The Full Belmonte, 4/10/2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Gen. Aleksandr V. Dvornikov in 2016.Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, via AP
“Russia reorganized the command of its flagging offensive in Ukraine on Saturday, selecting for the mission a general accused of ordering strikes on civilian neighborhoods in Syria, as Western nations poured more weapons into the country in anticipation of a renewed Russian assault in the east.
The appointment of the general, Aleksandr V. Dvornikov, as the top battlefield commander came as Britain announced that it was sending missiles that target aircraft, tanks and even ships, and as Slovakia handed the Ukrainian military a long-range S-300 air defense system, with the blessing of the United States.
In another show of support for Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain made a surprise visit on Saturday to Kyiv, the capital, where he met with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and discussed a ‘new package of financial and military aid,’ the British government said.” Read more at New York Times
“Nine evacuation corridors have been agreed upon in southern and eastern Ukraine, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said earlier today, two days after a Russian missile strike on a train station killed at least 50 people.” Read more at CNN
Here’s why calls for war crimes trials over Russia’s invasion face long odds.” Read more at New York Times
“French voters head to the polls today for one of the most consequential presidential elections the country has seen in decades. Twelve candidates, including incumbent Emmanuel Macron, are running for the top job.” Read more at CNN
“France’s presidential elections today are expected to elevate President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen to a dramatic two-week runoff.” Read more at New York Times
“A South Texas sheriff’s official said on Saturday that a 26-year-old woman had been indicted on a murder charge in connection with the ‘death of an individual through a self-induced abortion.’
The woman, Lizelle Herrera, 26, was arrested on Friday and detained in Starr County, the official, Maj. Carlos Delgado, said in a statement reported Saturday by The Associated Press. Ms. Herrera was released on bail on Saturday, according to a statement from the Frontera Fund, an abortion rights organization. Her bond was set at $500,000.
While circumstances of the case remain unclear — the statement did not say whether Ms. Herrera was accused of having the abortion or aiding one, or how far along the pregnancy had been — the indictment comes months after the Texas Legislature passed several restrictions on abortion.
The charge also comes amid expectations that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion and that prohibited states from banning the procedure before a fetus is viable outside the womb, which is currently about 23 weeks of pregnancy.” Read more at New York Times
“Power could be fully restored in Puerto Rico today after hundreds of thousands of people on the island have been in the dark since a fire at a power plant Wednesday evening, officials said.” Read more at CNN
“White House officials are divided over ending restrictive immigration policies amid a surge of migrants crossing the southern U.S. border.” Read more at New York Times
“The number of attendees who have tested positive for the coronavirus after last weekend’s Gridiron dinner has risen to 67, organizers say, including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who became the third member of Biden’s Cabinet in attendance who was infected.
The new figures, released Saturday evening by the organizers of the dinner, do not include the many staff members at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington who worked the event. Renaissance officials did not respond to repeated requests for information about the health status of workers or how many were assigned to the event.
Organizers said the annual white-tie marquee dinner, held in person on April 2 after a two-year hiatus, attracted 630 guests this year.
The latest tally means more than 10 percent of guests in attendance have tested positive in the aftermath of the event. Most of the employees who worked the dinner wore masks however most of the attendees did not.” Read more at New York Times
“Wading into a tight Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania, former President Donald J. Trump endorsed Mehmet Oz on Saturday, throwing his weight behind the former star of ‘The Dr. Oz Show,’ who has been attacked by rivals as a closet liberal. Dr. Oz’s celebrity appears to have been a deciding factor for the former president, whose own political career was grounded in reality television.” Read more at New York Times
“COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Colorado Republicans on Saturday voted to place on their U.S. Senate primary ballot a state representative who attended the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol and is a supporter of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election.
The gathering is a key step toward garnering the party’s nomination to face Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in November. State Rep. Ron Hanks was the lead choice of 3,700 delegates to the state GOP’s assembly, winning 39% of the vote. His only GOP rival in the June 28 Republican Senate primary will be businessman Joe O’Dea, who chose to circulate petitions to get on the ballot rather than go through the assembly.
‘I fully expected Donald Trump to win in 2020 — and he did,’ Hanks, who has made the election his central issue, said to resounding cheers from the crowd at an arena in Colorado Springs. ‘When we saw what we saw on election night in 2020, it changed everything just like the changes we felt after 9/11.’” Read more at AP News
“The Trump administration left office without providing the State Department with an accounting of the gifts former President Donald J. Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials received from foreign governments in 2020, the department disclosed late Friday.
The department said that as a result, it could not fully account for the gifts officials received, the latest example to emerge in recent months of how the Trump administration’s flouting of laws and norms about the day-to-day operations of government now makes it harder to determine whether anything improper took place.
‘It’s flagrant and it looks terrible,’ said Richard W. Painter, the former top ethics lawyer for George W. Bush’s administration. ‘Either it was really stupid or really corrupt.’
Under federal law, each government department and agency is legally required to submit a list to the State Department of gifts over $415 its officials received from foreign governments. The measure is intended to ensure that foreign governments do not gain undue influence over American officials.
Departing White Houses typically provide the State Department with a list of the gifts officials receive before, or shortly after, they leave office to ensure they have followed the law.
But in the list of gifts for 2020 that the State Department released on Friday, there are no gifts for any White House officials. Although the pandemic curtailed some of Mr. Trump’s travel, Mr. Trump went to Switzerland and India — where he received gifts, including a bust of Gandhi, a sculpture of Gandhi’s famous ‘three monkeys’ metaphor and a spinning wheel. Top foreign leaders for at least a dozen countries visited the White House.
In a highly unusual disclosure, the department said that its Office of the Chief of Protocol, which was run by a Trump appointee until Jan. 20, 2021, had failed before Mr. Trump left office to ask the White House for a list of the gifts it received, and that Mr. Trump’s White House left office without providing one.
The department said it had tried to collect the information about the gifts Trump White House officials had received but had failed to come up with an accounting.” Read more at New York Times
“ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Imran Khan, the former international cricket star turned politician who oversaw a new era of Pakistan’s foreign policy that distanced the country from the United States, was removed as prime minister early on Sunday after losing a no-confidence vote in Parliament.
The vote, coming amid soaring inflation and a rift between Mr. Khan’s government and the military, capped a political crisis that has embroiled the country for weeks and came down to the wire in a parliamentary session that dragged into the early morning hours. Pakistan remains in a state of turmoil as it heads into an early election season in the coming months.
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, has struggled with instability and military coups since its founding 75 years ago. While no prime minister in Pakistan has ever completed a full five-year term in office, Mr. Khan is the first to be removed in a no-confidence vote.
The motion to oust Mr. Khan was passed with 174 votes, two more than the requisite simple majority.
Analysts expect that lawmakers will choose the opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif, a member of a Pakistani political dynasty, to serve as interim prime minister until the next general election, probably in October. Mr. Khan is expected to run in that election as well.” Read more at New York Times
‘Dwayne was a great teammate but even more so a tremendous friend to so many. I am truly heartbroken,’ said Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin of Haskins, who joined Pittsburgh in 2021. Credit...Brian Westerholt/Associated Press
“Dwayne Haskins, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback and 2018 Heisman Trophy finalist at Ohio State, was fatally struck by a dump truck Saturday morning while trying to cross a highway on foot in South Florida, police said.
Haskins, who re-signed with the Steelers last month, was 24.
Haskins was trying to cross Interstate 595's westbound lanes, near the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Broward County, when the dump truck hit him, the Florida Highway Patrol said. The incident was reported shortly after 6:30 a.m., the patrol said.
He was ‘walking on (the highway) for unknown reasons’ when the incident happened, the patrol said in a news release.” Read more at CNN
“AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — The harsh cold and relentless wind. The lead late Saturday afternoon at the Masters. All the elements were there for Scottie Scheffler to start feeling the pressure of trying to win his first major at Augusta National.
Scheffler never looked worried until the final hole, and then only briefly.
His lead at four shots, his confidence level high, Scheffler’s wild drive to the left of the 18th fairway into the trees didn’t bother him nearly as much as the sight of the spotter poking around in the leaves in a desperate search for the golf ball….
He took a one-shot penalty, dropped it onto pine straw and then ripped a 3-iron from 240 yards that hit the green and rolled just over the back, leaving him two putts for a bogey that felt much better.
Scheffler had a 1-under 71 — one of only nine scores under par in the third round — that gave him a three-shot lead over Cameron Smith going into Sunday.” Read more at AP News
“AUGUSTA, Ga. — Saturday is called moving day at the Masters Tournament because that is when top-performing golfers try to leapfrog up the leaderboard to position themselves for a championship charge in Sunday’s final round.
The axiom held true for Cameron Smith of Australia, whose four-under-par 68 on Saturday moved him to within three shots of the third-round leader, Scottie Scheffler, who shot a determined and steady one-under-par 71.
But Saturday was also something else: a day of shifting spotlights.
Since Tiger Woods arrived on the Augusta National practice range last weekend, he has dominated all conversation about the 2022 tournament and attracted huge galleries of spectators who followed him from hole to hole as if no other golfer in the field mattered.
But Saturday afternoon, as Woods limped and labored through 18 holes and fell 16 shots behind Scheffler, the focus of this year’s Masters changed.
Woods, who shot a 78 on a day when temperatures dipped into the 40s, was far from abandoned on the golf course. But a certain sense of reality set in as well as he fell to seven over par for the tournament and dropped into a tie for 41st place.
Woods’s return to competitive golf after a near-fatal car crash roughly 14 months ago has been inspirational and heartening and a startling success by any measure. But as the third round came to a close, it was evident that Woods’s comeback this week would have its limits. From the start of his third round, Woods’s surgically repaired back looked stiff, and traversing Augusta National’s many hillocks and mounts seemed especially painstaking on his rebuilt right leg and ankle.
Most shocking, his greatest strength — his putting stroke, which has been the envy of his peers for a quarter century — deserted him. Woods three-putted his final three holes and had a four-putt on another hole.” Read more at New York Times
“The N.B.A. playoffs begin on Saturday. The Miami Heat and the Phoenix Suns are the top seeds.” Read more at New York Times
“The Christian Holy Week begins today with Palm Sunday. The Jewish holiday of Passover begins Friday night. Here are Times recipes for the occasion.” Read more at New York Times
Undated handout photo issued by HarperCollins Publishers of best-selling novelist Henry Patterson, who wrote 85 books, including The Eagle Has Landed, using the pseudonym Jack Higgins, has died aged 92. (HarperCollins Publisher/PA via AP)
“LONDON (AP) — British author Jack Higgins, who wrote ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ and other bestselling thrillers and espionage novels, has died. He was 92.” Read more at AP News