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Fox News host Laura Ingraham takes week off after David Hogg comments | Media
The Fox News host Laura Ingraham announced late on Friday that she
would take the next week off, after 11 advertisers dropped her show over
her mockery of a teenage survivor of the Florida school shooting.
Ingraham said on air she would take Easter week off with her children
and a “great line-up of guest hosts” would fill in. In an email on
Saturday, a Fox News spokeswoman said the break had already been planned.
Ingraham taunted David Hogg, 17, on Twitter on Wednesday. In
response, Hogg called for a boycott of advertisers on The Ingraham
Angle.
Ingraham wrote
that Hogg had been “Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and
whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable
given acceptance rates.)”
Hogg is a survivor of the 14 February shooting that killed 17 people
at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, a suburb of Fort
Lauderdale. He and other classmates have become the faces of a youth-led
movement for gun control reform, last weekend leading a huge protest
march in Washington DC.
Hogg tweeted a list of a dozen companies that advertise on The
Ingraham Angle and urged his supporters to demand they cancel their ads.
On Thursday, Ingraham tweeted an apology.
“Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA,” she wrote, “incl[uding]
David Hogg. On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for
any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of
Parkland.
“For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David
immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how ‘poised’ he
was given the tragedy. As always, he’s welcome to return to the show
anytime for a productive discussion.”
The apology did not stop companies dropping her show. The first to
cancel were Nutrish, a pet food line created by the celebrity chef
Rachael Ray; TripAdvisor; the online home furnishings seller Wayfair;
Nestlé; Hulu; Expedia; and Stitch Fix, an online personal shopping
service.
According to CBS News, four more companies dropped the show on
Friday: Johnson & Johnson, Office Depot, the dieting company Jenny
Craig and the Atlantis Paradise Island resort.
Hogg wrote on Twitter: “An apology in an effort just to save your
advertisers is not enough. I will only accept your apology only if you
denounce the way your network has treated my friends and I in this
fight. It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children.”
After Ingraham announced her time off, he added that she should: “Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week.”
He told
CNN: “I think it’s great that corporate America is standing with me.
They cannot push us around, especially when all we’re trying to do here
is save lives.”
Elsewhere on Friday, the rock musician and Donald Trump supporter Ted
Nugent said students calling for gun control were “mushy brained
children”.
The National Rifle Association board member was a guest on the Joe
Pags Show, a nationally syndicated conservative radio program. Parkland
survivors were wrong to blame the NRA for mass shootings, he said,
adding that “the evidence is irrefutable, they have no soul”.
The gun-control measures such activists support would amount to “spiritual suicide”, he said.
March Madness Final Four 2018: Loyola Chicago vs. Michigan updates and analysis
98-year-old Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, the Loyola Ramblers
chaplain, spoke to reporters ahead of the team's game against Michigan.(Reuters)
No. 11 seed Loyola Chicago takes
on third-seeded Michigan on Saturday night in the first semifinal of
the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The Ramblers
are attempting to become the lowest-seeded team to reach the national
championship game. Follow the game here as we update throughout the
night.
Michigan’s
Moe Wagner killed Loyola-Chicago’s magical run to the Final Four on
Saturday night, scoring 24 points and grabbing 15 rebounds as the Wolverines ran away from the Ramblers with a 69-57 win.
Wagner
was monstrous down the stretch, keying a 17-2 run that helped the
Wolverines erase a nine-point deficit and reach the national
championship for the first time since 2013. Wagner’s dagger came with
the Ramblers trailing by just five with just over three minutes
remaining, when he did this:
Wagner didn’t stop
running for loose balls even with his team up by eight in the final
minutes, when he nearly took out CBS broadcasters Bill Raftery and Grant
Hill and shared a moment with both after:
Loyola-Chicago’s Sister Jean was wheeled out of the arena shortly after.
Michigan will go for the title against the winner of Villanova-Kansas on Monday night.
Ramblers 20 minutes from shot at national championship
Loyola
Chicago looked as though it was struggling to shed the nerves of making
its first Final Four appearance on Saturday night in San Antonio. It
started just 2-for-10 against Michigan, watching shot after shot miss
and Wolverine after Wolverine blow by to the rim at the other end.
Michigan led by eight early and looked comfortable after a 9-0 run.
Yet
even after arguably their worst first half performance of the
postseason, the Ramblers lead 29-22 at halftime. How? Improved shooting
(center Cameron Krutwig and guard Marques Townes each have eight
points), a lift from reserve Aundre Jackson (eight points) off the bench
and a sloppy offensive performance so far from Michigan, which has 11
points and 11 rebounds from forward Moe Wagner but is nonetheless
shooting 9-for-31 (29 percent) from the field. Loyola Chicago also got a
bit of luck, including on this off-balance jumper by Townes with the
shot clock winding down – which led the guard to do a Michael
Jordan-esque shrug.
Loyola also got this running floater at the buzzer from guard Donte Ingram right before halftime:
That led to plenty of shout-outs to Sister Jean, who is courtside in San Antonio, on Twitter:
Loyola
has certainly been in this position before; aside from overcoming a
seven-point lead early in the second half of its first-round win over
Miami, the Ramblers also overcame an early nine point deficit in the
second round against Tennessee and a 12-point deficit within the first
seven minutes in the Sweet 16 against Nevada. — Roman Stubbs
* * *
SAN
ANTONIO — In the back corner of the Michigan locker room Thursday, the
6-foot-6 Michigan guard Charles Matthews sat and heard a wavelet of
questions about a leading topic of the 2018 Final Four. To the sport,
it’s a subject gathering steam, that of transfers, their frequency and
what should be their rights within the game.
To Matthews, it’s an ancient matter.
Repeatedly,
he begged off discussing how in 2015-16, he played for Kentucky,
playing 370 minutes in 36 games, averaging 1.7 points and 1.6 rebounds.
It had been so long ago, he said. He wasn’t interested in the rehash.
Loyola-Chicago band members cheer before Saturday’s semifinal game against Michigan. (Eric Gay/Associated Press)
Three
of the 10 starters in the opening semifinal between Loyola Chicago and
Michigan on Saturday could tell of a winding rehash if interested.
They’re transfers, and they’re crucial to the matchup. Matthews, once
ranked No. 11 by Rivals.com among recruits in 2015, and third among
shooting guards, has played by far his fullest season and has led
Michigan in scoring in this tournament.
His
stat line for last season showed all zeros, much as the stat line did
for Loyola Chicago guard Marques Townes and in 2015-16 for Loyola
Chicago guard Clayton Custer. By the time Michigan had withstood Florida
State in the West Region final in Los Angeles, Matthews had made his
curvy trip from a potential one-and-done college player to Final
Four-bound team scoring leader.
He had gone for
20, 11, 18 and 17 points in Michigan’s four NCAA tournament games, on
strong shooting of 7 for 13, 5 for 12, 8 for 11 and 6 for 14, the last
in a game when hardly anyone made a shot. “It was special,” Matthews
said. “Last year all I used to hear in practice was, ‘Turnover,
Matthews,’ ‘Turnover, Matthews.’ And, ‘Go see 212,’ that’s when I have
to run up to the top of the bleachers. But I stayed with it. Coach
stayed on me. He continued to believe in me, and that continued to help
my confidence grow. My teammates believe in me, and I believe in them.
So it’s just been a special feeling.”
For
Custer, Loyola Chicago’s team leader, the trail went from Overland Park,
Kan., to Iowa State, for a season with 12 game appearances, zero starts
and 15 field goal attempts, three of them good. At Loyola Chicago, this
Missouri Valley Conference player of the year joined high school
teammate Ben Richardson, who helped lure him once he decided to depart
Iowa State. For Townes, Custer’s fellow guard, it had gone from Edison,
N.J., through Farleigh-Dickinson (N.J.), where Townes played two seasons
and averaged 10 points after being on a high school team with
Karl-Anthony Towns, now of the Minnesota Timberwolves, and Wade Baldwin,
now of the Portland Trail Blazers.
“A lot of
times young people, in recruiting, they want — whether it’s a transfer
or a high school kid — they want to make a splash on signing day, or
announcement day,” Loyola Chicago Coach Porter Moser said. “‘Hey, I’m
going to this conference, this school,’ and they think that validates
them being a player with all the peripheral people. We always sell, ‘Go
to a place, go to Loyola and make a splash on game day. You could have
125, 130 splashes.’ ”
The biggest one has come.
* * *
Series history:
The schools have played three times before, but not since 1969, when
Loyola won, 112-100, at Chicago Stadium. Michigan won the two previous
meetings.
Fast facts: Loyola’s
14-game winning streak is the longest of the Final Four teams … The
Ramblers are making their first Final Four appearance since 1963 … This
is the 100th season of Loyola men’s basketball … Through last weekend,
Loyola ranked fifth in the country in scoring defense and second in
fewest personal fouls per game … Five Loyola players are averaging
double-digit points, something the Ramblers haven’t done since 1963 …
Michigan is in the Final Four for the first time since 2013 …
Michigan is 6-1 in national semifinal games, the best record of any
school that’s played in at least five … Michigan Coach John Beilein
would hit 800 career victories if his team wins the national title …
Charles Matthews leads Michigan in both points (16.5 ppg) and rebounds
(7.3) during the NCAA tournament.
The
Ramblers knocked off No. 6 seed Miami in a first-round thriller, 64-62,
inching ahead when Donte Ingram connected on a long three-pointer as
time was running out. It was their first NCAA tournament game (and win)
since a 1985 trip that ended against Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in the
Sweet 16. And it made Sister Jean into a national sensation.
More
late-game dramatics against No. 3 Tennessee: Clayton Custer hit the
go-ahead basket with less than four seconds left in a 63-62 win. That
victory gave the Ramblers their 30th win, breaking the school record set
by the 1963 NCAA championship team. And it put a focus on the Chicago school’s oddball charm.
Another
game, another big shot: Marques Townes hit a backbreaking three-pointer
with less than seven seconds left to help clinch a 69-68 win over No. 7 seed Nevada. That made it three tournament wins by a total of four points.
For the first time in the tournament, Loyola was able to relax in the final moments, coasting to a 78-62 win over No. 9 seed Kansas State. The Ramblers became just the fourth 11th seed to advance to the Final Four, and as George Mason showed, a world of opportunity now awaits.
The Wolverines trailed No. 14 seed Montana 10-0 before surging ahead for a 61-47 win.
Their
second-round game offered one of the tournament’s most dramatic
endings, when freshman Jordan Poole bombed in a long three-pointer as
time expired to clinch a 64-63 win over No. 6 seed Houston.
That
seemed to ignite the Wolverines, who dominated seventh-seeded Texas
A&M in a 99-72 laugher. That makes three Elite Eight appearances in
six years for Michigan. The Wolverines set an NCAA tournament record
with eight players making at least one three-pointer in that game. Included in that group was freshman walk-on C.J. Baird, who had more fun than anyone in the win. Michigan is on the fashion vanguard, too, with some of the shortest shorts in this even
Michigan outlasted No. 9 seed Florida State, 58-54, to reach its eighth Final Four. Despite some recent offensive struggles, German forward Moritz Wagner is a big reason the Wolverines play on.
At the Justice Dept.’s Death Penalty Unit, Accusations of Favoritism, Gender Bias and Unwanted Groping
Katie Benner
The chief of the Justice Department’s death penalty unit was removed from his post amid questions about grievances against him.
Al Drago for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — When Kevin
Carwile arrived to run the Justice Department’s death penalty unit in
2010, he had never prosecuted or sat through an entire capital
punishment case. He was moved into the job after overseeing the gangs
unit, and some prosecutors worried he lacked the expertise to steer the
division.
Now Mr.
Carwile has been removed from his post after The New York Times inquired
about a series of grievances against him, including complaints that he
promoted gender bias and a “sexualized environment.” He fostered a
culture of favoritism and sexism, according to court records, internal
documents and interviews with more than a half-dozen current and former
employees. In one episode, his deputy groped an administrative assistant
at a bar in view of their colleagues, according to some who were
present. Mr. Carwile asked the witnesses to keep it secret, one said.
Employees
of the unit, the capital case section, complained about the issues to
Justice Department officials, the inspector general and the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission at least 12 times. Some allegations
went unaddressed for years. In cases that were investigated, the
accusers were never told what investigators found. Both Mr. Carwile and
his deputy, Gwynn Kinsey, remained Justice Department employees despite
the inquiries.
Gwynn Kinsey was Mr. Carwile’s deputy in the division.
Six employees,
including the administrative assistant, said they eventually left the
section or quit government altogether in part because of the toxic
climate. A defendant in Indiana has asked in court for the government to
drop the death penalty recommendation in his case because of the unit’s
emerging conduct issues.
Mr.
Carwile declined to comment. After The Times contacted the Justice
Department for this article, he was demoted and detailed to a different
division. Through his lawyers, Mr. Kinsey declined to comment.
“The
Department of Justice takes these allegations extremely seriously but
cannot discuss specific employee disciplinary actions, or comment on
internally handled personnel actions or matters that may impact personal
privacy,” said Ian Prior, a Justice Department spokesman. The
department confirmed that it referred some allegations made by employees
to the inspector general, whose spokesman would not confirm or deny any
investigation.
The unit is poised to gain power. President Trump has suggested the United States start executing drug dealers, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has urged prosecutors to seek the death penalty whenever possible in drug-related crimes.
A Mercurial Boss
The
Justice Department created the capital case section in 1998 to help the
attorney general decide when to apply capital punishment. The section’s
prosecutors advise or work with trial teams on cases and a few trials a
year. They were involved in some high-profile prosecutions like those
of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, and Dylann S. Roof, who was convicted in 2016 of murdering nine people at an African-American church in South Carolina.
As
the death penalty fell out of favor in the United States, the influence
of the unit, already one of the smallest in the Justice Department,
waned. About half a dozen trial lawyers worked there in the beginning of
2012, along with a lawyer conducting protocol reviews and three others
on loan from different parts of the department.
Mr.
Carwile had arrived just before the public learned of the Fast and
Furious scandal, a botched operation in which agents at the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives let criminals move guns across
the border into Mexico to try to build a bigger case. Many of the
firearms were later found at crime scenes. Mr. Carwile incorrectly told
superiors that the A.T.F. learned about guns moving illegally only after
the fact, according to a subsequent inspector general investigation. He
was moved from his post as head of the gangs unit to the much smaller
capital punishment division.
Kevin Carwile arrived to run the Justice Department’s death penalty division in 2010.
He quickly gained a
reputation as a mercurial manager with a hands-off style that bordered
on neglect, according to current and former employees. He rarely
responded to emails, four former employees said, and in meetings his
questions revealed that he had not read their messages.
But after his first year, Mr. Carwile received the Excellence in Management award for the criminal division as the section’s lawyers prosecuted more cases.
In
2013, Jacabed Rodriguez-Coss, a prosecutor who had herself won one of
the department’s highest awards, complained to human resources that Mr.
Carwile expected her to involuntarily travel far more than her male
counterparts.
Though
she lived in Connecticut and had cases in Rhode Island and Vermont, he
assigned her to one in California. She protested that her family needed
her nearby. Her husband, an F.B.I. agent, was one of the first on the
scene of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and was
confronting the aftermath of having worked on the case.
Ms.
Rodriguez-Coss filed a complaint to the E.E.O.C., which notified the
Justice Department. Mr. Carwile subsequently suspended permission for
her to work from Connecticut. She sued the department in 2016, accusing
him of gender discrimination and claiming that her permission to work in
Connecticut was taken away in retaliation for her complaints.
Seven
men and women from the unit filed declarations in her support. Two male
colleagues said that they had not been assigned so much travel. Bruce
R. Hegyi, a former prosecutor, wrote that he left because of “plainly
unethical and improper conduct.”
He
said in his filing that Mr. Carwile promoted “a sexualized
environment,” took him to a restaurant with scantily clad waitresses and
let a fellow prosecutor show naked photographs of a woman during a work
gathering of both men and women.
Other
employees said in their declarations that Mr. Carwile held men-only
meetings, sent emails only to men and assigned more desirable and
high-profile cases to men. “Women only go to law school to find rich
husbands,” he said, according to a declaration filed by one lawyer,
Amanda Haines.
Under Mr. Carwile, there was incentive “not to stir things up,” said Kevin Little, the lawyer representing Ms. Rodriguez-Coss.
“My client and other of her colleagues feared retaliation,” he said.
The
Justice Department said in its response that Ms. Rodriguez-Coss’s
claims “boil down to her admitted refusal to perform the essential
requirements of her position,” which included taking on cases that
required travel.
Life-or-Death Cases in the Balance
Around
the same time, Ms. Haines, who worked as a federal prosecutor for 18
years before joining the division, alerted Mr. Carwile to persistent
work-quality issues, warnings that she later described in a court
filing.
In one case
in Pennsylvania, she said, she received no files describing the
government’s work by the previous prosecutor, despite numerous requests,
and dozens of boxes with discovery materials had sat unreviewed.
She
told Mr. Carwile and Mr. Kinsey, but the problem went unaddressed. Her
colleague instead received a plum assignment: the Boston Marathon
bombing trial.
In
the Indiana case, Ms. Haines said her predecessor interviewed over a
dozen witnesses without a law enforcement officer or other witness
present, an error that could jeopardize the government’s work. She said
in a legal filing that the prosecutor, who later won a departmental
award, destroyed his interview notes, which he initially denied but
later acknowledged.
After
Ms. Haines took her concerns to Mr. Carwile, a colleague shared them in
an email with Sung-Hee Suh, then the deputy assistant attorney general.
Ms.
Haines also described the errors in a declaration filed in Ms.
Rodriguez-Coss’s lawsuit. After her accusations became public, defense
lawyers in the Indiana case pushed back on the government’s
recommendation to seek the death penalty for their client, Andrew
Rogers, a felon accused of tying up his cellmate and stabbing him to
death.
The notes the
prosecutor is accused of destroying could have been the difference
“between a verdict for life and a verdict for death,” the defense wrote
in a brief in January.
“If you pull on the thread, who knows how many cases could be impacted?” said Mr. Little, Ms. Rodriguez-Coss’s lawyer.
A portion of a brief filed by defense lawyers for
Andrew Rogers, a felon accused of tying up his cellmate and stabbing him
to death.
‘Unwelcome Liberties’
Two
years ago, another prosecutor in the section, Ann Carroll, was asked to
travel for work after she had surgery. Around that time, she learned
that a male colleague was allowed to forgo travel to accommodate his
gluten intolerance.
“Over
the 20 years I had worked at the Department of Justice, I had never
experienced a complete lack of sensitivity in the immediate aftermath of
a serious medical illness,” Ms. Carroll wrote in a declaration. “I felt
Mr. Carwile’s response was arbitrary, and gender-based.” She quit that
June.
Before departing, Ms.
Carroll said she described ethical violations to Ms. Suh, prompting a
management review. Four former and current employees said in court
declarations and to The Times that they told Ms. Suh and James Mann, the
chief of staff to the head of the Criminal Division at the Justice
Department, about the mishandled cases, sexualized culture and gender
bias.
Ms. Suh
ultimately said that Mr. Carwile and Mr. Kinsey, as a result of the
review, were “now doing their best,” according to Mr. Hegyi’s
declaration, and she concluded that employees were unhappy because they
wanted to work from home, to choose between trials and case reviews, and
to be given more ways to bring concerns to management.
Her
conclusions dumbfounded employees who said they had shared more serious
grievances. A person briefed on the matter said they were not told of
steps being taken to address complaints because those were confidential.
Ms.
Suh, who now works at the asset manager Pimco, said she could not
comment on the details of pending litigation or personnel matters. “Any
allegations of misconduct, discrimination, harassment or bias actually
brought to my attention were fully and fairly investigated and addressed
appropriately,” she said.
The
years of warnings that their bosses had ignored or condoned misconduct
came to a head last May. During a work-sanctioned happy hour at a
restaurant near the Justice Department, colleagues watched Mr. Kinsey
grope the administrative assistant, Alyssa tenBroek.
“Mr.
Kinsey, who is a married man, began to take what seemed very clearly to
be unwelcome liberties of a physical, sexual nature,” Luke Woolman, an
intern at the time, wrote in his declaration. He said Mr. Kinsey
repeatedly touched Ms. tenBroek, whom he identified as A.T.,
“inappropriately, openly and obviously” in front of patrons, Mr. Carwile
and at least one other Justice Department prosecutor.
Mr.
Woolman and the prosecutor, Sonia Jimenez, suggested everyone go home,
he later told Ms. Haines. Ms. Jimenez tried to discourage Mr. Kinsey
from trying to persuade Ms. tenBroek to go to a hotel with him,
according to an internal memo by Ms. Haines.
A portion of the declaration by Luke Woolman, an intern at the time in the death penalty division.
As the night wound down, Mr. Carwile pulled aside Mr. Woolman and asked him not to tell anyone what he had seen.
“He sternly reiterated his request, specifically stating that he was being serious,” Mr. Woolman wrote.
Fallout From a Night Out
After
that night, tensions in the unit exploded into view. Ms. tenBroek
showed colleagues text messages from Mr. Kinsey in which he offered to
give her money, pay her bills or take her on a trip. He also sent her
photos of herself that he had downloaded from the internet.
He signed off “XOXOXOX,” according to Ms. Haines’s memo. In other messages, he appeared to apologize.
Ms.
tenBroek later told Ms. Haines and Julie Mosley, another prosecutor,
that Mr. Kinsey groped her again in the cab and tried to coerce her into
checking into a hotel.
Ms.
Mosley told the E.E.O.C., and Ms. Haines sent her memo to superiors at
the Justice Department. “I trust you will give this matter the serious
attention it deserves,” she wrote. Mr. Woolman said in a court filing
that he shared his story with Mr. Mann and an investigator from the
inspector general’s office.
Ms.
tenBroek did not dispute her co-workers’ accounts and said in a
statement that she had participated in the department’s “lengthy and
taxing” complaint process. She has since left the agency.
“I
have always wanted to pursue a career with the Department of Justice,
but it failed me when I reported misconduct,” she said. “No woman should
feel compelled to deal with the pervasive harassment that I
experienced, much less have her complaint be effectively disregarded.”
The
department’s inspector general began investigating, and Mr. Kinsey was
demoted and moved to another division. He is appealing. A person close
to Mr. Kinsey said that evidence in another investigation is favorable
to him, but would not say who was conducting that inquiry.
Current
and former employees said the public understandably expects death
penalty cases to be handled with integrity. As Mr. Sessions and Mr.
Trump push for more capital punishments, the section’s history, they
say, could work against the Justice Department.
The
same month as the happy hour, the inspector general, Michael E.
Horowitz, sent a memo to Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general.
Sexual harassment, he wrote, “profoundly affects the victim and affects
the agency’s reputation, undermines the agency’s credibility, and
lowers employee productivity and morale.”
Fight for gun control heads to town halls after March for Our Lives | US news
Adam Gabbatt
The Resistance Now is a weekly update on the people, action and ideas driving the protest movement in the US. If you’re not already receiving it by email, subscribe.
After March for Our Lives, Town Halls for Our Lives
After the success of the March for Our Lives,
the fight for gun control is continuing at a pace, with activists
pushing for every member of Congress to attend a Town Hall for Our Lives
next week – even as Republicans continue to avoid meeting with their
constituents.
The events are being organized by March for Our Lives in conjunction
with the Town Hall Project, which works to pressure members of Congress
to hold regular town halls in their districts.
The Town Halls for Our Lives, being held on 7 April, will focus on
gun control and gun violence. The events are being organized by
activists, who book venues themselves before pressuring their elected
representatives to attend.
Nathan Williams, from the Town Hall Project, said so far people were
working to schedule town halls in about 150 congressional districts. So
far the US representatives Ted Deutch and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz have
said they will attend Town Halls for Our Lives in Florida, while Nydia
Velázquez and Carolyn Maloney plan to attend events in New York. Ruben
Gallego, who represents Arizona’s seventh district, has also said he
will be at a Town Hall for Our Lives. All five are Democrats.
Members of the House and the Senate are on recess for the next week.
Recess is traditionally an opportunity for elected officials to meet
with constituents in their home districts, holding town halls or other
in-person events.
Over the past year, however, the majority of Republicans have refused
to hold in-person events. During this recess only 14 Republican
representatives or senators are holding events, from a total of 289 GOP lawmakers. More than 40 Democrats are scheduled to hold town halls.
Many Republicans shied away from holding in-person events through
2017 as debate raged over GOP attempts to reform the Affordable Care
Act. Those who did attend town halls faced angry questioning from
constituents, with thousands of activists attending events across the
country to rail against healthcare reform.
Williams said he was seeing a similar energy at the moment, but with a
focus on gun control. The Republican senator Joni Ernst, who is opposed
to banning semiautomatic rifles, faced angry questions at a town hall she held in Iowa from people demanding gun reform.
“In the same I would guess that the energy of last spring was
rocket-fueled by the Women’s March, I think this march last Saturday has
had the same effect,” he said.
“And what’s exciting for us is that it’s not necessarily all the same
people – it’s a lot of young people who weren’t reaching out to us last
year, and probably weren’t going to town halls last year, that are
newly very active and becoming very savvy.
“People don’t just want to march and go home. They want to know
what’s next. And right now what’s next is organizing these town halls
and holding their members of congress accountable.”
Donald Trump stops funds for recovery efforts in Syria as he mulls withdrawal of US troops
Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, Alissa J Rubin
President Donald Trump, having this week signalled a possible withdrawal of American troops from Syria,
has ordered the state department to suspend more than $200m (£140m) in
funds for recovery efforts there while the administration reassesses its
role in the conflict, administration officials said on Friday.
The freeze on stabilisation and humanitarian aid came as two members of the US-led coalition fighting in Syria
were killed – one US soldier and one British – and five others were
wounded by a bomb in a late night attack, the military said on Friday.
The attack took place near Manbij in northern Syria and is believed
to have been carried out by remnants of Isis, a senior US military
official said.
A statement posted by the US Central Command, which directs US forces
in the region, said “an improvised explosive device” detonated about
11pm local time on Thursday.
The statement did not reveal the identities of the service members
involved, how seriously the survivors were hurt or where in Syria the
attack occurred. The US-led coalition includes about 30 countries, but
only a few have forces on the ground.
A statement released Friday by the Ministry of Defence in London confirmed that the second soldier killed in the blast was British and that the mission was to counter fighters with Isis.
Coalition forces have been deployed to Syria to fight, alongside
Kurdish militia allies, against Isis. But with that group largely
routed, the seven-year-old civil war in Syria has entered a dangerous
new phase.
Two US allies, Turkey and the Kurds,
who control parts of northern Syria, are fighting each other. And the
Kurds and coalition forces are engaged in a tense standoff with the
Syrian government, along with its allies – Russia, Iran and
Iranian-backed militias.
On Thursday, Mr Trump suggested the US could pull its approximately
2,000 troops out of Syria “very soon”. The comments surprised defence
department officials who have maintained that some kind of US presence
in parts of Syria may be necessary to avoid recreating the conditions
that led to the rise of Isis – and also to avoid ceding influence in the
country to Russia.
One of the strongest trends of this 10-year bull
market has been the shift to passive investing. Trillions in assets have
flowed out of actively managed mutual funds and into passively managed
exchange traded funds and indexed mutual funds.
Last year was no exception, with just
under $7 billion flowing out of actively managed funds, and $692 billion
flowing into passively managed funds, according to year-end figures
from research firm Morningstar. Only the popularity of actively managed
bond funds, with $179 billion in inflows, saved active management from a
third straight abysmal year.
Tetra Images | Getty Images
ETFs are traded on exchanges, so they can be bought and sold like stocks through a brokerage.
With interest rates rising and volatility up in the
markets, however, investors may be shifting away from pure indexing
toward more active management of investment risk.
"It's about downside
protection," said Ryan Sullivan, a vice president of global ETF services
at Brown Brothers Harriman. Sullivan helps fund companies to design and
administer their products.
"There seems to be a growing interest in actively managed equity products in an ETF wrapper," he said.
Actively managed ETFs,
where portfolio managers pick and choose investments like active mutual
fund managers instead of simply tracking an index of assets, have been
growing rapidly, albeit from a very small base. The lion's share of
assets in the space is in fixed-income funds employing total return or
low duration strategies.
"It's taken time for
active management [in ETFs] to gain traction in the market," said
Sullivan. "The segment has continued to set records in terms of growth,
but it still represents only 1 percent of the broader market." More from Advisor Insight: Why investors can't gauge their own risk tolerance Crazy tax moves clients wanted advisors to try for 2018 Don't put all your financial eggs in one investment basket
That may change this
year, judging by the results of a recent survey of financial advisors
and institutional investors by BBH. The survey found a big increase in
interest in the products, particularly in the area of international
equity and emerging markets, which attracted $239 billion in fund flows
last year, per Morningstar.
To that point, 54 percent
of survey respondents said they would use actively managed ETFs in
emerging markets, and 45 percent said they would do so in international
developed markets.
"I think we may see a spike in demand for actively managed ETFs this year," Sullivan said.
The explosive growth in
so-called smart beta funds also suggests investors are not as
comfortable buying the market or segments of it through simple indexing.
Assets in smart beta funds surpassed $1 trillion in December and now
comprise about one quarter of the entire ETF market.
The funds still passively
track an index, but they use a rules-based methodology to screen a
universe of securities for desirable factors, such as profitability,
high dividends, low volatility or value for equities. In the
fixed-income market, popular factors to emphasize include credit
quality, yield and duration.
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Some product manufacturers are taking things a step
further and creating their own indexes for funds to track. Last summer
BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, launched some fixed-income
ETFs — specifically, the iShares Edge Investment Grade Enhanced Bond
ETF (IGEB) and iShares Edge High Yield Defensive Bond ETF (HYDB) — that track a proprietary index rather than a popular benchmark such as the Barclays Capital US Aggregate Bond Index.
In November the financial
giant announced plans to launch seven actively managed equity sector
ETFs to be called iShares Evolved. Instead of tracking industry indexes
created by financial companies and joint ventures like MSCI, S&P Dow
Jones Indices and others, the funds will use indexes created by robots
employing machine learning to classify potential components. The company
did not comment further on its plans.
"Companies are trying to
move the needle in terms of index creation," said Sullivan. "With
self-indexing, a team creates a methodology to produce an index and then
launches an ETF to track it."
Wisdom Tree Investments,
one of the pioneers of smart beta investing strategies, is putting an
active twist on passive investing in emerging markets. The company's
WisdomTree China ex-State-Owned Enterprises Fund (CXSE) tracks a proprietary index of the broad market that excludes companies with more than a 20 percent state-ownership interest
"There seems to be a growing interest in actively managed equity products in an ETF wrapper."
"We focus the fund on companies that are freer to
compete in the global market," said Luciano Siracusano, chief investment
strategist for WisdomTree. "We're giving investors the option to
control for the risk of state ownership." Last year the CXSE had a
return of 80 percent — more than double the return on the iShares China Large Cap fund, which includes the state-owned enterprises in the index. WisdomTree has launched a similar fund, with ticker symbol XSOE, for the broader Asian market.
Last June the company also launched its first multifactor U.S. equity fund (USMF).
It screens for 200 stocks with the highest combined score on four
factors: value, fundamental quality, momentum and low volatility.
"Factors behave differently in different markets," said Siracusano. "The
goal is to get most of the upside [of the S&P 500] and protect
against the downside."
In a suddenly volatile market, more investors may be looking for that kind of protection. — By Andrew Osterland, special to CNBC.com
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