The Full Belmonte, 4/17/2022
War in Ukraine
A shopping center in central Kharkiv was struck by what appeared to be guided missiles on Saturday.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
“Russia pounded military targets throughout Ukraine in apparent retaliation for the sinking of a ship and ahead of an offensive in the east.
Russia said it was poised to complete its capture of the strategically important city of Mariupol in Ukraine’s south.
Telegram has become Russia’s largest remaining outlet for unrestricted information after the Kremlin silenced the news media and banned social media platforms.” Read more at New York Times
“Russia is careening toward a historic debt default. The country is on the verge of defaulting on its foreign debt for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution more than a century ago. The event risks ossifying Russia’s position as a pariah in the global economic arena. Our business correspondent walks us through the likely implications.” Read more at NPR
Authorities outside Columbiana centre mall in Columbia, South Carolina, following the shooting.Photograph: Sean Rayford/AP
“Twelve people were injured after a shooting at a South Carolina shopping mall, including 10 people who were shot and two injured in a ‘stampede,’ police said Saturday afternoon.
Police in Columbia, South Carolina's capital city, responded to reports of shots fired at the Columbiana Centre mall, about 10 miles from downtown Columbia.
The gunshot victims ranged in age from 15 to 73, Chief W. H. Holbrook said at a press conference. Two of the people who were shot were in critical condition Saturday, Holbrook said. There were no reported fatalities, he added.
Three people were detained as ‘people of interest’ Saturday afternoon, Holbrook said. One of them, 22-year-old Jewayne M. Price, remains in police custody and is expected to be charged with unlawful carrying of a pistol.” Read more at USA Today
“Facing an intensifying backlash from political parties and business groups, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas on Friday ended his policy of inspecting all commercial vehicles crossing into the state from Mexico, a time-consuming process that had caused traffic jams of 14 hours or more at the border.
Mr. Abbott said his decision came after an agreement with the governor of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, who flanked him at a news conference on Friday, to step up security measures on the Mexican side of the border at ports of entry and along the Rio Grande.
Earlier in the week, Mr. Abbott said the safety inspections, which began on April 6, were part of a concerted effort to force Mexican officials to do more to stop the flow of migrants into the United States. He said on Wednesday that he would end the inspections at one entry point — the bridge between Laredo and the Mexican city of Colombia, Nuevo León — only because the governor of that state had agreed to increase border security on the Mexican side.
On Friday, Mr. Abbott said he now had agreements in place with the governors of all four Mexican states bordering Texas to enhance security. He left open the possibility of reissuing a similar policy if crossings increased….
The policy was crafted amid a broader battle Mr. Abbott is waging against the White House on immigration. The arrival of migrants is expected to increase sharply next month with the Biden administration’s plan to end a Trump-era pandemic policy in which a majority of unauthorized migrants are turned away at the border under an emergency public health order known as Title 42.
Mr. Abbott, a two-term Republican up for re-election in November, had presented the inspections as a means of addressing the anticipated effects of that policy’s termination. Thousands of additional migrants are expected to seek asylum across the border each day — most of them crossing into Texas.
Mr. Abbott strongly opposes some of the Biden administration’s moves to ease Trump-era restrictions on immigration. But because the federal government alone has authority over such matters, Mr. Abbott has sought novel strategies to insert the state into immigration enforcement, such as arresting migrants for misdemeanor trespassing. The vehicle inspections were part of that effort. A carefully constructed policy was aimed at smugglers and migrants but carried out under powers available to the state — namely vehicle safety.
But a chorus of voices — including politicians from both parties, business and trade groups, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection — urged the governor to rescind the policy because of its effect on individuals and the broader economy at a time when the supply chain was already strained.
In a news release on Tuesday, Customs and Border Protection said delays were being felt at major commercial crossings into Texas as a result of ‘additional and unnecessary inspections’ by state police, leading to a drop in commercial traffic of up to 60 percent.
‘The strength of the American economy relies heavily on the efficient flow of cross-border commerce,’ the agency said.” Read more at New York Times
“Remote drone crews killed more people than nearly any other military personnel in the past decade. Several people broke down under the stress.” Read more at New York Times
“Fifteen million people have died of Covid, the World Health Organization estimates. India is stalling attempts to make the total public.” Read more at New York Times
“Elon Musk’s politics can seem elusive, making it difficult to say whether either the elation or the fear about how he might run Twitter is justified.” Read more at New York Times
“Disney spent decades avoiding political controversy. Now its brand is endangered as it tries to navigate a politically polarized momen.” Read more at New York Times
“PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Several businesses and residents have filed suit in state court in Pennsylvania seeking to overturn Philadelphia’s renewed indoor mask mandate scheduled to be enforced beginning Monday in an effort to halt a surge in COVID-19 infections.
The lawsuit, filed in Commonwealth Court on Saturday, said Philadelphia lacks the authority to impose such a mandate.
Philadelphia earlier this week became the first major U.S. city to reinstate its indoor mask mandate after reporting a sharp increase in coronavirus infections, with the city’s top health official saying she wanted to forestall a potential new wave driven by an omicron subvariant.
Attorney Thomas W. King III, who was among those involved in last year’s successful challenge to the statewide mask mandate in schools, said the city’s emergency order went against recommendations of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and ‘imposed a renegade standard unfound anywhere else in the world.’” Read more at AP News
“Fiona Hill vividly recalls the first time she stepped into the Oval Office to discuss the thorny subject of Ukraine with the president. It was February of 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s administration. Hill, then the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia for the National Intelligence Council, was summoned for a strategy session on the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. Among the matters up for discussion was the possibility of Ukraine and another former Soviet state, Georgia, beginning the process of obtaining NATO membership.
In the Oval Office, Hill recalls, describing a scene that has not been previously reported, she told Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that offering a membership path to Ukraine and Georgia could be problematic. While Bush’s appetite for promoting the spread of democracy had not been dampened by the Iraq war, President Vladimir Putin of Russia viewed NATO with suspicion and was vehemently opposed to neighboring countries joining its ranks. He would regard it as a provocation, which was one reason the United States’ key NATO allies opposed the idea. Cheney took umbrage at Hill’s assessment. ‘So, you’re telling me you’re opposed to freedom and democracy,’ she says he snapped. According to Hill, he abruptly gathered his materials and walked out of the Oval Office.
‘He’s just yanking your chain,’ she remembers Bush telling her. ‘Go on with what you were saying.’ But the president seemed confident that he could win over the other NATO leaders, saying, ‘I like it when diplomacy is tough.’ Ignoring the advice of Hill and the U.S. intelligence community, Bush announced in Bucharest that ‘NATO should welcome Georgia and Ukraine into the Membership Action Plan.’ Hill’s prediction came true: Several other leaders at the summit objected to Bush’s recommendation. NATO ultimately issued a compromise declaration that would prove unsatisfying to nearly everyone, stating that the two countries ‘will become members’ without specifying how and when they would do so — and still in defiance of Putin’s wishes. (They still have not become members.)
‘It was the worst of all possible worlds,’ Hill said to me in her austere English accent as she recalled the episode over lunch this March. As one of the foremost experts on Putin and a current unofficial adviser to the Biden administration on the Russia-Ukraine war, Hill, 56, has already made a specialty of issuing warnings about the Russian leader that have gone unheeded by American presidents. As she feared, the carrot dangled by Bush to two countries — each of which gained independence in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and afterward espoused democratic ambitions — did not sit well with Putin. Four months after the 2008 NATO summit, Russian troops crossed the border and launched an attack on the South Ossetia region of Georgia. Though the war lasted only five days, a Russian military presence would continue in nearly 20 percent of Georgia’s territory. And after the West’s weak pushback against his aggression, Putin then set his sights on Ukraine — a sovereign nation that, Putin claimed to Bush at the Bucharest summit, ‘is not a country.’
Hill would stay on in the same role in the Obama administration for close to a year. Obama’s handling of Putin did not always strike her as judicious. When Chuck Todd of NBC asked Obama at a news conference in 2013 about his working relationship with Putin, Obama replied, ‘He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.’ Hill told me that she “winced” when she heard his remark, and when Obama responded to Putin’s invasion and annexation of the Ukrainian region Crimea a year later by referring to Russia as ‘a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,’ she winced again. ‘We said openly, ‘Don’t dis the guy — he’s thin-skinned and quick to take insults,’ Hill said of this counsel to Obama about Putin. ‘He either didn’t understand the man or willfully ignored the advice.’…
Looking back on the Trump years, Hill has slowly come to recognize the unsettling significance in disparate incidents and episodes that she did not have the arm’s-length view to appreciate in the moment. During our lunch, we discussed what it was like for her and others to have worked for Trump after having done the same for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Her meeting in the Bush White House in 2008, Hill told me, offered a sharp contrast to the briefings she sat in on during her tumultuous two years of service in the Trump administration. Unlike Trump, President Bush had read his briefing materials. His questions were respectful. She offered him an unpopular opinion and was not punished or frozen out for it. Even the vice president’s dyspeptic behavior that day did not unnerve her, she told me. ‘His emphasis was on the power of the executive branch,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t on the unchecked power of one executive. And it was never to overturn the Constitution.’…
The ambitions of Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, were steadily made manifest. On March 19, 2016, two years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, a hacker working with Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U., sent an email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, from the address no-reply@accounts.googlemail.com. The email, which claimed that a Ukrainian had compromised Podesta’s password, turned out to be a successful act of spearphishing. It allowed Russia to obtain and release, through WikiLeaks, 50,000 of Podesta’s emails, all in the furtherance of Russia’s desire that Clinton would become, if not a defeated presidential candidate, then at minimum a damaged one.
The relationship between the Trump campaign, and then the Trump administration, and Russia would have implications not just for the United States but, eventually, for Ukraine as well. The litany of Trump-Russia intersections remains remarkable: Citizen Trump’s business pursuits in Moscow, which continued throughout his candidacy. Candidate Trump’s abiding affinity for Putin. The incident in which the Trump campaign’s national security director, J.D. Gordon, watered down language in the 2016 Republican Party platform pledging to provide Ukraine with ‘lethal defense weapons’ to combat Russian interference — and did so the same week Gordon dined with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, at an event. Trump’s longtime political consigliere Roger Stone’s reaching out to WikiLeaks through an intermediary and requesting ‘the pending emails,’ an apparent reference to the Clinton campaign emails pirated by Russia, which the site had started to post. Trump’s chiming in: ‘Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.’ The meeting in the Seychelles islands between Erik Prince (the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and a Trump-campaign supporter whose sister Betsy DeVos would become Trump’s secretary of education) and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in an effort to facilitate a back-channel dialogue between the two countries before Trump’s inauguration. The former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s consistent lying to federal investigators about his own secretive dealings with the Russian political consultant and intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom he shared Trump campaign polling. Trump’s two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in the summer of 2018, unattended by staff. Trump’s public declaration, at a joint news conference in Helsinki, that he was more inclined to believe Putin than the U.S. intelligence team when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The dissemination by Trump and his allies in 2019 of the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election, in support of the Clinton campaign. Trump’s pardoning of Manafort and Stone in December 2020. And most recently, on March 29, Trump’s saying yet again that Putin ‘should release’ dirt on a political opponent — this time President Biden, who, Trump asserted without evidence, had received, along with his son Hunter Biden, $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor.” Read more at New York Times
“WASHINGTON — When fresh allegations of domestic violence were lodged against former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens last month, one of his Republican rivals for the state’s open Senate seat, Representative Vicky Hartzler, stepped up and called for him to end his campaign.
Then she moved on to an issue perhaps more resonant with Republican primary voters: transgender women in sports.
‘Eric Greitens is a toxic candidate unfit to hold office,’ Michael Hafner, a spokesman for Ms. Hartzler’s Senate campaign, said, before declaring the central message of her campaign: ‘Missouri family values, freedom, and taking back our country.’
In Missouri, Georgia, Ohio and now Nebraska, Republican men running for high office face significant allegations of domestic violence, stalking, even sexual assault — accusations that once would have derailed any run for office. But in an era of Republican politics when Donald J. Trump could survive and thrive amid accusations of sexual assault, opposing candidates are finding little traction in dwelling on the issues.
Political scientists who have studied Republican voting since the rise of Trumpism are not surprised that accused candidates have soldiered on — and that their primary rivals have approached the accusations tepidly. In this fiercely partisan moment, concerns about personal behavior are dwarfed by the struggle between Republicans and Democrats, which Republican men and women see as life-or-death. Increasingly, Republicans cast accusations of sexual misconduct as an attempt by liberals to silence conservatives.
The candidates who do speak of their opponents’ domestic violence and assault allegations often raise them not as disqualifications in looming Republican primaries, but as matters ripe for exploitation by Democrats in the fall.
‘It’s a horrible problem; he’ll never be elected, and that’s the educational process we’re going through right now,’ Gary Black, Georgia’s agriculture commissioner, said of domestic violence and assault allegations leveled at Herschel Walker, his Trump-backed Republican rival to take on Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in November. ‘There’s a great desire for Republicans to get their seat back. Electability is going to be the issue over the next six weeks.’
Democrats, including President Biden and Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, have weathered their own accusations of misconduct in the past — and where such charges have proven difficult to discount, the party has shown itself more willing to jettison its candidates.
The accusations facing some Republican men are so stark that they raise the question: What would disqualify a candidate in a Republican primary? Mr. Greitens resigned as Missouri’s governor after a hairdresser testified under oath in 2018 that he had taped her hands to pull-up rings in his basement, blindfolded her, stripped her clothes off and taken a photo of her, which he threatened to release if she revealed their affair.
Amid his current Senate campaign, Mr. Greitens was accused last month in a sworn affidavit from his former wife that he had violently abused her and had hit one of their sons as his governorship unraveled. Still, a poll taken after the accusations came to light showed Mr. Greitens neck and neck with Ms. Hartzler and Eric Schmitt, Missouri’s attorney general.
Mr. Walker, a former college and pro football star who has the backing not only of Mr. Trump but also much of the Republican establishment, has been accused by his ex-wife of attacking her in bed, choking her and threatening to kill her. Mr. Walker doesn’t deny the assault and has said he was suffering from mental illness.
Mallory Blount, a spokeswoman for Mr. Walker’s campaign, said he ‘emphatically denies’ the ‘false claims’ from another woman who said he had been her longtime boyfriend and that when she broke up with him, he had threatened to kill her and himself. Ms. Blount also said he has denied a violent stalking charge by a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.
Mr. Walker ‘has owned up to his mistakes, sought forgiveness, gotten treatment, and dedicated his life to helping others who are struggling,’ Ms. Blount said, condemning the media for surfacing past allegations.
Max Miller, another Trump-backed candidate and a former White House aide running for an Ohio House seat, was accused by one of Mr. Trump’s press secretaries, Stephanie Grisham, of hitting her the day they broke up. Mr. Miller denied the allegation, then sued Ms. Grisham for defamation, accusing her of making ‘libelous and defamatory false statements.’ His campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
‘It used to be that being accused of domestic violence was an automatic disqualifier, regardless of party,’ Ms. Grisham’s lawyer, Adam VanHo, said. ‘And to turn around and sue to silence your accuser was even more abhorrent.’…” Read more at New York Times
“Adults in New Jersey will be able to legally purchase recreational marijuana beginning Thursday.” Read more at New York Times
“Earth Day is on Friday. President Biden will travel to Seattle to discuss his administration’s plans for combating inflation and climate change.” Read more at New York Times
“North American birds are experiencing a cataclysmic decline — but they can thrive, with our help. A 2019 study found that there were 3 billion fewer breeding birds than in the 1970s, with major losses among common birds: sparrows, blackbirds and finches. Birds can serve as an indicator species — meaning they help scientists understand how healthy an ecosystem is. That makes the current losses all the more troubling. Here are 8 simple ways we can look out for our feathered friends.” Read more at NPR
A subway station in Manhattan.Brittainy Newman for The New York Times
More mass shootings
“A gunman opened fired in a Brooklyn subway, wounding 10 people on Tuesday and injuring others. A mall shooting in South Carolina yesterday wounded 10. A gang shootout this month in Sacramento killed six and wounded 12 more. New Orleans reported its bloodiest weekend in 10 years. Road rage shootings appear to be up in some states.
These are examples of America’s recent violent turn. Murders have spiked nearly 40 percent since 2019, and violent crimes, including shootings and other assaults, have increased overall. More tragedies, fromirelations. And Americans bought a record number of guns in recent years.
Another explanation, covered in this newsletter before, ties these issues together: a growing sense of social discord and distrust. As Americans lose faith in their institutions and each other, they are more likely to lash out — sometimes in violent ways, Randolph Roth, a crime historian at Ohio State University, told me.
Besides Covid and police brutality, the country’s increasingly polarized politics and poor economic conditions have also fueled this discord. That helps explain the murder spike, as well as recent increases in drug addiction and overdoses, mental health problems, car crashes and even confrontations over masks on airplanes.
But given the shootings of the past two weeks, I want to step back and focus on violent crime trends in particular, with the help of charts by my colleague Ashley Wu.
Experts pointed to several reasons for concern: not only the headline-making tragedies, but also continued murder rate increases in some cities and the persistence of problems that contributed to more violent crime in the first place. But experts also see some potentially hopeful signs: recent decreases in murder rates in other cities, the easing of Covid-related disruptions and growing distance from the more chaotic police-community relations of 2020.
The bad news
It is too early to draw firm conclusions about 2022’s levels of violence; crime trends usually take shape in the summer. But so far this year, murders are up 1 percent in major U.S. cities, and some places are reporting sharp increases, according to the crime analyst Jeff Asher’s team.
Sources: University of Chicago Crime Lab; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; city police departments; American Community Survey
The major causes of the 2020-21 murder spike still linger to varying degrees. The guns that Americans bought remain in circulation. While Covid cases have plummeted and lockdowns have ended, new variants are still disrupting social services and life in general.
Community-police relations are also still fraught, especially in minority neighborhoods. ‘If there is a fundamental breakdown in the community, the police are simply not going to be able to do an effective job,’ said Charis Kubrin, a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine.
There are other reasons for concern: The worsening drug crisis could fuel violence between rival gangs and dealers. The end of federal pandemic-era relief programs, like the child tax credit, is already increasing poverty rates.
Inflation is particularly concerning because it could drive people to engage in property crime if they cannot keep up with higher expenses, said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. And ‘some of those robberies end up as homicides,’ he told me.
The old and new problems also feed into social discord. In March, 75 percent of adults said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the U.S., up from 65 percent three years ago, before the pandemic, Gallup found.
The good news
The data show some bright spots. The rise in homicides reported for 2022 is lower than the 2020-21 increase. In several big cities, murders are actually down.
Sources: University of Chicago Crime Lab; city police departments; American Community Survey
‘It’s too early to say,’ Jamein Cunningham, a criminal justice expert at Cornell University, told me. ‘But it’s nice to have numbers that at least, relative to this time last year, suggest it might be easing.’
Murder rates are still 30 percent lower than they were during the previous peaks between the 1970s and ’90s. ‘I don’t think the Wild West days of the ’70s and ’80s are coming back,’ said John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago.
As Covid cases fall, so will the pandemic’s effects on crime and violence. More distance from the police violence and protests of 2020 could also ease police-community tensions. (This seemed to happen before: Murders spiked in 2015 and 2016 after protests over police brutality, then murder rates leveled off, before spiking again in 2020.) And the social discord wrought by those problems could start to fade.
Federal funding is also flowing to cities and states to combat crime. The specifics and execution matter, but studies broadly suggest that more support for policing and other social services, which many places are now adopting, could help.
For More
After a carefully planned attack, the Brooklyn subway gunman seized lucky breaks to melt into the city before New Yorkers helped find him.
Some cities are trying to stop relying on police officers for minor traffic stops.
Democrats are broadly moving away from bolder calls for justice and police reform, in response to rising crime and bad polling on these issues.” Read more at New York Times
“These Indian half sisters are the star roles in Bridgerton. They're also the subject of heated discussion in India. The representation of Kate and Edwina Sharma in Netflix’s 19th-century English drama has won plaudits, especially for the casting of dark-skinned actors and the distinctive sartorial choices. But some viewers are baffled by the show’s many cultural gaffes. And the criticism doesn’t stop there.” Read more at NPR
“BeReal is the latest photo-sharing social media obsession among Gen Zers — but the app comes with a twist.” Read more at NPR
“WASHINGTON (AP) — The ‘cake’ was made from frozen fruit juice, sweet potatoes, carrots and sugar cane and it lasted about 15 minutes once giant panda mama Mei Xiang and her cub Xiao Qi Ji got hold of it.
The National Zoo’s most famous tenants had an enthusiastic breakfast Saturday in front of adoring crowds as the zoo celebrated 50 years of its iconic panda exchange agreement with the Chinese government.
Xiao Qi Ji’s father Tian Tian largely sat out the morning festivities, munching bamboo in a neighboring enclosure with the sounds of his chomping clearly audible during a statement by Chinese ambassador Qin Gang. The ambassador praised the bears as ‘a symbol of the friendship’ between the nations.
Pandas are almost entirely solitary by nature, and in the wild Tian Tian would probably never even meet his child. He received a similar cake for lunch.
In addition to hailing the 1972 agreement sparked by President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit to China, Saturday’s celebration also highlighted the success of the global giant panda breeding program, which has helped bring the bears back from the brink of extinction.
Xiao Qi Ji’s birth in August 2020 was hailed as a near miracle, due to Mei Xiang’s advanced age and the fact that zoo staff performed the artificial insemination procedure under tight restrictions shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic shut the entire zoo. At age 22, Mei Xiang was the oldest giant panda to successfully give birth in the United States.
Normally they would have used a combination of frozen sperm and fresh semen extracted from Tian Tian. But in order to minimize the number of close-quarters medical procedures, zoo officials used only frozen semen.” Read more at AP News