The Full Belmonte, 2/15/2022
“Russia's defense ministry claimed Tuesday that it started pulling back some troop units taking part in military exercises near Ukraine's border, but it gave no specific details on where the troops were pulling back from, or how many.
Ukrainian officials said it was too early to tell whether the announcement reflected a genuine change of tone from Moscow following weeks of tensions over fears of a Russian invasion.
The apparent development came a day after Russia's foreign minister indicated the country was ready to keep talking about the security grievances that led to the Ukraine crisis – Europe's worst East-West standoff in decades – and western officials warned the attack could come at any time, signaling Wednesday as a possible invasion day.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly accused the West of causing undue panic over Russia's invasion threat, saying Ukraine's intelligence did not indicate an imminent threat. The fears of an invasion grew from the fact that Russia has massed more than 130,000 troops near Ukraine. Russia denies it has any invasions plans.” Read more at USA Today
Water levels at the Great Salt Lake are lower than ever.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
“The southwestern U.S. has been in a drought since 2000. It’s the region’s driest period in at least 1,200 years.” Read more at New York Times
“Former President Donald Trump's long-time accounting firm informed the Trump Organization last week that it should no longer rely on nearly 10 years' worth of financial statements. The tax firm, Mazars, also announced they would no longer serve as the accountants to the Trumps, citing a conflict of interest. Mazars said the only work not completed was the filing of Trump and Melania Trump's tax returns. A Trump Organization spokesperson responded to the firm cutting ties, expressing disappointment at the split and also suggested Mazars performed their work ‘in accordance with all applicable accounting standards and principles’ without any discrepancies.” Read more at CNN
“The sweeping bill to overhaul the US Postal Service's finances hit a snag yesterday in the Senate. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, objected to a unanimous consent request to make a technical fix to the bipartisan bill. The measure seeks to overhaul the Postal Service's finances to help allow it to modernize its service. Scott, however, argued that the Senate should slow down and work to improve issues with the legislation. The Senate was not able vote to advance the bill yesterday, but despite the delay, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed the Senate will eventually pass it soon.” Read more at CNN
Sarah Palin leaves the courthouse in New York yesterday. Photo: Seth Wenig/AP
“By dismissing Sarah Palin's lawsuit against The New York Times yesterday, a district judge kept one of the media's landmark legal protections in place — at least for now, Axios Media Trends expert Sara Fischer writes.
Catch up quick: Palin sued The Times over a 2017 editorial — quickly corrected — that falsely linked her to the 2011 mass shooting that wounded former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.).
Judge Jed S. Rakoff said Palin failed to prove that the paper acted with ‘actual malice’ — the standard the Supreme Court established in the landmark 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan.
The intrigue: The judge took the unusual step of throwing out the case while the jury — unaware of his decision — is still deliberating. He said he'll let the jury continue so its verdict can be part of the record for appeal.
Palin has suggested she ultimately wants to challenge the ‘actual malice’ standard — which would have to go to the Supreme Court.
Go deeper: Timeline for Palin v. NYT.” Read more at Axios
“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies are working behind the scenes to ensure Trump-backed candidates don’t win in the 2022 midterm elections.” [Vox] Read more at NYT / Jonathan Martin
“The defense is expected to start presenting witnesses Tuesday, a day after federal prosecutors rested their case against J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao, the three former Minneapolis police officers charged with violating George Floyd's civil rights in May 2020. It came after nearly three weeks of testimony from doctors, police officers and bystanders, including the teenager who recorded widely seen video that showed Officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee onto Floyd's neck for 9 1/2 minutes while the 46-year-old Black man was handcuffed, facedown and pleading for air. Kueng, Lane and Thao are broadly charged with violating Floyd's constitutional rights while acting under government authority. Kueng knelt on Floyd’s back and Lane held down his legs while Thao kept bystanders back. Thao and Kueng said they plan to testify, while Lane hasn't made a final decision on the matter.” Read more at USA Today
“Texas is suing Meta, alleging that Facebook’s facial-recognition technology violated state privacy protections for personal biometric data. The state is seeking civil penalties in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Jury selection starts Tuesday in a trial to determine if engineering contractors Veolia North America and Lockwood, Andrews & Newman, known as LAN, bear responsibility for lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan. The companies were not part of the recent $626 million settlement between Flint residents and the state of Michigan, Flint and two other parties. Attorneys for four Flint children claim Veolia and LAN were negligent in not doing more to get the city to properly treat water that was being pulled from the Flint River in 2014-15. Corrosive water caused lead to leach from service lines serving homes, a disastrous result in the majority Black community. Veolia and LAN deny liability. U.S. District Judge Judith Levy declined to dismiss the lawsuit.” Read more at USA Today
“New York City fired 1,430 employees — less than 1 percent of its work force — for not complying with its vaccine mandate.” Read more at New York Times
“MANAGUA, Nicaragua — Nicaragua’s politically active student population, one of the last pockets of opposition to President Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian government, is also the latest target of his wide-ranging crackdown on dissent, with five private universities brought under state control.
The government said the colleges were stripped of their ability to operate independently this month because they had not complied with financial regulations. Critics, however, saw the move as Mr. Ortega’s latest effort to clamp down on challenges to his tightening grip on power.
Since last year, his administration has jailed or put under house arrest political activists and civil society leaders, raided media offices, outlawed street protests and shuttered dozens of nongovernmental organizations. In November, Mr. Ortega ran for a fourth consecutive term in office on a ballot devoid of any credible challenger, and won.
Universities had been among the last remaining centers of resistance.
The government said the National Council of Universities, a state advisory body, would oversee the institutions brought under its control. A governing party official this past week labeled another private university, which observers fear could be taken over next, as a hotbed of terrorism that promoted violence and disinformation.” Read more at New York Times
“Sweden recommended that people 80 and over receive a second booster shot.” Read more at New York Times
“The United States has suspended avocado imports from Mexico after a US official carrying out an investigation received a threatening call.” [Vox] Read more at CNN Business / Karol Suarez
“German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged solidarity with Ukraine in a meeting with the country's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Scholz said Ukraine's sovereignty was not negotiable and warned of ‘far-reaching sanctions’ if Russia invades.” Read more at NPR
“The last several hundred Afghan evacuees who have been living on US military bases are expected to depart over the next week, signaling the end to a months long operation to resettle tens of thousands of Afghans. Last fall, more than 50,000 Afghan nationals arrived in the US and gradually moved to communities across the country after extensive vetting following the frenzied evacuation due to the Taliban resurgence. The effort -- dubbed ‘Operation Allies Welcome’ -- has been a heavy lift for the Biden administration, which has pushed to increase its resettlement capacity across agencies.” Read more at CNN
“Limited options | U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is increasingly doubtful that China will make any concessions after failing to abide by a trade agreement reached during Donald Trump’s presidency, sources say. Jenny Leonard writes that officials are losing patience but will let talks on the so-called phase-one trade agreement play out before deciding how to respond.” Read more at Bloomberg
“Strategic purpose | China’s decision to clear Pfizer’s coronavirus pill for use suggests that Beijing may be looking at how to move beyond the strict Covid Zero strategy that’s leaving it increasingly isolated. Zeng Guang, a former chief scientist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said the move could lay the groundwork to gradually allow a more flexible approach.” Read more at Bloomberg
“Robust response | Demonstrators against Covid-19 vaccine mandates halted traffic at two major Canadian border crossings into the U.S. even as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked a law giving his government emergency powers to end blockades. Semi-trailers and farm equipment were used to block commercial vehicles in a protest started by truckers that’s morphed into a broader rally against coronavirus restrictions.
Trudeau ordered financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in an illegal blockade and report them.” Read more at Bloomberg
Vehicles block a border crossing yesterday in Emerson, Manitoba province.
Photographer: Jen Skerritt/Bloomberg
“MADRID — After a 14-year legal battle, the Spanish Supreme Court has ordered the demolition of a luxury hotel and golf resort in the arid heartland of Spain because of breaches of environmental laws.
The four-star hotel resort, called Marina Isla de Valdecañas, was built on an island in a reservoir in the region of Extremadura, about a two-hour drive from Madrid, and became a popular weekend getaway for businesspeople and celebrities.
It was backed by regional politicians in Extremadura, who had hoped that the development would bring much-needed investment to the area. Long ranked as the poorest region of mainland Spain, Extremadura has struggled to build its tourism industry, which has been an engine of growth in other parts of the country.
But, environmental groups sued before it was even built to stop it, on the grounds that the resort had been constructed in a protected area, and last week won a crucial victory against the government and the developer, José María Gea.” Read more at New York Times
“The United States is enduring its most severe increase in traffic deaths since the 1940s.
It is a sharp change from the recent norm, too. Deaths from vehicle crashes have generally been falling since the late 1960s, thanks to vehicle improvements, lower speed limits and declines in drunken driving, among other factors. By 2019, the annual death rate from crashes was near its lowest level since cars became a mass item in the 1920s.
But then came the Covid-19 pandemic.
Crashes — and deaths — began surging in the summer of 2020, surprising traffic experts who had hoped that relatively empty roads would cause accidents to decline. Instead, an increase in aggressive driving more than made up for the decline in driving. And crashes continued to increase when people returned to the roads, later in the pandemic.
Per capita vehicle deaths rose 17.5 percent from the summer of 2019 to last summer, according to a Times analysis of federal data. It is the largest two-year increase since just after World War II.
Source: National Highway Safety Administration
This grim trend is another way that two years of isolation and disruption have damaged life, as this story — by my colleague Simon Romero, who’s a national correspondent — explains. People are frustrated and angry, and those feelings are fueling increases in violent crime, customer abuse of workers, student misbehavior in school and vehicle crashes.
‘Erratic behavior’
In his story, Simon profiles one of the victims, a 7-year-old boy in Albuquerque named Pronoy Bhattacharya. Like Pronoy, many other victims of vehicles crashes are young and healthy and would have had decades of life ahead of them if only they had not been at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Pronoy was killed as he crossed the street with his family in December, after visiting a holiday lights display. The driver had run a red light.
‘We’re seeing erratic behavior in the way people are acting and their patience levels,’ Albuquerque’s police chief, Harold Medina, told Simon. ‘Everybody’s been pushed. This is one of the most stressful times in memory.’
Art Markman, a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said that the emotions partly reflected ‘two years of having to stop ourselves from doing things that we’d like to do.’ He added: ‘When you get angry in the car, it generates energy — and how do you dissipate that energy? Well, one way is to put your foot down a little bit more on the accelerator.’
Rising drug abuse during the pandemic seems to play an important role, as well. The U.S. Department of Transportation has reported that ‘the proportion of drivers testing positive for opioids nearly doubled after mid-March 2020, compared to the previous 6 months, while marijuana prevalence increased by about 50 percent.’ (Mid-March 2020 is when major Covid mitigations began.)
Other factors besides the pandemic also affect traffic deaths, of course. But those other factors tend to change slowly — and often counteract each other. Improving technology and safety features reduce traffic deaths, while the growing size of vehicles and the rise of distracted driving lead to more deaths. The only plausible explanation for most of the recent surge is the pandemic.
Rising inequality
Vehicle crashes might seem like an equal-opportunity public health problem, spanning racial and economic groups. Americans use the same highways, after all, and everybody is vulnerable to serious accidents. But they are not equally vulnerable.
Traffic fatalities are much more common in low-income neighborhoods and among Native and Black Americans, government data shows. Fatalities are less common among Asian Americans. (The evidence about Latinos is mixed.) There are multiple reasons, including socioeconomic differences in vehicle quality, road conditions, substance abuse and availability of crosswalks.
These patterns mean that the rise in vehicle crashes over the past two years has widened racial and class disparities in health. In 2020, overall U.S. traffic deaths rose 7.2 percent. Among Black Americans, the increase was 23 percent.
One factor: Essential workers, who could not stay home and work remotely, are disproportionately Black, Destiny Thomas, an urban planner, told ABC News.
Another factor: Pedestrians are disproportionately Black, Norman Garrick of the University of Connecticut noted. ‘This is not by choice,’ Garrick told NBC News. ‘In many cases, Black folks cannot afford motor vehicles.’ As Simon’s story notes, recent increases in pedestrian deaths have been especially sharp.
The increasing inequality of traffic deaths is also part of a larger Covid pattern in the U.S.: Much of the burden from the pandemic’s disruptions has fallen on historically disadvantaged groups. (Deaths from Covid itself have also been somewhat higher among people of color.)
Learning losses have been largest for Black and Latino children, as well as children who attend high-poverty schools. Drug overdoses have soared, and they are heavily concentrated among working-class and poor Americans.
As I’ve written before, there are few easy answers on Covid. Continuing the behavior restrictions and disruptions of the past two years does have potential benefits: It can reduce the spread of the virus. But those same restrictions and disruptions have large downsides.
Many workplaces remain closed. Schools aren’t operating close to normally (as my colleague Erica Green has described). Millions of adults and children must wear masks all day long. These changes have created widespread frustration and anxiety — and the burdens of them do not fall equally across society.
Dr. David Spiegel, who runs Stanford Medical School’s Center on Stress and Health, has a clarifying way of describing the problem. People are coping with what he calls ‘social disengagement.’ — a lack of contact with other people that in normal times provides pleasure, support and comfort. Instead, Spiegel said, ‘There’s the feeling that the rules are suspended and all bets are off.’” Read more at New York Times
“In the final hours before President Nixon resigned, his Defense secretary moved to restrict the commander-in-chief's access to nuclear assets, Garrett Graff writes in Watergate: A New History, out today.
Why it matters: With the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in coming in June, Graff told me his 216,000-word, 793-page book is the first "start-to-finish narrative history of Watergate written since the 1990s — and the story as we understand it has changed significantly."
Garrett tells me it's been rumored ‘for 50 years that Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger issued an order in the final days/hours of the Nixon presidency ... that ... took away Nixon's nuclear launch powers.’
‘Schlesinger claimed as such in the 1970s, but no one ever found proof,’ Graff continued.
‘Until now. I located a front-line soldier in a nuclear-armed unit in that August of 1974 who remembers the order ... It's an unprecedented extra-legal order ... since the president has unchecked nuclear launch authority.’
‘The message was blunt,’ the front-line officer told Graff, requesting anonymity to speak about classified orders even a half-century later.
He paraphrased the order he saw that night in Bavaria: ‘No troops shall be deployed unless co-signed by Dr. Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State. Please inform Command. Sent: James R Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense.’” Read more at Axios
Photo by MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP via Getty Images
“The International Olympic Committee has a full-fledged nightmare on its hands in Beijing after an arbitration court — in a stunning decision — allowed Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva to continue competing in the Games despite a positive test for a banned substance.
Valieva, just 15, is a star. She is the favorite to win the women’s singles competition this week, which will become must-see TV for all the wrong reasons. In its ruling, the IOC decided to cancel any medal ceremony if Valieva places in the top three.
What a mess.
To fully grasp how farcical this whole thing is, let’s take a step back:
The saga begins in 2014 at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the first time Russia had hosted the Games since the Soviet Union fell. Two years later, The New York Times uncovered an alleged state-sponsored doping scheme that included at least 15 athletes who medaled. It shook the Olympic world.
Russia has been in trouble ever since. Its athletes compete as neutrals in international competition, only allowed into the Games after a significant vetting process. You’ll notice the chyrons don’t read ‘Russia’ in this year’s competitions, but ‘ROC’ or ‘Russian Olympic Committee.’
Russia won’t be allowed to compete as a country in international competitions until December 22 of this year.Despite all this, here we are, with a Russian athlete — a minor, at that — in the middle of a possible doping scheme. Incredible stuff.
Other athletes are understandably outraged. The World Anti-Doping Agency and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee are mad, too. Even Sha’Carri Richardson, who was barred from the Summer Olympics due to a positive marijuana test, chimed in, asking (rightly) why she couldn't run but Valieva can compete after testing positive for a drug that increases blood flow.
The IOC says it will decide on awarding medals ‘once the case of Ms. Valieva has been concluded.’ Until then, we get to watch the most awkward skating competition yet.” Read more at The Athletic
Kirill Kudryavtsev /AFP via Getty Image
“The U.S. women's hockey team will face longtime rivals Canada in the gold medal game at the Beijing Olympics today. Either the U.S. or Canada has come home with the gold medal in every Olympics since the event was introduced.” Read more at NPR
“Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic said in an interview broadcast Tuesday that he is prepared to skip the French Open and Wimbledon if vaccination against COVID-19 is required for him to play.
The 20-time Grand Slam champion said he is not vaccinated and added that missing the next two majors, where he is the defending champion, and other tournaments is ‘the price that I am willing to pay.’
Djokovic was deported from Australia in January after losing a bid to stay in the country to defend his Australian Open title, despite not being vaccinated against COVID-19.” Read more at USA Today
“Lives Lived: Rabbi Simcha Krauss led a rabbinical court that helped Orthodox women obtain Jewish divorces from recalcitrant husbands. He died at 84.” Read more at New York Times
“The Oscars, seeking cultural relevance again after last year’s ceremony hit record low ratings, have a host again. Three, in fact.
Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes are in final negotiations to host the 94th Academy Awards next month, according to six sources with knowledge of the discussions. The three comic actresses come to the gig with varying levels of expertise, including stints hosting the MTV Movie Awards (Schumer in 2015) and the BET Awards (Hall in 2019). Sykes also had her own talk show, which ran from 2009 to 2010, and has hosted ceremonies including the GLAAD Media Awards. The news was reported earlier by Variety.” Read more at New York Times