The Full Belmonte, 7/17/2022
“An ongoing heat wave is fueling wildfires, causing heat-related deaths and breaking records in Western Europe.
British authorities are issuing dire warnings, as temperatures may reach 104 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Britain, a region usually known for moderate summer heat, with July highs in the 70s. It's the first time such a forecast has been made in the area.
The heat poses a serious health risk, as people will need to take precautions to avoid heat-related illness. In Britain, few homes, apartments, schools or small businesses have air conditioning, making residents particularly vulnerable.
Extreme heat is also endangering the environment and homes, with wildfires raging in Portugal, Spain and France.
British authorities have described it as a ‘national emergency’ and southern Britain is under an “extreme” heat warning for the first time on record.
London Underground subway passengers are being advised not to travel on Monday and Tuesday, because the heat is expected to affect rails and might cause delays, authorities said.
Already deadly heat; raging wildfires
In Spain, 237 deaths occurred due to high temperatures last week, according to the country's Carlos III Institute, which records temperature-related fatalities daily.
The heat has helped fuel raging wildfires in multiple countries:
In France, firefighters struggled Saturday to contain a huge wildfire that raced across pine forests in the Bordeaux region for a fifth straight day.
In Portugal, more than 160 people have been injured by wildfires and hundreds have been forced to evacuate. The pilot of a firefighting plane also died when his plane crashed.
Spain is also battling several wildfires, including two that have burned about 18,200 acres and caused around 3,000 people to be evacuated.” Read more at USA Today
“POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — Russian missiles hit industrial facilities at a strategic city in southern Ukraine Sunday as Moscow continued efforts to expand its gains in the country’s east.
Mykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych said that the Russian missiles struck an industrial and infrastructure facility in the city, a key shipbuilding center in the estuary of the Southern Bug river. There was no immediate information about casualties.
Mykolaiv has faced regular Russian missile strikes in recent weeks as the Russians have sought to soften Ukrainian defenses.
The Russian military has declared a goal to cut off Ukraine’s entire Black Sea coast all the way to the Romanian border. If successful, such an effort would deal a crushing blow to the Ukrainian economy and trade and allow Moscow to secure a land bridge to Moldova’s separatist region of Transnistria, which hosts a Russian military base.
Early in the campaign, the Ukrainian forces fended off Russian attempts to capture Mykolaiv, which sits near the Black Sea Coast between Russia-occupied Crimea and the main Ukrainian port of Odesa.” Read more at AP News
FILE - In this Oct. 8, 2019, photo, supporters of LGBTQ rights stage a protest on the street in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. A judge in Tennessee on Friday, July 15, 2022, has temporarily barred two federal agencies from enforcing directives issued by President Joe Biden's administration that extended protections for LGBTQ people in schools and workplaces. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
“A judge in Tennessee has temporarily barred two federal agencies from enforcing directives issued by President Joe Biden’s administration that extended protections for LGBTQ people in schools and workplaces.
U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley Jr. in an order on Friday ruled for the 20 state attorneys general who sued last August claiming the Biden administration directives infringe on states’ right to enact laws that, for example, prevent students from participating in sports based on their gender identity or requiring schools and businesses to provide bathrooms and showers to accommodate transgender people.
Atchley, appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020, agreed with the attorneys generals’ argument and issued a temporary injunction that prevents the agencies from applying that guidance on LGBTQ discrimination until the matter can be resolved by courts.” Read more at AP News
“INDIANAPOLIS – An attorney for Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the doctor who provided an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio, sent a cease-and-desist letter Friday to Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, citing comments he made about Bernard on Fox News Channel Wednesday night.
‘Your false and defamatory statements to Fox News on July 13, 2022, cast Dr. Bernard in a false light and allege misconduct in her profession,’ Kathleen DeLaney, the attorney representing Bernard, wrote in the letter to Rokita.
A spokesperson for Rokita's office wrote in an email that the letter will be reviewed when it arrives but ‘no false or misleading statements have been made.’
Bernard is an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist who provided care to a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio. The story garnered international attention after IndyStar, part of the USA TODAY Network, wrote about the child.
Rokita made an appearance on Fox News Channel where he said his office was looking into whether Bernard met reporting requirements.
‘We're gathering the evidence as we speak, and we're going to fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure,’ Rokita said on the ‘Jesse Watters Primetime’ show. ‘If she failed to report it in Indiana, it's a crime for — to not report, to intentionally not report.’
The attorney general also claimed that Bernard has ‘a history of failing to report,’ as a part of his roughly 2-minute appearance. Rokita did not offer any evidence to support his claims.
He released a statement Thursday reiterating his speculation about whether reporting requirements had been followed, and said he was ‘investigating this situation.’ He also said there may be further action if a HIPAA violation occurred, meaning patient information was improperly shared. He did not offer evidence of that claim.
The attorney's letter states that Bernard complied with her reporting duties in the case. Through a public records request and subsequent documents, IndyStar found Bernard filed a form with the Indiana Department of Health and the Department of Child Services disclosing the child's abortion and abuse. That form was released by the state to IndyStar late Thursday.
‘We are especially concerned that, given the controversial political context of the statements, such inflammatory accusations have the potential to incite harassment or violence from the public which could prevent Dr. Bernard, an Indiana licensed physician, from providing care to her patients [sic] safely,’ DeLaney wrote.
IU Health released a statement Friday stating Bernard, who is a physician there, did not violate any privacy laws under HIPAA.
‘IU Health conducted an investigation with the full cooperation of Dr. Bernard and other IU Health team members. IU Health’s investigation found Dr. Bernard in compliance with privacy laws,’ according to the statement.
Prosecutors in Ohio have charged Gerson Fuentes, 27, with rape after he allegedly told police he raped the 10-year-old girl on two occasions. He was arrested Tuesday.
Columbus police said they were made aware of the girl's pregnancy June 22 after her mother reported it to Franklin County Children Services. She received the abortion in Indianapolis June 30.” Read more at USA Today
“A U.S. district judge denied former President Trump’s lawyer John Eastman’s motion to implement a temporary restraining order preventing the Department of Justice (DOJ) from accessing his phone.
In an opinion issued Friday, U.S. District Judge Robert C. Brack said that Eastman failed to show ‘a clear and unequivocal right to relief from an immediate, irreparable harm.’
‘Because there is no evidence that the Government has searched the phone … and because the warrant specifies that no search of the phone will occur until further order of the court, Eastman fails to show a likelihood of success,’ Brack continued.
Federal agents previously served Eastman a warrant to seize his phone and any other electronic devices as well as the information on such devices as he exited a restaurant.
On July 8, Eastman filed a request in the U.S. District Court of New Mexico to implement a temporary restraining order on actions to obtain his phone.
Eastman’s argument to the court stated that the FBI’s search warrant violated his First, Fourth and Fifth amendment rights due to being nonspecific and lacking probable cause.
The phone will be searched as part of a Department of Justice investigation into the lawyer’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and allegations that he was part of efforts to muddle transition of power from Trump to President Biden.
Eastman featured prominently in the third public hearing of the Jan. 6 committee investigation of the attack on the Capitol for allegedly pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results on the day of the riots.” Read more at The Hill
“Former Trump adviser and right wing podcaster Stephen K. Bannon promised the contempt of Congress charges against him would become a ‘misdemeanor from hell’ for the Biden administration, but after judicial rulings against his proposed defense, legal experts said his trial set to start Monday could be more of a quick trip through court.
At a recent hearing that left Bannon’s legal strategy in tatters, his lawyer David Schoen asked U.S. District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols, ‘what’s the point of going to trial if there are no defenses?’ The judge replied simply: ‘Agreed.’
The exchange was a remarkable comedown for the combative, bombastic Bannon team that live-streamed his declaration, ‘we’re taking down the Biden regime’ as he surrendered to the FBI in late 2021 on charges he had illegally flouted the House committee probing Jan. 6….
Bannon’s case, while high profile and politically significant, is a legal rarity. Over the last four decades — even when Congress referred such an instance of alleged contempt of Congress to the Justice Department for prosecution — they were rarely charged, and those that did lead to convictions or pleas came undone. But this trial comes amid highly-watched televised hearings of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — the panel that Bannon refused to speak to, or provide documents to, leading to his criminal charges.
Bannon is one of two former Trump aides to face criminal charges in connection with rebuffing the committee, along with former White House trade adviser Peter K. Navarro. On the same day Navarro was indicted in June, the Justice Department disclosed that it would not charge former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications chief Daniel Scavino Jr.
Unlike Bannon and Navarro, Meadows and Scavino engaged in months of talks with the committee over the terms and limits of potential testimony and executive privilege claims. Meadows also turned over thousands of text messages and communications with members of Congress and other White House aides before ending negotiations and withdrawing his appearance for a deposition. And unlike the other three men, Bannon left the Trump White House in 2017 and was a private citizen at the time of the 2020 election and subsequent presidential transition.
Bannon’s lawyers have argued that former president Donald Trump invoked executive privilege to shield the conversations from congressional inquiry — but the judge in his case noted that it’s not at all clear Trump did invoke the privilege. Even if he did, it’s not clear that a former, rather than current president can assert the privilege, or how such a claim could apply to Bannon, who had been out of government for years by the time period in question….
In issuing a subpoena to Bannon, the committee said it wanted to question him about activities at the Willard Hotel the night before the riot, when Trump supporters sought to persuade Republican lawmakers to overturn the 2020 election results. The committee said Bannon spoke with Trump by telephone that morning and evening, the last time after Bannon predicted ‘hell is going to break loose’ Jan. 6, and the committee’s report recommending that he be found in contempt said the comments indicated he ‘had some foreknowledge about extreme events that would occur the next day.’
But charging Bannon and taking him to trial significantly decreases the odds he ever provides evidence to the committee….
If convicted, Bannon’s potential punishment is unclear. The two misdemeanor contempt charges are each punishable by at least 30 days and up to one year in prison. Court records show that the three similar contempt of Congress cases that have been charged in D.C. federal court since 1990 all resulted in guilty pleas, but none of those individuals received jail time under plea deals with prosecutors. Two were pardoned by a president of their party and the third was allowed to withdraw his plea and admit to a lesser charge in a sentencing mix-up by prosecutors.
Bannon, however, is a different sort of defendant than those past government officials.
A former media executive who boasted of creating a ‘platform for the alt-right,’ Bannon has championed a ‘populist-nationalist’ movement since chairing Trump’s campaign for part of 2016. While he has denied responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot by Trump supporters, he considered himself an ideological architect of the efforts to overturn the election and the Jan. 6 Trump rally.” Read more at Washington Post
“Around 5 in the afternoon on Christmas Day in 2020, as many Americans were celebrating with family, President Donald J. Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., on the phone with a little-known conservative lawyer who was encouraging his attempts to overturn the election, according to a memo the lawyer later wrote documenting the call.
The lawyer, William J. Olson, was promoting several extreme ideas to the president. Mr. Olson later conceded that part of his plan could be regarded as tantamount to declaring ‘martial law’ and that another aspect could invite comparisons with Watergate. The plan included tampering with the Justice Department and firing the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, according to the Dec. 28 memo by Mr. Olson, titled ‘Preserving Constitutional Order.’
‘Our little band of lawyers is working on a memorandum that explains exactly what you can do,’ Mr. Olson wrote in his memo, obtained by The New York Times, which he marked ‘privileged and confidential’ and sent to the president. ‘The media will call this martial law,’ he wrote, adding that ‘that is ‘fake news.’
The document highlights the previously unreported role of Mr. Olson in advising Mr. Trump as the president was increasingly turning to extreme, far-right figures outside the White House to pursue options that many of his official advisers had told him were impossible or unlawful, in an effort to cling to power.
The involvement of a person like Mr. Olson, who now represents the conspiracy theorist and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, underscores how the system that would normally insulate a president from rogue actors operating outside of official channels had broken down within weeks after the 2020 election.” Read more at New York Times
“Starting in first grade, students across Russia will soon sit through weekly classes featuring war movies and virtual tours through Crimea. They will be given a steady dose of lectures on topics like ‘the geopolitical situation’ and ‘traditional values.’ In addition to a regular flag-raising ceremony, they will be introduced to lessons celebrating Russia’s ‘rebirth’ under President Vladimir V. Putin.
And, according to legislation signed into law by Mr. Putin on Thursday, all Russian children will be encouraged to join a new patriotic youth movement in the likeness of the Soviet Union’s red-cravatted ‘Pioneers’ — presided over by the president himself.
Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian government’s attempts at imparting a state ideology to schoolchildren have proven unsuccessful, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, Sergei Novikov, recently told thousands of Russian schoolteachers in an online workshop. But now, amid the war in Ukraine, Mr. Putin has made it clear that this needed to change, he said.
‘We need to know how to infect them with our ideology,’ Mr. Novikov said. ‘Our ideological work is aimed at changing consciousness.’
As the war in Ukraine approaches the five-month mark, the vast ambitions of his plans for the home front are coming into focus: a wholesale reprogramming of Russian society to end 30 years of openness to the West.
The Kremlin has already jailed or forced into exile just about all activists speaking out against the war; it has criminalized what remained of Russia’s independent journalism; it has cracked down on academics, bloggers and even a hockey player with suspect loyalties.
But nowhere are these ambitions clearer than in the Kremlin’s race to overhaul how children are taught at Russia’s 40,000 public schools.
The nationwide education initiatives, which start in September, are part of the Russian government’s scramble to indoctrinate children with Mr. Putin’s militarized and anti-Western version of patriotism, illustrating the reach of his campaign to use the war to further mobilize Russian society and eliminate any potential dissent.
While some experts are skeptical that the Kremlin’s grand plans will quickly bear fruit, even ahead of the new school year the potency of its propaganda in changing the minds of impressionable youngsters was already becoming apparent.” Read more at New York Times
“ST. ANDREWS, Scotland (AP) — Cheers from every corner of the Old Course that belonged to Tiger Woods for two days at St. Andrews switched over to Rory McIlroy in the British Open, and he certainly did his part to give them what came to see Saturday.
McIlroy holed a bunker shot for eagle on the 10th hole that he described as part skill and part luck, but it was pure magic. He showed discipline to know when to aim away from the flag, and to take bogey when he was stuck between a wall and a road behind the 17th green.
McIlroy now shares the stage at the home of golf with Viktor Hovland, the emerging Norwegian star who was every bit as good in making birdies and avoiding the blunders that cost so many other potential contenders.
Both made birdie on the final hole for a 6-under 66. No one else was closer than four shots. They have the same score at 16-under 200, though the support is one-sided.” Read more at AP News
“PHILADELPHIA (AP) — I think it’s gonna be a long, long time until we see another songwriter and performer like Elton John.
Wrapping up a 50-plus year career with a farewell tour, the British pianist and vocalist has created some of the most memorable and enduring music in the history of pop-rock, songs burned into the collective DNA of humanity.
They may be quite simple, like the basic four-chord glory of ‘Crocodile Rock,’ or dazzlingly complex like the 11-minute magnum opus ‘Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding.’
But now that it’s almost done, I hope you don’t mind that I put down in words how wonderful it has been to have Elton John on our radios and in our ears since the late 1960s.
The artist born 75 years ago as Reginald Kenneth Dwight kicked off the final leg of his North American farewell tour Friday night at Citizens Bank Park, home of baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies. And yes, he felt the love that night.
‘America made me famous and I can’t thank this country enough,’ he told the audience. ‘Thank you for the loyalty, the love, the kindness you showed me.’
He has sold over 300 million records worldwide, has played over 4,000 shows in 80 countries, and recorded one of the best-selling singles of all-time, his 1997 reworking of “Candle In The Wind” to eulogize Princess Diana, which sold 33 million copies.” Read more at AP News
PHOTOGRAPH: JEENAH MOON/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
“PELOTON’S EXISTENTIAL CRISIS rolls on. This week, the beleaguered home workout company announced that it will stop producing its own stationary bicycles and treadmills.
Peloton has been spinning its wheels for months now. Demand for its spendy workout equipment (the Peloton Bike starts at $1,445) surged at the beginning of the pandemic, and an overzealous Peloton responded by ratcheting up production. Then last year, it recalled its Tread+ treadmills after a child died in an accident with one of the machines. Peloton sales then plummeted, due to a combination of bad press and lack of demand as the market became saturated and potential new customers started to leave their houses again. Peloton's stock crashed, it decided to temporarily suspend production of its bikes and treadmills, and company cofounder John Foley resigned as CEO and was replaced by former Spotify CFO Barry McCarthy.
The company tried to catch up and entice new users. It expanded its subscription service for streaming workouts. Despite its overstock problem, it even made new stuff, releasing a body-tracking webcam last April and announcing a rowing machine in May.
Now the company is backpedaling yet again. Peloton will still contract another manufacturer to build some of its equipment, it just won't do it in the company's own facilities. (Those are operated by Peloton’s subsidiary company, Tonic Fitness Technology.) Still, it's a big shakeup for a company that, until earlier this year, had planned to spend $400 million to build its own manufacturing plant in Ohio. Peloton is riding for its life, but there might not be much road left ahead.” Read more at Wired