Icicles hang off the State Highway 195 sign yesterday in Killeen, Texas. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
“Broken pumps, burst pipes and chemical shortages have left millions without potable water after this week's devastating winter storm.
The big picture: Millions of people across the South have been told to boil water, with thawing temperatures expected to reveal the extent of the damage to infrastructure.
Texas: 7 million people — because low water pressure could have allowed bacteria to seep into the system, AP reports.
Tennessee: 260,000 homes and businesses in the Memphis area — because of water main ruptures and problems at pumping stations.
Mississippi: Most of Jackson’s 161,000 residents — because the city ran out of chemicals due to resupply issues.
Between the lines: Water mains will need repair and homes have frozen pipes that will fail as they warm up. Municipal systems will take time to recover.
What's next: Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D) said he expects residents will have drinkable tap water again next week.” Read more at Axios
Water flows from a burst water pipe in Austin. Photo: Thomas Ryan Allison/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“Republicans are struggling to persuade voters to oppose President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan, which enjoys strong, bipartisan support nationwide even as it is moving through Congress with just Democratic backing.
Democrats who control the House are preparing to approve the package by the end of next week, with the Senate aiming to soon follow with its own party-line vote before unemployment benefits are set to lapse in mid-March. On Friday, the House Budget Committee unveiled the nearly 600-page text for the proposal, which includes billions of dollars for unemployment benefits, small businesses and stimulus checks.
Republican leaders, searching for a way to derail the proposal, on Friday led a final attempt to tarnish the package, labeling it a ‘payoff to progressives.’ The bill, they said, spends too much and includes a liberal wish list of programs like aid to state and local governments — which they call a ‘blue state bailout,’ though many states facing shortfalls are controlled by Republicans — and increased benefits for the unemployed, which they argued would discourage people from looking for work.
Those attacks have followed weeks of varying Republican objections to the package, including warnings that it would do little to help the economy recover and grow, that it would add to the federal budget deficit and possibly unleash faster inflation, and that Democrats were violating Mr. Biden’s calls for ‘unity’ by proceeding without bipartisan consensus.
The arguments have so far failed to connect, in part because many of its core provisions poll strongly — even with Republicans.
More than 7 in 10 Americans now back Mr. Biden’s aid package, according to new polling from the online research firm SurveyMonkey for The New York Times. That includes support from three-quarters of independent voters, 2 in 5 Republicans and nearly all Democrats. The overall support for the bill is even larger than the substantial majority of voters who said in January that they favored an end-of-year economic aid bill signed into law by President Donald J. Trump.
While Mr. Biden has encouraged Republican lawmakers to get on board with his package, Democrats are moving their bill through Congress using a parliamentary process that will allow them to pass it with only Democratic votes….
The Republican pushback is complicated by the pandemic’s ongoing economic pain, with millions of Americans still out of work and the recovery slowing. It is also hampered by the fact that many of the lawmakers objecting to Mr. Biden’s proposals supported similar provisions, including direct checks to individuals, when Mr. Trump was president.” Read more at New York Times
“Before his first news conference as defense secretary on Friday, Lloyd J. Austin III found himself watching an emotional video that laid out in stark terms the military’s stumbling response to sexual harassment and assault in the ranks.
A visibly distraught Marine, seated in a car, described how her superiors were handling her case. In the video, which lit up TikTok and Twitter on Thursday and Friday, and was widely disseminated among women’s veterans groups, the Marine said she had just found out that a commanding general had decided that the person she identified as having harassed her would remain in the Corps.
Wiping away tears, the Marine said her treatment by her superiors was why women in the military died by suicide. Aides to Mr. Austin said he viewed the video after it was sent to him by a friend.
Few specifics of the case have emerged, but the Marine Corps hurried to assemble an official response. ‘We are aware of the video of the Marine in distress,’ the Corps said in a statement on Twitter on Friday.
But while the statement insisted that the Marine Corps took ‘all allegations of misconduct seriously,’ and that commanders had taken actions to ensure the Marine was safe, it did not go into detail about the commanding general’s alleged decision to keep an accused perpetrator on the job.
Another statement, from Capt. Angelica A. Sposato with the Corps’ 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force in Camp Lejeune, N.C., said that the video ‘specifically refers to an allegation of misconduct regarding the wrongful appropriation and distribution of personal information.’ The ‘current administrative separation process for the accused perpetrator mentioned in the video is ongoing,’ Captain Sposato said.
Mr. Austin, for his part, said he found the video ‘deeply disturbing,’ adding that he had asked his staff for more information.
In 2019, the Defense Department found, there were 7,825 sexual assault reports involving service members as victims, a 3 percent increase over 2018. From 2018 to 2019, the conviction rate for cases was unchanged.
Soon after Mr. Austin took the helm at the Pentagon last month, he ordered a review of how the Defense Department has been handling sexual assault cases. But that issue has been a matter of congressional debate for over a decade.” Read more at New York Times
Jessica M. Watkins, second from left, and Donovan Crowl, center, march down the steps of the U.S. Capitol with the Oath Keepers militia group during the Jan. 6 riot. Credit...Jim Bourg/Reuters
“WASHINGTON — The Justice Department lodged charges on Friday against six more suspected members of the Oath Keepers, adding new defendants to a case that had already accused others in the right-wing militia group of an organized plot to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6 and stop the final certification of the presidential election.
The charges, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, accused Kelly Meggs, the self-described leader of the Oath Keepers’ Florida chapter, and his wife, Connie, of joining four other militia members — including a middle-aged couple from Ohio — in a military-style ‘stack’ that ascended a flight of stairs outside the Capitol and then broke into the building. The group of six, court papers say, worked with the three members of the Oath Keepers who were charged last month: Thomas E. Caldwell, Jessica M. Watkins and Donovan Crowl.
The new indictment against what is now a total of nine Oath Keepers represents the most significant effort by the government so far to prove that far-right extremists worked together in advance of Jan. 6 to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden’s victory and to help former President Donald J. Trump keep hold of power.
Indeed, prosecutors say, in late December, Mr. Meggs wrote a message on Facebook echoing a tweet that Mr. Trump had posted, saying that a rally in Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the results of the election would be ‘wild.’” Read more at New York Times
“NAIROBI, Kenya — Erik Prince, the former head of the security contractor Blackwater Worldwide and a prominent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya by sending weapons to a militia commander who was attempting to overthrow the internationally backed government, according to U.N. investigators.
A confidential U.N. report obtained by The New York Times and delivered by investigators to the Security Council on Thursday reveals how Mr. Prince deployed a force of foreign mercenaries, armed with attack aircraft, gunboats and cyberwarfare capabilities, to eastern Libya at the height of a major battle in 2019.
As part of the operation, which the report said cost $80 million, the mercenaries also planned to form a hit squad that could track down and kill selected Libyan commanders.
Mr. Prince, a former Navy SEAL and the brother of Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, became a symbol of the excesses of privatized American military force when his Blackwater contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.
In the past decade he has relaunched himself as an executive who strikes deals — sometimes for minerals, other times involving military force — in war-addled but resource-rich countries, mostly in Africa.
During the Trump administration, Mr. Prince was a generous donor and a staunch ally of the president, often in league with figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone as they sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s critics. And Mr. Prince came under scrutiny from the Trump-Russia inquiry over his meeting with a Russian banker in 2017.
Mr. Prince refused to cooperate with the U.N. inquiry; his lawyer did not respond to questions about the report. Last year the lawyer, Matthew L. Schwartz, told The Times that Mr. Prince ‘had nothing whatsoever’ to do with military operations in Libya.
The accusation that Mr. Prince violated the U.N.’s arms embargo on Libya exposes him to possible U.N. sanctions, including a travel ban and a freeze on his bank accounts and other assets — though such an outcome is uncertain.
The report raises the question of whether Mr. Prince played on his ties to the Trump administration to pull off the Libya operation.” Read more at New York Times
“Before COVID-19 shut down tennis nearly a year ago, Naomi Osaka was merely one of several young stars in women’s tennis who went into Grand Slams thinking they had a chance to win. But after a second Australian Open title on Saturday and fourth Grand Slam, there’s no doubt anymore about the dominant force in the women’s game.
Osaka’s 6-4, 6-3 victory over American Jennifer Brady in the final was her 21st consecutive win dating to last February and has nudged her ahead of every active women’s player aside from Serena and Venus Williams and Kim Clijsters in the Grand Slam count.
It also showed why she’s 4-0 in Grand Slam finals with a well-earned reputation for raising her game in big matches.
DAN WOLKEN:Time is running out for Serena Williams to win Grand Slam No. 24
Brady, playing in her first Slam final, grabbed some momentum at 4-4 in the first set and earned a break point with a lob winner that would have given her a chance to serve out the first set. But once Osaka erased that, she never looked back, breaking Brady to win the set and then rolling through the second with merely a hint of drama.” Read more at USA Today
“The U.K.’s top court ruled that a group of former drivers for Uber Technologies Inc. were entitled to a minimum wage and other benefits while working for the company, dealing a setback to Uber and other gig-economy firms in world-wide battles over their employment model.
The U.K.’s Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision issued Friday, upheld lower court decisions that granted the group of 25 drivers a type of U.K. employment status at Uber. The company had appealed those rulings, maintaining that its car-service and food-delivery drivers are independent contractors, without employee rights.
While Friday’s decision directly applies only to the former Uber drivers involved, labor activists say it sets a potential precedent for others in the U.K. who work for companies in the gig economy, where apps distribute individual tasks to a pool of people that the app makers regard as independent contractors.
Uber said that the decision doesn’t automatically reclassify all of its U.K. drivers, and that it is unrelated to its Uber Eats food-delivery business. The company said that since the case was filed it has added driver benefits such as insurance for sickness and injury.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West at Vanity Fair’s 2020 Oscars after-party.Credit...Ringo Chiu/EPA, via Shutterstock
“Kim Kardashian West has filed for divorce, seeking to end a nearly seven-year marriage to Kanye West that had become an endless source of celebrity news, family turmoil and brand sponsorships, a spokeswoman for Ms. Kardashian West said on Friday.
The spokeswoman, Christy Welder, would not elaborate on the filing, which would dissolve a union that came to be known as Kimye. Ms. Kardashian West, 40, and Mr. West, 43, have four children: North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm.
Their tumultuous marriage was tracked incessantly by the media; became fodder for occasional episodes of her long-running reality show, ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’; and was documented for millions on their Instagram and Twitter accounts.” Read more at New York Times
“GOP state lawmakers across the country have proposed a flurry of voting restrictions that they say are needed to restore confidence in U.S. elections, an effort intended to placate supporters of former president Donald Trump who believe his false claims that the 2020 outcome was rigged.
But the effort is dividing Republicans, some of whom are warning that it will tar the GOP as the party of voter suppression and give Democrats ammunition to mobilize their supporters ahead of the 2022 midterms.
The proposals include measures that would curtail eligibility to vote by mail and prohibit the use of ballot drop boxes. One bill in Georgia would block early voting on Sundays, which critics quickly labeled a flagrant attempt to thwart Souls to the Polls, the Democratic turnout effort that targets Black churchgoers on the final Sunday before an election.” Read more at Washington Post
“A Moscow court has rejected an appeal from Alexei Navalny that virtually guarantees the Russian opposition figure will be sent to a prison camp for two and a half years.
In a widely expected ruling, the judge upheld a decision to imprison Navalny by reversing a parole handed down in 2014 for embezzlement in a case Navalny said was politically motivated.” Read more at The Guardian
“Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) on Friday announced his opposition to President Biden’s choice to lead the White House budget office, imperiling her nomination in a narrowly divided U.S. Senate.
Neera Tanden, tapped to be director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has emerged as a lightning rod for criticism over her prior attacks against Republican lawmakers and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
If all Republicans vote against her nomination, Manchin’s opposition would prevent Tanden from being confirmed through the Senate, where each party only controls 50 votes. Biden has so far secured approval for seven of his cabinet nominees, and Tanden was widely expected to prove among his most controversial choices.
Asked while leaving Air Force One if he was going to pull Tanden’s nomination, Biden told reporters ‘no’ and expressed confidence that ‘we are going to find the votes and get her confirmed,’ according to a pool report. The White House also issued a statement defending Tanden.” Read more at Washington Post
“In Texas’s Black-Swan Blackout, Everything Went Wrong at Once
The Arctic blast that left millions without power in Texas ignited a blame game between advocates of renewable energy and those who back traditional sources, but there’s one thing most experts agree on: The U.S. electricity system needs a total revamp. Rachel Adams-Heard, Naureen S. Malik and Brian Eckhouse investigate.” Read more at Bloomberg“Saudi Ultimatum to Move In or Lose Out Unsettles Global Firms
Some businessmen see Saudi Arabia as waking sleeping giant, with planned mega-projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet, Zainab Fattah and Lin Noueihed report on how the Kingdom’s ultimatum for global companies to move their regional hubs to Riyadh by 2024 or lose business is the kind of decision making that has made some wary of investing there.” Read more at Bloomberg“News that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration withheld nursing home Covid-related fatality data from the legislature as it handled a federal probe has rocked the Statehouse. As Keshia Clukey reports, now Democratic lawmakers who once took a back seat to the governor are angry, with some calling for the emergency powers he was granted at the start of the pandemic to be revoked.” Read more at Bloomberg
Cuomo speaking during a news conference in New York on Oct. 5, 2020.
“Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has said flags in the state will fly at half-staff for Rush Limbaugh, the hard-right talk radio host who died this week aged 70.
The decision met with opposition.
Gary Farmer, Democratic minority leader in the Florida Senate, said: ‘Any move to lower our flag in deference to a man who helped drive the hatred and inflame the prejudices against marginalised groups, people of colour, women and anyone who did not look like him or think like him is wrong and should be rescinded.’
‘This is not who we are. This is not who we want to be.’
But DeSantis, a controversial governor known to some as a ‘mini-Trump’ and widely thought to have presidential ambitions, called Limbaugh a friend….
DeSantis has previously ordered flags to be at half-staff to honour law enforcement officers killed on duty, members of the US navy killed in a mass shooting in Pensacola and the liberal supreme court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among others.” Read more at The Guardian