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2nd woman accuses Virginia official of sexual assault

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WASHINGTON — A second woman accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault Friday, saying the Democrat raped her 19 years ago while they were both students at Duke University.

Calls for his resignation grew steadily as the day wore on.

A lawyer for Meredith Watson, 39, said in a statement that Fairfax had attacked Watson in 2000. The statement described the assault as “premeditated and aggressive,” and noted that while Watson and Fairfax had been social friends, they were never involved romantically.

The lawyer, Nancy E. Smith, said her team had statements from former classmates who said Watson had “immediately” told friends that Fairfax had raped her. A New Jersey public relations firm representing Watson provided The Associated Press with a 2016 email exchange with a female friend and 2017 text exchanges in which Watson said Fairfax had raped her. She also expressed dismay about his run for political office.

Watson’s representatives declined to provide further documentation and said their client would not be talking to journalists.

Fairfax shot back at his accusers quickly: he said in a statement that he would not resign from office, and vowed to clear his name against what he described as a “vicious and co-ordinated smear campaign” being orchestrated against him.

“I deny this latest unsubstantiated allegation,” the embattled Democrat said. “It is demonstrably false. I have never forced myself on anyone ever. I demand a full investigation into these unsubstantiated and false allegations. Such an investigation will confirm my account because I am telling the truth.”

Duke spokesman Michael Schoenfeld said the university’s police department has no criminal reports naming or involving Fairfaxe. Any accusation made through the student disciplinary process would be protected by student privacy laws, and Schoenfeld said the university couldn’t comment or release further information.

Police officials in Durham, North Carolina, where Duke is, said they had no records of an accusation against Fairfax in 2000.

This is not the first time Watson has accused someone of assault. Following inquiries from AP and other media, Watson’s lawyer confirmed that while in college she accused another man, a basketball player at Duke, of raping her when she was a sophomore. Smith said Watson reported it to a top-level university administrator but received no help and was discouraged from taking the claim any further. The lawyer said Watson also told friends — including Fairfax — about the earlier incident.

Duke officials told AP on Friday they had no immediate knowledge of the accusation against the basketball player but were researching the matter.

The latest accusation against Fairfax comes two days after Vanessa Tyson, a 42-year-old political science professor, said publicly that Fairfax sexually assaulted her in a Boston hotel room during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Tyson says Fairfaix , then a law student working as an aide to Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards, forced her to perform oral sex.

Fairfax says his sexual encounter with Tyson was consensual.

At the time, Tyson was working as a student adviser at Harvard University and was a frequent speaker to Boston-area support groups for rape survivors. Tyson has said she was sexually molested by a family member as a child.

A man who was romantically involved with Tyson in the late 1990s said Thursday that she disclosed the childhood abuse to him during a conversation about why she found certain kinds of physical intimacy difficult. The man spoke to AP on condition of anonymity out of concern publication of his name would damage his career.

He said Tyson told him oral sex in particular brought back painful memories of her childhood trauma. The man said he finds it nearly impossible to believe that Tyson would have performed oral sex without being forced.

Though the man also knows Fairfax and considered him a friend, he said he believes Tyson is telling the truth.

The Associated Press typically does not identify those who say they were sexually assaulted, but both Tyson and Watson issued public statements using their names.

Tyson said Wednesday the 2004 incident left her feeling deeply humiliated and ashamed. She only began to tell friends about the alleged assault in October 2017, after seeing a photo of Fairfax next to an article about his campaign.

Watson also confided in a friend after seeing that Fairfax was running for office. Watson, who now lives in Maryland, did so after she received an email from a college friend in 2016 urging former Duke students to support the campaign of “our good friend Justin.”

Watson replied: “Justin raped me in college and I don’t want to hear anything about him. Please, please remove me from any future emails about him please. Thank you!”

Watson’s lawyer said the circumstances of the alleged assault in 2000 were similar to what Tyson had described happening four years later, but declined to provide further details.

“At this time, Ms. Watson is reluctantly coming forward out of a strong sense of civic duty and her belief that those seeking or serving in public office should be of the highest character,” Smith said, according to the written statement. “She has no interest in becoming a media personality or reliving the trauma that has greatly affected her life. Similarly, she is not seeking any financial damages.”

Smith added that Watson also hopes Fairfax will resign his elected position.

Carliss Chatman, a Washington & Lee Law School professor who graduated from Duke in 2001, said she has remained friends with Fairfax and hosted a political fundraiser for him. She remembers Watson from parties but didn’t think Watson and Fairfax ran in the same social circles and was surprised that the statement from Watson’s attorneys had described them as friends.

“It doesn’t feel plausible at all,” she said of Watson’s allegations.

The accusations against Fairfax have rocked an administration that was already struggling amid calls for the resignation of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam over a racist photo that appeared on his 1984 medical school yearbook page. Fairfax would be in line to become governor if Northam resigned.

Following news of a second accuser against Fairfax, Democratic state lawmakers in Virginia issued a call for Fairfax to resign, as did the Virginia Black Legislative Caucus. Several members of the state’s congressional delegation, both black and white, also said Fairfax, who is black, can no longer serve in the office.

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Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief Julie Pace and reporter Jonathan Drew in Durham, North Carolina, contributed to this report. Kunzelman reported from College Park, Maryland, and Suderman from Richmond, Virginia.

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Follow AP investigative reporter Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck , Kunzelman at http://twitter.com/Kunzelman75 and Suderman at http://twitter.com/AlanSuderman

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Contact the AP’s investigative team with tips about this or other matters: https://www.ap.org/tips

Michael Biesecker, Michael Kunzelman And Alan Suderman, The Associated Press

Storytelling is in our DNA. We provide credible, compelling multimedia storytelling and services in English and French to help captivate your digital, broadcast and print audiences. As Canada’s national news agency for 100 years, we give Canadians an unbiased news source, driven by truth, accuracy and timeliness.

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Trump Needs To Take Away What Politicians Love Most — Pork

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in an interview on CSPAN, Sept. 30, 2000

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Stephen Moore

Shortly before his death in 2006, I had the privilege of interviewing Milton Friedman over dinner in San Francisco. The last question I asked him was: What are the three things we had to do to make America more prosperous?

His answer I have never forgotten: “First, allow universal school choice; second, expand free trade; third and most importantly, cut government spending.” That was long before Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden came along.

There are not too many problems in America that cannot be traced back to the growth of big and incompetent government.

It is notable that the two big bursts of inflation during modern times both occurred when government spending exploded. The first was the gigantic expansion of the LBJ “war on poverty” welfare state in the 1970s with prices nearly doubling, and then the post-COVID era spending blitz in the last year of Trump and then the Biden $6 trillion spending spree with the CPI sprinting from 1.5% to 9.1%.

Coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.

The connection between government flab and the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar is obvious. In both cases the Washington spending blitz was funded by Federal Reserve money printing. The helicopter money caused prices to surge. (I still find it laughable that 11 Nobel prize-winning economists wrote in the New York Times in 2021: Don’t worry, the Biden multi-trillion-dollar spending spree won’t cause inflation.)

The avalanche of federal spending hasn’t stopped even though COVID ended more than three years ago. We are three months into the 2025 fiscal year and on pace to spend an all-time high $7 trillion and borrow $2 trillion. If we stay on this course, the federal budget could reach $10 trillion over the next decade.

This road to financial perdition cannot stand. It risks blowing up the Trump presidency.

Upon entering office, Trump should on day one call for a package of up to $500 billion of rescissions — money that the last Congress appropriated but has not been spent yet. Cancelling the green energy subsidies alone could save nearly $100 billion. Why are we still spending money on COVID?

We could save tens of billions by ending corporate welfare programs — such as the wheel barrels full of tax dollars thrown at companies like Intel in the CHIPS Act. The Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency is already identifying low hanging fruit that needs to be cut from the tree.

Along with extending the Trump tax cut of 2017, this erasure of bloated federal spending is critical for economic revival and for reversing the income losses to the middle class under Biden.

This is especially urgent because the curse of inflation is NOT over. Since the Fed started cutting interest rates in October, commodity prices are up nearly 5% and the mortgage rates have again hit 7% — in part because the combination of cheap money and government expansion is a toxic economic brew — as history teaches us.

Nothing could suck the oxygen and excitement out of the new Trump presidency more than a resumption of inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. Trump’s record-high approval rating will sink overnight if the cost of everything starts rising again.

Cutting spending won’t be easy. The resistance won’t just come from Bernie Sanders Democrats. Trump will have to convince lawmakers in his own party — many of whom are already defending green-new-deal pork projects in their districts.

This is why Trump should make the case in his inaugural address that downsizing government is the moral equivalent of war. Borrow a line from Nancy Reagan: just say no — to runaway government spending. Say yes to what Friedman titled his famous book: “Capitalism and Freedom.”

Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”

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What is ‘productivity’ and how can we improve it

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jock Finlayson

Earlier this year, a senior Bank of Canada official caused a stir by describing Canada’s pattern of declining productivity as an “emergency,” confirming that the issue of productivity is now in the spotlight. That’s encouraging. Boosting productivity is the only way to improve living standards, particularly in the long term. Today, Canada ranks 18th globally on the most common measure of productivity, with our position dropping steadily over the last several years.

Productivity is the amount of gross domestic product (GDP) or “output” the economy produces using a given quantity and mix of “inputs.” Labour is a key input in the production process, and most discussions of productivity focus on labour productivity. Productivity can be estimated for the entire economy or for individual industries.

In 2023, labour productivity in Canada was $63.60 per hour (in 2017 dollars). Industries with above average productivity include mining, oil and gas, pipelines, utilities, most parts of manufacturing, and telecommunications. Those with comparatively low productivity levels include accommodation and food services, construction, retail trade, personal and household services, and much of the government sector. Due to the lack of market-determined prices, it’s difficult to gauge productivity in the government and non-profit sectors. Instead, analysts often estimate productivity in these parts of the economy by valuing the inputs they use, of which labour is the most important one.

Within the private sector, there’s a positive linkage between productivity and employee wages and benefits. The most productive industries (on average) pay their workers more. As noted in a February 2024 RBC Economics report, productivity growth is “essentially the only way that business profits and worker wages can sustainably rise at the same time.”

Since the early 2000s, Canada has been losing ground vis-à-vis the United States and other advanced economies on productivity. By 2022, our labour productivity stood at just 70 per cent of the U.S. benchmark. What does this mean for Canadians?

Chronically lagging productivity acts as a drag on the growth of inflation-adjusted wages and incomes. According to a recent study, after adjusting for differences in the purchasing power of a dollar of income in the two countries, GDP per person (an indicator of incomes and living standards) in Canada was only 72 per cent of the U.S. level in 2022, down from 80 per cent a decade earlier. Our performance has continued to deteriorate since 2022. Mainly because of the widening cross-border productivity gap, GDP per person in the U.S. is now $22,000 higher than in Canada.

Addressing Canada’s “productivity crisis” should be a top priority for policymakers and business leaders. While there’s no short-term fix, the following steps can help to put the country on a better productivity growth path.

  • Increase business investment in productive assets and activities. Canada scores poorly compared to peer economies in investment in machinery, equipment, advanced technology products and intellectual property. We also must invest more in trade-enabling infrastructure such as ports, highways and other transportation assets that link Canada with global markets and facilitate the movement of goods and services within the country.
  • Overhaul federal and provincial tax policies to strengthen incentives for capital formation, innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth.
  • Streamline and reduce the cost and complexity of government regulation affecting all sectors of the economy.
  • Foster greater competition in local markets and scale back government monopolies and government-sanctioned oligopolies.
  • Eliminate interprovincial barriers to trade, investment and labour mobility to bolster Canada’s common market.
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