Moon says S. Korea’s 2050 carbon-neutral goal is ‘heavy promise,’ urges calm preparations
InternationalNov 03. 2020President Moon Jae-in speaks during a Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul, Tuesday. (Yonhap)
By The Korea Herald/ANN
President Moon Jae-in said Tuesday that South Korea is seriously committed to its stated aim of going carbon neutral by 2050 to support the global fight against climate change.
He called for national efforts to attain the goal via a “calm and cool-headed” approach, speaking during a weekly Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae.
“Carbon neutrality is the direction in which the world should move to respond together to the climate crisis,” he stressed. “We should actively participate in this global trend as a responsible member of the international community.”
The president described his relevant statement last week as a “heavy promise” that reflects Seoul’s commitment.
In an annual budget policy speech at the National Assembly, Moon announced that South Korea, one of the world’s most fossil fuel-reliant economies, will “strive to become carbon neutral by 2050” as part of the government’s Green New Deal drive.
He presented a vision for replacing coal-fired power generation with renewable energy.
In his opening remarks at the Cabinet session, Moon unveiled more details of the carbon-neutral campaign.
He instructed the authorities to meticulously draw up a road map for the energy transition from fossil fuels to environment-friendly sources in tandem with a review of plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“In particular, I would like you to explore various measures to accelerate energy conversion such as decarbonization, the development of the hydrogen economy and the expansion of renewable energy use,” he said.
He pointed out that carbon neutralization is not an easy task for South Korea, which relies heavily on fossil fuels.
“But responding to climate change is not an option but a must,” he emphasized. (Yonhap)
HKSAR gov’t to implement national security law without fear: HKSAR chief executive
InternationalNov 03. 2020Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor meets the press at Central Government Offices on Oct 27, 2020. [Photo by PARKER ZHENG/China Daily]
By Xinhua/China Daily/ANN
HONG KONG — Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Carrie Lam said on Monday that the implementation of the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the HKSAR is both timely and essential.
Lam made the remarks in a speech delivered at the opening of the Hong Kong Legal Week 2020. She said that she and the HKSAR government will continue to steadfastly implement the national security law in Hong Kong without fear or worry.
Lam said that the violent protests during the social unrest last year has undermined public perception of the rule of law, and exposed the shortcomings in Hong Kong with regard to safeguarding national security, thus the enactment of the national security law in Hong Kong is “both timely and essential.”
“Since then, law and order and stability in society has been restored and we now have an enhanced system for Hong Kong to accurately and comprehensively implement the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ principle,” she said.
Lam once again urged everyone in society, regardless of his or her political stance, to support the rule of law and respect the courts, judges and their rulings.
Geoffrey Ma Tao-li, chief justice of the Court of Final Appeal of the HKSAR, said at the opening that the rule of law is essential to Hong Kong’s prosperity, and he hoped that the society will cherish and protect it.
Ma said that the role and functions of the judiciary are clearly set out in the HKSAR Basic Law and the HKSAR enjoys independent judicial power including that of final adjudication, reflecting the constitutional arrangement under the “one country, two systems”.
Judges’ vows also reflect the independence of the judiciary, judges should uphold the HKSAR Basic Law, perform their duties faithfully and uphold the rule of law fearlessly and selflessly, he said.
Teresa Cheng, Secretary for Justice of the HKSAR government, said that the HKSAR government has already started projects that will promote the proper understanding and recognition of the rule of law at various levels in the society, hoping to raise the awareness on the importance of a law-abiding society.
The Hong Kong Legal Week is an annual flagship event of the Justice Department of the HKSAR government. In response to the challenges posed by COVID-19, for the first time, a series of webinars will be broadcast live from Nov 2 to 6.
More international students to be admitted to Japan’s national universities
InternationalNov 03. 2020Foreign students attend an entrance ceremony for the University of Tokyo in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, in October 2012. (Yomiuri Shimbun file photo)
By The Japan News/ANN
The education ministry plans to allow an increase in the number of foreign students studying at national universities from the 2022 academic year, in an effort to increase the universities’ international competitiveness and ensure the stability of their finances, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Monday.
The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry will send to national universities a notice that will allow an increase in their enrollment limit by next summer. The liberalization of tuition fees for foreign students is likely to be discussed as well.
Under the current system, a university hoping to increase its quota needs to apply to the Council for University Establishment and School Corporation, an advisory organization to the education minister, which will conduct an inspection as to whether the increase is appropriate.
Since the 1990s, when the population of 18-year-olds started to decline, the ministry has maintained the stance that no increase was allowed in national universities’ enrollment except for special cases, saying it would place a burden on the finances of competing private universities.
Total enrollment at all national universities has hovered around 96,000 since the 2005 academic year.
There were 13,070 foreign students studying at national universities in the 2019 academic year, about 3% of the total number of students. The ratio was lower than that for private universities, which stands at 3.7%.
By issuing the notice by next summer, the ministry envisions that an increased number of international students will be admitted to national universities from the 2022 academic year.
However, if the number of foreign students increases without any limit, it is feared that there will be a shortage of teachers and classrooms. The ministry will check in advance the level of enrollment.
The ministry’s plan to increase the number of international students is aimed at attracting more talented foreign students to improve university’s research capabilities and garner international recognition.
Major international university rankings are decided based on various statistics, such as research paper citations, the ratio of international students and other factors related to the globalization of universities.
On the World University Ranking 2021, released by British education magazine publisher Times Higher Education in September, only two universities in Japan ranked in the top 200 — the University of Tokyo at 36th and Kyoto University at 54th.
The government has set a goal of having at least 10 universities in the top 100 by 2023, but this is considered difficult to achieve.
Increasing the number of international students will aid in the management of national universities, as the increased tuition revenues will strengthen their financial base.
The ministry is considering a plan to liberalize national universities’ tuition fees for international students. Currently, the standard annual tuition for national universities is set at ¥535,800 for both Japanese and foreign students. The fees can be increased by up to 20% at each university’s discretion.
Among foreign students studying at universities in Japan in the 2019 academic year, the largest segment — 41.2% — came from China. This was followed by Vietnam at 19.8%, Nepal at 8.2%, South Korea at 7% and Taiwan at 3.3%.
Storm Goni forecast to hit Vietnam’s central provinces on Thursday
InternationalNov 03. 2020Projected path of Goni storm. — Photo courtesy of the Vietnam Disasters Monitoring System
By Viet Nam News/ANN
HÀ NỘI — The tenth storm to enter the East Sea this year is expected to make landfall in central provinces from Đà Nẵng to Phú Yên on Thursday, after ripping through the Philippines killing at least 16 people on Sunday.
At a meeting of Central Steering Committee for Natural Disaster Prevention and Control on Monday morning, director of the National Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting Mai Văn Khiêm said Storm Goni was weakening as it passed the Philippines however.
Around 30 hours after it hit the Philippines with wind speeds of up to 183km per hour, it entered the East Sea gusting up to 88km per hour.
At 1pm on Monday, the storm was 680km from Việt Nam’s Hoàng Sa (Paracel) Archipelago, moving westwards at 10-15km per hour.
Khiêm said that the storm would make landfall with wind speeds of 60-75 km per hour, and there was little chance of it gaining strength.
Heavy rain is forecast from Wednesday afternoon.
“Notably, the rain will blanket central areas already hit by the ninth storm of the year,” Khiêm said.
Provinces from Thừa Thiên-Huế to Phú Yên and north of the Central Highlands will see average rainfall of 100-200mm from Wednesday to Friday.
Provinces from Nghệ An to Quảng Trị will see average rainfall of 150-300 m from Thursday to Saturday. Flood warnings have been issued in river areas in provinces from Quảng Nam to Quảng Ngãi.
Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Nguyễn Xuân Cường said that Goni was a super typhoon that lost strength when entering East Sea.
“It’s difficult to predict the storm’s developments, however” he said, calling for close observation of the storm.
“We must prepare for the possibility of flash floods, landslides and damage to dams and reservoirs,” Cường said.
Chairing the meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Trịnh Đình Dũng said even though the storm had weakened, people needed to stay alert.
He asked agencies and localities to call in all vessels from areas in the path of the storm.
People in coastal areas should evacuate, he said.
Meanwhile, according to power companies in the central region, supplies and resumed for 95 per cent of customers affected by the particularly strong ninth storm – Molave – in the central region last week.
About 213,000 people were still without power, mostly in Quảng Nam and Quảng Ngãi provinces.
On Monday afternoon, search and rescue forces recovered the eighth body of 11 people who were buried by a landslide in Phước Lộc Commune, Phước Sơn District in the central province of Quảng Nam on October 29. The seventh body was found on Sunday.
Meanwhile, bad weather and rough seas were posing difficulties in the search for 23 fishermen from Bình Định vessels – BĐ 97469 TS and BĐ 96388 TS.
BĐ 96388 TS sank 143.5 nautical miles off Cam Ranh on October 27 while seeking shelter from the ninth storm. There were 12 fishermen on board.
BĐ 97469 TS sank the same day about 172 nautical miles away from Hòn Tre Island with 14 fishermen on board.
On October 29, the Hong Kong-registered M/V Fortune Iris rescued three fishermen from BĐ 97469 TS.
As of Monday, Storm Molave had killed 31 people and injured 134 others, while 49 people remain unaccounted for. Damage has been estimated at VNĐ10 trillion. — VNS
Some parts of Asia appear to have gotten a grip – albeit a tenuous one – on Covid-19 in recent days, compared with the situation in Europe and the United States where cases are spiralling and are barely contained.
India – which has recorded Asia’s highest number of infections at more than 8.2 million cases – has seen its daily count fall steadily since the peak in mid-September.
Although it reported another 45,000 new cases on Monday (Nov 2), that number is less than half of the daily figure about six weeks ago.
Indonesia – South-east Asia’s worst-hit nation – on Monday reported its lowest number of new cases since late August. It had around 2,600 cases and another 101 deaths, taking the tally to more than 415,000 infections and over 14,000 fatalities.
The Philippines, the second worst hit country in the region, reported nearly 2,300 new cases and 32 more deaths, bringing the total to some 385,000 infections and 7,200 fatalities.
While the number of new cases on Monday was slightly higher than those recorded over the past week, the daily infection count has been trending downwards since it peaked in early August.
“Experience with previous pandemics has been critical to help (some Asian) countries be better prepared to manage Covid-19,” said Dr Shenglan Tang, a policy expert with the Duke Global Health Institute, who with his team reviewed the Covid-19 strategies of seven Asian countries and regions earlier this year.
In north-east Asia, Japan continued to report fewer new Covid-19 cases from a month ago, with 667 new infections on Monday.
With Covid-19 under control, the country has begun to ease some travel curbs, lifting its entry ban on foreign travellers from Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and six other locations.
It is the first time Japan has lifted its entry ban on any region since the pandemic began, reflecting its growing confidence in managing the pandemic, on top of a necessity to revive its battered economy.
Neighbouring South Korea saw 97 new cases as of midnight on Sunday, much lower than its most recent triple-digit peaks in August and September. Its total caseload rose to more than 26,700, and the death toll reached 468, adding two more fatalities.
Despite the positive news, however, health authorities in many Asian remain wary about the situation.
South Korean officials are warning of growing clusters in the capital of Seoul and its surrounding Gyeonggi province. The government on Sunday said it would expand its mandatory mask policy to spas, malls, wedding halls and elsewhere from Nov 7 as part of new rules aimed at preparing for a prolonged pandemic.
Filipino authorities, too, are bracing themselves for more potential Covid-19 cases as rescue and evacuation operations due to Typhoon Goni prevent people from observing proper social distancing.
In India, health officials have warned against complacency as an upcoming Hindu festival season is forecast to bring a new cascade of Covid-19 cases.
Stocks popped Monday on the final trading session before Election Day, bouncing back from a bleak period of selling that plunged major indexes into weekly losses not seen since the initial U.S. coronavirus outbreak in March.
The Dow Jones industrial average gained more than 355 points, or 1.3%, at the open. The broader S&P 500 added 1.1% while the Nasdaq 100 climbed 0.9%.
The stock market rebound arrived as covid-19 infections are rapidly spreading across the country. On Friday, public health officials reported nearly 100,000 new cases, the most in a single day, as infections surge in many battleground states that may decide the outcome of the presidential election. Adding to the escalating public health crisis, investors have had to grapple with stalled negotiations in Washington for a coronavirus rescue package and corporate earnings that reflected greater uncertainty about the state of business operations in the quarters ahead.
Global markets climbed on Monday, even as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a second national lockdown over the weekend as rising infections in England were poised to overwhelm hospitals by the end of the year. Starting later this week and through early December, all nonessential shops, pubs, cafes, restaurants and gyms in England have been ordered to shut down. Grocery stores, child-care facilities, schools, colleges and universities will, however, remain open.
Several European governments, including economic powerhouses Germany and France have enacted curfews and other social and business restrictions to combat a spike in infections.
The German DAX is up 1.4%, France’s CAC increased more than 2% and the Pan-European Stoxx gained 1.9% during trading on Monday. Asian markets climbed as well, with the Shanghai inching up 0.02% and the Nikkei picking up 1.4% for the day.
All three major indexes in the U.S. finished the month of October in the red, marking the second consecutive month of losses. Analysts say that investors should expect volatility in the weeks ahead, as the outcome of the presidential election is decided and as the transmission of the virus coincides with dropping temperatures in much of the U.S. and with flu season.
The uncertainty over the election is complicated further by the various scenarios in which one major party may control the White House while the other controls one or both chambers of Congress. For months investors have closely watched talks between Senate Republicans, the White House and House Democrats over a coronavirus aid package. While Democrats have already passed a $2.2 trillion version last month, the GOP has insisted on a smaller deal. Analysts say that a Democratic sweep of Congress and the White House would lead to an even larger stimulus, while a Trump reelection or a Republican victory in the Senate would mean a smaller deal.
The timing of the next round of massive government spending will also play a major factor in the volatility in the markets, analysts say. Without a safety net for households and businesses until as late as February, in the case of a divided government or a lame-duck presidency, investors have expressed fears that the U.S. economic recovery may stumble through the winter months.
There are at least 129 accounts of what happened that day in Ocoee, and they vary wildly.
Some said the attack was a spur-of-the-moment reaction to a Black man trying to vote. Others said it had been carefully planned by White residents for weeks. Only a few Black folks were killed that day; or, dozens of bodies were piled into a mass grave. Every Black resident who survived fled the day after; or, survivors were harassed, threatened and cheated out of land for the next seven years until they all left.
This is what is certain: 100 years ago, on Nov. 2, 1920 – the same day women voted nationally for the first time – the worst instance of Election Day violence in American history unfolded in a small Florida town west of Orlando.
And the perpetrators got away with what they did for the rest of their lives. There are no roadside markers in Ocoee like you might find in Selma, Ala., no excavation projects to locate the purported mass grave like in Tulsa. Until recently, many descendants of survivors had no idea they were descendants of survivors, or that they had been robbed of a valuable inheritance long before they were born.
Now, after years of research, a new exhibit at the Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando has unearthed a crime long buried.
“Most of the people living in Ocoee don’t even know that this happened there,” said Pamela Schwartz, chief curator of the history center.
– – –
Ocoee was founded in the 1850s by a White man who brought 23 enslaved African Americans with him, Schwartz said. After the Civil War, many Confederate veterans resettled there, hiring Black laborers to work their land. Starting in 1888, many of those laborers were able to purchase the very acres they had been toiling over from their White employers, bringing them wealth and security often denied to Black folks in the Jim Crow South.
Census records indicate that in 1920, about one-third of the town of 800 was Black. Though it isn’t accurate to say Ocoee was integrated, there wasn’t a Blacks-only neighborhood across the proverbial tracks, the way you might find elsewhere in the South.
“It was interspersed. It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s a Black part of town, here’s a White part of town,'” Schwartz said. “These people were neighbors for 30 years before the massacre happened.”
After World War I ended in 1918, the same trends happening nationally took hold in Ocoee, too. Black veterans returned home expecting better treatment like they got in Europe, but white-supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan resurfaced to keep that from happening. Racist violence erupted all over the country in what became known as the Red Summer of 1919.
The fight for women’s suffrage further fueled those tensions. Many anti-suffragists argued that if women were permitted to vote, Black men might try to vote, too. Some suffragists denied this would happen, and some even argued that White women should be allowed to vote so they could act as a bulwark against any Black men who might try to exercise their rights.
In Ocoee, Black and White Republican leaders held clinics to show Black residents how to register to vote, pay a poll tax and cast a ballot. (The 24th Amendment banned poll taxes in 1962.)
A month before the election, two of the White leaders – attorney W.R. O’Neal and Judge John Cheney – received a threatening letter from the KKK. “We shall always enjoy WHITE SUPREMACY in this country and he who interferes must face the consequences,” it read. Across Florida – in Daytona, Jacksonville and Orlando – local KKK chapters held huge rallies to intimidate potential Black voters.
Florida may not spring to mind immediately when one thinks of the Jim Crow South, but in fact there were more lynchings there per capita than in any other state besides Mississippi, according to research by the Equal Justice Initiative. White Floridians used racial terror not just to intimidate voters, but also to discourage labor organizing in the orange groves and turpentine fields.
– – –
Despite the threats, a handful of Black residents in Ocoee, both men and women, showed up to the polls on Election Day. In the morning, they cast their ballots without incident, according to two accounts. But in the late afternoon, a Black labor broker named Moses Norman showed up to vote. Election officials told Norman that he hadn’t paid his poll tax. He said he had, but he was turned away. Norman sought help from Cheney, the White judge, who advised him to try again. Again, he was turned away.
It is unclear exactly how or why, but that was the spark that lit a racist inferno that burned Black Ocoee to the ground.
By the evening, a White mob had arrived from Orlando. A rumor spread that Norman was hiding out in the home of July Perry, a Black landowner and community leader in his early 50s who had been involved in the voter registration drive.
His house was surrounded by the mob. At some point, two White men were shot and killed – perhaps by Perry’s teenage daughter, perhaps by one another as they fired their weapons at the house. Then it went up in flames. So did a nearby AME church, where Norman and Perry were trustees, and at least two dozen other homes.
“Basically the options were leave and get shot, or stay and burn,” Schwartz said.
It may never be known exactly how many Black residents were killed that night. Newspaper accounts said six. Witnesses remembered many more, perhaps 30 or even 60. One person claimed two and a half “wagonloads” of Black bodies were dumped in a trench near a lake.
Research is ongoing, but Schwartz and her team have been able to confirm four. Three were unidentified burned bodies buried by a funeral home. The other was July Perry.
Amazingly, the Perrys made it out of the house alive. His wife and daughter were taken to a jail in Tampa. Perry, shot in the leg, was taken to a jail in Orlando. Within hours, a lynch mob pulled Perry from his cell, and he was brutalized and killed. His body was left hanging in front of Cheney’s Orlando home.
No one was ever held responsible for any of the deadly violence. Agents for the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) showed up a few weeks later, but they made it clear they weren’t investigating murder, arson or assault. They were only interested in election fraud.
The leader of the mob later became the mayor of Ocoee.
– – –
These days, Robert Hickey is a retired educator in New York. But in the late 1940s and 1950s, he was raised by his grandparents in Apopka, Fla., while his mother worked as a maid up north. Those grandparents, Lucy and John Hickey, didn’t like talking about what they had survived decades earlier, but over the years, he pieced it together.
John Hickey had owned a lot of land in and around Ocoee, from which he sold lumber and produced turpentine. He did so well that he would even lend money to White people, Hickey said.
On the night of the massacre, his grandmother “was standing on the front porch of their house and watched all these homes going up in flames,” Hickey said. “So as it got closer to them, they fled into the swamps.”
The couple hid with the two children they had at the time in a hole left by a pine tree until the next night. Then his grandfather hooked up a wagon and sent his wife and children to stay with friends in a neighboring town without him. As a man, he was more of a target, and he didn’t want his family to witness it if he got caught.
“She took the back roads to Apopka, and they were stopped by some White men on horses, but they allowed them to go forward,” Hickey said.
His grandfather walked through the forest and swamps and joined them a few days later.
Some people never returned to Ocoee after the massacre. But many did and tried to rebuild, only to be pressured into signing their land over to White people and leaving for good. Hickey’s grandfather bought one of his properties in 1911 for $200. A decade later, he “sold” it for $5. He moved with his family to Apopka and started over, eventually purchasing several houses that he rented to laborers in the orange groves.
But what happened in Ocoee stayed with him. “I could tell that something had happened to him that was really bad,” Hickey said of his grandfather. “He was very withdrawn.”
As part of their research, Schwartz and her team mapped out 44 properties lost by Black residents onto present-day maps, then valued them in today’s dollars. They also tracked down as many descendants of survivors as they could. They have held virtual tours of the exhibit for dozens of family members, and they’ve informed the families how much the stolen land is worth today.
That’s how Schwartz and Hickey met. His grandfather’s land, she told him, is now worth $750,000.
“I just heard this big sigh on the other end of the phone,” Schwartz said.
“A lot of people who were involved in the whole swindle were public officials,” Hickey said. “He earned it. He didn’t steal it, he didn’t take it, but it was stolen from him.”
Hickey said he spoke with a lawyer who represented descendants of the 1923 Rosewood massacre. A 1994 law has allowed hundreds of Rosewood descendants to attend Florida colleges tuition-free, one of the first examples of legislation making reparations to African Americans. Hickey wondered whether the law could apply to his family, since his grandparents experienced the same sort of terror inflicted on the residents of Rosewood in Ocoee. But the lawyer said no.
The properties that the history center has mapped so far are worth at least $10 million altogether.
Perry’s family was cheated out of his land, too. While his wife was still in jail in Tampa, she signed over the executorship of Perry’s land to Bluford Sims, a Confederate captain and Perry’s former employer. He posted an ad in the paper for “beautiful little groves belonging to the Negroes that have just left Ocoee.” After years of litigation, his children received about $100 each for land that sold for thousands.
– – –
Ocoee was a Whites-only “sundown” town until the 1970s. But Black folks in the region never forgot what happened there. In the late 1990s, a local activist group, the Democracy Forum, pressed for town halls about the massacre, some of which included descendants of the perpetrators.
“Sometimes the sentiment was, ‘It’s better to let sleeping dogs lie,'” Schwartz said.
Fifteen years later and 35 miles away, a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin was shot to death in Sanford, Fla., sparking the Black Lives Matter movement.
In 2017, members of the Democracy Forum approached the history center with its archive of the massacre. They also asked for a 100th anniversary commemoration in 2020.
In 2018, the city released a proclamation acknowledging the massacre. A formal apology to descendants is in the works, and the Florida legislature has passed a law requiring that the Ocoee Election Day massacre be taught in Florida schools.
The property where the AME church used to be is now a Mexican restaurant. The main road is named for Bluford Sims, although there’s a petition to change it. A newer house stands where Perry’s home used to be. When reached by a Washington Post reporter, the homeowner said he “didn’t know anything about that” before ending the call.
This past summer, as the history center put the final touches on its exhibit, the nation erupted in protest after the killing of another Black man. One evening, one of the staff members went to a Black Lives Matter protest in Orlando, where she was surprised to see a young man holding up a sign that read: “July Perry. Ocoee, Florida. November 2, 1920.”
– – –
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Jenkins and Samantha Schmidt contributed to this report.
In this warped year, Election Day is also our greatest sporting event. We cannot pretend a more significant or engrossing competition exists, cannot vanish into diversion, cannot enjoy our problems away. Even if we wished to, the people in sports wouldn’t let us.
This rare unification of sport and state doesn’t reflect, as President Trump claims, the athletes’ desire to overplay their hand and turn political. It is a necessary reaction to the troubling times: to the unabashed hatred, injustice and division coursing through the United States; to the senseless deaths and unfathomable suffering because of the wicked combination of police brutality and the raging novel coronavirus; to the intolerant and contemptuous behavior of Trump, who embodies and inflames so many societal ills.
For the past four years, Trump used sports in a way that no American political figure has ever thought to try. He attempted to demonize them because so many prominent figures disagreed with him. He’s instigated petty feuds with the likes of LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Megan Rapinoe and Colin Kaepernick. He went after the entire NFL for kneeling. He barked at the criticisms of journalist Jemele Hill. He also went as far as taking credit for the Big Ten returning to play football after initial coronavirus concerns.
To energize his base of supporters, Trump tried to belittle and divide a diverse and sheltered world of sports. Instead, he awakened, unified and mobilized some of the most competitive adversaries he has faced. He gave the politically agnostic among them just what they needed to activate: an opponent. Combine that with social issues that are chillingly personal to many athletes, and sports have been politicized in a more overt manner than ever before.
The result is bad for ratings, Trump likes to say. It could be worse for the president, however. It is his fault that sports are like this. Athletes didn’t just decide one morning to become what they hadn’t aspired, as a collective, to be. Trump targeted them, expecting an easy win. And the aggressive response has been far more controlled and strategic than he may have envisioned.
We’ll start to see the scoreboard Tuesday, but regardless of whether Trump or Joe Biden wins the election, there is no denying sports have played a role in fighting the incumbent’s unapologetic attempt to keep down voter turnout. While voter intimidation and suppression tactics remain a concern, there’s an inspiring energy and sense of mission about this election now, one that emphasizes public desire to be responsible stewards of a democracy. Every corner of the sports world has contributed to that effort. Since the return of sports in late July from a virus-forced hiatus, the message of “VOTE” has been on display almost as much as the score of the game.
Although it can be inferred that a majority of athletes want to vote out Trump and other politicians who seem unconcerned about the pandemic and systemic racism, most haven’t explicitly told people who to vote for, focusing instead on engagement. They pushed their teams to turn more arenas and stadiums into voting centers. Last week, Chris Paul, the National Basketball Players Association’s president, led about 2,500 people on a march to a North Carolina voting site.
Athletes have made simple, universal points: listen, learn, care, participate. They want people to be good citizens and vote. They want police to stop killing with impunity. They want to encourage humanity.
Shame on these unspoiled and selfless athletes.
In August, the NBA staged a strike after police shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., and it resulted in nearly all of sports pausing for a few days. After the league returned to play, then-Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers shared a direct, incisive thought about his sport’s role amid the societal agony.
“It isn’t the NBA’s job to change the world,” he said, “but it is the NBA’s job to be a part of the world.”
Sports relish insulation. The games are about escaping worlds. It’s not a privilege exclusive to fans. Actually, the participants disappear into the experience the most. At the highest levels, many athletes receive an opportunity to abandon poverty, to go from rags to riches. Then they escape to this new life of money and fame. Along the journey, the hall passes to exit real life keep coming. When leaders in the neighborhood see prospects with the talent to make it, they protect them. When they become essential to their schools’ success and prestige, rules and academic standards are sometimes massaged to accommodate them. When they make it big in the pros, they become so removed from reality that everyday tasks are handled and afternoon naps are an expectation, not a luxury.
Every step of the way, the insulation thickens. The bubble environments that the NBA, WNBA and NHL developed to complete their seasons were more than coronavirus-free fortresses. They were metaphors. In sports, it seems you can always build a wall.
But it’s not an impenetrable way of life. Extraordinary athleticism may provide insulation from issues of poverty and the failures of public education, but it doesn’t prevent a star from getting pulled over for driving while Black. It doesn’t keep the president from responding to their protests – their desperate pleas for the voiceless to be heard – by referring to one of them as a “son of a bitch” and saying they should be fired.
Trump picked the wrong fight, and there are hints of bigotry in the way he underestimated Black athletes and women of all races. He doesn’t believe in their empowerment. He thought they wouldn’t push back in a forceful manner, and if they did, he envisioned more of the extreme polarity and chaos he prompted while going after the NFL in 2017.
But the landscape is different now. Suffering is widespread and multifaceted, creating more pathways to empathy. And sports figures have adjusted, which is what they do best. Most of them spend their lives overcoming odds and accomplishing incredible feats. They spend their lives striving.
Trump didn’t respect their strength and resolve, and because of that, he inadvertently galvanized a source of tremendous, underutilized influence in America: the athlete. The Black athlete, in particular.
Such a movement has been building for nearly a decade in response to police brutality. But brazen racism created a level of urgency and commitment unprecedented in major American team sports leagues.
For sports, the motivation is not to flaunt political clout. Many players have admitted they are voting for the first time. Their franchise owners largely support Republican candidates. Some owners have thrown significant money toward Trump, but athletes haven’t yet targeted them. It’s proof that the sports world prefers to rest somewhere between apolitical and tolerant of ideological differences. It’s also proof that athletes are focused on how best to channel their influence.
“I’m not going to give my energy to that because it’s not surprising,” James said during the NBA Finals when asked about the discrepancy between the interests of players and owners. “My mom has always told me, ‘Control what you can control.’ And I can’t control that. What I can control is what I’m doing on my side and trying to have people gather around me and gather around my initiatives and doing what we’re doing to try to effect change, not only in our communities but outside our communities with the youth, and let them understand how important their voice is and their vote is to our society.
“It’s hard as hell, because they just don’t believe it. They don’t believe that their vote or their message or their minds or their voices matter. But that’s where my energy is, on continuing to push the envelope in my community, continue to let them know that they are the future, they are the reason why there will be change.”
Throughout history, civic leaders have been wise to use sports to unify and excite. The tradition includes trips to the White House, keys to the city, declarations of days celebrating some grand accomplishment, friendly bets between governors, photo opportunities. Feel-good stuff. But from the beginning of the Trump presidency, few in sports wanted to let a divisive president use them for grip-and-grin publicity.
Perhaps that offended Trump. So he became the villain and whined that he wasn’t allowed to be the hero. He has some support in the sports world, but overwhelmingly he is a foe. He is the most powerful human to scoff at concerns from athletes – reflecting the concerns of the communities they represent – about humanity.
Now, after four years of jawing and antagonism, the battle truly enters the political arena. Athletes are hoping they did their part to ignite voters in a way that Biden, a 77-year-old political lifer trying to represent change, could not accomplish alone. The early voting numbers suggest the nation will be engaged, and if so, that’s a victory for the democratic process, a victory that shamefully wasn’t assured because of presidential interference.
Trumpism has done much to incite and demoralize. The spirit within sports remains indomitable, however. It doesn’t mean the athletes will win, and if they do, it doesn’t mean they will prove to be a critical factor. But equality is a game that neither ends nor awards MVPs. It demands a constant desire to improve, defend and evolve. At this important moment, the pursuit found some ideal competitors from a sports world who could no longer justify staying cozy and insular.
By The Washington Post · Ruby Mellen · NATIONAL, WORLD, POLITICS The past four years have not always been an easy time to be an American overseas, and the run up to the 2020 presidential election is no exception.
International approval of the United States, according to a Pew survey of 13 countries, has spiraled to the lowest levels since the organization began tracking it. The trend has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. response to which has alarmed experts around the world and ground much international travel to a standstill, disrupting the lives of those split between countries. The chaotic election season has stoked perceptions of decline.
A half-dozen Americans based outside the United States told The Washington Post that a defining aspect of life abroad in recent times has been watching attitudes toward America shift. Yet they expressed a degree of happiness to be overseas for the election, watching from afar as fraught politics destroy friendships and strain families.
Those interviewed expressed relative investment in the election, echoing a broader trend: The U.S. Vote Foundation, a nonprofit voter assistance organization, told The Post that it had received a higher-than-normal influx of queries, as voters fret over making sure their ballots get counted amid consular disruptions and postal slowdowns. According to a report by Vice, nearly every state expects to see a year-over-year spike in turnout among overseas voters, typically a disengaged demographic.
Donald and Maria Williams, 77 and 78, who have voted in every U.S. presidential election since they retired and moved from Arkansas to Mexico 14 years ago, said they were especially worried that their vote would get lost or fail to arrive in time.
Normally, the couple would submit their ballots by means of a diplomatic pouch organized by the U.S. Consulate, bound for Washington, to be sent on via the U.S. Postal Service to their polling place in Little Rock. Not this year.
“We just didn’t trust what was going on with the Postal Service,” Donald Williams told The Post from their home in the town of Tizapan el Alto. Instead, they drove some 50 miles to the nearest FedEx store, in Guadalajara.
Many Americans overseas share their worries. The coronavirus pandemic has spurred a heightened demand for absentee ballots, a burden for the U.S. Postal Service, which has seen delays and errors in delivering ballots to polling places.
Although President Donald Trump has alienated many Mexicans over the past four years, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center – he launched his 2016 presidential campaign by smearing Mexican immigrants as rapists – the Williamses said that has not affected their relationships with Mexican neighbors.
Maria Williams moved to the United States from Germany when she was a teenager and still speaks with a strong German accent. Watching from south of the border, she cannot help but tie what’s going on in the United States to her childhood during World War II.
“With a German background – it’s been extremely difficult to see white supremacy on the rise in the United States,” she said.
Emily Newberg, 32, is also disturbed by what she sees back home, watching from her house in Popayán, Colombia. When Trump won in 2016, she was volunteering for earthquake relief efforts in Ecuador and has remained in Latin America ever since.
“Every day, every week, every month, every time you look at the news, there’s some new scandal, some new frustrating thing,” which makes the United States “more embarrassing,” she said.
She lives with her Colombian husband and their two young daughters in the country’s west, where she finds herself lying to taxi drivers about where she’s from.
“It’s like being embarrassed of your country instead of being proud of where you come from. I find it really challenging to be proud of the U.S.,” she said.
She categorizes herself as a “bad voter,” who skipped the 2016 election and plans to do so again. “My one vote’s not going to change it,” she said.
But she’s been following this year’s election as much as she can and encouraging friends back home in Illinois to vote.
She said she was baffled by the number of Colombians who still want to immigrate to the United States. “It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be,” she said she tells them.
For Rachel Grandi, 36, and her husband, Danny Budzinski, 35, who relocated to Amsterdam in 2017, where Budzinski works as a software engineer and Grandi works in alumni relations, having a baby in the Netherlands led to a realization: “There are things that are still a long way off for the U.S.”
Giving birth did not put her and her husband into debt, as it might have for some in the United States, Grandi said. But “you do get a little bit of bruised pride when people are making fun of your country,” she said. “People are laughing at us, and we deserve it.”
Grandi and Budzinski voted by mail this year. They were able to print out their ballots but received hard copies by mail, as well.
Daniel DeFossey, 41, based in Mexico City, who voted by fax, has built his identity in Mexico City on being an outsider. In 2013, the New York native started the Pinche Gringo, a chain of barbecue restaurants scattered through the Mexican capital, which grabbed headlines in 2016 for throwing huge watch parties for the presidential debates that drew American expats and Mexicans alike.
Four years later, inhibited by the pandemic, DeFossey cannot stage a repeat performance, but he has started a YouTube show aimed at explaining U.S. politics to Mexico. One September episode endeavored to make sense of the electoral college.
“I feel a bit safer” not being in the United States, DeFossey said. “I can live in Mexico and then feel like there’s not so much polarization. It’s not destroying families and friendships.”
Even from thousands of miles away, even across an ocean, it can be hard to disconnect from the U.S. news cycle – even if you’re not American.
“It’s weird that I’m all the way over here and I’m still like freaked out,” said Sharen Lena Treutel, 59, who lives on the Greek island of Santorini. She’s turned her Canadian and French friends there on to MSNBC.
“The level of respect has really gone down,” she said.
The Williamses, content in their small town in Mexico, have no desire to return to the United States, regardless of who wins the election. Travel grows harder as they grow older. But they said they never stop caring about the politics of the country they still call “home.”
“I will stay involved until the end,” Maria Williams said. “To me voting is not a privilege, it’s an obligation.”
By The Washington Post · Tim Elfrink · NATIONAL, POLITICS
In swing states around the country, Republicans are already gearing up legal challenges to the election results. Speaking on Sunday in one tightly contested battleground, President Donald Trump made it clear that he is also planning to quickly push the presidential contest into the courts.
“We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers,” Trump told reporters in Charlotte.
The president’s comments are among his most unambiguous yet that he is embracing an aggressive legal strategy in an election that has already been beset with a multitude of lawsuits.
Republicans have been mostly unsuccessful in their efforts to limit expanded voting options during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, The Washington Post reported, including in a Supreme Court decision last week allowing Pennsylvania and North Carolina to count ballots cast before Election Day but received days later.
Trump has repeatedly taken the Supreme Court to task for those decisions, a grievance he aired again Sunday evening amid a whirlwind trip of five rallies in five swing states.
“I happen to think it was a terrible decision for our country made by the Supreme Court,” Trump told reporters before his rally in Hickory, N.C. “And I think it’s a very dangerous decision.”
GOP strategists have now turned their attention to preparing to challenge the validity of individual ballots, an effort that Trump suggested Sunday would begin immediately after voting ends.
It’s not clear precisely where the president was promising a quick legal challenge. But his comments came amid a discussion of voting in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, where Trump alleged without evidence that extended deadlines to count mail-in ballots would lead to fraud.
“I think it’s terrible when we can’t know the results of an election the night of an election in a modern-day age of computers,” said Trump, before alleging that the Democratic governors of Pennsylvania and Nevada would somehow interfere with accurate counting.
He also suggested that voters were to blame by waiting too long to mail in ballots, although delivery delays by the U.S. Postal Service under a Trump-backed postmaster general have emerged as the biggest factor for most late arrivals.
“I don’t think it’s fair that we have to wait a long period of time after the election,” Trump said. “If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots long before. They could have put their ballots in a month ago.”
President Moon Jae-in speaks during a Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul, Tuesday. (Yonhap) ![Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor meets the press at Central Government Offices on Oct 27, 2020. [Photo by PARKER ZHENG/China Daily]](https://media.nationthailand.com//images/news/2020/11/03/30397235/800_72fdefdd316fe68.jpeg?v=1604371346)
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor meets the press at Central Government Offices on Oct 27, 2020. [Photo by PARKER ZHENG/China Daily] 
Foreign students attend an entrance ceremony for the University of Tokyo in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, in October 2012. (Yomiuri Shimbun file photo) 
Projected path of Goni storm. — Photo courtesy of the Vietnam Disasters Monitoring System 
Trump’s campaign /file photo 
President Trump/ file photo 
