Airline passengers who have endured tens of thousands of weather-related flight delays this week could face a new source of disruptions starting Saturday, when wireless providers are expected to power up new 5G systems near major airports.
Aviation groups have warned for years that 5G signals could interfere with aircraft equipment, especially devices using radio waves to measure distance above the ground and which are critical when planes land in low visibility.
Predictions that interference would cause massive flight groundings failed to come true last year, when telecom companies began rolling out the new service. They then agreed to limit the power of the signals around busy airports, giving airlines an extra year to upgrade their planes.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
The leader of the nation’s largest pilots’ union said crews will be able to handle the impact of 5G, but he criticized the way the wireless licenses were granted, saying it had added unnecessary risk to aviation.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently told airlines that flights could be disrupted because a small portion of the nation’s fleet has not been upgraded to protect against radio interference.
Most of the major U.S. airlines say they are ready. American, Southwest, Alaska, Frontier and United say all of their planes have height-measuring devices, called radio altimeters, that are protected against 5G interference.
The big exception is Delta Air Lines. Delta says it has 190 planes, which include most of its smaller ones, that still lack upgraded altimeters because its supplier has been unable to provide them fast enough.
The airline does not expect to cancel any flights because of the issue, Delta said Friday. The airline plans to route the 190 planes carefully to limit the risk of canceling flights or forcing planes to divert away from airports where visibility is low because of fog or low clouds.
The Delta planes that have not been retrofitted include several models of Airbus jets: all of its A220s, most of its A319s and A320s and some of its A321s. The airline’s Boeing jets have upgraded altimeters, as do all Delta Connection planes, which are operated by Endeavor Air, Republic Airways and SkyWest Airlines, the airline said.
JetBlue did not respond to requests for comment but told The Wall Street Journal it expected to retrofit 17 smaller Airbus jets by October, with possible “limited impact” some days in Boston.
Wireless carriers including Verizon and AT&T use a part of the radio spectrum called C-Band, which is close to frequencies used by radio altimeters, for their new 5G service. The Federal Communications Commission granted them licenses for the C-Band spectrum and dismissed any risk of interference, saying there was ample buffer between C-Band and altimeter frequencies.
When the Federal Aviation Administration sided with airlines and objected, the wireless companies pushed back the rollout of their new service. In a compromise brokered by the Biden administration, the wireless carriers then agreed not to power up 5G signals near about 50 busy airports. That postponement ends Saturday.
AT&T declined to comment. Verizon did not immediately respond to a question about its plans.
Buttigieg reminded the head of trade group Airlines for America about the deadline in a letter last week, warning that only planes with retrofitted altimeters would be allowed to land under low-visibility conditions. He said more than 80% of the U.S. fleet had been retrofitted, but a significant number of planes, including many operated by foreign airlines, have not been upgraded.
“This means on bad-weather, low-visibility days in particular, there could be increased delays and cancellations,” Buttigieg wrote. He said airlines with planes awaiting retrofitting should adjust their schedules to avoid stranding passengers.
Airlines say the FAA was slow to approve standards for upgrading the radio altimeters and supply-chain problems have made it difficult for manufacturers to produce enough of the devices. Nicholas Calio, head of the Airlines for America, complained about a rush to modify planes “amid pressure from the telecommunications companies.”
Jason Ambrosi, a Delta pilot and president of the Air Line Pilots Association, accused the FCC of granting 5G licenses without consulting aviation interests, which he said “has left the safest aviation system in the world at increased risk.” But, he said, “Ultimately, we will be able to address the impacts of 5G.”
PARIS — Rioting and looting raged in cities around France for a fourth night despite a huge police deployment and 1,311 arrests, as family and friends prepared Saturday to bury the 17-year-old whose killing by police unleashed the unrest and forced the French president to cancel an important trip abroad.
France’s Interior Ministry announced the new figure for arrests around the country, where 45,000 police officers fanned out in a so-far unsuccessful bid to quell days of violence that was triggered after the teen’s death on Tuesday.
Despite an appeal to parents by President Emmanuel Macron to keep their children at home, street clashes between young protesters and police raged on. About 2,500 fires were set and stores were ransacked, according to authorities.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
The violence in France was taking a toll on Macron’s international commitments. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeir’s office said that Macron phoned on Saturday to request a postponement of what would have been the first state visit by a French president to Germany in 23 years. The trip, supposed to officially start on Monday, would have seen Macron travel to Berlin and two other German cities.
Macron’s office said he spoke with Steinmeier and, “given the internal security situation, the president (Macron) said he wishes to stay in France over the coming days.”
Given the importance of the French-German relationship on the European political scene, the scrapping of the official trip was a clear sign of the gravity of France’s unrest. This is the second time in months that French unrest hurt Macron diplomatically. King Charles III canceled his first foreign visit as U.K. monarch, initially planned for France, because of protests over Macron’s pension reform plans.
Rituals to bid farewell to the teen, identified only as Nahel, who was killed in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, began on Saturday with a viewing of the open coffin by family and friends.
Later, at the entrance to a cemetery on a quiet hill in Nanterre with central Paris in the distance, dozens of people from all walks of life stood along the road, waiting for the teen’s body to arrive. There was a woman with a baby stroller and men wearing sunglasses and murmuring. Many of the mourners were from the Muslim community.
As the number of arrests continued to mount, the government suggested the violence was beginning to lessen thanks to tougher security measures. Since the unrest began on Tuesday night, police have made a total of 2,400 arrests — more than half of those in the fourth night of violence.
Still, the damage was widespread, from Paris to Marseille and Lyon and even far away, in the French territories overseas, where a 54-year-old died after being hit by a stray bullet in French Guiana.
Hundreds of police and firefighters have been injured, including 79 overnight, but authorities haven’t released injury tallies for protesters.
The reaction to the killing was a potent reminder of the persistent poverty, discrimination, unemployment and other lack of opportunity in neighborhoods around France where many residents trace their roots to former French colonies — like where Nahel grew up.
“Nahel’s story is the lighter that ignited the gas. Hopeless young people were waiting for it. We lack housing and jobs, and when we have (jobs), our wages are too low,” said Samba Seck, a 39-year-old transportation worker in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.
Clichy was the birthplace of weeks of riots in 2005 that shook France, prompted by the deaths of two teenagers electrocuted in a power substation while fleeing from police. One of the boys lived in the same housing project as Seck.
Like many Clichy residents, he lamented the violence targeting his town, where the remains of a burned car stands beneath his apartment building, and the town hall entrance was set alight in rioting this week.
“Young people break everything, but we are already poor, we have nothing,” he said, adding that “young people are afraid to die at the hands of police.”
France’s national soccer team — including international star Kylian Mbappe, an idol to many young people in the disadvantaged neighborhoods where the anger is rooted — pleaded for an end to the violence.
“Many of us are from working-class neighborhoods, we too share this feeling of pain and sadness” over the killing of Nahel, the players said in a statement.
Nahel’s mother, identified as Mounia M., told France 5 television that she was angry at the officer, but not at the police in general. “He saw a little Arab-looking kid, he wanted to take his life,” she said.
“A police officer cannot take his gun and fire at our children, take our children’s lives,” she said. The family has roots in Algeria.
Early Saturday, firefighters in Nanterre extinguished blazes set by protesters that left scorched remains of cars strewn across the streets. In the neighboring suburb Colombes, protesters overturned garbage bins and used them for makeshift barricades.
Looters during the evening broke into a gun shop and made off with weapons in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, police said.
Buildings and businesses were also vandalized in the eastern city of Lyon, where a third of the roughly 30 arrests made were for theft, police said.
In the face of the escalating crisis that hundreds of arrests and massive police deployments have failed to quell, Macron held off on declaring a state of emergency, an option that was used in similar circumstances in 2005.
Steinmeier’s office said the German president “has the fullest understanding in view of the situation in our neighboring country.”
Darmanin ordered a nationwide nighttime shutdown Friday of all public buses and trams, which have been among rioters’ targets. He also said he warned social networks not to allow themselves to be used as channels for calls to violence.
“They were very cooperative,” Darmanin said, adding that French authorities were providing the platforms with information in hopes of cooperation identifying people inciting violence.
The violence comes just over a year before Paris and other French cities are due to host Olympic athletes and millions of visitors for the summer Olympic Games, whose organizers were closely monitoring the situation as preparations for the competition continue.
The police officer accused of killing Nahel was given a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide. Preliminary charges mean investigating magistrates strongly suspect wrongdoing, but need to investigate more before sending a case to trial. Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said that his initial investigation led him to conclude that the officer’s use of his weapon wasn’t legally justified.
Race was a taboo topic for decades in France, which is officially committed to a doctrine of colorblind universalism.
Thirteen people who didn’t comply with traffic stops were fatally shot by French police last year. This year, another three people, including Nahel, died under similar circumstances. The deaths have prompted demands for more accountability in France, which also saw racial justice protests after George Floyd’s killing by police in Minnesota.
In 2006, Corey Matthews was the first person in his family to go to college.
The application and selection process was so foreign to him that community programs that illuminated his options and helped him apply to several schools were a godsend. But when he had to decide where to actually enroll, Matthews merged what he had been taught with a criteria straight out of the movies.
“I grew up in L.A. so I associate UCLA with sports, which I didn’t really have an interest in, but I did have an interest in big parties,” says Matthews, now 34 and a vice president of global philanthropy with JP Morgan Chase. Today, he helps to manage a grant portfolio in Los Angeles consistent with the company’s goals, the kind of multifactor strategy work that makes him chuckle about his 17-year-old logic and sigh when he thinks about just how significant that decision and, in many ways, his freshman class became.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
What Matthew found on campus was something far different than a series of ragers interrupted by classes and coursework.In 2006,10 years after California voters first banned race consideration in college admissions with Proposition 209, just 96 Black freshmen were admitted to UCLA, one of the state’s two flagship public universities. After a few more students were admitted during the appeals process, Matthews ultimately became one of just 100 Black freshmen out of 4,852 total. But the initial news of 96 Black students – a figure unseen at one of California’s most prestigious public universities since the early 1970s – situated a respected institution in one of America’s most diverse cities and a state often understood as acaricatureland controlled by progressive policy and people as the place to watch for those on both sides of the affirmative-action debate. California had become the first state in the nation to ban affirmative action in admissions, to lean into a particular conception of American fairness and absolute meritocracy that those opposed to affirmative action say exists.
Courtesy of Leroy HamiltonPortrait of Corey Matthews
Of course California has long been more complicated than those who consider the Golden State a byword for progressive excesses and accommodations. Its voters, after all, have sent Ronald Reagan, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, and Kevin McCarthy to Washington.Nearly 55% approved Proposition 209. And it has long been a kind of laboratory where new and sometimes long-sought-after policies get implemented and their effects often become clear.
When California eliminated affirmative action in college admissions, Black and Latino student enrollment in the University of California system declined, with the sharpest drops happening at the state’s flagship universities. A fraught, sometimes taxing on-campus atmosphere developed for the small number of Black and Latino students who did enroll, but it also breathed new life into a rich tradition of student activism. The change pulled students, alumni, and some faculty into a range of efforts to recruit, admit, and retain a larger number of Black and Latino students, producing notable but modest effects which, after the nadir of Black student enrollment became the subject of national headlines in 2006, slowly pushed back against the creep of Proposition 209-inspired thinking and practices at the states’ public colleges and universities.
But by 2016, two decades after California voters approved Proposition 209 and a decade after the push to counter its effects gained force, something else was also clear. Student enrollment in the University of California system, one of the most well-regarded in the nation (it includes seven schools considered so-called public Ivies) still didn’t look much like the people who live in the state. Black, Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander students made up about 56% of the state’s high school graduates but just 37% of those enrolled in California’s public colleges and universities, University of California data indicates.
In the years since Proposition 209, at least 10 other states have gone the way of California, banning affirmative action in college admissions with two reversing course after courts struck down those policies. But now that the Supreme Court has ruled that race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions at both private and public universities is unconstitutional, the whole country will join them. And for a large segment of the population, that’s just fine – according to a recentPew Research Center poll,only 33% approveof selective colleges considering race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.
“It’s interesting, the national discourse around affirmative action at the time,” Matthews says about his experiences at UCLA beginning in 2006, “it felt very clear. If you believed in social justice and understood equity and race — and we weren’t even using terms like equity – you would be OK with affirmative action, almost immediately. But affirmative action has evolved to something completely different. People will say, ‘Yeah, I believe in equity, but is affirmative action the way? Oh, I don’t supportthat.’”
The lessons of what happened in California are important to understand.
Back in 2006, it didn’t take long for Matthews to realize that what he’d hoped would be a fun school right there in his big-city hometown was also a swirling vortex of controversy.
“There was just a lot of outcry around how there were not even 100 Black students out of an entering class of 4,000. Then you peel that back a little bit further and there were even fewer Black men, young Black men coming into the university.”
What that ultimately set in motion for Matthews is something he’s still unpacking today.
“UCLA is not bashful about its student activism, taking very public stances on certain issues, having students agitate on certain issues,” says Matthews. “Because of that…when I got there, I always say the campus sort of descended upon me.”
It’s hard for him to remember now, but he thinks it was at events set up by the UCLAAfrikan Student Unionfor the incoming freshmen class in April of his senior year in high school that he learned how Black student enrollment, what people were already calling “the Infamous 96,” compared to previous years. A few months later, Matthews was on campus, a freshman, navigating his first steps into adulthood. On the first day of class, he was approached by a Black upperclassman with one of those “are you with us?” kind of conundrums.
“[He] came up to me and said, ‘Come with me and go to this protest,’” Matthews says.
Matthews felt torn. He knew he needed to go to class but also that the work of trying to raise questions and find solutions to the dearth of diversity on campus was very important.
He went to the protest, then to his later classes. But the people he connected with at that protest, the work he did with them, the work he did helping to recruit Black applicants in Los Angeles, and the work he did as the eventualAfrikan Student Union chairpersonin coalition with Asian and Latino student groups familiarized him with a concept that is much talked about in college-admissions circles today.
The concept is called holistic admissions. It requires or calls on schools to consider more than a student’s grades andACTandSATscores. Research has shown that these standardized tests do not accurately predict college performance but closely reflect the education and wealth of a student’s parents and a student’s access to test-prep tools. And an admissions system that depends on them alone disadvantages Black and Latino students, those who come from poor families, and those who are among the first in their families to go to college or trying to navigate the higher-ed system without some kind of experience or guide. Holistic admissions require a school to consider academic performance but also who a student is, what they have tried to learn or do inside and outside of school, what they have had to manage or opted to take on, the context in which they grew up, what interests and hobbies they have developed, how they have contributed to their communities and what all of this together suggests about a student’s potential to contribute to campus life and to the communities where they live after graduation.The concept came up during oral arguments at the Supreme Court last year, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson probing why, if a university is evaluating an applicant holistically, race should not be considered while other factors, such as a family’s history with the school, could. “That seems to me to havethe potential of causing more of an equal protection problem than it’s actually solving,” she said.
Holistic admissions acknowledge that there are multiple types of promise, intelligence, and ability, says Mandela Kayise, who in 2006 was the president of UCLA’s Black alumni association. He had arrived on campus as an undergraduate student in the late 1970s only to be forced out by economic challenges, returned in the 1980s to finish his degree, and joined the administration working in student advising and retention. Kayise also served as a faculty advisor to student groups when Prop 209 passed in 1996 and was doing similar work 10 years later when the Infamous 96 arrived. There were protests against Proposition 209 before and after it passed, he says. But it was when the Infamous 96 got there, human proof of exactly what the ban’s opponents had warned would happen, more of the campus, people connected to it, and Los Angeles civil rights organizations got involved. “It became ‘enough is enough,’” says Kayise, who is now the president and CEO of New World Education, a college-access, student-retention and leadership-development organization.For the Infamous 96, and some alumni, holistic admissions became a major focus of student activism and ultimately, a practice UCLAimplemented in 2007and the entire University of California system would follow in 2020.
In 2006, Peter Taylor, a Black UCLA alumni, became chair of the university’s task force on African American student recruitment, retention, and graduation. It included students, administrators, faculty, staff, and members of the municipal community. “One of the things we looked at was why UCLA’s African American [student] population had been shrinking,” says Taylor, a now retiredinvestment banker who has also served as president of the UCLA board of directors, chair of the UCLA foundation board, and spent five years as the University of California system’s chief financial officer. At the time, the system consisted of 10 campuses and five medical centers with a $24 billion budget. “Prop. 209 was a big part of it, but part of it was that the admissions system needed to be transformed, a chance for students to make a holistic case for themselves. And we also raised a lot of money for African American students.”
Black student enrollment slowly began to grow again. Taylor knows that some people will say, “Oh, well, you were just giving them such great scholarships that of course they decided on UCLA,” or presume that race-based scholarships violate the law. But while the University of California could not operate a race-based scholarship, community foundations could and did. And, in most cases, the community-foundation scholarships amounted to a letter to Black students who had been admitted saying, “Congratulations and here is $1,000 to use toward your college costs.” It wasn’t much compared to the cost of college, but $1,000 can make a difference for very low-income students who often face transportation challenges, relatively small costs that they simply can’t cover for a textbook, or issues balancing work hours and school. Plus, the letters included the names of established professionals who were Black alumni.
The school’s admissions officers also fanned out and engaged in more on-the-ground, in-person recruiting activity. Under the old way of operating, simple, relatively low-cost, human-to-human niceties like this didn’t happen often, Taylor says.
Still, by 2020, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, had found that the end of affirmative action in public college admissions had not only reduced overall Black and Latino student enrollment at California’s public universities but also done damage to these students’ college-graduation rates and wages earned after the college years. What’s more, the 2020 study, released by Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, found that claims that affirmative action in college admissions had harmed white and Asian students did not bear out when researchers examined enrollment, graduation rates, and earnings before and after Proposition 209. Instead, the ban on affirmative action in college admissions had contributed to a sort of two-tier higher-education system where the state’s flagship schools – UCLA and Berkeley – are attended overwhelmingly by white and Asian students while the other schools in the system, many of which had low Black and Latino student enrollment before the change, saw some gains. Proposition 209 also deterred thousands of qualified students from these same groups from applying to any campus. Because fewer students of color enrolled in UC schools overall after Proposition 209 and the number enrolled in STEM programs, particularly among Latino students, also fell, the number of early-career Black, Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander graduates earning over $100,000 dropped by at least 3%.The studyprovided the “first causal evidence that banning affirmative action exacerbates socioeconomic inequities.”
That year the system’s board of regents voted unanimously to support a repeal of Proposition 209. They also agreed to phase out requirements that applicants submit SAT and ACT scores, then by 2025 develop the system’s own standardized test. The state’s lawmakers put the question of repealing Proposition 209 on the November 2020 ballot. But California voters defeated it – with 57% voting to keep the ban on affirmative action in college admissions in place.
Beyond the enrollment figures and the graduation rates, there are the experiences of being a Black human being on a campus like UCLA’s.And to this day Kayise wonders if the Infamous 96 were a class asked to take on too much.
“They were so small,” he says. “They not only had to figure out how to thrive themselves in an environment where there were fewer of them to provide support to one another but they picked up the job of trying to help the next generation of high school students gain access and rebuild some of the programs and community-service projects, the [Black] fraternities and sororities that were suffering.”
In essence, as Black student enrollment slid to that low in 2006, some of the organizations, events, programs, and infrastructure that previous groups of Black students could rely upon for social, emotional, and academic support had shriveled or died. The Infamous 96 had to rebuild them and use them at the same time.
“Going to college is hard, it’s hard enough,” says Rachel Aladdin, another member of the Infamous 96. Like Matthews, she was a first-generation college student. She grew up in Pasadena, about 30 miles and an entire world northeast of UCLA’s campus outside Los Angeles. Aladdin and her identical twin sister,Rebekah, were raised by a single father, who was living with multiple sclerosis. So as they applied to college, they considered practical things, like the ease with which they could get back to Pasadena on the weekends.
Courtesy of Rachel AladdinRachel Aladdin (right) and sister Rebekah Aladdin (left), at their graduation from UCLA in 2010.
Rebekah received an admissions letter from UCLA first. Rachel doesn’t think hers ever came, but she found out that she too had been admitted five stressful days later when a high school history teacher let her log into an admissions website in his classroom.
Rachel Aladdin was awarded a four-year scholarship from the Jackie Robinson Foundation, and by that summer she was on campus for the freshman summer program, an academic enrichment and social-adjustment program for students coming from underserved communities. Between that and freshman orientation, she thinks she met all of the Infamous 96. There were a number of athletes among them including the NBA player Russell Westbrook. The 96, and for that matter the limited number of Black students on campus, were generally close, and from this Aladdin drew a big circle of friends.It was, perhaps, the one upside of such a small group of Black freshmen. She grew up in a family where race was talked about, and while her hometown was diverse, there’s a fair bit of effective segregation, she says. So, being one of just 96 Black students admitted was upsetting but not surprising. What was hard was the day to day on campus once classes began.
“When you have the troubles of life on top of that, as a Black person from an underserved community,” Aladdin says, “and you now have this racial climate that you have been thrown into. It was crazy. I don’t know if some of my experience was projection because it was so top of mind. There are 96 Black freshmen here. And you felt alienated. You felt very different.”
When Matthews arrived on campus, he was, as he puts it, all of 5 ft. 3 in. Yet, non-Black people all over campus frequently asked him questions or mentioned things to him that seemed to hinge on the presumption that he was an athlete.
“I’ve since had a little growth spurt so I am now 5 ft. 7 in.,” he says. “But what I could not believe is that people, at this Division I school, seriously looked at me and made their assumptions. This was before we had or at least I knew of terms like microaggressions, pre-DEI and all of that.”
It often made Matthews, other members of the 96, and other Black students on campus feel as if they weren’t welcome.
“We really started talking about campus climate and safety and feeling psychologically safe and feeling that, ‘Do I belong here?’ thing,” Matthews says. “This was about like look, I’m on campus. I stick out like a sore thumb. I stay in my little small enclave and I go to class and that’s what I’m doing.”
Matthews didn’t feel welcome so he didn’t engage in many parts of campus life. He got in. He did what he could to make way for others. He went to class. He learned. He graduated. He got out. He’s accepted that not everyone actually grasps the difference between equality and actual equity, that people are sometimes rude intentionally and sometimes don’t know exactly how offensive they are. Sometimes they simply do not care.
For Aladdin, the climate on campus made her question everything. When someone would fail to move over to share the sidewalk, forcing her into the grass, she often wasn’t sure if they were just rude or they were racist. When someone failed to hold a building door despite her trailing only inches behind, when people didn’t thank her for holding the door for them or making room for them on a bench, she wasn’t sure.
“You often found yourself asking, how racist is this, really?” Aladdin says. “I think with time those thoughts subsided, but at first…I made sure I was aware of my surroundings because I didn’t know how weird things could get.”
When she walked across campus or anywhere near the row of white fraternity houses, she felt particularly anxious about her safety. It wasn’t that she thought white frat guys were particularly dangerous. It was that she wasn’t sure anyone would care or respond if she became the victim of a crime and she worried about hate crime specifically. In class she was often the only Black person in the room and felt the need to represent Black people well. But unlike her classmates, most of whom had laptops and in some cases, multiple devices, she and her sister were sharing a desktop. She majored in world arts and cultures and found other students in the department, many of them wealthy and most of them white, a bit standoffish.
Aladdin, who since graduation has worked as an actress, model, songwriter, and screenwriter, has an ad-sales job at Disney and a BET Christmas movie on her resume,Merry Switchmas, featuring both her and her twin. But when she was a freshman, she had to deal with all of that on top of all the other changes that come with anyone’s adjustment to college.
“The emotional gymnastics of having to analyze it,” says Aladdin, who went home every weekend until her father died her senior year. “You have this dynamic that felt so uncomfortable, but then you also felt this responsibility to do something about it.”
In the fall of 2021, UCLA championed the demographics of its new student body. It had required a lot of effort and spending on targeted recruitment and other activities that began after the year that brought in the Infamous 96. It still wasn’t much like the state’s population but had restored and surpassed the level of campus diversity in 1995 the year before Proposition 209 passed. In 1995 there were 790 Latino students on campus. In 2021 there were 1,185, according to the school’s data. There were 259 Black students enrolled at UCLA in 1995 and in 2021, 346. (Federal data putspercentages for Black and Latino students that year slightly lower than UCLA’s figures.) But even the University of California system itself argued last year that the loss of affirmative action had had a profound impact, writing in a brief to the Supreme Court that “[f]or nearly a quarter century, UC has made persistent, intensive efforts to improve the diversity of its student body through race-neutral programs, yet full realization of the educational benefits of diversity remains elusive.”
A public university system exists to educate, to prepare, to enable the intellectual and economic growth of a state, its people and the country around them. It exists to foster the development of leaders and innovations and meet social and economic needs. So, Taylor has also grown concerned about other after-effects of Proposition 209 and somephenomenawhich predate it but have grown more intense. Away from the California flagships, Black and Latino student enrollment has slowly climbed on campuses where these students were once scarce. He worries that public resources aren’t keeping pace. That’s true in other parts of the U.S. as well, where most students, and certainly the vast majority of students of color, attend open or nearly open enrollment schools as opposed to the elite institutions at the center of the affirmative-action debate. There, public funding cuts have shifted more costs onto students, including many low-income students.
UCLA, like every campus, always had people occupying every place on the continuum from anti-racist to open bigot, Kayise says. It always had people who hated affirmative action and took every chance they could get to “accuse” Black students of “taking” someone else’s slot. Both Matthews and Aladdin had a version of that very exchange, a decade after the affirmative-action ban. Kayise recalls a professor who kept a cartoon affixed to his office door that read “Affirmative Action lets them in. I kick them out.” So Kayise has a warning to a country that just followed California and banned race-based affirmative action: Watch the campus climate, the way all students are treated.
“People need to be prepared,” Kayise says, “for the kind of attitudinal change that you might find. People who maybe feel like Black people don’t belong on those campuses may now feel emboldened. They may no longer feel an obligation to lift a finger to facilitate any form of diversity, no need to diversify the staff, try to bring new voices onto the faculty. Like, you are free now to say what you feel.”
Warning:This post contains spoilers for the first five episodes of The Witcher season 3.
Following a year-and-a-half hiatus, The Witcher is back for a highly-anticipated new season that will mark Henry Cavill’s final outing as titular monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia before Liam Hemsworth takes over the lead role of the popular fantasy series. Netflix dropped the first five episodes of the show’s third season on Thursday, setting viewers on a crash course for the release of the final three installments on July 27.
Season 3 opens with Geralt, Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), and Princess Cirilla “Ciri” of Cintra (Freya Allan) testing the bonds of their makeshift family as they travel the Continent attempting to fend off a myriad of threats while Ciri continues training to hone her magic and defend herself.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
But with everyone from the rogue fire mage Rience (Sam Woolf) to the elven queen Francesca (Mecia Simson) to Nilfgaardian emperor Emhyr “The White Flame” var Emreis (Bart Edwards)—who we now know is actually Ciri’s believed-to-be-dead father Duny—hunting for Ciri, Geralt, and Yennefer soon decide they’re going to need some reinforcements to protect their ward.
While Geralt attempts to track down Rience, Yennefer escorts Ciri to the magical academy Aretuza to meet with her mentor Tissaia (MyAnna Buring), hoping that the rectoress will be able to help teach Ciri to control her powers. As it comes to light that a much older and more powerful mage is not only pulling Rience’s strings but is also responsible for the disappearance of a number of half-elven Aretuza novices, Yennefer proposes holding a Conclave of Mages to unite the Brotherhood, the organization that governs the Continent’s magic users, and the rulers of the Northern Kingdoms in the coming war against Nilfgaard, and suss out the mysterious figure who’s really behind these evil deeds.
And how better to kick off the Conclave than with a glamorous ball.
How does part one of The Witcher season 3 end?
Believing that Stregobor (Lars Mikkelsen), a mage with a history of experimenting on young girls and hating elves, is their prime suspect, Geralt and Yennefer formulate a plan to bring the wizard’s treason to light. While Geralt and Istredd (Royce Pierreson) create a distraction at the ball, Yennefer sneaks into Stregobor’s office and breaks into his safe, finding a hoard of items belonging to the kidnapped novices as well as the missing Book of Monoliths, an old elven tome that supposedly “holds the key to traveling between spheres.”
But exposing Stregobor and getting him arrested is a bit too easy.
Following ominous conversations with both Redanian spymaster Dijkstra (Graham McTavish) and Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu), the powerful mage romantically involved with Tissaia, during which Geralt is told that he must pick a side in the battle to come, Geralt and Yennefer put the missing pieces of the puzzle together and realize that Vilgefortz is the true villain at work and wants Ciri for his own gains.
While Yennefer stays behind to try to locate Tissaia and warn her about Vilgefortz, Geralt exits the room to the sounds of screaming and suddenly finds a knife pressed to his throat by Dijkstra. “Should have chosen a side, witcher,” Dijkstra tells him.
Although Vilgefortz’s ultimate motives remain unclear, in Andrzej Sapkowski’s books on which The Witcher is based, the mage is a central antagonist who gives Geralt a serious run for his money in his quest to protect Ciri.
“Our villain has been playing a very long game. A very long game—decades,” showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich told Netflix’s Tudum in April. “[The writers have] obviously known who the villain was since the moment we started writing season 1. So the writers have also been playing a very long game, and there have been scenes and actions in the past where a character will seem to do something that is well out of character, or that’s not who the fans believe he or she actually is.”
The astonishing rebellion of former convict and “troll factory” owner Yevgeny Prigozhin on June 23 and 24 has unveiled the brittle foundations beneath the surface of Russia’s power structures. The stifled revolt has shed light on the growing confusion and lack of assertiveness of Russia’s perennial leader, President Vladimir Putin. Although the illusion of his omnipotence has not been entirely shattered, the carefully constructed image of unity and strength within the regime is starting to show cracks.
Putin has long used the Wagner Group as a counterbalance to the military and assumed that Prigozhin, who was completely dependent on his patronage and state resources, could never pose a political threat to him. Despite gradually being distanced from Putin and his inner circle, the outspoken businessman managed in recent months to accumulate significant political capital as a counter-elite populist. While professing full loyalty to Putin and fervently supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin lambasted the military top brass in charismatic recruitment pitches across Russia, press conferences with war bloggers, and obscenity-laden Telegram rants. Prigozhin’s exploits in the war, especially his significant contributions to the capture of Bakhmut, enhanced his sense of privilege and emboldened his decision to rebel when he felt cornered.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Prigozhin’s clumsy, reckless mutiny was neither a blatant power grab nor an attempt to overthrow the regime. Instead, it was born out of desperation. The clash between Prigozhin and the military leadership—Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov—had been escalating for a while, but Putin appeared reluctant to intervene. The feud reached a tipping point after Prigozhin overtly challenged the rationale for the war, accused the army of trying to sabotage the Wagner Group, and impulsively started his “march for justice.” Recognizing his impending ouster from Ukraine and struggling to sustain the “private military company” amid the state apparatus turning against him, Prigozhin aimed to capture Shoigu and Gerasimov, draw Putin’s attention, and force discussions on the preservation of his lucrative enterprise. However, the insurrection unfolded into a crisis and exposed that Putin, long-regarded as Russia’s unshakable strongman, is increasingly hesitant and misinformed.
Fierce internal strife and deadly turf battles among elites often happen in Russia, but they rarely spill out into the open. Putin seems to have underestimated Prigozhin’s growing brazenness and burgeoning popularity among the angry pro-war “ultra-patriotic” camp and the military rank and file in Russia, who see him as a kind of folk hero taking on the establishment. Despite receiving multiple warnings that Prigozhin was getting too erratic, the Russian president sat idly by as the maverick tycoon crusaded against the defense chiefs. Putin’s apparent disengagement in the lead up to Prigozhin’s shocking stunt presents a vivid picture of an aging autocrat increasingly detached from the realities of his power structures, unable to mediate disputes within his ranks, and failing to prevent internal power struggles from spiraling out of control.
Prigozhin’s audacious move elicited a surprising degree of paralysis in decision-making within the regime. There was a discombobulated response from the military and security services, and government officials were mainly silent, waiting for a clear signal from Putin. The Wagner Group seized Rostov-on-Don, the logistical hub and nerve center of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, and came close to reaching Moscow without encountering much resistance. Russia’s chief propagandists, such as RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, were curiously silent. Some bureaucrats and oligarchs scrambled to leave Russia or depart from Moscow in the midst of the chaos. While elites in Russia were predominantly aligned against Prigozhin and believed he “went mad,” their reluctance to act decisively without explicit direction from the Kremlin exposed a significant vulnerability of Putin’s ruling style, which distributes power based on personal loyalty rather than institutional stability.
Putin waited for more than nine hours after he was briefed about the “attempted armed rebellion” to give a televised address accusing Prigozhin of “treason.” It took Putin another ten hours to reach a surprising deal with the mercenary boss, reportedly closing a criminal investigation into his mutiny, exiling him to Belarus, and dissolving his mercenary operations in Ukraine. Putin had lost control of the situation, sending shockwaves through the state. Russia’s power brokers eventually rallied behind Putin, but notably, only after the uprising ended, underlining the crucial role of Putin’s active engagement in securing elite solidarity.
Notwithstanding his latest setbacks, Putin remains the centripetal force holding the Russian state together. His authority, albeit increasingly questioned, continues to be the central mechanism by which political stability is maintained. It is Putin who sets the national agenda and ultimately holds the reins of Russia’s power dynamics. In the wake of the upheaval, the regime is making a concerted effort to show elite consolidation and project the image of an unwavering, united front supporting an indispensable statesman.
The Kremlin has orchestrated a series of set piece events in recent days aimed at rewriting the narrative of the insurrection and demonstrating normalcy. Putin vowed to “take decisive action” and applauded the “civic solidarity” of the people. Talking heads in Russia are currently painting Prigozhin out to be a “traitor”, thanking Putin for his “strength and wisdom” in resolving the crisis with minimal bloodshed, praising him for averting “complete chaos and a civil war.” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov argued that Russia will come out “stronger” after the incident. Russians usually feel more comfortable aligning themselves with prevailing narratives espoused by Putin’s propaganda machine than confronting negative information and difficult news stories. Putin maintains approval ratings at around 82%, and although his public approval is derived more from apathetic obedience than sincere allegiance, the pervasive belief that there is no alternative to his rule remains intact—at least for now.
The Kremlin’s relentless repression of dissenters may intensify, promoting an atmosphere of fear and stoking greater fatigue and helplessness to stand up to the regime. The uprising is already being called a “crash test of loyalty” in Russia, and purges of alleged Wagner Group conspirators seem to have begun in the military. Following intense speculation about his presumed involvement in the mutiny, the whereabouts of Russian army general and Commander of the Aerospace Forces Sergey Surovikin are currently unknown. Putin may become more brutal and paranoid as the intrigues surrounding the incident are further unraveled.
The rebellion does not suggest a sudden plunge into political volatility in Russia, but it serves as a stark reminder that Putin is not infallible. He has outlived many predictions about his demise before, but the system he built is becoming more fragile as the war goes on. The key question moving forward is whether Putin can manage to restore the perception of his ironclad rule or whether the failed gambit of Prigozhin will serve as a catalyst for more severe domestic challenges threatening the survival of the regime.
Nearly 18 months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine now, amidst last week’s failed coup attempt, battlefield setbacks, and global diplomatic condemnation, Putin is coming under increasing strain to finance his increasingly-expensive war—and there’s a history lesson for how this will all end.
Far from the prevailing narrative on how Putin funds his invasion, Putin’s financial lifeline has his merciless cannibalization of Russian economic productivity. He has been burning the living room furniture to fuel his battles in Ukraine, but that is now starting to backfire amidst a deafening silence and dearth of public support. That is far from the prevailing narrative on how Putin funds his invasion. Ample western commentators posit that Putin is pulling in billions from trade to finance the invasion thanks to high commodity prices, weak western sanctions, and sanctions evasion.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
It is often overlooked that Putin is funding his invasion of Ukraine not only through marginal commodity exports or trickles of sanctions evasion but through the cannibalization of Russia’s productive economy. As an extractive authoritarian dictator with state control over 70% of the economy, Putin will never really run out of money since he can always pull the authoritarian equivalent of finding money under the couch, or pull a schoolhouse bully act and shake down kids (i.e. oligarchs) for their lunch money at recess time.
Putin has levied draconian “windfall taxes” on basically anything that moves. Many thought last year’s record $1.25 trillion ruble windfall tax on Gazprom and certain other Russian state owned businesses was a one-time occurrence, but Putin has only doubled down and ordered more windfall taxes in the months since, raising trillions of rubles more from companies and oligarchs alike. Likewise, first Putin resorted to levying onerous taxes on both companies and people leaving Russia after the invasion before he dropped all pretense and just started indiscriminately seizing money and property instead.
Some, like Deripaska, even argue that Putin’s shakedowns are hurting the Russian economy even worse than western sanctions – which are already causing entire sectors of the Russian economy to implode, as we’ve shown before. And on top of sanctions, with over 1,000 western companies leaving Russia practically overnight, already Russian consumers are hard-pressed to find erstwhile staples, ranging from consumer electronics to automobiles.
Amidst such undisguised plundering of the Russian economy, stripping it down for war toys, it is perhaps no surprise that Prigozhin’s failed putsch this past weekend revealed no lost love for Putin domestically from the Russian populace and elites. After all, not only did military leaders and civilians alike passively wave columns of Wagnerites through checkpoint after checkpoint on the road from Rostov to Moscow without a shred of resistance; even Putin’s own regional governors were lethargic in their response, and even now, a whopping 21 of them have yet to express any support for Putin. Ironically, the only group of Russians who rushed to Putin’s defense with any genuine enthusiasm prior to Belarusian President Lukashenko’s diplomatic intervention were brigades of Chechens who sped to Moscow and Rostov, led by Putin’s longtime ally and newly-minted selfie-pal Ramzan Kadyrov.
There is a historical pattern here. Of the two major Russian revolutions over the past century, both were undergirded by debilitating economic woes caused partially by military overreach and struggles on the battlefield. After all, wars are never cheap: economic analysts estimate that sustaining its military efforts costs Russia at least $1 billion a day, and it surely didn’t help that Putin sunk billions in not only the Wagner Group but also Prigozhin’s other companies. Likewise, World War I drained Tsar Nicholas II’s coffers prior to his abdication in 1917, when Russia was wracked by over 100 labor strikes amidst widespread famine, exacerbated by both forced conscription as well as returning military veterans. And prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the escalating costs of the Cold War combined with low oil prices and severe recession undermined the Soviet economy from within. Losing wars seems to go hand-in-hand with economic morass and regime change in Russia.
Historian Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners reminds us that the evil of the Third Reich triumphed through the complicity of average Germans through their complacency. We now see Russians’ willing complacency with the murderous autocratic Putin.
When I first moved to Texas in 2016, I never expected it’d be here that I’d come out as intersex. I certainly never thought that would’ve happened in a Senate hearing, divulging details about my body and medical history most of my family didn’t even know to a bunch of conservative legislators. I told them that I was born with physical traits—external sex anatomy, internal reproductive organs, hormones, and chromosomes—that didn’t fit neatly into the binary “male” or “female” options on a birth certificate. And I shared that very personal fact with a government chamber full of total strangers because the “bathroom bill” they were pushing not only discriminated against the trans community, but also completely ignored the existence of intersex folks like me.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
The day that bill died in June 2017, something new was born within me: The confidence to share my truth with the world and the conviction that the whole world needed to hear my story—our story. Since then, I haven’t stopped showing up (at the State Capitol and on stages across the globe) to raise awareness of the inequity we face. Similarly to what the trans community has experienced, though, increased visibility can be a double-edged sword. At first, only the wrong people listened to me—or the right ones listened, those tasked with serving their constituents, but they intentionally received and parroted the wrong message.
As I shouted about the involuntary surgery that sterilized me, an operation to remove the internal testes that didn’t “match” my external “female” genitalia, Gov. Greg Abbott and the former Texas Attorney General heard me loud and clear. They then translated the alarm bell I was sounding for intersex kids into a battle cry against trans youth; they used arguments of forced sterilizations and the neglect of gender-nonconforming children not to help me and others like me, but rather to hurt people I also care about. Despite hearing my desperate calls for a life raft—one of affirmative consent, so that all human beings might decide for themselves the form their body might take—they instead unleashed a deluge of misinformation that has since swept the nation.
The same bills that seek to block gender affirming care for transgender Americans, cropping up in state legislatures across the country, contain loopholes that allow the same surgeries and hormones to be forced onto intersex children without our having any say in the matter. As journalist Carter Sherman wrote in their piece for VICE, “Republicans have compared gender-affirming health care to child abuse and Nazi war crimes. But they’re more than happy to let doctors perform surgeries on intersex children.”
This all proves that the authors of these bills seek not to shield children from harm but rather to eradicate those that don’t fit their cis-heteropatriarchal paradigm. Texas Republicans took my plea for protection and warped it into propaganda—and it’s time to set the record straight.
I’ll start by clarifying here what should seem obvious: Both trans and intersex kids must be at the decision-making table when determining the course of our futures. And we deserve to live freely as who we are in any and all spaces—from restrooms to sports pitches. But despite comprising roughly 2% of the world’s population, intersex people are usually left out of any conversation on LGBTQIA+ rights. Even media coverage of anti-trans bills that also target our bodies remove any evidence of the identities we were born with and the intersex community at large. We are, quite literally, erased from the coverage of our own erasure.
This exclusion is, unfortunately, something we’ve long been accustomed to. Our identity is stamped out the moment we leave the birth canal and bolstered each day thereafter, as intersex people are left off most forms for data-collection or even a drop-down menu to purchase a plane ticket. This calculated effort to shove us into one of the categories society is more comfortable with is reinforced through medically unnecessary and non-consensual surgeries that force our bodies to fit neater onto a piece of paper, rather than editing the piece of paper to accommodate the reality of human diversity.
We are told it’s easier to hide our truth from the world than it would be to change the hearts and minds of those who fear difference; the box we’re pushed into then takes the form of a closet that many of us never find our way out of. Most of us reside deep in the shadows of shame and stigma, until there’s a critical mass of us living “out” and it feels safe for the rest of us to do so, too.
But we are very much here—everywhere—including Texas. Our stories matter, regardless of whether or not our “representatives” acknowledge them. And while we have been playing defense against a hateful, misinformed agenda, our offensive push for rights and recognition of the truth is stronger.
For example, as an intersex person, I have not been able to find endocrinologists, gynecologists, or even primary care doctors who can meet my needs since moving here. So in 2023, Texas Health Action and I partnered to launch the nation’s first ever competent care for intersex adults through their Kind Clinics in cities across the state. Given that one of the patients we surveyed while crafting this care-offering routinely flies to Japan to access a proficient provider, this is life-changing support for our community.
Beyond overhauling a cluster of clinics, we’ve been working to systematically improve care outside the realm of sexual wellness. The Austin City Council passed a local resolution to craft a public education campaign for not just doctors of intersex kids, but also for parents to work with their own children and make better-informed decisions than my parents were equipped to make. The City Council is also working on a budget amendment to fund it later this summer. (This policy is based on one that passed in New York City and has since scaled statewide.)
And that’s just in Texas. In 2022, President Biden’s historic executive order last Pride Month committed to end conversion therapy; it also mandated a year-long report by Health and Human Services to identify “promising practices for advancing health equity for intersex individuals”. This was the first ever federal policy to formally address and endeavor to assist our community.
From national politics to international media, 2023 has seen a swell of support that might help wash away the misinformation that has drowned out our voices and buoy our identity into the mainstream. A documentary, Every Body, chronicling our movement’s struggle over the past three decades, has just released—the first movie ever highlighting intersex existence to achieve nationwide theatrical distribution.
One of the film’s subjects, River Gallo, explains that media representation is necessary to help establish our existence in the common cultural vernacular, which will pave a pathway to enacting the sweeping legislative changes needed to keep our community safe from harm. But lifting our voices into media prominence isn’t enough to keep us safe. Sean Saifa Wall, another subject of the film, reminded me that the counter-efforts targeting intersex and trans kids are waged by a well-coordinated network of groups promoting “gender exploratory therapy”—a new form of conversion therapy, focused on enforcing a “norm” around gender and sex rather than sexuality. This means that, in addition to representation, we also can’t give up our own political advocacy efforts until real policies are in place to protect us.
In 1993, Cheryl Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America to “end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female.” Thirty years after our movement took shape, our message is being amplified and the shame and misinformation that obscured the truth about our community is beginning to dissipate. In the struggle to achieve body autonomy for all, the intersex community demands that everybody deserves the right to decide what’s right for their own body, intersex people included. If our current trajectory continues—and if we pick up enough allies along the way—I have hope we might celebrate that reality together in a future Pride month to come.
