TOKYO —"Spectators from overseas will not be allowed to attend the Summer Olympics in Japan, organizers said on Saturday, making a major concession to the realities of Covid-19 even as they forged ahead with plans to hold the world’s largest sporting event.
The Tokyo Games, which begin in July, were originally scheduled for 2020 but were delayed by a year because of the pandemic. The Tokyo organizing committee has been scrambling to develop safety protocols to protect both participants and local residents from the virus. Concern has been running high in Japan, with big majorities saying in polls that the Games should not be held this summer.
Seiko Hashimoto, president of the Tokyo committee, promised at a news conference on Saturday that the lack of international spectators would not spoil the Games.
‘The Tokyo 2020 Games will be completely different from the past, but the essence remains the same,’ Ms. Hashimoto said. ‘Athletes will put everything on the line and inspire people with their outstanding performances.’” Read more at New York Times
“Federal health officials on Friday announced updated guidance on physical distancing in schools, now saying students need only be 3 feet apart, rather than 6.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), students can maintain a distance of three feet or more in classroom settings so long as there is universal masking, a change that's aimed at speeding the return to in-person learning.
The recommendation is for all K-12 students, regardless of whether community transmission is low, moderate or substantial, the CDC said.
Middle school and high school students should be at least 6 feet apart in communities where transmission is high, the CDC said, if cohorting is not possible.
Cohorting is when groups of students are kept together with the same peers and staff throughout the school day to reduce the risk for spread throughout the school. According to the CDC, older students are more likely to be exposed to COVID-19 and spread it than younger children.
The CDC also recommends 6 feet of distance in common areas, like lobbies and auditoriums, and during activities like singing, shouting, band or sport practices.” Read more at The Hill
“U.S. President Joe Biden called on Congress to send him new legislation on hate crimes and for Americans to “change our hearts” to combat racially motivated attacks on Asian Americans, following the shooting murders of eight people in the Atlanta area.” Read more at Bloomberg
“In his first standoff with China, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took a calculated risk.
Staring at his Chinese counterpart across a hotel conference room in Alaska’s largest city, he called Beijing a threat to ‘global stability’ and denounced its record on human rights, trade, Hong Kong, Taiwan and a range of other issues in front of throngs of reporters and video cameras.
The remarks were intended to demonstrate the Biden administration’s confidence in the face of Chinese aggression and set the tone for what Blinken has called the ‘biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century.’
The two-day meeting, which ended Friday, followed a separate diplomatic dust-up after President Biden affirmed his view that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a ‘killer,’ generating a furious response from Moscow.
In just two months, the Biden administration has shown a surprisingly strong appetite for rhetorical fisticuffs with America’s top adversaries. The dramatic standoffs help clarify Washington’s new outlook in a post-Trump era, but also create unpredictable and sometimes chaotic outcomes on the diplomatic stage.
After four years of President Donald Trump’s erratic style of diplomacy, many expected Biden to return to a traditional approach. But the new administration has not shied away from impugning heads of governments and ruling parties, and ripping up the playbook on standard diplomatic choreography.
In Alaska, Biden officials anticipated that China would respond angrily to Blinken’s shot across the bow, but expected that the retort would be limited to a two-minute statement from each Chinese official, per the ground rules Washington and Beijing agreed upon.
That didn’t happen.
Instead of issuing a modest rejoinder, Yang Jiechi, a senior Chinese diplomat, seized on Blinken’s remarks and delivered a 17-minute diatribe against U.S. imperialism and failed military interventions over the last 20 years — flipping the accusation back at the United States regarding which country is responsible for sowing instability.
‘We do not believe in invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other countries, because all of those would only cause turmoil and instability in this world,’ Yang said.
As Yang skewered various aspects of U.S. governance, including the treatment of Black Americans, the carefully negotiated ground rules between the world’s two largest economies evaporated, resulting in an extended back-and-forth between U.S. and Chinese officials, with both sides later excoriating the other for breaking diplomatic protocol.
‘This rancorous public display is unquestionably unhelpful in any effort to establish a more positive dynamic,’ said Danny Russel, a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute who was a senior diplomat in the Obama administration.
‘The goal of the meeting in Anchorage was to communicate, and so what happened instead was they got involved in a bit of a sparring match with some diplomatic theatrics,’ he added. ‘This is an art form with which the Chinese excel.’
Whatever setbacks may have occurred, Blinken immediately won praise from his boss back in Washington.
‘I’m very proud of the secretary of state,’ Biden told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House when asked for his reaction to the first day of talks.
Biden has similarly brushed off criticisms from Moscow, which temporarily recalled its ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, in what is believed to be the first such instance in more than 20 years. On Thursday, Putin said that by calling him a killer, the U.S. president was projecting to compensate for America’s killing of Native Americans and slavery.
‘When I was a child, when we argued in the courtyard, we said the following: ‘If you call someone names, that’s really your name,’ ‘ Putin said. ‘When we characterize other people, or even when we characterize other states, other people, it is always as though we are looking in the mirror.’
The twin spats with Russia and China raise questions about whether Biden will seek to forge productive relationships with them, or whether confrontation and conflagration will be the new normal.
The Biden administration has imposed sanctions on both countries in response to Moscow’s alleged poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Beijing’s ongoing crackdown on political freedoms in Hong Kong.” Read more at Washington Post
Deb Haaland in Washington at the ceremony on Thursday. Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, is the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history. Photograph: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
“Deb Haaland made sure she was making history in style.
From head to toe, Biden’s new interior secretary dressed in pieces that honored her Native American heritage when she was sworn in on Thursday: a sky-blue ribbon skirt adorned with embroidered images of butterflies, stars and corn along with moccasin boots, dragonfly earrings and a turquoise bead necklace.
Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, is the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history. As interior secretary, Haaland is charged with overseeing the department that manages the country’s national parks, wildlife refuges and natural resources like gas, oil and water. The interior department also works to uphold the US government’s treaty obligations with Native American tribes, of which there are 574 sovereign tribal nations in the US.” Read more at The Guardian
“Facing a swell of outrage and accusations that it prized men’s basketball players more than the athletes competing in the women’s tournament next week, the N.C.A.A. apologized on Friday for vast disparities in workout facilities at its marquee championship events.
Later in the day, Mark Emmert, the president of the N.C.A.A., acknowledged an additional startling imbalance between the men’s and women’s tournaments: different methods of coronavirus testing for athletes and for others inside the tournaments’ ‘controlled environments.’
The method in use at the men’s event in Indiana is called a polymerase chain reaction test, or a P.C.R. test, which is considered the gold standard of virus testing. It is highly sensitive and almost always detects infections. The method for the women’s tournament in Texas is a rapid antigen test, which is cheaper and generally provides quicker results but is less sensitive and more likely to yield false negatives.
‘We have complete confidence in all the medical protocols that have been put together,’ Emmert said, adding that the N.C.A.A. had used national and local medical advisers to formulate plans for the events. ‘All of the health experts say the protocol that they’re using right now in all our venues and all our championships is one that has no difference at all in our ability to mitigate risk.’
The controversy around the women’s tournament erupted this week with complaints about unequal facilities. Players at the men’s tournament have benefited from an enormous, well-stocked workout complex in downtown Indianapolis. But the stars of the women’s game, who will play their tournament in Texas beginning on Sunday, appeared to have only a rack of hand weights.
Faced with an uproar on Friday, Dan Gavitt, the N.C.A.A.’s vice president of basketball, apologized for ‘dropping the ball, frankly.’
‘We will get it fixed as soon as possible,’ he said from Indiana.
Similarly, Lynn Holzman, who played at Kansas State and rose to become the N.C.A.A.’s vice president of women’s basketball, said Friday that organizers ‘fell short.’ Her voice sometimes catching during a videoconference with reporters, Holzman acknowledged that the episode was a ‘blemish.’…
Although the N.C.A.A. has faced serious strain in the last year, it makes so much money from the men’s tournament that providing equal amenities for everyone should not be a financial issue. The men’s tournament is the crown jewel for the N.C.A.A., which will draw more than $850 million in television rights from it this year alone. The women’s tournament, by comparison, is part of a multisport broadcast deal worth nearly $42 million this fiscal year.
On Thursday, the N.C.A.A. posted an online statement from Holzman, in which she partly attributed the lack of women’s weight room facilities to a dearth of space in San Antonio, where the bulk of the tournament is being held. She was shortly called out on that excuse.
Sedona Prince, an Oregon sophomore, posted a video online showing an abundance of space where the women are training. Adjacent to the women’s practice court, a vast, wide open area is unused.
‘If you’re not upset about this problem, then you are a part of it,’ Prince said.” Read more at New York Times
“Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made no secret of her disdain for a program intended to forgive the federal student loans of borrowers who were ripped off by schools that defrauded their students. She called it a ‘free money’ giveaway, let hundreds of thousands of claims languish for years and slashed the amount of relief granted to some successful applicants to $0.
Then, after a class-action lawsuit made it impossible to stall any longer, her agency built what amounted to an assembly line of rejection.
In Ms. DeVos’s final year in office, her agency denied nearly 130,000 claims — far surpassing the 9,000 rejections in the prior five years — with a system that pressured workers to speed through applications in a matter of minutes, according to internal Education Department documents filed in federal court.
The department aimed to process 5,000 applications a week, the documents show — a standard that required agency employees to adjudicate claims that could stretch to hundreds of pages in less than 12 minutes. Those who did it faster were eligible for bonuses; those who took longer risked being fired. Agency employees rejected claims against hundreds of schools for not including written evidence that borrowers were never required to submit. And the department frequently disregarded its own findings of wrongdoing by schools when reviewing claims from their students.” Read more at Washington Post
“Four men described as leaders of the far-right Proud Boys have been charged in the US Capitol riots, as an indictment ordered unsealed on Friday presents fresh evidence of how federal officials believe group members planned and carried out a coordinated attack to stop Congress from certifying President Biden’s electoral victory.
So far, at least 19 leaders, members, or associates of the neo-fascist Proud Boys have been charged in federal court with offenses related to the Jan. 6 riots. The latest indictment suggests the Proud Boys deployed a much larger contingent in Washington, with over 60 users ‘participating in’ an encrypted messaging channel for group members that was created a day before the riots.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Just days after the Tennessee Historical Commission voted overwhelmingly to remove a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and first Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, several Republicans state lawmakers are pushing to replace the entire commission with new members, Matt Shuham reports.
The bust of Forrest was installed at the state Capitol in the late 1970s, and has been the subject of protests pretty much ever since. But the effort to sack the historical commission is just the latest in a years-long bureaucratic struggle over monuments to Confederate history in Tennessee, Matt reported. In fact, the current rules for removing monuments date back to 2013, when the state passed the Heritage Protection Act, barring the removal of monuments on public property without a two-thirds waiver vote from the commission.” Read more at Talking Point Memo
“The Taliban warned Washington on Friday against defying a May 1 deadline for the withdrawal of American and NATO troops from Afghanistan, promising a ‘reaction,’ which could mean increased attacks by the insurgent group.
The Taliban issued their warning at a press conference in Moscow, the day after meeting with senior Afghan government negotiators and international observers to try to jumpstart a stalled peace process to end Afghanistan’s decades of war.
President Biden’s administration says it is reviewing an agreement the Taliban signed with the Trump administration. Biden told ABC in an interview Wednesday that the May 1 deadline ‘could happen, but it is tough,’ adding that if the deadline is extended it won’t be by ‘a lot longer.’” Read more at Boston Globe
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.POOL/PHOTOGRAPHER: POOL/GETTY IMAGES
ALBANY, N.Y. — “He called her and her co-worker ‘mingle mamas.’ He inquired about her lack of a wedding ring, she said, and the status of her divorce. She recalled him telling her she was beautiful — in Italian — and, as she sat alone with him in his office awaiting dictation, he gazed down her shirt and commented on a necklace hanging there.
In the latest allegation against Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Alyssa McGrath, an employee of the governor’s office, described a series of unsettling interactions with the governor, telling The New York Times that Cuomo would ogle her body, remark on her looks, and make suggestive comments to her and another executive aide.
McGrath, 33, is the first current aide in Cuomo’s office to speak publicly about allegations of harassment inside the Capitol. Her account of casual sexual innuendo echoes other stories that have emerged in recent weeks about a demeaning office culture, particularly for young women who worked closely with the governor.
The most serious accusation against the governor was made by another current aide who has accused Cuomo of groping her breast in the Executive Mansion. McGrath said that the aide described the encounter in detail to her after it was made public in a report in The Times Union of Albany last week….
Multiple women, including former and current aides, have accused the governor of inappropriate remarks and behavior, including unwanted touching and unwelcome sexual advances.
Cuomo, 63, has denied any wrongdoing, and has suggested that his relationships with employees he viewed as friends may have been misinterpreted….
The scandal that has engulfed the governor, leading most of the state’s Democratic leaders to call for his resignation, began with the accounts of two former employees, Lindsey Boylan, a former economic development official, and Charlotte Bennett, an executive assistant and senior briefer.
Although McGrath does not work directly for Cuomo, she said that she and her co-worker were commonly pulled from the pool of executive chamber assistants to work weekends and at the mansion. Many assistants in the chamber are women, often decades younger than Cuomo.” Read more at Boston Globe
“No. 15 seed Oral Roberts shocked No. 2 Ohio State 75-72 on Friday in the men's NCAA Tournament first round, becoming the first Cinderella of March Madness.
The Golden Eagles' Kevin Obanor made two free throws with 13 seconds left in overtime to seal the win after he made two free throws with 14.9 seconds left to tie the game at 64 and force overtime.
‘We just had the mindset of, ‘Show us that you deserve to be No. 2,' and we came out with a lot of confidence,’ Obanor said after the game.
Oral Roberts becomes just the ninth No. 15 seed to knock out a No. 2, joining the likes of Middle Tennessee (2016) and Florida Gulf Coast (2013).
Sophomore guard Max Abmas – the nation's leading scorer – made key plays down the stretch to help the mid-major pull off the bracket-busting upset.” Read more at USA Today
“South Carolina women's basketball coach Dawn Staley took NCAA president Mark Emmert to task Friday over disparities in provisions for the men's and women's tournaments.
‘What we now know is the NCAA’s season long message about ‘togetherness’ and ‘equality' was about convenience and a soundbite for the moment created after the murder of George Floyd,’ she said on Twitter.
Photos on social media showed a full weight room at the men's tournament in Indianapolis, while the women's tournament in San Antonio had a rack of weights and some yoga mats in an empty ballroom. There were also disparities in tournament swag and quality of food.
‘There is no answer that the NCAA executive leadership led by Mark Emmert can give to explain the disparities,’ said Staley, whose team is a No. 1 seed at the tournament, which starts Sunday in San Antonio. ‘Mark Emmert and his team point blank chose to create them! The real issue is not the weights or the ‘swag’ bags. It’s that they did not think or do not think that the women’s players ‘deserve’ the same amenities of the men.’
She also took issue with the official March Madness Twitter account including the tagline: ‘The Official NCAA March Madness destination for all things Division I/NCAA Men’s Basketball.’
‘Those words mean one thing – March Madness is ONLY about men’s basketball,’ she said. ‘How do we explain that to our players? How can an organization that claims to care about ALL member institutions’ student-athlete experiences have a copyrighted item that only ‘represents’ one gender?’
Staley, who had a Hall of Fame playing career, has coached women's college basketball for 20 years, including the past 12 years at South Carolina. She won a national title in 2017 and is a two-time coach of the year.” Read more at USA Today
“With the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan enacted and underway, Republican-controlled states are bristling at one part of the law. A provision attached to $350 billion in aid prohibits states from using those funds to finance tax cuts, sparking ire from the GOP and leading Ohio to file a lawsuit over the measure. Here are some points of interest:
$330 billion:Estimated pandemic-induced state and local government budget shortfall
$350 billion: Amount of state and local aid in the American Rescue Plan
21: Republican AG’s demanding to be allowed to use the relief money for tax cuts
10: Number of those AG’s who represent states with tax shortfalls in 2020
$1.1 billion: Amount of 2020 tax revenue Ohio claims to have lost
$5.5 billion: Money Ohio is set to receive under the ARP
15: Number of times variations on the word ‘coerce,’ including ‘gun to the head,’ appear in Ohio’s lawsuit
628: Pages of text in the ARP
643: Minutes it took aides to read the entire text of the legislation on the Senate floor
81: Number of words in the ARP in reference to banning states from using stimulus funds to finance tax cuts
$0: Amount of state and local aid the GOP-supported COVID relief bill would have provided.” Read more at Talking Points Memo
WASHINGTON — “Even as Americans across the country hunt for a lifesaving shot in a bid to get back to a semblance of prepandemic normalcy, more than a quarter of members of Congress, just a phone call away from receiving a coronavirus vaccine, have turned it down.
Lawmakers who have continued to meet in person during the pandemic, often in violation of public health advice, have had access to the Pfizer vaccine since late December. But in the House, about 25 percent of lawmakers have not received a vaccination, the top Republican wrote this week to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, citing data from the Office of the Attending Physician. It is unclear how many senators have been vaccinated, though a handful of Republicans have said they do not intend to get one.
The hesitance around receiving the vaccine mirrors a broader trend across the United States, where there are differing degrees of opposition to being inoculated against the coronavirus, but polling suggests that Republicans are far more skeptical. Because vaccinations are confidential health information, there is no breakdown of which lawmakers have received one or what their party affiliations are. But in recent weeks, several Republicans have publicly rejected the idea of being vaccinated.
Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and a former ophthalmologist, said he was ‘going with the science on this one’ in refusing a vaccine.
‘I have not chosen to be vaccinated because I got it naturally,’ Mr. Paul, who tested positive for the virus last March, recently told reporters. (The science says the opposite; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people get vaccinated even if they have already had the coronavirus.)
‘I had Covid,’ said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin. ‘I think that probably provides me the best immunity possible actually having the disease.’
The reluctance is just the latest barrier that Congress is confronting as leaders consider how to begin reinstating a sense of normalcy on Capitol Hill, where partisanship has become inextricably tied to health decisions and offices amount to their own fiefs, each with their own rules and perceptions of risk. It is emerging at a time when many aides on Capitol Hill — some of whom work for lawmakers who expect them to show up in person to the office — are themselves struggling to find a vaccine dose amid uneven policies about who should get one.
Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, told reporters on Friday that the House should be aiming for ‘100 percent’ of members to be vaccinated, but lamented that she could not force anyone to accept a shot. If Republicans refused, she said, it would simply take longer to get the House back to normal, as members of that party have been pushing to do.” Read more at New York Times
“Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida has been partially closed after some of its employees were infected with the coronavirus, according to an email sent to club members Friday afternoon.” Read more at Washington Post
“George F. Bass, who was often called the father of underwater archaeology, scouring shipwrecks for revelatory artifacts and developing new techniques for exploring the ocean, died on March 2 at a hospital in Bryan, Texas. He was 88.” Read more at New York Times