Democrats chose Tom Perez as new leader, Trump says he won’t attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and more from the United States and around the world.
Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez
Christopher Aluka Berry / Reuters
—Members of the Democratic National Committee have selected former Labor Secretary Tom Perez as their new chairman, beating out Representative Keith Ellison for the top position. More here
—In the latest development with his contentious relationship with the press, President Trump said will not attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. More here
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
President Trump Will Not Attend the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
In the latest development with his contentious relationship with the press, President Trump said will not attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The president made the announcement over Twitter on Saturday afternoon.
I will not be attending the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!
Trump, who would firsthand be the subject of ridicule by a comedian selected by the association, decided to avoid the awkward showing on April 29. In 1981, Ronald Reagan was the last person to not attend the dinner, but that was because he was shot in an assassination attempt a month earlier.
Several media organizations, including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Bloomberg, had already announced they would no longer host afterparties. Samantha Bee, of TBS’s Full Frontal, said she would host a Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner event to raise money for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Trump has never handled roast-style events well. In 2011, Seth Meyers ripped Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with some scathing jokes, including, “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”
Earlier this year, there were rumors of whether this year’s dinner would even happen. But in February, Jeff Mason, a Reuters reporter and WHCA president, said the dinner was still on, adding, “the WHCA will pursue its core mission of advocating for journalists’ ability to ask questions of government officials, push for transparency, and help Americans hold the powerful to account.”
Members of the Democratic National Committee have selected former Labor Secretary Tom Perez as their new chairman, beating out Representative Keith Ellison for the top position. Democrats, still reeling after the win of President Trump in the last election, are hoping fresh leadership can get the party back on track. In recent years, Democrats have struggled to connect with voters in state and local elections, as Republicans dominate state governments nationwide. A majority of the 447 members of the DNC, who are activists and donors from across the country, thought Perez could bring the necessary change. Ellison, who is the first Muslim elected to Congress, was backed by the progressive wing of the party, including from Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former DNC Chairman Howard Dean. Perez was a darling of former administration officials, and enjoyed the endorsement of former Vice President Joe Biden. Meeting in Atlanta, the selection required two rounds of voting. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who built an outsider campaign, dropped out of consideration before the first round of voting, along with a string of other long-shot candidates. Perez said the Democratic Party is “suffering from a crisis of confidence, a crisis of relevance" after Trump’s win in the 2016 election. In his first act as chairman, Perez made Ellison the deputy chairman of the DNC.
A September 2016 view of Homs (Omar Sanadiki / Reuters)
Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents stormed two Syrian security offices in Homs, killing at least 32 people, including the head of the local military intelligence service branch. The Levant Liberation Committee attack in the central city, which has been ravaged by the civil war, also wounded at least 24 others. The twin attacks, each with three suicide bombers, hit heavily fortified buildings. As rescue workers arrived on the scene, other bombs went off at security checkpoints. This comes just one day after a suicide car bombing killed 60 people and wounded 100 in the northern city of al-Bab. The city was recently retaken by Syrian forces after three years of ISIS control.
The former California governor called President Trump’s attacks on John McCain “absolutely unacceptable.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain saw in each other a willingness to buck the Republican Party and became fast friends and political allies. Mindful of McCain’s legacy, the former California governor said on Wednesday he couldn’t stay silent in the face of President Trump’s recent spate of attacks on the late senator.
He told me Trump’s swipes at McCain are both disgraceful and destructive. “He was just an unbelievable person,” Schwarzenegger said. “So an attack on him is absolutely unacceptable if he’s alive or dead—but even twice as unacceptable since he passed away a few months ago. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to do that. I just think it’s a shame that the president lets himself down to that kind of level. We will be lucky if everyone in Washington followed McCain’s example, because he represented courage.”
Michael Jackson’s music is a gift. What do we do with it now?
The camera flies high above the palm trees of Hollywood, soaring north and west, all the way to the suburb of Simi Valley, where it slows down to seek out a certain street, and then slows some more until it finds a particular house. It hovers above it, and then swoops down, pushing in all the way to the doorstep, where it rests, impatient. It is the house where James Safechuck, one of the two men at the center of Leaving Neverland, an HBO documentary, grew up, but in a way it might as well be the Darlings’ house: “Peter Pan chose this particular house because there were people here who believed in him.”
But the Safechucks are not the only people who believe, because here is another suburban house, and here again is that seeking, searching intelligence, the camera pushing closer and closer. It is the house in Brisbane, Australia, where the other subject of the documentary, Wade Robson, grew up. The implication is clear: Michael Jackson could have any little boy in the world; all he needed were parents who would serve up their sons to him.
Trump’s continuing attacks on John McCain reveal a worrisome state of mind.
Donald Trump is not well. Over the weekend, he continued his weird obsession with a dead war hero. This time, his attacks on John McCain came two days after the anniversary of McCain’s release from a North Vietnamese prison camp. He tweeted this:
Spreading the fake and totally discredited Dossier “is unfortunately a very dark stain against John McCain.” Ken Starr, Former Independent Counsel. He had far worse “stains” than this, including thumbs down on repeal and replace after years of campaigning to repeal and replace!
So it was indeed (just proven in court papers) “last in his class” (Annapolis) John McCain that sent the Fake Dossier to the FBI and Media hoping to have it printed BEFORE the Election. He & the Dems, working together, failed (as usual). Even the Fake News refused this garbage!
Unwritten rules underlie all of elite-university life—and students who don’t come from a wealthy background have a hard time navigating them.
Last Tuesday, the Justice Department charged 50 people with involvement in an elaborate scheme to purchase spots in some of the country’s top schools. The tactics described in the indictment were complex and multipronged, requiring multiple steps of deception and bribery by parents and their co-conspirators to secure their children’s admission to the schools of their choice. The plot purportedly included faking learning disabilities, using Photoshopped images to make it seem as if students played sports that they did not actually play, and pretending that students were of different ethnicities in an effort to exploit affirmative-action programs. The alleged scheme was led by a man named William Singer, who called his business venture a “side door” into college. On Tuesday, Singer pleaded guilty to all charges.
A newly discovered giant virus turns its victims to “stone.”
The very first giant virus was discovered in a water-cooling tower in 2003. As the name suggests, giant viruses are unusually large and their genomes unusually complex, all of which went against the prevailing idea of viruses as small, simple, and primitive. Then one baffling giant virus became many, as scientists kept discovering different types: in water off the Chilean coast, in Siberian permafrost, in an Austrian sewage plant, and now in mud from a Japanese hot spring.
The newest giant virus is Medusavirus, so named because of the way it infects amoebas, single-celled organisms that commonly live in water. When Masaharu Takemura, a virologist at Tokyo University of Science, first grew microbes from the hot-spring mud in his lab, he noticed that some amoebas would die in the presence of the giant virus. The dead amoeba cells burst open. But others would shrivel and harden, which amoebas sometimes do when guarding against bacteria that also prey on them. (It’s a dangerous life out there for amoebas.)
Donald Cline must have thought no one would ever know. Then DNA testing came along.
Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on March 18, 2019.
The first Facebookmessage arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?
Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.
A NASA spacecraft reached a space rock and found it orbited by tiny moons—a phenomenon that “has never been seen before in any solar-system object.”
Billions of years ago, something—perhaps the vibrations of an exploding star—jostled a cloud of cosmic gas and dust suspended in space. The cloud collapsed on itself and flattened into a spinning disk. The center grew heavy and ignited, forming our sun. The stuff that remained ricocheted, collided, and congealed. The biggest clumps of space stuff smoothed into spheres—the planets and moons. The smallest, the asteroids and comets, stayed as they were, like crumbs left over from an elaborate feast.
And right now one of those crumbs is exploding.
An asteroid named Bennu has been caught spewing particles into space—hundreds of gravel-size bits, hurtling from the surface at high speed.
The tiny explosions were spotted by a NASA spacecraft named OSIRIS-REx. The probe settled into an orbit around the asteroid in late December and noticed the first ejection within days. Over the next two months, OSIRIS-REx observed nearly a dozen of these events. And more are still being detected.
When my wife was struck by mysterious, debilitating symptoms, our trip to the ER revealed the sexism inherent in emergency treatment.
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
The biology of mental illness is still a mystery, but practitioners don’t want to admit it.
In 1886, Clark Bell, the editor of the journal of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, relayed to a physician named Pliny Earle a query bound to be of interest to his journal’s readers: Exactly what mental illnesses can be said to exist? In his 50-year career as a psychiatrist, Earle had developed curricula to teach medical students about mental disorders, co-founded the first professional organization of psychiatrists, and opened one of the first private psychiatric practices in the country. He had also run a couple of asylums, where he instituted novel treatment strategies such as providing education to the mentally ill. If any American doctor was in a position to answer Bell’s query, it was Pliny Earle.
The justices will decide four new cases without strong partisan valence.
Big-agenda, partisan issues—the census, reapportionment and gerrymandering, the Second Amendment, abortion—are bearing down on the Supreme Court like a ship with black sails. I am not optimistic that a majority will defy Republican orthodoxy on any of these—and if that is correct, the Court will emerge next spring as both a very live political issue and a shadow of its former self.
Not every case is an agenda case, though. On Monday, the Court granted certiorari in four new criminal-justice cases that, by and large, lack a strong partisan valence. These cases will involve the Court doing, well, you know, law,and in particular, cleaning up some loose ends of its criminal jurisprudence.
Did I mention that they are really, really interesting?
