“Simplistic Racist Moron.” Baltimore’s David Simon “The Wire” creator nails it.

The American President is an embarassment and disgrace to the country upon which he has foisted his warped, misguided and destructive persona. The people who voted for this abomination are responsible for the ongoing daily disaster.

The President’s latest scrurrilous attack on the City of Baltimore and its Black Congressman Elijah Cummings is nothing more than red meat to fire up his base.

Excerpted from The Guardian 7.28.2019

The creator and star of the seminal TV series The Wire have blasted Donald Trump, after the president described Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings’ Baltimore-centered district as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess”.

Series creator David Simon, who worked as a police reporter on the Baltimore Sun before turning to script-writing, called Trump a “simplistic, racist moron” and “a permanent stain on our land”.

In an email to the Guardian on Sunday, the actor Dominic West, who played Detective Jimmy McNulty in all five seasons of The Wire, asked: “What would a lonely hysterical neurotic who uses hand cleanser all day understand about a vibrant community like Baltimore?
On Sunday, he also quoted Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, another target of Trump’s racist invective, when he added: “Impeach the motherfucker!”

The president triggered another racism-tinged firestorm with his attack on Cummings. Simon was not the only famous Baltimorean to comment.

The filmmaker John Waters told ARTnews: “Give me the rats and roaches of Baltimore any day over the lies and racism of your Washington, Mr Trump. Come on over to that neighborhood and see if you have the nerve to say it in person!”

In tweets on Saturday, Simon described the president as an “empty-suit, race-hating fraud” who would “wet himself” if he spent five minutes in West Baltimore.

He expanded on his theme, saying Trump would be terrified if he “stepped out of his limo and found himself suddenly a racial minority”.

If Trump dared to visit Baltimore – a city with an African American majority, according to the US census – Simon said he would find the “humanity of those he encountered could not matter to him; only their lack of whiteness and his discomfort”.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jul/28/david-simon-donald-trump-simplistic-racist-moron

Italian police probe blindfolding of San Franciscan held in officer’s killing

The brutal interrogation of a suspect is abhorrent.

Given the world wide shock and outrage evident in the global media it is understandable why this suspect in the murder of an unarmed Italian officer is being treated brutally.

The Italian authorities, representative of the nation, are angry and mortified.

Excerpted from Los Angeles Times, New York Post and CNN 7.28.2019

ROME —

Italian police have launched an internal investigation after a young California man arrested in connection with the killing of a Rome police officer was handcuffed and blindfolded during interrogation.

The pair, classmates in ritzy Mill Valley were allegedly furious that instead of cocaine, a drug dealer pedalled “a different substance” when they set up a buy in Trastevere, a popular tourist spot in the city known for its nightlife.

A photo published by Italian media on Sunday showed Gabriel Christian Natale Hjorth, 18, sitting in an office of Italy’s Carabinieri police with his head bowed, his hands cuffed behind his back and a piece of cloth tied around his eyes.

“We disassociate ourselves with this kind of behavior and we are investigating who was responsible,” said a Carabinieri spokesman, who said he did not know why the American had been blindfolded.

Natale Hjorth and Finnegan Lee Elder, 19, were arrested on Friday in Rome following the stabbing death of Carabinieri officer Mario Cerciello Rega, 35, (shown above) in the early hours of Friday.

The two young men, who were high school classmates in Mill Valley near San Francisco and were reportedly vacationing in Rome, had purchased what they thought were drugs from a street dealer hours earlier, authorities said, only to find that instead of cocaine they had been sold ground-up aspirin.

To get even they allegedly stole a bag from a man they believed was an accomplice of the dealer, demanding 100 euros and a gram of cocaine for its return, police said.

The man, however, informed the police, who sent two plainclothes officers to the rendezvous.

The two officers, including Cerciello Rega, announced they were police, but Elder allegedly stabbed Cerciello Rega eight times before fleeing with Natale Hjorth, authorities said. The police said Elder later confessed after the knife was found in the hotel room the teens were sharing.

San Francisco teens confess. Fatally stabbed Italian policeman near Vatican

My City has enough problems for all the world to witness in person, view and read about 24/7.

Ever expanding downtown expansion, exorbitant housing prices, over-burdened public transit, traffic congestion, pedestrian and bicycle fatalities and an intractable Homeless problem have given San Francisco a Dystopian image.

Worst of all, San Francisco has become a political and cultural punching bag for the Right wing media machine.

Now the City’s reputation will be tarnished further by a crime committed near The Vatican, allegedly by two young San Franciscans.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the two accused of the murder graduated from Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley. This is the same school from which I graduated long ago. This factoid makes the whole affair even more depressing on a personal level.

San Francisco Examiner 7.27.2019

Two 19-year-old US citizens have confessed to a fatal knife attack on a Carabinieri police officer in Rome, police said on Saturday.

The alleged perpetrators, identified in a report by ABC as San Franciscans Gabriel Christian Natale Hjorth and Finnegan Lee Elder, were arrested after they were located in a hotel room hiding behind a ceiling panel. They both confessed to the attack during an interrogation after being taken into police custody.

Police officer Mario Cerciello Rega, 35, was fatally stabbed eight times overnight into Friday in Rome’s central Prati district near the Vatican.

Cerciello Rega was among several officers involved in a plain clothes operation against two thieves who had stolen a backpack from an Italian man. The thieves had offered to return the backpack to the victim in exchange for 100 euros and a gram of cocaine.

After reporting the crime to police, the man arranged a meeting point with the thieves. When the Carabinieri showed up instead, they were attacked with a knife.

Police had previously said that the perpetrator of the stabbing was “probably an African citizen,” a description that unleashed caustic commentary from the ruling far-right League party.

A police statement did not clarify which of the two teens carried out the attack.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/san-francisco-teens-confess-to-fatal-stabbing-of-italian-policeman/

Who done it? Ex-Nazi testimony sparks further mystery over 1933 Reichstag fire

Hitler’s grip on Germany was cemented following the Reichstag Fire in February 1933. Hitler blamed Communists, Jews, labor unions and used his newly won position as Chancellor to destroy the opposition and begin the 12 years of Nazi terror.

Ninety climbers, 100,000 square meters of silvery tarpaulins and 5 million enchanted visitors — the wrapping of the Reichstag Building in the summer of 1995 is considered the most spectacular work by artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude. From then on everything seemed possible, including the choice to once again make the Reichstag the seat of a democratically elected German parliament. (Photo above)

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 7.26.2019

A newly discovered witness account by an ex-Nazi officer has cast fresh doubt on claims a Dutch communist was behind the 1933 Reichstag fire. The blaze was used by the Nazis to crack down on their opponents.

The fire, which gutted the German parliament building, is viewed by historians as a pivotal moment in Adolf Hitler’s seizure of total power. The Nazi party used the event to justify an emergency decree and crack down on communists, who were blamed for the blaze.

Marinus van der Lubbe was blamed for the Reichstag fire and executed in 1934

Germany’s RND newspaper group on Friday published a 1955 affidavit found in the archives of a Hanover court.

In the account by Hans-Martin Lennings, a former member of the Nazis’ paramilitary SA unit, Lennings stated that he drove Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe to the Reichstag on the night of the fire.

According to the testimony, when Lennings and his SA group brought van der Lubbe to the Reichstag they noticed “a strange smell of burning and there were clouds of smoke billowing through the rooms.”

It’s unclear why the SA unit would have brought van der Lubbe from an infirmary to the Reichstag, but the statement suggests the fire had already started by the time they arrived.

Van der Lubbe was later blamed for the blaze, convicted of arson and executed after admitting he committed the act alone. He said he had committed the arson to rally communists against fascism. Four other defendants in the trial were acquitted, a decision that angered Hitler.

Reichstag Fire II 7.26.2019

From afar, the row of upright, black cast-iron slabs in front of the Reichstag Building are reminiscent of the narrow grave slabs of Jewish cemeteries. If you take a closer look, Dieter Appelt’s artwork reveals the names, dates and places of death of those Reichstag deputies who were murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

https://www.dw.com/en/ex-nazi-testimony-sparks-fresh-mystery-over-1933-reichstag-fire/a-49765704

37 years later, Rutger Hauer’s ‘Blade Runner’ performance still a marvel

Blade Runner is one of our favorite films. We have watched it countless times. Blade Runner strikes a nerve in its chilly dystopian story telling, cinemaphotography, soundtrack and its comment on the human condition. Unforgettable and timeless.

New York Times 7.25.2019 – Bilge Ebiri

With his combination of menace and anguish, he created an unforgettable character that made the movie the classic it remains today.

“Gosh, you really got some nice toys here.”

Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty speaks those words more than halfway through Ridley Scott’s 1982 film “Blade Runner.” They’re not the character’s first lines (he has a brief scene earlier, threatening an artificial eye designer) nor his most famous. That honor goes to his unforgettable dying soliloquy about all the memories that “will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

Rutger Hauer III 7.25.2019.jpg

But the words are, perhaps, the first to offer a window into his conflicted, synthetic soul.With his shock of blond hair and imposing figure, the Nexus-6 replicant Batty, a lifelike android meant for combat who has turned on his human masters, seems like a science-fiction villain par excellence. But the anxious wonder with which he gazes at the cluttered lair of the genetic engineer J.F. Sebastian resembles that of a nervous child. A steely surface masking a tender, wounded inner world — the description could apply just as easily to “Blade Runner” itself, which is why Batty, and Hauer’s portrayal of him, remains the sci-fi classic’s beating heart.

The actor, who died Wednesday at 75, had a long and distinguished career that included titles as diverse as the Dutch war classic “Soldier of Orange,” the medieval romance “Ladyhawke,” the Italian fable “Legend of the Holy Drinker,” and whatever the hell “Hobo With a Shotgun” was. But his performance as Batty was, after all these years, still his most indelible turn, in part because it spoke to his unique gifts.

Arriving from Holland, Hauer made his American film debut in 1981, as a remorseless terrorist in the Sylvester Stallone thriller “Nighthawks,” At first glance Hauer might have looked like just another in a long line of European musclemen who steadily found work in Hollywood throughout the 1980s, ready to play their share of killer robots, stoic soldiers and disposable blond henchmen.

But Hauer brought to this particular killer robot a mixture of physical menace, regal charm and psychic anguish. He moved with melancholy grace, his eyes alternately darting and serene. The character, we’re told, has a lifespan of only four years, and probably even shorter if the film’s protagonist, the gruff cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), has anything to say about it. What’s only implied, and then suggested through performance, is that Roy Batty will cram into that short period the existential journey of an entire human life.

Blade Runner - 1982

So, in his early scenes, he speaks in clipped, hesitant tones. Batty has clearly researched his predicament — he knows he doesn’t have long to live, and he has ideas about all the scientific methods that could be used to prolong his existence — but he sputters the words out, as if saying them for the first time: “EMS recombination,” “a repressive protein.”

That childlike nervousness evokes genuine pathos, even as we witness the violence he’s capable of. When he finally viciously kills his creator, the scientist-businessman Eldon Tyrell, rage, sadness, fear and exaltation all dance across Batty’s face. And are those tears in his eyes, or just the ever-present sweat caused by “Blade Runner’s” apocalyptic climate? Is there even a difference? This world is as broken as the humans and near-humans who populate it.

Had Hauer played Batty as another stone-faced Eurobaddie, “Blade Runner” itself might have been a more comfortably classifiable genre effort, the kind of movie that many viewers expected in 1982, the kind that promised to pit Ford, the star so familiar to us as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, against a new kind of futuristic nemesis. Instead, audiences were thrown off by the knotty neo-noir that Scott and the screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples delivered, the film flopped, and a cult masterpiece was born.

Look no further than Batty’s extended final battle with Deckard to see both the evidence of the movie’s idiosyncratic tone and how Hauer’s remarkable performance enhances it, practically deconstructing the simple plot before our eyes. The replicant chases the beleaguered, frightened Deckard around an abandoned building, toying with the cop and playing singsong children’s games. But there’s still a catch in Batty’s words, slight pauses scattered in unusual places. Seeing that Deckard has killed his replicant lover, Pris (Daryl Hannah), Batty offers, “I thought you were good. Aren’t you the … good man?” The awkwardness of the words, combined with the pause before “good man” seems to question the film’s very moral universe.

And maybe, when Batty strips down to his underwear for the final pursuit, it’s a sign that he has nothing to hide, that he is finally fully himself and self-aware — in contrast to our hero, who never really suspects that he himself may well be a replicant (a much-speculated-upon theory that years later was confirmed by the 2017 sequel).

We see Hauer’s impressive physique, and sense Batty’s growing confidence, which turns first to bewilderment, and then to a kind of joy when Deckard fights back and actually wallops him in the face.Hauer’s delivery of Batty’s dreamily immortal final lines is certainly perfect, but what’s even more heartbreaking is what he says right before, as he saves the seemingly defeated Deckard from plunging to his death: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” Scott shoots Hauer in extreme close-up, and captures in the actor’s eyes an instant of almost explosive awareness. It’s the kind of moment that still catches a viewer off-guard, many decades later. It’s the look of a man who has finally unlocked himself, and a brave, cruel new world.

Now we find out. SF ‘Fight club’ deputy accused of breaking inmate’s ribs

What has the San Francisco Sheriff’s Legal Department done to ensure its Deputies obey the law? San Francisco will be choosing a new District Attorney this November. The new DA must aggressively go after law breaking and misconduct regardless of the perpetrator. (See earlier Post 2.2.2019)

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 7.24.2019

Almost a decade before San Francisco sheriff’s deputy Scott Neu (pictured above) was charged and fired for allegedly pitting jail inmates against each other in the infamous “fight club” case, he was accused of punching, kicking and kneeing an inmate in his cell, leaving the man with two broken ribs, records released Tuesday show.

But then-Sheriff Michael Hennessey did not discipline Deputy Scott Neu and the district attorney’s office declined to file any criminal charges in the 2006 case after the Sheriff’s Department conducted an internal investigation into the inmate’s complaint.

Scott Neu remained a deputy until 2015 when late-Public Defender Jeff Adachi exposed the fight club case. Adachi said deputies arranged and gambled on fights between inmates during a two-day period in early March 2015, at County Jail No. 4 on the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant St.

A year later, the district attorney’s office charged Neu with 17 criminal counts, including assault under color of authority, making threats, inhumanity to a prisoner and cruel and unusual punishment and he was fired.

Two other deputies were accused of assault under color of authority, inflicting cruel and unusual punishment and breaching official duties. All three pleaded not guilty.

The inmates settled a lawsuit against the city and Sheriff’s Department in 2016 for $90,000.

The district attorney’s office dismissed the charges against the deputies on Feb. 1, 2019 after prosecutors said they learned the Sheriff’s Department mishandled the investigation by destroying evidence and improperly conducting joint administrative and criminal investigations.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-deputy-in-fight-club-case-was-previously-14118153.php

SFPD “Shakedown” of 4th Estate in arrest of credentialed reporter

The unfolding story of the San Francisco Police Department vicious smear of the late Public Defender immediately following his death in February 2019 is gradually coming to light. First, the SFPD leaked a copy of its own report to a local journalist. Then the SFPD arrested and tried to have prosecuted the person to whom the report was leaked to cover their proverbial asses following a public uproar.

San Francisco Examiner 7.23.2019

Newly unsealed records confirmed Tuesday that police stopped short of telling a judge that the subject of an investigation into a leaked incident report on the death of Public Defender Jeff Adachi was a journalist.

Sgt. Joseph Obidi only provided Judge Rochelle East with a brief job description lifted from Carmody’s LinkedIn page that did not explicitly refer to him as a journalist. Obidi then stated that Carmody was not employed by “any of the news organizations that obtained the death investigation report.”

David Snyder, director of the First Amendment Coalition, which sought to unseal the warrant, said the language Obidi used in the application could be read as police trying to explain Carmody is not a journalist.

Snyder said the documents showed the investigation “started and ended with journalists.”

“They (SFPD) were shaking down the fourth estate to get the information they thought they needed,” Snyder said.

In an application to review the phone records of freelance journalist Bryan Carmody, a police sergeant did not disclose to San Francisco Superior Court Judge Rochelle East that Carmody had a police-issued press credential.

East struck down the warrant last Thursday and ordered the unsealing of the application. The judge found that the warrant violated the California Shield Law, which protects the unpublished material of journalists from being obtained through a search warrant.

Thomas Burke, an attorney for Carmody, said he does not blame the judge for issuing the search warrant. Burke blames the San Francisco Police Department for not telling East that Carmody was a journalist.

“She did not understand that he was a journalist,” said Burke, who asked East to invalidate the search warrant. “I don’t think you can fault a judge for knowing one thing or another if they are not told that by law enforcement.”

The warrant was the first of five that police obtained against Carmody. In May, police raids on Carmody’s home and office raised press freedom concerns.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/new-documents-show-police-failed-to-tell-judge-leak-investigation-subject-was-a-journalist/

Mexico facing a guacamole crisis. US and Mexican drug cartels invade the kitchen

Food news of the world. Drug cartels are getting into the culinary business.

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 7.22.2019

It has become increasingly common for Mexico City’s taquerias to serve fake guacamole in their tacos. The guacamole no longer has any avocado. High demand, measly harvests, and US and Mexican drug cartels are to blame.

Even Mexican drug cartels seem to want a piece of the avocado business. Due to its weather and geography, the Mexican state of Michoacán has become a hub for the production of synthetic drugs and, simultaneously, a “paradise” for the cultivation of avocados.

While drug cartels routinely threaten and extort money from farmers, avocado shipments are also often being attacked.

The situation has led some leading producers to form their own security services, the so-called autodefensas, which is a private paramilitary force.

The US has acquired quite a liking for the Mexican dip guacamole. Especially on the day of the Super Bowl, Americans devour the avocado-based dip in immense quantities. According to the Avocado Producers and Exporting Packers Association of Mexico (APEAM), 120,000 tons of avocados were imported by the US for consumption during this year’s Super Bowl alone. That’s 20% more than in the previous year and four times the quantity of 2014.

The Americans’ craving for avocado is increasingly forcing taco stalls in Mexico to serve their meat-filled tortillas with fake guacamole. The fake variety still contains the base ingredients of tomatoes, chili oil, salt, garlic and cilantro, but the avocados are substituted by a type of Mexican squash. The dip retains its green color and has a similar consistency and taste to the original. Nevertheless, “it still hurts,” the online portal Chilango said.

Recipes akin to one published by food blogger Alejandra de Nava have been in circulation for years now. The uproar around fake guacamole, however, stems from the skyrocketing prices for avocados, making their use in guacamole almost a luxury.

https://www.dw.com/en/mexico-facing-a-guacamole-crisis/a-49703429

New York art scene protest. Whitney Board member’s company makes teargas

Art and politics have always been intermingled. Now the prestigious Whitney in New York City is in the cross hairs of art world politics.

Excerpted from The Guardian 7.21.2019

The removals from the prestigious survey of American art come after 46 of 75 artists picked for the show signed a letter in March demanding the resignation of Warren Kanders, a vice-president of the Whitney board with ties to a company that distributes equipment including teargas that the letter said has been used on migrants at the Mexican border, Palestinians in Gaza, protesters in Egypt and Puerto Rico, and against Native Americans protesting a pipeline at Standing Rock.

Many still exhibited but the protest was joined by more than 100 artists including Barbara Kruger and Nan Goldin, as well as dozens of curators, critics and theorists.

The artist Marilyn Minter, long rumored to be a member of Guerrilla Girls, a feminist activist group that has protested gender and ethnic bias in culture since the 1980s, said: “Nan Goldin is my hero.”

“I fucking hate the art world,” she added.

In a letter to the Whitney curators, the six artists who removed their work on Friday and Saturday (another cancelled his involvement before the show opened) said they were angered and conflicted by Kanders’ connections to Safariland, a distribution company.

Eddie Arroyo, Agustina Woodgate, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, Nicholas Galanin and Christine Sun Kim said the Whitney board’s failure to meaningfully respond to the March letter had forced their hand.

“Growing pressure from artists and activists has made our participation untenable,” read their letter, which was obtained by ArtForum. “The museum’s inertia has turned the screw, and we refuse further complicity with Kanders and his technologies of violence.”

Also on Saturday, the London-based collective Forensic Architecturerequested that a 10-minute video called “Triple-Chaser”, made with Praxis Films, which is run by the film-maker Laura Poitras, be taken down. Forensic Architecture said one of its researchers found what they believe to be direct evidence linking the firm to violence classified by the United Nations in a recent report as a potential war crime.

Art institutions are increasingly exposed over the sources of their funding. In June, Yana Peel, the chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries in London, stepped down after she was linked in a Guardian report to the Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO, which has been criticised by human rights organisations.

Protests organised by Goldin at the Metropolitan and Guggenheim museums in New York, and regarding the Tate in London and the Louvre in Paris, with the anti-opioid group Pain, have forced several institutions to refuse funding from the Sackler family, whose firm, Purdue Pharma, has been accused of a role in triggering the opioid-abuse crisis. In March, some Sackler philanthropic groups said they would suspend giving.

Michael Quinn, a lawyer who works with Goldin and Pain, told the Guardian artists were merely stepping into a vacuum “created by government and corporate leaders’ failure to address some very basic societal problems”.

“I see artists increasingly stepping in as the voice of change,” he said. “This is clear from in the political work being exhibited.”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jul/21/whitney-biennial-artist-new-york-warren-kanders

‘Squad’: A Military Unit’s Name Becomes a Political Label for the future

I am posting this OpEd Piece from the WSJ “Review” Section. Interesting, informative and educational. The “Squad” is the future of this country.

Ben Zimmer – Wall Street Journal 7.20.2019

For several days, President Trump has been taunting four progressive Democratic congresswomen known collectively as “The Squad” with insults widely condemned as racist.

The four lawmakers—Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts—adopted the “squad” label shortly after they were elected last November, as they quickly joined forces on Capitol Hill.

When the four appeared together Monday to respond to Mr. Trump’s initial inflammatory tweets, Ms. Pressley sought to assert a broader “squad” of like-minded supporters. “Our squad is big,” she said. “Our squad includes any person committed to building a more equitable and just world…. And given the size of this squad, and this great nation, we cannot—we will not—be silenced.”

Squad III 7.20.2019

How did the word “squad” become a proud label for a political cadre? It traces back to ancient military usage.

In Vulgar Latin—the amalgam of informal dialects that became the colloquial source of the Romance languages—the word began as “exquadra,” meaning “square.” That evolved into “squadra” in Italian, “escuadra” in Spanish and “esquade” in French. In these languages, the term could refer to the square formation that infantry troops used when under attack by cavalry. This kind of formation was used by Roman legions and carried on through the Napoleonic wars, eventually rendered obsolete by the development of modern weaponry.

‘Firing squad’ first referred to soldiers detailed to fire a salute at a funeral.

English borrowed French “esquade” as “squad,” appearing in the language by the late 16th century, not long after the related word “squadron” also entered the lexicon via the Italian form. Both “squad” and “squadron” originally referred to small groups of military personnel; a note from the earl of Essex dated 1596 refers to a captain who “commanded a squad of horse” (meaning a cavalry squadron) in France.

“Squad” developed new meanings in the military and law enforcement, such as the “firing squad,” which first referred to soldiers detailed to fire a salute at a funeral and later to those tasked with executing someone condemned to death. In the early 20th century, “squad” became a designation for police units dealing with particular crimes. Such units included the “flying squad” (a kind of rapid-response team), “vice squad,” “murder squad,” and “riot squad.”

“Fraud squad” shows up in press reports in the early 1960s, and that rhyming pair was matched by “God squad”—a term first used on college campuses for evangelical Christian groups—and of course “The Mod Squad,” the ABC crime drama that made its debut in 1968 featuring a trio of hip undercover cops.

“Squad” spread to other fields, notably sports, where it came to refer to the roster of players from which a team on the field is chosen, as in the victorious 23-player squad that recently represented U.S. women’s soccer at the World Cup in France. In hip-hop circles, “squad” began to be used in the 1990s for a different kind of roster: rap groups that went by such names as the Def Squad and the Hit Squad.

In rap usage, “squad” flourished in recent years to refer to one’s “posse” or close circle of friends. In 2015, Taylor Swift appropriated “squad” to refer to her coterie of young celebrities, popularizing “squad goals” (often rendered on social media with the hashtag #squadgoals) to allude to the aspirations of such an intimate group.

Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib and Omar became known as “The Squad” after Ms. Ocasio-Cortezposted a photo of the four of them on Instagram during the orientation for incoming House members. She captioned it “Squad,” and the term quickly caught on. This week, Ms. Tlaib directed a message on Twitter to her constituents, writing, “You are all my squad!” While “squad” may be outgrowing its close-knit origins, it remains a powerful expression of solidarity.

The American President is an embarassment and disgrace to the country upon which he has foisted his warped, misguided and destructive persona. The people who voted for this abomination are responsible for the ongoing daily disaster.

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Food news of the world. Drug cartels are getting into the culinary business.

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Art and politics have always been intermingled. Now the prestigious Whitney in New York City is in the cross hairs of art world politics.

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