The Full Belmonte, 12/29/21"
“The US has hit a new record average of daily Covid-19 cases, with 254,496 new cases reported in the last week as of yesterday. That shatters a previous record from all the way back in January. Much of that increase is being fueled by the Omicron variant, and while vaccinated and boosted individuals may only experience mild symptoms from Omicron, experts stress that is not the case for unvaccinated people. This surge is also affecting children, with pediatric hospitalizations up 35% in just the past week. In New York City, pediatric admissions have increased five-fold over the past month.” Read more at CNN
“WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. health officials’ decision to shorten the recommended COVID-19 isolation and quarantine period from 10 days to five is drawing criticism from some medical experts and could create more confusion and fear among Americans.
To the dismay of some authorities, the new guidelines allow people to leave isolation without getting tested to see if they are still infectious.
The guidance has raised questions about how it was crafted and why it was changed now, in the middle of another wintertime spike in cases, this one driven largely by the highly contagious omicron variant.
Monday’s action by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cut in half the recommended isolation time for Americans who are infected with the coronavirus but have no symptoms. The CDC similarly shortened the amount of time people who have come into close contact with an infected person need to quarantine.
The CDC has been under pressure from the public and the private sector, including the airline industry, to shorten the isolation time and reduce the risk of severe staffing shortages amid the omicron surge. Thousands of flights have been canceled over the past few days in a mess blamed on omicron.
‘Not all of those cases are going to be severe. In fact, many are going to be asymptomatic,’ CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday. ‘We want to make sure there is a mechanism by which we can safely continue to keep society functioning while following the science.’
CDC officials said the guidance is in keeping with growing evidence that people with the virus are most infectious in the first few days.” Read more at AP News
“The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection has stood down on requests for some documents from the Trump White House after pushback from the Biden administration. This is the first time the administration has insisted the committee scale back its pursuits, though such an exchange isn’t unusual during a congressional inquiry into such high-profile affairs. As a result, the committee won't be getting hundreds of pages of National Security Council records. However, the Biden White House said in a letter earlier this month that those materials didn’t appear to have anything useful for the committee’s purposes.” Read more at CNN
“John Madden, a Hall of Fame football coach who retired young and went on to become a legendary broadcaster and the face of a wildly popular videogame series, has died at age 85, the NFL said.
Madden was perhaps the National Football League’s most enduring personality.
To fans of a certain age, he was the coach who led the Oakland Raiders to a Super Bowl victory in the 1976 season. For millions of Sunday afternoon viewers, he will be remembered as the garrulous commentator who transformed the way people watch sports. To a younger generation of NFL followers, he is known as the face of Electronic Arts’s ‘Madden NFL Football,’ one of the most popular sports videogames of all time.
During a 50-year career in which the game he loved changed so dramatically, Madden enjoyed a popularity that was one of the few constants.
Born in Austin, Minn., in 1936, Madden had an involvement in pro football that once looked as though it would be an altogether shorter affair.
Pat Summerall and John Madden working Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans.PHOTO: RIC FELD/ASSOCIATED PRESS Drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles as a tackle in 1958, Madden suffered a knee injury during his rookie season that ended his playing career before it began.
While recovering, Madden spent time analyzing the game and studying film, setting the stage for his transition into coaching.
Madden gained experience as an assistant on Don Coryell’s staff at San Diego State before joining the Raiders as a linebackers coach in 1967. Two years later, Raiders owner Al Davis promoted Madden to head coach. At age 32, he was the youngest head coach in NFL history.
At a time when the league’s leading coaches were authoritarians such as Vince Lombardi, Paul Brown and Tom Landry, Madden was football’s first player’s coach. He famously didn’t care about facial hair or whether his players wore coats and blazers on the airplane. He didn’t expect players to practice with the same intensity with which they played, either.
John Madden coaching the Oakland Raiders in 1970.PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS His philosophy, he would later write, boiled down to three simple requirements: ‘Be on time. Pay attention and play like hell when I ask you to. There was nothing else I needed.’
Madden’s approach made him an ideal leader for the Raiders, a franchise then known as a halfway house for rejects, castoffs, renegades and retreads. During his 10 years as coach, Madden never suffered a losing season and only missed the playoffs twice. His career regular-season record of 103-32-7 gives him the highest winning percentage in NFL history among coaches with at least 100 victories.
In 1977, Madden led the Raiders to a 32-14 win over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl XI, the franchise’s first championship. Just two years later, he retired at age 42.
John Madden and the Raiders celebrated defeating the Minnesota Vikings 32-14 at the Super Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., in January 1977.PHOTO: TONY TOMSIC/ASSOCIATED PRESS Madden began working as a broadcaster in 1979, when he was one of the first former coaches to work on the national level as a TV analyst. He proceeded to reinvent the role of a football broadcaster.
At a time when few, if any analysts put much time into preparing for broadcasts, Madden treated each game as studiously as if he were still a coach.
Rather than simply describing what he saw, Madden explained it to viewers, drawing X’s and O’s on the screen to illustrate intricacies earlier commentators never mentioned.
At the same time, Madden’s trademark sound effects—'Boom!” “Wham!”—and humorous tangents made him a fan favorite.
As a broadcaster, John Madden famously used the Telestrator to explain football plays to TV viewers.PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS Madden’s deep understanding of the game and bar stool persona allowed him to connect with viewers as effortlessly as he once had with his players. He is the only announcer to call Super Bowls on each of the four major networks and during his three-decade career in the booth, he earned a record 16 Emmys as a sportscaster.
‘John Madden is the best sports analyst in television history,’ said Cris Collinsworth, who succeeded Madden in the booth at NBC in 2009.
Madden’s enduring popularity made him one of the great product pitchmen of all time. He peddled everything from beer and hardware to foot fungus spray, though his most famous endorsement is the EA Sports videogame series that bears his name.
The EA Sports videogame series named after John Madden has been embraced by fans.PHOTO: ED RIEKER/AP IMAGES FOR NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE When Madden was first approached by executives from EA Sports about a football game in 1984, he conceived of the series as an educational tool. He demanded input in the creative process and wanted it to be as realistic as possible.
Meeting his requirements took time—the first edition of ‘John Madden Football’ wasn’t released until 1988—but the result was one of the most popular sports series of all time.
As of 2020, the Madden NFL series has sold 130 million copies, making it one of the bestselling sports videogames of all time and keeping Madden’s name alive for another generation of football fans.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
John Madden was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in August 2006.PHOTO: JAY LAPRETE/BLOOMBERG NEWS 
Senator Harry Reid in 2014. In his three-decade Senate tenure he oversaw the passage of landmark legislation, including a sweeping economic stimulus, a new set of rules for Wall Street and the Affordable Care Act.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
“Harry M. Reid, the Democrat who rose from childhood poverty in the rural Nevada desert to the heights of power in Washington, where he steered the Affordable Care Act to passage as Senate majority leader, died on Tuesday in Henderson, Nev. He was 82.
Mr. Reid had been treated for pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 2018, but lived to see the Las Vegas airport renamed for him earlier this month. His death was confirmed in statements from Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader.
Even by the standards of the political profession, where against-the-odds biographies are common and modest roots an asset, what Mr. Reid overcame was extraordinary. He was raised in almost Dickensian circumstances in tiny Searchlight, Nev.: His home had no indoor plumbing, his father was an alcoholic miner who eventually died by suicide, and his mother helped the family survive by taking in laundry from local brothels.
After two decades of campaigns in Nevada marked by success, setback and recovery, Mr. Reid was elected to the Senate in 1986. He became the chamber’s Democratic leader after the 2004 election.
But it was not until his colleague Barack Obama was elected president four years later that Mr. Reid was able to meld his deep knowledge of congressional rules, his facility with horse-trading and his cussed determination to unify his 60-seat majority and pass landmark legislation.
‘If Harry said he would do something, he did it,’ President Biden, who served as Mr. Obama’s vice president, said in a statement Tuesday evening. ‘If he gave you his word, you could bank on it. That’s how he got things done for the good of the country for decades.’
Pushing through a sweeping economic stimulus after the Great Recession, a new set of rules governing Wall Street and the most significant expansion of health care coverage since the Great Society of the 1960s, all with scant Republican support, Mr. Reid became, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the indispensable lawmakers of the Obama era.
‘The records will be written about the eight years of Obama and Reid,’ Mr. Reid boasted shortly after he announced in 2015 that he would not seek re-election the following year.
Yet the three-decade Senate tenure of this soft-spoken yet ferociously combative Nevadan, a middleweight boxer in his youth, also traced the chamber’s evolution from a collegial and consensus-oriented institution to the partisan and fractured body it has become. Republicans placed some of the blame on Mr. Reid for this change, pointing to his 2013 decision to upend Senate rules by doing away with the filibuster on most nominations by a president.
Mr. Reid, though, reflected the broader leftward shift of his party and his state. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, when Nevada finally grew large enough to require a second seat, he arrived in the capital as a moderate western Democrat: opposed to abortion rights, largely supportive of gun rights and uneasy about immigration.
But as Nevada grew from an overwhelmingly rural, white redoubt of ranches and mines to a polyglot gambling mecca in which 70 percent of voters live in the Las Vegas area, Mr. Reid adapted as a matter of necessity. He won his final re-election in 2010, a dismal year for Democrats nationally, thanks in part to an outpouring of support from his state’s rapidly growing Hispanic and Asian communities after his popularity among many other Nevadans had plummeted in the economic collapse.
‘I may have won without them, but I doubt it,’ Mr. Reid said in a later interview about his support among immigrants in his 2010 campaign.
But after Democrats lost the Senate majority in 2014, and after he had lost nearly all his sight in his right eye the next year in a serious accident in his home during a workout, Mr. Reid decided not to run for a sixth term. He said he did not want to be one of those senators who served well into old age.
While he was willing to adjust with the times politically, he remained a stylistic throwback. A Mormon who neither drank nor smoked, he also shunned his state’s principal industry, claiming with his characteristic bluntness that ‘the only people who make money from gambling are the joints and government.’” Read more at New York Times
“In February, with the images of the violent insurrection in Washington still fresh in the minds of Americans, newly confirmed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin took the unprecedented step of signing a memo directing commanding officers across the military to institute a one-day stand-down to address extremism within the nation’s armed forces.
The stand-down came in response to the participation and the subsequent arrests of several veterans and at least one active duty service member, who along with thousands of supporters of former President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, stormed the U.S. Capitol in a melee that sent lawmakers scrambling for safety, left one person fatally shot by Capitol Police and caused millions of dollars in damages to the building largely seen as the symbol of American democracy.
Austin’s order, which also came as America as a whole was grappling with how to address systemic racism, was the latest in a series of decades-long efforts by the military to purge its ranks of extremists and white supremacists. Last week, in response to the order the military issued new rules to deal with extremism that included social media usage policy updates where liking and reposting white nationalist and extremist content could result in disciplinary action. The DOD also updated its screening of recruits and is looking at how to prepare troops who are retiring from being targeted by extremist organizations.
But an AP investigation found that despite the new rules, racism and extremism remain an ongoing concern in the military.
The investigation shows the new guidelines do not address ongoing disparities in military justice under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the legal code that governs the U.S. armed forces. Numerous studies, including a report last year from the Government Accountability Office, show Black and Hispanic service members were disproportionately investigated and court-martialed. A recent Naval Postgraduate School study found that Black Marines were convicted and punished at courts-martial at a rate five times higher than other races across the Marine Corps.
The AP investigation also shows the military’s judicial system has no explicit category for bias-motivated crimes – something the federal government, at least 46 states, and the District of Columbia have on the books – making it difficult to quantify crimes prompted by prejudice.
As a result, investigative agencies such as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service or Army Criminal Investigative Division also don’t have a specific hate crime category, which impacts how they investigate cases.” Read more at AP News
“WASHINGTON — President Biden’s commission to study structural revisions to the Supreme Court found one potential change both Democrats and Republicans have said they could support: implementing term limits for the justices, who currently have lifetime tenure.
Yet the bipartisan support among legal experts and the public for term limits isn’t catching on among elected officials on Capitol Hill who would be the starting point on any alterations to the makeup of the Supreme Court. Impatient liberals clamoring for change say enacting term limits would take far too long, while Republican lawmakers are loath to endorse changes they are characterizing as part of a broader effort from Democrats to politicize the judiciary.” Read more at Boston Globe
Proud Boys members Zachary Rehl, left, and Ethan Nordean, left, walked toward the US Capitol in Washington, in support of President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“A federal judge on Tuesday refused to dismiss an indictment charging four alleged leaders of the far-right Proud Boys with conspiring to attack the US Capitol to stop Congress from certifying President Biden’s electoral victory.
US District Judge Timothy Kelly rejected defense attorneys’ arguments that the four men — Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Charles Donohoe — are charged with conduct that is protected by the First Amendment right to free speech.
Kelly said the defendants had many nonviolent ways to express their opinions about the 2020 presidential election.
‘Defendants are not, as they argue, charged with anything like burning flags, wearing black armbands, or participating in mere sit-ins or protests,’ Kelly wrote in his 43-page ruling. ‘Moreover, even if the charged conduct had some expressive aspect, it lost whatever First Amendment protection it may have had.’’
Nordean, Biggs, Rehl, and Donohoe were indicted in March on charges including conspiracy and obstructing an official proceeding. All four of them remain jailed while they await a trial scheduled for May.” Read more at Boston Globe
“National security police in Hong Kong have raided another pro-democracy news outlet and arrested several people associated with the publication. After the raid, Stand News announced it would immediately cease publication and dismiss all employees. Among those arrested are Hong Kong pop star Denise Ho, who is a former Stand News board member. A government notice claimed the raid and arrests were a result of a ‘conspiracy to publish seditious publications.’ The raid comes at the end of a difficult year for press freedoms in Hong Kong, where a controversial national security law looms large.” Read more at CNN
“NEW DELHI — India has blocked a charity founded by Mother Teresa from accepting foreign donations for its humanitarian work.
It was not made clear why the government refused Monday to renew the license of the organization, the Missionaries of Charity, under the country’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. The group can appeal, but for now, a major source of funding has been cut off.
The news came around a tense Christmastime, when churches have been vandalized and celebrations interrupted by hundreds of right-wing Hindus across the country.
The rise in attacks on Christians, who make up about 2 percent of India’s population, is part of a broader shift in which religious minorities feel less safe. Anti-Christian vigilantes are sweeping through villages, storming churches, burning Christian literature, attacking schools, and assaulting worshippers.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Two Save the Children staff who were reported missing in eastern Myanmar after an attack allegedly carried out by the country’s military junta have been confirmed dead, the organization says. At least 30 people including women and children were killed in the attack last week, which has attracted international condemnation. Yesterday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the attack ‘unacceptable’ and said the US would continue to urge for a restoration of democracy to the Southeast Asian country. Myanmar has been the site of massacres, mass arrests, torture, forced displacements and other violence since a military coup toppled the government in February.” Read more at CNN
“Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, may be called in for questioning in a lawsuit regarding Google’s ‘incognito mode’ feature. Plaintiffs in the 2020 lawsuit have accused Google of illegally invading their privacy by tracking internet use while Google Chrome browsers were set in ‘private’ mode. According to a court filing in September, Pichai was warned in 2019 that describing the company's incognito browsing mode as ‘private’ was problematic, but the company stayed the course because Pichai did not want the feature ‘under the spotlight.’ Google has spoken out against the lawsuit, and says it makes it clear that incognito mode only stops data from being saved to a user's device.
“Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andrew Clyde have racked up more than $100,000 in fines for not wearing masks on the House floor.” Read more at New York Times
“Poorer countries are getting more Covid-19 shots, but deliveries remain slow. Low-income countries, where around one-tenth of the global population lives, have received less than 2% of all vaccine doses as the Omicron variant spreads and the pandemic drags into 2022. Wealthy countries are still receiving a disproportionate share, drawing calls by global health officials to close the gap to help curtail new variants.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Walmart is facing a public outcry in China over Xinjiang. The big-box retailer is facing backlash after a U.S. law barred most imports from the Chinese region where many Western governments have flagged forced-labor and other human-rights concerns. Some consumers in China said Walmart had stopped stocking Xinjiang-made items and said they would boycott the company in response, part of an online outcry mirroring past nationalistic consumer campaigns encouraged by state-affiliated entities.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Covid-19 could disrupt jury deliberations Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial. U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan, who is presiding over the case, said in court in New York that she was concerned about an ‘escalating risk’ that jurors or trial participants may need to quarantine because of the spread of the Omicron variant.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Older Americans are falling victim to fraud, physical violence and neglect as family isolation and staffing shortages erode safeguards. Elder-abuse cases, which have been on the rise for years, are expected to continue climbing even after the pandemic ends due in part to the aging U.S. population and the shortage of trained and licensed caregivers. Stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures left older adults isolated and at times sheltering with abusers, either family or caregivers who used the risk of Covid-19 as a weapon—threatening to send them to a nursing home, for instance, or to cough on them if they didn’t give them money. The number of elder-fraud victims increased 55% between 2019 and 2020, the latest data available, according to an FBI report.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Lives Lived: Thomas Lovejoy spent decades trying to preserve the Amazon rainforest. He also helped create the public TV series ‘Nature’ and popularized the term ‘biological diversity.’ Lovejoy died at 80.” Read more at New York Times
“New digital outlets and nonprofits are filling some of the gap left by fading local papers. But many are providing community-service information more than traditional accountability journalism, Axios Media Trends author Sara Fischer writes.
Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America, a journalism nonprofit, said: ‘The decline of local newspapers has not just led to more government corruption and waste, but also polarization and misinformation.’
The U.S. and Canada now have 700+ independent local news startups, according to Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION), a trade organization.
By comparison, at least 100 newspapers closed during COVID, said Penny Abernathy, a news-desert expert at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, formerly at UNC.
Without more government support, the U.S. could lose 100 more newspapers next year and another 500 over the next five years, she estimates.
Between the lines: Many local upstarts and nonprofits are still small compared to the newspapers that once dominated American journalism.
Most of LION's members (80%) have four or fewer employees. Many are individuals writing newsletters or blogs.
Fran Wills, CEO of the Local Media Consortium, which represents hundreds of local newspapers, said: ‘People are looking at local media in a different way, and starting to value it in a higher way than they might have pre-pandemic.’” Read more at Axios