Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 94

The Unionizing of Graduate Students

NEWS BRIEF Graduate students at private universities can now unionize.

The National Labor Relations Board ruled 3-1 Tuesday that graduate students working as teaching or research assistants are entitled to collective-bargaining rights. The case, brought forth by Columbia University graduate students and the United Automobile Workers (which already backs the university’s clerical workers, in addition to graduate students at New York University and the University of Connecticut), is a reversal of a 12-year-old ruling by the federal board.

The board, in its decision, said graduate students can be both students and employees, and are therefore allocated the rights of workers. The decision, according to Inside Higher Education, states:

The board has the statutory authority to treat student assistants as statutory employees, where they perform work, at the direction of the university, for which they are compensated. Statutory coverage is permitted by virtue of an employment relationship; it is not foreclosed by the existence of some other, additional relationship that the [National Labor Relations] Act does not reach.

The ruling overturns one from 2004 that said graduate students who served as teaching or research assistants were still students, and not subject to union rights for which workers are entitled. That ruling, which involved Brown University graduate students, only involved private universities. Graduate students at public universities are subject to state collective-bargaining laws, and many have already unionized.

Before the ruling, Columbia University expressed its concerns with graduate students unionizing, saying it “could adversely affect their educational experience.” The New York Times reported in 2015:

Columbia officials say the school is generous to teaching and research assistants, paying full tuition and stipends. Students say they receive $22,000 to $40,000, varying by department. Like many universities, Columbia fears that a union could bring tensions and strikes.

The university may still appeal the NLRB decision in court.

Why Black Voters Are Rejecting Trump

Although Donald Trump has long claimed to “have a great relationship with the blacks,” the polls tell a different story, with Trump frequently polling in the single digits among black voters. Over the last few days, the Republican nominee has added a new passage to his stump speech, reaching out to the African American community.

Speaking in Akron, Ohio, Monday night, Trump said:

Our government has totally failed our African American friends, our Hispanic friends and the people of our country. Period. The Democrats have failed completely in the inner cities. For those hurting the most who have been failed and failed by their politicians—year after year, failure after failure, worse numbers after worse numbers. Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it's safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats. And I ask you this, I ask you this—crime, all of the problems—to the African Americans, who I employ so many, so many people, to the Hispanics, tremendous people: What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I'll straighten it out. I'll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?

He added, “Look, it is a disaster the way African Americans are living .… We’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”

But Trump’s outreach faces several key hurdles. The Republican Party has long struggled to win over black voters, a problem exacerbated by Trump’s flirtation with white supremacists throughout the presidential campaign. Trump’s dour, bleak message is increasingly at odds with attitudes among black Americans, who, while concerned about racism and other problems, are more optimistic about the future than their white counterparts. Finally, Trump has chosen to pair his outreach to black voters with simultaneous racially charged accusations about rigged elections.

Trump’s low standing with black voters is unprecedented in the modern era. Political scientist Larry Sabato observes:

Trump polls 1-2% among blacks. In '64 Goldwater got 6% after voting no on the Civil Rights Act. In '68 segregationist George Wallace won 3%.

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) August 21, 2016

After months of blithely asserting that black voters will support him or else simply ignoring his poor standing, Trump has recently begun to address it, approaching the problem with a mixture of humility and bravado.

“In recent days, across this country, I've asked the African-American community to honor me with their vote,” Trump said in Virginia over the weekend. “I fully recognize that outreach to the African-American community is an area where the Republican Party must do better.” Yet he also predicted he’d sweep the black vote during his 2020 reelection campaign. “At the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African-American vote.”

Related Story

How Donald Trump Speaks to—and About—Minorities

That would be truly remarkable. As I reported in November 2015, the best any Republican has done with black voters in the last few decades was Gerald Ford’s 17 percent in 1976, running against a Southern Democrat in an era when Dixiecrats and Democratic support for segregation were still within recent memory. (At the time, one poll showed Trump pulling 25 percent of the black vote; most analysts predicted the real numbers would be much lower, and here we are.) What’s more, a 95 percent total would match only Barack Obama in 2008, and would exceed his 2012 showing among African Americans.

Nor do his recent appeals seem likely to close the gap much. First, Trump’s approach risks coming across more as lecturing than as reaching out. His comments in Akron were similar to a riff he delivered in Michigan on Friday, calling on black voters to give him a chance.

“You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

This paternalistic tone has been Trump’s hallmark of late—for example, in his nomination-acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, where he told listeners, “I alone can fix it.”

Trump’s caricatures of black communities as dens of crime, poverty, and shiftlessness are not likely to win him many fans. (In May, when the journalist Robert Draper asked him the most dangerous place he’d ever been, he quipped, “Brooklyn.” He was probably not referring to the threat posed by Williamsburg gentrifiers.) Not all blacks are living in poverty. While some black Americans live in rough neighborhoods, others do not. And African American voters are widely concerned with racial discrimination, both at the hands of the police and criminal-justice system and otherwise. Calling for more stringent policing is not necessarily the solution that black communities want. Trump, in contrast, has made praising the police a regular part of his speech, and when asked whether he believed African Americans were subject to bias, he said he could empathize because the election system was “rigged” against him.

Trump might be able to craft a more effective outreach message if he were spending meaningful time seeking out African American voters and leaders. But Trump has tended to avoid black organizations and black communities. He skipped the annual convention of the NAACP, which is typically not a friendly audience for a GOP candidate, but which Mitt Romney visited in 2012. Trump supporters complained to The Wall Street Journal that the candidate had skipped out on other chances to speak to black audiences.

“You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it's safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats.”

Meanwhile, he’s delivering his appeals to black voters in overwhelmingly white places. Trump began his latest African American outreach with what was billed as a speech in Milwaukee, where protests erupted recently after police shot and killed Sylville Smith, a black man. But the event was actually in suburban Washington County, Wisconsin, which is 96 percent white. In Michigan, Trump spoke in Eaton County, which is 88 percent white. During an appearance on CNN Monday night, Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski suggested that Trump felt unsafe holding events in African American centers, an argument likely to alienate black voters even further. It’s certainly true that black communities may not be favorably disposed to Trump, but that’s the problem he’s trying to fix in the first place.

Trump continues to view minority communities through an essentialist lens, as groups whose interests can be distilled to economic insecurity. He tends to speak about them as a monolithic and inherently separate group from himself and his campaign—and, by extension, his base. It’s little wonder black voters aren’t flocking to him. “We're going to have great relationships with the Hispanics,” he said in May. “The Hispanics have been so incredible to me. They want jobs. Everybody wants jobs. The African Americans want jobs. If you look at what's going on, they want jobs.” He has since added crime to the list of worries, part of his more recent attempt to position himself as the candidate of law and order.

According to some media narratives, appealing to economic anxiety has been highly successful with white voters. As my colleague Derek Thompson notes, that’s too simplistic a view, and “economic anxiety” is to a great extent inextricable from racial insecurities; moreover, Trump isn’t winning enough white voters to win the election.

The approach is even less likely to work with black voters. Outside of these bread-and-butter economic issues, as I wrote in November, Trump faces the intractable problem that black Americans lean liberal and simply disagree with his signature policies. They, like white voters, have a range of concerns, aspirations, and views, and when it comes to economic insecurity, African Americans (as well as Hispanics) are more optimistic than their white fellow citizens.

As my colleague Russell Berman wrote one year ago, “white Americans—and in particular those under 30 or nearing retirement age—have all but given up on the American Dream.…  By contrast, 43 percent of African Americans and 36 percent of Latinos said The Dream is alive and well.” In a 2015 survey sponsored by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute, barely a quarter of whites deemed the nation on the right track, but almost two-thirds of African Americans felt it was on the right track. For these demographics, “Make America Great Again” sounds like a callback to a Golden Age that never existed; the good old days are in the future.

“Look, it is a disaster the way African Americans are living. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”

Even if that were not true, there’s the small matter of Trump’s relationship with white supremacists in America. While he has disavowed the support of former Ku Klux Klan leader (and current congressional candidate) David Duke, just like everyone else, black voters were able to see his vacillation on Duke earlier in the campaign. They’re also able to see the enthusiasm with which white supremacists and “racialists” have embraced Trump. They’re able to see the close alliance between the Breitbart media empire, which has espoused ethnic nationalism, and the Trump campaign, most recently with the hiring of Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon as campaign CEO.

Yet Trump is redoubling his focus on racial dogwhistle politics just as he attempts to court black voters. He’s begun talking repeatedly about how vote fraud is the “only way” he could lose the election. The claim is factually suspect: There’s no evidence for widespread voter fraud in the United States, but worries about fraudulent voting by black voters are a longstanding bogeyman for Republican politicians. Black leaders promptly labeled Trump’s call for poll-watchers to “go down to certain areas and watch and study, make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times” a reference to heavily black urban precincts. As Rick Hasen points out, the Republican National Committee is barred from such poll-watching by a federal consent decree, stemming from intimidation of minority voters in the 1970s and 1980s.

None of this is to say that Trump doesn’t have black supporters. I’ve spoken to many of them at Trump rallies. Another one, Jamie Douglas, wrote an interesting rejoinder to my colleague James Fallows yesterday. Many of these voters have carefully considered reasons for backing the Republican.

That doesn’t change the fact, however, that the overwhelming majority of African Americans are against Trump, for reasons that are not especially obscure. While the vote-rigging talk doesn’t help Trump gain ground among black voters, it’s hard to imagine what he could do at this point to dramatically change his polling. While his standing may regress toward the mean in the coming weeks—and surpass Wallace and Goldwater—Trump’s best chance at uniting 95 percent of African Americans is still likely to be in service of electing Hillary Clinton.

The American Invasion of Canadian Waters

NEWS BRIEF An estimated 1,500 Americans aboard plastic rafts, inner tubes, and other flotation devices unknowingly floated to Canada after strong winds sent them into international waters, the CBC News reports.

The floaters began their journey Sunday at Lighthouse Beach in Port Huron, Michigan, as part of an annual “Float Down” event, in which thousands of attendees spent the day floating along the St. Clair River, a 40-mile long river which forms an international boundary between Michigan and Ontario. Though the event was only supposed to span eight miles down the river toward Michigan’s Chrysler Beach, strong winds going as fast as 30 miles per hour blew the floaters toward an unexpected destination: Sarnia, Canada.

The Canadian Coast Guard, Sarnia police, and the Canada Border Service Agency quickly responded to the fleet of American floaters heading for Canadian shores. Peter Garapick, the head of the Canadian Coast Guard’s search and rescue program, said many of the Americans, fearing the repercussions of entering Canada without proper documentation, attempted to swim back to the United States.

“We had to pull a lot of people out of the water and say ‘no,’” Garapick told CBC News. “They were very upset, cold, and miserable.”

Police loading floaters onto buses to get them back to bridge and home. Strong winds blew them off course. pic.twitter.com/8HFTkjYW8F

— Sarnia Police (@SarniaPolice) August 21, 2016

The event, which was organized through Facebook, did not appear to be sponsored by a particular group

Though all of the participants were eventually rescued from the water and sent back to the U.S. by bus later that evening, the Canadian responders were faced with an additional challenge of cleaning up what the American invasion left behind. Sarnia city spokeswoman Katarina Ovens said workers spent several hours cleaning up beer cans, coolers, and picnic tables the floaters brought with them.

Terry McAuliffe's Second Try at Restoring Felon Voting Rights

NEWS BRIEF In late April, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe announced, to great fanfare, that he was restoring voting rights to 200,000 felons who’d been stripped of the franchise when they went to prison. The move won McAuliffe, a Democrat, praise from social-justice advocates, but it inspired an immediate backlash from Republicans in the commonwealth, who vowed to block the move.

In July, the Virginia Supreme Court sided with the GOP, ruling by a 4-3 margin that while the governor had the ability to grant clemency to felons, including restoring voting rights, he did not have the power to do so en masse—such decisions could only be made on a case-by-case basis. Chief Justice Donald Lemons wrote:

Never before, however, have any of the prior 71 Virginia Governors issued a sua sponte clemency order of any kind, whether to restore civil rights or grant a pardon, to an entire class of unnamed felons without regard for the nature of the crimes or any other individual circumstances relevant to the request. What is more, we are aware of no point in the history of the Commonwealth that any Governor has even asserted the power to issue such an order.

McAuliffe, a man known for his irascibility, promised to find a way to restore voting rights anyway, using an autopen to sign individual orders for all 200,000 felons within two weeks. A fortnight came and went with no news.

But on Monday, McAuliffe held a news conference in Richmond to announce he had ordered restoration of voting rights to 13,000 felons who had already registered to vote prior to the state Supreme Court order, and had ordered that they be returned to voting rolls.

Advocates for restoring the voting rights of those felons who have served their time point out that felon disenfranchisement was originally instituted in states like Virginia for the express purpose of stripping African Americans of the vote. Regardless of the motivations today, the result is much the same, because the criminal-justice system disproportionately takes in blacks. Virginia Republicans objected to McAuliffe’s move on the basis it was intended to juice the Democratic vote ahead of the election in what could be a swing state.

The relatively small number of ex-felons who registered to vote immediately—less than 7 percent of the 200,000 people eligible for reinstatement—suggests that electoral impact might not be that great. In any case, McAuliffe said he will process documents to give the remainder of the 200,000 their voting rights as well.

Ben-Hur Was Hollywood’s Epic $100M Mistake

In 2004, Mel Gibson’s biblical film The Passion of the Christ hit theaters after a months-long, small-scale ad campaign that focused on church groups and evangelical leaders, despite controversy over its violent content and allegations of anti-Semitism. After opening on Ash Wednesday, it became the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, earning $611 million worldwide. It was a genuine indie phenomenon born out of circumstances so unusual they’d be impossible to replicate—so naturally Hollywood has tried anyway with Ben Hur, the biggest and most disastrous result of the industry’s hubris to date, which opened this weekend to a pitiful $11.4 million at the box office.

The fifth film adaptation of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was a $100 million co-production between Paramount Pictures and MGM. It starred the relatively unknown British actor Jack Huston in the title role, was directed by the mid-tier action maestro Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), and drew largely negative reviews. Many critics noted the film’s supreme inferiority to William Wyler’s 1959 version of the tale, which won 11 Oscars and is widely viewed as one of the greatest classic Hollywood epics. Just the idea of remaking Wyler’s film feels like a colossal error in an age of tiresome franchise reboots—but when you consider how studios tried to belatedly capitalize on religious audiences to save the movie, the existence of Ben-Hur seems all the more cynical.

It’s hard to understand who else Ben-Hur was supposed to appeal to. The original novel tells the story of a Roman slave who becomes a champion chariot racer and devout Christian after being inspired by the deeds of Jesus Christ, whose story runs parallel to the main narrative. The older viewers who’d be most likely to recognize the title would almost invariably compare the new film to the beloved 1959 (the movie’s audience skewed older, with 94 percent over age 25). Meanwhile, younger audiences, the demographic Hollywood has the toughest time connecting to, would have little interest in Ben-Hur on name recognition alone. What’s more, they’d be even less drawn to a swords-and-sandals epic set in Ancient Rome, which has become a deeply unpopular genre in the years after Gladiator’s success in 2000.

With no obvious age group to target, MGM and Paramount decided to pitch Ben-Hur straight at religious audiences. The film was largely advertised on Christian broadcasting networks, with the studios hoping to attract the kind of word-of-mouth hype that greeted The Passion of the Christ (which opened to an astonishing $83 million in 2004). Commercials highlighted the fact that the remake was more heavily inspired by Wallace’s book. Wyler’s 1959 film was more oblique about the character of Jesus, who was barely shown onscreen. But Bekmambetov’s version sees the Brazilian star Rodrigo Santoro in a much-expanded version of the Christ role, for which he sought and received a blessing from Pope Francis.

In 2004, Gibson’s roadshow tour for The Passion of the Christ saw him visiting church groups and giving impassioned speeches about the film (which Hollywood studios refused to fund or distribute). The result was an organic, grassroots movement that sprung up in the movie’s favor. But this year’s Ben-Hur marketing campaign was more haphazard, shifting to religious audiences only in recent months when it became clear word of mouth wasn’t spreading through the now-traditional methods of advertising (television, online, and social media among them). The producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey showed Ben-Hur to celebrity pastors and pushed their endorsements out online, as well as holding special screenings at mega-churches around the country in recent weeks.

That approach has often worked for smaller-scale, faith-based films. In recent years, movies like Heaven Is for Real, War Room, Miracles from Heaven, God’s Not Dead, and Risen have been solid, mid-size hits, earning between $40 million and $90 million in the late winter and early spring seasons, when the box-office market is less crowded. But they weren’t the $100 million epics that Ben-Hur was, nor were they hoping to draw the younger, action-oriented audience that can boost an opening weekend. Instead, they opened small and added theaters as popularity grew. Because of its huge budget, Ben-Hur couldn’t do that—it needed to open strong like The Passion of the Christ did. But a glance at the relative success of all Christian-oriented films shows that Mel Gibson’s 2004 triumph was probably a bizarre anomaly, not some magic model for studios to follow.

Ben-Hur’s failure wasn’t just that it couldn’t appeal to Christian audiences. But its poor box-office take seems to reflect countless misguided Hollywood strategies, all of which have combined for a particularly lackluster blockbuster season this summer. Ben-Hur highlights the diminishing returns studios are seeing from the endless cycle of reboots and sequels, and exposes the folly of relying on name recognition and old marketing formulas. The film might not be Hollywood’s most memorable flop of 2016, but it’s the latest evidence of how unsustainable (and costly) the industry’s approach to moviemaking has become.

Questions About Hillary's Health: The Birtherism of 2016

If you can’t beat ’em, you can at least hope they have to withdraw for medical reasons.

The last two weeks have seen a steady increase in innuendo by supporters of Donald Trump who claim—without evidence—that Hillary Clinton is frail, unhealthy, or on the verge of physical collapse. The rumors, spread by voices ranging from the conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, represent a sort of updated birtherism for the 2016 election: a fervent hope for a deus ex machina that will rescue a struggling candidate by disqualifying his opponent.

The innuendo has reached the Sunday shows. “She has an entire media empire that … fails to point out several signs of illness by her.  What you’ve got to do is go online,” Giuliani said on Fox News Sunday this weekend. “So, go online and put down Hillary Clinton illness, take a look at the videos for yourself.”

One should be wary of taking too seriously the things that septuagenarians on television tell you to Google, but if you follow Giuliani’s advice, you are apt to find a piece on Factcheck.org that shows that many of the rumors are based on fake documents spread online. Other analyses, such as one by the television personality Dr. Drew, are based on a two-page summary released by Clinton’s doctor. A third bunch are actually farcical, like a post on the conservative website Heat Street suggesting that pictures of Clinton with pillows indicated some frailty.

Also on Sunday, the conservative activists and Trump supporter Amy Kremer claimed on CNN (again, without proof) that Clinton suffers from CTE, the degenerative disease caused by repeated blows to the head that some former NFL players have been found to have suffered. The influential Drudge Report has often made space for stories suggesting Clinton is unhealthy. Breitbart, the Trump-adoring conservative website whose CEO Steve Bannon recently became CEO of the Trump campaign, has also been a central purveyor of rumors.

Trump has gotten in on the act, dog-whistling toward the health worries. He has warned that Clinton “lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face,” and there was this peculiar tweet last week:

#WheresHillary? Sleeping!!!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2016

(Trump has said in the past he sleeps for only four hours a night.)

Concerns—or more frequently concern-trolling—about Clinton’s health dates back to 2012, when she reportedly fainted while suffering from a stomach virus and sustained a concussion. After the injury, doctors found a blood clot and prescribed thinners. She later appeared before a Senate committee discussing the Benghazi attacks wearing special glasses.

In June 2014, Andrew Stiles, then of the puckish conservative site the Washington Free Beacon, wrote a satirical post questioning Clinton’s health, based on a People cover in which the former secretary of state clutched a patio chair, which he claimed resembled a walker.

“Notice the subtle placement of the word ‘grandmother’ at the bottom of the page, next to what a layperson might reasonably assume to be an old person’s walker in Clinton’s hand,” Stiles wrote. “Then there is the juxtaposition of a graphic celebrating the life of [recently deceased] Brady Bunch star Ann B. Davis. Taken together, these aspects of the cover raise troubling questions about PEOPLE Magazine’s political agenda.”

Stiles then wrote a follow-up post with a photoshopped image of Clinton using a walker. Both posts were tagged as “parody” on the Free Beacon. He would go on to write the recent Heat Street post, a series of images showing Clinton leaning against pillows with exaggerated arrows pointing to them.

These satirical posts are relevant not because they are especially dangerous or unusual, but because they are so indistinguishable from the innuendo of folks like Giuliani, Jones, or Kremer. In fact, lots of news stories treated Stiles’s latest post as earnest, and Drudge also featured it. “There are lots of idiots on the internet, unfortunately,” Stiles wrote in a message. He noted that the Heat Street post never actually makes any assertions about Clinton’s fitness, although “people might assume that based on context of other, more earnest, nonsense.”

On that earnest (if not sincere) side of the ledger, it’s not just Giuliani’s flacking of random conspiracy videos, or Kremer’s insinuations without evidence. Bloggers have taken Clinton’s scratchy throat as evidence of serious illness rather than, you know, the result of spending a lot of time speaking. (My colleague Olga Khazan spoke to voice experts who suggested Clinton is speaking in a needlessly strained manner, but that’s separate from illness.)

There is, as noted several times now, not unintentionally, no evidence for these theories. That isn’t to say that Clinton may not have some lurking, undiscovered health problems; that’s how undiscovered problems work. What is available is a report from Clinton’s doctor, Lisa Bardack, who actually examined her and determined, “She is in excellent health and fit to serve as president of the United States.” Bardack’s assessment, in fact, offers significantly more detail than a letter released by Trump’s doctor, Harold Bornstein.

The fact that there’s no evidence for serious ailments plaguing Clinton is not an impediment to these conspiracy theories; it’s essential to them. In the absence of evidence, campaign surrogates can espouse the theories on television and elsewhere, under the old guise of “just asking questions.” This is a favorite Trump trick. He doesn’t know whether Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the Kennedy assassination, but he saw a story saying that in the National Enquirer and he’s just asking some questions. Or, to connect this back to the birther issue, Trump doesn’t know that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, but there are some fishy things, and he’s just asking whether there’s any evidence he wasn’t.

The approach requires a certain degree of complicity, from both Democrats and the press. First, it relies on the assumption that Clinton’s backers will be unwilling to fight fire. (Not that they couldn’t do so, extrapolating irresponsibly from a few data points just like their counterparts: Hey, listen, Trump is older than she is, and he’s a great fan of fast food, and …) Second, it depends on the fact that major news outlets will invite Trump surrogates to comment in the name of even-handedness, giving them a chance to air these ideas to a national audience. Poppy Harlow may have been appalled at Kremer’s comments on CNN, but Kremer still managed to get a chance to make them.

Political tactics like this—there’s a delightfully filthy term for it—make for fun for operatives, and they can produce some mayhem, but they seldom win elections, especially at a national level. The birther movement reached a huge range of people; as recently as this month, a plurality of Republicans in an NBC News poll disagreed with the assertion that Obama was born in the United States. The movement may have greased the skids for Trump, too. But it didn’t have much luck stopping Obama, who won two terms. With Trump trailing by a decent margin nationally and in swing states, a focus on Clinton’s health may serve as a distraction, but probably won’t close the gap. That makes it look more and more like an unhealthy obsession.

The Niqab Ban at a German School

NEWS BRIEF A German court ruled Monday in favor of a school that is seeking to prohibit students from wearing a niqab, a full-body veil that covers a woman’s face except her eyes, Deutsche Welle reports.

The student, who has only been identified as an 18-year-old German resident, was accepted to the Sophie Scholl night school in Osnabrück, northern Germany. The school reversed the decision after learning the student wore the niqab to class, claiming her choice of dress violates the school’s need for “open communication” with its students.

Deutsche Welle has more:

The Sophie Scholl School didn’t want the student to wear her niqab for two reasons. One was that they couldn't identify her—someone else could take a test for her, for example. … The other reason was that school officials believe that the open communication needed in education would not be possible if only the student's eyes are visible.

Open communication “is not just based on the spoken word but also on non-verbal elements and body language,” a statement from Lower Saxony's school authority reads. “To facilitate that kind of communication, it is essential that the students' faces are visible.”

The student was scheduled to appear in court Monday to present her case against the school’s decision, but she didn’t show. As a result, the court denied her claim.

The ruling follows a nationwide debate over whether a full-body covering ban, such as the one in place in France, should be implemented in Germany. Last week, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere proposed a ban of the full face veil, which he said “doesn’t fit in with our open society.” The proposal, which found support among several members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), would prohibit women from wearing full-faced veils such as the burqa or the niqab, in public schools, public offices, or while driving.

Members of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) voiced opposition to the proposal, and Andrea Nahles, the employment and social affairs minister and a member of SPD, called the discourse surrounding it  “increasingly xenophobic.”

Germany’s laws already prohibit face coverings that conceal people’s identities at public demonstrations, such as protests. It remains unclear, however, if an outright ban on face veils would be constitutional in Germany, whose constitution guarantees that “freedom of faith and of conscience, and freedom to profess a religious or philosophical creed, shall be inviolable.”

Ryan Lochte's Sponsorship Woes

Updated on August 22 at 5:11 p.m. EST

NEWS BRIEF Ryan Lochte, the Olympic gold-medal-winning swimmer, has lost four major commercial sponsorships over his account of being robbed at the Rio Olympic Games.

The announcements began Monday morning:

The official response regarding our sponsorship of Ryan Lochte. pic.twitter.com/0DdP2RyceD

— Speedo USA (@SpeedoUSA) August 22, 2016

Hours later, Ralph Lauren said it won’t renew its contract with Lochte, which ran through the games.

now Ralph Lauren says they won't renew Lochte's contract pic.twitter.com/01dXGdvQmN

— Katie Peralta (@katieperalta) August 22, 2016

Syneron-Candela, which develops aesthetic medical products, also ended Lochte’s deal with its company Gentle Hair Removal. “We hold our employees to high standards, and we expect the same of our business partners,” Syneron-Candela said in a statement.

Airweave, a Japanese mattress company and the “official mattress supplier to Team USA,” followed Monday afternoon, announcing in a tweet it had decided to part ways with Lochte “after careful consideration.”

The companies cut ties with the swimmer after this account of the robbery, which was at odds with video footage, enraged Brazilians, embarrassed the U.S. Olympic Committee, and unleashed massive criticism of the champion swimmer.

As we reported last week, Lochte and three of his teammates—James Feigen, Jack Conger, and Gunnar Bentz—said they were robbed at gunpoint by men dressed as police officers as they returned to the Olympic Village from a party. But police in Rio were unable to corroborate their account. And it later emerged, via video footage, that the swimmers had vandalized a toilet at a gas station and then offered to pay for the damage after armed security guards got involved.

Rio has for years been trying to shed its image as a crime-prone city, and reports of the robbery at gunpoint initially embarrassed many Brazilians, who became irate when it emerged the story was fabricated. A Brazilian judge ordered the swimmers’ passports seized, but Lochte had already left Rio for the U.S. His teammates weren’t as lucky: Two of them were taken off a U.S.-bound plane by Brazilian authorities, but were allowed to return home after apologizing. The fourth paid the equivalent of $10,800 to resolve the dispute.

Lochte in a statement last Friday said he regretted his actions, but the nature of his apology itself drew criticism, as did the fact he apologized to his sponsors before he did the games organizers.  Over the weekend, he told NBC that he “over-exaggerated” what had happened in Rio. He also told People that he’d apologized to his teammates.

Those apologies though aren’t likely to placate Lochte’s sponsors or USOC, which criticized the swimmers’ actions and said it would review “potential consequences for the athletes, when we return to the United States.”

Hillary Clinton's Latest Email Scapegoat: Colin Powell

Hillary Clinton has struggled for months to find a satisfactory explanation for why she chose to use a private email server and a personal email address while she was secretary of state, a choice that FBI Director James Comey described as resulting in “extremely careless” handling of classified information. Publicly, none of her excuses have met with much success.

Privately, however, Clinton seems to have found one scapegoat: former Secretary of State Colin Powell. It has long been known that Powell used a private email address at Foggy Bottom, and Clinton told FBI investigators that Powell recommended she do the same, according to a New York Times report on Friday:

The account is included in the notes the Federal Bureau of Investigation handed over to Congress on Tuesday, relaying in detail the three-and-a-half-hour interview with Mrs. Clinton in early July that led to the decision by James B. Comey, the bureau’s director, not to pursue criminal charges against her.

Separately, in a 2009 email exchange that also emerged during the F.B.I. questioning, Mrs. Clinton, who had already decided to use private email, asked Mr. Powell about his email practices when he was the nation’s top diplomat under George W. Bush, according to a person with direct knowledge of Mr. Powell’s appearance in the documents, who would not speak for attribution.

The Times notes that liberal journalist Joe Conason, a longtime advocate for the Clintons, first reported that conversation between Powell and Clinton.

But the Powell story, even if accurate, doesn’t clear things up much. For one thing, as Conason pointed out, Clinton had already decided to use a private email account by the time of the conversation. (The story’s subtext, that former and current Cabinet secretaries sit around and discuss ways to circumvent public-records laws, is a separate issue.) For another, Powell used a private email address but not a private server; his address was through AOL.

Powell is not taking kindly to the reports. In response to the Times story, Powell’s spokesman issued a statement saying, “General Powell has no recollection of the dinner conversation. He did write former Secretary Clinton an email memo describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department.”

When People spoke with Powell Sunday night in the Hamptons, he was blunter. "Her people have been trying to pin it on me,” he said. “The truth is, she was using it for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did.” (Powell added, “It doesn't bother me. But it's okay; I'm free.”)

Powell is a Republican who served in the George W. Bush administration and was repeatedly mentioned a Republican presidential candidate, but he endorsed Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. While several other Republican Cabinet members, including colleagues in the Bush administration, have backed publicly backed Clinton over Republican Donald Trump this year, Powell has not. He has not committed to endorsing any candidate, despite sporadic speculation that a Clinton endorsement is near. It doesn’t sound like Powell is especially enamored of Team Clinton at the moment.

Remembering D.A. Henderson

D.A. Henderson, an American public-health official who led the international campaign to eradicate smallpox in one of the greatest scientific endeavors of the 20th century, died on Friday. He was 87 years old.

Henderson’s death was announced Saturday by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he taught as a public-health professor.

When Henderson, then a 39-year-old epidemiologist, became the first chief of the World Health Organization’s smallpox-eradication unit in 1967, the virus killed an estimated two million people every year on three continents. By the end of his tenure there 10 years later, the disease was all but wiped out worldwide. The WHO certified in 1980 smallpox had been completely eradicated—a first in human history. Its absence spared an estimated 60 million lives that would’ve been lost during the almost four decades since then.

The enemy, which Henderson called “the oldest of scourges and the most devastating,” was an ancient one. Smallpox first appears in the historical record 5,000 years ago and never truly leaves it. The disease infected Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War and disfigured the 7-year-old Georgian boy who would become Joseph Stalin. It killed pharaohs and saints, tsars and peasants, merchants and nobles alike during its periodic waves throughout Africa and Eurasia. Millions of indigenous people died after its arrival in the New World, where it contributed to the depopulation of the Americas. An estimated 500 million people succumbed to the disease in the final century before its eradication. If homo sapiens had a nemesis, it was smallpox.

“No disease has ever been so instantly recognized or so widely known and feared,” Henderson later recalled in his 2009 book on the eradication campaign. “Smallpox was hideous and unforgettable.”

For me, the memory of a ward full of smallpox victims thirty-five years ago in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is still vividly etched in my mind. The ugly, penetrating odor of decaying flesh that hung over the ward; the hands, covered with pustules, reaching out, as people begged for help. Neither water nor food offered comfort; pus-filled lesions covered the insides of their mouths, making it painful for them to even chew or swallow. Flies were everywhere, thickly clustered over eyes half-closed by the pustules. More than half the patients were dying, and there was no drug, no treatment that we could give to help them.

Smallpox had one crucial weakness: only humans can transmit it to one another. Epidemiologists in the mid-20th century began to suggest the virus could be driven to extinction through mass-vaccination campaigns. But the logistical hurdles were immense. In order to succeed, the number of active human smallpox infections would need to be reduced to zero, even in endemic hotspots like Brazil, Ethiopia, and India. Even as Henderson launched the WHO campaign in 1967, more than a few public-health experts dismissed smallpox-eradication as a utopian fantasy.

Donald Ainslie Henderson was born September 7, 1928, in Lakewood, Ohio, a comfortable middle-class Cleveland suburb. After receiving his medical degree in 1954, he joined the U.S. Public Health Service to fulfill a selective-service requirement in the aftermath of the Korean War. From there he transferred to the CDC’s epidemic-intelligence division and soon found himself serving as its chief. Henderson savored the challenges of tracking outbreaks through “shoe-leather epidemiology.”

“Every outbreak was unique—how it had occurred and developed, which groups were infected, what were the best ways to deploy community and federal resources, and what could be done to prevent a recurrence,” he later wrote. “There was nothing routine about the job, and it demanded a great deal of rapid learning.”

In 1967, the WHO General Assembly, pushed first by Soviet officials and then by the U.S. government, approved a global smallpox-eradication campaign. Henderson was tapped to lead the project—a move intended by WHO’s leadership, he later claimed, that would allow them to blame the United States if it floundered.

To achieve eradication, Henderson and his small WHO staff coordinated with hundreds of doctors and thousands of local health workers throughout Africa, Asia, and South America. They conducted surveillance, tracked epidemics, and administered vaccines in a targeted effort to eliminate it country by country. Those efforts often required navigating civil wars and refugee crises, dilapidated public-health systems, and national politics and Cold War rivalries, as well as the WHO’s balkanized bureaucracies—a task at which Henderson excelled.

Henderson left the program in its waning days to serve as dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, but did not leave the issue of smallpox permanently. The Soviet Union’s collapse in the 1990s revealed the existence of a massive biological-weapons program in violation of international treaties, raising the specter that the disease could return. Henderson, who supported destroying the last smallpox samples at the CDC’s labs in Atlanta, Georgia, and Russia’s Vector Institute in Siberia, also backed the resumption of smallpox-vaccine manufacturing after the Soviet revelations and the September 11 attacks—a grim postscript to the most formidable medical accomplishment of the 20th century he had helped secure.

“When this all began for me in 1961,” he wrote, “I had not the slightest inkling that smallpox would be a disease that would preoccupy me for a lifetime. Whatever the quandaries, I return to the basic fact that, for the first time in history, a disease has been eradicated—the most serious of all the pestilential diseases.”