The Full Belmonte, 1/20/2022
“President Joe Biden held a news conference yesterday marking his first year in office. In his address, he touted major strides in Covid-19 vaccination efforts, but also the challenges that lie ahead as many priorities in his agenda remain stalled in Congress, including the Build Back Better Act and voting rights legislation. On the topic of Ukraine, where tens of thousands of Russian troops have amassed along the border, Biden predicted Russia ‘will move in’ to Ukraine, citing concerns by the country's president, Vladimir Putin, even as he acknowledged disunity within NATO over how to respond to a ‘minor incursion.’ Shortly after those remarks, the White House issue a clarification stating that a potential Russian invasion ‘will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our Allies.’” Read more at CNN
“As Democrats steeled themselves for Wednesday’s defeat of the party’s voting rights plank in the Senate, President Biden told reporters he accomplished more than any other president in his first year and vowed to take his legislative wish list, including bits of his moribund Build Back Better agenda, out on the campaign trail this year.
During a nearly two-hour news conference, the president defended his leadership, said he plans to seek reelection with Vice President Harris on the ticket and assailed Republicans for what he said is their politically motivated fear of compromises that would otherwise benefit the American people. He did not mention that Democrats have blocked his legislative ambitions.
Asked if he overestimated his ability to unify the country, Biden said the U.S. is ‘not as unified as it should be.’
Biden said the United States and NATO allies are prepared to deliver ‘severe costs and significant harm’ in the form of economic sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine, where it has 100,000 troops massed at the border. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to test the United States and NATO, Biden added. ‘I think he will regret having done it. … My guess is he will move in,” he told reporters. ‘He has to do something.’
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet Friday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva to continue diplomatic talks (Reuters), but Biden suggested Moscow’s representatives may not know exactly what Putin is preparing to do to try to block NATO expansion westward. He said he is open to a third summit with the Russian president.” Read more at The Hill
“Senate Democrats suffered a major defeat yesterday in their efforts to pass voting rights legislation -- a key issue for the party, which is under pressure to take action ahead of the midterm elections. An attempt by Democrats to change filibuster rules in order to pass a voting bill failed amid opposition from moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. After the vote, Sinema released a statement saying she opposed the change because it would ‘deepen our divisions’ and ‘risk repeated radical reversals in federal policy.’ The proposed rules change -- to allow for a ‘talking filibuster’ on the legislation -- would have forced lawmakers to come to the Senate floor and speak in opposition. Once those speeches end, the Senate would be able to hold a simple majority vote for final passage.” Read more at CNN
“The Supreme Court cleared the way yesterday for the release of presidential records from the Trump White House to a congressional committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol. The high court's order means that more than 700 documents will be transferred to Congress that could shed light on the events leading up to the insurrection. The select committee is seeking those documents as it explores Trump's role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That includes his appearance at a January 6 rally in which he directed followers to go to the Capitol where lawmakers were set to certify the election results and ‘fight’ for their county. The documents include activity logs, schedules, speech notes and three pages of handwritten notes from then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows -- paperwork that could reveal goings-on inside the West Wing as Trump on the day of the riot.” Read more at CNN
Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, the first pontiff in centuries to leave the role.
“Berlin (CNN) Pope Benedict XVI knew about priests who abused children but failed to act when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, an inquest found Thursday, rejecting Benedict's long-standing denials in a damning judgment.
‘He was informed about the facts,’ lawyer Martin Pusch said, as the Westpfahl Spilker Wastl law firm announced the findings of an investigation into historic sexual abuse at the Munich Archdiocese over several decades. The report was commissioned by the church itself.
‘We believe that he can be accused of misconduct in four cases,’ Pusch said. ‘Two of these cases concern abuses committed during his tenure and sanctioned by the state. In both cases, the perpetrators remained active in pastoral care.’
Benedict continues to deny the allegations, the firm said Thursday. He has repeatedly rejected claims that he knowingly covered-up abuse, including in 2013 when he wrote: ‘I can only, as you know, acknowledge it with profound consternation. But I never tried to cover up these things.’” Read more at CNN
Hugo Lowell in Washington
“The former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack that Donald Trump hosted secret meetings in the White House residence in days before 6 January, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The former senior Trump aide also told House investigators that the details of whether Trump actually intended to march to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse rally would be memorialized in documents provided to the US Secret Service, the sources said.
The select committee’s interview with Grisham, who was Melania Trump’s chief of staff when she resigned on 6 January, was more significant than expected, the sources said, giving the panel new details about the Trump White House and what the former US president was doing before the Capitol attack.
Grisham gave House investigators an overview of the chaotic final weeks in the Trump White House in the days leading up to the Capitol attack, recalling how the former president held off-the-books meetings in the White House residence, the sources said.
The secret meetings were apparently known by only a small number of aides, the sources said. Grisham recounted that they were mostly scheduled by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and that the former chief usher, Timothy Harleth, would wave participants upstairs, the sources said.
Harleth, the former director of rooms at the Trump International Hotel before moving with the Trumps to the White House in 2017, was once one of the former first family’s most trusted employees, according to a top former White House aide to Melania Trump.
But after Harleth sought to ingratiate himself with the Biden transition team after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election in order to keep his White House role, Trump and Meadows moved to fire him before Melania Trump stepped in to keep him until Biden’s inauguration.
Grisham told the select committee she was not sure who exactly Trump met with in the White House residence, but provided Harleth’s name and the identities of other Trump aides in the usher’s office who might know of the meetings, the sources said.
The Guardian previously reported that Trump made several phone calls from the Yellow Oval Room and elsewhere in the White House residence to lieutenants at the Willard hotel in Washington the night before the Capitol attack, telling them to stop Joe Biden’s certification.
Trump increasingly retreated to the White House residence to conduct work as his presidency progressed, according to another former Trump administration official, as he felt less watched by West Wing aides than in the Oval Office.
Towards the end of his presidency, the former Trump administration official said, an aide to former White House adviser Peter Navarro tried at least once to quietly usher into the residence Sidney Powell, a lawyer pushing lies about election fraud, to speak with Trump.
A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment on Grisham’s interview that took place the first week of January. Harleth did not respond to questions about the meetings in the White House residence when reached last week by phone.
Over the course of her hours-long interview, Grisham told House investigators that the mystery surrounding Trump’s promise at the Ellipse rally that he would march with his supporters to the Capitol might be resolved in Trump White House documents, the sources said.
The former president’s purported intention to go to the Capitol has emerged as a crucial issue for the select committee, as they examine whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy coordinating his political plan to stop Biden’s certification with the insurrection.
Trump’s promise is significant as it served as one of the primary motivations for his supporters to march to the Capitol alongside militia groups like the Oath Keepers, and was used by far-right activists like Alex Jones to encourage the crowd along the route.
But Trump never went to the Capitol and instead returned to the White House, where he watched the attack unfold on television – after being informed by the Secret Service before the insurrection that they could not guarantee his security if he marched to the Capitol.
The select committee is now trying to untangle whether Trump made a promise that he perhaps had no intention of honoring because he hoped to incite an insurrection that stopped the certification – his only remaining play to get a second term – one of the sources said.
Grisham told the select committee that Trump’s intentions – and whether the Secret Service had been told Trump had decided not to march to the Capitol – should be reflected in the presidential line-by-line, the document that outlines the president’s movements, the sources said.
The chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, has told reporters the panel is already seeking information from the Secret Service about what plans they had for Trump on January 6, as well as what evacuation strategies they had for then-vice president Mike Pence.
But the presidential line-by-line, which gets sent to the Secret Service, could also reveal discussions about security concerns and suggest a new line of inquiry into why an assessment about conditions that were too dangerous for the president were not disseminated further.
But the presidential line-by-line, which gets sent to the Secret Service, could also reveal discussions about security concerns and suggest a new line of inquiry into why an assessment about conditions that were too dangerous for the president were not disseminated further.
Grisham also told the select committee about the necessary coordination between the Trump White House, the Secret Service and organizers of the ‘Save America’ rally at the Ellipse on 6 January in order to ensure Trump’s appearance, the sources said.
The former Trump aide suggested to the select committee that Trump was determined to speak at the rally once he heard about its existence, the sources said, and was constantly on the phone to oversee the event’s optics, the sources said.” Read more at The Guardian
“The Central Intelligence Agency has determined that a foreign country is probably not mounting a global attack aimed at U.S. personnel who have reported painful and sometimes debilitating physical symptoms, a significant finding that could undermine some officials’ suspicion that Russia is to blame for a years-long series of mysterious illnesses.
‘We assess it is unlikely that a foreign actor, including Russia, is conducting a sustained, worldwide campaign harming U.S. personnel with a weapon or mechanism,’ said a senior CIA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the agency.
That leaves open the possibility that a foreign power could be responsible for cases that cannot be attributed to medical conditions or other factors, the official said.
Since the first cases of personnel suffering from symptoms including dizziness and headaches were reported at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2016, government investigators have reviewed more than 1,000 cases of what officials have termed ‘anomalous health incidents,’ the official said.
The symptoms, which are accompanied by sensations such as ringing in the ears, have come to be known commonly as Havana syndrome, and have been reported by intelligence, diplomatic and military personnel on every continent except Antarctica.
The majority of cases could be attributed to a preexisting medical condition or environmental or other factors, the senior official said. “A few dozen” of those incidents, which the official called ‘the toughest cases,’ could not be explained and will receive further scrutiny, the official said. ‘Our work is continuing, and we are not done yet.’
But another U.S. official said the category of unexplained cases was larger than a few dozen and noted that other investigations are pending, including by a panel of independent experts and other government agencies, and they might reach different conclusions than those of the CIA.” Read more at Washington Post
“With more than 18 million global coronavirus cases reported last week alone, the head of the World Health Organization says there is still no clear end in sight as health care systems remained overburdened by the influx of patients. ‘This pandemic is nowhere near over,’ WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, adding the next few weeks will be critical for strained health care workers. In the US, about 63% of the total population is fully vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19, according to data published yesterday from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC experts also say a Covid-19 vaccine for children under the age of 5 could be available within a month. Read more at CNN
““NBC will not send any announcers to the Beijing Winter Olympics due to COVID-19 safety concerns. It's the second Olympic Games now marred by the threat of COVID-19. China recently announced tickets would not be sold to the public for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games.” Read more at NPR
“The Biden administration defended the use of a controversial Trump-era border policy that allows authorities to swiftly remove migrants encountered at the US southern border. A Justice Department spokesman cited Covid-19 concerns as the main rationale for invoking the policy, known as Title 42. The use of the authority has drawn fierce criticism from immigrant advocates, attorneys and health experts, who argue the policy has no health basis and puts migrants in harm's way. The United Nations refugee agency has also pushed back on the restrictions.” Read more at CNN
“The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing Thursday on the possibility of creating an independent immigration court system . The hearing comes as U.S. immigration courts have hit a historic backlog jam not seen in decades, sparking years-long delays for immigrants seeking asylum, according to a new report. Pending cases at the end of December reached 1.6 million — the largest ever in the court's four-decade history, according to the report released Tuesday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Though the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered courtrooms and contributed to the logjam, the most alarming cause is the rate by which the Homeland Security Department, which oversees immigration enforcement, is adding new cases to the pile, according to the report.” Read more at USA Today
“The first flights carrying fresh water and other aid to Tonga finally arrived Thursday after the Pacific nation's main airport runway was cleared of ash left by a huge volcanic eruption . New Zealand and Australia each sent military transport planes carrying water containers, various supplies and communications equipment. The deliveries were dropped off without the military personnel coming in contact with people at the airport in Tonga. That's because Tonga is desperate to make sure foreigners don't bring in the coronavirus. It has not had any outbreaks of COVID-19 and has reported just a single case since the pandemic began. U.N. officials report about 84,000 people — more than 80% of Tonga's population — have been impacted by the volcano's eruption, including three deaths, U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said.” Read more at USA Today
“MADRID (AP) — When the coronavirus pandemic was first declared, Spaniards were ordered to stay home for more than three months. For weeks, they were not allowed outside even for exercise. Children were banned from playgrounds, and the economy virtually stopped.
But officials credited the draconian measures with preventing a full collapse of the health system. Lives were saved, they argued.
Now, almost two years later, Spain is preparing to adopt a different COVID-19 playbook. With one of Europe’s highest vaccination rates and its most pandemic-battered economies, the government is laying the groundwork to treat the next infection surge not as an emergency but an illness that is here to stay. Similar steps are under consideration in neighboring Portugal and in Britain.
The idea is to move from crisis mode to control mode, approaching the virus in much the same way countries deal with flu or measles. That means accepting that infections will occur and providing extra care for at-risk people and patients with complications.
Spain’s center-left prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, wants the European Union to consider similar changes now that the surge of the omicron variant has shown that the disease is becoming less lethal.” Read more at AP News
“A leaked Oath Keepers list names 20 current military members.The Pentagon knew it had a problem with extremism in its ranks, but leaned on a vague policy that did not outright ban all types of participation with extremist groups.” Read more at USA Today
“Two of the biggest insurance companies aren’t renewing policies for thousands of multimillion-dollar homes in California due to the risk of wildfires. AIG and Chubb want to raise rates to cover their perceived risks but are coming up against tight state regulations. Mass-market insurers have done non-renewals for years.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“The CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom is back at work. Vishal Garg of Better.com took a break from his duties last month after laying off 9% of the company’s workforce during a videoconferencing call. Millions of people have watched a video of the infamous Zoom meeting posted online. The head of the online mortgage lending business has apologized.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard is in line with its plan to be the Netflix of gaming.
The deal would set the company to move gamers from playing on pricey hardware to playing on the cloud by streaming games on any internet-connected device with a screen, like viewers do with videos on—you guessed it—Netflix. Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service accounted for 60% of the $3.7 billion in consumer spending on cloud-game services, according to the research firm Omdia, which expects that to grow to $12 billion by 2026. The number of Game Pass subscribers has grown 39% in the past year to 25 million, Microsoft said Tuesday.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Many older people have great sex lives, research shows.
As the stress of the Covid-19 pandemic hurts many people’s intimate lives, now is a great time to turn to an untapped group of experts for sex help: grandparents. Though more often stereotyped as consumers of calcium supplements than of the Kama Sutra, many seniors are sexually active—and sexually satisfied—according to author and retired sex therapist Barry McCarthy. Those who are, he says, tend to focus on the quality of lovemaking, not the quantity. For older adults, one way to keep things spicy is to acknowledge that there’s more to sex than intercourse, he says. Other tips include scheduling intimacy, more actively communicating desires and preferences and adapting to the ways bodies change with age.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“The Sundance Film Festival, one of the biggest showcases of independent films, kicks off virtually for the second year in a row Thursday after organizers canceled its in-person events due to the spread of the omicron variant of coronavirus. The 11-day festival in Park City, Utah, has been the launching pad for a ton of great indie movies over the years, from Oscar-ready films like ‘In the Bedroom’ and ‘Precious,’ to the horror gorefest ‘Saw’. Some highlights this year include the W. Kamau Bell-directed docu-series ‘We Need to Talk About Cosby’ and Amy Poehler's ‘Luci and Desi,’ a documentary on the relationship between Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz.” Read more at USA Today
Alize Cornet celebrates after winning her second-round match at the Australian Open against No. 3 seed Garbine Muguruza on Thursday, Jan. 20, 2022.Mark Metcalfe, Getty Images
“France's Alize Cornet, ranked No. 61 in the world, bounced No. 3 seed Garbiñe Muguruza 6-3, 6-3 in the second round of the Australian Open in Melbourne on Thursday. Cornet is appearing in her 63rd career Grand Slam tournament, the past 60 in a row. She never has made it past the fourth round at a major.
Spain's Muguruza, a two-time Grand Slam champion and the the runner-up in Australia in 2020, became the highest-seeded player to lose a match.
Head here to see more of the best photos from the 2022 Australian Open.” Read more at USA Today
