“This year's College Football Playoff field could've been expanded to include eight teams, 12 teams, 16, 24, 48, 96 or 128.
In the end, regardless of the number of contenders in the bracket, the road was going to end with Alabama and Georgia meeting in the latest iteration of this one-sided rivalry.
The most talent. The Heisman Trophy winner. Nick Saban. Kirby Smart. The best defense in the country. An almost unstoppable offense.
In the Crimson Tide and Bulldogs, the playoff gets the ultimate matchup of two powerhouse programs with layers of depth, years of shared history and enough storylines to easily fill the space between New Year's Eve and the championship game on Jan. 10.
While not negating the argument for playoff expansion, the inevitability of this pairing makes the concept of doubling or tripling the current four-team field seem like window dressing — whether it took one game or two or three, the Tide and Bulldogs were destined to meet to decide this year's championship.
For Alabama, the 27-6 win against Cincinnati in the Cotton Bowl was driven by a rejuvenated running game. This level of production against one of the top defenses in the FBS showed the Tide with a newfound offensive balance; already effective, an offense that can lean on the traditional ground attack is suddenly even more dangerous.
Georgia's 34-11 demolition of Michigan in the Orange Bowl was a stark reminder of how this group dominated the regular season, in the process drawing comparisons to some of the best teams in recent history.
This perception was shattered by Alabama's 41-24 win in the SEC championship game, which destroyed the national image of Georgia as a juggernaut marching toward perfection and raised serious questions about the Bulldogs' odds in a projected rematch against the Crimson Tide.
How the Bulldogs tore apart the Wolverines answers the second part: Georgia is clearly as good as advertised in September, October and November, and just as obviously the only team capable of stopping Alabama.” Read more at USA Today
“Betty White, who created two of the most memorable characters in sitcom history, the nymphomaniacal Sue Ann Nivens on ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and the sweet but dim Rose Nylund on ‘The Golden Girls’ — and who capped her long career with a comeback that included a triumphant appearance as the host of ‘Saturday Night Live’ at the age of 88 — died on Friday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 99.
Her death, less than three weeks before her 100th birthday, was confirmed by Jeff Witjas, her longtime friend and agent.
Ms. White won five Primetime Emmys and one competitive Daytime Emmy — as well as a lifetime achievement Daytime Emmy in 2015 and a Los Angeles regional Emmy in 1952 — in a television career that spanned seven decades and that the 2014 edition of ‘Guinness World Records’ certified as the longest ever for a female entertainer.
But her breakthrough came relatively late in life, with her work on ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ from 1973 to 1977, for which she won two of her Emmys.
As Sue Ann, the host of a household-hints show on the television station where Ms. Moore’s character worked, the bedimpled Ms. White was annoyingly positive and upbeat, but also manipulative and bawdy — the sexpot next door, who would have you believe she slept with entire Army brigades during World War II.
Once, when someone asked her how she was feeling, Sue Ann replied cheerfully: ‘I didn’t sleep a wink all night. I feel wonderful.’
She won another Emmy in 1986 for an entirely different kind of character: the naïve, scatterbrained Rose on ‘The Golden Girls,’ which revolved around the lives of four older women sharing a house in Miami. Whereas Sue Ann knew everything there was to know about getting a man into bed, Rose got to the same place innocently, and by being just a wee bit off center.
Ms. White was the last surviving member of the show’s four stars. Estelle Getty died in 2008, Bea Arthur in 2009 and Rue McClanahan in 2010.
Ms. White won her final Emmy in 2010 as outstanding guest actress in a comedy series for hosting the Mother’s Day episode of ‘S.N.L.’ She followed that appearance with a regular role on yet another sitcom, ‘Hot in Cleveland,’and then with a book contract and her own reality show. She was bigger than she had been in decades. But she didn’t see her resurgence as a comeback.
‘I’ve been working steady for 63 years,’ she said in an interview for the ABC News program ‘Nightline’ in 2010. ‘But everybody says, ‘Oh, it’s such a renaissance.’ Maybe I went away and didn’t know it.’
Ms. White was over 50 and already a television veteran when she first appeared on ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ but her work there elevated her career to a new level.
A comedy about a young, single television news producer in Minneapolis, ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ was one of the most popular sitcoms of its day or any other, thanks to smart writing, Ms. Moore’s charismatic presence and a high-caliber supporting cast. Even in the company of scene-stealing actors like Ms. Moore, Ed Asner and Valerie Harper, Ms. White’s Sue Ann stood out.
The character, introduced in the show’s fourth season, was conceived as cloying, calculating and predatory, her deviousness always accompanied by a charming smile. The producers wanted a ‘Betty White type’ to play the role, but they did not immediately ask Ms. White because she and Ms. Moore were close friends and the producers were afraid that there would be damage to the friendship if she didn’t get the role, or didn’t want it.
“They went through about 12 people and couldn’t find anybody sickening enough,” Ms. White told Modern Maturity magazine in 1998, “so they called me.”
Betty Marion White was born on Jan. 17, 1922, in Oak Park, Ill., the only child of Horace and Tess (Cachikis) White. Her father was an electrical engineer, her mother a homemaker. When Betty was a toddler, the family moved to Los Angeles, where she grew up.
At Beverly Hills High School, from which she graduated in 1939, she appeared in several student productions and even wrote her class’s graduation play, in which she had the lead role. During World War II she served in the American Women’s Voluntary Services and drove a ‘PX truck’ delivering soap, toothpaste and candy to soldiers manning the gun emplacements the government had established in the hills of Santa Monica and Hollywood.
She also met and married a P-38 pilot, Dick Barker. That marriage lasted less than a year; when Ms. White wrote an autobiography, ‘Here We Go Again,’ in 1995, she mentioned the marriage but did not mention his name.
Toward the end of the war she became involved in the Bliss-Hayden Little Theater, which was run by two Hollywood character actors, Lela Bliss and Harry Hayden, and designed to give young people a chance to perform in front of an audience. Her first performance there was in ‘Dear Ruth,’ a comedy about a girl who pretends to be her older sister. It was seen by Lane Allen, an actor turned agent, who encouraged Ms. White to pursue an acting career. She and Mr. Allen were later married, but that union also ended in divorce.
Ms. White began her radio career by saying one word on the popular comedy ‘The Great Gildersleeve.’ The word was ‘Parkay,’ the name of the margarine sponsoring the show. That led to bit parts in 1940s radio staples like ‘Blondie’ and ‘This Is Your F.B.I.’
She broke into television in 1949 on a local talk show called ‘Al Jarvis’s Hollywood on Television.’ When Mr. Jarvis left the show, she succeeded him as host.
She had a few television shows of her own in the 1950s, including two sitcoms and a variety show (which she produced herself, and on which she drew both praise and criticism for featuring a Black tap dancer, Arthur Duncan, as a regular, a highly unusual move for the time). But none of those shows stayed on the air for long, and by the early 1960s she was best known as a very busy freelance guest. Game shows were her specialty: She appeared on ‘To Tell the Truth,’ ‘I’ve Got a Secret,’ ‘The Match Game,’ ‘What’s My Line?’ and, most notably, ‘Password,’ whose host, Allen Ludden, she married in 1963.
Ms. White and Mr. Ludden remained married until his death in 1981. They had no children together, but she helped him raise his three children by a previous marriage, David, Martha and Sarah. (Information on her survivors was not immediately available.)” Read more at New York Times
Many research groups studying Omicron in animals have found that, compared with other variants, it causes much less damage to the lungs.Credit...Jerome Delay/Associated Press
“A spate of new studies on lab animals and human tissues are providing the first indication of why the Omicron variant causes milder disease than previous versions of the coronavirus.
In studies on mice and hamsters, Omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty.
‘It’s fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging,’ said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway.
In November, when the first report on the Omicron variant came out of South Africa, scientists could only guess at how it might behave differently from earlier forms of the virus. All they knew was that it had a distinctive and alarming combination of more than 50 genetic mutations.
Previous research had shown that some of these mutations enabled coronaviruses to grab onto cells more tightly. Others allowed the virus to evade antibodies, which serve as an early line of defense against infection. But how the new variant might behave inside of the body was a mystery.
“You can’t predict the behavior of virus from just the mutations,” said Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge.
Over the past month, more than a dozen research groups, including Dr. Gupta’s, have been observing the new pathogen in the lab, infecting cells in Petri dishes with Omicron and spraying the virus into the noses of animals.
As they worked, Omicron surged across the planet, readily infecting even people who were vaccinated or had recovered from infections.
But as cases skyrocketed, hospitalizations increased only modestly. Early studies of patients suggested that Omicron was less likely to cause severe illness than other variants, especially in vaccinated people. Still, those findings came with a lot of caveats.
For one thing, the bulk of early Omicron infections were in young people, who are less likely to get seriously ill with all versions of the virus. And many of those early cases were happening in people with some immunity from previous infections or vaccines. It was unclear whether Omicron would also prove less severe in an unvaccinated older person, for example.
Experiments on animals can help clear up these ambiguities, because scientists can test Omicron on identical animals living in identical conditions. More than half a dozen experiments made public in recent days all pointed to the same conclusion: Omicron is milder than Delta and other earlier versions of the virus.
On Wednesday, a large consortium of Japanese and American scientists released a report on hamsters and mice that had been infected with either Omicron or one of several earlier variants. Those infected with Omicron had less lung damage, lost less weight and were less likely to die, the study found.
Although the animals infected with Omicron on average experienced much milder symptoms, the scientists were particularly struck by the results in Syrian hamsters, a species known to get severely ill with all previous versions of the virus.
‘This was surprising, since every other variant has robustly infected these hamsters,’ said Dr. Michael Diamond, a virologist at Washington University and a co-author of the study.
Several other studies on mice and hamsters have reached the same conclusion. (Like most urgent Omicron research, these studies have been posted online but have not yet been published in scientific journals.)
The reason that Omicron is milder may be a matter of anatomy. Dr. Diamond and his colleagues found that the level of Omicron in the noses of the hamsters was the same as in animals infected with an earlier form of the coronavirus. But Omicron levels in the lungs were one-tenth or less of the level of other variants.
A similar finding came from researchers at the University of Hong Kong who studied bits of tissue taken from human airways during surgery. In 12 lung samples, the researchers found that Omicron grew more slowly than Delta and other variants did.
The researchers also infected tissue from the bronchi, the tubes in the upper chest that deliver air from the windpipe to the lungs. And inside of those bronchial cells, in the first two days after an infection, Omicron grew faster than Delta or the original coronavirus did.
These findings will have to be followed up with further studies, such as experiments with monkeys or examination of the airways of people infected with Omicron. If the results hold up to scrutiny, they might explain why people infected with Omicron seem less likely to be hospitalized than those with Delta.
Coronavirus infections start in the nose or possibly the mouth and spread down the throat. Mild infections don’t get much further than that. But when the coronavirus reaches the lungs, it can do serious damage.
Immune cells in the lungs can overreact, killing off not just infected cells but uninfected ones. They can produce runaway inflammation, scarring the lung’s delicate walls. What’s more, the viruses can escape from the damaged lungs into the bloodstream, triggering clots and ravaging other organs.
Dr. Gupta suspects that his team’s new data give a molecular explanation for why Omicron doesn’t fare so well in the lungs.
Many cells in the lung carry a protein called TMPRSS2 on their surface that can inadvertently help passing viruses gain entry to the cell. But Dr. Gupta’s team found that this protein doesn’t grab on to Omicron very well. As a result, Omicron does a worse job of infecting cells in this manner than Delta does. A team at the University of Glasgow independently came to the same conclusion.
Through an alternative route, coronaviruses can also slip into cells that don’t make TMPRSS2. Higher in the airway, cells tend not to carry the protein, which might explain the evidence that Omicron is found there more often than the lungs.
Dr. Gupta speculated that Omicron evolved into an upper-airway specialist, thriving in the throat and nose. If that’s true, the virus might have a better chance of getting expelled in tiny drops into the surrounding air and encountering new hosts.
‘It’s all about what happens in the upper airway for it to transmit, right?’ he said. ‘It’s not really what happens down below in the lungs, where the severe disease stuff happens. So you can understand why the virus has evolved in this way.’
While these studies clearly help explain why Omicron causes milder disease, they don’t yet answer why the variant is so good at spreading from one person to another. The United States logged more than 580,000 cases on Thursday alone, the majority of which are thought to be Omicron.” Read more at New York Times
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called for more rigorous ethics training and better systems of conflict checks in the judicial system.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times
“WASHINGTON — Amid a drop in public confidence in the Supreme Court and calls for increasing its membership, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. devoted his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary on Friday to a plea for judicial independence.
‘The judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and coequal branch of government,’ he wrote.
The report comes less than a month after a bipartisan commission appointed by President Biden finished its work studying changes to the federal judiciary. While that panel analyzed proposals like imposing 18-year term limits on justices and expanding, or ‘packing,’ the court with additional justices, much of the chief justice’s report was focused on thwarting less contentious efforts by Congress to address financial conflicts and workplace misconduct in the judicial system. Both issues are the subject of proposed legislation that has drawn bipartisan support.
Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, a nonprofit group that has called for stricter ethics rules for the Supreme Court, said the chief justice faced an uphill battle.
‘Chief Justice Roberts is taking a page from his old playbook: acknowledging institutional challenges in the judiciary but telling the public that only we judges can fix them,’ Mr. Roth said. ‘Yet the problems of overlooked financial conflicts and sexual harassment are serious and endemic, and there’s no indication they’re going away. So Congress has every right to step in and, via legislation, hold the third branch to account, which I expect to happen in 2022.’
Chief Justice Roberts addressed at some length a recent series of articles in The Wall Street Journal that found that 131 federal judges had violated a federal law by hearing 685 lawsuits between 2010 and 2018 that involved companies in which they or their families owned shares of stock.
‘Let me be crystal clear: The judiciary takes this matter seriously,’ the chief justice wrote. ‘We expect judges to adhere to the highest standards, and those judges violated an ethics rule. But I do want to put these lapses in context.’
In the scheme of things, he wrote, the number of violations was vanishingly small.
‘According to The Wall Street Journal’s own data,’ he wrote, ‘the 685 instances identified amount to a very small fraction — less than three hundredths of 1 percent — of the 2.5 million civil cases filed in the district courts in the nine years included in the study. That’s a 99.97 percent compliance rate.’
‘Still,’ he wrote, ‘this context is not excuse. We are duty-bound to strive for 100 percent compliance because public trust is essential, not incidental, to our function.’” Read more at New York Times
Smoke rose from the ashes of a neighborhood in Superior, Colo. on Friday, after a wind-whipped wildfire tore through the area the day before.THOMAS PEIPERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“SUPERIOR, Colo. — Tens of thousands of Coloradans driven from their neighborhoods by a wind-whipped wildfire anxiously waited to learn what was left standing of their lives Friday as authorities reported more than 500 homes were feared destroyed.
At least seven people were injured, but there were no immediate reports of any deaths or anyone missing in the aftermath of the blaze that erupted outside Denver on Thursday and swept over drought-stricken neighborhoods with terrifying speed, propelled by gusts up to 105 mph.
‘We might have our very own New Year’s miracle on our hands if it holds up that there was no loss of life,’ Governor Jared Polis said, noting that many people had just minutes to evacuate.” Read more at Boston Globe
Supporters of Donald Trump climb a wall at the Capitol on Jan. 6. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
“Federal prosecutors in the District have charged more than 725 individuals with various crimes in connection with the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, when hundreds of rioters forced their way into the U.S. Capitol, the U.S. attorney’s office said Friday.
As the country nears the first anniversary of the storming of the Capitol, the U.S. attorney’s office in the District, the largest office of federal prosecutors in the nation, released a breakdown of the arrests and convictions associated with the attack.
The Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event
Of those arrested, 225 people were charged with assault or resisting arrest. More than 75 of those were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon against police officers. The office said 140 police officers, including Capitol officers and members of the D.C. police department, were victimized during the attack.
The office said about 10 individuals were charged with assaulting members of the media or destroying their equipment.
Some 640 people were charged with entering a restricted federal building or its grounds. And another 75 were charged with entering a restricted area with a deadly weapon.
Prosecutors in the office have been working with the FBI as well as prosecutors in various locations around the nation. The office said the individuals arrested come from nearly all 50 states.
One person, 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt of California, was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to breach a set of doors deep in the Capitol during the riot. Federal prosecutors later cleared the officer of any wrongdoing in Babbitt’s death.
According to a May estimate by the Architect of the Capitol, the attack caused about $1.5 million worth of damage to the building.
About 165 individuals, the office said, have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, from misdemeanors to felony obstruction.
So far, 70 defendants have received some kind of sentence from a judge. Of those, 31 people were ordered jailed, and 18 were sentenced to home detention. The remaining 21 defendants were placed on probation.
In early December, Robert Scott Palmer, 54, of Largo, Fla., received the longest prison sentence to date among those convicted in the attack. A U.S. District Court judge sentenced him to more than five years in prison.
In October, Palmer pleaded guilty to resisting arrest and assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon. Prosecutors said Palmer broke into the Capitol building and, while inside, threw a wooden plank at police officers; then, they said, while he was on the front line of the riot, he sprayed police officers with a fire extinguisher and hurled the emptied extinguisher at the officers. No officers, prosecutors said, were injured.
The FBI is continuing to identify suspects in the case and is collecting tips at fbi.gov/wanted/capitol-violence, 1-800-CALL-FBI (800-225-5324) or tips.fbi.gov.” Read more at Washington Post
“Minimum wage increases and police accountability are part of a series of new laws taking effect across the country on Saturday, the first day of 2022.
Some of the laws such as abortion restrictions in New Hampshire or police reform measures passed in Illinois, Oregon, and North Carolina address some of the most contentious issues of our time.
Others, such as a Maine law passed in the aftermath of a September 2019 explosion that killed a firefighter and injured a number of others, are more narrowly focused and were passed to remedy specific situations.
The Connecticut Parentage Act allows unmarried, same-sex, or nonbiological parents to establish parenting rights through a simple form that gives parents legal capabilities immediately after a child is born.
In Kansas, people will be allowed to buy specialized license plates featuring the “Don’t Tread on Me” and coiled snake symbol featured on what’s known as the Gadsden flag. Critics suggested that the Gadsden flag has become a racist symbol that has been adopted by some far-right groups.
Here is a rundown of some of the new laws taking effect Saturday across the country:
ABORTION
In New Hampshire, abortion will be prohibited after 24 weeks of gestation, with exceptions for the mother’s life or physical health.
Democrats have already drafted legislation seeking to repeal the new restrictions. Some also want to include the right to make reproductive medical decisions a constitutional right.
The new law in New Hampshire comes as the US Supreme Court is considering a case that could severely erode abortion rights that have stood for half a century. Republican lawmakers across the country are ready to further restrict or ban abortions outright while Democratic-led ones are seeking to ensure access to abortion in their state law.
DRUG LAW CHANGES
Recreational marijuana will become legal in Montana. State voters approved the change in a November 2020 initiative.
Under the new law, only businesses that had been providing medical marijuana prior to Nov. 3, 2020, are eligible to grow, manufacture, and sell adult-use marijuana, concentrates and edibles through June 30, 2023.
A new Mississippi law eliminates the requirement for a prescription to buy decongestants that contain ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. Under the new law, the medicine will be available behind the counter of pharmacies, and pharmacists will be required to keep track of how much is sold to one person.
Like many other states, Mississippi mandated a prescription years ago because drug enforcement agents said medications with ephedrine or pseudoephedrine were being used as an ingredient in crystal methamphetamine
MINIMUM WAGE
California will become the first state to require a $15-an-hour minimum wage for businesses with more than 25 employees. A number of other locations across the country have already reached the $15 threshold.
More than 20 other states are also increasing their minimum wages to amounts of less than $15. A handful of states have no state-level minimum wage law, meaning they rely on the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
PHYSICAL DISCRIMINATION
In both Illinois and Oregon, new laws take effect that ban discrimination based on physical characteristics, such as hairstyle.
In Oregon, the bill known unofficially known as the ‘Crown Act’ will ban discrimination based on ‘physical characteristics that are historically associated with race,’ including hair styles such as braids, locs, and twists.
In Illinois, the legislation is known as the Jett Hawkins Law after Gus ‘Jett’ Hawkins, a Black student who at age 4 was told to take out his braids because the hairstyle violated the dress code at his Chicago school.
His mother, Ida Nelson, began an awareness campaign after the incident, saying stigmatizing children’s hair can negatively affect their educational development. She called the it ‘monumental’ when the bill was signed last summer by Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker.
POLICE REFORM
Spurred by the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd and other Black people killed by police, a number of states passed new criminal justice laws in 2021 — the first full year of state legislative sessions after Floyd’s death.
An Illinois law standardizes certification of police officers by the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board and allows for decertifying officers for repeated errant or unethical behavior, instead of only when they’re convicted of a crime.
In North Carolina, law enforcement recruits now must receive psychological screenings by a licensed psychologist to determine their suitability for the job before they can work as an officer or deputy. A previous mandate didn’t apply to everyone.
In Oregon, a new law requires a police officer who witnesses another officer engaging in misconduct or a violation of the state’s minimum moral fitness standards to report it to a supervisor within 72 hours. A police agency must complete an investigation within three months and report findings of misconduct that rises above minor violations to the state.” Read more at Boston Globe
“China is turning a major part of its internal Internet data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.
China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.
The software primarily targets China’s domestic Internet users and media, but a Washington Post review of bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020 include orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.
The documents, publicly accessible through domestic government bidding platforms, also show that agencies including state media, propaganda departments, police, military and cyber regulators are purchasing new or more sophisticated systems to gather data.
These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyses Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a Xinjiang cybercenter cataloguing Uyghur language content abroad.
‘Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,’ said a Beijing-based analyst who works for a unit reporting to China’s Central Propaganda Department. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their work, said they were once tasked with producing a data report on how negative content relating to Beijing’s senior leadership is spread on Twitter, including profiles of individual academics, politicians and journalists.” Read more at Washington Post
“The Republican chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, who was appointed by former President Donald J. Trump, said on Friday that she was cutting short her term after a clash with Democratic banking regulators.
Jelena McWilliams, who started a five-year term as chair in June 2018, will resign effective Feb. 4, she wrote in a letter to President Biden. She is also stepping down as a director of the F.D.I.C.’s board. Ms. McWilliams is the only Republican currently on the five-member board, and her departure will add a second vacancy.” Read more at New York Times
“WASHINGTON — The Navy has fired the commander and the second in charge of the littoral combat ship Montgomery because of “a loss of confidence in their ability to command,” the service said on Thursday.
Cmdr. Richard J. Zamberlan, the ship’s skipper, and Cmdr. Phillip Lundberg, the vessel’s executive officer, were relieved by Capt. Marc Crawford, the commander of the Navy’s Surface Division 11, the Navy said in a statement.
The Navy did not elaborate on the circumstances of the firings, but two Navy officials said the officers’ removal had resulted from their handling of a sexual harassment investigation. The two officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing inquiry.
It is unusual for the Navy to relieve a ship’s commander, much less its two top officers, for any reason. In April, the Navy removed Cmdr. Kathryn J. Dawley as the skipper of the Hawaii-based guided-missile destroyer Hopper for what officials said was a poor command climate and bad crew morale.” Read more at New York Times