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Opinion: Why the United States needs to stay in Afghanistan - DW (English)

A year ago, the US struck a deal with the Taliban — but it wasn't about Afghanistan. It was about Donald Trump and "America First," and the consequences have been catastrophic, writes DW's Sandra Petersmann.

On the table are, sadly, two very bad options: The withdrawal of all international troops by May 1, as agreed in the Doha accord, or the extension of the US-led intervention that began nearly 20 years ago.

I favor staying, and let me explain why. 

International soldiers will not win this war, nor will they bring peace. But they are an indispensable bargaining chip in the difficult peace negotiations underway in the Qatari capital.

Thirsty for power and recognition, the Taliban are demanding the end of foreign occupation and the easing of all sanctions against them. These are the only two levers the West has at its disposal to put pressure on the radical Islamist extremists to agree to a cease-fire and advance negotiations. 

Sandra Petersmann has been reporting on Afghanistan since 2001

Bitter truth about 'America First'

To put it bluntly, troop withdrawal and sanctions are not a panacea that will work overnight. People will continue to die in Afghanistan in the coming months as a result of terror and war. According to the UN, between October and December of last year alone, at least 30 civilians on average were killed or injured each day. 

This is the bitter truth of the "America First" policy. Former President Donald Trump took it to extremes with the Doha Accord. The narcissist desperately wanted to go down in history as the president who brought US troops home. He was all about ending America's longest war to win an election. But that plan backfired.

Trump was not the only one

Trump was not the first to decide on Afghanistan's fate based solely on domestic political considerations. "America First" began with the revenge-driven invasion after the 9/11 terror attacks. How else can we explain the United States and its Western allies' unsavory alliances with war criminals and human rights abusers (for example the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum) for the sake of hunting down al-Qaeda and punishing the Taliban? 

Germany's Bundeswehr has been on duty in Afghanistan for the past 20 years

The hasty invasion took no account of the Afghan civil war which began in 1978 and remains unresolved to this day. Nor did the intervention at least consider the wounds left by the Cold War and Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The military campaign was carried out without any regard for the dangerous role played in Afghanistan by regional states such as Pakistan, India and Iran. They, too, are igniting the Afghan battlefield with maximum national egoism.    

The German perspective

And that is why now — after 20 years of war for the US coalition and after a total of four decades of continuous war for the Afghan people — there are no better options on the table. 

America's allies, including Germany, will follow the beat of Trump successor, Joe Biden's administration. If the US goes, all coalition troops go. There are currently about 10,000 left in the country. If the Americans stay, NATO allies will stay. Germany currently has around 1,100 troops stationed in Afghanistan, making it the second-largest troop contributor after the United States.

But the Afghanistan mission is just as unpopular in Germany as it is in the US. Germans also question why the Bundeswehr is still on the ground. Germany is now facing a federal election, but the political elite in Berlin do not want to spoil their campaigns with the issue of Afghanistan — and they refuse to provide much-needed explanations to the public. Germany first!

High time for 'Afghanistan first'

It is time for truth: Those who invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago in an ill-considered manner should not pull out equally recklessly and deal a death blow to the young and however imperfect Afghan democracy — which was created by, and is totally dependent on, Western support. Dodging responsibility means admitting defeat. 

Afghanistan needs maximum pressure on the Taliban as well as on the divided, often corrupt government and the many warlords. It needs maximum political and diplomatic involvement of all the major regional states and the other two global powers, Russia and China. This will be strenuous and dangerous.

But those who still refuse to put the necessary strength, willpower and patience into an "Afghanistan first" policy risk further displacing a terrorized Afghan population from their homeland — an outcome that will also have consequences for the rest of the world.

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Biden's tricky tango with Congress - CNN

That is a useful frame for trying to make sense of the dramas that proliferated on Capitol Hill this week as Congress took up multiple nominations to President Joe Biden's Cabinet and held its first hearing on the January 6 insurrection. As Garber notes, the translation of individual traits into a "national character" most often occurs at "times of stress, as a marker not so much of social progress as of social and cultural anxiety."

We saw this. Conviction and commitment (and the lack of same), and in darker terms, eccentricity, hypocrisy and excuses made for bad behavior were on full display on the nation's highest political stage.

Dismissing hypocrisy with a laugh is part of what has left America's political discourse vulnerable to infiltration by dangerous conspiracy theories, wrote Frida Ghitis, reacting to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson's remarks during hearings about the violent Capitol riots. He suggested, citing multiple discredited claims, that the day had a "jovial," "festive" tone and that the assault had been a false-flag operation. As Ghitis pointed out: "That conspiracy theories exist and are spreading is not news, but hearing them uttered by a US senator during an official congressional hearing marks a new low, one that demands we sit up and take notice." And because tens of millions of Americans "believe the same thing[s]... by uttering that poisonous nonsense from the halls of Congress, Johnson is pumping more fuel into a dangerous fire."

While no huge new revelations emerged during Tuesday's testimony about the US Capitol riots, the hearing sharpened the contours of the story, bringing into focus staggering security, defense and leadership failures, Jill Filipovic observed: "There was no shortage of finger-pointing and blame-passing, but one big takeaway was clear: We've barely scratched the surface of what happened on one of the most ignominious days in American history."

Meanwhile, Biden Cabinet nominees Neera Tanden (Office of Management and Budget), Deb Haaland (Interior) and Xavier Becerra (Health and Human Services) came under fierce questioning from Republicans, putting the focus on the need for support from key moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema if they are to be confirmed. In Tanden's case, the fate of her nomination was in doubt at week's end. Andrea González-Ramírez, writing for Gen, noted of the nominees, all of whom would be history-making firsts in their positions if confirmed: "I saw a familiar pattern develop. Regardless of their actual record and without even having a chance to discuss it, nominees of color ... have been painted as 'famously partisan' people with 'radical' ideas." (González-Ramírez, joining a huge portion of the internet, also mentioned the hypocrisy of going after anyone in the Biden administration for "mean" tweets, given the behavior of the previous administration.)

More smart takes:

SE Cupp: Marjorie Taylor Greene is in Congress to get famous

Thomas Balcerski: What Biden and Pelosi can learn from a 1941-1942 presidential commission

Going big on relief

Some pandemic-era unemployment benefits are set to expire March 14, and the House kicked into high gear this week to advance the Biden administration's $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package—which included a provision to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from $7.25. On Saturday the House passed the relief bill -- and the minimum wage hike, though that will be stripped out in the Senate version after a ruling by the Senate parliamentarian. Colleen Doody wrote in the Washington Post's "Made By History" that much of the debate on that issue leaves out an important historical point borne out by the original New Deal minimum wage legislation: "The basic idea: Raising wages would increase consumption, thus giving businesses the incentive to hire more workers. It worked, reminding us today that mandating higher wages doesn't just increase standards of living. It boosts the economy."

The relief bill now heads to the Senate. Writing for CNN Business Perspectives, economist Joseph Stiglitz argued that "Congress must pass this legislation or risk an anemic and devastatingly incomplete recovery." In the Washington Post, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman took issue with the package as overly massive and insufficiently bipartisan: "The Biden administration's partisan approach repeats the same mistake that Barack Obama made early in his presidency. It sets the wrong tone for the beginning of a new administration and risks undermining other bipartisan efforts going forward."

A pandemic turning point?

On the grim milestone of 500,000 Covid deaths, CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner offered a reminder that big lies can be deadly: "The January 6 attack on the United States Capitol was a vivid demonstration of the havoc that can result when a really big lie is repeatedly injected into the body politic. But there was another big lie in 2020, also propagated by former President Donald Trump...a lie that systematically downplayed the severity of Covid-19 and the utility of face masks, and very likely resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans." The pandemic's cost isn't limited to lives lost; it also includes a tally of lives broken beyond repair. Writing in the New York Times, nurse Theresa Brown shared harrowing stories of nurses across the country whose careers and existences are crumbling under the onslaught of unyielding and traumatizing demands.

As vaccine efforts continued, Bhaskar Chakravorti described how expanding accessibility to modern technology could make the rollout more equitable as Black Americans continue to bear the brunt of the pandemic: "Black households tend to have less access to computers and the internet compared with White households. ...The digital divide only exacerbates the issue of equitable access to public health. The first step to fixing this inequity is acknowledging that Covid-19 is more than a public health crisis and an economic crisis. It is also an information crisis." Kent Sepkowitz, also a CNN medical analyst, wrote about life after receiving both doses of the vaccine and the questions it raises: What can I do now? What should I not do? "For me," he reflected, "the answer is clear.... The best advice, alas, is what the CDC is pushing: continue to hunker down and keep on doing what you're doing."

More key insights:

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Sheila Davis: Bring on the reinforcements: The workers who could get us through this crisis

Kathy Giusti: What Covid can teach us about cancer

Dr. Megan Ranney: I'm worried the Olympics can't be made safe against Covid

Trump has CPAC, but Biden has kryptonite

The American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference was one of the first big GOP stages to set its lights for Donald Trump. The defeated former president, under pressure after the Supreme Court gave the Manhattan DA access to his tax returns and banned from Twitter, is making this year's conference -- themed "America Uncanceled" -- the site of his first major public address since he left the White House.

For Dean Obeidallah, CPAC's invitation to Trump was itself a clear signal that conservatives and Republicans are trying to sell a new "Big Lie": that assaulting democracy through post-election lies and incitement to insurrection isn't that big a deal -- "or worse, such conduct is acceptable in pursuit of political power."

One key aspect of CPAC: It's sure to put a spotlight on the MAGA side of the intra-squad tension among Republicans over whether they should remain the Party of Trump. Former RNC chair Richard Bond explored how those factions have warred within the life and career of a single lawmaker: Lindsey Graham, whose whipsawing transformation from voice of reason to sycophant reveals him to be, in Bond's estimation, the consummate "political opportunist [who] has placed his desire for power above his own professed standards of decency."

According to Julian Zelizer, Trump's CPAC appearance gives Biden a unique opportunity to counter Trump's likely bluster -- by not reacting. "Starting this weekend, the President can deliver the kind of political blow that hurts Trump more than anything else — he can ignore him. Indifference is Trump's kryptonite. If Biden can pull it off...this will leave him on the strongest political ground."

Another smart take:

Jennifer Rodgers: On Trump's taxes, here's where it gets interesting

Biden's global challenges

On Friday, the Biden administration released a long-anticipated intelligence report on the gruesome death in 2018 of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The report found Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for the killing, but Biden declined to take any direct action against him. In so doing, affirmed Peter Bergen, Biden's administration is reflecting the reality of a longtime marriage of convenience between Washington and Riyadh: "the new administration is hoping a mere rebuke and a slap on the wrist will be enough to signal the changing tides of US foreign policy after the Trump administration. At the same time, the Biden administration wants to maintain an alliance that has served both countries' interests reasonably well for the better half of the last century."

With an airstrike Thursday against Iran-backed Syrian militias, Biden signaled in a measured and direct way -- more than his previous two predecessors -- that Iran can no longer use militias in Syria and Iraq as proxies to attack western, especially American, interests anywhere in the region, argued David Andelman. He wrote: "If the administration's posture in the region remains one of reasoned but consistent toughness, Iran may restrain itself from any tit-for-tat retaliation and response. It may now understand the price it could pay for failing to respond to US overtures at diplomacy -- and continuing to back those militias."

More sharp commentary:

Michael Eisner and Abdullah Alaoudh: How Biden can strike a blow against Saudi Arabia's human rights violations

Amed Khan: What Biden should do about China's atrocities against the Uyghurs

The time is now to confront hate

As the disturbing rise in violence against Asian Americans continues, former federal prosecutor Shan Wu argued that prosecutors need to charge anti-Asian violence as hate crimes to effectively deter future racists from inflicting pain not just on the victim but on the entire Asian American community. Prosecutors are often reluctant to charge hate crimes because they don't want to risk losing, Wu wrotes, but "having hate crime laws on the books and not using them undermines confidence in the criminal justice system far more because it sends the message that hate crimes do not really matter."

Bigotry and hatred in our history, unless rooted out and fully addressed, leave toxic traces that cannot heal. As the US contends with its Confederate monuments and slavery-built past, wrote Lev Golinkin, the nation must also reckon with its role in allowing some Nazi and Nazi collaborators to seek refuge here after World War II. Golinkin wrote: "We're in the middle of a heated national conversation fueled by a hunger for racial justice. But how can we hope to acknowledge the impact of centuries-old institutions like slavery and Jim Crow when we can't be honest about coddling perpetrators of the Holocaust, which still has living eyewitnesses, victims and veterans? We can't get to 1619 if we can't get past 1945."

The problem with comfort zones

This is the last weekend of Black History Month, and US House majority whip Rep. James Clyburn took stock of the sobering challenges Americans face: the pandemic, chronic economic insecurity, growing racial divides and gender inequities. Clyburn made a passionate case that getting beyond this difficult moment requires all of us to reflect on moments in Black history when people got out of their comfort zones to help make America better: "We may feel safe and secure remaining inside our bubble interacting only with those who look and think like us. But doing so risks living in echo chambers and insular existences."

How to bridge the gaps between those echo chambers is one goal of "Renegades: Born in the U.S.A.," a new podcast with former President Barack Obama and rock superstar Bruce Springsteen. And while their "conversations across the divide" approach may work for these two legends, observed Nicole Hemmer, they don't "truly reckon with the structures and forces that are eroding American democracy, nor get at the deeper challenges around race and justice in the US." The show "feels like it's doing the hard work of thinking about race," noted Hemmer, and the problem is "that will suffice for people whose primary goal is to feel like they're doing that work." Actually getting the change made is another matter entirely.

More on Black History Month:

Peniel Joseph: We can finally meet the real Malcolm X

Terence Moore: What Tiger Woods means to Black America

Don't miss these

Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva: Attacking Joe Biden's dog Champ is a low blow

Persis Yu: Big student loan debt is not a 'Harvard, Yale, Penn' problem

Richard Thompson Ford: The fashion police are judging you on Zoom

Catherine Clinton: Why Mary Lincoln is as controversial as ever

Suzanne Russo: Texas goes it alone on electric power. That's actually a good thing

Allison Hope: Potato Head is getting with the times. So should Congress

The Beat legend who was the hive and the honey

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died this week at 101, was the center of a literary revolution, remembered Tess Taylor. As a poet, the founder of City Lights and City Lights Press—respectively, a bookstore that democratized literature as the first to sell only paperbacks and a press that fought for free speech in its publication and defense in court of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" -- Ferlinghetti was the crux of an ecosystem of poetry and culture that fostered generations of poets, including Taylor, and built a California world where words could thrive for all.

Wrote Taylor: "Here was not only a poet but a movement. Here was a hive and honey. Whether we ever wrote poetry like Ferlinghetti, or like the Beat Poets he championed, or like the formalist poet Marie Ponsot, who he also championed, he had made more spaces to which we could respond, as if the web of connections he had built simply made more oxygen in the air."

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Opinion: Connecticut’s new COVID-19 vaccine plan puts my family at risk - Hartford Courant

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Opinion: What issues are most important to you? The new opinion editor is asking - The Columbus Dispatch

Opinion/Commentary: Diverse Cabinet sends a strong message - The Daily Progress

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Opinion: Gov. Abbott’s call for winterization misses the breadth of our needs - Houston Chronicle

In his televised address Wednesday night, Gov. Greg Abbott expressed sympathy for Texans who suffered in homes without power, heat and water. He said they deserve answers and vowed immediate actions. But the governor’s answers miss the mark.

Gov. Abbott announced investigations of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — ERCOT — which manages the state’s electric grid. But he left out agencies that manage gas and water systems that failed us, too. We need to take on the full challenge in front of us. If, after this massive failure, we settle for some minor tinkering, we will set ourselves up for more disasters. First, let’s look at the governor’s call to action.

He called for the Legislature “to mandate and to fund the winterization of the Texas power infrastructure,” to protect it from future winter events. But winterization alone doesn’t protect us from the full range of extreme events that Texas can face. In a warming climate, we will more often face extreme heat, drought, hurricanes and floods than repeats of winter events. Climate science remains unclear whether arctic blasts will become more common, but we know that heat and precipitation extremes are becoming more severe.

We shouldn’t focus only on freeze failures. We have to anticipate future disasters. We must weatherize, not winterize.

From the Editorial Board

Reliable and resilient energy and water systems must prepare for a full spectrum of extremes, not just winter events. Some winterization investments, such as de-icing equipment for wind turbines, protect against freezes but reduce power output during the summer, when we’re more likely to need it most. By contrast, investments in efficiency and better transmission within and beyond the state would benefit us throughout the year, but not count as winterization.

Moreover, by calling to “protect our power grid,” the governor ignored the other systems that failed us. The freeze revealed the vulnerabilities and interdependence of three systems — power, gas and water. Failures in the gas supply and electric power outages cascaded upon each other because we rely too heavily on gas to make power and use power to move gas. Our water systems failed for lack of electricity while backup generators froze up.

Preventing future crises will require recognizing that the freeze failures extended beyond the power grid to gas and water systems as well.

And we must build out a more diversified portfolio of power sources, including more renewables linked with more robust transmission, rather than relying so heavily on the gas supply systems that failed us.

The governor’s call to “mandate and fund” winterization is troubling too. Who will fund those actions? Will we once again socialize the costs of our energy systems, while privatizing the gains? That would be especially galling after gas and power producers landed windfall profits while failing to provide us enough energy when we needed it most.

This leads to the big question many of our leaders are doing all they can to avoid. The United States — along with other countries that have signed the Paris climate agreement and a growing number of energy companies and banks — have set aggressive targets to transition away from fossil fuels. Those targets could turn gas plants and supply lines winterized at taxpayer expense into stranded assets.

Gas is often called a “bridge fuel” from coal to renewable energy and a “firm” resource available whenever we need it. But the freeze failures revealed the urgency of crossing that bridge and constructing more resilient systems beyond it.

Texas is known for its weak governor system of government. The governor’s speech was indeed weak. It’s time for the state Legislature and Public Utilities Commission to step up and deliver the solutions we need to make our energy and water systems more reliable, clean, affordable and resilient throughout the year.

Cohan is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.

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Opinion: Saudi crown prince has blood on his hands - DW (English)

Washington has made a U-turn in its relations with Saudi Arabia after a CIA report made it very clear what role the crown prince played in journalist Jamal Khashoggi's murder in 2018, says DW's Rainer Sollich.

In the wake of Friday's publication of the CIA report detailing Saudi involvement in the murder of journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi, the last doubts have now been dispelled: Khashoggi's 2018 murder in Istanbul was approved, if not ordered, by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

It was not the work of a hit squad that lost control without the knowledge and consent of those at the top, as the Saudi royal family would still like the world and its own citizens to believe.

Rainer Sollich heads DW's Arabic department

New low for Saudi Arabia

It is now plain that MBS, as the crown prince is known, bears full responsibility for one of the cruelest political crimes in recent decades. Khashoggi was lured into a trap and killed because the rulers in Riyadh disliked his unrelenting criticism of the Saudi royal family in US publications.

Later, his body was dismembered, probably with a saw, and dissolved in acid. This particularly vile mafia-esque murder brought Saudi Arabia's reputation, in the region and worldwide, to a new low. It was a blatant violation of humanity that was completely unjustifiable and should never be accepted by the world.

Biden will isolate MBS

The heir to the Saudi throne and de facto ruler does have some merits: a modest, yet recognizable, liberalization of society, including the noticeable improvement in the role played by women in society. Many young Saudis see the crown prince as a bearer of great hope, and some worship him like a pop star.

But Mohammed bin Salman has another side, which is much more serious in moral terms. There is literally blood on his hands — not only that of Khashoggi, but also that of the many innocent people killed by Saudi airstrikes on schools or apartment buildings in the ongoing war in neighboring Yemen.

Former US President Donald Trump was fully aware of all this, but still protected MBS and touted him as a model partner in the Middle East. Trump's successor, Joe Biden, will now attempt to isolate the Saudi crown prince politically, with the help of the CIA report, and will try to reset relations between the two countries by placing a stronger emphasis on human rights.

But Biden has so far shied away from direct sanctions against MBS, whom many EU states have long treated as a persona non grata. There is a clear danger: With MBS at its helm, Saudi Arabia risks a permanent fate as a pariah state and thus a weakening of its own interests.

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The court of international public opinion long ago found MBS guilty over Khashoggi murder. The US has just caught up - CNN

A Turkish intelligence audio recording captured the moments inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul that Saudi government agents drugged, suffocated and dismembered the 59-year-old Washington Post columnist.

In the 879 days since, the only geopolitical question of consequence is what role Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials MBS, played in his death.

Two years ago, the CIA concluded with a high degree of confidence that MBS personally ordered the killing but gave no more detail.

The Crown Prince has denied that he ordered Khashoggi's murder but has said that he bears responsibility. "This was a heinous crime," he said in an interview with CBS in 2019. "But I take full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia, especially since it was committed by individuals working for the Saudi government."

Trump dismissed the CIA assessment and defended MBS. During his administration, US intelligence officials never spoke publicly or presented evidence about the murder. He even boasted that he saved MBS's "ass" to biographer Bob Woodward, who writes in his book "Rage" that Trump also boasted that "I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop."

However, his successor, Joe Biden, has no love of MBS. On the campaign trail he said senior Saudi leaders should be made "the pariah that they are."

The drum roll to the apparent denouement of the saga has been building since Biden was declared America's 46th president. So, on Friday, in keeping with his "recalibration" of relations with Saudi and upholding US law, expectations of MBS's comeuppance were high as Biden's director of national intelligence published the long-awaited report.

Report upsets Saudis

Its authors "assess" that MBS "approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill" Khashoggi, but the report does not offer a smoking gun revealing irrefutable evidence of the Kingdom's de-facto day-to-day ruler's precise malfeasance.

But the circumstantial evidence presented by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's report is profound.

MBS's "control of decision-making in the Kingdom," his "absolute control" over the Kingdom's intelligence and security operations, the "direct involvement of a key adviser and members of bin Salman's protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince's support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi" make it "highly unlikely" it could have gone ahead without his "authorization," and contribute to the authors' conclusion of his guilt.

And this is upsetting the Saudis. The Foreign Ministry released a terse statement, saying: "It is truly unfortunate that this report, with its unjustified and inaccurate conclusions, is issued while the Kingdom had clearly denounced this heinous crime."

They are particularly aggrieved that allegations target the Crown Prince. The Saudi narrative holds it was his subordinates who messed up and misinformed each other. In their words, "This was an abhorrent crime and a flagrant violation of the Kingdom's laws and values. This crime was committed by a group of individuals that have transgressed all pertinent regulations and authorities of the agencies where they were employed."

In December 2019, Saudi authorities said they investigated 11 suspects in Khashoggi's murder. In a closed-door trial eight were found guilty, of whom five were sentenced to death. Ultimately, they were all given jail time.

The highest profile defendants however -- two of them close confidants of MBS -- had their charges dismissed, none of which aligns with the new intelligence report that also blames those closest to the Crown Prince.

If Biden thought he could get through his recalibration without a small rupture, he may have to reassess. Not only is the tone of Riyadh's fury atypically harsh, it has also been fast. Saudi ministries are historically flat-footed on communications, but they always listen to the Crown Prince.

Hurry to diversify

The tough truth for MBS is that the court of international public opinion found him guilty long ago. The flip side is that the King picked him to reform the country, where he remains fairly popular, so he is not about to leave office.

In private, Saudi officials acknowledge MBS's international image is permanently "tarnished," but it was darkening long before Khashoggi's murder. His war in Yemen and the shakedown of about 200 allegedly corrupt princes and businessmen inside Riyadh's plush five-star Ritz Carlton hotel in November 2017 put his reputation under a cloud.

Earlier this month, Biden announced that "we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arm sales," and said he will appoint an envoy to focus on the long-standing conflict.

MBS wants to be known as the Kingdom's modernizer, in a hurry to diversify the economy, deliver jobs and realize the ambitious social change embedded in his "vision 2030." To do that he needs investors, and in the years since his early turbulence they've been starting to come back.

Off the back of the new intelligence report, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken announced a "Khashoggi Ban," imposing visa restrictions or 76 Saudis "believed to have been engaged in threatening dissidents overseas, including but not limited to the Khashoggi killing." And Janet Yellen's US Treasury Office has imposed sanctions on Saudi's former Deputy Head of General Intelligence Presidency and Saudi Arabia's Rapid Intervention Force, or "Tiger Squad," the crown prince's personal protective detail and, according to the Treasury, "involved" in Khashoggi's murder.

Both Biden and MBS are in a bind. The cost for either of disengagement could be high, not least for MBS in an ally ready to defend the Kingdom, and an army of reliable investors looking for no-nonsense commercial contracts.

Without Saudi, Biden not only loses leverage over Iran, and military influence in the region, he opens the door for his major adversary China, or Russia, to score a strategic jackpot and chip away at the heart of US hegemony in the Gulf.

There are no easy or good options, which could explain why Biden is not sanctioning the Crown Prince, and why the long-awaited intelligence report was so short on detail.

Even so, the Kingdom has been put on notice by Blinken, who warned that "we have made absolutely clear that extraterritorial threats and assaults by Saudi Arabia against activists, dissidents, and journalists must end. They will not be tolerated by the United States."

But Blinken's threat is a double-edged sword: Biden is now hostage to the red line too. As hard as it was to thread US national interests through the eye of Saudi alleged perfidy once, it will be a whole lot harder if MBS is judged to have fallen foul of US standards again.

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Sexual violence survey sparks discourse over sexual assault on college campuses - Kent Wired

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Opinion | Getting the Unemployed Back to Work - The New York Times

Economic growth is the primary corrective for unemployment, but targeted aid can help people find jobs more quickly.

Millions of Americans are approaching a grim anniversary: one year without paid work.

Many of those who lost jobs in the explosion of layoffs last March, and in the subsequent months, are still trying to find new work. Roughly 8 million fewer Americans are working today than at this time last year, just before the coronavirus gripped the economy.

Unemployment is traumatic. Studies of unemployed workers, including recent work on the 2008 financial crisis, find that joblessness takes a toll on physical and mental health, frays personal relationships and even undermines the future earnings of jobless workers’ children. The evidence also shows the damage caused by unemployment compounds with time.

As the pain of unemployment rises, so does the difficulty in finding new work.

Sidelined workers begin to lose their networks. They struggle to stay current. Their unused skills atrophy. A particularly striking study of Swedish workers published in 2008, for example, found declines in reading comprehension among those unemployed for long stretches.

Stronger economic growth will be sufficient to help many people get back to work. After the 2008 crisis, experts who argued that long-term unemployment might be irreversible proved to be wrong. In a strong labor market, employers are willing to take risks, to invest in training, to tolerate learning curves and otherwise do what is necessary to find workers.

But given the high cost of unemployment, there is a powerful case for the government to help people find work quickly, even if they might eventually find jobs on their own.

There is also reason to worry that relying on growth may not be good enough.

Job losses during the pandemic have been concentrated among low-wage workers. The Federal Reserve estimates that among American workers in the bottom fifth of the wage distribution, unemployment may have climbed as high as 20 percent.

Some of those low-wage workers are particularly vulnerable to replacement by automation, and recessions tend to provide employers with both the opportunity and the incentive to experiment with new ways of doing business. The M.I.T. economists David Autor and Elisabeth Reynolds argued in an analysis last year that the crisis could reduce the need for some kinds of low-wage workers, like those who serve business travelers.

Even as experts predict that the economy will be reshaped by this crisis, the pandemic is making it harder for workers to learn new skills. Comparing the current recession to the financial crisis of 2008, the Pew Research Center found that a larger share of American workers now say they’re considering seeking work in a different field, but that the share of workers who are actually pursuing training in another field has declined.

Retraining workers sounds like a good answer to unemployment, and the government has a long history of throwing money into training. But much of that money has been wasted.

Penny-pinching is a common problem. States often tout “tuition-free” programs that cover only a part of the actual cost of obtaining an education. Effective training also requires care and persistence. Programs work best when they are tailored to meet the specific needs of employers, when states ride herd on providers to ensure students are actually learning useful skills, and when states work with students to bridge the gap between finishing a degree and starting a job.

The Biden administration did not include funding for retraining programs in its $1.9 trillion coronavirus package. That is a mistake Congress can correct. There is an opportunity to reprise the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program for public schools by requiring states to compete for funding by developing evidence-based job training programs.

Even effective training programs, however, don’t create jobs — they create qualified workers. The benefits accrue only if the government also gets the big picture right, by bringing the coronavirus under control, pumping money into the economy and keeping interest rates low.

The government can also help to drive job creation by delivering the kind of major investment in infrastructure that both political parties have been talking about for years. President Biden has said he will present his version of such a plan in the coming weeks. The case for infrastructure spending doesn’t rest on high unemployment. Pumping federal money into green energy projects and bridge repairs and lead abatement is an investment in the future. But the jobs are nice too.

Another intriguing way to help workers, which can be deployed in combination with training, is to subsidize job creation by supplementing wages for new hires.

In 2009 and 2010, the federal government spent $1.3 billion to place about 260,000 low-income people in jobs, temporarily paying about 80 percent of their wages. The Obama administration also started 13 longer-term experiments on a smaller scale, offering wage subsidies to reduce unemployment among groups that struggle to find jobs.

In a final analysis published last year, the government concluded that some of the programs had produced sustained increases in employment and earnings. There were other benefits, too, like stabilizing homes for children and reducing criminal activity. Other programs didn’t work, and on the whole the economic gains were smaller than proponents had hoped. But as with the failures of training programs, policymakers now know more about how to build better programs.

Britain is continuing to refine the use of subsidies. The government has introduced a program, the “Kickstart Scheme,” aimed at preventing people between the ages of 16 and 24 from falling into long-term unemployment. It has committed 2 billion pounds to provide employers with a subsidy equivalent to the minimum hourly wage for up to 25 hours a week for as long as six months.

Congress also could provide funding for another round of experiments in the United States, building on the lessons learned after the last crisis.

The United States doesn’t have a proven strategy for minimizing long-term unemployment. Unfortunately, a clear case for action is not the same as knowing what to do. But uncertainty does not justify inaction. The way to help as many people as possible is to build on past successes and to improve on past failures. Since this will not be the last economic crisis, by next time the government may have learned what is necessary to help people return to work.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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Opinion: Protecting the Chesapeake requires investment in wastewater treatment - The Virginian-Pilot

Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

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Potato Head is getting with the times. So should Congress - CNN

Hasbro has announced it is dropping the gendered honorific "Mr." from the brand name of its popular Potato Head toy. The move, a seemingly innocuous one that follows in the inclusive footsteps of other brands like Mattel and Target, has sparked the fury of the internet mob once again exposing its ugly underbelly of anti-LGBTQ hate.

It's a child's toy. It's -- let's get real -- a potato. Why such an overreaction? We all know the answer.

But for an additional reminder, we turn to Congress, which is having a slightly elevated, though at times inane, misinformed and Mr. Potato Head-level, debate about whether to extend equal protections for LGBTQ people though the passage of the Equality Act.

The sweeping legislation would extend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to add sexual and gender identity to the list of protected classes. It would close gaping holes that exist in more than half the states, which marginalize LGBTQ people in their laws. It remains perfectly legal in many of these states to kick someone out of their house or public space or deny them services, including health care, simply because of who they are or who they love. The Equality Act acknowledges that discrimination against LGBTQ Americans is a national crisis that requires federal action.

The US House of Representatives passed the bill 224-206 on Thursday, and it now goes on to the Senate, where its future is uncertain for a few reasons.

Congressman Mark Pocan (D-WI), co-chair of the LGBTQ Equality Caucus, expressed one of them well when he scrapped his prepared speech on the House floor during the vote and said, "I was going to talk about the need for equal treatment under the law for everyone regardless of who they love. Human kindness. Respect for others. Pretty basic stuff," he said. "But the new QAnon vibe in this body has gone too far."

Pocan was referring to Georgia Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene's egregious stunt earlier that day: she taped an anti-transgender sign outside of her office, a bullying response to her colleague, Illinois Rep. Marie Newman, who had hung a transgender pride flag outside on the door of her office across the hall in honor of her daughter, who is transgender.

While Greene's conduct was out of step with that of most adult public figures who purport to respect at least some level of decorum, her sentiment is sadly not far off from the positions expressed by some transphobic politicians and their supporters.

We heard them during the House floor debates for the Equality Act—they are familiar to LGBTQ advocates and community members. They go like this: If we are allowed access to the health care we need, and to adopt children who need homes, buy the wedding cake, feel affirmed and safe in school and in everyday life -- that will somehow open up the floodgates for people to "take advantage" and cheat their way into sports and bathrooms with the intent of harming others. It's the 2021 version of the repulsive canard that gay people are incipient pedophiles.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), for example, who spoke on the House floor during the bill's debate, said, "As someone who enjoyed playing sports and coaching high school track for many years, imagining the damage these policies will cause to women and girls is heartbreaking."

The debates that took place on the House floor this week are only a stale rehashing of faulty gender panic. They have played out in local legislatures for years, decades even. The same false utterances -- the ones that exploit the public's lack of exposure to and understanding of transgender people and gender identity and expression -- are likely to come in the Senate soon, and they may well derail the bill's passage. Sen. Mitt Romney, for example, has said that he can't support the bill because it has no religious carveouts.

For another clue as to what opposition might look like, see Rand Paul's transphobic attack aimed at President Joe Biden's nominee for assistant health secretary, Dr. Rachel Levine, who is transgender, during her confirmation hearing this week. No small potatoes.

But any Republican senators who plan to take this discriminatory tack are not "reading the room" in 21st-century America. They need look no further than their most important stakeholders, our nation's children, for a reality check about gender identity. I hereby invite them over to my living room (masks on, please) to observe my own toddler at play.

My 3-year-old happily swaps Potato Head's features and attire -- a mustache and a purse, high heels -- without any regard for assigned gender roles. Lipstick looks cool with facial hair, and so does an extra arm coming out of the nose hole. My kid uses gender pronouns interchangeably and we read books and talk about how some people might feel like boys, others like girls, some like both, some like neither. Others yet, feel more like girls sometimes and boys or something else other times.

A recent Gallup poll revealed that more Americans identify as LGBTQ than ever before -- 5.6% or 18 million -- including one in six Gen Zers. It's entirely possible that the number is higher, as some are understandably reluctant to share their truth.

What's more, it's not just people who identify as LGBTQ who care about gender inclusion. More than half of Gen Z thinks official forms and the like should include gender options beyond just male or female, according to Pew. More than one-third of Gen Zers know someone who uses a gender-neutral pronoun.

My kid even gets it. It's not any more complex than that. One day, they will scratch their head about why so many people punish others simply because of how they identify or dress or what toys they play with.

The future is gender-neutral and gender-inclusive and we all need to get used to it.

The truth is, if you have never felt forced into a gender category or treated a certain way because of it -- which doesn't just mean LGBTQ people -- then you might not understand what's at stake here. If you have been told -- in a job or opportunity or social encounter -- that your attire or your gait or your weight or your tone don't match what they're looking for you may well have been a victim of gender policing. If you have ever been made to feel like you aren't worthy because of some trait or habit or passion that is deemed appropriate for others, you may well have been a target of gender bias.

If you've ever brought home a paycheck lower than someone with the same qualifications but different genitalia, you have a very good reason to make the fight for gender neutrality your own.

If signed into law, the Equality Act would extend protections to all LGBTQ Americans, from Portland to Miami and everywhere in between. We wouldn't have to fear that we might not be recognized as lawful spouse, parent--or just a human being deserving of equal treatment under the letter and spirit of the law.

My LGBTQ community needs to be able to maintain gainful employment and housing, to access the health care they need, to shop at a store, sit on a park bench and use a bathroom safely and without the bitter judgment of --or actual danger from--people stuck firmly in the year Potato Head was first born:

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Gulf Stream is weakest it's been in more than 1,000 years, study says

This Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2020, satellite image made available by NOAA shows Tropical Storm Eta at 10:40 a.m. EST in the Gulf of Mexico, Theta, right, and a tropical wave to the south that became Tropical Storm Iota. An overheating world obliterated weather records in 2020 - an extreme year for hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, floods, droughts and ice melt - the United Nations' weather agency reported Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020. (NOAA via AP) A group of scientists from Europe presented new research this week claiming that the Gulf Stream is weaker now than it's been at any point over the last 1,000 years. The Gulf Stream is an Atlantic Ocean current that plays a largely hidden role in shaping weather patterns in the United States. Much has been researched and learned about the influential current over the past 500 years, particularly due to the expertise of one of America's Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin. But in recent decades, a shift in the Gulf Stream's circulation has become weaker than any other time over the last millennium, according to a recently published study by scientists from Ireland, Britain and Germany. The weakening of the Gulf Stream, formally known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), can be mostly pinned to one catalyst, the researchers said: human-caused climate change. The Gulf Stream current moves a massive amount of water across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the study's authors, it moves nearly 20 million cubic meters of water per second, acting like a giant conveyor belt. How strong of a current is that? "Almost a hundred times the Amazon flow," he told the Potsdam Institute. The Gulf Stream location in the Global Real-Time Ocean Forecast System model (RTOFS) from 2016. (Image via NOAA) The main function of the Gulf Stream is to redistribute heat on Earth by way of the ocean current. The ocean circulatory system plays a crucial role in many weather patterns around the world, particularly along the U.S. East Coast. Rahmstorf said that his team's research was groundbreaking for being able to combine previous bits of research to piece together a 1,600-year-old picture of the AMOC evolution. "The study results suggest that it has been relatively stable until the late 19th century," he said. "With the end of the little ice age in about 1850, the ocean currents began to decline, with a second, more drastic decline following since the mid-20th century." An original mapping of the Gulf Stream from Timothy Folger and Benjamin Franklin from 1768. (Image via Library of Congress) So what are the implications of this decline in the ocean currents? AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Bob Smerbeck said it could plausibly lead to rising sea levels if water levels are warmed this year. However, Smerbeck added that it is tricky to know just how warm the waters could get. Previously, studies have shown that rising water temperatures and higher sea levels can lead to more extreme weather events such as stronger tropical storms, a higher likelihood for extreme heat waves or a decrease in summer rainfall. However, other researchers have also come out with contrasting data, suggesting that the Gulf Stream hasn't actually declined over the past 30 years. Using a different data modeling system, researchers from the United Kingdom and Ireland pieced together data from climate models that they said in a study published earlier this month showed "no overall AMOC decline." "Our results reinforce that adequately capturing changes to the deep circulation is key to detecting any anthropogenic climate-change-related AMOC decline," the authors write in their study, which was written just days before Rahmstorf's team published its research on the topic. Smerbeck, who has been a meteorologist at AccuWeather for nearly 25 years, urged caution in how to interpret the new research claims. "One possible repercussion discussed in article 1 [the first study mentioned above] about warming waters along the east coast from an AMOC slowdown could lead to rising sea levels due to thermal expansion of the seawater. This seems plausible," Smerbeck said. But, he added that the amount of seawater rise would depend on how warm that waters could get and he wasn't ready to speculate on that. This undated engraving shows the scene on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pa. The document, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Philip Livingston and Roger Sherman, announces the separation of 13 North American British colonies from Great Britain. The formal signing by 56 members of Congress began on Aug. 2. (AP Photo) How was the Gulf Stream as we know it today discovered? Well, the discovery was fueled by a need for increased efficiency with the mail service and was inspired by the empiricism of whalers. In 1768, Benjamin Franklin was working in London as deputy postmaster, according to The Smithsonian Magazine, responsible for overseeing the arrival of mail to and from the American colonies. His cousin, Timothy Folger, worked as a captain of a merchant ship at that same time. One day, Franklin asked Folger why his merchant ships arrived at the colonies much faster than Franklin's mail ships made it back to England. Folger explained to his cousin that merchant captains followed the advice of whalers, who followed a "warm, strong current" to track and kill whales. While Franklin said mail captains were too prideful to follow the advice of "simple American fishermen," sailing against the current was costing precious time, according to author Laura Bliss. So Folger sketched out a general location of the current for Franklin, dubbing it the "Gulph Stream." However, Franklin's mail carriers refused to follow the directions. A chart of the Gulf Stream, published in 1786 in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. (Image via Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division) But when Franklin switched allegiances to the burgeoning United States during the Revolutionary War, he mapped out a more precise route of the AMOC and gave it to French allies, providing them a key advantage in the battle of European Maritimers, according to The Smithsonian. The combination of Folger's whaling knowledge and Franklin's mapping would become crucial in later understanding the importance of the current, even if they originally were just trying to figure out how to deliver mail faster. While knowledge of the AMOC may only go back a few hundred years, Smerbeck said the dating of the currents can be done in a variety of different ways. Direct measurements with deep-ocean instruments only go back to 2004, he said, but other methods can help piece together the puzzle, such as analysis of coral and historical data from ship logs. "Tree rings can tell how wet or dry the nearby land climate was in the past, which can be linked to sea surface temperatures," Smerbeck explained. "Ice cores can pretty much tell the same thing as well as how warm or cold it was in the past," he said. "Ocean sediments can show if there were high or low runoff periods from nearby precipitation over land, which could be linked to how warm or cold sea surface temperatures were in the past." Researchers have used all of these clues to inform the understanding, which stretches back more than a millennium, they've developed of the Gulf Stream. Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier, Spectrum, Fubo, and Verizon Fios.

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