India suspends cricket league as players test covid positive
Indias cricketing regulator suspended the Indian Premier League after multiple players contracted Covid-19, bringing a temporary halt to a tournament that has divided the nation on whether it was appropriate to play sport as thousands of citizens die each day.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India, in an emergency meeting, decided to defer the Indian Premier League 2021 season, according to an emailed statement. The BCCI will help arrange for the “secure and safe passage” of all the participants in IPL, according to the statement.
The Indian Premier League, a franchise-based tournament featuring players from around the world had been functioning in a so-called bio-bubble, which kept away crowds and was meant to protect players from infection.
However, the tournament has attracted critics who called it insensitive to conduct the tournament amid a dire health situation in the country. Several international players decided to return to their home countries earlier in the tournament, while some Indian players declined to participate in the current season to focus on supporting relatives amid a virulent second wave.
The suspension of the tournament also casts doubt on when and how players from Australia will be able to return home, after the country announced over the weekend that nation’s citizens in India who try to return home would be liable for five years in prison and fines of about $50,000. There are 14 Australian players currently in India while others are also part of the support staff or commentary teams for the tournament.
Shares of Sun TV Ltd., owner of the Hyderabad franchise of the Indian Premier League declined as much as 3.4% after news of the tournament suspension. Other companies that own teams including Reliance Industries Ltd., India Cements Ltd., and United Spirits Ltd. also fell briefly, but most pared losses.
Published : May 05, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · P R Sanjai, Ronojoy Mazumdar
Biden sets new vaccine goals as White House grapples with its message
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden declared a new goal Tuesday that 70% of adults will have at least one coronavirus vaccine shot by the Fourth of July as the White House grappled with how to send Americans a complex message: A normal life is within reach if you get vaccinated – but the crisis is far from over, so dont fully relax your guard.
Biden has been accused of sending mixed messages recently by continuing to wear a mask outside despite official guidance that he does not need to, since he is fully vaccinated. The White House is reaching out to scientists and public health experts to understand how the science is evolving as more people get vaccinated and which restrictions they can and cannot relax, according to people familiar with or engaged in the conversations.
“The challenge for the president, and the federal government in general, is you’re having to set standards for the entire country and role-model for the entire country, and what might be appropriate in one place is not what’s appropriate everywhere,” said Celine Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York’s Bellevue Hospital and a member of Biden’s coronavirus transition task force. “The problem is we don’t know necessarily who around us is fully vaccinated.”
Beyond aiming for 70% of adults to have at least one vaccine shot by Independence Day, Biden said Tuesday, he wants 60% to be fully vaccinated by the same time, part of an effort to create a nascent sense of normalcy by the holiday.
“The light at the end of the tunnel is actually growing brighter and brighter,” Biden said. “We need you to bring it home. Get vaccinated.”
The White House also told states Tuesday that coronavirus vaccine doses they choose not to order will become available to other states – the most significant shift in domestic vaccine distribution since Biden took office and part of his effort to account for flagging demand in parts of the country.
To help accomplish that, Biden announced a change in strategy to focus more sharply on hesitant and rural Americans – directing pharmacies to offer walk-in appointments, allocating funding for pop-up clinics and sending more doses to rural health clinics, among other moves.
To meet the new benchmarks, the country will need to dispense 100 million shots over the next 60 days, beyond the more than 200 million that have been administered so far. But this next phase will require reaching Americans who are far from traditional health-care facilities or are skeptical that getting vaccinated will do them any good.
Still, Biden’s goals are well within reach given the current pace of vaccinations. The president has developed a pattern of announcing goals that may appear ambitious at first but end up being achieved with relative ease, such as his early pledge, made with much fanfare, to administer 100 million shots in his first 100 days – a goal he more than doubled.
About 150 million Americans have received at least one dose to this point, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post.
Biden said he will focus on three areas in the coming weeks: vaccinating adolescents between 12 and 15, if the Food and Drug Administration determines the vaccines are safe for them; making it more convenient for everyone to get vaccinated, especially those in rural and hard-to-reach locations; and persuading individuals who are hesitant to get vaccinated.
“We know there are millions of Americans who need a little bit of encouragement to get the shot,” Biden said. That persuasion effort, he added, will in some ways be easier than the massive logistical effort it took to produce enough vaccines in the first place, but “in another sense it’s harder, because it’s beyond my personal control.”
Health officials are confident that communities that can achieve a 70% vaccination rate will see sharp declines in individual cases, hospitalizations and deaths, a senior administration official said on a call with reporters Tuesday.
Still, over the past few weeks, some health experts have criticized Biden and the White House, arguing they need to better demonstrate the perks of getting vaccinated, a key step in overcoming hesitancy. After a surge of vaccinations over the past few months, supply has started to outstrip demand as hesitancy has become the Biden administration’s most significant hurdle.
About 40% of adult Americans are fully vaccinated, but polls suggest that a significant portion of the population does not plan to get inoculated. In some cases, they believe the vaccines were developed too quickly and may be unsafe; in other cases, they are young adults who do not feel vulnerable.
Biden spoke directly to the latter group Tuesday, warning that even though the virus is especially dangerous to older people, that does not mean younger people are automatically safe.
“We’re still losing hundreds of Americans under 65 years of age every week, and many more are getting seriously ill from long stretches at a time,” the president said. “Look, even if your chance of getting seriously ill is low, why take the risk when you have a safe, free and convenient way to prevent it?”
For all the progress in beating back the pandemic, cases remain stubbornly high, at about 50,000 new confirmed infections each day – a number several experts said is probably an undercount given lower rates of testing – and about 700 deaths per day.
Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, suggested Biden is trying to send a message to multiple audiences – those who have been vaccinated, those who are considering it and those who are reluctant.
“You’ve got this balancing act,” said Emanuel, who was on Biden’s coronavirus transition task force. “On the one hand, ‘If he can’t stop wearing a mask, then I might not be able to stop wearing a mask, and what’s the advantage?’ There is a strain of that. The other thing that probably is important is . . . we only have 44 percent of the population vaccinated, so that is a problem.”
The administration has begun taking steps to loosen restrictions for those who are vaccinated, including new guidance last week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that vaccinated Americans do not have to wear a mask outside, unless they are in a crowded venue such as a sports arena or at a concert.
But some experts note that there continues to be a patchwork recovery across the country. Several states are still experiencing increases in caseloads, and various pockets of the country have notably low vaccination rates.
Much of the appropriate public health behavior now depends on a person’s specific circumstances, experts said. A group of people who are all fully vaccinated can return to their pre-pandemic behavior together, while a vaccinated person in a region of the country with high rates of transmission and many unvaccinated people still needs to take precautions such as wearing a mask.
The task for the administration over the next several weeks, as it works to hit its Fourth of July goal, will be persuading reluctant Americans to get vaccinated while not reopening the country too quickly and risking another surge in cases, experts said.
“We’re in an area where it’s not going to be guided by precise science. It’s going to be guided by science, common sense and politics,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and an adviser to Biden’s coronavirus task force. “We’re going to see flare-ups of cases handled on a state-by-state basis. . . . I don’t think we’re done at all yet.”
Biden also announced Tuesday that millions of dollars from his coronavirus relief package will be made available to support the new vaccination strategies. Nearly $250 million will be allocated to hire workers who will be charged with increasing vaccine confidence and assisting with vaccination appointments in hard-to-reach communities.
The president is also making available $130 million to improve vaccine education and information, particularly targeting health disparities in underserved communities. An additional $250 million will be allocated to assist state outreach efforts, and more than $100 million will be sent to approximately 4,600 rural health clinics.
But experts say the United States cannot fully return to normal until vaccine is widely available globally, because variants of the virus will continue to circulate and can be imported into the Unites States unless more people are inoculated. Numerous outside groups and liberal lawmakers have pushed the Biden administration to ramp up its commitment to help other countries obtain vaccine doses.
Biden nodded to the issue at the end of his comments Tuesday, noting that his administration has committed 60 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to other countries, calling it a “significant humanitarian commitment.”
The AstraZeneca vaccine is not currently being used in the United States and faces an FDA safety review. But if the United States defeats the virus, Biden said, it will export the versions of vaccine it is currently using internally.
“As long as there’s a problem anywhere in the world – even if we solve it here – we’re going to move as quickly as we can to get as many doses of Moderna and Pfizer as possibly can be produced and export those around the world,” Biden said.
Published : May 05, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Tyler Pager, Yasmeen Abutaleb
Bill and Melinda Gates, who run one of the worlds largest philanthropies, plan to divorce after 27 years
SEATTLE – Bill and Melinda Gates, who run one of the worlds largest philanthropies, are divorcing after 27 years of marriage. They both announced the divorce on Twitter in posts at the same time.
“After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage,” they wrote. Bill Gates, the co-founder of the software giant Microsoft, has an estimated net worth of $130.5 billion, ranking him fourth on Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest people.
They added that together they would continue to run the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose mission is to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives.
“We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives,” according to the statements.
According to Melinda Gates’s divorce filing, obtained by the gossip website TMZ, the couple signed a separation contract. She is not requesting spousal support. Her filing called the marriage “irretrievably broken.” Bill Gates filed a joinder, meaning he supports the dissolution of the marriage.
The Gateses met at Microsoft, where Melinda worked developing multimedia products for the company. They married in 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Melinda left Microsoft in 1996. The couple have three children.
The couple have spent much of the past two decades focused on their foundation. Bill Gates stepped down as chief software architect at Microsoft and gave up his day-to-day duties in 2008 to work full time at the foundation. He stepped down as Microsoft’s chairman in 2014.
Their philanthropy issued nearly $55 billion in total grant payments through the end of 2019, focusing on addressing the inequities in global health and the U.S. education systems.
The end of their marriage comes a little more than two years after another Seattle billionaire, Jeff Bezos, announced that he and his wife at the time, MacKenzie, were divorcing. Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, founded the e-commerce giant Amazon and owns The Washington Post. Their divorce settlement, a year later, set a record, giving MacKenzie an Amazon stake worth approximately $36 billion at the time.
While the Gates Foundation has long sought to address global inequity, it focused increasingly on how to end the coronavirus pandemic, whose impact is likely to be more profound on the developing world. In the past year, the foundation has committed $1.75 billion as part of its global covid response, funding the development of vaccines, tests, and drugs, supporting efforts to testing and trace those infected, and paying to prepare health systems for rising cases in the developing world.
As the virus raged, Bill Gates, 65, emerged as a leading advocate for science-based approaches to end the pandemic. He studied infectious diseases as part of his philanthropic work and had previously warned about the potential for a pathogen-spread pandemic, notably in a prescient TED Talk in 2015. He also became a target for conspiracy theorists who claim he engineered the pandemic and is mining it for profit and leveraging it for global surveillance and population control.
Melinda Gates, 56, began to emerge from her husband’s shadow as she took a larger role at their philanthropy two decades ago. Along with her father-in-law, Bill Gates Sr., she oversaw the foundation while her husband continued his full-time work at Microsoft. In that time, she traveled the globe to see where the need for the philanthropy was greatest and to set the agenda. She also became a more prominent public figure, speaking about malaria at the White House in 2006 and before the U.N. General Assembly in 2010 about reducing poverty and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS.
While the Gateses often appeared together publicly, they rarely talked about their relationship. Melinda Gates wrote about one stressful moment in her 2019 book, “The Moment of Lift.” She recalled how Bill had written the foundation’s annual letter every year since 2007, something she felt in those early days was too much for her with young kids at home.
In 2012, Melinda brought up the idea of writing the letter Bill, something he opposed, she wrote, because he felt the process had been working just fine. But Melinda pressed her case because she felt her voice could also have impact. When they wrote their first letter together, she recalled how difficult it was.
“I thought we were going to kill each other,” Melinda Gates wrote. “I felt, ‘Well, this just might end the marriage right here.'”
They have written the letter jointly since 2014.
In addition to giving away much of their wealth, the Gateses also teamed up with billionaire investor Warren Buffett in 2010 to launch the Giving Pledge, a commitment by superwealthy people to donate at least 50% of their money to charity. It has more than 200 signatories.
The Gateses will continue to work together on foundation strategies and direction. In their tweets, the Gateses asked for “space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life.”
CIA officer used experience to write realistic spy thrillers
Jason Matthews, who parlayed his 33 years as a CIA officer into a second career as a best-selling spy novelist, writing scenes so gripping and vivid that some readers thought he was violating the agencys strict secrecy protocols, died April 28 at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 69.
The cause was corticobasal degeneration, a degenerative neurological disease, said his wife, Suzanne Matthews.
With the CIA, Matthews was a practitioner of “human intelligence,” or the one-to-one cultivation of sources who might provide information about hostile countries. During his nine overseas assignments, he often worked behind the lines of enemy countries in what the CIA called “internal operations.”
In outposts across Europe, Asia and the Caribbean, Matthews recruited agents and used the classic spy techniques of dead drops – leaving a message in a public place to be picked up later – and brush passes, when two people brush against each other in a crowded place and surreptitiously exchange information.
He knew how to walk or drive in circuitous patterns to lose anyone who might be tailing him and could detect tension or deception in the faces of people he was interviewing. He became so adept that the CIA made him an instructor and later the chief of internal operations.
Matthews, who spoke seven languages, worked abroad under the mantle of the State Department. His wife was also a CIA officer for more than three decades, making them among the agency’s few “tandem couples,” or married spies.
For the most part, however, their life of espionage contained little glamour and less action. Matthews said he spent most of his time in the office, doing research and filing reports. He called his work “clandestine journalism.”
His cables to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., became known for their graceful writing and precise scene-setting.
“Without bragging or hyperbole,” Matthews told Men’s Journal in 2015, “you had to write a very careful, descriptive account of who you saw, what you did and some of the atmospherics.”
After retiring in 2010 – his final post was at an obscure CIA station in Los Angeles – Matthews followed other intelligence officers, including John le Carré, Graham Greene and Charles McCarry, and began to weave his experiences into fiction.
His first novel, “Red Sparrow,” was published in 2013 and portrayed a Russian ballerina, Dominika Egorova, recruited by her country’s spy service. She was sent for special training to the “Sparrow School” – based on an actual Soviet-era training site – in which women (and some men) learned the arts of seduction, spying and killing. She falls in love with an American CIA officer, and action ensues, from Moscow to Rome to Washington and several bedrooms in between.
Literary scholar Art Taylor, in a review in The Washington Post, called “Red Sparrow” a “sublime and sophisticated debut . . . a first-rate novel as noteworthy for its superior style as for its gripping depiction of a secretive world.”
Matthews was praised for his plotting and characterizations, such as this sketch of a Russian spy official: “His eyes were dull and watery, his teeth corrugated and stained, and he slouched with the familiar casual authority honed on the razor strop of decades of Soviet officialdom. His tie was askew, his suit was a washed-out brown that recalled low tide at the beach.”
What most impressed aficionados of spy fiction, however, was the realism Matthews brought to the methods of spying itself, or tradecraft.
“Lord knows how he got the manuscript of ‘Red Sparrow’ past the redacting committee at Langley,” British spy novelist Charles Cumming wrote in the New York Times. He added: “I have rarely encountered a nonfiction title, much less a novel, so rich in what would once have been regarded as classified information.”
Matthews insisted that the “CIA approved every comma, every semicolon of my book.” The practices described in the books, his wife said in an interview, were no longer in use.
“Red Sparrow” received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best first novel by a U.S. author. It was adapted for a 2018 film starring Jennifer Lawrence, with Matthews serving as technical adviser.
He published two sequels with the same characters – including scenes featuring Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Palace of Treason,” which examined Iran’s nuclear program, appeared in 2015, followed three years later by “The Kremlin’s Candidate,” in which Putin seeks to install a Russian puppet as CIA director.
In all of his books, Matthews concluded each chapter with a recipe suggested by the plot.
“I like to cook, and our family certainly enjoyed the various cuisines of the countries we lived in,” he said. “The recipes are elliptical and abbreviated. They’re more like clues than formal recipes.”
James Jason Matthews was born Sept. 17, 1951, in Hartford, Conn. He grew up speaking Greek at home. (His grandfather’s name was changed when he came to the United States.)
Matthews’s father developed a way of making flash-frozen pies and sold the technique to a food company. The family later operated a sailing ship on excursions from Mystic, Conn.
After graduating from the private Mount Hermon school (now Northfield Mount Hermon) in Massachusetts, Matthews studied Spanish and French at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va. He graduated in 1973.
He received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1975, then came to Washington, expecting “to be writing brochures for the Forest Service.” He had several job interviews, including one in a “nondescript building in Rosslyn, Virginia,” he told Men’s Journal in 2015. “Gray little office. Gray little man.”
It turned out to be the CIA, which Matthews joined in late 1976.
He met his wife, the former Suzanne Moran, who was already in the CIA, on an overseas assignment. They married in 1983.
In addition to his wife, survivors include two daughters, Sophia Baumann of Manhattan Beach, Calif., and Alexandra Matthews of Brooklyn; a brother; and a granddaughter.
Matthews said he never shot anyone while in the CIA, but he had some close calls.
“Whenever we picked up the phone for 33 years, depending on where we were, we knew it was bugged, we knew it was monitored,” he told the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., in 2015. “And same thing with rooms. We would get up sometimes in our apartment and walk through the living room to get to the kitchen in the morning and there would be a stubbed out cigarette in the ashtray. The entry teams had come in at night and had left just a little sign that they’d been there.”
When it came time to retire, he was not sure what to do. He had long been an admirer of the novels of le Carré and McCarry, and one day he sat down at his daughter’s computer and began to write.
“Being in the agency is a very experiential career, like being a policeman or a fireman or a jet pilot,” Matthews told the New York Times in 2015, “and when it stops, it really stops. There are retiree groups that get together, mostly in Washington, and sit around and swap war stories, but I was living in California, and it was either write something or go fishing.”
EPA sends Virgin Islands oil refinery a violation notice
WASHINGTON – A giant oil and gas refinery was served with a “notice of violation” by the Environmental Protection Agency after two major incidents that released noxious fumes and a chemical-filled vapor cloud over nearby neighborhoods in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The EPA said Monday that Limetree Bay Refining was served with the notice because the company did not operate five monitoring stations to gauge the air quality around its plant, a major source of harmful greenhouse gas emissions. The company also did not operate a meteorological tower.
“A major source of air pollution, such as Limetree Bay, is subject to controls under its air permits,” the agency said in a statement.
“Limetree Bay may be liable for civil penalties and required to take actions to correct the violations,” the statement said. The company has 30 days to request a video conference to discuss or contest the notice of violation.
In a statement Monday, the company contested EPA’s allegations.
“We strongly disagree with the claim that we are in violation of any ambient air monitoring requirement,” it said. “The former refinery operator was required to perform area monitoring, but that requirement was linked exclusively to their burning of sulfur-containing residual fuel oil, which Limetree Bay does not do.”
The plant’s previous owner, Hovensa, stopped operating five sulfur dioxide monitoring stations when it shut down in 2012 in the wake of financial problems and a multimillion-dollar settlement with the EPA over environmental violations. At the time, according to the notice, Hovensa pledged to reactivate the monitors if it restarted.
A Limetree employee informed the EPA on Feb. 16 – more than two weeks after the plant started running again – that it was not operating the air monitors, the notice added.
Short-term exposures to high levels of sulfur dioxide can damage the human respiratory system. People with asthma, especially children, are vulnerable.
“EPA issued this notice of violation to protect the people who live near and work at this refinery, and we have also deployed a team of experts to St. Croix and are working to assess Limetree Bay’s compliance with environmental laws,” said Walter Mugdan, the acting chief of EPA Region 2, which oversees the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In conjunction with the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources and the U.S. Virgin Department of Health, the EPA is investigating the extent of the release of gas, its composition, duration and causes.
The EPA also ordered inspections of the facility “over the course of the coming months” to focus on compliance with various environmental statutes.
“Limetree Bay is in a community predominantly made up of people of color and low-income populations who are already disproportionately affected by environmental burdens,” the statement said. “These disproportionate burdens present environmental justice concerns, which are a priority for EPA.”
Within days after reopening this year, a pressure-release valve sent on Feb. 4 a fine mist of oil and water over hundreds of homes that neighbor the facility. The mist rained oil onto rooftops, home gardens, car hoods and cisterns that residents rely on for drinking and washing.
Less than two months later, it emitted sulfuric gases that led some schools and a coronavirus vaccination site to close. One resident, Sonya Rivera, said “a foul, funky smell” descended over her home. Others said a stench of rotten eggs or sewage lingered for more than a week.
In its statement, the EPA said it relies on refineries to measure sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere so it can better control a population’s exposure to the gas.
Published : May 04, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Darryl Fears, Juliet Eilperin
FBI shoots, wounds person outside CIA headquarters
WASHINGTON – At least one FBI agent shot and wounded a person outside CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., early Monday evening, the bureau said, asserting that the person emerged from his vehicle with a weapon.
The FBI released few details about the encounter and the person who was shot. In a one-paragraph statement, the bureau said the person had been involved “security incident” outside CIA headquarters before he “emerged from his vehicle with a weapon.” He was taken to the hospital after the shooting for treatment of his wounds, the bureau said.
The bureau did not identify the suspect or detail the nature of his wounds, nor did it describe the weapon it said he was carrying. The shooting occurred at about 6 p.m., the bureau said.
Officials familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said that the person had pulled up to the security gate outside CIA headquarters hours earlier, and that the shooting occurred after lengthy negotiation with him. The FBI said it was reviewing the incident.
“The FBI takes all shooting incidents involving our agents or task force members seriously,” the bureau said. “The review process is thorough and objective, and is conducted as expeditiously as possible under the circumstances.”
The shooting was first reported by NBC News.
The CIA said in a statement before the shooting that its compound had remained secured, and that its protective officers were “the only Agency personnel directly involved” in the incident. The agency later referred questions to the FBI.
The security perimeter is tight around CIA headquarters, often waylaying drivers who erroneously find their way driving toward the campus.
In 1993, a man who said he was protesting U.S. policies toward Muslims, shot and killed five people outside the facility, then successfully fled to Pakistan and Afghanistan for 4 1/2 years.
The man, Mir Aimal Kasi, was eventually brought back to the United States, convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed by injection in 2002.
The bureau is famously tight-lipped about releasing information when its agents are involved in shootings, and because FBI agents do not generally do street patrols or respond to basic calls for service, they are involved in fewer such incidents than many local police departments.
But agents have been involved in high-profile and sometimes controversial shootings over the years. An FBI agent was charged criminally with lying about firing at a self-styled militia leader who was killed in 2016 in an encounter stemming from a standoff with law enforcement at a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon. The agent was ultimately acquitted.
A U.S. bankruptcy administrator asked a federal judge on Monday to dismiss the National Rifle Associations efforts to declare bankruptcy or appoint a trustee or examiner to oversee the gun rights organization – a setback for the group at the close of a federal court hearing to consider its petition.
The recommendation bolstered the arguments of New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, whose office has fought the NRA’s attempts to relocate from New York to Texas, and came after senior NRA executives acknowledged in court testimony that they received lavish perks.
Linda Lambert, a lawyer with the U.S. trustee’s office – which participates in bankruptcy cases to protect taxpayer interests and enforce bankruptcy laws – told the court that the evidence presented in the hearing showed that the nonprofit organization lacked proper oversight and that personal expenses were masked as business costs.
Adam Levitin, a bankruptcy expert at the Georgetown University Law Center, said the position of the trustee – a Justice Department official who typically remains neutral in a bankruptcy proceeding – does not bode well for the NRA.
“I don’t see how the NRA pulls off a win here,” he said, adding: “I think it’s pretty clear that the NRA loses. The real question is what the remedy will be.”
In court on Monday, NRA attorney Greg Garman expressed disappointment in Lambert’s comments, saying: “We have natural enemies. This Department of Justice may not see eye to eye with the National Rifle Association, but so be it, we have done the right thing.”
The NRA began considering bankruptcy last year after James filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the gun organization, alleging that senior NRA executives used the organization to benefit themselves and their friends.
The NRA responded by accusing the attorney general of pursuing a political agenda. The group announced in January that it was declaring bankruptcy and moving from New York, where it was founded in 1871, to Texas, where the state attorney general and other officials offered a warm welcome.
On Monday, Gerrit Pronske, an attorney for New York state, called the gun lobby’s attempted move “a circus sideshow” designed to avoid legal accountability, warning that approving its reorganization plan risked turning bankruptcy courts into “a haven for wrongdoers.”
Garman countered that the bankruptcy plan was vital to the survival and future success of what he termed “an irreplaceable” civil rights organization.
“There is no one who stands in the breach to defend the Second Amendment other than the NRA,” Garman said in his closing arguments Monday afternoon.
The NRA has said it is in sound financial condition but needs to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection because of the existential threat presented by James’s lawsuit.
Judge Harlin Hale is considering the complex case from his Dallas courtroom, hearing requests through videoconference from New York state and other parties to dismiss the NRA bankruptcy petition and, if that fails, to appoint a trustee to run the organization while it is in bankruptcy.
Hale has said he expects to issue a decision in about a week.
The hearing called renewed attention to the inner workings of the long-powerful gun lobby as President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have called for new gun regulations after a rash of deadly shootings across the country.
The NRA submitted a reorganization plan Monday that calls for payment of outstanding debts and leaving in place the current management – including longtime NRA chief Wayne LaPierre. The plan was approved Sunday in a closed-door meeting of the NRA board, according to a person familiar with the vote, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the session.
NRA lawyers argued throughout the bankruptcy hearing that LaPierre has been an effective manager and a fundraising powerhouse for the group, which says it has more than 5 million members. The lawyers said LaPierre has imposed more rigorous fiscal management in recent years and noted that the reorganization plan calls for a compliance officer, a new position in the organization.
Under questioning from New York state’s attorneys, LaPierre acknowledged that he did not disclose receiving lavish perks, including access to luxurious yachts and $300,000 in suits from an exclusive Beverly Hills boutique.
The hearing also pulled back the curtain on the internal actions of top NRA officials.
Several witnesses testified that LaPierre did not inform the full NRA board or its general counsel of plans to declare bankruptcy before announcing it publicly.
The NRA’s current president, Carolyn Meadows, acknowledged in testimony read into the record that she destroyed notes and records in advance of subpoena from the New York attorney general. Meadows testified that the records that were discarded included medical information.
Attorneys for the NRA acknowledged during the hearing that “cringeworthy activity” had occurred in the past – but they maintained that governance had improved under LaPierre, who they said showed a willingness to fire NRA executives who had misused their positions.
“It is very, very true that we don’t run from what happened before 2018, but, your honor, we are safe, we are secure, we are a well-run organization,” Garman said Monday. “We have responsible new parties in place to ensure that the transparency, the trustworthiness that the court and the parties require is here.”
SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico
The four Crew-1 astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico right on schedule early Sunday, returning to Earth after a six-month stay on the International Space Station.
The astronauts – three Americans and one from Japan – had undocked from the station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, flew through the atmosphere and then touched down in the Gulf of Mexico under four massive parachutes at about 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday.
The return mission appeared to go flawlessly from start to finish, with the autonomous SpaceX Dragon spacecraft firing its engines on schedule to slow it down enough to pull it out of orbit and into the atmosphere. Within an hour of splashdown, the capsule had been lifted aboard a recovery ship and the four astronauts had disembarked, to be flown first to Florida aboard a helicopter and then aboard a NASA plane to Houston.
“It really could not have been a more flawless journey home for Crew Dragon Resilience,” said NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier.
Once the crew splashed down, SpaceX mission control had some fun with the astronauts: “We welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you’ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.”
The Dragon capsule splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla.
It’s the first time a U.S. space capsule has landed under the cover of darkness since 1968. It was only the second time that a spacecraft has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.
Weather conditions were excellent, with little wind and glass-like seas. The descent was captured by cameras on board the recovery ship and aboard a nearby aircraft.
The astronauts aboard the capsule, Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of Japan, set the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a United States spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.
North Korea threatens response to Bidens hostile policy
TOKYO – As the Biden administration prepares to unveil a new strategy to deal with North Korea, the regime in Pyongyang is already pushing back, complaining on Sunday about continued U.S. hostility and threatening to respond.
In his April 28 address to a joint session of Congress, President Joe Biden called Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs a “serious threat to America’s security and world security” and promised to respond through “diplomacy and stern deterrence.”
North Korea responded angrily, saying the comments were “intolerable” and reflected the “usual story” from the United States.
“His statement clearly reflects his intent to keep enforcing the hostile policy toward the DPRK as it had been done by the U.S. for over half a century,” Kwon Jong Gun, head of the Foreign Ministry’s department of U.S. affairs said in a statement, referring to his country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday the administration had now completed a review of American policy toward North Korea, with the goal of the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, but a “clear understanding that the efforts of the past four administrations have not achieved this objective.”
U.S. officials familiar with the plan told The Washington Post the new policy would aim to strike a balance between former president Donald Trump’s grand-bargain, leader-to-leader diplomacy and former president Barack Obama’s arm’s-length approach to the crisis, and would propose “a calibrated, practical approach to diplomacy … with the goal of eliminating the threat to the United States.”
But the scale of the task facing the new administration was underlined by North Korea’s angry statement from Pyongyang on Sunday, in which Kwon said Biden’s comments already revealed that little would change from the regime’s point of view.
American diplomacy, Kwon said, was a “spurious signboard” for covering up its hostile acts toward North Korea, citing joint military exercises with South Korea, while Washington’s talk of deterrence was just a way to threaten the country with nuclear weapons.
That, he said, clearly showed that North Korea needs to build a “powerful deterrence” of its own to counter the United States.
“The U.S. will face worse and worse crisis beyond control in the near future if it is set to approach the DPRK-U.S. ties, still holding on the outdated policy from Cold War-minded perspective and viewpoint,” Kwon said.
“Now that the keynote of the U.S. new DPRK policy has become clear, we will be compelled to press for corresponding measures, and with time the U.S.will find itself in a very grave situation.”
While Kwon’s comments came in response to Biden’s speech to Congress rather than directly to the policy review, they underscore the breakdown in communication between the two countries since the collapse of a summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in 2019.
They also underline the huge challenge involved in trying to convince North Korea’s government to surrender a nuclear arsenal it clearly views as essential to the survival of the regime.
“North Korea wants the U.S. to lift sanctions and recognize it as a nuclear power. The Biden policy review is charting a different course,” said Leif-Eric Easley, associate professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.
“The U.S. goal of ‘complete denuclearization’ means not accepting North Korea as a nuclear weapons state and that sanctions relief will be conditioned on progress toward denuclearization.”
Kim Dong-yup, a former South Korean navy officer who teaches at Kyungnam University in Seoul, said North Korea has chosen to dig into its heels rather than holding out hope for any dramatic change of approach from Washington and Seoul, predicting the country might soon stage a weapons test or other military action.
Cars make a covid comeback, and that means burning more oil.
Its starting to feel as commonplace as handwashing: To protect against covid, people across the globe are skipping trains and buses. Instead, theyre part of the great car comeback thats sending vehicle sales soaring and fueling a demand surge for oil and metals.
Julie Murataj is a reluctant part of the shift. Two of her three kids are now getting dropped off at school instead of taking public transit. Then she drives her Volvo SUV to work, where she helps London schoolchildren cross the road by halting traffic with a bright, red and yellow stop sign that Brits call a “lollipop.” It’s a front-row seat to the world’s changing travel habits.
“There are many, many more cars,” Murataj said. “I’m seeing the roads busier now than they used to be pre-covid.”
After being stuck in their homes for so long, people are itching to get out again. It’s a boon to newly reopening economies, with consumers ready to start spending more at gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, hotels and attractions. Daimler, BMW and Toyota all started the year with sales at records, and things are so hot that used car prices in the U.S. are soaring to all-time highs.
The jump in vehicle sales is a strong sign that this is more than just a passing fad. Like the ubiquitous face mask, the car renaissance could be the latest example of how covid-19 makes a lasting impact on our lives. The change could usher in an era of heavier traffic jams and longer commutes. All the extra driving will send gasoline consumption soaring, but with that also comes a rise in pollution. The increase in gasoline use that the International Energy Agency projects for this year alone would add as much as 1.5 billion pounds of carbon emissions per day.
Traffic in Hong Kong is already twice as congested as in 2019. The streets of Tel Aviv, Moscow and Bucharest are all busier now than they were before the pandemic, according to TomTom NV. In the U.S., driving miles on highways are starting to top 2019 levels, and in the U.K., fuel sales are already at similar levels to last summer’s peak.
“People have a lot of cash in their pockets, and as lockdowns ease places will open up and allow those kind of leisure trips that may have been blocked,” said Richard Bronze, co-founder of London-based consultant Energy Aspects.
Gasoline is the big winner.
Profits from making the fuel are near seasonal five-year highs and are expected to stay strong as the Northern Hemisphere heads into summer driving season. U.S. refiner Valero Energy Corp. says gasoline sales are nearly at pre-pandemic levels, and the biggest bulls are predicting demand could hit a record. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects summer fuel prices to be the highest since 2018 this year.
The picture extends across the globe. BP said that oil demand in China is back above pre-pandemic levels. In Europe, gauges of road congestion compiled by Bloomberg and covering 15 nations just posted their strongest reading in 10 weeks as the region emerges from another wave of the virus.
In Japan, an explosion for drivers-license applications signals a lasting shift to car travel. Applications processed in Shizuoka Prefecture, south of Tokyo, rose 8.7% in 2020, according to prefectural police. It’s the first significant rise in the past decade. The bulk of applications came from people in their 20s, a marked change from pre-Covid times when younger generations were increasingly choosing to forgo car ownership.
“We’re pretty bullish on gasoline going forward,” Gary Simmons, chief commercial officer at Valero, said on a call last week.
Other commodity markets are also getting a boost. Copper, aluminum, palladium and platinum, used in car parts, are seeing strong demand. And consumption is robust for corn and sugar, used to make ethanol, as well as soybean oil, used in biodiesel. With more crops going into fuels, it’s likely to exacerbate the food inflation that’s already crimping consumer wallets.
Meanwhile, largely empty rail and metro carriages are ferrying just a handful of commuters in some of the western world’s largest cities. That’s putting a hole in the finances of mass transit systems like New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, German state railway Deutsche Bahn and Transport for London, which operates the U.K. capital’s tube network.
The move away from mass transit helps explain why the world’s carbon emissions are coming back fast after last year’s historic drop.
Earlier this month on London’s Marylebone Road, which runs alongside one of the U.K. capital’s royal parks, nitrogen-dioxide levels hit the highest since before the country’s first coronavirus lockdown, according to Imperial College London. The pollutant is mainly produced by diesel traffic, according to Simon Birkett, founder of not-for-profit Clean Air in London.
London crossing guard Murataj is an asthmatic and can easily tell you about the change.
“Through the first lockdown, when literally nobody was going anywhere, my breathing improved so much,” she said. “It was like being in the country or by the sea. I didn’t need to use my inhaler.”
But now?
“It’s probably worse now than it was” before covid, Murataj said.
China, further along than most of the world in its coronavirus rebound, offers some insight on how long the car mania will last.
When lockdowns first started to ease last year, commuters in Beijing abandoned the city’s crowded metro and began commuting by car. But with the world’s second-largest economy staving off subsequent Covid waves and traffic jams in Beijing almost as bad as 2019, metro passenger volumes hit a post-Covid high this month.
The big difference, though, is the world outside of China has struggled to keep cases in check, especially in light of new virus variants. Parts of Europe have been in and out of lockdowns to deal with infection spikes, the Philippines’ case count breached 1 million this week and Japan has declared a new state of emergency in Tokyo, Osaka and two other prefectures.
Of course, the biggest virus threat is now in India, which is battling the world’s largest surge in covid-19.
Vinkesh Gulati owns dealerships of both new and used cars in Faridabad, outside of Delhi. Demand is so strong that some of his customers are on a six-month waiting list, depending on what model they’re interested in. The congested city streets mean that in years past many buyers opted to travel by two-wheeled scooter or motorcycle. But now, the open-aired vehicles are being shunned.
Customers “often tell me that they are buying cars to move around to overcome the boredom and frustration of staying at home all the time,” said Gulati, who’s also president of the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations, which represents 90% of dealers in the country.
“They can leave on a weekend morning, drive for 200 miles and come back in the evening. It’s a good family outing.”
That desire for travel is expected to surge in the coming months, when the Northern Hemisphere basks in summer weather. Office workers have a store of vacation days to enjoy and kids will be out of school, so many families will be loading up their cars and hitting the road.
Some people are already making the move.
Saad Rahim is the Geneva-based chief economist at Trafigura Group, one of the world’s top independent commodity trading houses. He’s driving at least twice as much as he was before the pandemic began, mostly on family road trips around Switzerland.
Being in a car is like being in “your own bubble,” he said. “People are taking advantage of that.”
Published : May 02, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Alex Longley, Debjit Chakraborty, Andy Hoffman
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