Daily Archives: July 21, 2022

Why Is This Happening? ‘His Name is George Floyd’ with Robert Samuels – MSNBC

Posted: July 21, 2022 at 1:15 pm

Its been a little over two years since the tragic murder of George Floyd, and what was arguably the largest civil rights protests in United States history. Since May of 2020, hashtags and icons have been used to commemorate him, but he was so much more than a face on a mural. He was a father, partner, athlete, and friend who constantly strove for a better life, as chronicled in His Name Is George Floyd: One Mans Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. The book builds off of a series in The Washington Post in October 2020 called George Floyd's America. Robert Samuels, a national enterprise reporter at The Washington Post, co-wrote the book with colleague Toluse Olorunnipa, a political enterprise and investigations reporter. Samuels joins WITHpod for a personal look at how systemic racism impacted Floyds life, his familys social mobility, his legacy and more. Samuels also discusses how even despite all of the seemingly endless challenges Floyd faced, he still held on to his vision for a better world.

Note: This is a rough transcript please excuse any typos.

Robert Samuels: A lot of folks who believe that to get by in life you simply need to get by, there's not a lot of ambition, George Floyd wasn't one of those people though.

From early on, he started telling his sister that he didn't want to rule the world, he didn't want to change the world, but he wanted to do something to touch the world.

Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to "Why Is This Happening?" with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

It's been a little over two years since the death of George Floyd, a man in Minneapolis who was buying something at a store, had the police called on him for possibly passing a counterfeit 20. And the police showed up, and as you know, Derek Chauvin ended up kneeling on George Floyd's neck as a crowd of onlookers watched and raised alarms and screamed out for help and recorded on their phones until George Floyd was no longer able to breathe, as he said, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe," and ended up dying.

And in the wake of that, the United States saw the largest civil rights protests, racial justice protests it had seen in over a generation and by some metrics ever if you count participation estimates and the number of people that were on the streets. You had protests in cities large and small that swept across the country. You had this moment to sort of invoke what's become a cliche, a racial reckoning, about the sort of systemic legacy of anti-Black racism in America and its intersection with the legacy of policing.

And then, you had a backlash to that, which in many ways one could say was as equal in its force, even if it didn't mobilize in the streets in the same way, but produced what we have seen in state house after state house with prohibitions on the teaching of certain aspects of the legacies of white supremacy, and chattel slavery, and Jim Crowe, and racial segregation and systematic oppression up to this current day.

And the continuation of this pitch battle about the meaning of the American story as it pertains to race. The aspiration towards of equality with the reality of systematic inequities that persist, and persist, and persist long past the inception points that created them and long past the point that many people would like to admit that they persist.

At the center of that though was a person, a man by the name of George Floyd, with a story, with a family, with a history, with an inner life (ph), with passions, with complications, with all of the human attributes that attach to any person. And a story that put him in that place at a certain time propelled by all of the historical structural forces that produced the system of the racial caste in America.

And that, telling that story is the project of a fascinating new book, which is a biography of George Floyd. It's called, "His Name is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice." It's a biography of George Floyd, but also about the structural factors of history and class in American society that shaped who he is, and what his life was and how he came to be there at that moment. And how he died at the hands of a white police officer. And what happened afterward.

It's co-authored by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, and it builds off a series that was done in "The Washington Post" in October 2020, called "George Floyd's America."

And two years plus after his death, I thought it would be great to sit down with Robert Samuels, a fellow Bronx native and one of those co-authors.

Robert, great to have you on the program.

Robert Samuels: Thanks for having me, Chris. I really appreciate it.

Chris Hayes: This is a really interesting project because it's at the intersection of biography and sort of history and social history. How did you conceive of it?

Robert Samuels: So much of the conversations in the country when we had first endeavored on this project were about systemic racism. And they were good conversations to have, but I thought lost in those conversations was the idea of how it actually played out in someone's life.

And so, in the summer of 2020, a group of reporters at "The Post" asked ourselves, how can we make this real? How can we show the tangible impact of what it does?

And the idea came to try and look at the life of George Floyd, a person who everyone recognized, felt the brunt of racism on May 25, 2020.

But what we wanted readers to understand, Chris, was that the structures of systemic racism were hobbling George Floyd before he ever met Derek Chauvin. And in going through the story of his life we could help the world see who we are as a larger society and what we might be able to do to start unlocking and dismantling systemic racism in America.

Chris Hayes: So, I want to start the story with the first emancipated generation in George Floyd's family history, which I think is a really fascinating story that you trace back. Tell us about many generations back where George Floyd's people came from.

Robert Samuels: So, we understood that if we really wanted the world to understand why George Floyd grew up poor, why he was born poor, you had to go back to the very beginning. Even though people don't like talking about slavery, but it turns out when we went back seven generations George Floyd's great-grandfather was a man named Hillery Thomas Stewart. He was the first person on his mother's line to be emancipated.

And he was an industrious fellow. He actually amassed 500 acres of land in eastern North Carolina, which would have made him one of the wealthiest and most industrious Black landowners of his time.

But before he was able to make one single inter-generational transfer all that property and land was stripped from him through tax fraud, unscrupulous business deals that he could not understand, being forced to sign letters that he could not understand because it was illegal for him to learn how to read.

And so, he ended up dying a popper in a country where if he was able to continue George Floyd would have been born in a different life. That money would have been passed on. It would have grown. Instead, his family was forced into the abusive and expletive nature of sharecropping, where his family worked. They continued to work for generations, hoping that one day they'll be able to rid themselves of these credit burdens that sharecropping had brought about, but they could never do it.

And one thing that I think is really important about this conversation, Chris, is when we talk about the abuses of sharecropping, like when I was growing up in the Bronx I thought this was something that happened long ago. You know, I sort of saw in black or white or sepia tones.

Chris Hayes: Yes, totally.

Robert Samuels: Yes, but the people who we spoke to about it, George Floyd's aunts and uncles, they're living today. They're of working age today. And that shows just how long that history of slavery reached, to people who are still living today.

Chris Hayes: So, the story of Hillery Thomas Stewart I found very affecting and compelling for a number of reasons. One that I think often, the story that you can read about, the expropriation of Black wealth in that period is just sheer theft and violence, right? Like literally marauded off their land.

In this case, it has the same end, but it's a much more pernicious form or perdition, basically in which he is taken advantage of, partly because he is an emancipated slave who was legally barred from being literate, right. So, he is sort of sitting duck for these people to prey upon him.

But also, the notion that in this one family's lineage is the story of tremendous progress and then regress that's the story of Black emancipation right after the Civil War and then in the seven decades after. That this man is emancipated and begins to amass land as a full citizen of the newly liberated South, and that that is just a blink of an eye before it's all taken back and his family, for seven generations, would be thrust back into the sort of neo-feudalism of sharecropping.

Robert Samuels: Right. That's right. And that's how we begin to understand how structural racism works, right. Now, when they were taking away the land from the Stewarts, that's George Floyd's maternal side, again, his mom's side, this was a slow burn. It wasn't like the Klan came in and completely robbed it.

Chris Hayes: Exactly, right.

Robert Samuels: And I think that's what people really need to understand about how racism works. It's easy to think about actors as being nefarious, swift people who will do and inflect immediate punishment on African Americans in this country.

But what our reporting showed that time and time again was it was a feeling of fear and a feeling of resentment of Black progress that seeped into to many of the policies and many of the actions by people who are in with the majority in this country.

Chris Hayes: So, this is back many generations on his mother's side. Tell the story of his parents, were sort of more immediately where they come from, the world they're coming on (ph).

Robert Samuels: Sure. So, Larcenia Stewart, that's George Floyd's mother, that's her maiden name, she meets a musician who she falls in love with. His name is George Perry Floyd, Sr. And he has big dreams. He dreams about being a musician. He plays gigs in New York, and they begin to have a family.

Larcenia, who everyone knew as Sissy, and later Miss Sissy, didn't want that kind of life. She didn't want to be around a traveling rolling stone of a musician. So, she first returns to North Carolina and still faces the burden of racism. Feeling that her family could not get ahead, she makes a move. And she moves with a man named Felonus Hogan (ph) to Houston, Texas. And she hopes that living a bigger city that's rapidly growing, that she might be able to set her family on a stronger path.

Now, again, I really want to emphasize that Miss Sissy was not someone who never believed in hard work or was never industrious. She worked as a domestic worker. She worked at a local hamburger joint, and she was known for her gregarious spirit. She'd take people in. If she saw them drunk, she'd fix them meals. She'd fix meals for the entire community. We have stories about people who had grown up with George Floyd, who lived with the Floyd family for a very long time.

So, she was a matriarch of a very full house, a very loving home. And the person who really had taken to her, who loved kissing on her cheek to the point where she'd say, this side's getting numb kiss me on the other side was George Perry Floyd, Jr., her first son.

Chris Hayes: This is another place where I just found the striking, you know, microcosm of the larger story, which is for generations in America, Black people in the rural South and in small town South and parts of the South have moved to large metropolitan areas seeking more opportunities, seeking to escape the bonds of the inheritance of the structural factors that had produced sharecropping and segregation and Jim Crowe during the Great Northern Migration that happens in the 1900s, 1920s. But even as late as Sissy, George Floyd's mom, that this is part of a much larger story, the sort of striking out from metropolitan areas searching for opportunity.

Robert Samuels: Right. There are so many times where, the Floyd family, they held on to the belief of the American promise. And that's one of the things about the American promise, right, that if you work hard and your find the opportunity something good will happen to you.

I don't know how it got so encoded into everyone's DNA in the country that this is how it works. And so, yes, she follows a very familiar pattern of leaving the South to a city hoping that she'd be able to flee herself and her family from some of the structures that were oppressing her.

But when she got to Houston, right, she and her family run into different ways that the original American sin begins to pour out. She moves into an area called "The Bottoms," the Third Ward of Houston and later into a housing project called Cuney Homes.

Now, that neighborhood was a redline neighborhood. It was segregated because the federal government had chosen that it should be that way. It was by a highway which sliced through a community and separated the wealthy from the not-so-wealthy. And there was not a lot of investment in the school systems that came.

She takes her children, and they are educated in a school system, the Houston Independent School District, that was amongst the last major metropolitan cities to integrate. And when they did begin to integrate, you saw the flight, the white flight of white residents from the Houston School District. Some even tried to make their own school districts and invent their own cities.

And one of the most interesting things that happened is that as George Floyd's going to school and all of this is going on, the courts say you need to swap teachers. You cannot have a segregated educational workforce.

So what happens? Well, the best Black teachers are pulled away from the schools that George Floyd is going to, and the white schools did not respond in kind. They did not send their best teachers.

So you are left with an educational system that did not have the investment originally and it did not have the right educational experience or cultural understanding to actually relate to these children.

Chris Hayes: What year was George Floyd born?

Robert Samuels: George Floyd was born in 1973.

Chris Hayes: OK, so his childhood is in the Houston Third Ward which is a predominantly Black neighborhood, right? I mean and sort of in some ways when you say relined, I mean again the nature of the Third Ward is very recognizable as an instantiation of a form of concentrated Black poverty that is produced in city after city after city after the Great Migration and through this sort of redlining that gets produced in the post-World War II era. The Third Ward's an example of that.

Tell me about what his upbringing's like, his life world in that neighborhood is like.

Robert Samuels: So if you live in a city, you'd recognize a community like Third Ward, and particularly the Cuney Homes Housing Project because it looks so distinct from the neighborhoods that are across the interstate from it.

The people in that community called it the "The Bricks" because the homes, the project housing, they were low-slung brick homes connected to one another. But it also referred to the hard scrabble life that people led there.

And as factory jobs left the United States there was not a lot of investment in work. And so what happens is that neighborhood, the currency of the neighborhood largely becomes drugs. So George Floyd is growing up in a community that is known for dealing drugs, a lot of drug users, a lot of poverty, a lot of people who can't get jobs.

And a lot of folks who believed that to get by in life you simply need to get by. There's not a lot of ambition. George Floyd wasn't one of those people, though. From early on he started telling his sister that he didn't want to rule the world, he didn't want to change the world, but he wanted to do something to touch the world.

And one of the most interesting things that we learned about him came from his second grade teacher Ms. Sexton. And she kept this essay that he wrote in second grade.

Chris Hayes: Yes, this is incredible detail.

Robert Samuels: Yes, this is second grade so it's not a full essay, it's about a paragraph. And it comes after she teaches this segment about African American history. And George Floyd, after learning about Thurgood Marshall, says he wants to be a Supreme Court Justice because he wants to be able to adjudicate and regulate how the law is played out.

Now it's not just the dream that's interesting about this, right, it's how he writes about it. The spelling's right, the grammar is right, the punctuation's right. And George Floyd, at second grade, was reading and writing at grade level, which is incredibly hard if you grow up --

(CROSSTALK)

Chris Hayes: Yes.

Robert Samuels: -- in a community as destitute as his was. And so there was something special about George Floyd. And I think there is something that we, as readers, ask about this and what we as society should be asking about this. Which is how is it that these bright Black boys, who have these big dreams in second grade, what happens that prevents from achieving them?

Chris Hayes: Yes, I found that detail about the second grade essay just really profound and really moving, you know, partly because I do think and I appreciate about the project of this book. Even in the mourning of George Floyd, there's a kind of dehumanization because he becomes an icon rather than a person. And just that like this human detail of this bright little boy, memorable bright little boy with big dreams for the world writing about being a Supreme Court Justice just like completely got me when I came across that in the book.

Robert Samuels: You know Toluse and I, when we first endeavored on this project, one of my biggest worries was that we were simply going to write a Black pain essay that would just make people feel terrible and lament how hard it is to be Black in the United States, which it is.

But the more we learned about George Floyd the less nervous we got because it's true that when a person becomes a hashtag, they're flattened in a way that is unfair and some of it is that people don't want to traffic and negativity about the people who are dead. And so you hear things like, oh, this guy was a gentle giant, he wouldn't hurt a fly.

And I know that, as a person who receives that information, you sometimes say, oh, yes, sure, they're just trying to protect their life. But by all accounts, you know, through all the interviews that we did with his friends and his family, the people who loved him, the people who were on football teams with him, the people he was in rehab with.

They all told these similar stories that George Floyd was not just a generic person who should be reduced to a hashtag. He was a man of flesh and blood. But he was distinct in the way he loved people, in the ways that he hugged people. And he was incredibly distinct in his positivity and optimism that despite everything that was happening to him and had happened to him, he was going to make a difference. Up until the last days of his life, he never lost that.

Chris Hayes: We'll be right back after we take this quick break.

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Chris Hayes: Let's talk a little bit about who he was, what his personality was. Because it does come across like I totally agree with you and like one of the things, you know, you're a reporter and you learn this as a reporter, right. Like A, people are complicated, really complicated. I mean that's true of if you're asked to write a 5,000-word profile of anyone that you love, a family member, right, and you want to write an honest profile like there would be a lot of complexity there.

Also like some people are harrassable. Some people are like kind of jerks. Like and some people that terrible things happen to can be kind of ornery. Or, you know, there's all sorts of complexity. It does come across that this is a particularly like soulful and sensitive individual in terms of who he was, just his personality. That comes across in how he's described by this friends and stuff.

And tell me a little bit about like what kind of a guy he was?

Robert Samuels: Yes. So George Floyd, you know, he was 6'6" and 225 pounds, a big muscular guy. He wasn't always that way. He was pretty lanky when he was growing up. And he used to be mocked because he was so skinny until people saw what he could do with a basketball and a football.

So they told him, you know, Supreme Court that's cool. But the way that people really make it out of this neighborhood is if they're great athletes --

(CROSSTALK)

Chris Hayes: Right.

Robert Samuels: -- and so that's what George Floyd invest in. But when you talk to the people who are with him on the Jackets football team, which was one of the best teams in this state and known for their ruthless aggressive style. They'd make every game a morality play, you know, the coach would say, "This is the rich against the poor."

George Floyd was often mocked because he was not a ruthless player. He did not like to hit, he did not like to be hit. One of the most entertaining anecdotes in the book is, I'm not very good with football. But he's on the field and a person's charging at him who's bigger than he is and wider, who could really do some damage to him and they're at practice. And instead of getting tackled, George Floyd just throws him the ball. And they laugh and he laughs and that's who he was.

The other thing about George Floyd is people would say he had almost the opposite of a Napoleon complex. He was very self-conscious about his size.

Chris Hayes: Yes.

Robert Samuels: So if he was walking into a room with strangers he'd want to go and shake people's hands and to let them know he wasn't there to intimidate them, he wasn't there to scare them. And the three words that he's most associated with now in his death are, "I can't breathe". But when we talked to so many people who knew him, they talk about the last thing he would always say to them is, "I love you".

Now, the first we heard that from one of his girlfriends and then we heard it from his second girlfriend. And we thought well, you know, this guy's just good with girls. But then we learned about it with all his other friends too. That those were the last words that he had ever shared with them. He'd end most phone calls and most text messages with it, "I love you". Because he felt that as being Black and being poor and living in the conditions in which he was living, hearing those words was not something that people in his situation often heard enough.

Chris Hayes: So he develops this incredible frame, and he is a naturally gifted athlete and is a quite elevated level of athletic ability in high school. What happens next?

Robert Samuels: Well, his big dream is to get a football scholarship which would then take him to play pro. But when he gets to college, he realizes that he cannot meet the academic requirements to play. And it's incredibly hard for him. This is the cruel contradiction of this. You know, he was good at these sports, but he really built himself up, his size, developed his body so he could play these games.

And then at the end, he can't do it because he can't meet the academic requirements for post-secondary education. So it's one of those real cruel contradictions. So what's he left with? He's left with returning to a community during a time when the policing within his community has increased, this is the war on drugs era, this is the crime bill era in a place where the only true economics in the community are to deal drugs. And that's what George Floyd begins to do.

Now, when we talked to people about his ability to hustle, those who hustled with him say that his heart was never really in it. He wasn't particularly good at it. It was something he did because he had to do. And ultimately, he got caught.

And in a world where, in Texas at that time, there was no public defender system, there is not a lot of grace for people who looked like he did. He pleaded guilty to a number of drug-related charges both usage and possession because he thought there was no other option, which leaves him with the brand of convicted felon.

And when you get that brand in Texas, like many other states at the time, that meant it was going to be fairly impossible for you to get a job. You could not get a professional license in Texas if you were a former felon, which prohibited you from one in three jobs in Texas. You couldn't become a barber if you wanted to.

So what does that lead to, right? It leads to rolling the dice on that experience, but it also leads to a feeling of depression and escapism that no system in Texas was truly equipped to handle.

At that time, Governor George W. Bush restricted the number of safe beds, those are beds for people who have drug dependency issues and addiction issues. He restricted the number of those in prison. They did not expand Medicaid, which meant George Floyd could not get health insurance.

And so, here he was with this issue and no way to fix it.

Chris Hayes: This is by his mid-20s, right? I mean, at this point he --

Robert Samuels: Yes.

Chris Hayes: -- has developed a substance dependence, right?

Robert Samuels: Yes.

Chris Hayes: What drugs?

Robert Samuels: So, at first, we know about largely opioids.

Chris Hayes: Yes.

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Why Is This Happening? 'His Name is George Floyd' with Robert Samuels - MSNBC

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The First Images from the James Webb Telescope Are Breathtakingand Significant – The New Yorker

Posted: at 1:13 pm

Since its launch, arguably the roughest luck the James Webb Space Telescope has had is hitting a micrometeoroid the size of a grain of sand. But, of the three hundred and forty-four details that were once listed as things that could go wrong and destroy the whole mission, none has happened. On July 12th, the first five scientific images taken by the telescope were released to the public. The level of detail has far surpassed expectations. These images carry news about the early universe, the birth and death of stars, the collision of galaxies, and the atmospheres of exoplanets. (Exoplanets are ones not in our solar system.) And theyre very, very pretty. The smudgy-pastel feel that previous telescopes delivered is not present. The sharpness and clarity might make you think of Vermeerwhat is being painted is light.

I am beyond cloud nine, the astrophysicist Marcia Rieke told me. Rieke has served as the chief scientist for one of the telescopes main instruments, the NIRCam; her husband, George Rieke, has been the chief U.S. scientist for another instrument, the MIRI. Marcias team looks at some of the shortest wavelengths that the telescope can perceive, while Georges team looks at some of the longest. There was always a possibility that the highly complex J.W.S.T. would disappoint, or fail altogether. Now I feel like the young people who worked on this projectthey have a bright future in astronomy, Marcia said.

Marcia Rieke had an opportunity to see the first images a few days before they were released, because she was asked to make a short presentation to help interpret them. The first one, called a deep-field image, is of a patch of sky that, from Earth, is about the equivalent of what would be occluded by a grain of sandor a micrometeoroidheld out at arms length. The Hubble telescope, which focussed on a similar patch of sky for two weeks, revealed thousands more galaxies than expected. The new image, which took less than a day to make, shows immensely more detailand more galaxies. No matter where weve pointed J.W.S.T., even in the images taken during commissioning that would last a few tens of seconds, we kept getting these galaxies that we werent even looking for in the background, Rieke said. She said that the team started to term these incidental galaxies photobombers.

Rieke was surprised by how moved she was by the beauty of the pictures. I knew computationally that the diffraction was limited to a micron, that the full width at half maximum was whateverI knew wed have pretty pictures, she said. I didnt expect them to be so absolutely stunning. You know, if you start out in life as a ground-based astronomer... this is not the level of detail youre used to being able to see.

After her surprise subsided, she began to look at the galaxies that appeared the reddest. Their light had been travelling the longestsometimes for more than thirteen billion years. This means that they are being seen as they were not too long after the Big Bang. They hold information about how the earliest galaxies were formed, and of what elements they consisted. Now that we have the image, we go through the process of measuring, quantitatively, how bright every spot is with every filter that you measured with, she said. Then you can get an instant estimate of how far away that galaxy is.

A list of the most interesting or unusual galaxies was put together. And what is interesting depends on who you are, she said. Maybe youre interested in the most distant galaxy. Or the one that shows a black hole. Then another J.W.S.T. instrument, NIRSpec, can give data that open up other lines of inquiries: How many heavy elements or metals are there in that galaxy? Or is the galaxy so young that those heavy elements havent had time to form? In September, a longer exposure of a deep field that is represented in a famous Hubble image will be takenten times longerwhich will bring news of even earlier, and therefore fainter, light. This light will be coming from even closer to the earliest moments of our universewhen the first little aggregates of stars have come together, Marcia said.

Each of the five images had its own Easter eggs, as one of the astronomers who presented the images live on a NASA stream put it. One, of a dying star sending out waves of energy, revealed a second star nearby, which the dying star was orbiting. Little rays of dying starlight were escaping from the clouds of dust, just as sun rays might pierce through clouds. In the image of the exoplanet WASP-96b, water vapor was seen. In the image of the Carina Nebulaa birthplace of starsa dark billow in the cloud of dust and ionized gas presented a mystery.

Rieke feels that these images are the beginning of getting to pay back to the public the moneysome ten billion dollarsthat was spent on the J.W.S.T. For pragmatists, one might think, O.K., Webb can study exoplanets in great detail, she said. We can, for example, look for evidence of climate change on an exoplanet and study that, since we dont have other examples in our solar system where we can look at the effects of carbon dioxide and other gases. But Rieke is clearly more persuaded by other kinds of gains. People need hope and challenges. And people need the spice of discovery. She said that, for scientists, these images bring a sense of scale. What does it mean to know our place in the universe? You can say, Who cares? But, if we really want to understand the universe, we need to know at least how it works.

Some people might find the level of detail in the images less like a Vermeer and more like a Hieronymus Boscheverywhere you zoom in, you get an image that is frightening, alien, or sublime. Theres something vertiginous and confusing about taking ones life seriously, until a new sense of scale alters that perspective. I spoke with Rieke while travelling with my daughter, who made an observation about our hotel room that I found relevant to, well, cosmic beauty. You know what I like about small hotel rooms? she asked. I didnt know. Theres less there to be scared of in the dark. Of course, such experiences of scale can be comforting at other ages, too.

I asked Rieke about an idea related to whats called the Drake equation. How likely is it that there are other civilizations out there, and how many might there be? Some have used the equation to say that its almost certain that there are stories a long time ago and in galaxies far, far away. Others have solved the equation to say, basically, no. Rieke said, I feel pretty confident that Webb will at some point identify an exoplanet in the habitable zone. A place thats nice and comfy, with an atmosphere whose composition is like Earths. But, she said, even with input from biologists and chemists, theres still a lot of controversy over what might be evidence for the suggestions of life.

Link:
The First Images from the James Webb Telescope Are Breathtakingand Significant - The New Yorker

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Bob Korechoff, 75, is an aerospace engineer who worked with a team of engineers to fix the Hubble Telescope – The Spokesman Review

Posted: at 1:13 pm

Robert Korechoff, 75, currently lives a quiet life in Western Montana, but 30 years ago Korechoff worked on a camera that brought humanity awe-inspiring pictures from billions of light years away.

The camera that he helped create, which was replaced in 2009, was a part of the Hubble Space Telescope, named after noted astronomer Edwin Hubble. The camera that Korechoff helped create now resides in the Smithsonians Air and Space Museum.

Korechoff was born in Los Angeles. He attended UCLA, where he graduated with his bachelors in physics in 1968, later earning his doctorate in 1977. After graduating with his bachelors, Korechoff went to work as an aerospace engineer. Korechoff spent 42 years in this field, but spent the majority of that time as an optical engineer.

That line of work involved the design, analysis and testing of optical instruments. Such things as telescopes, cameras, instruments called spectrometers, that are in Earths orbit or are going to end up going to some other planet, Korechoff said.

Korechoff worked at several different companies on many different projects throughout his long career, including many military and government jobs. He believes the most significant work he did was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, where Korechoff worked on the Hubble.

In April 1990, the Hubble telescope launched. But by June a problem was discovered with the telescopes primary mirror that Perkin-Elmer Corp. had been contracted by NASA to produce. The faulty mirror sent back unclear images captured from the Hubble. This problem led to severe disappointment for many scientists who had spent so much time on the project, including Korechoff.

The telescope had a huge amount of hype, Korechoff said. You know, there were actually astronomers all over the world who were waiting for this telescope to be launched because they knew it was going to be groundbreaking. And then to find out that there was a problem with it, of course, was just catastrophic.

By July, Korechoff had been asked to help a team of scientists at JPL modify the next-generation cameras optics so it could compensate for the mirrors error. In order to solve the problem, Korechoff said he first had to work with several teams of engineers from around the country to understand more about the faulty mirrors shape. Determining the mirrors shape took a year, Korechoff said.

Once the problem with the mirror was understood, JPL set out to design and modify the next-generation camera. Designing and creating the new camera took another two years, Korechoff said, which he likened to eyes working with a pair of glasses.

If you wear glasses, thats because the lens in your eye doesnt have the right shape, so the images are blurry. You can correct that by wearing eyeglasses, Korechoff said. So, you put another lens in front of the one thats not working right, and the two of them together can form a good image.

By December 1993, the mission was launched to manually install the next-generation camera that would fix the faulty mirror. During this time, the Hubble was approximately 300-400 miles above the Earth. The Hubble, Korechoff said, was designed from the beginning to be serviced by astronauts, and all the instruments were made to be removable and replaceable. Korechoff described as risky the astronauts four-day servicing mission to fix the Hubble and said it required a huge amount of planning. The mission was successful, and the Hubble began to send clear images of the cosmos back to Earth.

Nicole Moore, an associate professor of physics at Gonzaga, said she believes that the work of the Hubble has provided humanity with innumerable amounts of scientific input. Moore specializes in optics and believes that the faulty mirror has taught us a lot about how to test and design complex scientific instruments.

Moore aid she hopes the mistake that was made on the Hubble will teach us to be more careful when designing impressive scientific feats. Evidence of the need to be more cautious when building these instruments can be seen in the recent success of the James Webb Space Telescope. The hope of the Webb telescope is to pick up where the Hubble left off. Despite this, it is undeniable that the root of a lot of astronomical insight can be traced back to the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope.

I think Hubble really enabled us to understand the history of the Universe in a much deeper way than we could before, Moore said, And much more beautifully, too.

Today, Korechoff and his wife, Sharon, whom he met while she worked in administration at JPL, enjoy their retirement by kayaking, canoeing and admiring Swan Lake, near Bigfork, Montana. Korechoff said his work on the Hubble is the most interesting and important job he ever had.

I think it has given people a whole different view on our place in the universe, Korechoff said. Every time there is an advancement in astronomy, it seems that our place in the universe diminishes, in a good way. People used to, 2,000 years ago, think that everything was centered around the Earth. Then, slowly as more things were learned and more observations were made, we realized, Hey, were not that important.

Were just a speck, he continued. Were just a speck in the universe.

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Bob Korechoff, 75, is an aerospace engineer who worked with a team of engineers to fix the Hubble Telescope - The Spokesman Review

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Comparing The Hubble Telescope & The James Webb Is Like Millennials Vs. Gen Z – Bustle

Posted: at 1:13 pm

Yeah, yeah. Last week, the James Webb telescope offered us five never-before-seen photos from outer space, and the internet went wild. I get it Webb is the hot new thing but hes hardly the first telescope to make its way out of the stratosphere. Not to make this about me, but I, the Hubble Telescope, have been orbiting the Earth since 1990. And Im still out here. Five stupid photos? Ive taken 1.5 million. Give me some credit!

If you could see into the past on Planet Earth, youd know I was once a star in my day, too. Rory Gilmore was 32 in the Netflix reboot, and her life was just beginning. (Meanwhile, the Webb has never known the pain of having to wait a whole week for the next episode to air on the WB.) My mirror may be much smaller, but I can loop around the Earth in just 95 minutes. Probably because I dont stop to take constant selfies.

What does Webb do that I cant? Snap some extra gas and dust? Honestly, you could slap an Instagram filter on me and Id be almost as good as the Webb images. Besides, whos to say sharper photos are even better? Havent you heard of impressionism? A full-on Monet? Clueless?

NASA spent $10 billion on Webb, but if I had that kind of money, I wouldnt just see in infrared Id see in seven dimensions. Also, Id buy Costco stock. With age comes wisdom: I now know it was a mistake not to start investing earlier.

I dont mean to sound bitter, though. My anger is sadness at its core. Not the existential emptiness of seeing high resolution images of the vast expanse of space thats just my backyard but the kind that comes from scrolling on Instagram too long and realizing your much-younger sorority sisters are now engaged. Everybody wants to compare my photos to Webbs. Oh, Webb found the second star in the Carina Nebula! Wow, Webb got the best shot of Stephens Quintet! Big whoop. Has social media taught us nothing? Comparison is the root of dissatisfaction. People are even saying that my photos look like the before picture in a Botox ad compared to Webbs, but 32 is way too young for that. (Isnt it? Right?)

Taylor Swift yes, we get music in space once bravely asked the question, Will you still want me when Im nothing new? And it seems to this humble Hubble the answer is no. Now I know how Taylor felt when Olivia Rodrigo released Sour. And I cant even release a 10-minute version of one of my best images and ruin Jake Gyllenhaals life. Ill continue my lonely orbit until they retire me into the Pacific Ocean, sometime in the late 2030s. If outer space werent the very definition of out to pasture, Id say thats where I was headed. But truthfully, its where Ive always been.

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Rutgers Astrophysicist Selected for Research on the James Webb Space Telescope – Rutgers University

Posted: at 1:13 pm

Kristen McQuinn was granted early access to data from the worlds most powerful telescope

Rutgers astrophysicist Kristen McQuinn was granted early access to data from NASAs James Webb Space Telescope(JWST)to support her research into the expansion rate of the universe, determining the age of stars and reconstructing the history of a small nearby galaxy.

McQuinn, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, was awarded time on the most powerful telescope that has ever been put into space through a competitive proposal review process. She has been able to log in and download data to begin conducting analysis and observations.

McQuinn spoke to Rutgers Today about her research, her reaction to the stunning images from the telescope and why they are important to everyone not just scientists.

Can you tell us about your work with the James Webb Space Telescope?

My work focuses on how the smallest galaxies in our universe formed and evolved. I will use JWST to image some of the oldest stars in nearby galaxies including stars that formed when the universe was very young to reconstruct the galaxies histories. JWST will charter new ground in this area of science with its ability to resolve populations of very old and very faint stars in galaxies that are beyond Hubbles reach.

I also measure the distances to galaxies using the brightness of specific types of stars. Such distances are critical to determining the expansion rate of the universe, which is driven by a mysterious phenomenon we call dark energy. The measurements of the expansion rate from the near and distant universe disagree and have for a long time. Pinning down the distances to nearby galaxies can improve our calibration and understanding of the universes expansion. JWST will make a significant impact in my work in this area as I will be able to measure very precise and accurate distances over a much larger volume of space than previously possible. Max Newman, a graduate student in my research group, is already preparing for this type of work by calibrating a similar method using data from the Hubble telescope, JWSTs predecessor.

What ongoing research will you be doing with the telescope?

The observing time Ive been awarded on JWST will allow me to answer fundamental questions on how small galaxies form at cosmic dawn when the universe was much denser and hotter. I will also be able to create a "cosmic yardstick" using JWST that will allow us to more accurately measure the expansion of the universe.

What exactly do those beautiful photos show and tell us?

The first images are AMAZING! We knew they would be better than anything weve had in the past, but JWST has exceeded all of our expectations. The images have incredible resolution and reveal objects in the universe at infrared wavelengths that were previously hidden to us. For example, the Carina nebula shows in exquisite detail a stellar nursery where stars are being born, including jets of material being expelled by stellar sources and complexes of hot dust. The image of the interacting galaxies inStephans Quintetis also spectacular and resolves individual stars in the galaxies in a similar way that Hubble resolved stars in our nearby neighbor the Andromeda galaxy, only these systems are 20x farther!

Why is the release of the photos so significant? How does it advance our understanding of the universe and what we have learned so far? What will it allow us to learn going forward?

These initial images are really important. While JWST is designed to be used by professional astronomers, what we learn about the universe through JWST is for all of us. So engaging people of all ages and backgrounds in science by demonstrating JWSTs capabilities is a critical part of the success of the mission.

There are already discoveries in the data for example, fainter galaxies than weve ever found before are identifiable in the image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 but the real work is only just beginning. The best is yet to come though when the data are fully analyzed and detailed results are released by different teams around the world.

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Boris Johnson’s Fall Gives Brexit a Chance to Succeed – Foreign Policy

Posted: at 1:12 pm

Theres an old political joke where a soul is asked to choose between heaven and hell and is given a trial run in each. Down in hell, hes shown around what amounts to the best country club in the world, plays a few holes of golf with Beelzebub, is served fine venison, and washes it down with long-vanished Bordeaux vintages in a tte--tte with the devil himself. Preferring this to sitting on clouds listening to lyre music surrounded by winged toddlers, he chooses hell, only to be thrust into a fire pit, watching his best friend be flayed alive by a pair of oversized demons. What happened to the country club, he asks? Satan wastes no time in putting the poor soul right: Then, we were campaigning. Now, were governing.

As prime minister, Boris Johnson gave Britain a government that ended up on the lower end of purgatorycloser to the decaying end of a dictatorship, with sex predators being appointed to positions of authority, admissions of mysterious visits to supposedly former KGB agents villas, $1,000 rolls of wallpaper, and attempts to extort a $180,000 treehouse for his latest son, all against the background of a once-in-a-century pandemic and the most serious war in Europe since 1945.

The war and pandemic were of course outside his control. Brexit, however, is his responsibility. His decision to campaign for Britain to leave the European Union (he notoriously wrote a pro-Remain and a pro-Leave article before deciding to publish the second) is credited with giving it the 52 percent needed for victory. His takeover of the Conservative Party, ruthless purge of moderate Tories (including even Charles Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, as well as Winston Churchills grandson Nicholas Soames), and decisive victory in the 2019 general election enabled him to get an agreement acceptable to the EU through Britains Parliament.

Unlike his predecessor Theresa Mays deal, which sought to avoid the need for a trade and customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and included arrangements for security cooperation, Johnsons required checks on goods traded between the island of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Johnson, however, sought later to renege on his own deal and the Northern Ireland Protocol that gives it legal force, going so far as to introduce a bill that would give British ministers the power to unilaterally violate the protocol.

Yet there is a fundamental difference between getting Brexit to happen and ensuring it sticks. Johnsons idea of Brexit, famously summed up as pro having [cake] and pro eating it, has run up against its own impossibility and the incompetence with which it has been implemented. Six years after the vote, 53 percent of British voters think they were wrong to leave the EU, and only 35 percent say that the decision was right.

The Tories are behind in the polls, and though some of that is due to Johnsons now tarnished brand, they are also suffering from being in power for 12 years and from an adverse economic climate. In addition, Keir Starmer, who leads the opposition Labour Party, has detoxified his party so that the worst people say about him is that hes boring, while the third party, the Liberal Democrats, have become acceptable to left-leaning voters no longer put off by their time in government with the Tories between 2010 and 2015, while at the same time winning over the support of more pro-European former Tory voters.

This means that while Britains majoritarian system usually gives the party that can assemble around 40 percent of the vote a parliamentary majority, tactical votingin which voters choose the candidate most likely to defeat the one they like least rather than the one they support the mostagainst Conservatives has returned.

The approximately 60 percent of the vote now shared by Labour, Greens, and Liberal Democrats is likely to be more concentrated on the candidates most likely to defeat Tory incumbents. Setting aside Scottish National Party support for the moment, current polling would produce a Labour governmentsupported by the Liberal Democratswith a very slim majority. Such a government would probably change the electoral system to a form of proportional representation, making the Tories Brexit-reconciled coalition of voters unviable.

Now that pragmatic former soldier Tom Tugendhat has been eliminated from the Tory leadership contest, voters are likely to hear even less discussion about how to make the best of Brexit and even more determination to be tough on Brussels as the remaining candidates compete for the support of mostly anti-European party members. Yet, the route to Conservative success in the next election consists of more Brexit pragmatism, not less.

Current Tory support is vulnerable on two flanks. The red wall of Northern English seats formerly held by Labour and the blue wall of long-standing Tory seats in wealthy southern counties are both under threatfrom Labour in the north and the resurrected Liberal Democrats in the south. Red wall voters who switched to the Tories support Brexit but are vulnerable to economic shocks. The blue wall voters whom the Liberal Democrats are trying to poach opposed Brexit but have an economic interest in Tory government: They are generally affluent and support low taxes, low regulation, and other economically right-wing policies.

The main effect of Brexit has been to damage manufacturing on the island of Great Britain, which is no longer able to participate in Europe-wide supply chains. According to an economic analysis by the Centre for European Reform, the goods trade is down 14 percent, adding a further Brexit shock to inflation caused by energy price rises and the waning of the COVID-19 pandemic. U.K. inflation is expected to peak at 11 percent this year, compared to 7 percent inside the eurozone.

This crunchhigher prices and lower outputdisproportionately hits areas in the so-called red wall of parliamentary seats in the Midlands and North of England where the Tories picked up seats from Labour in 2017 and 2019.

The blue wall in South East England depends more heavily on services, which escaped a Brexit hit (the Centre for European Reform analysis tentatively concludes that services trade has gone up since), and it is populated by Remainers who are nevertheless reconciled to Brexit, provided their prosperity is maintained.

Figures from Northern Ireland suggest a way forward. The Northern Ireland Protocol gives Northern Irelands businesses access to both the U.K. and EU goods markets, and it has led to the region having the strongest growth of all (apart from London), a change from years of decline relative to the rest of the United Kingdom.

The protocols direct extension to the whole of the U.K. (which would essentially be the same as Mays failed Brexit deal) would revitalize U.K. manufacturing in the red wall, eliminating many trade barriers with the EU, and allowing U.K. manufacturers to take part in European supply chains again, while reassuring blue wall voters that Brexit is being pursued with an eye to pragmatism. It would also alleviate the fears of unionists in Northern Ireland (the mostly Protestant political community in Northern Ireland that wants to stay part of the U.K.), who would then have exactly the same relationship with the EU as the rest of the U.K.

Formal endorsement of Mays approach to Brexit is of course far too pragmatic for the current Conservative Party. The short period devoted to the Tory leadership racein which candidates compete for the votes of Tory members of Parliament, then of party membersdoes not offer the chance to develop such a radical argument.

But its spiritengaging with the needs of the manufacturing-centered economy of the red wall, adopting a pragmatic stance to keep the blue wall on their side, and extending the provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol to the rest of the U.K. in order to reassure unionistsoffers the best route to Conservative victory in the next election. It would be their best option for preventing a Labour-Liberal Democrat government that would enact electoral reform, free Labour from its dependence on Euroskeptic red wall seats, and keep the Tories out of power for long enough to undo Brexit altogether.

Like Dante, the Conservative Party has been offered a glimpse of the underworld by Johnsons mismanagement of Brexit. Returning to Mays deal offers the chance to escape permanent confinement there.

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Liz Truss claims unresolved Brexit row with EU shows she gets stuff done – The Independent

Posted: at 1:12 pm

Conservative leadership hopeful Liz Truss has claimed that the unresolved row with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol shows how she gets stuff done.

The foreign secretary pointed to the current dispute over Brexit as an example of her delivery despite her failure to reach a deal with Brussels on after several months of negotiations.

Ive shown I can get things done, she told BBC Radio 4s Today programme. Whether its sorting out the issues with the Northern Ireland Protocol to make sure we deliver the full opportunities of Brexit, I can get stuff done.

In her first full interview of the campaign, Ms Truss also shared her regret over her backing the Leave campaign in 2016 and claimed Brexit had been a success. I fully embraced the choice the people of Britain made, she said.

Reminded that she had predicted that Brexit would mean less trade, slashed investment and fewer jobs, Truss replied: I was wrong and Im fully prepared to admit I was wrong.

The foreign secretary added: The portents of doom didnt happen. Instead, weve unleashed new opportunities. And I was one of the leading figures driving those opportunities.

Ms Trusss attempt to tear up parts of the Brexit withdrawal dealin defiance of the EU have moved closer to becoming law, after the Northern IrelandProtocolBill cleared the Commons on Wednesday night.

But peers are expected to contest parts of the Bill, and leading figures in Brussels have warned in recent days that it could put the UK and the EU on course for a trade war.

Truss the bookmakers favourite to be the next PM also said she would bulldoze down opposition to her ideas and take on the Whitehall machine, as she positioned herself as more radical than rival Rishi Sunak.

I think every day when I get up in the morning, What can I do to change things? she said. Im impelled to do that. I am pretty hard working, pretty direct. And I will bulldoze through, frankly, the things that need to get done.

Defending her plan to cut taxes immediately, Ms Truss also pledged to wage an ongoing battle the Treasury if she makes to No 10. The Treasury do have an economic orthodoxy. They do resist change.

The foreign secretary said Sunak had pushed Britain in the wrong direction on taxation, and she would swiftly axe his National Insurance rise if she becomes PM.

She admitted her plan to cut taxes would cost at least over 30bn a year. About if it would cost about 38bn, as some have estimated, Truss said: Id say thats slightly high but its around that figure

But she insisted tax cuts would boost growth, and rejected widespread warnings that her cuts would fuel inflation. My tax cuts will decrease inflation Its not a gamble.

Asked to name the leading economists who agreed with her approach to tax, she named the right-wing Brexiteer Patrick Minford.

Ms Truss also denied modelling herself on Margaret Thatcher. I dont accept that. Im my own person. Im from a different background.

The Tory hopeful defended her backing for the Liberal Democrats as a student, saying her political views had developed over the years.

She also defended her loyalty to Boris Johnson in a later interview, telling GB News she wanted him to stay Boris admitted he made mistakes, she also told Today. But the positive side of the balance sheet is extremely positive.

Truss said she would be happy to serve under Sunak if he wins the Tory leadership contest. She also hinted at jobs for Sunak and rivals if she wins the race to No 10.

Weve had fantastic candidates present themselves, like Penny, Kemi, Tom Tugendhat and Rishi, and we need to make sure that those talents are being fully used, she told GB News.

Truss and Sunak will try to win over the support of local politicians on Thursday morning when they take part in a private hustings for the Conservative Councillors Association.

They will then tour the UK to take part in 12 hustings for the Tory members who will vote for their next leader, with the result being announced on 5 September.

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Brexit: Bookings of UK acts at European festivals have fallen by 45 per cent – NME

Posted: at 1:12 pm

The number of British acts appearing on the bill at European festivals has fallen by almost half post-Brexit, according to new research.

Campaign group Best For Britain which is pushing for closer relationships with Europe and the world shared the figures today (July 21). They showed that the number of British artists scheduled to perform in Europe as part of this years festival season had decreased by 45 per cent when compared to 2017-2019 (pre-Brexit).

Naomi Smith, CEO of Best For Britain, explained of the findings: The Beatles famously made their name in Europe and its on tour that many musicians gain the formative experiences and audiences they need to take off.

With their dud Brexit deal, our lame duck Government has not only robbed emerging British talent of these opportunities abroad, but has also made international acts think twice before including Glasgow or London in their European tours.

Chief Executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians and UK Trade and Business Commissioner, Deborah Annetts, added: Previous witnesses to our commission have described how, if youre a festival organiser in Barcelona who needs to fill a last-minute slot, British bands will be at the bottom of your list due to new barriers created by this botched Brexit deal.

Whoever ends up replacing Boris Johnson must commit to removing this needless bureaucracy which is stifling the prosperity and creativity of the next generation of British musicians.

Protestors demonstrate against Brexit CREDIT: Getty Images

Earlier this year, artists, management and politicians spoke to NME about the ongoing issues of performing live in Europe post-Brexit.

It came over one year on fromthe music industry essentially being handed a No Deal Brexit when the UK governmentfailed tonegotiate visa-free travel and Europe-wide work permits for musicians and crew. As a result, artists attempting to hit the road again after COVID found themselves on the predicted rocky road for the first summer of European touring after Britain left the EU.

White Lies were forced to cancel the opening night of their 2022 European tour in Paris this April due to Brexit legislation causing their equipment to be held up for two days. The bands drummer Jack Lawrence-Brown told NME that the situation was incredibly frustrating.

Wed done our best to ensure that wed be prepared in any circumstance, he said. Its very frustrating when you prepare for as long as we have to then rock up to the first venue and find that your equipment has been stuck in a 25 mile-long queue on the M20 through not fault of your own, and no fault of the trucking company either.

It wasnt the plan that wed worked hard to get right.

Lawrence-Brown largely blamed Brexit-related red tape regarding visas and carnets (a document detailing what goods and equipment are being taken across borders) for the setback.

White Lies. CREDIT: Charles Cave

Prior to Brexit, this kind of tailback was never an issue, he told NME. Theres now a huge amount of paperwork for bands to deal with if they want to get themselves into Europe.

In January 2021, European festival bosses expressed their concerns over Brexit potentially preventing many UK acts from being booked to play live events on the continent.

Eric Van Eerdenburg, the director of Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands, told NME that the additional costs and requirements needed to tour in Europe would prove horrible and very limiting for UK artists.

The new findings from Best For Britain came ahead of todays cross-party UK Trade and Business Commission. It is taking evidence related to the post-Brexit challenges facing the UK music industry during the first festival without COVID-enforced restrictions.

Meanwhile, Elton John has warned that smaller, less established UK acts risk being stranded in Dover if Brexit-related travel issues are not resolved with the European Union (via Sky News).

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Britain kicks off post-Brexit ‘transformation’ of finance – Reuters

Posted: at 1:12 pm

LONDON, July 19 (Reuters) - British financial regulators will have to promote the global competitiveness of the country's financial sector, though a plan for more government oversight of their work has been put on hold for now, finance minister Nadhim Zahawi said on Tuesday.

Zahawi confirmed that a long-awaited financial services and markets bill would be introduced before parliament on Wednesday to "capitalise on the benefits of Brexit and transform the UK financial services sector".

Bankers have been calling for speedy reforms to bolster London's attractiveness as a global centre for finance after Britain's departure from the European Union.

Amsterdam has already overtaken London as Europe's top share trading centre, prompting Britain to ease listing rules as it tries to persuade chip designer Arm to have a London listing.

Zahawi said the bill, which includes cutting "excessive" capital buffers at insurers to invest in infrastructure, would unlock "tens of billions of pounds", a step which pits it against a more cautious Bank of England.

The bill also cracks down on financial scams, ensuring vulnerable people and rural areas have access to cash, and introduces rules for using stablecoins, a type of cryptoasset, for payments.

"Consumers will remain protected, with legislation ensuring that victims of scams can be compensated while also acting to protect access to cash for the millions of people that rely on it," Zahawi told guests at the City of London's annual Mansion House dinner in the historic financial district.

Britain's Payment Systems Regulator will have powers to reimburse victims of so-called authorised push payment fraud, when fraudsters deceive people into sending them money online.

Regulators like the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority will be given a secondary objective to promote the global competitiveness of the financial sector, a requirement many regulators across the world already face.

Nevertheless, some lawmakers fear this could herald a return to the type of light-touch regulation which ended with banks being bailed out in the financial crisis. Zahawi said the new objective would be "unambiguously" secondary to maintaining financial stability and protecting consumers.

Part of the bill shifts laws inherited from the EU to the rulebooks of British regulators, making it easier to amend them in future but also giving the watchdogs far more influence at the expense of parliament.

As a counterbalance, the finance ministry had flagged it could grant itself "call-in" powers to tell regulators to review a rule, if it believed that would be in the public interest.

Lawmakers have said this should be done sparingly, and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned last week the independence of regulators was part of London's standing as a global financial centre.

Zahawi said call-in powers would not be in the bill, indicating a more cautious approach. "I want time to consider all the arguments before making such an important decision."

Caroline Wagstaff, chief executive of the London Market Group, which represents the insurance market, said the new financial services bill would boost the sector only if the competitiveness objective for regulators had real teeth.

"The bill absolutely must contain sufficient detail on how the regulators will be held to account on the issue of competitiveness or it will not achieve the regulatory culture change we need, and it will just be words on a page," Wagstaff said.

Vincent Keaveny, Lord Mayor of the City of London, said a clear commitment is needed on setting out how regulators will focus more on competitiveness, but a "bonfire of regulation" would damage the sector's international reputation.

A government-sponsored review on Tuesday set out recommendations to speed up how listed companies can tap markets for extra funding, and Zahawi said all of them have been accepted by the government. read more

A new digitisation taskforce, chaired by former HSBC chair Douglas Flint, will drive modernisation in owning shares by eliminating paper certificates.

The government will also streamline the capital raising process by reforming the Companies Act to accelerate rights issues and the processes around them, Zahawi said.

The first annual "State of the Sector" will be published on Wednesday to affirm the government's "vision for the sector".

Additional reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Red Rishi: Is a Brexit-backing Thatcherite too left-wing for the UK Conservatives? – POLITICO Europe

Posted: at 1:12 pm

LONDON Hes the millionaire ex-chancellor who loves small states and sound money; the Brexit-voting former hedge fund boss who attended one of Englands most exclusive fee-paying schools.

Yet in the frenzied race to replace Boris Johnson as U.K. prime minister, its Rishi Sunak who now finds himself painted as the high tax, pro-EU candidate of the Tory left.

Its been quite a ride for a man described only four months ago as a Thatcherite in trainers by the left-leaning Guardian newspaper.

Rishi blasted on socialist taxes, the front page of the right-wing Daily Mail screamed last week, promoting an op-ed article from Johnsons loyal lieutenant Jacob Rees-Mogg. Sunak has squandered the Conservative Partys decade-long efforts to build a competitive tax regime, Rees-Mogg warned.

Liz Truss: Ill spike Sunaks tax hike, its sister paper the Mail on Sunday had splashed the previous weekend, celebrating the foreign secretarys true blue campaign. Two days later, the Mail front page said ominously: Truss Back me or itll be Rishi. It sounded like a warning to readers.

Plenty of Tory MPs remain unconvinced by this Get Rishi campaign.

Sunak picked up 118 votes from his colleagues in Tuesdays fourth-round leadership ballot, retaining his place as the contests front-runner and leaving him just two short of the 120 required to secure his place in the final head-to-head.

But his hopes of actually winning that contest were badly undermined by a YouGov opinion poll of Conservative Party members the rank-and-file footsoldiers who will pick the winner from the final two candidates which found he would be well beaten by either of his remaining opponents in the crucial head-to-head vote.

This glaring disparity between the views of Tory MPs and the partys grassroots members is in part a reflection of a successful effort by enemies to undermine his record after two and a half years as Johnsons chancellor.

Opponents have accused Sunak of raising taxes to socialist levels a blasphemous accusation in a party that idolizes the free-marketeer Margaret Thatcher.

Sunaks critics repeatedly attack his tenure at the Treasury, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and consequently the heaviest public borrowing since World War II. Sunaks attempts to reduce the burden on public finances through a national insurance hike for workers, and the reversal of business tax cuts, have enraged his enemies further.

Rishi, you have raised taxes to the highest level in 70 years, Truss told him pointedly in Sunday nights ITV hustings. That is not going to drive economic growth.

The socialist tag reflects the size of the tax burden, the size of the state and inflation, added an unimpressed Tory aide.

Improbably, Sunak also finds himself vulnerable to right-wing attacks on Brexit, despite having voted Leave in 2016. Some Brexiteers fear he would blink at the prospect of a damaging trade war with the EU, should relations deteriorate further in the months ahead.

Indeed it is Remain-voting Truss, now reinvented as the darling of the Tory right, who is seen as the tax-cutting, Brexit true-believer.

[Truss] is the only candidate thats going to get [Brexit] done. All of the others will be run by the civil service, and will cave to them, Tory Brexiteer Marcus Fysh told Nigel Farage on GB News this week.

Sunaks supporters claim to be relaxed by this angle of attack.

Actually its ill-advised, because it just serves to highlight that Truss didnt support Brexit in the first place, one former political aide supportive of Sunak said. It sort of forces him to come out and explain that he did.

Indeed, Sunak supporters were gleeful when the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they backed Brexit in a televised debate on Sunday.

Truss was clearly desperate to raise her hand, but couldnt, the former adviser said with relish.

Nevertheless, with their candidate tanking in party membership polls, Team Sunak has felt obliged to launch counterattacks against attempts to paint him as a soft-centered Tory.

At the weekend they released a tongue-in-cheek video titled Rishi & Brexit: A Short History, explaining how he went against the advice of his superiors as a young MP to campaign to leave the EU. It pointedly includes an image of his rival Truss promoting the Im In message that was one of the slogans of the campaign to remain inside the European Union.

And in an article for the Brexit-backing Sunday Telegraph, Sunak promised to rewrite former EU laws still getting in the way of British businesses, and outlined plans for a new Brexit minister and Brexit delivery department if he wins.

Sunak has also fought back on his economic record, labeling Trusss own borrowing plans socialism at the ITV hustings Sunday night.

Hes not a socialist. Its absolute nonsense. He just believes in sound money. Theyre the ones planning to borrow money to spend on things we cant afford, one senior backbench supporter said of Sunaks rivals.

To call the Conservative candidate a socialist, at least in my generation, it doesnt make sense at all. I think its a smear, a veteran former Tory MP added. The bigger influence is being chancellor of the exchequer, and seeing the books.

Another Tory MP backing Sunak believes many MPs are actually very grumpy about what the government was forced to do to prop up the economy when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.

Few of those branding Sunak a socialist raised objections at the time to the billions of pounds released for the furlough scheme, the MP pointed out.

I dont remember people saying let businesses in my constituency go to the wall. I dont remember people saying dont help people on furlough, the MP added.Of course its big government weve just had COVID.

But the anti-Sunak political adviser quoted above insisted the COVID-19 outlay had been used by the Treasury as justification for sort of total retrenchment from Johnsons broader post-Brexit plans.

Will Tanner, director of the center-right Onward think tank, said in truth, Sunaks campaign had been notable for the fact that he hasnt wedded himself to an ideological pitch.

Its been relatively kind of centrist and establishment, actually, he added.

Torsten Bell, chief executive of the center-left Resolution Foundation, said Sunak was obviously not a socialist in any meaningful use of the word, but had fallen victim to the tension between the fiscal conservatism element of Conservatism, and the lower taxes element of Conservatism.

One further dynamic clouds the picture over Sunak the manner of his departure from government.

His dramatic resignation earlier this month helped precipitate Johnsons final downfall, and came after months of what Johnsons allies believed was blatant leadership plotting.

This is a Conservative colleague who turned on the prime minister, the hostile adviser quoted above replied, when asked about the socialism charge against Sunak.

Indeed, supporters of Sunak believe many of the attacks are coming from Johnson loyalists intent on revenge, fearful their own ministerial careers could now be in jeopardy.

There is a small cabal of people around Boris, a group of ministers, who frankly would not be ministers in any other government. And theyre out to get him, the senior backbencher quoted above said.

But that doesnt mean their efforts to rebrand him are not damaging his prospects of becoming prime minister.

Hes just obviously much better than the rest of them, one supportive Tory strategist said. But hes not where he needs to be on tax. If the others dont blow themselves up during the campaign which they blatantly could then honestly, Im not sure he wins.

Whats driving the day in Westminster. Politics and policymaking in the UK capital.

Daily Archives: July 21, 2022

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The First Images from the James Webb Telescope Are Breathtakingand Significant – The New Yorker

Bob Korechoff, 75, is an aerospace engineer who worked with a team of engineers to fix the Hubble Telescope – The Spokesman Review

Comparing The Hubble Telescope & The James Webb Is Like Millennials Vs. Gen Z – Bustle

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Boris Johnson’s Fall Gives Brexit a Chance to Succeed – Foreign Policy

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Brexit: Bookings of UK acts at European festivals have fallen by 45 per cent – NME

Britain kicks off post-Brexit ‘transformation’ of finance – Reuters

Red Rishi: Is a Brexit-backing Thatcherite too left-wing for the UK Conservatives? – POLITICO Europe

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