The Full Belmonte, 1/29/2022
The 10 billion vaccine dose milestone
“On Friday, the world reached a milestone of 10 billion vaccine doses administered globally since the first were given in late 2020. But although that’s enough for everyone in the world to have gotten at least one dose, inequity continues to plague the vaccine distribution process.” [Vox] Read more at New York Times / Shashank Bengali
“High-income countries like the US and many European nations have vaccination rates in the 60 to 70 percent range, with some, like Portugal, even higher. Although the wealthiest 107 countries in the world contain 54 percent of the earth’s population, they’ve received 71 percent of vaccines given.” [Vox] Read more at Bloomberg / Drew Armstrong
“But in poor nations vaccination rates are dismal; only about 9.8 percent of people in poor nations have received at least one dose. That statistic seems to be acutely felt in Africa, which has received only 6 percent of vaccine doses.” [Vox] Read more at Brookings / Michel Sidibé
“The Covax vaccine-sharing initiative was supposed to ensure increased access to Covid-19 vaccines for poorer countries. After a burst of recent progress, Covax now says it can’t receive any new doses because it’s run out of funding for essential supplies like syringes.” [Vox] Read more at FT / Donato Paolo Mancini
“Largely due to vaccine inequity, many nations aren’t on track meet the World Health Organization’s goal to have 70 percent of the population inoculated by the middle of the year. Low vaccination rates likely mean we’ll continue to see more mutations and virus variants.” [Vox] Read more at CNBC / Holly Ellyatt
“(CNN)The January 6 Select Committee has issued subpoenas for 14 Republicans from seven states who served on bogus slates of Trump electors in 2020 as part of the Trump campaign's scheme to subvert the Electoral College.
The GOP leaders from the states served as ‘Chair’ and ‘Secretary’ on the slates of fake electors designed to be alternates should Republicans succeed in denying the certifications of the actual electoral votes that were won by Joe Biden.
The scheme didn't work, and then-Vice President Mike Pence certified the election results on January 6 when the congressional session reconvened after being interrupted by a mob of pro-Trump rioters.
‘The Select Committee is seeking information about attempts in multiple states to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the planning and coordination of efforts to send false slates of electors to the National Archives’ said Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the committee, of this batch of subpoenas. ‘We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme.’
In its subpoena letters, the panel says it has in its possession these fake elector certificates from the National Archives. The committee also says it has documentation showing that these delegations sent the bogus electors to Congress "as a justification to delay or block the certification of the election" and specifically for Pence to consider while in his role as President of the Senate when he certified the 2020 presidential election. The panel received all 700-plus pages from the National Archives last week that were previously tied up in litigation after the Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump could not block the panel from receiving them.
The committee subpoenaed the following chairperson and secretary of each group of so-called alternate electors. Each state pair is listed as chairperson and secretary respectively.” Read more at CNN
“WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has deployed the troops and military hardware needed to invade all of Ukraine, the Pentagon’s top leaders said on Friday, as senior Defense Department officials warned that the tense standoff was leading the United States, its NATO allies and Russia into uncharted territory.
Russia has assembled more than 100,000 troops at Ukraine’s borders, the officials said, publicly confirming for the first time what intelligence analysts have described for weeks. Those troops, Pentagon officials said, have the ability to move throughout Ukraine, far beyond an incursion into only the border regions.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III described a bristling array of Russian combined arms formations, artillery and rockets assembled at the Ukrainian border, which he said ‘far and away exceeds what we would typically see them do for exercises.’
Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was more blunt: ‘I think you’d have to go back quite a while to the Cold War days to see something of this magnitude.’” Read more at New York Times
“Republicans are pushing President Biden to be tougher on Russia over its aggression toward Ukraine, but their isolationist far-right flank is denying them unity on the issue.
Some of former President Trump’s closest allies have questioned why the U.S. would side with Kyiv over Moscow at all and expressed skepticism that it’s worth pouring American resources into the conflict.
Top GOP leaders espousing the party’s traditional hawkish views have urged the Biden administration to impose sanctions and bolster Ukraine’s military capacity to counter Russia’s troop buildup along their shared border in recent weeks after its past invasion of Crimea in 2014.
But Republicans more closely aligned with Trump — who during his presidency at times expressed pro-Russia sentiment — argue that America should stay out of it.
‘Despite claims by war hawks on both sides of the aisle, it is not in our national interest to spill American blood and treasure in Ukraine. A nation that cannot effectively secure its own border and protect its own territorial integrity cannot be responsible for doing so for nations in Eastern Europe,’ said Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.).
‘Russia invading Ukraine is not an immediate threat to the security of the American people, homeland, and way of life. The flow of dangerous drugs, crime, and criminals over our sovereign border is,’ echoed Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.).
Others are suggesting, without evidence, that Biden’s actions to side with Ukraine could benefit the business interests of his son, Hunter, who previously served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) argued that Biden is ‘compromised’ and renewed her regular calls for his impeachment.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), however, said this week that he thinks Biden is ‘moving in the right direction’ to deter Russian aggression.
The Defense Department announced Monday that 8,500 U.S. troops were placed on ‘heightened alert’ for potential deployment to Eastern Europe to bolster NATO defense forces, though Biden has emphasized he will not be putting puts on the ground in Ukraine itself. That came after Biden met with Defense Department officials at Camp David over the weekend to discuss his options.” Read more at The Hill
“WASHINGTON—The U.S. intelligence community’s approach to classifying vast amounts of information is so flawed that it harms national security and diminishes public trust in government, according to Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of national intelligence.
The acknowledgment of such concerns about how the nation’s spy agencies choose what information to keep secret under various classification levels is among the most significant by a president’s sitting intelligence chief, government transparency advocates said, and could indicate broader interest in the Biden administration for loosening restrictive access to some of the government’s growing collection of secrets.
‘It is my view that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner’ with allies, policy makers and the public, Ms. Haines wrote in a letter earlier this month to Sens. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Jerry Moran (R., Kan.), which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The letter was in response to an October request for information from the senators, who have pushed for overhauls of the declassification system to assist federal agencies struggling to process a large volume of secret information that is no longer sensitive, such as backlogged historical records Congress has said must be released. Messrs. Wyden and Moran have said classification costs taxpayers about $18.5 billion annually.
It is not publicly known how much information is classified by the government, but watchdogs and open-government activists believe such a trove is likely to include billions of records and is rapidly expanding, in part because of the explosion of digital communications.
Such secrecy, Ms. Haines wrote, ‘reduces the intelligence community’s (IC) capacity to effectively support senior policy maker decision-making, and further erodes the basic trust that our citizens have in their government. It is a fundamentally important issue that we must address.’
Despite numerous reviews looking at problems with classification, Ms. Haines said current efforts to address the exponential growth of classified material ‘are simply not sufficient.’
Government transparency advocates have argued for decades that the classification regime among intelligence agencies is overly restrictive and prevents the public from knowing what the U.S. government is doing on a range of security issues, such as drone strikes in foreign countries, surveillance practices at home and abroad, and offensive cyber operations.
Often unflattering information—such as civilian deaths from drone strikes—only comes to light after Freedom of Information lawsuits from media organizations, or if an official risks years of jail time by leaking classified material. U.S. national security officials, while acknowledging some shortcomings, have historically defended expansive classification practices as necessary to their core intelligence collection missions.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
Collapsed bridge in Pittsburgh today. Photo: Pittsburgh Public Safety via Reuters
“A former campaign road warrior told me, tongue-in-cheek, that it looked like the stealthiest advance move ever:
A 50-year-old bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh today, just ahead of a trip by President Biden to talk about his $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, which has strengthening aging bridges as one of its centerpieces.
Biden visited the bridge, and delivered a promise: ‘We're going to fix them all.’
10 people were injured but no one was killed, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports: A city bus was ‘left stranded in the twisted mess of a bridge that had been listed in poor condition for the past decade.’” Read more at Axios
President Biden and Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey visit the scene of the Forbes Avenue Bridge collapse. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
“Speaking at the site of a former steel mill that employed more than 5,000 workers during its heyday, Biden said 2021 was the ‘greatest year of job growth in American history.’
Reality check from Axios chief economic correspondent Neil Irwin: It’s true that the economy has roared back from its depressed 2020 levels faster than nearly anyone was projecting a year ago.
The exceptional growth path and plunging unemployment rate are true achievements, especially when compared to the long slog of the Obama recovery.
But the Biden economy has featured more than enough demand and not enough supply to match it — not enough workers, not enough semiconductors, not enough commodities.
The result is 7% inflation that is sapping Americans' confidence and Biden’s popularity.” Read more at Axios
“U.S. labor costs grew at the fastest pace since 2001. The fourth-quarter gain, compared with a year ago, was 4% on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said today. The tight labor market and rising inflation are among the reasons why.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“A new law will require New York City employers to list minimum and maximum salaries on job postings, though some business groups aren’t happy about it. Starting May 15, all employers, except those with fewer than four employees and staffing agencies hiring temps, must include the expected pay range or face fines and other civil penalties. The law is expected to address gender-pay gaps by providing more transparency.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“A Pennsylvania court struck down the state’s expansive mail-in voting law as unconstitutional, delivering a temporary win to state Republicans who challenged the law after former president Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting resulted in election fraud.
While the two-year-old law was struck down by a majority of the five-judge panel of the Commonwealth Court, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) and the state’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro (D), promised a swift appeal, criticizing the court’s opinion as being ‘based on twisted logic and faulty reasoning.’
‘The administration will immediately appeal this decision to the state Supreme Court and today’s lower court ruling will have no immediate effect on mail-in voting pending a final decision on the appeal,’ Wolf said Friday.
The state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the law establishing no-excuse mail-in voting for all voters in 2019 with bipartisan support. Previously, Pennsylvania voters could cast absentee ballots if they met certain criteria.
Amid the pandemic, more than 2.6 million Pennsylvania voters cast mail-in or absentee ballots out of 6.9 million.
The court said Friday that any changes to the voting law would require a constitutional amendment.
‘No-excuse mail-in voting makes the exercise of the franchise more convenient and has been used four times in the history of Pennsylvania. Approximately 1.38 million voters have expressed their interest in voting by mail permanently,’ Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote. ‘If presented to the people, a constitutional amendment to end the Article VII, Section 1 requirement of in-person voting is likely to be adopted. But a constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law before legislation authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting ‘be placed upon our statute books.’” Read more at Washington Post
“Virginia’s public colleges and universities cannot require students to get a coronavirus vaccine to enroll or attend in-person classes, the state’s new attorney general found in his first opinion since taking office this month.
Jason Miyares, a Republican, concluded that the schools don’t have the authority to issue coronavirus vaccine mandates, in the most recent move by the state’s new GOP leadership to challenge coronavirus mandates.
Miyares found that state lawmakers could pass legislation allowing public colleges and universities to take such a step, but that has not happened. State law specifically requires college students to be vaccinated for measles, tetanus and four other diseases to enroll, but covid-19 is not among them.
‘The General Assembly, and the General Assembly only, has the power to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine as an enrollment or in-person attendance requirement,’ Miyares said Friday in a statement. ‘While I encourage everyone to get the vaccine and believe it is a vital tool in our fight against COVID-19, Virginia public universities currently do not have the power to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine on students.’
A number of major public universities and colleges require students to have the coronavirus vaccination, including the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, George Mason University, James Madison University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia State University, Norfolk State, the College of William & Mary and the University of Mary Washington.
A spokesperson for U-Va. said Friday that officials are analyzing the opinion and plan to share more information when their review is finished. Other schools did not immediately respond to requests for comment. U-Va. announced in mid-September that more than 97 percent of students had confirmed they were vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Legal opinions by the state attorney general constitute the office’s analysis of existing law. The opinions are not legal rulings, and courts are not bound to them, but they do offer guidance for state agencies trying to comply with the law.
The ruling reverses one by Miyares’s Democratic predecessor, Mark R. Herring, whose office found in April 2021 that Virginia law gave state colleges and universities the authority to require coronavirus vaccinations. ‘Virginia’s colleges and universities may take steps to protect the health and welfare of their students by conditioning attendance in various activities or settings on receipt of an approve[d] COVID-19 vaccine,’ he wrote.
Miyares said Herring’s ruling failed to consider a section of law that was key to his ruling.
Many state colleges and universities rolled back requirements for staff to be vaccinated this month after Virginia’s new governor, Glenn Youngkin (R), issued an executive order saying state government agencies — including colleges and universities — could not require the vaccine as a condition of employment.
Miyares issued the opinion following a request by Youngkin for legal guidance on whether state institutions of higher education could require vaccines for students. In a news release, Miyares’s office said he was personally vaccinated and boosted against the coronavirus and encouraged others to do so.” Read more at Washington Post
“Charges have been filed against a Kansas man who said he was ‘coming for’ President Biden, and was found to be in possession of ammunition, though not a weapon, according to court documents.
Scott Ryan Merryman first called police in Independence, Kan., this week to say he was going to Washington to see Biden, according to a complaint filed in Maryland federal court on Friday. He allegedly told the Secret Service in a phone interview the next day that God had said he should go to the capital to lop off the head of the serpent in the heart of the nation.’” Read more at Washington Post
“NEW YORK — California lawyer Michael Avenatti got his chance Friday to interrogate the adult film actress with whom he took on President Donald Trump in 2018.
It did not seem to go as Avenatti expected.
Stormy Daniels, who has accused Avenatti of cheating her out of hundreds of thousands of dollars she was entitled to in a book deal, seemed unrattled as her former attorney asked her about supernatural visions and her ability to converse with ghosts.” Read more at Washington Post
“A federal jury on Thursday awarded $110 million to two U.S. Army veterans who said they had hearing damage because of combat earplugs produced by the multinational manufacturer 3M.
It is the latest decision in a network of hundreds of thousands of lawsuits that accuse 3M of knowingly selling defective earplugs to the military. 3M has maintained that the since-discontinued product, which was marketed as Combat Arms earplugs, Version 2, was effective and safe to use.
The decision on Thursday represented the largest sum awarded to date in the earplug litigation against 3M. The two veterans, Ronald Sloan and William Wayman, were each awarded $15 million in compensatory damages and $40 million in punitive damages by a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida.
Bryan F. Aylstock, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said both men had tinnitus and hearing loss that interfered with their daily lives.” Read more at New York Times
“The Department of Homeland Security is planning for as many as 9,000 migrant arrests per day at the US-Mexico border by this spring, outpacing last year’s average of about 6,500 arrests per day.” [Vox] Read more at Reuters / Ted Hesson
“Italy still doesn’t have a president, even after four days of parliamentary votes.” [Vox] Read more at AP
“Forty percent of people in Ethiopia’s Tigray region are suffering from ‘extreme lack of food’ due to the impacts of nearly 15 months of civil war, according to the World Food Programme.” [Vox] Read more at Al Jazeera
“The NFL is down to its final four teams and the Super Bowl participants will be decided in Sunday's conference championship games. The Kansas City Chiefs host the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC title game (3 p.m. ET, CBS) and the San Francisco 49ers visit the Los Angeles Rams (6:30 p.m. ET, Fox) for the NFC crown. Kansas City is looking to reach the Super Bowl for the third consecutive season, while the Bengals are hoping for their first trip since 1988. The Rams and 49ers have both recently won the NFC, Los Angeles losing to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 53 and San Francisco falling against the Chiefs a year later.” Read more at USA Today
“MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Ash Barty recovered from 5-1 down in the second set to win the Australian Open final 6-3, 7-6 (2) over Danielle Collins on Saturday, ending a 44-year drought for Australian women at their home Grand Slam tournament.
The top-ranked Barty won the first set with one service break against the 27th-seeded Collins.
But the 28-year-old American hit back quickly, breaking Barty's serve in the second and sixth games to take a 5-1 lead. Barty had only dropped one service game through six previous rounds in the tournament.
Momentum was with Collins and she twice served for the set, aiming to take her first Grand Slam final to a third set.
But Barty launched a comeback, winning five of the next six games and then dominating the tiebreaker.
Barty was the first Australian woman into the singles final of the Australian Open since Wendy Turnbull in 1980 and is now the first Australian champion since Chris O’Neil in 1978.
The 25-year-old Barty now has major titles on three surfaces, adding the hard court at Melbourne Park to her win on grass at Wimbledon last year and on clay at the French Open in 2019.” Read more at USA Today
“LONDON—The world’s largest spirits maker is running low on some of its products.
Diageo PLC said soaring pandemic demand is depleting stocks of Crown Royal whisky, Lagavulin Scotch and Don Julio tequila. These bestselling brands can take months or years to age before hitting liquor-store shelves, making it hard to quickly increase production.
Diageo said it also hasn’t had enough bottles to package up Bulleit bourbon to meet demand. It is separately grappling with higher costs for aluminum and cereals that go into the booze-making process. Shipping and energy bills have climbed.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
FILE - Joni Mitchell arrives at the 2015 Clive Davis Pre-Grammy Gala in Beverly Hills, Calif. Feb. 7, 2015. Joni Mitchell said Friday, Jan. 28, 2022 she seeks to remove all of her music in Spotify in solidarity with Neil Young, who ignited a protest against the streaming service for airing a podcast that featured a figure who has spread misinformation about the coronavirus. (Photo by John Shearer/Invision/AP, File)
“NEW YORK (AP) — Joni Mitchell said Friday she is seeking to remove all of her music from Spotify in solidarity with Neil Young, who ignited a protest against the streaming service for airing a podcast that featured a figure who has spread misinformation about the coronavirus.
Mitchell, who like Young is a California-based songwriter who had much of her success in the 1970s, is the first prominent musician to join Young’s effort.
‘Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,’ Mitchell said Friday in a message posted on her website. ‘I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.’
Following Young’s action this week, Spotify said it had policies in place to remove misleading content from its platform and has removed more than 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.
But the service has said nothing about comedian Joe Rogan, whose podcast ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ is the centerpiece of the controversy. Last month Rogan interviewed on his podcast Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious disease specialist who has been banned from Twitter for spreading COVID misinformation.
Rogan is one of the streaming service’s biggest stars, with a contract that could earn him more than $100 million.
Young had called on other artists to support him following his action. While Mitchell, 78, is not a current hitmaker, the Canadian native’s Spotify page said she had 3.7 million monthly listeners to her music. Her songs ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ and ‘A Case of You’ have both been streamed more than 100 million times on the service.
In a message on his website Friday, Young said that ‘when I left Spotify, I felt better.’
‘Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information,’ he wrote. ‘I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.’
There was no immediate response to a request for comment from Spotify.” Read more at AP News
“Art Spiegelman didn’t set out to write an educational aid for young-adult readers. A half-century ago, he simply wanted to better know his own origin story, discover more about his parents’ histories — and hear from his father, a Polish Jew and a survivor, how some of their relatives were killed in the Holocaust.
In an interview Thursday, he remembers his mind-set in his 20s: ‘I never meant to teach anybody anything.’
Now, though, given the latest roiling debates over which books can be banned from schools and libraries, the author of the seminal graphic memoir ‘Maus’ appreciates his work’s long cultural tail: ‘I’m grateful the book has a second life as an anti-fascist tool.’
Spiegelman is speaking shortly after learning that a Tennessee school board voted unanimously this month to ban ‘Maus,’ which in 1992 became the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize. The two-volume comic biography chronicles his family’s Holocaust history through a frame-tale of ‘70s conversations between Spiegelman and his estranged father, all told with anthropomorphic imagery: The Jewish characters are rendered as mice, for instance, and the Nazis are cats.
The 10-member board in McMinn County chose to remove ‘Maus’ from its eighth-grade language arts curriculum, citing its profanity and nudity. Now the New York-based author is sifting through the minutes of the board’s Jan. 10 meeting, trying to make some sense of its decision to target the graphic memoir, which previously has been challenged in California and banned in Russia. His conclusion: The issue is bigger than his comic book.
In the current sociopolitical climate, he views the Tennessee vote as no anomaly. ‘It’s part of a continuum, and just a harbinger of things to come,’ Spiegelman says, adding that ‘the control of people’s thoughts is essential to all of this.’
As such school votes strategically aim to limit ‘what people can learn, what they can understand and think about,’ he says, there is ‘at least one part of our political spectrum that seems to be very enthusiastic about’ banning books.
‘This is a red alert. It’s not just: ‘How dare they deny the Holocaust?’’ he says with a mock gasp. ‘They’ll deny anything.’
As the “Maus” ban became widely publicized this week, after the vote was reported in the Tennessee Holler, the graphic novel had a surge in sales. By Friday, ‘The Complete Maus’ hardcover was among the top 25 titles on Amazon’s bestseller list, and second among all historical biographies, as well as comics and graphic novels.
Spiegelman says comics are often challenged in educational settings, partly because of the visceral power of visual imagery. Jerry Craft’s ‘New Kid,’ Raina Telgemeier’s ‘Drama’ and Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ are among the acclaimed graphic novels that have appeared on the challenged-book lists spotlighted during Banned Books Week, the annual event that celebrates ‘the freedom to read.’
‘One of the reasons ‘Maus’ is so threatening — and one of the reasons [some] educators were trying to protect the idea of teaching it in a curriculum — was that it’s in comics form,’ Spiegelman says. The panel-to-panel narrative ‘makes it easy to remember — the visual component as well as with the underlying thoughts that need to be communicated — because you can go from the past to the present to the future and back and forth, as your eye flits across the page. Kids do it instinctively.’” Read more at Washington Post
“The new four-part docuseries about Bill Cosby is screening at the Sundance Film Festival Saturday and premiering on Showtime Sunday (10 p.m. ET/PT). Directed by comedian/CNN host W. Kamau Bell, ‘Cosby’ serves up a compellingly nuanced look at the actor and stand-up comic formerly lauded as ‘America's Dad,’ but now an accused serial sex abuser whose alleged crimes took place even as he entertained and inspired millions and stood up for Black Americans. Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt responded to the docuseries, saying that ‘Cosby vehemently denies all allegations waged against him,’ and complained that a ‘professional documentary’ should instead target what he ‘prosecutorial violations ... He wants our nation to be what it proclaims itself to be: a democracy.’” Read more at USA Today
“(CNN) A hiker in Arizona slipped and fell hundreds of feet to his death Monday after trying to take a photo in Lost Dutchman State Park, according to the Pinal County Sheriff's Office.
Richard Jacobson, 21, was found dead around 700 feet below the Flat Iron Trail, sheriff's office spokesperson Lauren Reimer told CNN by email.
A friend who was camping with Jacobson called 911 around 12:45 a.m. to report that Jacobson had gone to the edge of the trail ‘to take a photo and slipped,’ the statement said….
More than 250 people worldwide died attempting to take selfies from 2011 to 2017, a 2018 study published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care found. In 2020, a 25-year-old fell to his death at different Arizona state park while attempting to take a photo.” Read more at CNN
“The long-awaited White House cat has joined the Biden family — and her name is Willow. Michael LaRosa, a spokesman for first lady Jill Biden, confirmed the 2-year-old, gray-and-white short-haired tabby’s arrival, saying the cat is ‘settling into the White House with her favorite toys, treats and plenty of room to smell and explore.’
Willow is named after Jill Biden’s hometown of Willow Grove, Pa. The cat comes from an unnamed Western Pennsylvania farm where the Bidens made a campaign trip in 2020.
‘Willow made quite an impression on Dr. Biden in 2020 when she jumped up on the stage and interrupted her remarks during a campaign stop,’ wrote LaRosa in a news release. ‘Seeing their immediate bond, the owner of the farm knew that Willow belonged with Dr. Biden.’
The cat joins Commander, the German shepherd puppy the Bidens adopted last month, following the death of their dog Champ and the rehoming of their dog Major, both German shepherds. Major had trouble adjusting to his new home in the White House, having made headlines for several biting incidents. Major was the first shelter dog in the White House.” Read more at Washington Post