The Full Belmonte, 6/12/2023
“Sixteen young people head to court in Helena, Mont., today in the first youth climate lawsuit to ever make it to trial in the United States. The plaintiffs say state leaders are violating the state constitution, which says citizens have a right to ‘a clean and healthful environment’ by not addressing climate change. The landmark case's outcome could impact other children’s climate litigation in state and federal courts. (via Montana Public Radio).” [NPR]
Barr warns Trump could be ‘toast’
Graphic: CBS News
“As former President Trump heads to court in Miami tomorrow, William Barr, his former attorney general, told "Fox News Sunday" about events described in the 37-count indictment:
‘If even half of it is true, then he's toast. ... It’s a very detailed indictment, and it's very, very damning.’
‘They're not his personal records,’ Barr added:
‘Battle plans for an attack on another country, or Defense Department documents about our capabilities, are in NO universe Donald J. Trump's PERSONAL documents. They are the GOVERNMENT'S documents.’” [Axios]
The Great Grift: How billions in COVID-19 relief aid was stolen or wasted
By RICHARD LARDNER, JENNIFER McDERMOTT and AARON KESSLER
“WASHINGTON (AP) — Much of the theft was brazen, even simple.
Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.
Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana.
All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall.
An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.
That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes.
How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy.
‘Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,’ said Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington. ‘Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal.’
The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.
Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.
The pilfering was wide but not always as deep as the eye-catching headlines about cases involving many millions of dollars. But all of the theft, big and small, illustrates an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, more than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….” Read more at AP News
“Part of Interstate 95 collapsed in Philadelphia after a tanker truck caught fire under an overpass. Repairs could take months.” [New York Times]
Photo: Billy Kyle via Reuters
Largest settlement in US history over police misconduct reached
“A $45 million settlement has been reached in the civil police brutality case involving Richard "Randy" Cox, a Black man now paralyzed from the chest down following an arrest by police officers in New Haven, Connecticut, nearly a year ago. The case represents the largest settlement involving police misconduct in U.S. history and comes two years after the $27 million settlement involving the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers on Memorial Day weekend in 2020.” Read more at USA Today
Attorney Benjamin Crump, foreground left, and Doreen Coleman, mother of Randy Cox, hold a poster of Cox outside a courthouse in New Haven, Connecticut.
Ben Lambert/New Haven Register via AP
Silvio Berlusconi in Rome last year.Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
“Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul and Italy’s most polarizing and prosecuted prime minister, died at 86.” [New York Times]
Ukraine claims recapture of 4th village
“Ukrainian military officials said Monday their forces have retaken another village from Russian forces, signaling incremental successes in ramped-up counteroffensive operations against Moscow’s more than 15-month invasion of Ukraine. A day earlier, Ukrainian officials said three other small villages had been liberated, although Russian authorities did not confirm the Russian losses. The move also comes as the Kakhovka dam's breach has most likely disrupted the usual supply of fresh water to Crimea, forcing Russian authorities to impose rationing, use reservoirs, drill new wells and bring in bottled water to meet the needs of the population in the occupied peninsula, the British Defense Ministry said. Read more at USA Today
Emergency teams respond to injured civilian evacuees who had came under fire from Russian forces while trying to flee by boat in Ukraine on Sunday, June 11, 2023. (Credit: AP)
AP
“Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s former leader who pressed for independence from Britain, was arrested as part of an investigation into her party’s finances.” [New York Times]
“In India’s worst railway disaster in decades, almost all of the 288 people who died were in crowded cars where passengers stand for long stretches.” [New York Times]
“Remember Boris Johnson? Too bad if you were trying to forget him.
Having quit as UK prime minister less than a year ago after one scandal too many, Johnson has again hogged the limelight by announcing his decision to stand down from Parliament.
But it was the manner of his going, lobbing incendiary charges at Rishi Sunak’s government, that was most damaging to the current occupant of Downing Street.
In Scotland, another fallen idol — former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — protested her innocence on Twitter yesterday after police arrested and then released her in connection with an investigation into the Scottish National Party’s finances.
The weekend turmoil in London and Edinburgh doesn’t necessarily mean the defining political projects of each government, respectively Brexit and the push for Scots independence, are any more undermined than they've been in recent months anyway. But it’s undoubtedly bad for the incumbents.
Sunak’s Conservatives already trail the opposition Labour Party nationally by as much as 20 percentage points. And while a UK election is perhaps 18 months off, Johnson’s departing broadside fuels the sense that fighting over policies and personalities is consuming the governing party just when economic concerns are squeezing voters.
The upshot is Sunak, desperate to project calm after the Liz Truss-inspired chaos, instead finds himself on the lip of a vortex of Tory self-destruction and having to fight three special elections.
The chief beneficiary is Labour leader Keir Starmer, who looks increasingly like a prime minister in waiting. Seat gains in Scotland at the SNP’s expense may help decide the next election in his favor.
There was little sign of this political malaise last week during a trip to England, with the countryside looking its spectacular best in the throes of a midsummer heatwave.
The nation’s political rainmakers, though, are wilting under the heat.— Alan Crawford [Bloomberg]
Sturgeon welcomes Johnson in July 2019 in Edinburgh. Photographer: Duncan McGlynn/Getty Images
Volcano eruption
“Nearly 13,000 residents in the Philippines have evacuated their homes after the Mount Mayon volcano began spewing lava and sulfuric gas on Sunday. Philippine officials said 88% of residents living in the danger zone of the volcano have evacuated in the past few days. Situated about 200 miles southeast of Manila, Mayon is one of the world's most active volcanoes. The last time it violently erupted was in 2018 when it displaced thousands of villagers and coated nearby towns in thick layers of ash. Officials are closely monitoring the situation to assess whether additional evacuation warnings are needed, though the dramatic footage of molten lava spewing from the volcano has already prompted thousands of locals to flee.Fox demands Tucker cease and desist.” [CNN]
By Ishaan Tharoor
with Sammy Westfall
Ukraine’s current counteroffensive may dictate the fate of the war
In an image from video provided by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry on June 4, a soldier poses with a finger to his lips in an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Ukrainian Defense Ministry/AP)
“Few military campaigns have been as anticipated in recent memory as the current Ukrainian counteroffensive that appears to be underway. For months, speculation built over when and how Ukraine’s forces would strike back across the front lines in the south and east of their country. Kyiv shared little publicly about its plans to retake territory seized in the Russian invasion, though it clamored for Western tanks, infantry vehicles and other sophisticated military aid as it made its preparations.
Spring began to melt into summer. The brutal fighting over the eastern city of Bakhmut captured attention; so, too, the incessant barrage of Russian missiles and drones on civilian areas of Ukraine, including cities far from the main battlefields of the war. The specter of a nuclear escalation loomed darkly over the conflict. And in the past week, we saw a new horror — man-made ecological devastation, as a suspected Russian attack on the Kakhovka reservoir dam along the Dnieper River led to widespread flooding and the evacuation of thousands of civilians.
But now it seems Ukraine is on the march. Though coy on the details, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed as much at a news conference Saturday alongside visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Analysts have concluded that significant operations are in motion on at least three key fronts: Eastward over the bloodied terrain surrounding Bakhmut and toward occupied Luhansk; southeast into the Donetsk region; and southward into parts of the Zaporizhzhia region controlled by Russian troops and toward the Sea of Azov.
Russia has heavily fortified this latter approach, as Ukrainian success there would spell strategic disaster for the Kremlin. ‘The flat fields of Zaporizhzhia were long seen as a likely and advantageous focal point for the counterattack,’ my colleagues explained. ‘By cutting through here, Kyiv could sever the ‘land bridge’ between mainland Russia and Crimea. This would cut off Russia’s east-west supply lines.’
The region’s ‘position at the heart of the frontline means that any attack there could trap large numbers of Russian troops in a pocket to the west, in Kherson province,’ noted the Economist. ‘Many could also be trapped in Crimea itself, if Ukraine managed to strike the bridge over the Kerch strait again.’ The British magazine added that Ukraine just getting into artillery range of some of the rail and road links to the annexed peninsula would trigger a crisis for Russia.
Key areas in Ukraine's counteroffensive. (TWP)
Ukraine and its allies hope that the superior firepower and training of new Western-backed armored brigades will break through Russia’s reinforced lines. Experts, though, reckon the fighting will be more akin to the attritional slog that preceded Ukraine’s liberation of Kherson than the lightning campaign that routed Russian forces in Kharkiv.
‘This isn’t something you judge based on a few days of fighting,’ tweeted Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at the Center for Naval Analyses, downplaying social media hand-wringing over published Russian images of a handful of smoldering Ukrainian tanks. ‘Footage of combat losses, which are to be expected, can have an anchoring effect. The offensive will play out over weeks, and likely months.’
The end goal for Kyiv is a commanding position from which to turn and face the Kremlin: ‘If this counteroffensive is indeed successful, the Ukrainians will not only liberate more of their land from a brutal occupation but also might cause more Russians to accept that this is a war they cannot win and persuade the West to keep providing the support Ukraine needs for the long term,’ wrote Post columnist Max Boot.
Another Post columnist, David Ignatius, likened the operations to D-Day in World War II and to other offensives in history that serve as ‘a reminder that an army must sometimes take huge risks to position itself for eventual victory.’
Ukraine’s leader is fully aware of the stakes. Amid fears of Western fatigue and, in particular, waning U.S. support as elections draw near, Kyiv wants to show that the significant American and European outlay to buttress its war effort has been worth it — and is also worth sustaining.
‘Look, nobody expects as much [from this counteroffensive] as we do,’ Zelensky told my colleagues in an interview last month. ‘I’ll tell you frankly, I’m not sure that absolutely all of our partners believe that we are able to break the Russian Federation.’
Ukraine’s political and security future will be at the heart of discussions next month at a NATO summit in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius — where months of complicated wrangling over Kyiv’s potential membership in the military alliance and other security guarantees that can be extended to the besieged Ukrainians may come to a head. Within Europe, there are also varying views on how far Ukraine should be encouraged to wage its campaigns before entering negotiations with Russia.
‘I know that there is skepticism among some partners that it would be scary if Ukraine liberates absolutely all of its territories,’ Zelensky told The Post. ‘But I, for example, can live with this skepticism. And I believe that the more victories we have on the battlefield, frankly, the more people will believe in us, which means we will get more help.’
The Ukrainian counteroffensive also adds to the pressures on the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin has seen the ‘special military operation’ he launched last year sprawl into a ruinous war that has deepened Russia’s geopolitical isolation and gravely depleted its military capacity. Erstwhile supporters now openly challenge the logic and strategy that compelled the invasion, while bracing for worse news to come.
‘If Russia loses the corridor to Crimea, it will be a very serious blow,’ Tatyana Stanovaya, the founder of R-Politik, a political analysis firm with insight into Russia’s halls of power, told my colleagues. ‘Everyone understands how important it is for Putin and it will mean Putin has again not calculated the situation correctly and again not managed the situation. It will mean a very serious failure.’
Stanovaya added: ‘The mood is very gloomy among the elite. They don’t understand what Putin’s plans are and doubt whether he is adequately dealing with the situation. This has been going on for a long time, but the worry is building up.’” [Washington Post]
Screenshot: "Tucker on Twitter," Episode 2
“Fox News sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to Tucker Carlson as he ramps up a competing ‘Tucker on Twitter’ series that drew a combined 169 million views for its first two episodes, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The contract battle between Fox and its former top host — who was taken off the air in April, after the network's Dominion settlement — has mighty repercussions for the conservative media ecosystem.
Carlson and his growing production team are working to elevate Elon Musk's Twitter as a news platform.
The cease-and-desist letter has ‘NOT FOR PUBLICATION’ in bold at the top, surrounded by a red border.
What's happening: Fox is continuing to pay Carlson, and maintains that his contract keeps his content exclusive to Fox through Dec. 31, 2024.
Carlson is making a First Amendment argument for posting on Twitter, and asserts that Fox has committed material breaches of his contract.
Behind the scenes: Carlson's first two Twitter episodes were straight-to-camera monologues. I'm told he plans to keep iterating with longer, more varied episodes and the addition of guests.
We hear some big names have been lined up.
Justin Wells, Carlson's executive producer, tweeted yesterday: ‘Next Episode of Tucker on Twitter coming Tuesday: Tucker’s response to the indictment of President Donald Trump.’
Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer who represents Carlson along with Bryan Freedman, said in a statement to Axios: ‘Fox News continues to ignore the interests of its viewers, not to mention its shareholder obligations ... Fox is now demanding that Tucker Carlson be silent until after the 2024 election.’
‘Tucker will not be silenced by anyone ... He is a singularly important voice on matters of public interest in our country, and will remain so.’
Fox News didn't comment.” [Axios]
Florida’s ‘Dr. Deep’ resurfaces after a record 100 days living underwater
In this photo provided by the Florida Keys News Bureau, diving explorer and medical researcher Dr. Joseph Dituri points to his watch Friday, June 9, 2023, indicating that it is time to surface after spending 100 days in the Jules' Undersea Lodge marine habitat at the bottom of a Key Largo, Fla., lagoon. Dituri broke the previous 73-day record for underwater human habitation at ambient pressure, undertook medical and marine science research and interacted online with more than 5,500 students during his Project Neptune 100 mission organized by the Marine Resources Development Foundation. (Mariano Lorde/Florida Keys News Bureau via AP)
“KEY LARGO, Fla. (AP) — A university professor who spent 100 days living underwater at a Florida Keys lodge for scuba divers resurfaced Friday and raised his face to the sun for the first time since March 1.
Dr. Joseph Dituri set a new record for the longest time living underwater without depressurization during his stay at Jules’ Undersea Lodge, submerged beneath 30 feet (9.14 meters) of water in a Key Largo lagoon.
The diving explorer and medical researcher shattered the previous mark of 73 days, two hours and 34 minutes set by two Tennessee professors at the same lodge in 2014.
‘It was never about the record,’ Dituri said. ‘It was about extending human tolerance for the underwater world and for an isolated, confined, extreme environment.’
Dituri, who also goes by the moniker “ Dr. Deep Sea,” is a University of South Florida educator who holds a doctorate in biomedical engineering and is a retired U.S. Naval officer….” Read more at AP News
Tony Awards 2023 top moments
“Oscar winner Ariana DeBose returned to host this year's Tony Awards, which featured no scripted banter during the presentation of awards. The performance-heavy show was led by standout numbers from Ben Platt of "Parade" and Lea Michele of "Funny Girl." "Kimberly Akimbo," a musical about a 16-year-old girl played by Victoria Clark who ages four times faster than the average person, picked up the night's biggest trophy for best musical, along with prizes for best actress for Clark, best score and best book. And huge cheers came from the audience when "The Gilded Age" star Denée Benton compared 2024 hopeful Ron DeSantis to a "grand wizard,” referring to a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.” Read more at USA Today
•Gallery: See Jodie Comer, Jessica Chastain, Ariana DeBose, more on the red carpet.
Victoria Clark, left, and Justin Cooley, members of he cast of "Kimberly Akimbo", perform.
Charles Sykes, Invision/AP
Canada wins
It was going to take a lot for the actual result of this weekend’s RBC Canadian Open to briefly overshadow the golf-league merger news. But here we are, with a 72-foot putt to win it on the fourth playoff hole. Just watch:
Via CBS
It came from Canada’s own Nick Taylor, which made the scene even better. He’s the first Canadian to win the country’s open since 1954. The crowd was in a frenzy; Taylor’s fellow Canadian golfers were even more excited. Adam Hadwin was so pumped that he rushed the green with a bottle of champagne … and got bulldozed by a security guard who mistook him for a fan:
What a day. Hadwin’s wife reports that he survived the incident just fine. Also, don’t miss Lukas Weese’s column on the dwindling importance of events like the Canadian Open, and what it has to do to survive what’s next for the PGA Tour. [The Athletic]
Novak Djokovic in Paris.James Hill for The New York Times
“French Open: Novak Djokovic earned his 23rd Grand Slam title yesterday after winning the men’s singles championship.” [New York Times]
Photos: Reuters
Above: Djokovic holds each of his Grand Slam trophies, in photos from the Australian Open of 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2019 2020, 2021 and 2023 ... Wimbledon 2011, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022 ... the U.S. Open 2011, 2015 and 2018 ... and the French Open 2016, 2021 and 2023.
Photo: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
Above: Djokovic yesterday after beating Norway's Casper Ruud in the French Open men's singles final in Paris, 7-6 (1), 6-3, 7-5. [Axios]