the pandemic to 88 per day in the eight months between March and December last year. Calls for prostitution or sex work dropped from six per day to three per day, the Johns Hopkins researchers found. The number of 911 calls for violent crimes did not drop significantly in the same period.

They also found that of 1,431 people who had charges or warrants dismissed at the outset, only five were rearrested. Though studies of recidivism typically look at three years to review reoffender data, the fact that only five reentered the system in eight months is “pretty unbelievable,” said Susan Sherman, a behavioral health professor at Johns Hopkins who specializes in helping marginalized populations. “In a world where drug decriminalization is happening around the country, the impact on the community is important,” Sherman said, and Mosby “really values having an understanding of these impacts.”

A number of big-city prosecutors have moved to decriminalize drugs, and Oregon voters decriminalized small amounts of drugs statewide. Miriam Krinsky, head of Fair and Just Prosecution, which advocates for liberal prosecutors, said many prosecutors are now getting their communities to treat drug abuse as a public health problem rather than a crime problem. “At a minimum, the criminal justice system needs to get out of the way and do no harm,” Krinsky said. “It’s been doing harm for decades. We need to stop trying to punish our way out of it.”

Mosby noted that 13% of the American population is Black, but 35% of those incarcerated for drug violations are Black. “As a prosecutor, our mission is justice over convictions,” Mosby said. “You have to understand the importance of rectifying the wrongs of the past.”

Millicent Wagner understands that. She said she spent years as a drug addict and prostitute on the streets of Baltimore before going sober and reuniting with her family more than two years ago. But she still had an outstanding prostitution warrant from 2018. Last fall, she reached out to Mosby’s office after hearing of the new policy, and records show it quickly dismissed her case.

Trying to resolve her warrant the old way – surrendering at the jail, possibly going into custody, waiting 30 days for a hearing – “would have devastated my child. It would have hurt him the most. It would hurt me, too. Just having to be back in the Baltimore city jail, all those things I’ve been staying away from.” Instead of being back in the system, she is getting a state identification card that she wouldn’t apply for with an outstanding warrant, plus a Social Security card, and then a job.

“I think this could help a lot of people in my situation that have turned themselves around,” Wagner said. “It’s hard.”

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Beverly Cleary, beloved author who chronicled schoolyard scrapes and feisty kids, dies at 104

InternationalMar 27. 2021

By The Washington Post, Harrison Smith, Becky Krystal

Beverly Cleary was a new librarian in Yakima, Wash., when, as she later recalled, “A little boy faced me rather ferociously across the circulation desk and said, ‘Where are the books about kids like us?’ “

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/91f4cedd-76d1-4667-bb14-7d5fae0f0ec0

She was stumped. There were many volumes about precocious British tots with “nannies and pony carts,” she said, but none that would appeal to “grubby neighborhood kids” like the boy before her – or to the adventure-seeking girl she had once been.

That encounter in the library set Cleary, who died March 25 at 104, on her way to becoming one of the most beloved children’s authors of all time, a chronicler of childhood who found the whole of human experience within the ordinary high jinks of growing up.

She died in Carmel, Calif., said her publisher HarperCollins, which did not give a cause.

She wrote more than 40 books, many about high-spirited youngsters such as the spunky Ramona Quimby and adventurous Henry Huggins, a third-grader with hair “like a scrubbing brush” and with a knack for getting into gentle scrapes with his mutt, Ribsy.

In her stories, quotidian tribulations – the challenges of managing an unwieldy paper route, dealing with a fractious sibling or coping with an absent parent – became tales of triumph.

The books sold more than 85 million copies and became, like the works of Maurice Sendak and Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, essential reading for generations of schoolchildren. They earned Cleary some of the highest distinctions in her field, including the Newbery Medal and Newbery Honor, as well as the National Medal of Arts, bestowed by President George W. Bush in 2003.

She aimed her stories squarely at an elementary school audience and hoped that, by creating relatable characters, she would inspire in her young readers a lifelong love of books. Her writing was distinguished by what essayist Benjamin Schwarz of the Atlantic magazine once called her gift for “photographic and psychological exactitude.”

She pulled heavily from memories of what she once described as her “free and wild” youth in Oregon, first on a farm and then in Depression-era Portland, employing what she called “all the bits of knowledge about children, reading and writing that had clung to me like burrs or dandelion fluff.”

Cleary frowned on the moralizing, didactic themes that dominated children’s literature in the first half of the 20th century. She set out not to impart wisdom but instead to portray children at play, and to capture their dialogue and the ways they sometimes venture into an adult world beyond their full comprehension.

Her stories paved the way for the more mature subject matter of later young-adult writers such as Judy Blume, who has credited Cleary as a significant influence.

The setting of Cleary’s first work, “Henry Huggins” (1950), was modeled on Hancock Street in Portland, where she lived as a child. In her book, she gave the street a more evocative name: Klickitat, after a nearby street in Portland whose name reminded Cleary of the sound of knitting needles.

The boys she knew inspired the book’s title character, who hunts for night crawlers in the park and struggles with whether to spend his silver dollar, a gift from a grandparent, on a pair of guppies at the pet store. (“He didn’t see how his mother could object to two quiet little fish that didn’t bark or track in mud or anything,” Cleary wrote.)

“Henry Huggins” spawned five sequels and a spinoff series featuring Cleary’s most beloved character, Ramona Quimby. She was the little sister of Henry’s friend Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby and was “tossed in,” Cleary said, to move the story along.

Feisty, redheaded Ramona first received top billing in 1955 with the publication of “Beezus and Ramona.” Seven sequels followed, including “Ramona the Pest,” her 1968 classic about adjusting to kindergarten, and “Ramona and Her Mother” (1979), which earned a National Book Award in 1981 for children’s paperback fiction.

The “Ramona” books, the last of which appeared in 1999, gained a following that even Cleary never expected.

“Little did I dream, to use a trite expression from books of my childhood, that she would take over books of her own, that she would grow and become a well-known and loved character,” she wrote in the second volume of her memoirs, “My Own Two Feet” (1995).

A film adaptation of the first “Ramona” book, with the reversed title “Ramona and Beezus,” starred Joey King as Ramona and Selena Gomez as her older sister and was released in 2010 to mixed reviews. It was one of the few spinoffs tolerated by the author, who generally loathed the merchandising of her work.

Cleary occasionally strayed from the realistic children’s fiction that was her hallmark, writing several young-adult novels about thwarted romances and first loves. She also wrote three children’s books about the adventurous rodent Ralph S. Mouse, beginning with “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” (1965).

She once told the Los Angeles Times that the “Ralph” novels emerged from a family trip to Britain, where she bought her son “some little cars and a little motorcycle” to play with after he became ill. When the family came home, she said, “a neighbor called me over to see a mouse that had fallen in a bucket in her garden. And the thought crossed my mind that that mouse was just the right size to ride that little motorcycle.”

A whiskered star was born.

Her work took a darker tone in later years, as even idyllic Klickitat Street, where kids were allowed to play and walk to school without parental supervision, became the scene of anxiety, loneliness and a feeling of helplessness. By “Ramona Forever” (1984), the title character’s troubles shifted from kindergarten messes to worries about a new baby in the family, the death of a cat, her father’s unemployment and the departure of a beloved aunt.

Another poignant work, “Dear Mr. Henshaw” (1983), earned Cleary the top honor in children’s literature, the Newbery Medal. The novel consists of letters between Leigh Botts, a schoolboy whose lunch is always getting stolen, and Boyd Henshaw, an author with whom Leigh began corresponding for a class assignment.

In a review for the New York Times, children’s writer Natalie Babbitt praised “Dear Mr. Henshaw” as Cleary’s finest book. “Dialogue has always been one of the strongest parts of her work,” she wrote. “And here, where all is dialogue, that strength can shine alone and be double impressive.”

The book differed from her other works, Cleary once observed, because it did not arise from a joke or funny idea. Leigh’s often-absent father is a truck driver, and his parents eventually divorce. There is no tidy ending.

“At first I was surprised because it wasn’t funny like your other books,” Leigh writes in one revealing letter to Henshaw, explaining that he had just finished the fictional author’s new work. He continued, “but then I got to thinking (you said authors should think) and decided a book doesn’t have to be funny to be good, although it often helps. This book did not need to be funny.”

– – –

Beverly Atlee Bunn was born April 12, 1916, in McMinnville, Ore., the nearest town with a hospital to the family farm in Yamhill. Her father, Lloyd, was the son of a farmer whose ancestors had arrived in Oregon by covered wagon in the mid-1800s.

Her mother, the former Mable Atlee, was an aspiring writer who headed west from Michigan in the early 1900s to teach. She founded a library in Yamhill, but the family relocated to Portland after losing the farm in an economic downturn.

There, her father worked as a bank security guard but was laid off during the Depression, a traumatic experience for the young Cleary that inspired a similar episode in “Ramona and Her Father” (1977).

“I sat filled with anguish, unable to read, unable to do anything,” she wrote in her first memoir, “A Girl From Yamhill” (1988), recounting the moment when she learned her father had been fired. “How could anyone do such a thing to my father, who was so good, kind, reliable, and honest?”

Chickenpox and then smallpox kept Cleary out of first grade for a time, and when she returned, she was placed with the least-proficient group of readers. She was in third grade when she finally started to grasp the fundamentals of reading. She recalled the moment it all came together: the rainy afternoon at home when she stumbled across Lucy Fitch Perkins’s children’s novel “The Dutch Twins.”

“I picked up a book,” she told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “My mother always kept them around, with high hopes. I looked at the pictures, and then the words, and discovered I was reading.”

In recent years, Cleary’s birthday became a reading holiday of sorts, with libraries and schools across the country celebrating it as Drop Everything and Read Day.

She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1938 from the University of California at Berkeley. After receiving a second bachelor’s degree, in library science, from the University of Washington in 1939, she became a children’s librarian in Yakima. She later settled in California’s Berkeley Hills, where she devoted herself to writing full time with the encouragement of her husband, Clarence Cleary, an accountant she married in 1940.

He died in 2004. Survivors include their two children, Malcolm and Marianne; three grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

In “My Own Two Feet,” Cleary recalled a brief feeling of anxiety while working on her first book.

“It occurred to me that even though I was uncertain about writing, I knew how to tell a story,” she wrote, remembering her years as a librarian in Yakima. “What was writing for children but written storytelling? So in my imagination I stood once more before Yakima’s story-hour crowd as I typed the first sentence: ‘Henry Huggins was in the third grade.’ “

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Piracy fears mount as ships take long way around Africa to avoid blocked Suez Canal

InternationalMar 27. 2021

By The Washington Post, Sudarsan Raghavan, Antonia Noori Farzan

CAIRO – Brand-new Kia automobiles, cases of Heineken beer, live animals and billions of dollars of crude oil and other commodities remained stranded in the Suez Canal throughout the day on Friday. Meanwhile, tugboats and dredgers tried to free a grounded container ship that has come to symbolize the perils of a global economy that relies on goods traveling around the world in larger and larger vessels.

The Ever Given, one of the largest container ships ever built, has been stuck in the canal since Tuesday, creating an increasingly expensive traffic jam on both sides of the waterway. Some tankers have already opted to travel around the southern tip of Africa instead, adding weeks to their journeys, through a region known for piracy.

“It just shows you how vulnerable our supply-chain lines are,” said Guy Platten, secretary general for the U.K.-based International Chamber of Shipping.

On Friday morning, the canal’s service provider, Leth Agencies, said in a tweet that the Ever Given “remains grounded in the same position” with tugboats and dredgers working to dislodge the vessel, which is blocking the flow of an estimated $12 billion in goods.

Meanwhile, the Japanese owner of the ship expressed hope that it could be freed by Saturday night. Yukito Higaki, president of Shoei Kisen Kaisha, apologized Friday for the “great trouble and concern,” according to the Japanese financial news website Nikkei Asia.

Egypt’s Suez Canal Authority said Friday afternoon that its dredging operations were roughly 87% complete, but navigational safety regulations prevented the dredging ship from moving too close.

The U.S. Navy plans to send a team of dredging experts to the canal to assess the problem, CNN reported.

With some experts predicting that freeing the ship could take weeks, a number of global shipping companies on Friday began seeking alternative routes.

“We’re now beginning to see even vessels that had entered the Mediterranean hang a U-turn,” Lars Jensen, the CEO of Denmark-based SeaIntelligence Consulting, told The Washington Post.

At least seven tankers carrying liquefied natural gas were diverted, including three steered toward the longer route to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa. Another nine tankers were expected to be diverted if the blockage continues into the weekend, an analyst for data intelligence firm Kpler told the Guardian newspaper.

At least four long-range oil tankers with the capacity to haul 75,000 tons of oil were also possibly headed around the Cape of Good Hope, London-based ship brokering firm Braemar ACM told Reuters, adding that shipping rates have nearly doubled this week “as the market starts to price in fewer vessels being available in the region.”

On the ship-tracking service Marine Traffic, several ships could be observed changing course Friday.

Detouring around Africa is likely to add a week or two to most itineraries and hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional fuel costs.

With more ships potentially being diverted to the Cape of Good Hope, piracy could increase. Pirates have long preyed on ships moving in the waters off the Horn of Africa, and the seas off oil-rich West Africa are now considered among the world’s most dangerous for shipping.

Over the past two days, the U.S. Navy said it has been contacted by shipping firms from multiple countries concerned about the heightened risks of piracy to ships being rerouted, a spokesperson for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, told the Financial Times.

“There is a risk there, and it’s probably another reason why the ocean carriers will think twice before they actually go around the Horn,” said Genevieve Giuliano, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.

The Ever Given, operated by Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corp., was headed to the Netherlands on Tuesday when it ran aground in the 120-mile-long passage from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean during a dust storm. Exactly how the stranding occurred remains unclear, but experts have speculated that the containers stacked atop the ship could have acted like a massive sail propelling the boat forward in high winds.

Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, which is responsible for managing the ship’s crew and maintenance, has said that an investigation into the incident is underway. But officials have yet to release any details, including who has been questioned. Typically, Suez-based pilots guide the ship through the narrow passage, and the management company has said that two pilots were on board when the boat ran aground.

Continued failure to dislodge the ship could become a source of embarrassment for Egypt, where the canal and its pivotal role in global trade is a source of national pride. The country spent $8 billion in 2015 to widen parts of the canal, but not the section in question.

With more than 200 other ships stuck in the bottleneck, moving the Ever Given will only create a new set of headaches. Many of those vessels will arrive in European ports at the same time, and find they have nowhere to dock.

The unprecedented pileup could strain global supply chains already stressed by the coronavirus pandemic.

On top of the need to shuttle raw materials to industrial manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, shipping firms are grappling with extraordinary demand for consumer products, which has created a scarcity of empty containers.

“There is this boom we are seeing which has never happened before,” said Nils Haupt, a spokesperson for Hapag-Lloyd, an international container shipping company.

Five of Hapag-Lloyd’s vessels are stuck near the Suez, including the New York Express, which is locked in the Great Bitter Lake, and the Tsingtao Express, one of many ships waiting in outer anchorage in Port Said.

The containers aboard many of the ships, with goods mostly from China, are destined for consumers in the United States and northern Europe. Treadmills, desks, coffee machines and home improvement supplies are among the shipments as many continue to work and exercise at home, Haupt said.

Just a few days into the blockage, Haupt does not expect the delay to hurt many consumers yet. While more than 200 vessels are in the line to traverse the Suez eventually, several of Hapag-Lloyd’s ships are among the many others that have already been rerouted.

While most consumer goods passing through the Suez Canal are headed from China to Europe, the cascading chain of dominoes will eventually reach America. “We’re all connected globally,” Platten said.

The ongoing crisis highlights how much of the world economy relies on seafarers, some of whom have gone a full year without taking a break or seeing their families because of the pandemic, Platten said.

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Bertrand Tavernier, versatile and acclaimed French filmmaker, dies at 79

InternationalMar 27. 2021Bertrand Tavernier

By The Washington Post, Harrison Smith

Bertrand Tavernier, a French filmmaker who earned international acclaim for his humanistic, character-driven style and startling versatility, as well as for his tenacious efforts to promote and preserve cinematic history, died March 25 at his home in Sainte-Maxime, on the French Riviera. He was 79.

Tavernier was president of the Institut Lumière, a French film organization, which announced his death but did not give a precise cause. “His films will remain as masterpieces of French cinema,” former French interior minister Gérard Collomb said.

Mentored by directors Claude Sautet and Jean-Pierre Melville, Tavernier worked for more than a decade as a film critic, assistant director and publicist before making his first feature, “The Clockmaker of Saint-Paul” (1974), which he adapted from a Georges Simenon novel and shot with a handheld camera in his hometown of Lyon.

A contemplative drama about a widowed father who learns that his teenage son has murdered a factory foreman, the movie earned a runner-up prize at the Berlin International Film Festival and established Tavernier as a leader of a new generation of French filmmakers, succeeding the New Wave directors of the late 1950s and ’60s.

“His work is an abundance of invention and generosity, and in a way the opposite of the auteur theory that he once supported, since Tavernier never forces himself or a style upon us,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 2003. “If there is a common element in his work, it is his instant sympathy for his fellow humans, his enthusiasm for their triumphs, his sharing of their disappointments. To see the work of some directors is to feel closer to them. To see Tavernier’s work is to feel closer to life.”

Tavernier directed more than two dozen features and documentaries, including “Death Watch” (1980), a science-fiction fable starring Romy Schneider and, with cameras embedded behind his eyes, Harvey Keitel; “Coup de Torchon” (1981), a black comedy that received an Academy Award nomination for best foreign language film; and “A Sunday in the Country” (1984), a poignant family portrait about an elderly painter.

The winner of five César Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars, Tavernier worked with actors including Isabelle Huppert, Julie Delpy and Dirk Bogarde, whose last screen role came in Tavernier’s bittersweet “Daddy Nostalgia” (1990), about a dying man visited by his estranged daughter, played by Jane Birkin.

Tavernier also emerged as a leading evangelist for international cinema, organizing the Institut Lumière’s annual film festival in Lyon, co-writing a 1,200-page history of American film and publishing a book of interviews with directors such as Robert Altman, Roger Corman and John Ford.

He was perhaps best known in the United States for “Round Midnight” (1986), about an American jazz musician – Dale Turner, played by saxophonist Dexter Gordon – who travels to Paris to play at a club named the Blue Note and is taken in by a French fan. Loosely based on pianist Bud Powell, Turner struggles with alcoholism and drug use, even as he remains consumed by a lifelong love affair with jazz.

“My life is music,” he says. “My love is music. And it’s 24 hours a day.”

Tavernier co-wrote the screenplay, as he did for most of his films, and insisted on casting Gordon, who had spent years in Paris and struggled with addiction himself. The actor wrote many of his own lines and received an Oscar nomination for best actor; pianist Herbie Hancock, who performed on-screen with Gordon and other real-life musicians, won the Academy Award for best original score.

“In most films, characters take the journey from A to Z,” Tavernier told the New York Times in 1985, while shooting “Round Midnight.” “In mine, they go from A to B.” His protagonists were often timid and hesitant, gradually moving toward moments of realization or acceptance while looking back on their lives.

Tavernier let them take their time. Many of his films were slow and meditative; in “Round Midnight,” musical interludes sometimes seemed to say more than the dialogue itself. “When I make movies,” he explained in the Times interview, “I like to explore, to dream.”

René Maurice Bertrand Tavernier was born in Lyon on April 25, 1941, nearly a year after the Nazi invasion during World War II. His mother was a homemaker, and his father wrote poetry and founded the literary journal Confluences, which “became the vehicle for dozens of writers actively engaged in the resistance movement,” according to the Virginia Quarterly Review.

After being diagnosed with tuberculosis, Tavernier spent part of his childhood at a sanitarium. He began going to the movies daily while at high school in Paris, accompanied by another student, Volker Schlöndorff, who later directed “The Tin Drum.” Tavernier went on to found a film club while studying at the Sorbonne, then dropped out of school after interviewing Melville, who offered him the chance to work as an assistant director.

He later said he was terrible at the job, perpetually frightened by his boss, who “behaved like a tyrant on the set.” But he found his footing in the industry after Melville suggested he become a press agent, a job that enabled him to work with French, Italian and American filmmakers, including Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh.

Tavernier’s early films included “Let Joy Reign Supreme” (1975), a political satire set in 1720s France, and “A Week’s Holiday” (1980), starring Nathalie Baye as a brooding, dissatisfied schoolteacher who takes a brief vacation to reexamine her life.

His later works included “Life and Nothing But” (1989), about a group of French soldiers sifting through the soil around Verdun to identify victims of World War I; “L.627” (1992), about a police narcotics squad in Paris; and “Safe Conduct” (2002), which examined the French film scene during the Nazi occupation.

Tavernier’s first marriage, to screenwriter and collaborator Claudine “Colo” O’Hagan, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Sarah Tavernier; two children from his first marriage, filmmaker Nils Tavernier and writer Tiffany Tavernier; and a number of grandchildren.

In 2016, Tavernier released “My Journey Through French Cinema,” a three-hour meditation on film, which explored some of the movies that had offered him direction when he was a boy recovering from tuberculosis.

“I wanted to say thank you to all those filmmakers, writers, composers for the way that they enlightened my life,” he told NPR. “They gave me dreams, gave me passion. And I think I survived – I survived because of the cinema. It gave me hope. The cinema gave me a reason to live.”

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A Minnesota man can’t be charged with rape because the woman chose to drink beforehand, court rules

InternationalMar 27. 2021

By The Washington Post, Marisa Iati

After a 20-year-old woman took five shots of vodka and a prescription pill, she said she was standing outside a Minneapolis bar in May 2017 when a man invited her and a friend to a party. She agreed, but soon found out there was no gathering, she later testified.

She “blacked out” instead, waking up on a couch and found the man she had just met was allegedly sexually assaulting her, according to court records.

Almost four years later, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled this week that Francios Momolu Khalil, 24, cannot be found guilty of rape because the woman got drunk voluntarily beforehand. The decision Wednesday overturned Khalil’s prior conviction of third-degree criminal sexual conduct, which had been upheld by an appeals court, and granted him the right to a new trial.

The ruling also poured fuel on an effort in the Minnesota legislature to expand the state’s definition of “mentally incapacitated” to include voluntary intoxication so that defendants such as Khalil can be convicted of more serious offenses.

At issue in Khalil’s case was a state law that says a person is only considered “mentally incapacitated” and incapable of consenting to sex if they are intoxicated on substances “administered to that person without the person’s agreement,” like if someone spikes a punch bowl at a party. In Khalil’s case, Justice Paul Thissen wrote in an opinion, no one disputes that the woman chose to become drunk.

“If the Legislature’s intended meaning is clear from the text of the statute, we apply that meaning and not what we may wish the law was or what we think the law should be,” Thissen wrote.

Khalil has been incarcerated since his sentencing in 2019. His attorney in the lower court said he expects his client to be released soon.

“When you have a 6-0 unanimous decision, that tells you that the courts have recognized what I was telling the district court judge all along: You cannot add your own elements to the law,” said the attorney, Will Walker. “Otherwise, nobody would ever have a fair trial.”

Khalil’s attorney in the Minnesota Supreme Court case declined to comment on the ruling.

On the evening of the alleged assault, the woman went to a bar in Minneapolis’s Dinkytown neighborhood with a friend, but the bouncer refused to let her in because she was drunk, according to court records. That’s when Khalil and two other men allegedly approached the woman and her friend and invited them to a party.

Khalil drove the women to a house in North Minneapolis, prosecutors allege. The friend later testified that the woman immediately laid down on the couch and fell asleep.

When the woman woke up to see Khalil allegedly raping her, she told him she didn’t want to have sex, court records say.

“But you’re so hot and you turn me on,” he allegedly replied.

The woman then lost consciousness and woke up between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. with her shorts around her ankles, she testified. She and her friend left the house in a Lyft, and the woman went to a hospital to have a rape kit done later that day. She reported the case to Minneapolis police four days later, according to court records.

Minnesota is among a majority of states that treat intoxication as a barrier to consent only if the victim became drunk against their will. As of 2016, intoxication provisions in 40 states did not include situations where someone chose to consume drugs or alcohol, according to Brooklyn Law Review.

Definitions of rape have generally been expanding in recent decades, said Jill Hasday, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who has written about the history of marital rape. Courts that used to require women to prove that they displayed “utmost resistance” to unwanted sexual activity now apply what Hasday characterized as a more realistic understanding of how consent typically happens.

Minnesota rape survivors, advocates and dozens of legislators see the state’s voluntary intoxication defense as a loophole that still needs to be filled. Some legislators put forth a bill in 2019 to make voluntary drunkenness grounds for a felony rape charge, but the legislature instead convened a working group to study the issue. The bipartisan bill in the Minnesota House of Representatives emerged from that group’s report on possible changes to the law.

Under the existing statute, Khalil’s case could be charged as fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, a gross misdemeanor, according to the court ruling. State Rep. Kelly Moller, a Democrat, a co-sponsor of the bill and a prosecutor, said that charge does not go far enough.

“I’ve heard from prosecutors that even charging this as a fifth-degree gross misdemeanor is almost insulting to the victim,” she said, “because it’s such a lesser crime and it doesn’t encompass what the victim actually experienced.”

Moller said she often hears from prosecutors and victims about sexual assaults that cannot be prosecuted because the victim had chosen to consume drugs or alcohol before the attack. Ata state House committee hearing in February, a woman testified that when she was raped in 2019, prosecutors told her they could not pursue her case because she had chosen to drink cocktails before she lost consciousness on the day of the attack.

Of the nearly 10 million U.S. women who have been raped while intoxicated, according to background in the court opinion, Moller said most become drunk by choice. She pointed to Khalil’s case to argue that some alleged offenders seek to prey on people in that kind of condition.

If Moller’s bill succeeds in making voluntary drunkenness grounds for a rape charge, prosecutors will still have to explore the defendant’s knowledge of the victim’s state of mind.

“The state still has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knew or should have known that the victim was intoxicated to the degree incapable of providing consent,” Moller said. “And that burden is high.”

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Montgomery County police release video showing officers yelling at 5-year-old boy

InternationalMar 27. 2021

By The Washington Post, Dan Morse

Two Montgomery County police officers loudly berated a 5-year-old boy who had walked away from his school, calling him a “little beast” and telling him that “I hope your momma let me beat you,” according to a body-worn camera recording of the incident released Friday by the police department.

At one point, after the child was driven back to his school and walked into an office, one of the officers put her face inches from his, screaming “Ahhh!” five times as he was crying.

“Oh, my God, I’d beat him so bad,” she said, loud enough for the child to hear, before speaking him to him directly: “You do not embarrass me like this at school.”

The video of the January 2020 interaction aligns with many of the allegations in a lawsuit filed this year by the child’s mother. That matter is pending.

The recording also shows a school administrator openly telling the two officers the student’s past behavioral problems and commenting on his mother’s parenting methods while the child continues to cry feet away.

Community and political leaders reacted with horror as the video spread online.

“It made me sick,” said Montgomery County Council member Will Jawando, D-At Large, who pushed for the video’s release. “We all saw a little boy be mocked, degraded, put in the seat of a police car, screamed at from the top of an adult police officer’s lungs, inches from his face. This is violence.”

The Montgomery County school system released a statement describing the video as “extremely difficult” to watch.

“There is no excuse for adults to ever speak to or threaten a child in this way,” the school system said. “As parents and grandparents, we know that when families send their children to school, they expect that the staff will care for them, keep them safe and use appropriate intervention processes when needed.”

A police spokeswoman said the two officers in the video – identified in the litigation as Dionne Holliday and Kevin Christmon – were the subject of an internal department investigation that has concluded. They remain employed as sworn officers for the department, the spokeswoman said.

“A thorough investigation was conducted of the entire event,” the department said in a statement, saying it could not comment in its findings because such investigations are considered confidential under Maryland law.

Both the Montgomery County Police Department and school system, citing the pending litigation, declined to address the incident in detail.

A woman who answered a phone number listed for Holliday told a reporter not to call her again and hung up. Efforts to reach Christmon have been unsuccessful.

In a statement, the union representing Montgomery County police officers said its members do not receive training on how to “effectively communicate with a young child in distress” unless they are part of a specialized unit.

“It is clear, that the event and everything that has come after the event should have been handled better by all involved,” the statement from Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 35 said.

The statement also said the union members in the incident cooperated with a nearly year-long investigation, giving testimony on the incident in August before waiting “another six months for the police chief to take corrective action.”

Nearly 500 people have signed a letter online calling for the officers to be suspended or fired. The letter also demands the school system to review procedures for when police interact with children in schools.

“This footage makes it clear that officers terrorized this five-year-old child in the place any child should feel safe and protected – at school,” said Tiffany Kelly, a Montgomery County Public Schools parent and community activist, in a statement released by the Silver Spring Justice Coalition.

The lawsuit named four defendants: Holliday, Christmon, the Montgomery County government as a whole, and the Montgomery County Board of Education.

The officers were accused in the litigation of assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress on the child and other counts, according to court papers. The school system was accused of negligence.

“Employees of East Silver Spring Elementary School had a duty to exercise reasonable care to protect [the child] from harm and to properly supervise [him],” the litigation reads.

The incident unfolded around 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 14, 2020, when the student walked out of East Silver Spring Elementary School and police were called. They caught up to him along Silver Spring Avenue one block away. Christmon approached him and within a minute appeared to begin losing his patience, according to the video.

“Look at me,” he can be heard saying shortly before grabbing the student’s arm and walking him toward an assistant principal who had arrived from the school, according to the lawsuit.

“Christmon’s tone and demeanor directed at [the child] was more befitting a criminal rather than a scared five-year-old,” wrote the two attorneys who filed the lawsuit, Matthew Bennett and James Papirmeister.

The boy started to cry, according to the video, prompting the officer to respond: “Cut it out! Hey! Cut it out.”

At that point, his cries became interspersed with coughing. Christmon buckled him into the back seat of his squad car.

“I don’t want to go,” the boy can be heard saying between coughs.

“I don’t care,” the officer responded. “You don’t make that decision for yourself!”

The boy was terrified, the attorneys said, because “he thought he was going to be taken to jail.”

Two minutes later, they pulled up to the school. Both officers, the school administrator and the child walked toward the front door.

“That’s why people need to beat their kids,” the second officer, Holliday, said.

After getting inside an principal’s office, according to the lawsuit, Christmon forced the child onto a chair. His crying grew louder.

“Shut that noise up now!” Holliday said, moving close to his face. “I hope your momma let me beat you.”

The officers began discussing the student’s behavior in front of him.

The boy’s mother was called and placed on speaker phone.

“Calm down,” she could be heard saying. “Mommy coming, OK?”

Two minutes later, as another school administrator discussed the boy’s behavior from that day, Christmon told the boy: “That’s because you don’t get no whooping.”

The two officers continued discussing how he should be parented and kept in line.

“All that noise and stuff,” Holliday said. “Oh, it couldn’t be mine. It couldn’t be mine.”

“He don’t deserve no nap,” Christmon added. “Nothing but a spanking.”

The two could be heard laughing as Holliday compared him to a “little beast.”

“A crate,” she suggested. “Crate him.”

Christman bought up the name of a horror movie character. “Do you remember Chucky?”

With the boy still just feet away, Holliday asked an administrator if he could be booted from the school.

“What are the guidelines for getting him ejected from the facility?” she asked.

Bennett and Papirmeister said Friday that the child is receiving treatment for trauma.

“He has nightmares,” Bennett said. “He’s scared of the police now. It’s very upsetting for him.”

Papirmeister said the boy’s behavior – walking away from a school – cried out for an adult approaching calmly, maybe taking a seat next to him to ask about his day.

“You don’t have to be a social worker or licensed counselor to know how to approach a child like this,” Papirmeister said.

After his mother arrived, the adults spoke for a little bit in front of the boy.

Both officers repeatedly advised the mother to “beat” or “spank” the child at home.

“We want you to beat him,” Holliday said, adding, “Don’t use a weapon . . . but you can smack that butt repeatedly.”

The officers, the mom and at least one of the administrators finally moved to a conference room away from the child.

After speaking for a while, the child was let back in.

“I don’t like bad children, disrespectful children,” Holliday said. “I think they need to be beaten, and that’s what I told your momma.”

Christmon then pulled out his handcuffs, closing one of loops around one of the child’s tiny right wrist.

He then pulled both his hands behind his back.

“You know what these are for?” he asked the boy. “These people that don’t want to listen and don’t know how to act.”

One minute later, the officer slid the cuff off the boy’s wrist.

Holliday gave him some of the final words, speaking to him about his mom.

“I hope she does beat you when you go home because you deserve it so much for your actions today,” she said. “You were horrible.”