The Full Belmonte, 11/30/2023 - 12/1/2023
News Alert: Federal judge says Trump does not have absolute immunity, denying bid to dismiss election subversion case
“The federal judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case in Washington, DC, has refused to dismiss the charges against him, saying he does not enjoy absolute immunity for what he said and did after the election.
‘The court cannot conclude that our Constitution cloaks former Presidents with absolute immunity for any federal crimes they committed while in office,’ US District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote.”
Read More at CNN
George Santos Expelled from the House
“The House voted to expel embattled Rep. George Santos over allegations the New York Republican stole money from his own campaign and committed other misdeeds, in only the third expulsion from the chamber since the Civil War.
The vote was 311 to 114 just slightly more than the two-thirds House supermajority required to remove a member.”
READ MORE at Wall Street Journal
Saudi Arabia, oil giants sign onto a major climate deal to limit methane, a potent greenhouse gas
The deal, announced at the COP28 summit in Dubai, is seen by some environmental groups as a historic breakthrough on methane emissions — if successfully implemented. It also reflects the oil industry’s efforts to persuade the world it can provide a solution to global warming, despite what it has done to create the problem.
Read more at Washington Post
Ron DeSantis’s struggles grow in the GOP presidential race as internal disputes erupt into public view
“The Florida governor’s bid is facing extraordinary turmoil approximately six weeks before the Iowa caucuses as Republicans eager to stop Donald Trump increasingly pin their hopes on a rival contender.”
Read the story at Washington Post
GOP fights Hunter Biden push for public hearing
BY REBECCA BEITSCH
“House impeachment inquiry leaders seeking testimony from Hunter Biden sought to turn his offer for public testimony on its head Friday, writing that he had affirmed his availability for the deposition they demanded in an earlier subpoena.
The letter to Biden’s attorneys from House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) comes after a letter from Biden’s attorneys earlier in the week that says he was only willing to testify in public and not in a closed-door setting. That publicly scrambled the GOP, with some Republicans backing the idea of a public hearing.”
Read the full story here at The Hill
U.S. Says Indian Official Directed Assassination Plot in New York
A Manhattan indictment says the agent orchestrated an unsuccessful plot against a Sikh separatist, a plan linked to a killing in Canada.
By Jesse McKinley, Julian E. Barnes and Ian Austen
Jesse McKinley reported from New York, Julian Barnes reported from Washington and Ian Austen reported from Ottawa.
Nov. 29, 2023
“It was described as a New York hit job with international implications: an audacious assassination plot against a Sikh separatist.
The target was a lawyer at a New York-based group called Sikhs for Justice — an American citizen and an outspoken proponent of independence for the northern Indian state of Punjab. And the man who would attempt to arrange his murder, prosecutors said, was an Indian national who had been hired by an official inside the Indian government.
But the plot failed: The man planning the assassination hired a hit man who was, in fact, working for the American government.
The scheme burst into public view on Wednesday, when federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced that they had charged the Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, with murder for hire and conspiracy to commit murder for hire. The allegations could complicate the delicate relations among Washington, Ottawa and New Delhi.
The plot, prosecutors indicated in court documents, was no empty threat. It was linked to the June killing of another Sikh separatist in Canada, and they said that the Indian government official who orchestrated the attempted assassination told Mr. Gupta that there was another target in California.
The indictment included a photo of a roll of hundred-dollar bills that prosecutors said was an advance payment for the New York job. ‘We have so many targets,’ Mr. Gupta told the federal agent he had unwittingly hired to do the killing, the indictment said.
The target of the New York plot was identified by American officials as Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who is general counsel for Sikhs for Justice, which supports the secession of Punjab from India….” Read more at New York Times
Perry's texts
THE WEEKLY READ
Friday, December 1, 2023
How Scott Perry Went Off The Deep End In Effort To Debunk Trump Loss
By Josh Kovensky
“It was just after 8 p.m. ET on Jan. 6, 2021. Law enforcement had just finished clearing the Capitol building, and Congress was beginning to reconvene to finish the task which Stop the Steal supporters had violently disrupted: formalizing Biden’s win, and Trump’s defeat, in the 2020 election.
But Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) had his mind elsewhere.
‘Is this true?’ he texted one of his legislative directors, attaching to the message a press release claiming that an Italian defense contractor had ‘switched votes throughout America’ in the 2020 election.
Perry was inquiring about ItalyGate, the theory which holds that Italian satellites zapped votes in the 2020 elections away from Trump and to Biden.
A new tranche of texts from Perry, an influential figure in several prongs of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, were revealed on Wednesday in a previously sealed filing with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Perry has been fighting to block Special Counsel Jack Smith from accessing records on the congressman’s cell phone.
The filing includes a batch of Perry’s text messages and a lower court order from then-D.C. Chief Judge Beryl Howell allowing some texts to be released. Howell quoted and described dozens of messages in her order, which was revealed on Wednesday before vanishing from the docket later in the day, suggesting that they may have been placed online by mistake.
The messages show how wild conspiracy theories, including ItalyGate and a related tale of a supposed incident involving American soldiers in Germany and voting machine servers animated some of the most harrowing and extreme attempts to overturn the election. Perry, along with then-acting assistant attorney general Jeff Clark, tried to enlist the DOJ in Trump’s attempt to reverse his loss while, texts show, attempting to use Clark’s access to government databases to verify pulp novel-esque allegations of foreign cyber espionage.
Perry didn’t return a request for comment from TPM.
The messages serve as a reminder of the Trump administration’s unique ability to bring fringe figures into powerful government positions.
In November and December 2020, Trump and his allies were casting about for theories or evidence which could attribute his loss to fraud, or at least persuade the persuadable that Biden was, in fact, the loser. That led Perry to communicate with what Howell described in the ruling as a set of ‘cybersecurity individuals,’ including several people who had held senior appointments in the administration’s national security bureaucracy before going on to endorse conspiracy theories in the 2020 election.
Perry was in contact with Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force general who gained prominence on the far-right in 2020 for viral videos where he acted as a sieve for conspiracy theories. In one clip which gained attention, McInerney promoted claims that various foreign nations, including Italy and Pakistan, had hacked into voting machines, and also put forth the idea, reminiscent of spy thrillers, that an ultra-secret CIA program called ‘hammer and scorecard’ had been used to change votes from Trump to Biden.
Howell included texts from McInerney to Perry in which the retired general asked to ‘see if TUCKER would put me on’ before adding that Sidney Powell would be better. ‘I will re-engage the targets,’ Perry replied.
From the texts, Perry appeared to be especially concerned with how messages about supposed foreign cyber interference went out to the public. He exchanged messages with John Mills, a former director for cybersecurity policy, strategy, and international affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense before the election.
Mills has since gone on to become a voting fraud booster, and served as a plaintiff in a 2022 lawsuit seeking to undo a Virginia county’s election results.
Per the filing, Perry gave Mills’ contact information to Trump campaign official Justin Clark in August 2020, telling Clark about ‘cybersecurity information’ that Mills had provided.
By Sept. 14, Perry appeared worried, texting Mills that he ‘hear[s] the [Trump] campaign is going to start the narrative and then the administration is going to roll out the policy’ and that they ‘are running out of time while we wait for the lawyers.’
It’s not clear what that narrative was. But the search for ways to back up the claims of foreign cyber interference also led Perry into more behind-the-scenes, less Fox News-focused efforts.
One such person was Rich Higgins, a former Trump National Security Council staffer who left in 2017 after sending a memo which accused a ‘deep state’ cabal of marxists and Black Lives Matter activists of trying to undermine Trump.
Perry and Higgins corresponded in the days after the election, the filing says, as Trump and those around him grappled with his loss. On Nov. 12, Perry emailed Higgins about an ‘incredibly spooky’ story. The army, Perry wrote, had confiscated election software servers in Germany that had been used by Dominion.
‘The Agency is covering its tracks,’ Perry added.
Higgins played a low-profile but important role in propagating conspiracy theories about the election. On the same day as the Perry email, Higgins told far-right Washington state legislator Matt Shea (R) that the U.S. was undergoing a ‘color revolution;’ later, Higgins appeared in a White House memo advocating for him and others to receive access to NSA signals data to ‘prove” that the election had been stolen.
There’s no indication that Perry was involved in that memo. But the texts do show the congressman pushing for Jeffrey Clark to gain access to classified government records.
As Jan. 6 bore down on Perry and the rest of Trumpworld, his requests and directives appeared to become more frantic.
On Jan. 1, Perry sent Clark ‘relevant information’ via multiple texts, before telling the supposed acting-attorney-general-in-waiting to make sure that the Director of National Intelligence provided ‘exactly what you need. I’m attempting to send you specific questions [r]ight now.’
Clark replied by telling Perry to tell Trump that Gina Haspel ‘needs to get me’ security clearance ‘tickets’ in order to ‘access certain compartments of information otherwise sealed off.’
‘Roger,’ Perry replied. He later texted Clark that ‘POTUS is giving you a presidential security clearance.’
At the time, a 2021 Senate Judiciary Report said, Clark was seeking access to classified records from the DNI to substantiate a theory that the Chinese government had weaponized advanced home thermostats to interfere with voting machines.
The next day, on Jan. 2, Perry texted Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows with yet another request: Could he arrange a meeting between Trump and Italian PM Alberto Conti?
Those messages do not appear in TPM’s archive of texts provided by Mark Meadows to the House Jan. 6 Committee. But it’s clear from other records that Meadows, in the days before Jan. 6, was already acting.
On Dec. 30, he had already sent acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen a request to investigate the ItalyGate conspiracy theory.
‘Can you believe this?’ Rosen replied in a message to another official.” [Talking Points Memo]
Federal Civil Rights Investigation Opened Into Antisemitism at Harvard
There are now federal investigations into complaints of discrimination at several colleges.
Nov. 29, 2023
“The Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Education Department has opened an investigation into allegations of antisemitism at Harvard University, where the campus, like many others, has been roiled by demonstrations and confrontations between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students in the weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
The complaint against Harvard, filed on Tuesday, joins a growing list of federal civil rights investigations into complaints of discrimination based on ‘shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics,’ including at Columbia, Cornell, Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Tampa and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
The list includes a handful of school districts as well, including New York City public schools, Clark County School District in Las Vegas and Hillsborough County Schools in Tampa.
The Office for Civil Rights announced on Nov. 16 that it was investigating such complaints as part of its efforts to ‘take aggressive action to address the alarming nationwide rise in reports of antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and other forms of discrimination and harassment on college campuses and in K-12 schools since the October 7 Israel-Hamas conflict.’
The Office for Civil Rights publicly discloses the existence of the investigations, but it does not routinely reveal who filed a complaint or what it says. However, the office has an obligation under its regulations to investigate any complaint that states a viable legal claim. Universities could lose federal funding for civil rights violations.
It was not clear Wednesday who had filed the official complaint against Harvard, which was originally reported by Fox News Digital and The Boston Globe. The Globe said it had seen a letter from the Department of Education that said that the complaint accused the university of discrimination against students based on their Jewish or Israeli ancestry….” Read more at New York Times
Arizona Officials Charged With Conspiring to Delay Election Results
An indictment accuses two Cochise County supervisors of interfering with the state canvass of votes. The county has been a hotbed of election conspiracy theories.
Nov. 29, 2023
“Two Republican county supervisors in Arizona were indicted Wednesday on felony charges related to their attempts to delay the certification of 2022 election results.
Kris Mayes, the state attorney general, announced in a statement that Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, two of the three supervisors in Cochise County, face charges of interference with an election officer and conspiracy, criticizing what she described as their “repeated attempts to undermine our democracy.”
Neither Ms. Judd nor Mr. Crosby could be reached for comment Wednesday.
Last year, Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby sought to order a hand count of the ballots that had been cast in Cochise, a heavily Republican rural county, citing conspiracy theories that had been raised by local right-wing activists. When a judge ruled against them, they voted to delay certification of the election before eventually relenting under pressure of a court order.
The episode was closely watched by democracy advocates and election law experts, who saw in the supervisors’ machinations a worrying precedent. As Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him became widely accepted in the Republican Party, local Republican officials in several closely contested states used suspicion of the election system on the right to justify delaying the certification of 2022 election results.
In an interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Judd said she did not actually suspect there were any irregularities in the vote in Cochise County. She characterized the move as a protest against the election certification in Maricopa, the large urban county that includes Phoenix, where right-wing activists had made an array of unproven claims of malfeasance.
‘Our small counties, we’re just sick and tired of getting kicked around and not being respected,’ Ms. Judd said.
Katie Hobbs, then Arizona’s secretary of state, sued the supervisors last November, arguing that their protest, which threatened to delay the statewide canvass, would disenfranchise the county’s voters. (The county’s third supervisor, Ann English, a Democrat, has opposed the others’ actions.) Republican candidates lost their races for most of the top statewide races in Arizona’s election, in which Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, was elected governor.
In October, the local Herald/Review newspaper and Votebeat reported that Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby were subpoenaed by Ms. Mayes, a Democrat elected last year, to appear before a state grand jury in the attorney general’s investigation.
Although local Republican officials interfering with election systems in other states since 2020 have faced criminal indictments on other grounds, the Cochise indictments are the first criminal charges filed over a refusal to certify an election….” Read more at New York Times
A Florida GOP Leader, a Moms for Liberty Founder, and Allegations of Group Sex and Rape
Florida Party of Florida Chairman Christian Ziegler addresses attendees at the Republican Party of Florida Freedom Summit, Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023, in Kissimmee, Fla. Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press
“Where to even begin? The investigative journalism outlet Florida Center for Government Accountability has a story today alleging that Christian Ziegler, the chair of the Florida GOP, sexually assaulted a woman. This would be enough to attract attention, but this woman was allegedly having a ménage à trois with him and his wife Bridget, the erstwhile crusading chair of the Sarasota school board and a co-founder of the parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty.
The accusations in the story—which Mother Jones could not independently verify—are wild, to say the least:
The woman, according to sources close to the investigation, alleged that she and both Zieglers had been involved in a longstanding consensual three-way sexual relationship prior to the incident. The incident under investigation by Sarasota police occurred when Christian Ziegler and the woman were alone at the woman’s house, without Bridget Ziegler present, the sources conveyed.
Sources also corroborated that a search warrant was executed on Christian Ziegler’s cell phone and that investigators continue to conduct a forensic examination of the electronic device. Christian Ziegler is also alleged to have secretly videotaped the sexual encounters between the couple and the woman, sources said.
The story links to a police report obtained through a Freedom of Information Request for information involving Christian Ziegler. Nearly every word of the report has been redacted except ‘raped’ and ‘sexual assault complaint.’
If this scandal appeared in a book, it would certainly be banned by Moms for Liberty, which has called for sexually explicit material to be removed from school libraries, especially those that involve same-sex relationships of any kind. The group has been at the forefront of the movement to remove LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum from classrooms.
Ziegler, who spoke at both Moms for Liberty conferences I attended, now serves as a vice president at the Leadership Institute, the decades-old organization that trains conservatives to run for office and has been a sponsor of Moms for Liberty conferences for two years running. She has been praised lavishly by Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, who once said, ‘We should have her in every county!’
Today’s news coincides with the end of Ziegler’s term as Sarasota school board chair. In a Facebook post yesterday, she listed her accomplishments, which included ‘Terminated ‘Gender Diverse Guidelines,’ ‘Eliminated ‘Equity’ Committee,’ and ‘Eliminated ‘equity’ policy & position.’
‘I am optimistic that we have many of the right people who are willing to roll up their sleeves, and make the tough decisions necessary to improve the areas that have needed attention for over a decade,’ she wrote in the post. ‘If each board member remains mission-focused and doesn’t waiver in their responsibility of accountability, then the sky is the limit!’
Neither one of the Zieglers has commented on any of the allegations.” [Mother Jones]
In the West Bank, Release of Prisoners Deepens Support for Hamas
Some people in the West Bank, where frustration with the Palestinian Authority has been simmering for years, believe Hamas and other armed groups are the only ones they can trust to protect them.
By Christina Goldbaum and Hiba Yazbek
Reporting from Deir Abu Masha’al in the West Bank
Nov. 29, 2023
“The two cousins spotted each other on the bus leaving the prison, as shocked to see the other as they were by their sudden freedom. ‘Pinch me,’ Anwar Atta, 18, told his younger cousin. ‘I need to know if this is a dream.’
Then, early Sunday morning, the bus pulled out of Ofer Prison in the West Bank and into a throng of cheering Palestinians. Before the cousins’ feet could touch the ground, they were hoisted into the air and carried through the streets of Ramallah, surrounded by people waving Palestinian and Hamas flags, revving their motorcycle engines and whistling in excitement.
‘This is thanks to the resistance in Gaza,’ Anwar said hours later from his family’s home on the outskirts of the city.
Anwar and his cousin, Mourad Atta, 17, are among the 180 Palestinian teenagers and women freed from Israeli prisons in recent days, the largest such release of prisoners and detainees in more than a decade. Their freedom is part of a deal in which the Palestinians were traded for 81 hostages, many of them children, captured during the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7. The deal also included a temporary cease-fire in the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 13,000 people, according to Gazan officials.
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the elation over the prisoners’ release have deepened support for Hamas in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority has administered cities and towns for more than two decades. Gaza, the other Palestinian enclave, has by contrast been controlled since 2007 by Hamas, a militant group.
Now, as many in the West Bank fear the war could spread to the occupied territory, some believe Hamas and other armed groups are the only ones they can trust to protect them.
The Palestinian Authority — which is controlled by the Fatah political faction — is deeply unpopular and widely seen as a subcontractor to the Israeli occupation. Long-simmering frustrations with the authority’s leadership and accusations of corruption have been exacerbated in the past year by an uptick in violence by Israeli settlers….” Read more at New York Times
A U.S.-Iranian Miscalculation Could Lead to a Larger War, Officials Say
U.S. forces and militias backed by Iran have launched tit-for-tat attacks, fueling concerns as Israeli forces have also clashed with Iranian-backed groups.
By Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Nov. 29, 2023
“Neither Washington nor Tehran wants the conflict in the Gaza Strip to trigger a wider war in the region, officials in both capitals say.
But in the seven weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Iranian-backed militias have launched more than 70 rocket and drone attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. The Pentagon, for its part, has responded with four rounds of airstrikes, killing as many as 15 people, U.S. officials say.
National security officials fear a miscalculation amid tit-for-tat attacks, combined with each side’s belief that the other does not want a larger fight, could trigger exactly that: a regional conflict, just two years after the United States ended 20 years of war in the Middle East and South Asia.
So far, none of the U.S. reprisal attacks have provoked an escalation, even the one last week in Iraq that killed several militants with Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group. The Pentagon said on Tuesday that the attacks had subsided at least temporarily — the most recent being on Nov. 23, the day before an operational pause in the Gaza war began….” Read more at New York Times
“Tunnel rescue mission. After a weekslong rescue mission, Indian authorities have successfully rescued 41 construction workers from a road tunnel in northern India, which had collapsed after a landslide hit. The workers, who were trapped for 17 days, had to receive food, water, and oxygen through a 173-foot pipe while rescuers encountered multiple setbacks. Ultimately, officials turned to ‘rat-hole miners’—miners specializing in narrow tunnels—to dig through the last stretch of debris.’“I removed the last rock and I could see them,’ Munna Qureshi, one of the rat-hole mining experts who assisted in the rescue, told Indian media. ‘They hugged us, lifted us up and thanked us for taking us out. We worked continuously in the last 24 hours. I can’t express my happiness. I have done it for my country.’” [Foreign Policy]
India Ignored Repeated Warnings Before Tunnel Trapped 41 Men
Environmentalists argued that a road project was destabilizing the fragile Himalayan landscape. The government maneuvered to continue it.
By Mujib Mashal and Suhasini Raj
Reporting from New Delhi and Jaipur, India
Nov. 29, 2023
“As the trapped workers came out of the under-construction road tunnel after 17 days, the happy end to a rescue effort that had riveted India set off celebrations across the country.
Gone for the moment were questions about why the 41 men had been put at risk of being entombed in the tunnel in the first place. Instead, television crews outdid one another in excitement and volume, showering praise on the officials involved in the rescue, who lined up on Tuesday with garlands for the workers. Cameras focused on local representatives of India’s governing party, who credited the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
‘Modi makes it possible!’ they chanted in Hindi.
While activists and environmentalists also watched with relief, the scenes carried another, very different meaning for them. They had long warned, in futile court cases and failed tribunal hearings, that the $1.5 billion road-widening project was dangerously destabilizing the already fragile Himalayan landscape. To them, the fact that the work had proceeded anyway, ultimately incurring a disastrous landslide, was another reminder of how Mr. Modi has removed almost every obstacle to getting his way.
‘The focus is on rescue and not the reasons thereof,’ said Mallika Bhanot, an environmental conservationist in Uttarakhand, the northern state that is the site of the tunnel. ‘They do not want to bring attention to it.’
The construction project, which is largely widening more than 800 kilometers, or 500 miles, of roads to connect four major stops of a Hindu pilgrimage route, brings together two pillars of the image Mr. Modi has built: as an ambitious infrastructure developer and a champion of Hindu interests.
The prime minister personally inaugurated the highway project in 2016. In front of tens of thousands of people, Mr. Modi said the improved highways would make travel between the pilgrimage sites so easy that ‘people will remember the work that has been through the project for the next 100 years.’….” Read more at New York Times
“Hospitals under strain. China’s hospitals are facing an overwhelming number of cases of children with respiratory illnesses, with reports of hourslong wait times and queues of hundreds of patients. State media indicates that many hospitals are at full capacity; the Beijing’s Children Hospital, for example, has been at full capacity for the past two months and currently sees more than 9,000 patients a day, according to the Global Times.
World Health Organization (WHO) officials and other infectious disease experts say that the spiking numbers appear to be fueled by children now catching pathogens that they evaded under China’s COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. ‘This is not an indication of a novel pathogen. This is expected. This is what most countries dealt with a year or two ago,’ said Maria Van Kerkhove, the acting director of the WHO’s department of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention. Others have pointed to outbreaks of pneumonia associated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Annie Sparrow, an associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, argues that the WHO must go further in publicly pressing China about the growth of antibiotic resistant microbes. ‘Chinese doctors are once again being silenced and not communicating with their counterparts abroad, which suggests another potentially dangerous cover-up may be underway,” she writes.” [Foreign Policy]
“Finland closes Russia border. Finland has completely sealed its border with Russia after accusing Moscow of engaging in ‘hybrid warfare’ and encouraging migrants to enter the country. Of the 1,000 migrants who have attempted to pass the border without visas or valid documentation since August, Finnish officials said, more than 900 of the cases occurred this month. The border closure is expected to last for at least two weeks; the Kremlin has denied ushering migrants to the border.
‘Finland has a profound reason to suspect that the entry (of migrants) is organized by a foreign state. This deals with Russia’s influencing operations and we won’t accept it,’ said Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo. ‘We don’t accept any attempt to undermine our national security. Russia has caused this situation and it can also stop it.’” [Foreign Policy]
“If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere and you spot green and purple flickers of light sweeping the sky, you may not be seeing an aurora, but Steve, a light phenomenon believed to be the result of a flow of charged particles in the upper atmosphere. Compared to standard auroras, Steve materializes in a ribbonlike shape and typically appears for between 20 minutes and an hour. Steve’s name was inspired by the 2006 animated film Over the Hedge, where a group of animals names a towering, unfamiliar hedge ‘Steve’ to soothe their fears of the unknown. The name stuck here, too—and scientists have officially designated Steve as ‘Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.’” [Foreign Policy]
Britain Restricts Weighing of Gymnasts in Wake of Abuse
Athletes also must be allowed to hydrate regularly when practicing and be permitted visits to the restroom.
Nov. 29, 2023
“The weighing of gymnasts will be restricted under new British rules after a report detailed abuse in the sport, particularly of women and girls.
Gymnasts who are 11 and older in Britain may now be weighed only with their permission and with the permission of a parent if they are under 18. The weighing must be done by sports science or medical practitioners and it must have a ‘scientifically valid rationale.’
Gymnasts 10 and under will no longer be permitted to be weighed at all in a gymnastics setting.
In addition, the new rules require that gymnasts be given opportunities to hydrate regularly when practicing and be allowed visits to the restroom when needed. They also require that children under 12 not be made to practice during normal school hours and that older children can miss class time only under ‘exceptional circumstances.’
An independent investigation in 2022 found that the well being of gymnasts ‘has not been at the center of British Gymnastics’ culture.’…” Read more at New York Times
News Alert: Henry Kissinger, a dominating and polarizing force in US foreign policy, dies at 100
“Henry Kissinger, a former US secretary of state and national security adviser who escaped Nazi Germany in his youth to become one of the most influential and controversial foreign policy figures in American history, has died, according to a statement from his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates. He was 100.
Kissinger was synonymous with US foreign policy in the 1970s. He received a Nobel Peace Prize for helping arrange the end of US military involvement in the Vietnam War and is credited with secret diplomacy that helped President Richard Nixon open communist China to the United States and the West, highlighted by Nixon’s visit to the country in 1972.” Read More at CNN
Frances Sternhagen, Actress Who Thrived in Mature Roles, Dies at 93
Her Tony-winning Broadway career included ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ ‘On Golden Pond’ and’The Heiress.’ On TV she had maternal roles in ‘Cheers’ and ‘Sex and the City.’
“Frances Sternhagen, the Tony Award-winning actress who played leading roles in stage productions of ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ and ‘On Golden Pond’ as formidable older women when she was so young that she had to wear aging makeup, died on Monday at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 93.
Her son Tony Carlin confirmed the death.
Ms. Sternhagen won Tonys as featured actress in a play for her performances in two very different productions. In a 1995 Broadway revival of ‘The Heiress,’ based on Henry James’s novel ‘Washington Square,’ she was Cherry Jones’s well-meaning, matchmaking Aunt Lavinia. In ‘The Good Doctor,’ Neil Simon’s 1973 take on Chekhov, she played multiple roles in comedy sketches.
Ms. Sternhagen came into her own in mature Off Broadway roles: as the strong-willed 70-something-and-up Southern widow in Alfred Uhry’s ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ in 1988, when she was still in her 50s, and the concerned retirement-age wife in Ernest Thompson’s ‘On Golden Pond’ in 1979, when she was 49.
She received Tony nominations for her roles in the original productions of ‘On Golden Pond,’ ‘Equus’ and the musical ‘Angel’ and in revivals of ‘Morning’s at Seven’ and ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.’
People who never saw a Broadway show or even went to the movies may have known Ms. Sternhagen’s face from television. Beginning in the 1980s, when she played the controlling working-class mother of the oddball postal carrier Cliff Clavin on ‘Cheers,’ she sailed through a period of playing maternal figures in memorable recurring roles in a number of hit series.
On ‘ER,’ she was Dr. John Carter’s aristocratic Chicago grandmother. On ‘Sex and the City,’ she was Trey MacDougal’s rich but peculiar mom. Most recently she played the mother of Kyra Sedgwick’s Southern character on the police procedural ‘The Closer.’ She received three Emmy Award nominations, two for ‘Cheers’ and one for ‘Sex and the City.’
Ms. Sternhagen was known to turn down movie roles because they would take her away from her family for too long, but over the years she did appear in some two dozen films. She was Burt Reynolds’s intensely caring sister-in-law in ‘Starting Over’ (1979), a perfectionist magazine researcher in ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ (1988), and the cookbook author Irma Rombauer in ‘Julie & Julia’ (2009). Her other films included ‘The Hospital’ (1971), ‘Independence Day’ (1983) and ‘Misery’ (1990)….” Read more at New York Times