The X option will be available in the future, however, another change lets applicants ‘self select’ their binary gender.
The US State Department is in the process of offering a third gender marker – “X” – on US passports for Americans who do not identify as male or female, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Wednesday.
In a statement, Blinken said that, under new rules effective immediately, passport applicants will be allowed to “self-select” their gender, “M” or “F”, without requiring medical certification if their selection does not match other issued documentation.
This is the first step towards allowing a third gender marker option – “X” – other than “M” or “F”, Blinken said, in an effort to promote “the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people”, including LGBTQ+ people.
“The Department has begun moving towards adding a gender marker for non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming persons applying for a passport or CRBA (Consular Reports of Birth Abroad),” Blinken continued, explaining that the process to add gender markers is “technologically complex” and said his department is “evaluating the best approach to achieve this goal”.
Today we are taking important steps toward ensuring the fair treatment of LGBTQI+ U.S. citizens. https://t.co/tfNnTUQmsp
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) June 30, 2021
Blinken did not indicate when the new gender marker would be available.
The State Department’s website states, “We cannot provide an exact timeline for when we will begin offering a gender marker for non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming persons.”
Blinken’s announcement comes on the last day of Pride Month and is being celebrated by the LGBTQ+ community, which has argued that traditional male and female options discriminate against non-binary and intersex individuals.
Lambda Legal counsel Paul Castillo tweeted that the news “is a long time coming” for his group’s client “Dana Zzyym, an intersex and nonbinary U.S. Navy Veteran” who filed a lawsuit six years ago “to obtain an accurate passport”.
Today's news by the State Dept is a long time coming for countless LGBTQI+ Americans, including @LambdaLegal client Dana Zzyym, an intersex and nonbinary U.S. Navy Veteran, who filed their case in 2015 to obtain an accurate passport. https://t.co/EWMSOzzR0j
The US will join several other countries including Canada, Australia, Germany and India that offer an “X” option on passports. The move follows New York state’s announcement last week that a gender marker will be available on its driver’s licences and identification cards, joining several other states and localities that are allowing “X” on official documentation.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has shifted from his predecessor Donald Trump’s approach towards LGBTQ+ rights, kicking off his presidency in January by reversing Trump’s transgender military ban and restarting the tradition of officially recognising June as Pride Month. Trump only recognised it once during his four years in office, in 2019.
US President Joe Biden and LGBTQ advocate Ashton Mota of the GenderCool Project walk before delivering remarks to commemorate LGBTQ+ Pride Month in the White House, June 25, 2021 [Jonathan Ernst/Reuters]
Last week, Biden marked Pride Month at the White House and designated the Pulse Nightclub a national memorial. Forty-nine were killed in a 2016 mass shooting at the gay nightclub.
Biden’s administration also features the first openly LGBTQ+ Cabinet secretary to be confirmed by the Senate: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Virgin Galactic: "The class action stuff doesn't bother me as much. What it really is is that it's basically a very expensive stock and I think it had a good run. Let's find others."
The entertainer had been serving a three- to 10-year sentence in a prison outside Philadelphia.
Bill Cosby was released from prison Wednesday after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his 2018 conviction for sexual assault, a dramatic reversal in one of the first high-profile criminal trials of the #MeToo era.
The court’s decision seemed likely to end the Pennsylvania case, legal experts said, and while more than 50 women across the nation have accused Mr. Cosby of sexual assault and misconduct, statutes of limitations in their cases makes further prosecutions unlikely.
Mr. Cosby had served three years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a maximum-security prison outside Philadelphia when the court ruled that a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case.
Mr. Cosby, 83, returned to his home in suburban Philadelphia Wednesday afternoon where, looking frail and walking slowly, he was helped inside by his lawyer and a spokesman. He flashed a “V” sign as he reached his front door.
The court’s decision overturned the first major criminal conviction of the #MeToo era, which came soon after allegations of sexual assault had been made against the powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The accusations and eventual conviction of Mr. Cosby stunned the nation, painting a disturbing portrait suggesting that a man who had brightened America’s living rooms as a beloved father figure had been a sexual predator.
The case against Mr. Cosby began with his arrest in 2015 on charges that he had drugged and sexually assaulted a woman at his home in the Philadelphia suburbs 11 years earlier. In April 2018, the jury convicted Mr. Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, to whom Mr. Cosby had been a mentor and who was at the time a Temple University employee.
Ms. Constand had praised the guilty verdict at the time, saying, “Truth prevails,” and the National Organization for Women called it “a notice to sexual predators everywhere.” But Mr. Cosby’s lawyers, who had said at the time that allegations against Mr. Weinstein would make it difficult for them to receive a fair trial, later suggested in an appeal that the outcome had been influenced by what they described as a period of “public panic.”
Andrea Constand, who had said “Truth prevails” when Mr. Cosby was convicted of sexually assaulting her, returning to the courtroom in 2018.Pool photo by David Maialetti
In a statement issued with her lawyers, Ms. Constand said Wednesday that the court’s ruling was “not only disappointing but of concern in that it may discourage those who seek justice for sexual assault in the criminal justice system from reporting or participating in the prosecution of the assailant or may force a victim to choose between filing either a criminal or civil action.”
In their 79-page opinion, the judges wrote that a previous prosecutor’s statement that Mr. Cosby would not face charges, which paved the way for Mr. Cosby to testify in a civil trial, meant that he should not have been charged in the case. It was a 6-to-1 ruling, with two of the judges in the majority dissenting on the remedy, which barred a retrial.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which overturned Mr. Cosby’s conviction, wrote that a “non-prosecution agreement” that had been struck with Bruce L. Castor Jr., the former district attorney, meant that Bill Cosby should not have been charged in the case for which he was convicted and sentenced in 2018. The court also barred a retrial. Read the full 79-page opinion.
The case began in 2005, when Mr. Cosby was investigated in the case of Ms. Constand, and a former district attorney of Montgomery County said that he had given Mr. Cosby his assurance that he would not be charged in the case. The former district attorney, Bruce L. Castor Jr., announced in a news release at the time that after an investigation he had found “insufficient” evidence. He later testified that he had given Mr. Cosby the assurance to encourage him to testify in a subsequent civil case brought by Ms. Constand. (A civil suit she filed against Mr. Cosby was settled in 2006 for $3.38 million.)
In that testimony, Mr. Cosby acknowledged giving quaaludes to women he was pursuing for sex — evidence that played a key part in his trial after Mr. Castor’s successors reopened the case and charged Mr. Cosby in December 2015. That was just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired in the case, and it came amid a number of new allegations from women who brought similar accusations of drugging and sexual assault against Mr. Cosby.
“In light of these circumstances, the subsequent decision by successor D. A.s to prosecute Cosby violated Cosby’s due process rights,” the appeals ruling said.
Mr. Cosby posted a picture of himself, with a fist raised above his head and his eyes closed, on Twitter, writing: “I have never changed my stance nor my story. I have always maintained my innocence.”
Mr. Castor, who this year served as a lawyer for President Donald J. Trump during his second impeachment trial, said after the ruling was delivered on Wednesday that he believed his decision in 2005 had been “exonerated” by the ruling, calling the verdict a “shellacking” for the current district attorney’s office.
“I was right back in 2005 and I’m right in 2021,” he said in a phone interview. “I’m proud of our Supreme Court for having the courage to make an unpopular decision.”
Brian W. Perry, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Cosby, said he was “thrilled” with the ruling. “To be honest with you, we all believed, collectively, that this is how the case would end,” he said. “We did not think he was treated fairly and fortunately the Supreme Court agreed.”
The Montgomery County District Attorney, Kevin R. Steele, said that he hoped the decision would not “dampen the reporting of sexual assaults by victims.”
“He was found guilty by a jury and now goes free on a procedural issue that is irrelevant to the facts of the crime,” Mr. Steele said in a statement. “I want to commend Cosby’s victim Andrea Constand for her bravery in coming forward and remaining steadfast throughout this long ordeal, as well as all of the other women who have shared similar experiences.”
Patricia Steuer, 65, who accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said that she had been preparing herself for the possibility that Mr. Cosby’s conviction would be overturned but that she was still “a little stunned” by the court’s ruling on Wednesday.
“I’m wondering what the 43-year ordeal that I went through was supposed to be about,” said Ms. Steuer, who said she found out about the decision on Facebook. But she said she was “consoled by the fact that I believe we did the only thing that we could, which is to come forward and tell the truth.”
Scott Berkowitz, the president of RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, said: “We are deeply disappointed in today’s ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and by the message this decision sends to the brave survivors who came forward to seek justice for what Bill Cosby did to them. This is not justice.”
Others expressed support for Mr. Cosby. Phylicia Rashad, who appeared as Mr. Cosby’s wife in “The Cosby Show,” praised the decision on Twitter. “FINALLY!!!!” Ms. Rashad, who was recently named the dean of Howard University’s College of Fine Arts, wrote on Twitter. “A terrible wrong is being righted- a miscarriage of justice is corrected!” (She later wrote: “I fully support survivors of sexual assault coming forward. My post was in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth.”)
The decision undoes a verdict that several women who said that they had been assaulted and raped by Mr. Cosby had praised at the time as a measure of justice that had been long in coming. In a victim impact statement filed with the court in 2018, Ms. Constand had said of Mr. Cosby: “We may never know the full extent of his double life as a sexual predator, but his decades-long reign of terror as a serial rapist is over.”
And Janice Dickinson, a former model who had told the court that Mr. Cosby raped her in 1982 after giving her a pill — her account was one of five women the prosecution presented from women who said he had drugged and sexually assaulted them — said after the sentencing that “My heart is beating out of my chest at the moment.”
“This is fair and just,” she said in 2018. “I am victorious.”
The issue of whether the trial court had improperly allowed additional women to testify was not considered because the panel ruled that Mr. Cosby had relied to his detriment on Mr. Castor’s promise and then made statements in the civil case that were effectively used as evidence against him.
In a dissent, Justice Thomas G. Saylor disagreed that a statement Mr. Castor made in a news release represented an unconditional promise that bound his successor not to prosecute. Justice Kevin Dougherty, in a separate opinion in which he was joined by Justice Max Baer, found that though Mr. Cosby’s due process rights had been violated when he relied on Mr. Castor’s promise and testified in the civil case, the remedy should not have been barring further prosecution but throwing out the evidence the prosecution gained from Mr. Cosby’s testimony.
The reversal now leaves Cosby’s career and reputation in limbo. His conviction, after years of dodging accusations that he had preyed on women, had seemed to cap the downfall of one of the world’s best-known entertainers.
Its overturning undid what many women had seen as an early success of the #MeToo movement, a ruling which had been praised at the time as a sign that the accounts of female accusers were being afforded greater weight and credibility.
Sydney Ember, Matt Stevens and Jon Hurdle contributed reporting.
A cell in the brain region called the hippocampus, which contains neurons that can encode information about elapsed time. Credit: Robert McNeil, Baylor College of Medicine/SPL
Neuroscience
The ‘time neurons’ that help the brain keep track
Cells in the hippocampus play a part in time-stamping unfolding events.
To recall a past experience, we need to piece together when specific events happened and in what order. Now, scientists have confirmed that humans have “time neurons” that encode this information.
Rodents have long been known to have time-keeping cells in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped brain structure that has an essential role in memory. To look for similar cells in humans, Leila Reddy at the French national research agency CNRS in Toulouse and her colleagues recorded electrical activity in the hippocampal neurons of volunteers while the volunteers memorized a series of images and were quizzed, periodically, on which image came next in the sequence.
The researchers pinpointed a subset of neurons that fired one after the other during the approximately 6.5-second intervals between quizzes. These neurons showed similar patterns of activity during gaps when participants stared at a blank screen, suggesting that they were encoding time, rather than other information about the task.
The team was also able to decode the firing patterns of groups of time neurons to retrieve the identity of the specific time periods they encoded — affirming the neurons’ role as timekeepers in the brain.
Building on the buzz created from its "Simpsons"-"Star Wars" team-up, Disney+ announced on Wednesday its next short will bring the beloved Loki into the animated world of "The Simpsons."
The Marvel-themed short will premiere on Disney+ on July 7.
"The Good, the Bart and the Loki" will find the God of Mischief teaming up with TV's most mischievous minor Bart Simpson "in the ultimate crossover event paying tribute to the Marvel Cinematic Universe of Super Heroes and villains," according to a release from Disney+.
Tom Hiddleston will voice Loki in the short.
"The Simpsons" executive producer Al Jean, when speaking to CNN around the release of "Maggie Simpson in 'The Force Awakens From Its Nap,'" had said more collaborations between "The Simpsons" and properties from the Disney universe were in the works.
COVID-19 restrictions gave many an opportunity to learn a new skill or become reacquainted with a forgotten pastime. Waterloo native Connor Sandheinrich decided to use that opportunity to create an award-winning short film.
Sandheinrich wrote and directed “Unsafe Spaces,” a tense and unnerving three-minute black-and-white glimpse into an everyday situation that feels like an eternity for a woman who is walking to her car after a late-night shift.
In April, the film won Best Film and Best Editing awards in Arrow Films’ The Stylist Short Cuts Competition, which promotes female filmmakers in the horror genre.
Arrow Films is a leading independent film company specializing in distributing “world cinema,” cult, art, classic and horror films.
Sandheinrich, a 2017 Waterloo High School graduate, said her love for film began when she was a teenager. She and her friends would watch “four to five movies a week” at the local theater during summer break.
She also gave credit to her uncle, Gregg Sandheinrich, who currently works in the film industry in Los Angeles, as part of her inspiration to pursue a career in filmmaking.
Her love for cinema led her to attend the University of Kansas Department of Film and Media Studies, where she graduated in December 2020.
“My favorite genre is horror and thriller,” Sandheinrich said, so making a short film in the genre was a natural choice.
She explained the idea for the film came from conversations she has had with male friends about why females generally accompany each other to public restrooms or why women typically don’t go for runs at night.
The premise led to the creation of her film during COVID “quarantine” in 2020.
She said that effective horror films portray “obvious things” and situations with a perspective that elicits a response from the audience.
“These are things (women) think about all the time,” Sandheinrich continued. “Being able to show that to people who don’t have that experience… is very rewarding.”
The film contest judges agreed Sandheinrich’s film about a short walk to a car captured the woman’s emotions and was powerful enough to earn her the top prize when winners were announced April 15.
In addition to work on independent films, Sandheinrich currently works as a coordinator and post-production contributor for RW2 Productions, a Kansas City studio that specializes in advertisements and creative projects.
As a coordinator, it is her job to make sure the “day of (filming) goes smoothly,” she said, adding she facilitates “communication between all parties “ involved in a project from on-set assistance for a project director and behind-the-scenes work with the company’s clients.
“It’s cool to see a production from start to finish,” Sandheinrich concluded.
She currently has a film in pre-production. It is another collaboration with Nathan Shapiro, who collaborated with Sandheinrich in editing “Unsafe Spaces.”
She explained that she works with Indiegogo, a “crowdfunding” network of independent filmmakers, to find financing for future campaigns.
“Unsafe Spaces” began streaming on Arrowfilms.com on June 7. To watch Sandheinrich’s award-winning film, click here.
In 1878, Bombay University completed construction on a dazzling addition to the colonial city’s skyline: a 280-foot clock tower. Built in the Venetian Gothic style, the Big Ben–inspired structure was the tallest at the time in the city that would come to be known as Mumbai, with clock faces in each direction. It was right in the heart of the developing town, bursting from the surrounding trees on campus, with the sea not far away. There was just one prickly issue: No one could agree on what time it should keep.
Today, India has a single time zone, five-and-a-half hours ahead of UTC, based on the 82.5E longitude line that slices the country in half. But India is some 1,800 miles across, so the sun rises and sets in the east almost two hours earlier than it does the west, which has prompted periodic demands for more than one time zone. (The continental United States, by way of comparison, is about 2,800 miles across and has four time zones.) But every Indian watch wasn’t always set to the same time.
Until the mid-19th century local timekeeping was tied to the rising and setting of the sun. Until the early 1880s Bombay mostly followed this local solar time, or, appropriately, “Bombay Time.” But with the onset of the railways and telegraph from around the 1850s, it became expedient, even imperative, for colonial India to have a single uniform time. “Madras Time” was chosen as the default. The city of Madras (Chennai) lay roughly halfway between Calcutta (Kolkata) and Bombay. As Rajendra Aklekar, journalist and author of A Short History of Indian Railways explains, the Madras observatory ran the telegraph service used for synchronizing railway station times. So the colonial government advised that the region adopt this “Railway Time,” which was about 30 minutes ahead.
The clock tower at the University of Mumbai. ColsTravel/Alamy
This first attempt to impose a single time on Bombay in 1870 was unsuccessful, and a second attempt by the colonial government in 1881 also met with opposition. The city resisted, with many people (as well as the university and the high court) using Bombay Time, even as the railways and some government offices used Madras Time.
The imposition of a single time for Bombay was, from the outset, a thorny, charged issue that rankled the city’s pride and resurfaced repeatedly over a century. Bombay University was one of the arenas in which this battle unfolded. In April 1883, at a meeting of the University senate, the 40 or so attendees, including city officials, judges, and professors, debated: What time should the newly minted clock tower keep?
At the senate meeting, one Dr. D’Souza argued that because the clock and the tower belonged to Bombay, “the time of the city to which they belonged should be kept.” A Mr. Chambers, from the Bombay Observatory, proceeded to give “a learned discourse on the astronomical variations of time,” the Times of India reported in its April 16 edition, pushing for the abandonment of local time in favor of the more widely accepted standard time “for the sake of convenience.” One Mr. Orr, a senior high court official, demurred, arguing that given Bombay’s position as a key mercantile and trading port city in the British Empire, adopting a new time “would cause much inconvenience to the shipping interest of Bombay, to the mercantile community and to the high court.”
The municipal corporation appeared willing to pay half the cost of lighting the tower if Bombay Time was kept, while the government would do so if Madras Time won out. Bombay Time prevailed in a 34-to-7 vote.
The Indian railway system was one argument in favor of standardizing time across the country. Dinodia Photos/Alamy
The clock tower was one of earliest reported public debates over local time—but it was by no means the last. As time progressed, the arguments coalesced into two camps. Those that favored a single time argued it was uniform, convenient, and scientific. Those that resisted spoke of ritual, tradition, and city pride, and were often motivated by a spirit of colonial resistance.
At the time, the world didn’t yet have a codified system of time zones, but that was starting to change. In 1884, at the International Meridian Conference, the system of time zones at one-hour intervals was discussed. Calcutta, which falls on the 90E meridian, would be ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) by six hours. Bombay, on 75E, by five or so. (Technically though, Bombay Time worked about to be four hours and 51 minutes ahead of GMT.) It took some time, but this was the foundation of the system of time zones we know today.
Despite its unsuccessful attempts to align time in Bombay, the British were not done trying. In 1905, the unpopular Viceroy Lord Curzon again attempted again to impose a single time, measured from the north Indian city of Allahabad (Prayagraj), or 38 minutes and 50 seconds ahead of Bombay Time.
As the government consulted city officials and merchant bodies for feedback, Curzon announced the Partition of Bengal. This decision, nominally for efficiency, split the Hindu-majority west of the region and the Muslim-majority east, and was perceived as an attack on secular unity. It became a definitive moment in the independence struggle, and in Bombay, it emboldened the fight against the idea of a colonially imposed idea of time.
Timekeeping became a matter of pride for the resistance to British rule in India. andrew payne/Alamy
“The partition wasn’t as critical an issue in Bombay as in Bengal, but opposing Indian Standard Time was a way for all Indians to protest Curzon’s partition of the eastern Presidency,” says Shekhar Krishnan, a historian and adviser to the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (known as the BMC), the city’s governing civic body. His PhD thesis includes a section on colonial time, and he is working on a book about the subject. “Standard Time was a powerful new social norm and source of power for people and communities to identify and work with each other,” he adds.
The British couldn’t simply impose the new time standard. While they occupied the most important positions of power, Indians were given a degree of autonomy, especially in local government. The debates in the municipal corporation hall, where some of the opposition unfolded, were vigorous and close-fought. In the streets, about 15,000 people submitted a petition to revert to Bombay Time. Nevertheless, the practical considerations of a single time won out, and on January 1, 1906, Standard Time was set to be imposed.
The move angered laborers right away. Bombay was important in the cotton trade, and textile mill workers, already piqued about overtime hours and low wages, would have to start work before dawn under the new time system. They didn’t hold back on their frustration. More than 2,000 workers amassed at Jacob Sassoon Mill and vandalized the timekeeper’s office, the Times of India reported. The mill authorities ultimately conceded a little, allowing workers to start at 6 a.m. Bombay Time (6.39 a.m. Standard Time)—in tune with the rhythms of the sun.
Cotton laborers, shown here in Indore, resisted starting work before dawn. The Print Collector/Alamy
“If not for the protests by mill workers who worked on clear shifts run on clock time, and the immediate reversal of the city’s mill owners from standard to local solar time, the BMC would not have swung in favor of Bombay Time,” says Krishnan.
Resentment was building outside the mills too. The following month, at a public meeting, prominent local leaders gave fiery speeches supporting the use of Bombay Time. One Sir Bhalchandra Krishna, according to the Times of India, cited it as a matter of “comfort and convenience.” “From the native point of view, he said, the Standard Time caused great hardship to their religious ceremonial observances and the casting of horoscopes,” the paper reported, as such matters relied on the sun itself, and therefore were predicated on the use of Bombay Time.
Officially, the colonial government implemented Standard Time, but once again many people exercised a kind of passive resistance by simply operating on two sets of times, adjusting meetings or accounting for delays, depending on where they were going or what they needed to do. Corporation clocks stuck to Bombay Time and philanthropists funded clocks that showed it in the spirit of resistance Krishnan points out. (Briefly, between 1900 and 1906, the city even used three times. The third was Port Signal Time, for shipping schedules, which was five hours ahead of GMT.)
The time debate resurfaced in the city corporation intermittently over the years, often gleefully reported in the local news as the “Battle of the Clocks.” By 1927, the Times of India referred to a corporation debate on the subject as “a hobby” that was “ridden to death,” while a 1939 news report called it a “hardy annual” feature. And so it went, a city with two times and a populace that adapted. Obviously, it wasn’t an optimal arrangement.
Something as simple as making it to a dinner appointment could be difficult. In 1927, in the Times of India, a businessman bemoaned the trouble that came with an invitation for 7:51 p.m. (Bombay Time)—he had to add 39 minutes to it to realize that it was meant for 8:30 p.m. Standard Time. And the matter of pride and colonial resistance continued to fester. One Mr. JB Bomon-Behram described in a news report that following Standard Time was a loss “of prestige” and that the first act of “swaraj,” or Indian self-determination “would be to restore local time to Bombay.”
Eventually, the urgency of maintaining two time systems out of pride waned, and use of Standard Time grew. Only a few holdouts, notably clocks operated by the city corporation, followed Bombay Time. In the 1940s, with the war effort demanding greater uniformity and cohesion, Krishnan says, India (and Bombay) began to follow yet another “new standard time,” also called Japan Time, which was 6.5 hours ahead of GMT. In 1947, when India became independent, a single time zone became a natural next step: Indian Standard Time, 5.5 hours ahead of GMT. In the early 1950s, the municipality finally officially abandoned Bombay Time.
Independence Day celebrations in Calcutta in 1947. Keystone/Getty Images
Though it loomed large in the public consciousness for decades, even residents who grew up in the period have only a faint recollection of the Battle of the Clocks. “By the time I joined medical college in the 1940s, Indian Standard Time was quite well-established,” says Dr. RP Soonawala, 92, one of the city’s most well-known doctors. “Certain clocks did display Bombay Time but it was hardly in use.”
Still, for a while, relics of the old time lingered in the language. City historian Deepak Rao remembers that, even into the 1950s, people jokingly upbraided latecomers for “running on Bombay Time.” Dr. Madhukar Narvekar, 90, recalls people adding “IST” out of habit to distinguish it from “BT,” even though the latter had faded from use. These days, Bombay Time is largely overlooked as a piece of city heritage; it doesn’t have the symbolic heft of neo-Gothic architecture, such as that of the high court and the railway station, or the lived colonial legacies of cricket and the English language. “As a culture we need symbols to hold on to,” says Bharat Gothoskar, who founded Khaki Tours, a heritage-focused outfit that conducts city tours, “and time doesn’t have a physical embodiment.”
A postcard depicting a Parsi fire temple in Bombay. Chronicle/Alamy
There’s one exception: Members of the city’s Parsi community (an ethnoreligious group that practices Zoroastrianism)—even those born after the 1950s—remember Bombay Time better than most. “I knew about it growing up because as a Parsi, our fire temples observed time according to the old Bombay Time,” says Farrokh Jijina, a senior editor with Parsiana, a community magazine, because it is closer to “real” solar time. “When I first started wearing a watch, it was a source of confusion.”
Of history’s three most famous love affairs — Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, Joe Biden and Amtrak — only the third teaches a civics lesson. If President Biden has his way, taxpayers will give Amtrak yet another $80 billion; it received more than $100 billion in subsidies in its first 50 years. Nevertheless, it is remarkably efficient. Not as a railroad, but as an illustration of how many permutations of waste the government can generate when it goes into business.
Amtrak was born in 1971, when its supporters convinced Congress — wishful thinking thrives there — that a national passenger railroad would be a for-profit enterprise after receiving start-up billions from private sector railroads eager to unload their money-losing passenger trains. So, Amtrak, which almost certainly never will operate without government subsidies, began as a government subsidy for freight railroads. Since quickly using up those railroads’ money, Amtrak has received annual federal subsidies of $1.5 billion to $2 billion (in 2021 dollars).
The Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole has succumbed to the romance of railroading — “I love passenger trains” — without abandoning arithmetic. He says federal, state and local subsidies to air and highway travel average around a penny per passenger mile. In 2019, Amtrak subsidies per passenger mile were 34 times larger. That year, while Americans were traveling an average of 15,000 miles by automobile, 2,100 miles by plane and 1,100 miles by bus, they traveled less than 20 miles per person on Amtrak. Americans bicycle non-recreationally — to work, to appointments, to shop — 2 billion more miles than they ride on Amtrak, which is supposedly vital to the economy.
In the early 1970s, Amtrak’s share of U.S. passenger travel was approximately 0.16 percent. In 2019, it was 0.10 percent. Yet it stands to receive 26 percent of the transportation dollars in Biden’s infrastructure bill.
In the 1950s, Johnny Cash sang that “the Rock Island Line, she’s a mighty good road.” Midwesterners agreed. But to improve prospects for a merger with another railroad, Rock Island began deferring maintenance expenditures. By the time Washington approved the merger, O’Toole says, “Rock Island’s tracks were so decrepit that its passenger trains ran as slow as 10 miles per hour.” The merger proposal collapsed; so did the Rock Island.
To protect investors, Washington began requiring railroads to include depreciation among their operating costs. Amtrak does this in financial accounts, O’Toole writes, but “never mentions it in its press releases about its finances. In 2019, depreciation amounted to $868 million, increasing total losses to $1.13 billion — 38 times as much as claimed.” The Boston-D.C. corridor, which will get much of Biden’s $80 billion, and that Amtrak has often claimed to be profitable, has, O’Toole says, “a $38 billion maintenance backlog.” And Amtrak’s creative bookkeeping counts states’ subsidies (in 2020, Amtrak got $342 million in operating subsidies from 17 states — not counting $294 million for capital improvements) as “passenger revenues.”
In April, O’Toole wrote, Amtrak’s locomotives produced 167 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile, buses about 60. “The airlines emit about 174 grams per passenger-mile, but before the pandemic they were improving faster than Amtrak. I suspect that air travel will recover faster than train travel so that, after the pandemic ... flying will be greener than Amtrak.”
A hidden subsidy to Amtrak is the law giving it priority over freight trains on tracks privately owned by freight railroads — more than 70 percent of Amtrak miles are on such tracks. If the increased preference for Amtrak, which Biden proposes, causes freight rail to lose business to trucks, which haul tonnage with much higher carbon emissions than freight trains, this will increase Amtrak’s environmental damage.
Amtrak’s plan for new connections to some cities makes more political than transportation sense. O’Toole: “It currently has no trains at all into Wyoming; adding a line to Cheyenne will potentially get it two more votes in the Senate.” Los Angeles to Las Vegas? Trips by four bus companies, leaving about every half hour, cost as little as $20. Fares also begin at $20 for the eight airlines offering, together, about two flights an hour.
Amtrak is, however, a gift that keeps on giving by demonstrating government’s propensity for perpetuating its mistakes. The year after Amtrak was born, Arlo Guthrie recorded a song about the Illinois Central’s “City of New Orleans” passenger train: “This train’s got the disappearing railroad blues.” Actually, this train still loses money three times a week running (a scheduled) 19 hours each way between New Orleans and Chicago. Amtrak will never disappear, but this year’s tranche of billions will, and so will subsequent subsidies by the billions.
Every organization needs a reliable system of accountability to help ensure teams are actually completing projects and meeting goals in a timely way. In this piece, author Robert Reffkin, founder and CEO of Compass, lays out the system he implemented at his company. He calls it the Single Point of Accountability (SPOA) approach.
Everyone wants to get more done in less time. Yet when people collaborate, they often encounter a series of common problems: Confusion over who is responsible for what; friction between teams or departments; a single roadblock halting progress completely.
At Compass, the real estate technology company I lead that is now the largest independent brokerage in the country, we’ve successfully implemented a practice called “SPOA” — Single Point of Accountability — to directly address these challenges.
It’s a deceptively simple and surprisingly powerful idea. To help you put the SPOA role into practice in your organization, let me first share where the concept came from — and how it’s distinct from other well-known accountability structures.
When I Realized We Had a Problem
As Compass grew from a dozen employees in one city to tens of thousands of real estate agents and employees serving over 300 cities in the U.S., I noticed that people were spending more time figuring out what work to do and less time actually doing work that delivered results. The company had multiplied in complexity, employees became increasingly specialized, and most projects required participation from multiple departments with multiple priorities. As a result, our pace and our progress had slowed — but it took me a little while to understand exactly why.
Our biggest obstacle became clear to me during a routine conversation with two colleagues from our legal and finance teams. We were negotiating a partnership with another company, and I asked for an update on the deal terms. I had already inquired a few times over email but hadn’t gotten a clear answer. So when the three of us had the chance to get in a room together, I asked directly: “What’s going on? Have we finalized the deal terms yet?”
One of them said, “We are going back and forth with the other side, but we expect to have an answer soon.”
Frustrated by the lack of detail, I said, “Who’s ‘we’? I don’t understand who is doing what. Specifically.”
There was a brief silence. As it turned out, each of them thought that the other person was going to answer. Throughout the project, their desire to be collaborative led to them deferring to each other. The project had fallen behind schedule because neither employee felt singularly responsible for pushing it forward. They were often waiting for each other’s emails, creating unnecessary bottlenecks and delays.
This situation made a few things clear to me. First, it wasn’t their fault — it was mine for not yet creating a viable system of accountability. Second, this wasn’t an isolated issue; it was happening in hundreds of ways across the company.
To get the partnership done, I assigned one of the two employees to be singularly responsible for completing it. We closed the deal within the week. And we’ve been using the SPOA approach ever since.
How Does SPOA Work?
For every project that requires collaboration across multiple teams, we assign one person to be the SPOA. They’re responsible for driving it forward, clearing blockers, clarifying confusion, delegating tasks, and solving problems. Of course, they don’t have to do the entire project themselves — but they do need to make sure it gets done and that everyone’s responsibilities are clear. And when anyone needs an update on a project, the SPOA is the person who can and should answer.
A good SPOA delivers clarity to anyone else who’s unsure of their role. They enable others to focus, because everyone knows that the SPOA is obsessing over the progress and success of that overall project so they don’t have to. And by being constantly aware of every step of a project, a SPOA can spot patterns and deliver insights about what is working and how to improve the process in the future.
How Is This Accountability System Distinct?
Unlike a project manager, SPOA is not a job title or long-term role — rather, every time there’s a new project or initiative that doesn’t fit neatly into an existing department or job description, we identify a SPOA to drive it to completion. And unlike account management or customer success roles, SPOAs are empowered to do whatever it takes to get a project done. The SPOA’s job is not to absorb client dissatisfaction and communicate it internally. They’re genuinely responsible for delivering results and are expected to marshal the resources they need to do so. The role changes from project to project, initiative to initiative, depending on the given needs.
The SPOA role is perhaps closest to the “accountable” role in a RACI matrix — a project management frameworkdesigned to help clarify roles and responsibilities — but much simpler and clearer, which makes it more likely the practice will spread organically through your organization.
5 Key Factors of the SPOA Approach
While the basic idea is easy to understand, we’ve learned a number of lessons over the years about when and how to deploy the SPOA role to the greatest effect.
Cross-team initiatives need a SPOA.For example, every time we launch Compass in a new city, we assign a SPOA to oversee the expansion. Launches like these require close collaboration from a half-dozen departments, making a SPOA essential.
New and novel projects need a SPOA.The first time we reported quarterly earnings as a public company, we knew we’d face process obstacles and communications challenges, since we’d never done it before. It was clear that the SPOA should be our head of investor relations. In this case, our SPOA for the overall initiative decided to designate sub-SPOAs for each key metric we had to report.
SPOAs must be empowered.In too many contexts, project managers lack the influence they need to hit deadlines and drive results. To succeed, a SPOA needs to be able to assign work to collaborators over whom they have no managerial authority and to request resources from management to stay on track. The ad-hoc nature of the role helps here, since anyone could end up being a SPOA. As such, you can take existing hierarchies into account when naming SPOAs for mission-critical projects, and empower those SPOAs to operate with authority in their project-specific contexts.
The SPOA has to be a great communicator, but not necessarily an expert.The most important skill is being able to synthesize disparate information and clearly say, “Here’s what I’m seeing, here’s where we’re doing well, here’s where we’re not, and here’s what I need from you in order to hit our goal.”
Don’t wait to assign a SPOA.If you get to the point in a project where you realize it really should have had a SPOA, it’s already too late. By that point, the effort is likely behind schedule and mired in confusion and frustration — which makes it much more difficult to get someone excited about taking on the SPOA role. One helpful rule of thumb: if you think a projectmightneed a SPOA, it almostdefinitelyneeds a SPOA.
No one succeeds alone—in life or in business; collaboration is vital to progress. But it’s difficult for even the most collaborative people to work together effectively if they don’t understand who’s ultimately accountable. The Single Point of Accountability approach accelerates progress, reduces confusion, and facilitates efficient collaboration. Designating a SPOA might not solve all of your problems, but it does free everyone up to maximize their strengths and deliver results.
Los Angeles County and the W.H.O. warned that even immunized people should wear masks indoors. Some scientists agreed, but urged a localized approach.
Throughout the pandemic, masks have ranked among the most contentious public health measures in the United States, symbolizing a bitter partisan divide over the role of government and individual liberties.
Now, with a new variant of the coronavirus rapidly spreading across the globe, masks are again the focus of conflicting views, and fears, about the course of pandemic and the restrictions required to manage it.
The renewed concerns follow the wildfire growth of the Delta variant, a highly infectious form of the virus first detected in India and later identified in at least 85 countries. It now accounts for one in five infections in the United States.
In May, federal health officials said that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to mask up, even indoors. The advice signified a sea change in American life, setting the stage for a national reopening that continues to gain momentum.
But that was before the spread of the Delta variant. Worried by a global surge in cases, the World Health Organization last week reiterated its longstanding recommendation that everyone — including the inoculated — wear masks to stem the spread of the virus.
On Monday, health officials in Los Angeles County followed suit, recommending that “everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks indoors in public places as a precautionary measure.”
Barbara Ferrer, the county’s public health director, said the new recommendation was needed because of upticks in infections, a rise in cases due to the worrisome Delta variant, and persistently high numbers of unvaccinated residents, particularly children, Black and Latino residents and essential workers.
Roughly half of Los Angeles County residents are fully vaccinated, and about 60 percent have had at least one dose. While the number of positive tests is still below 1 percent in the county, the rate has been inching up, Dr. Ferrer added, and there has been a rise in the number of reinfections among residents who were infected before and did not get vaccinated.
To the extent that Los Angeles County has managed to control the pandemic, it has been because of a multilayered strategy that combined vaccinations with health restrictions aimed at curbing new infections, Dr. Ferrer said. Natural immunity among those already infected has also kept transmission low, she noted, but it is not clear how long natural immunity will last.
“We don’t want to return to lockdown or more disruptive mandates here,” Dr. Ferrer said. “We want to stay on the path we’re on right now, which is keeping community transmission really low.”
A Covid-19 memorial wall in London, where infections with the Delta variant are rising fast. Andy Rain/EPA, via Shutterstock
Health officials in Chicago and New York City said on Tuesday that they had no plans to revisit mask requirements. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declined to comment, but have not signaled any intention to revise or re-examine masking recommendations for those who are fully vaccinated.
“When the C.D.C. made the recommendation to quit masking, it didn’t anticipate being in a situation where we might need to recommend masking again,” said Angela Rasmussen, a research scientist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.
“Nobody’s going to want to do it. People are understandably accusing them of moving the goalposts.”
But the Delta variant's trajectory outside the United States suggests that concerns are likely to intensify.
Countries in the Asia-Pacific region are now reimposing restrictions and stay-at-home orders as the variant drives new surges. Four Australian cites have reimposed lockdowns, and on Monday, the Malaysian government said nationwide stay-at-home orders would be extended indefinitely.
Even Israel — which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and is aggressively immunizing younger adolescents and teenagers who qualify — has reinstated masking requirements in public indoor spaces and at large public gatherings outdoors, after hundreds of new Covid-19 cases were detected in recent days, including among people who had received both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
This is not the first time the world has been consumed by a more contagious variant of the coronavirus. The Alpha variant walloped Britain and brought the rest of Europe to a standstill earlier this year. In the United States, Alpha quickly became the dominant variant by late March, but the rapid pace of vaccination blunted its spread, sparing the nation a big surge in infections.
But Delta is thought to be even more fearsome. Much of what is known about the variant is based on its spread in India and Britain, but early evidence indicates that it is perhaps twice as contagious as the original virus and at least 20 percent more contagious than Alpha.
In many Indian states and European nations, Delta quickly outpaced Alpha to become the dominant version of the virus. It is on track to do the same in the United States.
Among the variant’s many mutations are some that may help the virus partly dodge the immune system. Several studies have shown that while the current vaccines are effective against Delta, they are slightly less so than against most other variants. For individuals who have received only one dose of a two-dose regimen, protection against the variant is significantly reduced, compared with efficacy against other forms of the virus.
A drive-through vaccination site in North Sumatra, Indonesia, on Tuesday.Dedi Sinuhaji/EPA, via Shutterstock
The W.H.O.’s rationale for maintaining masking is that while immunization is highly effective at preventing severe illness and death, the degree to which vaccines prevent mild or asymptomatic infections is unknown. (Officials at the C.D.C. disagree, saying the risk is minimal.)
The W.H.O. maintains that vaccinated people should wear masks in crowded, close and poorly ventilated areas, and should continue with other preventive measures, like social distancing.
“What we’re saying is: ‘Once you’ve been fully vaccinated, continue to play it safe, because you could end up as part of a transmission chain. You may not actually be fully protected,’” Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to the W.H.O., said at a news briefing last week.
Even countries with relatively high vaccination rates have seen an increase in infections driven by the Delta variant. Britain, where some two-thirds of the population have received at least one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or AstraZeneca vaccine and just under half have received two doses, is nonetheless grappling with a sharp rise in infections from the variant.
It is not certain what course the Delta variant will take in the United States. Coronavirus infections have been plunging for months, as have hospitalizations and deaths. But Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, has called the variant “the greatest threat” to eliminating the virus in the United States.
In May, when C.D.C. officials lifted masking recommendations, they cited research showing that fully vaccinated people were unlikely to become infected with the virus, even with asymptomatic infections.
But the variant’s talent for even partial immune evasion makes researchers nervous, as it suggests that fully vaccinated people may sometimes pick up asymptomatic infections and unknowingly spread the virus to others even if they never become ill.
The Delta variant can infect vaccinated people, although its ability to do so is very limited, said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “If you are in a place where cases are climbing, wearing a mask indoors in crowded public spaces is a way to keep yourself from contributing to the spread of Delta,” he said.
Other scientists stop short of recommending that fully vaccinated people always wear masks indoors, but some now suggest that this may be appropriate depending on local circumstances — for example, wherever the virus is circulating in high numbers, or vaccination rates are very low.
“Masking in public enclosed spaces needs to continue even after vaccination, until we can get everyone vaccinated or a new vaccine that is more effective against Delta transmission,” said Dr. Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Even now, roughly half of Americans are not vaccinated, and a wide swath of the country remains vulnerable to outbreaks of the virus and its variants. Vaccines for children under age 12 are not likely to be authorized until the fall, at the earliest.
Streets in Sydney, Australia, emptied after a two-week lockdown to contain an outbreak of the Delta variant.Saeed Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In Saskatchewan, Canada, reopening has proceeded in stages that are tied to population vaccination rates and the percentage of people in certain age brackets who have been vaccinated.
The province is moving to Step 3 of re-entry on July 11, but may maintain indoor masking requirements and restrictions on the size of gatherings, said Dr. Rasmussen, of the University of Saskatchewan. The strategy “makes a lot more sense than just saying, ‘If you’re fully vaccinated, go ahead and take off your mask,’” she said.
Yet some scientists fear it will be nearly impossible to reimpose mask mandates and other precautions, even in places where it may be a good idea to do so.
“It’s difficult to walk that back,” said David Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at the George Washington School of Public Health, referring to the C.D.C. advice. Yet with the rise of the Delta variant, it also is “extremely dangerous to continue the cultural norm of no one wearing a mask.”
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, vice president for global initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, said the arrival of the variant should prompt a rethinking of mask mandates.
He still wears a mask indoors in public places like grocery stores, and even on crowded city sidewalks. “We don’t know the long-term consequences of even a mild infection,” he said, referring to so-called long Covid. “Is a little more insurance from wearing a mask worth it? Yes.”
Sipping coffee outside the Whole Foods Market in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday morning, Monroe Harmon, 60, said he thought a step back toward masking requirements for everyone might be a good idea.
“There’s so many people suggesting that they just want their lives back,” said Mr. Harmon, who works for a security company. “I think you kind of roll the dice when you decide, ‘I want my life back, I’m not going to wear the mask, I’m not going to distance.’”
Jill Cowan and Ana Facio-Krajcer contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
US President Joe Biden and LGBTQ advocate Ashton Mota of the GenderCool Project walk before delivering remarks to commemorate LGBTQ+ Pride Month in the White House, June 25, 2021 [Jonathan Ernst/Reuters]
