The Full Belmonte, 1/8/2022
“WASHINGTON — Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed skeptical on Friday that the Biden administration has the legal power to mandate that the nation’s large employers require workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or to undergo frequent testing. A federal workplace safety law, they indicated during a two-hour argument, did not provide legal authority for the sweeping emergency measure.
The court seemed more likely to sustain a separate requirement that health care workers at facilities that receive federal money be vaccinated. That regulation, the subject of a second argument, was in keeping with other kinds of federal oversight and was supported by virtually the entire medical establishment, some justices noted.
The argument concerning large employers was more lopsided.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the states and Congress, rather than a federal agency, were better situated to address the pandemic in the nation’s workplaces. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the challenged regulation appeared to reach too broadly in covering all large employers.
Justices Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested that the governing statute had not authorized the agency to impose the mandate clearly enough, given the political and economic stakes.
The court’s three more liberal justices said the mandate was a needed response to the public health crisis.
‘We know the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated,’ Justice Elena Kagan said.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he would find it ‘unbelievable that it would be in the public interest to stop these vaccinations.’
Some of the participants in the arguments were missing from the courtroom, probably because of the pandemic. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has diabetes and has worn a mask since the justices returned to the courtroom in October, participated remotely from her chambers.
Two of the lawyers — Benjamin M. Flowers, the solicitor general of Ohio, and Elizabeth Murrill, the solicitor general of Louisiana — argued by telephone. The court’s Covid protocols require lawyers to be tested for the virus. ‘An arguing attorney who receives a positive test will not argue in person, but will instead be expected to participate remotely by telephone connection to the courtroom,’ the protocols say.” Read more at New York Times
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants schools open and kids vaccinated. Director Rochelle Walensky on Friday pointed to vaccines, masks, increased ventilation and testing as the best ways to protect children during in-person learning. Thousands of schools canceled classes for at least one day this week due to the increase in Covid-19 infections.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“(CNN)Three White men who chased and murdered 25-year-old Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in south Georgia were sentenced to life in prison Friday.
Travis McMichael, 35, his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, and neighbor William ‘Roddie’ Bryan, 52, were convicted in November on a raft of charges, including felony murder, for Arbery's death.
Judge Timothy Walmsley sentenced Travis McMichael and Gregory McMichael to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He sentenced Bryan to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Bryan, who is 52 years old, will be eligible for parole under Georgia law only after he has served 30 years in prison because he was convicted of serious violent felonies.Before handing down the sentence, Walmsley described the killing in a neighborhood outside Brunswick, Georgia, as a ‘chilling, truly disturbing scene,’ telling the court he ‘kept coming back to the terror that must have been in the mind of the young man running through Satilla Shores.’” Read more at CNN
Sidney Poitier’s Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category. He rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. Credit...Sam Falk/The New York Times
“Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like ‘To Sir With Love,’ ‘In the Heat of the Night’ and ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, has died at 94.
His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No other details were immediately provided.
Mr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film ‘Lilies of the Field’ made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.
Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s….
Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. ‘I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,’ he once wrote.” Read more at New York Times
“December’s jobs report, released Friday by the Labor Department, shows a mixed bag of results: The unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent, but non-farm employers added a dismal 190,000 new hires. Overall, however, the economy added a record number of jobs in 2021 as the U.S. slowly recovered from the horror of 2020. The total unemployment level is still 2.9 million below what it was in February 2020, just before businesses started shutting down as COVID swept the globe. Friday’s report doesn’t reflect the impact of the January’s Omicron surge, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the fresh outbreak has so far had minimal effect on employment. Jobless claims were at 207,000 last week, almost the lowest level in 50 years.” [Daily Beast] Read it at The Wall Street Journal
“WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday invited President Biden to deliver the State of the Union address to Congress on March 1 as the White House grapples with an evolving pandemic and looks for ways to regain momentum for a legislative agenda stuck in congressional gridlock.
Mr. Biden accepted Ms. Pelosi’s invitation, the White House said.
The date is later than is traditional — the address will be the first to be delivered in March — but it gives Mr. Biden more time to try to advance his domestic policy package, which has been hung up in the Senate because of the objections of a single Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia. The president is also struggling to pass federal voting rights legislation that would counter restrictions put in place by Republicans in some states.
Mr. Biden is likely to use the address to promote the gains of his administration, including the passage of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package and the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package last year.
It is unclear how the surging Omicron variant might affect this year’s State of the Union. Mr. Biden’s first address to Congress last year, which was not technically a State of the Union address, was made under the cloud of the pandemic.” Read more at New York Times
“Whether millennials prefer to raise plants and pets over children for financial and environmental reasons or because they’re lazy and entitled has been hotly discussed in recent years. Now Pope Francis has waded in, saying that not having children is “selfish and diminishes us” and that people are replacing them with cats and dogs.
Pet owners have reacted angrily to the comments, made during a general audience at the Vatican. They argue that animals have a lower environmental footprint than children, enable them to lead a life that is different but equally rewarding, and compensate for financial or biological difficulties in having children, rather than directly replacing them.
On social media, people pointed out that the pope himself chose not to have children and said there was hypocrisy in such comments, coming from an institution which has grappled with a legacy of child sexual abuse.” Read more at The Guardian“Bob Dylan’s lawyers have gone on the attack against an anonymous woman who claims he sexually abused her as a child at the height of his 1960s fame. The woman, only identified in her lawsuit as JC, initially alleged the abuse took place over a six-week period in New York in 1965, but the suit was changed last week to to say it happened over ‘several months’ after Dylan historians noted he was overseas on tour at the time. The suit claims Dylan attempted to ‘lower her inhibitions with the objective of sexually abusing her, which he did, coupled with the provision of drugs, alcohol, and threats of physical violence.’ In response, Dylan’s legal team dismissed the suit as ‘a brazen shakedown … false, malicious, reckless and defamatory,’ and added: ‘[He] will vigorously defend himself against these lawyer-driven lies and seek redress against all those responsible, including by seeking monetary sanctions against persons responsible for manufacturing and bringing this abusive lawsuit.’ JC’s lawyer Peter Gleason responded: ‘Neither my client or her counsel are going to be bullied.’” [Daily Beast] Read it at The Guardian
“An Oregon man who lied his way into getting $3.4 million in federal COVID relief funds, before pouring it into Tesla stock, has been sent to prison for four years. Andrew Aaron Lloyd, 51, was granted forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans when he falsely said he employed hundreds of people in various home care, shopping, and construction businesses. Through ‘sheer dumb luck,’ he transferred $1.8 million of the windfall to a brokerage account that purchased Tesla stock that soared in value to $13 million, prosecutors said. Along the way, he purchased 25 rental properties in Oregon and California valued at $5 million. However, his nine loan applications included identical employee information for different businesses, raising the suspicion of the IRS, FBI, and Small Business Administration. The feds have since seized $18 million in securities and cash from Lloyd’s accounts and, in addition to his prison sentence, he has been ordered to pay $4 million in restitution. [Daily Beast] Read it at The Oregonian
“The company hired by Arizona Senate Republicans to review Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat in the state has fired all of its staff and is shutting down after its findings were torn to shreds by Maricopa County officials. ‘Cyber Ninjas is shutting down. All employees have been let go,’ Rod Thomson, the company's representative, told NBC News Thursday night. The dramatic announcement came a day after elections officials in Maricopa County determined that 76 of the 77 claims made in the Cyber Ninjas report into the county’s 2020 election were false or misleading. The debunked report had been used by Donald Trump and his loss-denying allies as evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him. On Thursday, a judge said he will fine the company $50,000 a day if it doesn’t immediately turn over public records related to the deeply partisan audit.” [Daily Beast] Read it at NBC News
“Vice President Kamala Harris was inside the Democratic Party’s headquarters when a pipe bomb was found outside the building on Jan. 6 last year, several sources told Politico. Four people, including a White House official and a former law enforcement official, said that Harris was the Secret Service ‘protectee,’ previously unnamed in a Capitol Police timeline of events, evacuated from the Democratic National Committee’s offices seven minutes after authorities began investigating the explosive around 1 p.m. The bomb threat was neutralized about three-and-a-half hours later. A second pipe bomb, placed outside the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, was also discovered and neutralized that afternoon. The FBI is still hunting for the person or persons responsible. The bombs were planted about 17 hours before a mob of pro-Trump rioters breached the Capitol.” [Daily Beast] Read it at POLITICO
“A Capitol Police officer who was forced to take a year off work after an attack by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6 left her with a traumatic brain injury has sued the ex-president for $75,000 in damages. CNN reports Officer Briana Kirkland filed her lawsuit against Trump on Thursday—the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. The suit recounts that Kirkland was outnumbered 450 people to one at one of the doors of the Capitol and only armed with a baton. In the ensuing chaos, she was sprayed with chemicals and a scuffle left her with a concussion. Her lawyer, Patrick Malone, wrote in the filing that Kirkland was only able to return to work this week after suffering from a ‘traumatic brain injury that would cost her a year of her personal and professional life.’ He added that Trump’s “provocative words and actions leading up to and on January 6, 2021, were likely to incite and provoke violence in others and did in fact incite and provoke violence directed at Briana Kirkland.” Trump has responded to similar lawsuits by claiming immunity as president.” [Daily Beast] Read it at CNN
“Australians aren’t “meeeeh” about their new goat firefighters. The farm animals are being deployed as part of an experimental brush-clearing effort to eat potential wildfire tinder, like dry growth and leaf litter. Forty goats can clear more than half-acre of dense vegetation in two weeks, experts estimate.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“A leading voice for voting rights long before her nomination to lead the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division made her nationally known, Lani Guinier died Friday.
Ms. Guinier, the Bennett Boskey professor of law emerita at Harvard Law School, where she was the first woman of color granted tenure, was 71 and died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
After serving as a special assistant in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Carter administration, Ms. Guinier worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she headed the voting rights project. In 1988, she joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she became a tenured professor.
In April 1993, then-President Bill Clinton — a former Yale Law School classmate of Ms. Guinier’s — nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Republican US senators and conservative media figures quickly fought her nomination, however, and Clinton withdrew the nomination.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Reigning ‘Jeopardy!’ champion Amy Schneider has achieved yet another milestone during her historic run on the trivia game show.
Friday's episode saw Schneider, 42, score her 28th consecutive win and earn $42,000, bringing her total winnings to to $1,019,001 – making her the fourth ‘Jeopardy!’ contestant and first woman to win over $1 million in regular season play.
Schneider is currently the fourth-highest-earning winner in regular season play, behind legends Matt Amodio ($1,518,601), James Holzhauer ($2,462,216) and Ken Jennings ($2,520,700)
‘It feels amazing, it feels strange,’ Schneider said. ‘It’s not a sum of money I ever anticipated would be associated with my name.’
Though this week ended on a high note for Schneider, it got off to a rocky start. The contestant revealed on Twitter Monday that she was feeling ‘fine’ after getting robbed of her ID, credit cards and phone on Sunday.” Read more at USA Today
“John Legend has sold his song catalogue dating back to 2004, when he put out his first album. According to Bloomberg, Legend included both copyrights and royalty rights in the deal with KKR Credit Advisors and BMG Rights Management, which each purchased a 50 percent stake. According to a regulatory filing, the deal was first struck in September. Financial terms were not disclosed. The 43-year-old joins icons like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, and Neil Young in a string of giant music rights deals. Springsteen’s catalog went for $500 million.” [Daily Beast] Read it at Bloomberg
“You won’t be able to watch the Golden Globe Awards this year unless you’re there yourself. In a tweet, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced Thursday that the ceremony will be ‘a private event’ that ‘will not be live-streamed’ anywhere online. The Golden Globes’ social media accounts will publish the winners online. NBC, which usually airs the Globes, had already nixed any planned broadcast of the Globes’ 2022 ceremony over a lack of diversity and ethical concerns. The HFPA admitted it had no Black members last year despite claiming to be made up of a representative group of international journalists, leading to an A-list boycott and calls for reform.” [Daily Beast] Read it at New York Post
Dogs were played recordings either of humans reading excerpts from The Little Prince or the same recordings cut up into small pieces so it sounded unnatural. Photograph: Walik/Getty Images
“Dogs may appear to have selective hearing when it comes to commands but research suggests they are paying attention to human chit-chat.
Researchers – who arranged for headphone-wearing dogs to listen to excerpts from the novella The Little Prince – revealed the brains of our canine companions can tell the difference between speech and non-speech when listening to human voices, and show different responses to speech in an unfamiliar language.
The team said the findings supported other studies that suggest animals may share some human skills.
‘Our capacities to process speech and languages are not necessarily unique in all the ways we like to think they are,’ said Dr Attila Andics, senior author of the study at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.
The research involved 18 dogs of various ages and breeds that were trained to lie in an MRI scanner without restraint or sedation, but with headphones on. They were then played recordings either of humans reading excerpts from The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry or those same recordings cut up into small pieces and put back together in a different order so it sounded unnatural.
The results, published in the journal NeuroImage, reveal the dogs’ brains showed a different activity pattern in the primary auditory cortex for speech compared with non-speech, with the findings similar regardless of whether the language used – Hungarian or Spanish – was familiar. Curiously, the longer the dog’s head was, the better their brain could distinguish speech from non-speech.” Read more at The Guardian
“Americans face a moment of reckoning with their pandemic pups — and the money they spend on them.
Apollo, a black Labrador in Silver City, N.M., is complicating his owner’s moving budget with his voracious appetite. In Los Angeles, Zuri the Chihuahua mix’s surprise bee allergy has her mom fretting over more unexpected medical bills. In Sacramento, Cowboy the labradoodle’s parents are trying to train him out of his shoe-chewing separation anxiety.
With the country thrust into uncertainty by the omicron variant of the coronavirus, the millions of Americans who welcomed pets into their homes since the first shutdowns in March 2020 are facing shocks to their household budgets and logistical challenges as they try to predict the course of the pandemic and make preparations to return to work and social activities in person.
More than 23 million American households — nearly 1 in 5 nationwide — adopted a pet during the pandemic, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). Even President Biden adopted a new dog, Commander.
And many dog owners have spent the pandemic pampering those pooches. Americans spent $21.4 billion on nonmedical pet products through November, plus another $28.4 billion on dog food, according to market research firm Euromonitor International. Rover, a gig-economy platform that focuses on overnight boarding and dog-sitting, reported a record $157.1 million in revenue for the quarter ending Sept. 30.
Now some puppy parents are facing as much as thousands of dollars in additional costs as they prepare to return to life in person.
With many doggy day cares and boarding centers nationwide reporting months-long waiting lists — and newly adopted pets often lacking the socialization for boarding — pandemic pet owners are appealing to families, friends and businesses to ensure their dogs are living their best lives, or at least not spending the day alone. Veterinary practices report being slammed with appointment requests. Vet emergency rooms are warning of longer wait times.” Read more at Washington Post
“The newly erected statue of a grinning man with an enormous phallus has prompted delight and rage in an archaeological hotspot in northern Peru where it has been on show since the beginning of the year.
Although perhaps not anatomically correct, the crimson fibreglass structure is a faithful representation of a ceramic vessel from Peru’s pre-Columbian Mochica culture, whose people lived in the region between 150 and 700 AD.
A 15-minute drive from the centre of the regional capital, Trujillo, the statue has already proved hugely popular with passers-by and tourists who pose beneath the 1.5-meter member for selfies.
But despite its historical fidelity, the 9ft-tall fertility symbol has already been attacked by vandals who smashed a hole in the statue and reportedly fired shots in the air as they fled.
Arturo Fernández Bazán, the mayor of Moche, the district named after the ancient culture, told local media: “At two in the morning three hooded criminals held a knife to the security guard’s neck to keep him from reacting or calling his colleagues on the radio, and two of them damaged the phallus.”
The roadside monument to the ancient pre-Inca culture renowned for its sexually explicit ceramics has also drawn tourists, as the statue stands on the route between the imposing adobe temples of the sun and the moon, or the Huacas del Sol y la Luna.
Fernández Bazán said he plans to erect up to 30 more statues representing the Mochica culture – about a third of them representing erotic acts or childbirth – along the archaeological circuit.” Read more at The Guardian
The statue in Moche, the district named after the ancient culture. The vandals reportedly fired shots in the air as they fled. Photograph: AP
University of Alaska researchers discovered that hamsters are the heavyweights of the animal kingdom when it comes to handling their hooch.Getty Images/iStockphoto
“The heaviest drinkers in the animal kingdom are punier than you might expect. Elephants, for example, are massive, but they are relative lightweights—they lack a gene for alcohol metabolism. Humans actually rank pretty highly, thanks to our ancestors’ propensity for picking fermented fruit off the ground. But to find the real champs, you have to think smaller.
Think hoarder.
Think hamster.
‘You just put a bottle of unsweetened Everclear on the cage and they love it,’ says Gwen Lupfer, a psychologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage who has studied alcohol consumption in hamsters. They regularly down 18 grams per kilogram of body weight a day, the alcoholic equivalent of a human drinking a liter and a half of 190-proof Everclear. In the wild, hamsters hoard ryegrass seeds and fruit in their burrows, and they eat this fermenting store as it becomes more and more alcoholic over the winter. In the lab, well, they’re pretty happy with Everclear. Given the choice between water and alcohol, they go for the booze.
Humans have known about hamsters’ affinity for alcohol since at least the 1950s, when scientists in Texas found that hamsters could outdrink the common lab rat. Rats can be made to drink alcohol—either by selectively breeding genetic lines or by feeding them a mix of sugar and ethanol until they develop a taste for the latter. (Ethanol is the specific type of alcohol found in alcoholic drinks.) But with hamsters, ‘you could take a hamster right from the pet store and give it grain alcohol,’ says Danielle Gulick, an addiction researcher at the University of Florida. ‘It would happily drink.’
And they can drink a lot before getting drunk. When Lupfer was studying dwarf hamsters, she and her students rated the animals’ drunkenness on a literal wobbling scale. They scored the hamsters from zero, for ‘no visible wobbling,’ to four, for ‘falls onto side and does not right self.’ (They had previously, unsuccessfully, tried to track the hamsters’ walking by dipping their paws in watercolor—they couldn’t tell the drunk and sober hamsters’ paw prints apart.) The hamsters never averaged above 0.5 on the wobbling scale—even at the highest oral doses. But when Lupfer and her team instead injected the ethanol directly into the hamsters’ abdomens, the animals didn’t do so well. They started wobbling and falling over at much, much lower doses.
Consumed orally, Lupfer explains, alcohol goes straight from the gut to the liver, which starts breaking down the mind-altering toxin that is ethanol. Hamster livers are ‘so efficient’ at processing ethanol that very little ends up in their blood, says Tom Lawton, a critical-care doctor in Bradford, England. But when the hamsters got injected with ethanol, the substance could bypass the liver and go into their bloodstream and then their brain—hence much wobbling and falling over. Hamsters’ alcohol tolerance is likely an adaptation to their hoarding lifestyle. (Other animal hoarders might have evolved a similar tolerance, but they haven’t been as easy to study in a lab.) They would have a tough time getting through the winter, Lupfer told me, if they ‘didn’t like their own food that they’d hoarded or if they got sick from the alcohol in it.’
Hamsters don’t just tolerate alcohol, though; they prefer it to water—and that might be because they’re drinking for the calories. (Alcohol has seven calories per gram, almost as many as does fat, which clocks in at nine.) Gulick has found that giving hamsters sucrose water can suppress their boozing, but calorie-free saccharin water cannot. And in the ’90s, scientists investigating whether hamsters could be a good model for alcoholism studies decided to test ethanol against carefully calorie-matched offerings of tomato juice, peach juice, mango juice, sugar water, and a chocolate Ensure Plus nutrition shake. The hamsters indeed started drinking less alcohol when given sweet, calorie-rich alternatives. Chocolate Ensure Plus worked the best, which the researchers chalked up to a preference for its taste.
Lawton, who recently tweeted about hamsters and alcohol in a delightful thread, told me that he bred hamsters in his youth in Yorkshire. He did not learn until medical school that very serious scientists had studied hamsters’ alcoholic preferences. But as a teenager, he made a related discovery of his own. When his house got so cold that the hamsters would start hibernating, a spot of brandy would perk them right back up. Cheers.” Read more at The Atlantic