The Full Belmonte, 4/27/22
“RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — The United States marshaled 40 allies on Tuesday to furnish Ukraine with long-term military aid in what could become a protracted battle against the Russian invasion, and Germany said it would send dozens of armored antiaircraft vehicles. It was a major policy shift for a country that had wavered over fear of provoking Russia.
The announcement by Germany, Europe’s biggest economy and one of Russia’s most important Western trading partners, was among many signals on Tuesday pointing to further escalation in the war and disappointment for diplomacy.
Germany’s shift on weapons also was seen as a strong affirmation of a toughened message by the Biden administration, which has said it wants to see Russia not only defeated in Ukraine but seriously weakened from the conflict that President Vladimir V. Putin began two months ago.
The increasing flow of Western weapons into Ukraine — including howitzers, armed drones, tanks and ammunition — also amounted to another sign that a war Mr. Putin had expected would divide his Western adversaries had instead drawn them much closer together.” Read more at New York Times
A view of giant tubes that are part of one of the physical exit points of the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline on February 19, in Wloclawek, Poland.
“POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — Russia opened a new front in its war in Ukraine on Wednesday, cutting two European Union nations that staunchly back Kyiv off from its gas, a dramatic escalation in the conflict that is increasingly becoming a wider battle with the West.
One day after the United States and other Western allies vowed to speed more and better military supplies to Ukraine, the Kremlin upped the ante, using its most essential export as leverage. European gas prices shot up on the news, which European leaders denounced as ‘blackmail.’
In a memo, state-controlled Russian giant Gazprom said it was cutting Poland and Bulgaria off from its natural gas because they refused to pay in Russian rubles, as President Vladimir Putin had demanded. The company said it had not received any such payment since the beginning of the month.
The gas cuts do not immediately put the countries into dire trouble since they have worked on getting alternative sources for several years now and the continent is heading into summer, making gas not as essential for households.
Still, it sent shivers of worry through the 27-nation European Union, which immediately convened a special coordination group to limit the impact of the move.” Read more at AP News
“Tensions escalate | Officials in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region said shots were fired from Ukraine toward the pro-Russia enclave, the Interfax news service reported. That came a day after Moldovan President Maia Sandu said her government would resist ‘attempts to drag Moldova into actions that may endanger peace.’ Ukraine’s state railway chief said Russian missiles hit a bridge west of Odesa for a second straight day that provides access to Transnistria.
The U.S. denounced as ‘the height of irresponsibility’ warnings by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov about the risk of nuclear war over Ukraine.
Russia sowed land mines and booby traps as it withdrew from battle zones in Ukraine, making it harder to resettle people until the areas are cleared, the head of the HALO Trust mine-clearance humanitarian organization told Bloomberg TV.” Read more at Bloomberg
“Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, feared in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack that several far-right members of Congress would incite violence against other lawmakers, identifying several by name as security risks in private conversations with party leaders.
Mr. McCarthy talked to other congressional Republicans about wanting to rein in multiple hard-liners who were deeply involved in Donald J. Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 election and undermine the peaceful transfer of power, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times.
But Mr. McCarthy did not follow through on the sterner steps that some Republicans encouraged him to take, opting instead to seek a political accommodation with the most extreme members of the G.O.P. in the interests of advancing his own career.
Mr. McCarthy’s remarks represent one of the starkest acknowledgments from a Republican leader that the party’s rank-and-file lawmakers played a role in stoking violence on Jan. 6, 2021 — and posed a threat in the days after the Capitol attack. Audio recordings of the comments were obtained in reporting for a forthcoming book, ‘This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future.’” Read more at New York Times
“Most Americans have contracted Covid, including three out of four children.” Read more at New York Times
The U.S. has bought 3.1 million courses of molnupiravir, a Covid-19 pill from Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.
PHOTO: RACHEL WISNIEWSKI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Covid-19 pills will become more widely available. The Biden administration is expected to announce plans to double the 20,000 pharmacies, community health centers and hospitals where the antivirals are now available for patients. People can take Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics’ molnupiravir, also known as Lagevrio, at home shortly after they develop symptoms, helping prevent hospitalization.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Vice President Harris has COVID and is self-isolating, her office said. Harris is fully boosted and has no symptoms, and the White House said she's had no recent close contacts with President Biden.” Read more at Axios
“Pfizer and BioNTech said yesterday that they have requested FDA authorization of a booster dose of Covid-19 vaccine for children 5 through 11. The companies have said that a third vaccine dose raised Omicron-fighting antibodies by 36 times in this age group. Recent studies found that the effectiveness of Pfizer's vaccine for children ages 5 to 12 dropped substantially during the Omicron surge, falling from 68% to about 12% against Covid-19 infection. However, two doses continued to provide protection against more severe illness resulting in urgent care or hospitalizations. Currently, boosters are available for kids 12 and older with certain kinds of immunocompromised conditions, as well as adults. Second boosters are authorized for anyone 50 and older.” Read more at CNN
“WASHINGTON — President Biden on Tuesday used his clemency powers for the first time to commute the sentences of 75 drug offenders and issue three pardons, including to the first Black Secret Service agent to work on a presidential detail, who had long maintained he had been wrongfully convicted.
‘I think I’m in a state of shock, really,’ said Abraham Bolden Sr., 87, who was convicted of trying to sell a copy of a Secret Service file, even after witnesses admitted to lying for the prosecution in his case.
‘I’ve been waiting so long,’ said Mr. Bolden, who was in prison from 1966 to 1969. With Mr. Biden’s clemency order, his record is now wiped clean of that charge.
Mr. Biden’s top aides described the use of presidential power as part of a broader strategy to overhaul the criminal justice system by relying less on prison to punish nonviolent drug offenders and using employment programs to help prevent the formerly incarcerated from returning to prison. On the same day Mr. Biden detailed the commutations, the Justice and Labor Departments announced a $145 million plan to provide job skills training to federal inmates to help them with employment after they are released.” Read more at New York Times
“WASHINGTON—President Biden signaled to House Democrats this week that he is seriously considering taking action to forgive student-loan debt on a large scale, according to congressional aides and others familiar with the discussions.
Following a Monday meeting with the president at the White House, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said they felt confident that Mr. Biden is warming to calls from progressive Democrats to take executive action to erase at least some of the debt held by borrowers with federal student loans.
Mr. Biden didn’t detail his plans, but responded positively when lawmakers pushed him to forgive $10,000 in student debt, the people said, suggesting they would be happy with his final decision. He also indicated he is open to further extending the current pause on student-loan payments, which is set to expire on Aug. 31.
The president told the lawmakers that he was weighing the timing of any announcement and wanted to make sure it didn’t contribute to inflation, one of the people said.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
The Isaac Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Mass. It was built in the 1730s by Isaac Royall Sr., whose family established the first Harvard Law professorship. Photo: Paul Marotta/Getty Images
“Harvard bears ‘moral responsibility’ for slavery's role in the school's formative years, the university said today — and committed $100 million to study and atone.
Faculty, staff and leaders enslaved more than 70 individuals during the 17th and 18th centuries, Axios' Erin Doherty reports from a Harvard report out today.
Many of its most notable benefactors also built their fortunes on slavery.
The big picture: Harvard joins Brown, Georgetown and Princeton Theological Seminary in ‘putting financial resources behind efforts to make amends,’ The New York Times reports.
‘Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,’ Harvard president Lawrence S. Bacow said.
Among the recommendations from the report, conducted by a team of Harvard faculty:
Developing and expanding Harvard's partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, including funding summer programs to bring students and faculty from HBCUs to Harvard.
Honoring enslaved people through memorialization, research and educational opportunities.
Identifying the direct descendants of enslaved individuals who worked on campus or were enslaved by Harvard leadership, faculty or staff.
‘We further recommend that ... the university engage with these descendants through dialogue, programming, information sharing, relationship building, and educational support,’ the report said.” Read more at Axios
“An Air Force major general, who was found guilty of forcibly kissing a woman in 2018, was sentenced on Tuesday to a reprimand and docked pay for five months, in the first court-martial trial and conviction of a general in the branch’s 75-year history, its authorities said.
Maj. Gen. William T. Cooley, 56, was convicted of abusive sexual conduct on Saturday by Col. Christina M. Jimenez, the senior military judge in the case, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
The general avoided more severe penalties that could have been imposed, including dismissal, a reduction in rank or up to seven years in prison.
He was sentenced on Tuesday by Colonel Jimenez to a reprimand and to forfeit $54,550 in pay over five months. It amounts to $10,910 per month, or about two-thirds of his salary, the Air Force said.” Read more at New York Times
“Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt yesterday signed a law banning nonbinary gender markers on birth certificates. The legislation, which cleared the Oklahoma state legislature in recent weeks, states: ‘The biological sex designation on a certificate of birth issued under this section shall be either male or female and shall not be nonbinary or any symbol representing a nonbinary designation including but not limited to the letter 'X'.’ The law takes effect immediately because it was passed with an emergency designation. Oklahoma's measure is part of a broader effort by conservatives to make it more difficult for transgender and nonbinary Americans to receive gender-affirming health care, play sports or change their birth certificates and other identification documents to match their gender identity.” Read more at CNN
“A man who admitted to defacing an L.G.B.T.Q. pride mural in South Florida has been ordered by a judge to write a 25-page essay about the Pulse nightclub shooting, an unorthodox assignment that surprised local rights activists.
Judge Scott Suskauer of the 15th Judicial Circuit of Florida last week ordered Alexander Jerich, 20, to write an essay about the shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub, where a gunman killed 49 people in Orlando in 2016.
The essay is due by Mr. Jerich’s final sentencing date, which is set for early June and coincides with Pride month.
Mr. Jerich’s lawyer, Robert Pasch, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. In a sentencing recommendation, he wrote that his client ‘acknowledges and regrets the pain and anger felt by members and allies of the L.G.B.T.Q. community and citizens of Delray Beach,’ the city where the mural is located.” Read more at New York Times
“ROYE, France — There is no doubt that President Emmanuel Macron of France won a convincing re-election over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, on Sunday. Mr. Macron scored a thumping 17 point margin of victory, becoming the first French leader to be re-elected to a second term in 20 years.
In the view of many, the electoral system worked as it was intended to, with nearly 60 percent of those who voted joining together to defend against a xenophobic and nationalist far right widely regarded as a threat to French democracy.
That is, perhaps, unless you are a supporter of Ms. Le Pen, who was blocked in the final round for a second consecutive time.
‘I think we’re heading into five more years of crisis, probably worse, because people are just fed up,’ Sébastien Denneulin, 46, a Le Pen supporter, said on Monday morning in Roye, a northern far-right stronghold.
Even as Ms. Le Pen has edged her party into the mainstream, ensconcing it firmly in the political establishment, her supporters say they are growing frustrated with a lack of representation in the political system.
The far right enjoyed its strongest ever showing at the ballot box on Sunday, as Ms. Le Pen widened her appeal with pocketbook issues important in parts of the country like this northern region, where in the past two generations voters have shifted to the far right from the political left along with deindustrialization.
The challenge now for Mr. Macron will be how to lure back into the political fold the 41.5 percent of voters who cast ballots for Ms. Le Pen — and the roughly 28 percent who opted not to vote at all. Despite the president’s clear victory, the election results disguised myriad challenges that could make his next five years in office even more tumultuous than the last.
As French news media organizations drew up maps of the nationwide breakdown of the runoff vote, they showed a widening and deepening fracture along the French equivalent of American blue and red states.” Read more at New York Times
“BANGKOK (AP) — A court in military-ruled Myanmar convicted the country’s former leader Aung San Suu Kyi of corruption and sentenced her to five years in prison Wednesday in the first of several corruption cases against her.
Suu Kyi, who was ousted by an army takeover last year, had denied the allegation that she had accepted gold and hundreds of thousands of dollars given her as a bribe by a top political colleague.
Her supporters and independent legal experts consider her prosecution an unjust move to discredit Suu Kyi and legitimize the military’s seizure of power while keeping the 76-year-old elected leader from returning to an active role in politics.
The daughter of Aung San, Myanmar’s founding father, Suu Kyi became a public figure in 1988 during a failed uprising against a previous military government when she helped found the National League for Democracy party. She spent 15 of the next 21 years under house arrest for leading a nonviolent struggle for democracy that earned her the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. When the army allowed an election in 2015, her party won a landslide victory and she became the de facto head of state. Her party won a greater majority in the 2020 polls.” Read more at AP News
“Xi Jinping aims to beat U.S. economic growth this year despite lockdowns. The Chinese president said it was critical to show that the country’s one-party system is superior to Western liberal democracy, and that the U.S. is declining politically and economically, according to people familiar with the discussions. China’s economy is sagging under its worst Covid-19 outbreak since the pandemic began. The U.S. economy grew 5.5% year-on-year in the last quarter of 2021, compared with China’s 4.0%.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Twin peaks | Covid-19 cases are showing tentative signs of easing in China’s two centers of infection, suggesting that the authorities are starting to bring the outbreaks under control. Shanghai hinted at an easing of lockdown measures with case numbers at the lowest in three weeks, while Beijing infections look to be stabilizing.” Read more at Bloomberg
People wait in line for Covid-19 testing in Beijing today. Photographer: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images AsiaPac
“Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, bought Twitter on Monday for $44 billion, with the stated aim of restoring ‘free speech’ on the influential social media platform.
It’s likely that Musk means this in an American context, where the battle for ‘free speech’ has become a rallying cry for those on the U.S. political right who accuse Twitter (and other major tech firms) of silencing conservative voices by enforcing what they deem arbitrary content moderation policies—a simplistic approach that, as Anand Giridharadas argued in the New York Times, could stand to learn something from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the concepts of negative and positive liberty.
The list of grievances is long, but near the top of it is the ongoing ban of former U.S. President Donald Trump, a notoriously avid Twitter user.
So when it comes to Twitter’s future in the United States, loosened content moderation and Trump’s return may be enough for the company’s U.S. detractors to claim victory.
The rest of the world is a different story. That’s because for years now, states, not social media companies, have been taking the lead on deciding who gets to speak online. This approach makes social platforms not so much a public square as a school playground, where the government can act as supervisor, disciplinarian, and chief bully all at the same time.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t a closed authoritarian country that topped the list of governments requesting that content be removed from the platform. Japan led the world in legal demands regarding Twitter content in the first half of 2021, the most recent period for which the company has published data. According to Twitter’s transparency report, the Japanese requests—43 percent of the global total—stemmed from concerns over ‘laws regarding narcotics and drug control, obscenity, or financial-related crimes.’
More typical culprits appear when moving down the list. Russia, Turkey, and India, along with South Korea, round out the top five and contributed 95 percent of all legal demands in the reporting period.
While China sidesteps the issue entirely by blocking major social media channels (a policy that doesn’t stop its Twitter-happy diplomats), Turkey and India have taken a more hands-on approach.
Since 2020, Turkey has ordered social media companies with more than 1 million daily users to appoint a local representative and form a local entity that can be issued fines for noncompliance with government orders. That desire for control goes hand in hand with a wider media crackdown which has seen Turkey become one of the biggest jailers of journalists in the world.
India has also followed a similar route, recently instituting rules requiring major social media companies to open local offices and appoint local representatives to oversee compliance with its new regulations—and be held criminally liable for any breaches. Twitter has also faced pressure from the Indian government to remove accounts supporting farmer protests last year and was one of several companies asked to remove accounts criticizing the national response to the country’s COVID-19 epidemic.
Turkey and India are not outliers in their attempts to govern social media content. In 2021, at least 24 countries put new laws or rules in place to control how companies operate in that space, according to data from the latest Freedom On The Net report from Freedom House.
It’s not just countries with shaky democratic ideals that are keen to police online speech either. EU regulators, long a thorn in the side of Silicon Valley, unveiled new plans over the weekend that would limit how users are targeted with ads, as well as force tech firms to clamp down on illegal content or potentially face billions in fines.
The new rules would also include a ‘crisis mechanism’ that would allow the bloc to tightly control how social media companies operate during a health or security emergency.
The wide reach of the EU regulations, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), was criticized by Jacob Mchangama in a recent Foreign Policy piece where he warned that the new rules could cause ‘serious collateral damage to online free speech in Europe.’
‘It will most likely result in a shrinking space for online expression, as social media companies are incentivized to delete massive amounts of perfectly legal content,’ Mchangama writes.
If Musk is in fact set on improving free speech on his new website, the tide of global regulation is against him. Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, told the Financial Times that Musk will be subject to the same terms as any other company: ‘Elon, there are rules. You are welcome but these are our rules. It’s not your rules which will apply here,’ he said.
Further reading:
•Freedom House’s Freedom On The Net report, which covers the global drive to regulate big tech.
• Isaac Chotiner’s interview with Bloomberg’s Matt Levine in the New Yorker on what might be behind Musk’s Twitter play.
• FP Editor in Chief Ravi Agrawal’s Q&A with Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s competition commissioner, on her views on Big Tech and the role she wants to play in regulating it.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“Lend-Lease progress. The House Rules Committee considers a bill to reestablish the World War II-era Lend-Lease act to better speed the transfer of weaponry to the Ukrainian military. The bill has already been approved by the U.S. Senate, and will be put to a wider vote in the House of Representatives if it gets released by the House committee. The bill’s provisions don’t just include Ukraine, but other ‘governments of Eastern European countries impacted by the Russian Federation’s invasion.’” Read more at Foreign Policy
“Russia’s African ties. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov meets with his Eritrean counterpart Osman Saleh Mohammed in Moscow today, amid speculation that Eritrea could send conscripts to aid Russia’s war in Ukraine. Russia has denied recruiting soldiers from neighboring Ethiopia after hundreds of men appeared to register for military service outside the Russian embassy in Addis Ababa last week.
In West Africa, France has accused Russian mercenaries of attempting to stage a false flag operation in Mali by fabricating a mass grave near a former French military base, as my FP colleagues Amy Mackinnon and Robbie Gramer report. And in this week’s Africa Brief, FP’s Nosmot Gbadamosi analyzes Cameroon’s military deal with the Kremlin as President Paul Biya seeks to diversify his security relationships—turning to partners who won’t criticize his government’s human rights record.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“A school in Japan’s Kanagawa prefecture has racked up a $27,000 water bill after a teacher left a faucet running in the school’s swimming pool, believing the flow of fresh water would help protect swimmers from coronavirus infections.
The water ran freely from late June to early September, unleashing over 1 million gallons in total. Local authorities have asked the teacher responsible, as well as two other staff members, to pay half of the exorbitant water bill.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“The first all-electric Ford F-150 pickup rolled off the assembly line. The Lightning is a battery-powered version of America’s longtime bestselling vehicle. The auto maker has said it aimed to triple its original manufacturing target for the truck to 150,000 a year, citing 200,000 reservations.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“As Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress, was digging through the playwright Neil Simon’s manuscripts and papers earlier this year, he made a surprising discovery.
Simon, the most commercially successful American playwright of the 20th century, could also draw. Like, really draw.
‘They’re almost professional,’ Horowitz said in a recent phone conversation of some of the pen-and-ink drawings and paintings he found tucked among the scripts. ‘There are two watercolors in particular that are quite beautiful landscapes.’
More than a dozen notepads filled with drawings, cartoons and caricatures by Simon, who died in 2018, was just one of the surprising discoveries Horowitz made in the trove of approximately 7,700 of the playwright’s manuscripts and papers (and even eyeglasses), a collection that the library on Monday announced had been donated by Simon’s widow, the actress Elaine Joyce.” Read more at New York Times
“Lives Lived: For more than a decade, Geraldine Weiss wrote her investment newsletter under a pseudonym to conceal her identity in a male-dominated industry. She died at 96.” Read more at New York Times
Kate Pierson and Fred Schneider, of The B-52s, pose for a portrait on June 21, 2018. Photo: Christopher Smith/Invision/AP
“The B-52s are hitting the road one last time for a final tour this summer that will roam from coast to coast, AP reports.
‘The Final Tour Ever of Planet Earth’ will visit 10 cities across the U.S., kicking off Aug. 22 in Seattle and ending Nov. 11 in Atlanta.
Stops include Boston, Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and D.C.
Fred Schneider, co-founder and singer for the Athens, Georgia-based band, said: ‘No one likes to throw a party more than we do, but after almost a half-century on the road, it's time for one last blow-out.’
The band burst onto the New Wave scene in 1979 with ‘Rock Lobster’ — and cracked the pop charts in the late '80s with ‘Love Shack.’” Read more at Axios