The Full Belmonte, 8/29/2022
NASA fuels moon rocket for liftoff on 1st test flight
“CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA began fueling its new moon rocket early Monday for liftoff on a test flight to put a crew capsule into lunar orbit for the first time in 50 years.
Thunderstorms delayed the fueling operation by an hour. The threat of lightning diminished enough to allow the launch team to proceed with loading the rocket’s tanks. But it was uncertain how much the stalled work might shorten the two-hour launch window.
No one was inside the Orion capsule atop the 322-foot (98-meter) rocket at Kennedy Space Center. Instead, three test dummies were strapped in for the lunar-orbiting mission, expected to last six weeks.
It’s the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA, out-muscling the Saturn V that carried astronauts to the moon a half-century ago. Thousands of people jammed the coast to see the Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket soar.
Rain pelted the launch site as the launch team finally began loading more than 1 million gallons of super-cold fuel into the rocket. Forecasters remained optimistic the sky would clear by launch time later in the morning; the rocket is banned from flying through rain.” Read more at AP News
In the Mar-a-Lago search affidavit released Friday, ‘FPOTUS’ stands for former president of the U.S, and ‘NDI’ is national defense information. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images
“After the Mar-a-Lago search, Attorney General Merrick Garland faced online assassination threats, and he decried the rising ‘unfounded attacks on the professionalism of the FBI and Justice Department agents.’
On a separate front, the IRS last week launched a safety review because of misinformation about agency funding that riled the right.
Now, it's the National Archives — keeper of the Declaration of Independence, and romanticized in 2004 by the film ‘National Treasure.’
The agency ‘has become the target of a rash of threats and vitriol’ because of the records fight with former President Trump, rattling civil servants tasked with preserving the nation's records, the WashPost reports.
Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall said in a staff-wide email, obtained by The Post, that the National Archives and Records Administration ‘has received messages from the public accusing us of corruption and conspiring against the former President, or congratulating NARA for 'bringing him down.’
‘Neither is accurate or welcome.’” Read more at Axios
Russia Moves to Reinforce Its Stalled Assault on Ukraine
More modern equipment on its way to the front, but analysts don’t expect a major shift in the military balance
A Ukrainian unit launched rockets Saturday near a front line in the eastern Donetsk region.PHOTO: ANATOLII STEPANOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
“KYIV, Ukraine—Russia is moving to significantly bolster its forces in Ukraine as its campaign to secure territory in the country’s east and south stalls ahead of planned plebiscites on annexation by Russia.
A series of volunteer battalions formed in recent weeks across Russia is preparing to deploy to Ukraine, officials and military analysts say, including a major new ground-forces formation called the 3rd Army Corps intended to shore up a new offensive in eastern Ukraine and reinforce troops holding off a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south.
Footage posted online purporting to show the 3rd Army Corps training at a Russian military base in Mulino, some 250 miles east of Moscow, displays modern weaponry of a kind rarely deployed to Ukraine, analysts say. However, the U.S.-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War played down the formation’s chances of shifting the military balance in Ukraine, saying in a Saturday report that ‘better equipment does not necessarily make more effective forces when the personnel are not well-trained or disciplined.’” Read more at Wall Street Journal
Serbia’s Leader Cancels EuroPride. Organizers Say They Will Go Ahead Anyway.
The annual gay pride event was to take place in September in Belgrade. President Aleksandar Vucic said the timing was bad, citing ‘numerous problems’ currently affecting the country.
“President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia announced on Saturday that he would not permit EuroPride, an annual weeklong gay pride event, to take place next month in his country’s capital, Belgrade, shocking the event’s organizers, who denounced the decision and vowed to go ahead regardless.
Mr. Vucic, despite noting that he was ‘not happy’ about the decision, said that it was not the right time to host the event. He cited several reasons, including tensions with Kosovo, economic problems and concerns that anti-gay protesters could disrupt the festivities.
Organizers and civil rights groups said that any cancellation would violate their rights of freedom of assembly and free expression, which are laid out in the Serbian Constitution and protected by European human rights law.
‘This is a violation of minority rights,’ Mr. Vucic acknowledged, ‘but at this moment, the state is pressured by numerous problems.’
‘I am not happy about it, but we can’t manage,’ he added, in remarks reported by The Associated Press. Protesters, including far-right lawmakers and religious groups, have in recent weeks marched against the event, which is planned for Sept. 12-18.
‘From our perspective, nothing has changed. The event is going ahead as planned,’ said Steve Taylor, a board member of the European Pride Organizers Association, which licenses the festival.
And he added that Mr. Vucic’s stance could backfire. ‘The president’s statement this morning is probably the best marketing campaign we ever could have hoped for,’ Mr. Taylor noted.
EuroPride is a weeklong festival that has been held since 1992 in a different European city each year. The host is chosen through a vote by Pride organizers around Europe, and event planners said that this year’s iteration in Belgrade would be the first time it had been held in southeastern Europe. Past events have been held in Warsaw and in Riga, Latvia.
More than 15,000 people, many traveling from abroad, were expected to attend the Belgrade event, which was to include a program of talks, movies and exhibitions of work by artists from across the western Balkans and would culminate in a Pride march.” ” Read more at New York Times
The great drought and the great deluge, all at the same time
A person walks on the embankment of Poyang Lake, which exhibits low water levels because of a regional drought in Lushan, Jiangxi province, China, on Aug. 24. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)
“In the age of climate change, our past intrudes upon the present. Last week, receding water levels in a Serbian stretch of the Danube, Europe’s second-largest river, surfaced a flotilla of Nazi-era German warships that were still packed with ammunition and unexploded ordnance. They were exposed at a time when Europe is experiencing what appears to be the worst dry spell in half a millennium, with two-thirds of the continent under some form of drought warning.
Other ruins and wrecks are popping up as waterways shrink. A submerged 1st century A.D. Roman bridge possibly constructed under the orders of Emperor Nero emerged from the Tiber River last month; further to the north, out of the depths of Italy’s tourist-clogged Lake Como, emerged a 100,000-year-old skull of a deer and the ancient remains of lions, hyenas and rhinos.
Scorching high temperatures left the Iberian Peninsula drier than any time in the last 1,200 years. In Spain, parched riverbeds and shrinking reservoirs have exposed a Neolithic monument known as the Spanish Stonehenge, a Roman fortress, a medieval church, and a number of more recent ‘ghost towns’ that had been abandoned and flooded following 20th century dam projects.
In France, which is experiencing its worst drought on record, wine makers are harvesting their grapes earlier than ever. At a time where anxiety is already mounting over energy costs, surging temperatures and sparse rainfall have hit hydropower capacity in parts of Europe. They have also wreaked havoc on the continent’s agricultural output.
On this front, too, Europe’s rivers are turning up bleak omens — the receding waters in parts of central Europe have revealed old ‘hunger stones,’ markers placed along riverbeds that locals centuries prior left as guides to earlier droughts. One stone that emerged out of the Elbe read: ‘When this goes under, life will become more colorful again.’
Yet what’s being experienced now in Europe — and all over the world — isn’t simply a rerun of the past. The northern hemispheric summer has been defined by a relentless series of unwelcome climate-related superlatives. Heat waves set record temperatures across cities in the Middle East and Europe. China is in the grips of its worst drought on record, which has dried up parts of the Yangtze River and impacted swaths of the country’s industrial sector. Meanwhile, in the space of only five weeks, U.S. cities experienced five instances of 1,000-year rain events — that is, episodes of severe flooding that have just 0.1 percent probability of happening in any given year.
The scale and ferocity of what’s taking place is supercharged by climate change. ‘Studies have found that heat waves are increasing in intensity and duration in China, as well as delivering warmer temperatures at night, because of human-induced climate change,’ my colleagues reported. ‘The increase has been observed in urban and rural locations. Heat waves are also starting earlier and ending later.’
In China, droughts in some parts of the country have been met by a deluge in others. The western province of Qinghai experienced such heavy rains that some rivers changed course; landslides and floods killed more than a dozen people earlier this month.
In some cases, there is a direct link between drought and floods — soil actually absorbs water better when damp, while heavy rains slosh off parched landscapes into waterways. That explains why researchers in Central Texas are fearful of what may happen after a drought exposed 113-million-year-old dinosaur tracks in a dried-up riverbed.
‘Given the wild fluctuations in weather and precipitation, we can have these long dry periods exposing things and then catastrophic flooding,’ Vincent Santucci, senior paleontologist at the National Park Service, told my colleagues. ‘The high-energy nature of those floods can completely destroy a fossil site.’
In South Asia, searing heat earlier in the summer gave way to an erratic and intense monsoon season. That, in turn, has stoked major flooding and landslides across Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Pakistan has been ravaged in recent weeks, with heavy rains and rising rivers leading to the deaths of more than 1,000 people and the displacement of over 10 million. Pakistan declared a state of emergency over the weekend and requested international aid, with officials describing the devastation wrought by a summer of extreme weather as the worst in over a decade.
Pakistan is experiencing a ‘climate catastrophe,’ the nation’s climate change minister told NPR this weekend.
‘Extreme climate events have become a regular phenomenon in South Asia,’ wrote Hamid Mir for The Washington Post’s opinion pages last month. ‘We are facing weather-related problems in almost all parts of Pakistan. Flooding has become almost routine in some areas; others are plagued by drought. Glaciers are melting fast, resulting in reduced water flow in rivers. Farming is suffering as a result, and the decline in agricultural productivity is creating food insecurity. All this is accelerating migration from rural areas to cities.’
South Asia is at the sharp end of a planetary crisis. Unrelenting heat waves have led scientists to wonder whether areas in the region may soon become uninhabitable or too dangerous for human life. ‘Across India and around the world, summer has become a season of peril, when society’s poorest and most vulnerable members must live and work in conditions that push the limits of human endurance,’ my colleagues detailed in a grim but important piece that charted life for Indian day laborers with no choice but to work outside.
No part of the world is shielded from the reality of climate change. ‘The signature of a warming world is now perceptible every day in the conditions we regularly face,’ wrote my colleague Matthew Cappucci, when exploring the scientific causes of increased rainfall in the United States.
‘For many people, the concept of a changing climate might seem distant and removed — a two-millimeter rise in sea levels a year or a subtle uptick in global temperatures may appear inconsequential,’ he added. ‘But human influence is affecting the dynamics of weather systems, the periodicity of the jet stream and the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere.’
The experience of these weather extremes is not forcing major climate policy reforms. The global panic over energy has led to the short-term pursuit of more fossil-fuel extraction. China had to scramble for more coal after the summer heat and drought delivered a blow to its hydropower capacity.
‘After this crisis, the coal lobby will be saying, ‘This is why you need to have more coal mines and more coal-fired power plants,’’ Philip Andrews-Speed, a senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Energy Studies Institute, told my colleagues. ‘As in Europe, the key is keeping the lights on and keeping the heating and the air conditioning going. That is the short-term priority.’” Read more at Washington Post
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Turning Florida red
“Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who appears to be preparing to run for president in 2024, has achieved a national platform by leaning into cultural battles. He signed laws limiting what teachers can teach about race, sexual orientation and gender identity, and he recently suspended an elected prosecutor who said he would refuse to enforce the state’s anti-abortion laws.
DeSantis is up for re-election in November. I spoke to my colleague Patricia Mazzei, who as The Times’s Miami bureau chief has tracked his rise, about how DeSantis has changed life in Florida.
German: Where do you see DeSantis’s impact on Florida?
Patricia: He was elected by just 32,000 votes or so but has governed as if he had a mandate to reshape the state into a laboratory for right-wing policies.
Tuesday’s primary didn’t have big-name Republicans on the ballot, so DeSantis got involved in school board races. These are traditionally nonpartisan and sleepy. But he endorsed 30 candidates, and he campaigned for them. And he succeeded: So far, 20 of his endorsed candidates have won outright, and five are going to runoffs.
This is an example of trying to turn the state red — not just at the top level, but by starting at the bottom. That builds the bench of candidates who will back him as they go on to make their own political careers. It’s leaving a longer-lasting legacy of the policies and politics he espouses. School board decisions affect parents’ and their children’s lives on a daily basis by deciding what will be in school curriculums.
The focus on schools reminds me of the quote from the conservative Andrew Breitbart that ‘politics is downstream from culture’ — meaning that to win elections, partisans first need to shape culture. Changing what the next generation learns about seems like a clear attempt to change the culture, as does DeSantis signing an education bill that critics call the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law.
I went to one of the campaign events for these school boards last weekend in Miami-Dade County. There, the lieutenant governor — DeSantis’s running mate — said, ‘Our students should go to school to learn their ABC’s, not their L.G.B.T.’s.’
But Florida is not entirely a red state. For example, Miami is often called a gay mecca. How do you reconcile that with DeSantis signing the education law?
Generally speaking, the people of Florida are less conservative than their leaders. We’ve seen that in statewide ballot initiatives: Voters went against gerrymandering, passed medical marijuana legalization and a minimum wage hike, and restored ex-felons’ voting rights.
It’s just a contradiction in the politics. People who live in strictly red or strictly blue areas of the country may not know this. But where I am, if you go into a family gathering, party, anything, you never assume that everybody thinks the way you do. Even in cities like Miami or Orlando, where people are more liberal, your co-worker, neighbor, cousin and parents may have diametrically opposed political views.
How has DeSantis succeeded in this environment? The typical formula has been to act as a moderate, but DeSantis has openly embraced the hard right.
He has long been a Trump supporter and was a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus when he was in Congress. He got elected governor in 2018 by winning Trump’s endorsement and running a tongue-in-cheek ad with a jaunty tune and DeSantis exhorting his oldest child to ‘build the wall’ with toy blocks.
But he governed his first year by trying to lie low.
Then came the pandemic. He tried to keep the state open, and he seemed to take criticisms of his looser pandemic policies personally. He started to score political points by portraying himself as a foe of the ‘corporate media’ that conveyed virus restrictions endorsed by public health experts.
You can talk to independents, even Democrats, who may not necessarily vote for him, but they remember the lasting impact DeSantis’s policies had on their children, that they could go to school. They are happy they were able to keep their businesses open.
Is there a political risk for DeSantis’s re-election campaign in overreaching?
He has so many advantages built in for him. He’s got a lot of money right now. He’s got Republicans down the ticket who are all going to campaign with him and for him. His party is much more organized in Florida, and it has a better operation to get their voters to the polls than the Democrats. It’s a governor election in a midterm year, during which Florida has reliably gone red for almost three decades.
So even if there’s a feeling of overreach, is that enough for him to lose? Well, Democrats see a narrow path to victory. But it’s unlikely — it’s an uphill climb.
More on Patricia Mazzei: She grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and decided to become a reporter after working as a student journalist at the University of Miami, where a professor declared her to be a ‘muckraker.’ She began her career in 2007 and began writing for The Times in 2017.
For more
DeSantis is trying to channel the same culture war issues as Donald Trump, but with more discipline, The New Yorker explained in a profile.
Florida teachers, worried about violating new state laws, are increasingly nervous about what they can say to their students in schools.
DeSantis’s Democratic opponent for governor, Representative Charlie Crist, picked a teachers union leader as his running mate.
DeSantis suspended four school board members after a Parkland school shooting report accused them of incompetence. One ousted member called the move ‘political retribution.’” Read more at New York Times
Naomi Judd autopsy confirms singer died by suicide, family asks for 'respectful privacy'
“An autopsy of Naomi Judd confirmed Friday that the country music star died by suicide, as Judd's family previously reported.
The Grammy-winning singer, one half of mother-daughter duo The Judds, died April 30 at 76. Judd's daughters Wynonna and Ashley announced her death on social media that day.
‘Today we sisters experienced a tragedy. We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness,’ the sisters tweeted. ‘We are shattered. We are navigating profound grief and know that as we loved her, she was loved by her public.’
The Williamson County medical examiner in Tennessee determined Judd's manner of death and said Judd had a history of anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder and had left a ‘note with suicidal connotations’ near the scene, according to documents obtained by USA TODAY.
In a statement, Judd's family asked for prayers and thoughts for those who live with mental illness and their loved ones, and they provided information for contacting the 988 Suicide Crisis Lifeline.” Read more at USA Today
McIlroy storms from 6 back to win FedEx Cup and $18 million
By DOUG FERGUSONtoday
“ATLANTA (AP) — This year it became easy to overlook Rory McIlroy’s four majors, 30 wins on four continents and two years at No. 1 in the world. He has been viewed mostly as the strongest voice and staunchest defender of the PGA Tour in its battle against Saudi-funded LIV Golf.
So perhaps it was only fitting that a most tumultuous year for the PGA Tour culminated Sunday with McIlroy holding its biggest prize.
He had the final say with his clubs.
Six shots behind before the Tour Championship started, 10 shots back after two holes, McIlroy rallied from a six-shot deficit in the final round against the No. 1 player in the world and closed with a 4-under 66 to become the first three-time winner of the FedEx Cup.
‘It’s been a tumultuous time for the world of men’s professional golf in particular,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in the thick of things. I guess every chance I get, I’m trying to defend what I feel is the best place to play elite professional golf in the world.’” Read more at AP News
‘House of the Dragon’ renewed
Emma D’Arcy as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Matt Smith as Prince Daemon Targaryen in "House of the Dragon." Photo: Ollie Upton/HBO via AP
‘House of the Dragon,’ the ‘Game of Thrones’ prequel, has been renewed for a second season after its first episode was a hit.
‘Fire reigns,’ the show tweeted yesterday. ‘#HouseoftheDragon has been renewed for Season 2.’
The debut last Sunday drew 10 million U.S. viewers on TV and the HBO Max streaming service — the largest series premiere audience in HBO history.
Why it matters: The prequel shows the power of extending popular franchises for superfans. It also proves HBO can still market hits under its new owners, Warner Bros. Discovery, Axios' Herb Scribner and Sara Fischer report.
Backstory: Based on George R.R. Martin’s ‘Fire & Blood,’ the spinoff is set 200 years before the events that played out in ‘Game of Thrones,’ and focuses on how the House of Targaryen falls into civil war. (Reuters)” Read more at Axios