The Full Belmonte, 3/22/2022
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“Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee began four days of Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to be considered for the Supreme Court.” [Vox] Read more at NPR/Barbara Sprunt
“In their opening remarks, nearly all the committee’s Republicans invoked Democrats’ ‘constant attacks’ on Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018. Kavanaugh, unlike Jackson, was accused of sexual assault.” [Vox] Read more at Business Insider/Sonam Sheth
“Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), the sole Black senator on the Judiciary Committee, described Monday’s hearing as ‘a day of joy,’ sharing a story of Jackson’s daughter, who wrote to former President Barack Obama at age 11, recommending her mother as a Supreme Court justice.” [Vox] Read more at ABC News/Eric Fayeulle
“If all Democrats hold to the party line, Jackson could be confirmed without GOP support. Still, they are hoping to secure bipartisan support for her appointment.” [Vox] Read more at The Hill
“Ahead of this week’s hearings, Jackson received numerous outside endorsements, including from the American Bar Association and the Fraternal Order of Police.” [Vox] Read more at Axios/Shawna Chen
Satellite imagery shows burning apartment buildings in northeastern Mariupol, Ukraine.
“Mariupol, the Ukrainian city once home to more than 450,000 people, has been ‘reduced to ashes,’ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, as new images show Russian military vehicles and tanks scattered across the southern port city. US officials have also confirmed that Russia has used hypersonic missiles during the invasion. These weapons -- which travel at least five times the speed of sound and are nearly impossible to intercept -- were likely used by Russia to send a message to the West about their capabilities, multiple sources told CNN. This comes as President Joe Biden and fellow world leaders will hold a set of emergency summits in Europe this week, but few observers believe the talks will yield an end to the bloodshed in Ukraine. While Biden will be near the region, the White House says he has ‘no plans’ to visit Ukraine. Separately, cybersecurity officials say there is evolving intelligence that Putin's next escalation could be a direct cyberattack on the US. Biden issued an urgent warning to American business leaders yesterday, telling them to strengthen their companies' cyber defenses immediately.” Read more at CNN
“The pro-Kremlin Russian news outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda, citing defense ministry figures, briefly reported that 9,861 Russian soldiers had died and 16,153 were injured in the war so far, casualty figures that would eclipse those from Russia’s second Chechen war. Those figures were later deleted, but only after they had stayed on the site for hours. The outlet later claimed it had been hacked and said the numbers were inaccurate.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“The U.S. is sending Soviet-era air-defense systems it secretly acquired decades ago to Ukraine to protect against Russia’s attacks. Washington got hold of this technology in an effort to better understand what missile-defense systems Moscow was using and exporting around the world. Ukraine’s military is familiar with this equipment because it’s the kind the country got after the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war complicates the Biden administration’s military strategy on China and Russia.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Cyber threat | Biden warned of the risk from potential Russian cyberattacks as he urged the U.S. private sector yesterday to “harden your cyber defense immediately.” Such attacks have played a smaller role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than many experts predicted and anticipated retaliatory hacks against U.S. businesses and organizations in the wake of sanctions apparently haven’t occurred on any major scale.
A Russian court today convicted jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny on new fraud charges, a ruling that may keep Putin’s top critic in a maximum security prison for 13 years.” Read more at Bloomberg
“Risky policy | President Xi Jinping’s gamble that establishing a ‘no limits’ friendship with Putin may prevent the U.S. from containing China is threatening to leave it increasingly isolated. While more countries appear to be supporting the U.S. position on the invasion, messages at home affirming the China-Russia partnership have left Beijing struggling to convince the world it’s a neutral player in the crisis.” Read more at Bloomberg
“The confirmation reached the hostages in Chernobyl before midnight: After more than three weeks working at gunpoint on the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, some of them would finally be allowed to go home.
Late Sunday and early Monday, 64 technicians and support staff were evacuated across Russian lines and replaced by co-workers who had volunteered to relieve them, according to released Chernobyl employees and their families, Ukraine’s energy ministry and the United Nations’ atomic energy watchdog. The hostages were among 210 technicians and other support staff trapped at the defunct power plant since Russian forces seized control of it on Feb. 24, the first day of the war.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“The SEC proposed rules that would require public companies to disclose climate-change risks and greenhouse-gas emissions from their operations and, in some cases, supply chains and consumers. They would have to include the information in SEC filings such as annual reports. The proposal—part of a Biden administration push to address climate change amid congressional gridlock on the issue—will be open for public comment for at least two months before the agency begins to craft a final rule. Some industry groups and Republicans, who call the move overreach, are prepared to fight it.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Vice President Mike Pence was taken to a loading dock under the US Capitol during the January 6 riot, a US Secret Service inspector testified yesterday. This detail -- revealed during the second trial for a defendant charged in the Capitol attack -- is the first time that federal law enforcement has confirmed where Pence went after he was evacuated from the Senate chamber during the attack. One key point prosecutors worked to prove during the trial yesterday was how rioters jeopardized the security perimeter around Pence. It's an important distinction for the prosecution of certain rioters who are charged with entering and remaining in a restricted area, as well as disorderly conduct. Meanwhile, the first January 6 defendant to go on trial has asked a federal judge to throw out his conviction and to schedule a new trial, in what's expected to be an important test case for scores of US Capitol riot prosecutions to come.” Read more at CNN
“Women are seeing faster wage growth than men.
Female wages were up 4.4% in February from a year earlier, compared with a 4.1% rise in male wages, according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve. That marks the sixth straight month that women’s wage growth outpaced men’s. The Covid-19 pandemic hit female workers harder. They have a disproportionate share of lower-wage service-sector jobs in personal care, food preparation and healthcare support, industries that suffered when the virus first struck. Now, those sectors are bouncing back, and employers facing a tight labor market are willing to pay workers more. However, the gap between men’s and women’s wages remains wide: Last year, median weekly earnings for full-time female workers amounted to 83.1% of men’s earnings.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
Republican Eric Greitens, who is running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Missouri, spoke at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla.PHOTO: TRISTAN WHEELOCK/BLOOMBERG NEWS
“The ex-wife of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens alleges in a court filing under oath that he physically abused her and their children before their divorce, knocking her down, striking one of their sons across the face and yanking the boy around by his hair.
The filing sheds new light on Mr. Greitens’s past controversies as the Republican tries to make a political comeback by running for an open Senate seat in Missouri.
Mr. Greitens resigned as governor in May 2018 following allegations that he had coerced his hairdresser into a sexual act while she wept, struck her repeatedly and photographed her nude without her consent to prevent her from disclosing their affair. Mr. Greitens admitted in January 2018 that he had an affair with the hairdresser, but he denied the allegations of abuse and the existence of the photo.
In a sworn court filing this month discussing child-custody issues, former Missouri first lady Sheena Greitens said Mr. Greitens had admitted to her that he had taken the photo, but ‘he threatened that I would be exposed to legal jeopardy if I ever disclosed that fact to anyone, even family members or a therapist.’ She said she believed him because of ‘the reach of his influence in Missouri.’
Mr. Greitens denied his ex-wife’s allegations, saying in a statement that his sons were the joy of his life and that he is seeking full custody. He said that Ms. Greitens’s accusations were ‘completely fabricated, baseless’ and that he would continue to pray that she gets the help she needs.
Mr. Greitens’s attorney has moved to seal records and proceedings related to the allegations, which he said were ‘inflammatory and scurrilous’ and would irreparably harm Mr. Greitens’s Senate campaign.
An attorney for Ms. Greitens declined to comment Monday.
A grand jury indicted Mr. Greitens in February 2018 for felony invasion of privacy in connection with the photograph of the hairdresser. But proof of the photo never materialized, and St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner subsequently dropped the charge after Mr. Greitens’s defense attorneys, who had criticized her handling of the case, said they planned to call her as a witness.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Mark Meadows investigated: The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation has opened a probe into potential voter fraud by the former White House chief of staff.” Read more at USA Today
“Indiana’s Republican governor vetoed a bill that would have banned transgender girls from competing in school-sanctioned girls’ sports.” Read more at New York Times
“Fifteen states have enacted or are considering laws that would restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth. They put a staggering 54,000 transitioning transgender youth at risk of losing care. That's one-third of all transgender-identifying youth in the U.S.” Read more at NPR
“Disney employees are calling for the company to boost support for LGBTQ employees following the company's response to Florida's ‘Don't Say Gay’ bill. They're staging a daylong walkout Tuesday with a list of demands, culminating a week of smaller protests. If signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Parental Rights in Education bill would prohibit ‘classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels.’ After initial public silence on the matter, Disney CEO Bob Chapek apologized for not being a ‘stronger ally in the fight for equal rights’ and pledged a number of supportive measures, but some employees don't think that's enough. Walkout organizers and supporters want Disney to permanently cut off donations to lawmakers who backed Florida's bill.” Read more at USA Today
“Dangerous storms are in the forecast for portions of the southern U.S. over the next three days, forecasters warned, and all modes of severe weather are possible, including tornadoes. On Tuesday, the area most at risk shifts east into Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama , where the Storm Prediction Center warned that "significant and damaging tornadoes" are possible. Cities such as New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi, are all in the zone of greatest risk. The threat of severe storms will be ongoing in the morning and will last into the overnight hours.” Read more at USA Today
“The number of Americans who died of alcohol-related causes surged during the pandemic’s first year.” Read more at New York Times
“Miami Beach has declared a state of emergency after two shootings over the weekend wounded five people. A curfew will also be in effect as the city tries to curb spring break violence.” Read more at NPR
“Four years ago, nurse RaDonda Vaught accidentally grabbed the wrong drug from an electronic cabinet and administered it to her patient, who died. The Tennessee Board of Nursing revoked her license. Now she’s on trial for homicide, leaving other nurses fearful of the precedent.” Read more at NPR
“Charter schools looking for federal start-up grants would face stricter requirements under new rules proposed by the Biden administration.
As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden proposed eliminating federal funding to support for-profit charter schools, and the proposed new rules go a long way to fulfilling that vow.
At the same time, the spending bill that cleared Congress this month keeps overall funding for the charter school program level at $440 million, as Biden requested in his budget. Grants are typically about $500,000 per school, and they have benefited about half of the existing charter schools.
The result is a middle position of sorts, reflecting Biden’s ambivalence on the subject. Biden, like many centrist Democrats, was once a supporter of charter schools, but he shifted his rhetoric on the matter as they fell from favor with the party’s liberal wing. Teacher unions, which hold significant sway in the party, are among the movement’s fiercest critics.” Read more at Washington Post
“Rescue operations continued Tuesday after an airliner carrying 132 people crashed in China . But nearly a day after the crash, no survivors have been found, Chinese state media reported. The Boeing 737-800, operated by China Eastern Airlines, crashed in the southern province of Guangxi with 123 passengers and nine crew members on board. Only debris from the wreckage had been found, according to rescuers who spoke to state-run Xinhua News Agency. Chinese President Xi Jinping called for an ‘all-out effort’ in the rescue operations and for any potential safety hazards to be investigated. While Boeing has come under fire previously for crashes, it was the company's Boeing 737 Max that generated some of the harshest criticism over safety concerns.” Read more at USA Today
“Jamaica’s chilly royal welcome. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, better known as Prince William and Kate, face a frosty welcome in Jamaica today as the couple continue a Caribbean tour. A group of 100 Jamaican leaders have signed a letter protesting their arrival, timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Jamaican independence and the 70th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s rule, and have demanded an apology and reparations for slavery.
‘We see no reason to celebrate 70 years of the ascension of your grandmother to the British throne because her leadership, and that of her predecessors, have perpetuated the greatest human rights tragedy in the history of humankind,’ the letter read.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“Afghanistan is ranked ‘unhappiest’ of 149 countries in a UN survey. Results from the survey, conducted over three years, suggest the country’s quality of life was already at a low before the US military withdrawal that led to the Taliban’s takeover.” [Vox] Read more at Deutsche Welle
“Education in Afghanistan. Girls in Afghanistan could be returning to school as soon as this Wednesday following an education ministry announcement. Since the Taliban swept to power in August, girls had only been allowed attend school up to the sixth grade. Without specifically mentioning girls, the ministry said ‘it is committed to the right to education of all its citizens,’ and was working to ‘eliminate all kinds of discrimination’ in a Monday statement. The Taliban had previously pledged to allow girls return to school at all levels after the Afghan new year, which began yesterday.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“Babis on trial. Former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis will face trial in his home country following a fraud indictment in a case involving EU farm subsidies. Babis, who left power in December 2021 after losing in October elections, has denied the charges and said they are politically motivated.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“Hitting back | Russia will halt talks with Japan on a treaty that would officially end a conflict dating back to World War II after Tokyo imposed sanctions over Putin’s assault on Ukraine. The two countries never reached an official peace deal after the war as they wrangled for decades over a group of four islands close to Japan’s Hokkaido.” Read more at Bloomberg
“News outlets are finding creative ways to get around Kremlin efforts to block independent reporting inside Russia, Axios' Sara Fischer writes.
Tech workarounds range from carbon-copy websites to encryption tools and anonymous browsers.
Why it matters: While old-school circumvention methods like short-wave radio are being reintroduced, journalists trying to break through Russia's iron curtain for media are finding sophisticated digital techniques are more effective and efficient.
The U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have been mirroring websites for news sites being censored — making exact copies of them at new internet addresses.
Reality check: The Kremlin can block a mirrored domain once it's discovered, forcing news outlets to constantly shift to new domains.
Encrypted messaging channels, including Telegram or Whatsapp, are often used by outlets to communicate with their audiences to let them know which domains are active.
State of the art: News organizations are using encrypted channels to communicate with individual Russians on the ground who may provide photos and videos to Western outlets to verify and report on.
News sites and social networks are also beginning to establish their own Tor networks, which encrypt internet traffic and reroute it through thousands of servers around the world, making it virtually impossible to track.
Twitter last week announced its own Tor service that helps Russians access its site despite government efforts to block it.
The backdrop: Russians are desperate for accurate information.
Use of virtual private networks, or VPNs, which enable users to hide their locations to evade location-based restrictions, has skyrocketed.
Top10VPN.com, which tracks search volume data, saw the demand increase for VPN services peak at 2,692% above normal on March 14, after Russia announced it would ban Instagram.” Read more at Axios
“Lives Lived: The freelance photojournalist Sumy Sadurni was born in Chile and best known for documenting political resistance and gender issues in Uganda. She died at 32.” Read more at New York Times
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Capitol Hill yesterday.Doug Mills/The New York Times
The poor and powerless
“There have been three main career paths to becoming a federal judge in recent decades: defending corporate clients, serving as a prosecutor or working in politics. Many judges have followed more than one of the paths.
The Supreme Court reflects this pattern. Seven current justices worked as corporate lawyers at some point (Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas). Seven worked either in the White House or in a cabinet department (Gorsuch, Kagan, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Thomas, Samuel Alito and Stephen Breyer). Five worked as prosecutors (Alito, Breyer, Kavanaugh, Sotomayor and Thomas).
Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearings began yesterday, fits the pattern, too. She spent seven years as a corporate lawyer, in Boston and Washington, including a year at the same boutique firm where Barrett once worked and Kavanaugh spent a summer.
But Jackson has also held a job that makes her distinct from any current justice — and that job is shaping her confirmation hearings.
She spent two and a half years as a federal public defender in Washington, representing defendants who could not afford to hire a private lawyer. In that role, unlike many other legal jobs, she could not choose whom she did and did not represent.
Her time as a public defender means that she would become the only current justice who has spent a substantial amount of time defending poor people. It also seems to be consistent with her judicial philosophy. At other points in her career, Jackson wrote articles about unfairness in the justice system and served on the federal Sentencing Commission, which took steps to reduce mass incarceration.
‘Professional experience isn’t necessarily destiny,’ Irin Carmon of New York magazine notes. But previous experience probably does influence a judge’s outlook, Carmon explains, and the federal judiciary is now heavily weighted toward judges with backgrounds representing the rich and powerful.
Ketanji Brown Jackson in her Washington office.Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Jackson’s background, even with her seven years in corporate law, is a bit different. It is both more middle class and more varied.
She would be the first Black woman to serve as a justice and only the third Black person, after Thomas and Thurgood Marshall. Her family includes people who have worked in law enforcement (a police chief, an undercover officer and a sex-crime investigator) and somebody who spent years in prison (an uncle who received a life sentence in 1989 on cocaine charges).
Her parents worked as public-school teachers and administrators, and Jackson graduated from a public high school in the Miami area (the same one that Jeff Bezos attended). If she is confirmed, she would become only the third public high school graduate on the new court, along with Alito and Kagan. ‘Every other member of the court is a graduate of a Catholic high school,’ The Times’s Linda Greenhouse has written. All the justices — as well as Jackson, a Harvard graduate — attended private colleges.
A subtle shift
Jackson’s presence would do little to change the court’s ideological balance. She is a Democratic appointee nominated to replace a Democratic appointee (Breyer, for whom she clerked) on a court dominated by Republican appointees. And on many of the court’s biggest cases, a justice’s partisan background predicts his or her vote. Jackson will often be writing or signing dissents, along with Kagan and Sotomayor.
Still, Jackson’s background is relevant. It has the potential to influence the court in subtle ways, and it suggests that the politics of criminal justice have shifted.
For years, presidents avoided nominating former public defenders, partly out of a fear that they would be tarred with the sins of their old clients, as my colleague Carl Hulse points out. Some Senate Republicans are trying a version of this criticism with Jackson, claiming that she is soft on crime because of her résumé. In a background paper on her, the Republican National Committee criticized her work as a public defender representing Guantánamo Bay detainees as ‘advocacy for these terrorists.’ Similarly, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, suggested Jackson had ‘a special empathy for criminals.’
But President Biden’s decision to nominate her and her excellent chance of confirmation suggest that the bipartisan movement to reform the criminal justice system has shifted the debate. Biden himself briefly worked as a public defender, before running for the Senate in Delaware, and his judicial nominees have had a striking amount of professional diversity. Almost 30 percent worked as public defenders, an Associated Press analysis found.
‘Public defenders are not soft on crime — they are hard on injustice,’ Laura Coates, a former prosecutor, wrote for CNN. ‘In a country where race and bias are far too frequently elevated above fairness, public defenders are the welcome foil to balance the system.’
More on the hearings
‘I evaluate the facts, and I interpret and apply the law to the facts of the case before me, without fear or favor,’ Jackson said in her opening statement.
Jackson said she stood ‘on the shoulders’ of Constance Baker Motley, the first Black female federal judge.
Republican senators complained about the accusation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearing. ‘No one is going to inquire into your teenage dating habits,’ Senator Ted Cruz told Jackson.
Senators will ask Jackson direct questions today.
Cordial and largely substance-free: Jackson knows the playbook for a successful hearing, The Times’s Adam Liptak writes.” Read more at New York Times
“For more than two decades, Paul McCrory has been the world’s foremost doctor shaping the concussion protocols that are used by sports leagues and organizations globally.
As the leader of the Concussion in Sport Group, McCrory helped choose the members of the international group and write its quadrennial consensus statement on the latest research on concussions — a veritable bible for leagues, trainers, doctors and academics that an N.F.L. spokesman once called ‘the foundation of all sports-related research.’
But McCrory’s status as a leading gatekeeper for concussion treatment and research is under attack as he faces multiple accusations that he plagiarized other scientists, including in articles for a medical journal that he edited. He has denied intentionally lifting copy without credit, and has called one since-retracted piece an ‘isolated and unfortunate incident.’” Read more at New York Times
“The job of an airplane pilot may one day involve ‘flying’ multiple aircraft at once without ever leaving the ground, Axios transportation correspondent Joann Muller writes.
Why it matters: Over the next decade or two, autonomous aircraft will become ubiquitous, taking on industrial jobs that are too difficult for humans and shuttling cargo among logistics hubs.
Depending on public acceptance, these roboplanes could also be ferrying passengers across cities.
The market for self-flying aircraft is expected to grow 25% per year between now and 2040, according to new research by the Aerospace Industries Association and Avascent, an aviation consultancy.
That includes everything from vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (VTOLs) — which rise like a helicopter and fly like a plane — all the way up to larger cargo and passenger planes.
Dozens of startups have raised money — $7 billion so far — via private investors or public SPAC deals to advance their autonomous flight endeavors.
The researchers project that as many as 100,000 jobs will be created to support autonomous aviation by 2040 — in engineering, software, operations and logistics.
Avascent's Jay Carmel, a co-author of the report, tells Axios: ‘When we say fully autonomous, it's not as if these planes will have no humans involved.’
‘The human is going to be much more of an observer, in a management state.’
Here's how it's likely to play out: At first, autonomous aircraft will be used for industrial jobs that AIA calls ‘dull, dirty and dangerous’ — fighting forest fires, inspecting infrastructure, surveying crops.
Cargo applications — like delivering goods to warehouses and stores — will come next.
Passenger air taxis will come later, ‘most likely not arriving at scale until at least well into the next decade,’ says AIA.” Read more at Axios
“27.8 — The average minutes commuters spend on grooming and getting ready for the day, a January research survey found. Compare that to 19.1 minutes for telecommuters, who are also less likely to shower daily and put on fresh clothes.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The Indianapolis Colts may have found another short-term answer at quarterback by trading for Matt Ryan.
How much longer the soon-to-be 37-year-old, four-time Pro Bowler sticks around isn’t clear.
On Monday, Indy acquired the 2016 NFL MVP from Atlanta for a third-round pick in this year’s draft (No. 82 overall).
The Falcons wasted no time finding Ryan’s possible replacement — announcing they’d signed free agent Marcus Mariota to a two-year contract.
For Indy, the deal completes a two-week search for a successor to Carson Wentz, who was traded to the Washington Commanders after just one season with the Colts.
For Indianapolis general manager Chris Ballard, it’s also the latest attempt to plug a hole created by Andrew Luck’s surprise retirement at age 29 just before the start of the 2018 season.” Read more at AP News
Tyler Skaggs, seen here in 2016, fought through injuries for much of his career before he died of an opioid overdose in 2019. (Matt Brown/Getty Images)
“LOS ANGELES — In 2016, Los Angeles Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs was trying to return to the majors after nearly two years sidelined following Tommy John surgery on his elbow. But then he experienced discomfort in his groin and, wary after having suffered various injuries throughout his career, wanted to tell the team.
His agent, Ryan Hamill, disagreed, advising Skaggs that it would jeopardize the service time he needed to qualify for salary arbitration and accompanying seven-figure raises.
‘We can aleeve and Advil the f--- out of it,’ Hamill told Skaggs via text, according to court records reviewed by The Washington Post.
Two years later, in 2018, Skaggs described hamstring pain that was ‘getting worse pretty much every day.’ But Hamill repeatedly warned him against taking time off, including by telling him that he would hurt his chances to make the All-Star Game. When Skaggs said the Angels wanted to place him on the injured list, Hamill disagreed.
‘Why no dose pack,’ Hamill texted, referring to an anti-inflammatory steroid. ‘Flush this s--- out.’
The agent’s advice to his client — to play through pain in pursuit of short-term accolades and paydays — underscores the sort of raw dilemma faced by elite athletes who deal with grueling competition and schedules. But as with so many other chapters in Skaggs’s story, the advice seems disastrous in hindsight.
Skaggs died in 2019 at 27 after ingesting a fentanyl-laced opioid pill on an Angels road trip to Texas. In a trial last month, which ended in the conviction of the Angels’ former communications director who gave Skaggs the lethal dose, federal prosecutors suggested that his death was the result of a culture in baseball of self-medicating to be able to play through injuries.
The text messages between Skaggs and his agent were admitted into evidence by prosecutors, but they were not discussed in court and have not been previously reported. Though prosecutors included Hamill on a witness list before trial — specifying that his testimony would concern ‘injuries and difficulty managing and playing through pain; contract status’ — he was never called to the stand.
Hamill’s own pro baseball career ended in the minors. Now 43, he has a client list featuring some of the best arms in the game, including Noah Syndergaard, Jack Flaherty, Lucas Giolito, Max Fried and Hunter Greene.
At Skaggs’s memorial, the agent, who is listed among the directors for the foundation set up in Skaggs’s name following his death, recalled discovering him as a 16-year-old pitcher at Santa Monica High and guiding him through being drafted in the first round by the Angels.
‘We either texted or talked every day that year leading up to the draft,’ a tearful Hamill said in his eulogy, ‘and then we texted or talked almost daily for the 11 years after the draft.’
The text messages in evidence do not show whether Hamill was aware at the time of Skaggs’s opioid abuse. He declined to comment through a spokesman at Creative Artists Agency, where he is co-head of the baseball division.” Read more at Washington Post
“LONDON (AP) — Former tennis champion Boris Becker went on trial Monday in London for allegedly concealing property — including nine trophies — from bankruptcy trustees and dodging his obligation to disclose financial information to settle his debts.
Prosecutors said Becker, 54, ‘acted dishonestly’ when he hid or failed to hand over assets before and after he was declared bankrupt in June 2017. He is on trial charged with 24 counts under insolvency laws.
Prosecutor Rebecca Chalkley said the assets include trophies such as the 1985 and 1989 Wimbledon men’s singles title, his Australian Open trophies from 1991 and 1996 and his 1992 Olympic gold medal.
Becker is accused of concealing 1.13 million euros ($1.25 million) from the sale of a Mercedes car dealership he owned in Germany. He also allegedly failed to declare two German properties and hid a 825,000-euro bank loan.” Read more at AP News
“A copy of the 1939 ‘Marvel Comics No. 1’ sold at auction for $2.4 million.” Read more at New York Times
“One of Andy Warhol’s iconic Marilyn Monroe portraits is going to Christie’s in May for $200 million. That’s a record asking price for any artwork at auction. The work is a 3-foot square silk-screen from 1964 titled ‘Shot Sage Blue Marilyn,’ and it would break Warhol’s current auction record of $105.4 million set nine years ago for ‘Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster).’” Read more at Wall Street Journal