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President Donald Trump has aggressively targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across a wide swath of American society. So when Trump sent a White House invitation to the 2024 World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgersthe franchise of Jackie Robinson, a team whose identity is indelibly linked to its role in dismantling racial segregation in sportsit surprised some that the Dodgers accepted. Less than a week before they did so the Defense Department removed a tribute to Robinson on its website, a move apparently linked to its DEI purge. (The page was restored following a public outcry.) Author and retired urban policy professor Peter Dreier is among those who have criticized the Dodgers decision to celebrate their World Series victory with Trump. Dreier, who has chronicled the history of baseball and social activism in two books, co-wrote an opinion piece in the L.A. Times making the case for why the Dodgers should decline an invite from Trumpeven before one was issued. Capital & Main spoke with Dreier the weekend before the Dodgers were scheduled to visit the Oval Office. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Capital & Main: Dodger manager Dave Roberts says that visiting the White House isnt about the current president but about the office itself. Why do you disagree with that? Peter Dreier: Every president likes to get his picture taken with famous athletes. This is a photo opportunity for Trump to be seen with popular athletes and to bask in the reflected glory of the Dodgers victory. So its clearly not just about the office, its about the occupant. Hes sliding in the polls right now, and I assume he thinks that being seen with Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman and Shohei Ohtani will give him some free publicity that can help his presidency. So I think its naive and somewhat disingenuous for Dave Roberts to say that, and I doubt he believes it. Given the Dodgers history of breaking the color barrier by making Jackie Robinson the first Black Major League Baseball player, should that history and Trumps targeting of DEI have been a factor in the Dodgers decision about going to the White House? The Dodgers pat themselves on the back all the time for being the first team to integrate, and theyve ridden the Jackie Robinson reputation for a long time since 1947. So thats clearly something that they are proud of. Trump has called for the largest mass deportation in U.S. history. Los Angeles is a city with a very large number of immigrants and whose economy relies in large part on immigrant labor, including that of undocumented immigrants. Should that have played a role in the teams decision? There are quite a few players on the Dodgers who are from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. If they have any social conscience or awareness, which Im sure most of them do, they arent happy with the way Trumps administration is treating immigrants. Will you stop going to Dodger games? If I stopped going to sports events because I didnt like the politics of the players or organization, I wouldnt go to sports events. Just like if I only bought clothes made by union labor Id be naked. Itll be interesting to see whether Billie Jean King or Magic Johnson [part owners of the Dodgers] go to the White House. They explicitly campaigned for Harris. Are you disappointed that neither Johnson nor King nor any of the more prominent Dodger players have spoken out against the teams decision to go visit Trump in the White House? Yes. Im disappointed that they didnt have the courage to speak out. Maybe Billie Jean King and Magic will speak out at some point, but so far, they havent. When it comes to sports and politics, where do you think individual players or teams should draw the line and either take a stand or not? If youre a big star, you can speak out. You might lose some fans, but you might gain some fans. Trump barely got half of the votes in the United States and got very few in the L.A. area, so it would not be that harmful to the careers of Dodger players for them to speak out against the Dodgers going to meet Trump. And its very disappointing that none of them have stepped up to the plate, so to speak. Would Jackie Robinson have gone with the Dodgers to visit Donald Trump and the White House, were he alive today? Jackie Robinson would be outraged by the Dodgers meeting with Trump. Jackie Robinson was a liberal Republican. He went to the Republican convention [in 1964] supporting the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller when they nominated Barry Goldwater, and he heard people say things in that convention that so angered him that he came out of that event and said I know what it must have felt like to be at a Nazi rally. Donald Trump is a lot worse. Robinson always had the courage of his convictions regardless of what impact it had on him. He was criticized during his playing career for speaking out, and he said Im always going to speak out against injustice and if you dont like it, its too bad. So Im 100% sure Jackie Robinson would be upset that the Dodgers are going to the White House, and I think hed be extremely disappointed in [Black superstar] Mookie Betts in particular. Doesnt every player and executive on a team have equal responsibility for their decision to go or not to go to visit a controversial president in the White House? Betts was the one that I thought would be most likely to speak out first and then hed bring other players along with him. Hes sort of the moral leader of the team. After George Floyd was killed he got the team, white and Black, not [to] play for a game. And what theyre all saying is, Im doing this for the team, but theres a bigger team called America or a bigger team called society. And theyre playing under a fascist president, and I would hope that people that have a public platform like Major League Baseball players would speak out. Danny Feingold, Capital & Main language at top of story: This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
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Four space tourists who orbited the north and south poles returned to Earth on Friday, splashing down in the Pacific to end their privately funded polar tour.Bitcoin investor Chun Wang chartered a SpaceX flight for himself and three others in a Dragon capsule that was outfitted with a domed window that provided 360-degree views of the polar caps and everything in between. Wang declined to say how much he paid for the 3 1/2-day trip.The quartet, who rocketed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Monday night, returned off the Southern California coast. It was the first human spaceflight to circle the globe above the poles and the first Pacific splashdown for a space crew in 50 years.The Chinese-born Wang, now a citizen of Malta, invited Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian polar guide Eric Philips, all of whom shared stunning vistas during their voyage.“It is so epic because it is another kind of desert, so it just goes on and on and on all the way,” Rogge said in a video posted by Wang on X while gazing down from orbit.Mikkelsen packed the capsule with camera equipment and spent much of her time behind the lens.All four suffered from space motion sickness after reaching orbit, according to Wang. But by the time they woke up on day two, they felt fine and cranked open the window cover right above the South Pole, he said via X.Besides documenting the poles from 270 miles (430 kilometers) up, Wang and his crew took the first medical X-rays in space as part of a test and conducted two dozen other science experiments. They named their trip Fram2 after the Norwegian sailing ship that carried explorers to the poles more than a century ago. A bit of the original ship’s wooden deck accompanied the crew to space.Their medical tests continued at splashdown. All four got out of the capsule on their own, heaving bags of equipment so researchers could see how steady returning space crews are on their feet. They pumped their fists in jubilation.SpaceX said its decision to switch splashdown sites from Florida beginning with this flight was based on safety. The company said Pacific splashdowns will ensure that any surviving pieces of the trunkjettisoned near flight’s endfalls into the ocean.The last people to return from space to the Pacific were the three NASA astronauts assigned to the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Marcia Dunn, AP Aerospace Writer
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Oil company Chevron must pay $744.6 million to restore damage it caused to southeast Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, a jury ruled on Friday following a landmark trial more than a decade in the making.The case was the first of dozens of pending lawsuits to reach trial in Louisiana against the world’s leading oil companies for their role in accelerating land loss along the state’s rapidly disappearing coast. The verdictwhich Chevron says it will appealcould set a precedent leaving other oil and gas firms on the hook for billions of dollars in damages tied to land loss and environmental degradation. What did Chevron do wrong? Jurors found that energy giant Texaco, acquired by Chevron in 2001, had for decades violated Louisiana regulations governing coastal resources by failing to restore wetlands impacted by dredging canals, drilling wells, and billions of gallons of wastewater dumped into the marsh.“No company is big enough to ignore the law, no company is big enough to walk away scot-free,” the plaintiff’s lead attorney John Carmouche told jurors during closing arguments.A 1978 Louisiana coastal management law mandated that sites used by oil companies “be cleared, revegetated, detoxified, and otherwise restored as near as practicable to their original condition” after operations ended. Older operations sites that continued to be used were not exempt and companies were required to apply for permits.But the oil company did not obtain proper permits and failed to clean up its mess, leading to contamination from wastewater stored unsafely or dumped directly into the marsh, the lawsuit said.The company also failed to follow known best practices for decades since it began operating in the area in the 1940s, expert witnesses for the plaintiff’s testified. The company “chose profits over the marsh” and allowed the environmental degradation caused by its operations to fester and spread, Carmouche said.The jury awarded $575 million to compensate for land loss, $161 million to compensate for contamination and $8.6 million for abandoned equipment. The amount earmarked for restoration exceeds $1.1 billion when including interest, according to attorneys for Talbot, Carmouche & Marcello, the firm behind the lawsuit.Plaquemines Parish, the southeast Louisiana district which brought the lawsuit, had asked for $2.6 billion in damages.Chevron’s lead trial attorney Mike Phillips said in a statement following the verdict that “Chevron is not the cause of the land loss occurring” in Plaquemines Parish and that the law does not apply to “conduct that occurred decades before the law was enacted.”Phillips called the ruling “unjust” and said there were “numerous legal errors.”Houston-headquartered Chevron reported more than $3 billion in earnings for the fourth quarter of 2024. How are oil companies contributing to Louisiana’s land loss? The lawsuit against Chevron was filed in 2013 by Plaquemines Parish, a rural district in Louisiana straddling the final leg of the Mississippi River heading into the Gulf of Mexico, also referred to as the Gulf of America as declared by President Donald Trump.Louisiana’s coastal parishes have lost more than 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers) of land over the past century, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which has also identified oil and gas infrastructure as a significant cause. The state could lose another 3,000 square miles (7,770 square kilometers) in the coming decades, its coastal protection agency has warned.Thousands of miles of canals cut through the wetlands by oil companies weakens them and exacerbates the impacts of sea level rise. Industrial wastewater from oil production degrades the surrounding soil and vegetation. The torn up wetlands leave South Louisianahome to some of the nation’s biggest ports and key energy sector infrastructuremore vulnerable to flooding and destruction from extreme weather events like hurricanes.Phillips, Chevron’s attorney, said the company had operated lawfully and blamed land loss in Louisiana on other factors, namely the extensive levee system that blocks the Mississippi River from depositing land regenerating sedimenta widely acknowledged cause of coastal erosion.The way to solve the land loss problem is “not suing oil companies, it’s reconnecting the Mississippi River with the delta,” Phillips said during closing arguments.Yet the lawsuit held the company responsible for exacerbating and accelerating land loss in Louisiana, rather than being its sole cause.Chevron also challenged the costly wetlands restoration project proposed by the parish, which involved removing large amounts of contaminated soil and filling in the swaths fragmented wetlands eroded over the past century. The company said the plan was impractical and designed to inflate the damages rather than lead to real world implementation.Attorney Jimmy Faircloth, Jr., who represented the state of Louisiana, which has backed Plaquemines and other local governments in their lawsuits against oil companies, told jurors from the parish that Chevron was telling them their community was not worth preserving.“Our communities are built on coast, our families raised on coast, our children go to school on coast,” Faircloth said. “The state of Louisiana will not surrender the coast, it’s for the good of the state that the coast be maintained.” What does this mean for future litigation against oil companies? Carmouche, a well-connected attorney, and his firm have been responsible for bringing many of the lawsuits against oil companies in the state. Industry groups have accused the firm of seeking big paydays, not coastal restoration.Louisiana’s economy has long been heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry and the industry holds significant political power. Even so, Louisiana’s staunchly pro-industry Gov. Jeff Landry has supported the lawsuits, including bringing the state on board during his tenure as Attorney General.Oil companies have fought tooth and nail to quash the litigation, including unsuccessfully lobbying Louisiana’s Legislature to pass a law to invalidate the claims. Chevron and other firms also repeatedly tried to move the lawsuits into federal court where they believed they would find a more sympathetic audience.But the heavy price Chevron is set to pay could hasten other firms to seek settlements in the dozens of other lawsuits across Louisiana. Plaquemines alone has 20 other cases pending against oil companies.The state is running out of money to support its ambitious coastal restoration plans, which have been fueled by soon-expiring settlement funds from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and supporters of the litigation say payouts could provide a much-needed injection of funds.Tommy Faucheux, president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association, said the verdict against Chevron “undermines Louisiana’s position as an energy leader” and “threatens our country’s trajectory to America-first energy dominance across the globe.” He warned that “businesses here are at risk of beingsued retroactively tomorrow for following the laws of today.”Attorneys for the parish said they hope that big payout will prompt more oil companies to come to the table to negotiate and channel more funding towards coastal restoration.“Our energy is focused on securing appropriate verdicts and awards for every parish involved in these actions,” Carmouche said in a statement. “If we continue to be successful in our efforts, these parishes, and Louisiana, will have sent a clear message that Louisiana’s future must be built around a new balance between our energy industry and environmental necessities.” Jack Brook, Associated Press/Report for America
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