The Full Belmonte, 6/27/2022
“Russian missiles hit an apartment block and kindergarten in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Sunday. President Biden, in Germany for a G7 summit, condemned the strikes as ‘barbarism’ as world leaders gathered to discuss further sanctions against Moscow.” [Axios] Read more at Reuters
Russia’s economy, which the country’s central bank has sought to bolster against sanctions, isn’t expected to feel immediate ripple effects from any default.PHOTO: MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS
“Russia was poised to default on its foreign debt for the first time since 1918, pushed into delinquency not for lack of money but because of punishing Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia missed payments on two foreign-currency bonds as of late Sunday, according to holders of the bonds. The day marks the expiration of a 30-day grace period since the country was due to pay the equivalent of $100 million in dollars and euros to bondholders.
The default has been long in coming since the West all but unplugged Russia from the global financial system, creating payment obstacles Moscow couldn’t overcome. It wasn’t expected to cause any immediate ripple effects in markets or Russia’s economy. Russian bonds have traded for pennies on the dollar since days after the invasion, a sign that investors believed default was probable.
Russia last failed to pay its foreign borrowing during the Bolshevik Revolution when Vladimir Lenin, the newly installed communist leader, repudiated the debt of the Russian Empire. Russia defaulted on its ruble-denominated bonds during a financial crisis in 1998, but it was able to stay current with its overseas debt at the time.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
Litigation over the lack of payment could span years. Russia has accused the West of manufacturing an artificial default, and has gone to great lengths in recent months to route money in roundabout ways to get the required payments into the hands of bondholders.
“ELMAU, Germany — The U.S. announced on Sunday that it will ban new imports of Russian gold as it steps up efforts to deprive Vladimir Putin of the financial resources he needs to maintain his assault on Ukraine.
Biden administration officials made the announcement as the U.S. president prepared to meet with the leaders of France, Germany, Canada, the UK, Italy and Japan. The nations collectively make up an economic alliance known as the Group of Seven.
‘The United States has imposed unprecedented costs on Putin to deny him the revenue he needs to fund his war against Ukraine,’ President Joe Biden said in a tweet. ‘Together, the G7 will announce that we will ban the import of Russian gold, a major export that rakes in tens of billions of dollars for Russia.’
Other G-7 nations are expected to follow suit, with the United Kingdom being chief among them. The UK imports more gold from Russia than any other G-7 nation.” Read more at USA Today
Tyrone Turner for NPR
“The decision to strip Americans of their constitutional right to abortion — augured by former President Donald Trump’s appointment of three justices, tilting the court to its most conservative posture in 75 years — is now setting off a flurry of sweeping prognoses about the future of reproductive rights in America:
Doctors, who take an oath to ‘do no harm,’ are caught in an impossible legal and ethical gauntlet. The decision is now forcing them to ponder ‘how imminent must death be,’ as one OB-GYN put it, for pregnant patients who need the procedure because of life-threatening complications.
The ruling will likely disproportionately affect people with disabilities and women of color — and heighten the risks of people falling deeper into poverty. People with disabilities are over three times more likely than non-disabled people to be sexually assaulted, according to federal statistics — putting them at high risk of needing access to the procedure. Black and Hispanic women seek abortions at higher ratesthan their peers in conservative states, and financial constraints may prevent them from traveling for care. And a landmark study that followed women for a decade found those denied an abortion were four times more likely to be living in poverty years later. Data shows the potential consequences don’t stop there.
States where abortions remain protected are already worried about the demand from out-of-state patients. Minnesota, currently an island in a sea of abortion bans, has just eight clinics that provide the procedure. Wait times can last two weeks, pushing some patients outside the window of viability. One nonprofit says the cost of care can exceed $1,000 — inevitably widening the chasm in access among the rich and poor.
Restrictive abortion laws could lead to a wave of mass incarceration.A woman charged with murder for having a miscarriage, and awaiting her fate in front of a court of law, is now no longer just a hypothetical. The laws could give rise to a legal trawl net targeting patients who seek abortions — and those who aid them — that is tantamount to the War on Drugs, experts say. Lawyers are already gearing up for a fight.
The unraveling of nearly a half-century of precedent will play out more clearly in the months and years ahead. But one thing is certain, as our Nina Totenberg noted: The Supreme Court no longer has a center. Could it tear through other enshrined American rights? Only time holds the answers.” Read more at NPR
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Data: Axios research. Map: Sara Wise and Oriana Gonzalez/Axios
“Since the decision, clinics have stopped performing abortions in Arizona, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin, AP reports.
Women considering abortions already faced a near-complete ban in Oklahoma, and a Texas prohibition after roughly six weeks.
In Ohio, a ban on most abortions from the first detectable fetal heartbeat became law Friday when a federal judge dissolved an injunction that had kept the measure on hold for nearly three years.
A law with narrow exceptions was triggered in Utah. Planned Parenthood Association and the ACLU sued yesterday to stop the ban.” Read more at Axios
“President Biden is vowing to fight state efforts to ban the FDA-approved abortion pill — a big battleground in the post-Roe fight between the administration and emboldened red-state governments.
Why it matters: Lawmakers in at least 20 states have proposed restrictions or bans on the pills, Pew Stateline reports.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement: ‘[T]he FDA has approved the use of the medication Mifepristone. States may not ban Mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment.’
There's no settled law on whether states can ban the pills, and the question is likely to be litigated, the WashPost reports.
Why it matters: The administration could argue in court that FDA approval of mifepristone for medication abortions preempts state restrictions, Reuters reports.
States will have trouble enforcing restrictions on medication abortion: Women likely will be able to get pills online or in other states.
Zoom out: Biden said yesterday, in brief remarks about abortion before he signed the gun bill, that his administration will try to prevent states from violating ‘other laws’ as they implement the court decision.
An example, he said, would be ‘deciding to not allow people across state lines to get public health services. And we're going to take actions to protect women’s rights and reproductive health.’
Zoom in: The White House listed protection of medication abortion as one of the key actions the administration is taking post-Roe.
The statement said Biden directed HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra to protect women’s access to FDA-approved medication, including contraception and abortion pills.
State of play: More abortion pills are expected to be ordered online and delivered through the mail after Friday's decision, as part of an increase in abortion care through telemedicine, Axios' Kelly Tyko reports.
How it works: The pills used to terminate pregnancy — mifepristone and misoprostol — are FDA-approved for use in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, Axios' Tina Reed reports.
They're frequently prescribed online and mailed to patients,
By the numbers: In 2020, the majority of U.S. abortions (54%) were medication abortions, up from 39% in 2017, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.
In some European countries, up to 90% of abortions are done using pills.” Read more at Axios
“WASHINGTON (AP) — South Dakota’s Republican governor pledged on Sunday to bar mail-order abortion pills but said women should not face prosecution for seeking them.
In apparent defiance of legal guidance by the Justice Department after the Supreme Court last week stripped away women’s constitutional protections for abortion, Kristi Noem indicated in national television interviews that she would put in place a plan approved by state lawmakers to restrict the pills. The majority ruling Friday by the court’s conservative justices triggered abortion bans in South Dakota and elsewhere.
But Noem said doctors, not their patients, would likely be prosecuted for knowing violations of what would be one of the strictest laws on abortion pills in the United States.
‘I don’t believe women should ever be prosecuted,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe there should be any punishment for women, ever, that are in a crisis situation or have an unplanned pregnancy.’” Read more at AP News
“One week before scores of Proud Boys helped lead a pro-Trump mob in a violent assault on the Capitol last year, Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the group, and some of his top lieutenants held a foul-mouthed video conference with a handpicked crew of members.
The meeting, on Dec. 30, 2020, marked the founding of a special new chapter of the Proud Boys called the Ministry of Self-Defense. The team of several dozen trusted members was intended, Mr. Tarrio told his men, to bring a level of order and professionalism to the group’s upcoming march in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that had, by his own account, been missing at earlier Proud Boys rallies in the city.
Over nearly two hours, Mr. Tarrio and his leadership team — many of whom have since been charged with seditious conspiracy — gave the new recruits a series of directives: Adopt a defensive posture on Jan. 6, they were told. Keep the ‘normies’ — or the normal protesters — away from the Proud Boys’ marching ranks. And obey police lines.
‘We’re never going to be the ones to cross the police barrier or cross something in order to get to somebody,’ Mr. Tarrio said.
There was one overriding problem with the orders: None of them were actually followed when the Proud Boys stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Far from holding back, members of the far-right group played aggressive roles in several breaches at the Capitol, moving in coordination and often taking the lead in removing police barricades, according to a visual investigation by The New York Times of hundreds of hours of video footage of the assault.
And despite what Mr. Tarrio said about keeping away from ordinary protesters, members of the group repeatedly instigated people around them in a tactic that some Proud Boys later described in private messages as ‘riling up the normies.’
While the video conference has been mentioned in court papers, it has not been widely seen. A recording of it was seized from Mr. Tarrio’s phone by the F.B.I. this year, and a copy was recently obtained by The Times.
Lawyers for the Proud Boys say the recorded meeting is a key piece of exculpatory evidence, contradicting claims by the government that a conspiracy to attack the Capitol was hatched several weeks before Jan. 6.
In court filings, prosecutors have claimed that the Proud Boys began to plan their assault as early as Dec. 19, 2020 — the day that President Donald J. Trump posted a tweet announcing his Jan. 6 rally and saying it would be “wild.” But the video conference shows that, just one week before the event, when Mr. Tarrio and other Proud Boys leaders gathered their team for a meeting, they spent most of their time discussing things like staying away from alcohol and women and taking measures to ensure their own security.
The recorded meeting makes no mention of any planning that might have occurred in the week directly before the Capitol attack. And while Mr. Tarrio suggests during the meeting that the complex structure he created for the Ministry of Self-Defense was meant to be self-protective — not offensive — in nature, prosecutors have claimed that the group’s ‘command and control’ design was instrumental in facilitating the Capitol attack.” Read more at New York Times
“MOSCOW (AP) — More than four months after she was arrested at a Moscow airport for cannabis possession, American basketball star Brittney Griner is to appear in court Monday for a preliminary hearing ahead of her trial.
The Phoenix Mercury star, considered in some polls to be the United States’ most gifted female athlete, could face 10 years in prison if convicted on charges of large-scale transportation of drugs. Fewer than 1% of defendants in Russian criminal cases are acquitted, and unlike in the U.S., acquittals can be overturned.
The trial date has not been announced, but is expected soon; Griner was recently ordered to remain in pretrial detention until July 2. The hearing in the court of the Moscow suburb of Khimki is to address procedural issues.
Griner’s detention and trial come at an extraordinarily low point in Moscow-Washington relations. She was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport less than a week before Russia sent troops into Ukraine, which aggravated already-high tensions with sweeping sanctions by the United States and Russia’s denunciation of U.S. weapon supplies to Ukraine.” Read more at AP News
Republican Mary Miller speaks in Mendon, Illinois, as Donald Trump watches. Miller called the overturning of Roe v Wade a ‘victory for white life’. Photograph: Kate Munsch/Reuters
“Illinois Republican Mary Miller told a crowd at a rally held alongside former president Donald Trump that the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade was a ‘victory for white life’.
‘President Trump, on behalf of all the Maga patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the supreme court yesterday,’ she said, drawing cheers from the crowd in Illinois.
Miller is running for reelection in the state’s newly redrawn 15th congressional district against GOP Republican Rodney Davis with the former president’s blessing. She had been invited on stage to speak by Trump, who held the rally in Mendon, Illinois, to turn out the vote ahead of the state’s primary on Tuesday.
Miller’s spokesperson said the Illinois Republican had intended to say the decision was a victory for a ‘right to life’. The line as delivered was out of step with the disproportionate impact the repeal of abortion rights will have on women of color.
Miller spokesperson Isaiah Wartman told the Associated Press that it was ‘a mix-up of words’.
‘You can clearly see in the video … she’s looking at her papers and looking at her speech,’ Wartman said.”
Her campaign noted that she is the grandmother of several non-white grandchildren, including one with Down syndrome.
The freshman congresswoman, who was among those who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has previously come under criticism for quoting Adolf Hitler.
“Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future,’” Miller said in a speech last year, according to video posted by WCIA-TV. She later apologized after Democrats in Illinois called for her resignation.
Saturday’s rally came as some elements of the far right have pushed the ‘great replacement theory’, a racist ideology that alleges white people and their influence are being ‘replaced’ by people of color. Proponents blame both immigration as well as demographic changes, such as birthrates.
During the rally, Trump claimed credit for his role in the supreme court’s ruling on Friday ending the constitutional right to abortion. He noted that in 2016, he promised to appoint judges who opposed abortion rights. The three conservative justices he appointed all voted in favor over overturning Roe v Wade.
‘Yesterday the court handed down a victory for the constitution, a victory for the rule of law, and above all, a victory for life,’ he told the crowd, which broke into a chant of ‘Thank you Trump’.
After Friday’s ruling, several senators who recently approved justices responsible for this decision said they felt deceived. These politicians pointed to prior statements from Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch; both male judges had claimed they would not overturn Roe v Wade.” Read more at The Guardian
“A grocery store worker on Staten Island was arrested on Sunday after smacking Rudolph W. Giuliani on the back while the former mayor campaigned on behalf of his son, a Republican candidate for governor, according to the police and Mr. Giuliani.
In a brief interview, Mr. Giuliani said he was walking through a ShopRite grocery store in the Charleston neighborhood with supporters when the employee disparaged him and slapped his back, then made an apparent reference to abortion.
‘The one thing he said that was political was ‘you’re going to kill women, you’re going to kill women,’ said Mr. Giuliani, who said he understood the remark to be about the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade on Friday.” Read more at New York Times
“ISTANBUL (AP) — Dozens of people were detained in central Istanbul after city authorities banned an LGBTQ Pride march, organizers said Sunday.
Turkey’s largest city has banned the march since 2015, but large crowds nonetheless gather every year to mark the end of Pride Month. Organizers called the ban unlawful.
‘We do not give up, we are not afraid! We will continue our activities in safe places and online,’ the Istanbul LGBTI+ Pride Week Committee said on Twitter.
Kaos GL, a prominent LGBTQ group, said shortly before the march’s 5 p.m. (1400 GMT) start that police detained 52 people had been detained. The Pride Week Committee later said more than 100 had been arrested.
There was no immediate word on the number of arrests from the police or the governor’s office.
Images on social media showed people being frisked and loaded onto buses, including at least one news photographer. Journalists’ union DISK Basin-Is said ‘many’ were beaten by police.” Read more at AP News
Ghislaine Maxwell faces sentencing Tuesday.
“New York federal prosecutors have asked a judge to sentence Maxwell to 30 to 55 years in prison for helping disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage teens. The top count, sex trafficking of minors, carries a maximum of 40 years in prison. Her lawyers plan to appeal her conviction.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
Why inflation crisis is global
Reproduced from Pew Research Center. Map: Axios Visuals
“There's no place to hide when the price of oil and grains go up, Axios chief economic correspondent Neil Irwin tells me.
They trade on global markets, and higher energy and food prices are huge drivers of inflation everywhere.
Pew Research Center found that in nearly all of 44 advanced economies, consumer prices have risen substantially since COVID hit.
Among the 44 countries, the U.S. ranked 19th in change in annual inflation rate from Q1 of 2020 to Q1 of 2022.
Between the lines: Policy choices matter in exactly how much inflation a given place faces — whether in the form of Europe's dependence on Russian energy exports, Americans' aggressive stimulus last year, or Turkey's currency crisis.” Read more at Axios
“PARIS — In 2017, after the far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her allies won only a handful of seats in parliamentary elections, she blamed France’s two-round voting system for shutting her party out of Parliament despite getting over one million ballots cast in its favor.
‘We are eight,’ she said bitterly, referring to the seats won by her party in the National Assembly, the lower and more powerful house of Parliament. ‘In my opinion we are worth 80.’
Fast-forward to last week’s parliamentary elections. The voting system hasn’t changed, but with 89 newly elected lawmakers — an all-time record for her party, currently known as the National Rally — Ms. Le Pen is now beaming.
On Wednesday, she hugged her new colleagues, kissing cheeks left and right, before leading them into the National Assembly and posing for a group picture.
‘You’ll see that we are going to get a lot of work done, with great competence, with seriousness,’ Ms. Le Pen told a scrum of television cameras and microphones. In contrast with ‘what you usually say about us,’ she pointedly told the gathered reporters.
For decades, dogged by its unsavory past and doubts over its ability to effectively govern, the French far right failed to make much headway in local and national elections even as it captured the anger of France’s disillusioned and dissatisfied. Most recently, President Emmanuel Macron defeated Ms. Le Pen in April’s presidential race.
But the National Rally surged spectacularly in the parliamentary election last weekend, capping Ms. Le Pen’s yearslong quest for respectability as she tries to sanitize her party’s image, project an air of competence and put a softer face on her resolutely nationalist and anti-immigrant platform.
Fueled by anger against Mr. Macron and enabled by the collapse of the ‘republican front’ that mainstream parties and voters traditionally erected against the far right, the results came as a shock even within the National Rally’s own ranks.” Read more at New York Times
Screenshot: CNN
The landmark gun bill, signed by President Biden yesterday, was backed by 15 Republican senators and 14 Republican House members.
Screenshot: CNN
Gold miner in Canada finds mummified 35,000-year-old woolly mammoth
Discovery in the Klondike ranks as the most complete mummified mammal found in the Americas
“It was a young miner, digging through the northern Canadian permafrost in the seemingly aptly named Eureka Creek, who sounded the alarm when his front-end loader struck something unexpected in the Klondike gold fields.
What he had stumbled upon would later be described by the territory’s palaeontologist as ‘one of the most incredible mummified ice age animals ever discovered in the world’: a stunningly preserved carcass of a baby woolly mammoth thought to be more than 35,000 years old.
‘She’s perfect and she’s beautiful,’ Grant Zazula, the paleontologist for the Canadian territory of the Yukon, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
‘She has a trunk. She has a tail. She has tiny little ears. She has the little prehensile end of the trunk where she could use it to grab grass.’
He described the find as the ‘most important discovery in palaeontology in North America’. With much of the skin and hair intact, officials said the find ranks as the most complete mummified mammal found on the continent.
The woolly mammoth is believed to have been a little over one month old when she died. Stretching 140cm, she’s slightly longer than the only other whole baby woolly mammoth discovered in Siberia in 2007.
The discovery was made on the traditional territory of the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation. At a ceremony earlier this week, elders named the calf Nun cho ga, meaning ‘big baby animal’ in the Hän language.” Read more at The Guardian
Stanley Cup 2022: Best photos from Avalanche vs. Lightning
The best photos from the 2022 Stanley Cup Final, which pits the Colorado Avalanche against the two-time defending champion Tampa Bay Lightning.
The Colorado Avalanche are Stanley Cup champions for the first time since 2001, thanks to a resiliency that had eluded them in recent years.
The Avalanche tied an NHL record with their 10th come-from-behind victory of the playoffs to beat the Tampa Bay Lightning 2-1 in Game 6 Sunday night and end the two-time champions' reign.
Colorado star Nathan MacKinnon had his best game of the series with a goal and an assist in the second period to help the Avalanche clinch the franchise's third Stanley Cup with a 16-4 playoff record.
‘It’s a relief. It’s a 20-pound weight lifted off our shoulders, and it means so much to bring this championship back to the city of Denver,’ captain Gabriel Landeskog told NHL Network during the on-ice celebration at Tampa's Amalie Arena.
The Lightning, who were trying to send the series back to Denver for Game 7, got off to a good start when captain Steven Stamkos scored at 3:48 of the first period after a Colorado turnover.” Read more at USA Today
The NFL is pushing for an indefinite ban for Deshaun Watson
“The quarterback's sexual misconduct hearing is set to begin this week and the National Football League is preparing to make its case for an indefinite suspension that would last at least one year. Watson, who has been accused by dozens of women of sexual assault or other forms of misconduct during massage-therapy sessions, has denied any wrongdoing.” Read more at Wall Street Journal