The Full Belmonte, 11/20/2022
UN climate deal: Calamity cash, but no new emissions cuts
By SETH BORENSTEIN, SAMY MAGDY and FRANK JORDANS
“SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) — For the first time, the nations of the world decided to help pay for the damage an overheating world is inflicting on poor countries, but they finished marathon climate talks on Sunday without further addressing the root cause of those disasters — the burning of fossil fuels.
The deal, gaveled around dawn in this Egyptian Red Sea resort city, establishes a fund for what negotiators call loss and damage.
It is a big win for poorer nations which have long called for cash — sometimes viewed as reparations — because they are often the victims of climate-worsened floods, droughts, heat waves, famines and storms despite having contributed little to the pollution that heats up the globe.
It is also long been called an issue of equity for nations hit by weather extremes and small island states that face an existential threat from rising seas.
‘Three long decades and we have finally delivered climate justice,’ said Seve Paeniu, the finance minister of Tuvalu. ‘We have finally responded to the call of hundreds of millions of people across the world to help them address loss and damage.’” Read more at AP News
Police: 5 dead, 18 hurt in Colorado gay nightclub shooting
By THOMAS PEIPERT
Crime tape is set up near a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo. where a shooting occurred late Saturday, Nov. 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
“COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — An attacker opened fire in a gay nightclub late Saturday, killing five people and wounding 18, officials said. The club said the suspect was subdued by patrons.
Authorities received a report of a shooting at Club Q at 11:57 p.m. and responded within minutes, said Lt. Pamela Castro of the Colorado Springs Police Department.
The violence is the sixth mass killing this month and comes in a year when the nation was shaken by the deaths of 21 in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Castro had few details beyond the number of dead and wounded. She said the suspect was injured but didn’t know how and that the FBI was on the scene and assisting.” Read more at AP News
Musk restores Trump’s Twitter account after online poll
By ALEX VEIGA
“LOS ANGELES (AP) — Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump’s account on Twitter on Saturday, reversing a ban that has kept the former president off the social media site since a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was poised to certify Joe Biden’s election victory.
Musk made the announcement in the evening after holding a poll that asked Twitter users to click ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether Trump’s account should be restored. The ‘yes’ vote won, with 51.8%. Previously, Musk had said Twitter would establish new procedures and a ‘content moderation council’ before making decisions to restore suspended accounts.
‘The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,’ Musk tweeted, using a Latin phrase meaning ‘the voice of the people, the voice of God.’
Shortly afterward Trump’s account, which had earlier appeared as suspended, reappeared on the platform complete with his former tweets, more than 59,000 of them. His followers were gone, at least initially, but he quickly began regaining them. There were no new tweets from the account as of late Saturday, however.
Musk restored the account less than a month after the Tesla CEO took control of Twitter and four days after Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race.
It is not clear whether Trump would actually return to Twitter. An irrepressible tweeter before he was banned, Trump has said in the past that he would not rejoin even if his account was reinstated. He has been relying on his own, much smaller social media site, Truth Social, which he launched after being blocked from Twitter.
‘I hear we’re getting a big vote to also go back on Twitter. I don’t see it because I don’t see any reason for it,’ Trump said. ‘It may make it, it may not make it,’ he added, apparently referring to Twitter’s recent internal upheavals.
The prospect of restoring Trump’s presence to the platform follows Musk’s purchase last month of Twitter — an acquisition that has fanned widespread concern that the billionaire owner will allow purveyors of lies and misinformation to flourish on the site. Musk has frequently expressed his belief that Twitter had become too restrictive of freewheeling speech.” Read more at AP News
“In 2019, Donald Trump tweeted an image that left intelligence experts gobsmacked. It was a photo of a rocket that had exploded on a launch pad deep inside Iran. More than three years later, the U.S. government has formally declassified the image from one of its most powerful spy satellites.” Read more at NPR
Justice Alito denies disclosing 2014 Hobby Lobby opinion in advance
Supreme Court justice has said leak of Dobbs abortion decision made conservative majority ‘targets for assasination’
“Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. denied an allegation from a former antiabortion activist that Alito or his wife disclosed to conservative donors the outcome of a pending 2014 case regarding contraceptives and religious rights.
The New York Times reported Saturday that Rob Schenck, who on his website identifies himself as a ‘once-right-wing religious leader but now dissenting evangelical voice,’ said he was told the outcome of the case, Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, several weeks before it was announced. Schenck said a conservative donor to his organization relayed the information after a dinner with Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, and the justice’s wife.
But the donor, Gayle Wright, told the Times and affirmed in an interview Saturday that the account given by Schenck was not true, and Alito issued a statement denying it as well….
Schenck’s allegation comes after the unprecedented leak this spring of Alito’s draft opinion upholding a restrictive Mississippi abortion law and overturning the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade nearly 50 years earlier. The leak was a shocking breach of the court’s secretive and closely held deliberations, and Alito recently denounced it as a ‘grave betrayal of trust.’
The episode added to growing debate over the legitimacy and behind-the-scenes operations of the Supreme Court at a time when public approval of the court has sunk to historic lows.” Read more at Washington Post
Naomi Biden, President’s Granddaughter, Is Wed at the White House
The wedding took place on the South Lawn on Saturday morning. A reception with dessert and dancing was to follow in the evening.
“WASHINGTON — Naomi Biden, the eldest grandchild of President Biden, and Peter Neal were married in a private ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House on Saturday morning. It was the quintessential Biden affair: planned by the close-knit family and a handful of trusted aides.
‘It has been a joy to watch Naomi grow, discover who she is, and carve out such an incredible life for herself,’ Mr. Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, said in a statement. ‘Now, we are filled with pride to see her choose Peter as her husband and we’re honored to welcome him to our family. We wish them days full of laughter and a love that grows deeper with every passing year.’
The bride and groom both wore attire designed by Ralph Lauren, according to a person familiar with the event. For her, it was a lacy, long-sleeved ivory gown; for him, a three-piece navy suit.
A luncheon for the family and wedding party was held in the White House immediately after the South Lawn ceremony. A black-tie evening reception with dessert and dancing was to follow.” Read more at New York Times
Heather Ahmed shovels snow on Saturday. She is among many residents of the Buffalo, New York, area who have to dig out due to a historic storm.
“As millions of Americans gear up to travel during the Thanksgiving holiday week, many will have to deal with rain, snow, blustery winds and cold temperatures. Over 5 million people from Michigan to New York are under winter weather alerts as additional lake-effect snow is expected to fall today.” Read more at CNN
“President Joe Biden turns 80 years old today, becoming the first octogenarian to ever serve in the nation's highest office. The unique milestone of Biden’s birthday comes as the president faces speculation about whether he will mount a reelection run and dredges up questions about whether he’s too old to serve another term.” Read more at CNN
“Former national security adviser Michael Flynn has been ordered by a judge to testify before an Atlanta-area special grand jury investigating efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Fulton County prosecutors are interested in the grand jury hearing from Flynn specifically about a December 18, 2020, meeting he had with Trump, attorney Sidney Powell and others associated with the Trump campaign, according to a Fulton County court filing. During the heated Oval Office meeting, CNN previously reported, Flynn and Powell floated outrageous suggestions about overturning the election. The meeting was just three weeks after Trump pardoned Flynn near the end of his administration.” Read more at CNN
Leaked call shows clash between Kari Lake campaign and Maricopa County
Video from inside the GOP war room in Arizona reveals a breakdown in relations between campaign attorneys and a top lawyer for the county
“Hours before Kari Lake was projected to lose her race for Arizona governor, attorneys for her campaign and for the Republican National Committee spoke by phone Monday to a lawyer for Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than half the state’s voters.
The Lake representatives posed a series of questions about voting problems on Election Day, nearly a week earlier. Then, toward the end of the phone call, an attorney for the RNC stressed the importance of rapid answers, according to the Maricopa attorney, Tom Liddy, a lifelong Republican who heads the county’s office for civil litigation.
Liddy recalled that the RNC attorney, whom he and others identified as Benjamin Mehr, told him that there were ‘a lot of irate people out there’ and that the campaign ‘can’t control them.’
Liddy said in an interview Friday that he considered those words a threat.
On Friday night, a Twitter account associated with Lake’s campaign posted a video of a portion of the call that captures Liddy cursing and raising his voice. The Lake campaign did not respond to a request for the full video, which was taken from inside the GOP’s war room at a Scottsdale resort. County officials said they were blindsided that the conversation had been recorded and then posted publicly with the names of only one side bleeped out.
Tim La Sota, an attorney for the Lake campaign who was present for the call, did not dispute Liddy’s characterization of the conversation but said he did not interpret Mehr’s comments as a threat. An RNC spokesman called Liddy’s account of the call “false” and issued a statement attacking Maricopa County officials as “completely inept.”
The tense exchange, between two Republican lawyers, lays bare the internal GOP war over the administration of elections. Nowhere is that feud more ferocious than in Maricopa County, the second-largest voting jurisdiction in the country, which became a focal point of former president Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 loss. Vote-counting is still proceeding in the county, and the race for state attorney general, which could shape enforcement of election law, hangs in the balance.” Read more at Washington Post
Pete Kiehart for NPR
“Residents of newly liberated Kherson in Ukraine recall fear, torture and repression during eight months under Russian occupation. ‘We heard these crazy screams at night,’ one resident says. ‘There were shouts from the jail of people being tortured at night. In the summer when you opened the window, we heard it very well.’” Read more at NPR
“Regulators OK'd a plan to demolish four dams on California's Klamath River and open up hundreds of miles of salmon habitat. The project, championed by Native American tribes and environmentalists for years, will be the largest dam removal and river restoration project in the world when it goes forward.” Read more at CNN
November 20, 2022
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Good morning. Concerns about corruption and human rights loom over a typically joyous sporting event.
Doha, Qatar.Khaled Desouki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Kickoff
“The World Cup begins today in Qatar. The games, which normally start in late spring or summer, were pushed to accommodate the desert country’s climate — one of many reasons this is a weird World Cup.
The best national soccer teams will compete for the title of world champion. Around a billion people are expected to watch the final on Dec. 18. Tariq Panja, a sports reporter for The Times, is at the tournament (where it’s still about 85 degrees). I spoke with him about the scandals surrounding the event and what to expect from the games.
Lauren: I grew up in Arkansas, where we watched a different kind of football. Can you give me a sense of how big the World Cup is globally?
Tariq: There’s nothing bigger than this, not even the Olympics. The World Cup is the most watched event in the world. It happens every four years, and it’s a highlight of many people’s lives.
These 32 teams capture the imagination of supporters even outside their borders, particularly in Asia, where most countries historically do not qualify for the World Cup. People may adopt a team and support them with a fervent passion.
This is the fourth World Cup you’ve covered. What is different about this one?
This is the first time that the games are being played in November and December. Because of the desert heat in Qatar, the schedule had to be changed, upending the entire global soccer calendar. European soccer, for the first time, has been paused halfway through the season. Players now have less time to train with their national teams.
These games have normally been held in different cities across huge countries, like Russia, Brazil or South Africa. This is the smallest location ever to host this tournament.
In 2009, Qatar put forward the most extravagant bid in history to host the World Cup. Why did it want to host so badly?
Qatar is a tiny speck in the Gulf desert wanting the world to know it’s here. It’s the first Arab and first Muslim nation to host a sporting event of this size. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are looking on enviously, giving Qatar clout.
In 2009, Qatar spent tens of millions of dollars to try to host the World Cup. They paid famous athletes like Zinedine Zidane, one of the best players in history, to support their bid. Still, Qatar’s bid seemed like a joke. It was so outlandish as a concept. They were getting questions about the heat, about how they could fit the games in a country smaller than Connecticut and whether they would allow alcohol.
When FIFA’s president at the time opened the envelope and Qatar’s name came out, immediately everyone zeroed in on corruption. The investigations that followed forced FIFA to change the way it designated a host, and revealed how a country was able to bend the world to its will through force of cash.
You arrived in Qatar last week. What are you seeing?
Everything here feels shiny and newly built. It’s like a country with that new car smell. The clearest thing is that it is baking hot — and this is close to winter. There is very strong sunlight bouncing off concrete that’s been laid down for all the new buildings. They’ve also banned the sale of beer to fans in stadiums.
How has Qatar pulled off its preparation? Talk us through the controversy surrounding this tournament.
They essentially had to rebuild an entire country in 12 years to host this one-month event. They amassed hundreds of thousands of overseas workers, particularly South Asian workers, to do this construction. Thousands of those workers have died in Qatar since 2010, the year the country won hosting rights, according to human rights groups. Many more were injured building or refurbishing these eight air-conditioned stadiums, which Qatar will have little use for after the World Cup. It’s been a collision of some of the world’s poorest people with the ambition of some of the world’s richest people.
The country’s human rights record has been under scrutiny beyond the worker deaths. One key aspect of that is Qatar’s criminalization of homosexuality. The World Cup is supposed to be this festival open to everyone. How does that square with a country that would jail you for being gay?
FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, pushed back against the outrage yesterday, calling it ‘hypocrisy’ from European countries. He asked fans to criticize him instead of Qatar.
Some European soccer fans are calling for people to boycott watching the games. What would you tell someone weighing that decision?
It’s a conversation people are having all over the world, and it speaks to the troubling nature of this tournament. It’s for each individual to figure that out for themselves. But from the players’ perspectives, this isn’t their fault. It’s the position FIFA has placed them in.
Ultimately, though, this tournament could be held on the moon, and it would attract the same number of eyeballs. Soon, most of the world is only going to be talking about what the matchups look like.
What are you watching for in the matches?
Everything is politicized. Iran is under a lot of scrutiny because of their national protests; a player from France, Eduardo Camavinga, has received racist messages on social media; some of Argentina’s fans have created a nasty, racist song about another French player, Kylian Mbappé.
In terms of the soccer, look out for Brazil. They’ve got a very deep squad. Then there’s Argentina. This may be the last World Cup for one of the sport’s greats, Lionel Messi. And a non-European team has not won the tournament since 2002. So maybe this will be the time to end that 20-year wait.” Read more at New York Times
Staughton Lynd, Historian and Activist Turned Labor Lawyer, Dies at 92
After being blacklisted from academia for his antiwar activity, he became an organizer among steel workers in the industrial Midwest.
By Clay Risen
Nov. 18, 2022
“Staughton Lynd, a historian and lawyer who over a long and varied career organized schools for Black children in Mississippi, led antiwar protests in Washington and fought for labor rights in the industrial Midwest, died on Thursday in the town of Warren, in northeast Ohio. He was 92.
His wife and frequent collaborator, Alice Lynd, said his death, at a hospital, was caused by multiple organ failure.
Mr. Lynd was one of the last of a generation of radical academics — including his friend and colleague Howard Zinn — who in the 1960s overthrew their predecessors’ obsession with detached, objective scholarship in favor of political engagement.
Many of his colleagues stayed within the bounds of academia, but Mr. Lynd burst beyond them. As a young professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, he led students in marches against nuclear weapons. In 1964 he was one of the main organizers behind Freedom Summer, which brought Northern college students to Mississippi to teach and organize in Black communities.
When the Vietnam War was still relatively new and most Americans still supported it, he organized antiwar protests in Washington. He was among the first of about 350 people arrested during one demonstration — though not before neo-Nazis, staging a counter protest, dumped paint on him and two other marchers, David Dellinger and Bob Moses. A photo of the three bespattered men appeared in Life magazine.
In 1965 Mr. Lynd joined another radical historian, Herbert Aptheker, and a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden, on a trip to North Vietnam. There they met with Communist leaders and made global headlines, but also numerous enemies back home. The trip effectively ended Mr. Lynd’s career at Yale, where he had moved just a year before.
Mr. Lynd was not a communist, though he was often mistaken for one. Instead he made his own way on the left, drawing equal inspiration from Marxism, American abolitionism and Quaker pacifism — a diversity that helped explain his involvement with so many different movements.
‘Staughton was very unusual,’ Gar Alperovitz, a historian who wrote several books with Mr. Lynd, said in a phone interview. ‘He walked a path that was his own. And when it intersected with the activist groups on the progressive left, he would be involved. But he was a very moral political figure rather than a tactical one.’
In age he fell between the Old Left, which cut its teeth in the 1930s and ’40s, and the New, which was coming up in the ’60s. There was no question where his loyalty lay: He reveled in the impassioned spontaneity he encountered as a professor on college campuses, and students flocked to him in turn.
At Yale they would cram into his office or gather on his living room floor to hear him take on all comers, staking positions to the left even of outspoken liberals like the Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, a frequent verbal sparring partner.
Even as he developed a following as an agitator, he built a reputation as a pathbreaking historian. His best-known book, ‘The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism’ (1968), opened new ground by identifying members of the Revolutionary War generation who embraced abolition and equality, and it won praise even from establishment historians.
‘Of all the New Left historians, only Staughton Lynd appears able to combine the techniques of historical scholarship with the commitment to social reform,’ David Herbert Donald wrote in a 1968 review in Commentary.
But his academic star soon fizzled out. By the end of the 1960s, his outspoken activism had drawn the attention of the F.B.I. and gotten him blacklisted from higher education, even from small urban colleges in Chicago, where he and his family had moved in 1968.
He pivoted, involving himself in labor organizing among the factories that lined the southern shores of Lake Michigan. He received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1976, after which he and his wife moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where workers, union leaders and owners were fighting over the impending closure of the city’s steel mills.
To the frustration of both the union bosses and the mill owners, he sided with the rank and file, writing a handbook for workers trying to navigate the legal system. In the early 1980s he helped lead a high-profile effort to turn the mills over to a worker-owned cooperative. Though the effort failed, it brought him renewed acclaim on the left.
He did much of his later work alongside his wife. She wrote several books with him and, after getting her own law degree, joined him as a partner. They officially retired in 1996 but continued taking pro bono cases, this time with a focus on the death penalty and prison reform.
“Whether in his pathbreaking historical work on the roots of American radicalism, his active participation in campaigns for civil rights, his crucial role in steps toward democratization of the economy, Staughton Lynd was always in the forefront of struggle, a model of integrity, courage, and farsighted understanding of what must be done if there is to be a livable world,” the linguist and left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky wrote in an email.
Staughton Craig Lynd was born on Nov. 22, 1929, the same year that his parents, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, published their book ‘Middletown,’ based on their research in Muncie, Ind. It was one of the first books to offer a comprehensive study of an American community, and it established them as two of the country’s best-known academics.
The Lynds lived in New York City — Robert Lynd taught at Columbia, while Helen Lynd taught at Sarah Lawrence College — but Staughton was born in a hospital in Philadelphia because his mother preferred the doctors there.
He grew up among the New York intellectual set, attending the Ethical Culture School and the Fieldston School, and entered Harvard in 1946.
He studied social relations, a popular but now defunct major. In his free time he dabbled in radical politics, joining the Communist Party-aligned John Reed Club and briefly participating in two Trotskyist organizations on campus.
During the 1950 summer school session he met Alice Niles, a student at Radcliffe. They married the next year.
After graduating in 1951, he spent time studying urban planning before being drafted into the Army in 1953. As a conscientious objector, he was given a noncombat role, despite the continuing Korean War.
A year later, though, he received a dishonorable discharge after Army investigators dug up his Communist affiliations in college; they also highlighted his mother’s career as a “modern” professional woman.
He and others with similar disqualifications appealed, and the Supreme Court eventually ordered the Army to give them honorable discharges instead. The change in status allowed Mr. Lynd to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, which he used to pay for graduate school.
But first, he and Alice spent three years living on a Quaker commune in northern Georgia. They then spent six months in a similar community in New Jersey, where he first met Mr. Dellinger, a like-minded pacifist who brought him on as an editor at his magazine, Liberation.
The Lynds finally returned to New York City, where Mr. Lynd worked for a tenants’ rights organization on the Lower East Side and pursued a history doctorate at Columbia.
He received his degree, with a dissertation on New York State during the Revolutionary War, in 1962. By then he and Alice were already in Atlanta, where he got a job teaching at Spelman (and where Mrs. Lynd babysat the children of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a neighbor).
Among his colleagues was Mr. Zinn, who would be fired for his activism in 1963, and among his students was Alice Walker, who would go on to write “The Color Purple.”
Mr. Lynd became actively involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and grew particularly close to one of its leaders, Bob Moses, a similarly cerebral activist. In 1964 Mr. Lynd was chosen to oversee the educational component of Freedom Summer, instituting curriculums and training teachers for the many schools that were to open across Mississippi.
He was in Oxford, Ohio, where organizers gathered before heading to Mississippi, when he first heard about the kidnapping and murder of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
‘I’ll never forget Mickey Schwerner’s wife, Rita, pacing one of the rooms all night long, waiting for word of some kind,’ he wrote in The Bill of Rights Journal in 1988.
That fall Mr. Lynd joined the Yale history department, though by then he was spending more and more of his time as an activist.
In June 1965 he joined another antiwar protester in a lonely demonstration outside the Pentagon. Almost immediately, dozens of military police officers had surrounded them.
‘What in the cotton-picking world do you think you’re doing?’ he recalled one of them asking.
He straightened himself up, looked at the officer, and replied: ‘You don’t understand. We’re the first of thousands.’
His trip later that year to North Vietnam, and a 1966 trip to London, where he blasted American foreign policy on the BBC, persuaded the State Department to revoke his passport.
Mr. Lynd’s activism brought waves of criticism from alumni and pressure on Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, to fire him. Mr. Brewster resisted, but he let it be known, quietly, that Mr. Lynd was unlikely to receive tenure.
In 1968 the Lynds moved again, to Chicago, where Mr. Lynd was eager to get involved with the labor movement. He taught briefly at two local schools, Roosevelt University and Columbia College, and applied unsuccessfully to others. But he failed to find a permanent contract — the result, he insisted, of a concerted effort to blacklist him from teaching.
He then worked briefly for the social activist Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, and he and Alice Lynd wrote an oral history of Chicago labor, ‘Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers’ (1973).
Mr. Lynd wrote more than 20 more books and extended pamphlets, mostly about labor organizing and prison reform. An exception was ‘Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together’ (2009), written with his wife.
A year later, an interviewer for Harvard Magazine asked him why, after such a long career, he was still so active.
‘At age 16 and 17, I wanted to find a way to change the world,’ he said. ‘Just as I do at age 79.’” Read more at New York Times