Sen. Coons says one key thing separates Biden, Trump docs cases — but acknowledges political ‘fallout’
Isabella Murray – January 22, 2023
Sen. Chris Coons, a close ally of Joe Biden, on Sunday insisted there was a key difference between the current president and former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents while out of office.
“I have some confidence that, because he is fully cooperating, we will get to the bottom of this,” Coons told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz of Biden, in “sharp contrast” with Biden’s predecessor, whom the government suspects was less forthcoming in returning classified records.
On Saturday, Biden’s personal attorney said the Department of Justice had searched his Wilmington, Delaware, home the day before and found six items consisting of documents with classification markings, some from his time in the Senate in addition to his tenure as vice president.
The search was voluntary, according to federal authorities, and Biden’s attorney stressed his cooperation.
“There is one important document that distinguishes former President Trump from President Biden: That’s a warrant,” Coons, D-Del., said on “This Week.”
He was pressed by Raddatz over the latest developments and potential political consequences surrounding the discovery of multiple batches of documents with classified markings at an old office Biden used in Washington D.C. and at his Wilmington residence. This all unfolding just months after the Department of Justice separately recovered — via a court-authorized FBI search — a trove of classified materials from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Coons contended that the controversy wasn’t “keeping Americans up at night,” but Raddatz pointed to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll showing 64% of people say Biden acted inappropriately in his handling of classified materials.
“You don’t think there will be any political fallout from this? You don’t think Americans look at this and say, ‘Look, they both had classified documents?'” Raddatz asked.
PHOTO: Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., on “This Week.” (ABC News)
“I think the fallout is right now,” Coons said. “We’re talking about this, instead of President Biden’s leadership on confronting Russian aggression in Ukraine or talking about something I do think is on people’s minds — the potential of a debt ceiling fight and a default.”
“At a time when our president has done such a strong job, where we’ve got the wind at our back because of the big pieces of legislation that he just signed into law in the last few months, the fact that this will take up time and be a distraction — yes, that has a political impact,” Coons said.
But, he said, he didn’t think the controversy would become crucial for voters: “I do not think, in the end, Martha, that when we get to the next election, this will be the deciding issue.”
A first set of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president was discovered at his old office by his personal attorneys just ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, though the discovery wasn’t revealed to the public until news reports in early January.
Biden’s attorneys have since said that more documents were found at his Wilmington residence in December and in January. On Jan. 12, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced he was naming a special counsel to handle the investigation.
On “This Week,” Raddatz repeatedly asked Coons on if he thought Biden had made a “mistake” in not publicly disclosing the matter before reporters did.
“I think we’ll let the public decide that and I think once we get to the end of the special counsel’s investigation, the American people will have a chance to make a judgment on that question,” Coons replied.
PHOTO: ABC News’ Martha Raddatz interviews Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., on “This Week.” (ABC News)
While it remains unclear how the documents ended up at Biden’s office or his home in the years while he was out of office, Coons said Biden “had no idea. … I do think this was inadvertent. The whole point of having special counsel is to insure that and to give the American people confidence.”
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, took another view in his own “This Week” appearance. He said there were “a lot of unanswered questions” and criticized what he called a lack of transparency: “This broke a week before the midterm elections and they swept [it] under the rug.”
McCaul said the FBI search was “significant” and called both Biden and Trump “guilty of the same sin” in improperly retaining classified materials.
“Why are they taking these documents home? I don’t understand. I’ve lived in a classified world for a long time,” he said.
Coons, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee member who led the American congressional delegation in Davos, Switzerland, last week during the World Economic Forum, was also asked by Raddatz about the future of U.S. military aid for Ukraine to defend against Russia’s invasion. In Davos, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reportedly told Coons and others that Germany would only send its advanced Leopard 2 battle tanks along with the U.S. sending M1 Abrams vehicles.
“I am concerned that Russia is re-arming and preparing for a spring offensive. If it requires our sending some Abrams tanks in order to unlock getting the Leopard tanks from Germany, from Poland, from other allies, I would support that,” Coons said on “This Week.”
Russia’s Wagner chief writes to White House over new U.S. sanctions
January 21, 2023
FILE PHOTO: Wagner private military group centre opens in St Petersburg
(Reuters) – The head of the Russian private military contractor Wagner published on Saturday a short letter to the White House asking what crime his company was accused of, after Washington announced new sanctions on the group.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said on Friday that Wagner, which has been supporting Russian forces in their invasion of Ukraine and claiming credit for battlefield advances, would be designated a significant Transnational Criminal Organization.
A letter in English addressed to Kirby and posted on the Telegram channel of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s press service read: “Dear Mr Kirby, Could you please clarify what crime was committed by PMC Wagner?”
Kirby called Wagner “a criminal organization that is committing widespread atrocities and human rights abuses”.
Last month, the White House said Wagner had taken delivery of an arms shipment from North Korea to help bolster Russian forces in Ukraine.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry called the report groundless and Prigozhin at the time denied taking such a delivery, calling the report “gossip and speculation”.
Washington had already imposed curbs on trade with Wagner in 2017 and again in December in an attempt to restrict its access to weaponry.
The European Union imposed its own sanctions in December 2021 on Wagner, which has been active in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Mozambique and Mali, as well as Ukraine.
Prigozhin has described Wagner as a fully independent force with its own aircraft, tanks, rockets and artillery.
He is wanted in the United States for interference in U.S. elections, something that he said in November he had done and would continue to do.
(Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Helen Popper)
Most damning of all, it features a never-heard-before audio recording made by one of Kavanaugh’s Yale colleagues—Partnership for Public Service president and CEO Max Stier—that not only corroborates Ramirez’s charges, but suggests that Kavanaugh violated another unnamed woman as well.
A last-minute addition to this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Justice is the first feature documentary helmed by Doug Liman, a director best known for Hollywood hits like Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity, and Edge of Tomorrow. His latest is far removed from those fictional mainstream efforts, caustically censuring Kavanaugh and the political process that elevated him to the nation’s highest judicial bench, and casting a sympathetic eye on Ford, Ramirez ,and their fellow accusers.
Liman’s film may not deliver many new bombshells, but he and writer/producer Amy Herdy makes up for a relative dearth of explosive revelations by lucidly recounting this ugly chapter in recent American history, as well as by giving voice to women whose allegations were picked apart, mocked and, ultimately, ignored.
Win McNamee/Getty
The biggest eye-opener in Justice comes more than midway through its compact and efficient 85-minute runtime, when Liman receives a tip that leads him to an anonymous individual who provides a tape made by Stier shortly after the FBI—compelled by Ford’s courageous and heartrending testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—briefly reopened its investigation into embattled then-nominee Kavanaugh.
In it, Stier relays that he lived in the same Yale dorm as Kavanaugh and, one evening, wound up in a room where he saw a severely inebriated Kavanaugh with his pants down, at which point a group of rowdy soccer players forced a drunk female freshman to hold Kavanaugh’s penis. Stier states that he knows this tale “first-hand,” and that the young woman in question did not subsequently remember the incident, nor did she want to come forward after she’d seen the vile treatment that Ford and Ramirez were subjected to by the public, the media, and the government. The Daily Beast has reached out to Justice Kavanaugh for comment about the fresh allegations.
Stier goes on to explain that, though he didn’t know Ramirez, he had heard from classmates about her separate, eerily similar encounter with Kavanaugh, which she personally describes in Justice. According to Ramirez, an intoxicated Kavanaugh exposed himself right in front of her face in college, and that she suppressed memories of certain aspects of this trauma until she was contacted by The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow.
As Ramirez narrates in a trembling tone that seems on the perpetual verge of cracking, she suffered this indignity quietly, convinced that she was to blame for it (because she too was under the influence) and humiliated by the guffaws of the other men in the room. Her account is convincing in its specificity, and moving in its anguish.
Ramirez confesses that some of Farrow’s questions made her worried that she still wasn’t recalling everything about that fateful night, and it’s Stier’s recording that appears to fill in a crucial blank. Stier says he was told that, after Kavanaugh stuck his naked member in Ramirez’s face, he went to the bathroom and was egged on by classmates to make himself erect; once he’d succeeded in that task, he returned to harass Ramirez some more.
It’s an additional bit of nastiness in a story drowning in grotesqueness, and Liman lays it all out with the sort of no-nonsense clarity that only amplifies one’s shock, revulsion and dismay—emotions that go hand-in-hand with outrage, which is stoked by the numerous clips of Kavanaugh refuting these accusations with unconvincing fury and falsehoods.
Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty
Through juxtapositions of Kavanaugh’s on-the-record statements and various pieces of evidence, Justice reveals the many lies advanced by the judge in order to both sway public opinion and to give Republicans enough reasonable-doubt cover to vote in favor of his confirmation.
Moreover, in a lengthy segment about text conversations between Kavanaugh’s college buddies and Ramirez’s Yale classmate Kerry Berchem, the film persuasively suggests that Kavanaugh and his team were aware of Ford and Ramirez’s charges before they became public, and sought to preemptively counter them by planting alternate-narrative seeds with friends and acquaintances.
While Liman relies a bit too heavily on graphical text to convey some of this, the idea that Kavanaugh (or those closest to him) conspired to keep his apparent crimes secret—along with his general reputation as a boozing party-hard menace—nonetheless comes through loud and clear.
Surprisingly, although Ford is seen speaking to Liman just off-camera at the beginning of Justice, she otherwise doesn’t appear except in archival footage. Still, her presence is ubiquitous throughout the documentary, which generates further anger by noting that the FBI ignored Stier’s tip, along with the majority of the 4,500 others they received regarding Kavanaugh. The Bureau instead chose to send along any “relevant” reports to the very Trump-administration White House that was committed to getting their nominee approved.
The effect is to paint the entire affair as a charade and a rigged game in which accusatory women were unfairly and maliciously put on the defensive, and powerful men were allowed to skate by on suspect evasions and flimsy denials.
Justice is more of a stinging, straightforward recap than a formally daring non-fiction work, but its direct approach allows its speakers to make their case with precision and passion. Of that group, Ramirez proves the memorable standout, her commentary as thorough and consistent as it is distressed.
In her remarks about Kavanaugh’s laughter as he perpetrated his misconduct—chortling that Ford also mentions to Congress—she provides an unforgettable detail that encapsulates the arrogant, entitled cruelty of her abuser, as well as the unjust system that saw fit to place him on the nation’s highest legal pedestal.
And in an environment where every drops of water matters, that unusually deep snowpack is a rare bit of good news, especially for farmers. While every snowstorm is different, there’s about an 1 inch of water contained in a foot of snow.
Water users all across west are carefully watching snowfall-measuring sites so they can plan for the coming summer. Here’s what to know:
How much snow has California gotten?
Many snow-measuring sites in the Sierra Nevada on the California-Nevada border are showing double the amount of snow they usually have — and some are two or three times higher.
At Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, workers are still digging out of the 17 feet of snow that fell on the base area in the first 16 days of this year, said spokeswoman Lauren Burke. The ski area near Mammoth Lakes, Calif., has received more than 31 feet of snow already this winter at its summit.
“The skiing and riding has just been next-level. But it’s safe to say we are excited to see some blue-sky days in the next week or so,” Burke said.
Around Lake Tahoe, some measuring sites have recorded 300 or even 400% of the median amount, compared to data going back to 1991. And January and February are typically the snowiest months there, so more will likely pile up. Last year, Mammoth Mountain only got 21 feet of snow for the entire season — 10 feet less than it’s already gotten this winter.
In the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Utah, snow fall is up to 200% above average along the Continental Divide in Colorado.
The Sierra snowpack, which supplies 30% of California’s water, stands at 245% of its average for this date and at 126% of the traditional April 1 peak. All three sections of the Sierra – north, central and south – are registering above 200% of normal for the date, according to the state Department of Water Resources.
Unlike the East Coast and midwest, where rain falls more consistently, California and the West depend heavily on snow to provide irrigation water for crops, and to provide drinking water for growing cities like Las Vegas. About half of the West’s water comes from snowfall.
Large reservoir systems divert water from melting snow hundreds of miles from mountain areas to farmland or cities, particularly the Colorado River. Water users all across the West are carefully watching snowfall-measuring sites so they can plan for the coming summer.
Knowing just how much snow will melt and feed the water supply helps growers adjust.
“Being able to do that has been able to keep our water district more flush, pardon the pun, and weather the drought a lot better,” said almond grower Christine Gemperle, 51, who runs Gemperle Orchards in Turlock, Calif., with her brother.
How is climate change affecting snowfall?
More snow falling as rain: Rain is harder to capture in reservoirs because it comes all at once, instead of melting slowly like snow.
Less snow on the ground means the air stays warmer: This creates a feedback loop where the warmer air causes precipitation to fall as rain, instead of snow.
Climate change alters how and where snow falls: This means historical records are no longer as accurate when it comes to predicting water flows later in the summer.
How is snowfall measured? NASA is helping.
Mountainous snowfall covers vast, sparsely populated regions. So how do authorities know exactly just how much snow has fallen?
For generations, most snow measurements were made by jamming an aluminum pole into the snow and pulling out a core sample. A quick calculation of the weight allowed scientists to know how much “snow water equivalent” was inside the snowpack in a certain area. Scientists returned to the same snow course survey areas month after month, year after year, building up a picture of snowfall in those areas.
Starting in the 1980s, scientists developed remote snow-measuring systems that could automatically weigh and report snowfall, broadening our understanding of snowfall across remote areas. There are now more than 900 remote sites across the western United States.
NASA helped develop a more accurate snow measuring system using a small airplane fitted with LiDAR, which provides a much more comprehensive picture of the entire snowpack, not just a few hundred areas.
How an Investor Lost $625,000 and His Faith in George Santos
Grace Ashford, Alexandra Berzon and Michael Gold – January 20, 2023
As Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) was running for office, he also sought investors for a company that was accused of running a Ponzi scheme. (Tom Brenner/The New York Times)
A month after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit in 2021 accusing a Florida-based company of operating a Ponzi scheme, one of the firm’s account managers assured an anxious client that his money was safe.
The client, a wealthy investor named Andrew Intrater, had been lured by annual returns of 16% and had invested $625,000 in a fund offered by the company, Harbor City Capital — in part because he trusted and admired the account manager, an aspiring politician named George Santos.
Admiration aside, Intrater wanted to know about his investment and a promised letter of credit that secured it. Santos said that it was already on the way.
“All issued and sent over,” Santos assured him in a text message sent in May 2021.
The letter of credit did not exist, the SEC would later tell a court. The $100 million that Santos told Intrater that he had personally raised for Harbor City did not exist either, the commission said. Nor, seemingly, did the close to $4 million that Santos claimed he and his family had invested in Harbor City.
Santos’ representations form the basis of a sworn declaration that Intrater gave the SEC in May 2022, as part of its Harbor City investigation. Intrater’s interactions with the SEC are the first indication that the commission might be interested in Santos.
Intrater told the SEC that the representations influenced his decision to invest in Santos’ business and political endeavors — an allegation that could leave Santos vulnerable to criminal charges.
“I admired him and fundamentally I thought he’s a hardworking guy — he’s young and he has the ability to win,” Intrater said in a recent interview.
In late December, after Santos’ years of lies were exposed, Intrater reconsidered his appraisal. He shared with The New York Times text messages that he exchanged with Santos, as well as documents and the declaration that he had given to the SEC — all outlining the ways in which he said Santos had misled him.
“I don’t want Republicans having a bum representing Republicans, and I don’t want to have a guy that committed crimes walking free,” he said.
The SEC has not indicated publicly that it is looking into Santos and declined to answer questions about potential inquiries into the congressman or communications between Intrater and the agency. But the SEC reached out to Intrater in March 2022 to seek information on Santos’ dealings on behalf of Harbor City, according to Intrater and his lawyer.
Although Santos claimed to have raised $100 million for Harbor City, SEC documents say the firm had only raised a total of $17 million. And while Santos said that he and his family had invested millions of dollars because of Harbor City, financial disclosures filed during his 2020 run for Congress show that he earned just $55,000 that year, and had no assets.
If Santos had lured investors through the use of false statements, he could face charges of securities fraud, legal experts said.
It is not clear how the SEC is handling Intrater’s sworn declaration; it does not appear to have been filed in court. The SEC lawsuit against Harbor City and its chief executive, J.P. Maroney, was put on hold in October 2022 at the request of Maroney because of a related criminal investigation into him, court documents show. Maroney has denied wrongdoing.
Some of Santos’ interactions with Intrater have been outlined in news accounts, including in Mother Jones, The Daily Beast and The Washington Post.
But documents, as well as interviews and text messages reviewed by the Times, offer new evidence of the lengths Santos went to in an effort to obscure the problems at Harbor City, and how the relationship soured between the politician and one of his biggest supporters.
Intrater is a private equity investor perhaps best known for his financial ties to Viktor Vekselberg, his cousin. Vekselberg is a Russian oligarch whose U.S. assets were frozen in 2018 by the Treasury Department because of his ties to the Kremlin.
Under a license from the Treasury Department, Intrater says, he has continued to manage Vekselberg-connected assets but is in the process of winding them down. He says that he has not distributed or received funds or had business dealings with Vekselberg or related companies since the sanctions.
Intrater is also known for his relationship with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s onetime personal lawyer; Intrater’s firm, Columbus Nova, signed Cohen to a $1 million consulting contract when the businessman was looking for new investment opportunities in 2018.
Santos met Intrater a few years later; Intrater recalled that Santos called him seeking his financial support in the 2020 congressional race. After Santos lost, the two remained friendly, building a relationship over text messages and lunches at Osteria Delbianco, an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan. They bonded over a shared “old school” worldview and having families that fled the Holocaust, Intrater said. (Santos’ family did not actually flee the Holocaust, records show.)
Santos, as The Daily Beast reported, joined Harbor City in 2020, the same year he first ran for the House, and helped establish the firm’s presence in New York as its regional director. Santos had met Maroney, Harbor City’s CEO, when Santos was helping to organize conferences for LinkBridge Investors, Maroney said, and the two stayed in touch.
Maroney liked Santos, whom he described as “a consummate networker.” He hired him to bring in investments from the ultrawealthy.
According to court documents filed by the SEC, Harbor City told investors that it had discovered a way to make guaranteed money by investing in digital marketing and advertising.
But Harbor City was not doing any such investing, and only a small part of the $17 million it raised was used for legitimate business expenses, the government claims. The company, according to civil charges filed by the SEC, was instead engaged in a Ponzi scheme, using investments from new clients to make payments to older investors, while Maroney siphoned money from business accounts to buy a Mercedes and a waterfront house and pay down more than $1 million in credit card bills.
Intrater was a lucrative client. He decided to invest the $625,000 in a Harbor City fund, using a holding company, FEA Innovations. He and Maroney signed a subscription agreement, which was reviewed by the Times, on Jan. 15, 2021.
Intrater became one of Santos’ more generous patrons. In addition to his investments in Harbor City funds, first reported by The Washington Post, he donated more than $200,000 to Santos’ election campaign, associated political committees and a New York political action committee that he would later learn was controlled by Santos’ sister. He liked the political stances of Santos, a Republican, and his rags-to-riches story, he said.
In retrospect, he should have recognized warning signs, he said.
Though Intrater and his lawyers repeatedly requested the letter of credit, it never materialized. And while he received the first interest payment as scheduled in March 2021, the April payment was mysteriously clawed back. He did not receive any future payments from the company, he said.
With the April payment and the bank letter still missing, Intrater followed up with Santos on May 28, 2021. Intrater said he was unaware at the time that the SEC had by then made public its fraud complaint against Maroney and Harbor City.
But all was well, Santos assured Intrater, casually mentioning that he had been let go a few weeks earlier. Santos, who was running for Congress a second time, told Intrater that his political activities were deemed to be a conflict for Harbor City and he was leaving to focus on his real estate and small projects. (Santos has since admitted that he does not own any property.)
Maroney said in an interview that he had no problems with Santos’ political career and that he supported his ambitions, even agreeing to hold a fundraiser for Trump’s reelection bid at his home.
In fact, Maroney and another former Harbor City employee said Santos had been with the firm until the end. Maroney recalled in an interview last month that Santos “was definitely one of the ones that got the notice that everything we had had been frozen.”
Yet months after Harbor City’s accounts were frozen in April, Santos was still telling Intrater that things were fine, maintaining that the $100 million fund he had mentioned was separate from the one described in the SEC case, according to text messages he sent Intrater.
“Hey Andy, I put in calls to everyone I know still working at HC,” he wrote Intrater. “Should hear back today I hope.”
A few days later, Santos was fretting about his own financial exposure, which he had told Intrater was huge. “I’m having a nervous breakdown,” he texted.
As late as January 2022 he swore to Intrater that his family had invested “almost 4M,” and said that he had employed a lawyer, Joe Murray, to help him try to claw back any remaining funds.
The court-appointed lawyer overseeing Harbor City’s assets, Katherine Donlon, would not formally say whether Santos and his family had invested in Harbor City. But she said that she did not recognize their names as investors, in response to a request emailed by the Times.
Murray declined to answer questions from the Times about Santos’ representations to Intrater and on behalf of Harbor City, saying only, “It would be inappropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation.” Santos, who was not named in the SEC suit, has publicly said he had no knowledge of wrongdoing at Harbor City, an assertion that Maroney backed up.
Intrater said that at the time, he felt for the younger man, who he believed was also a victim.
“Take long walks to clear your head in order to deal with the stress,” he coached Santos via text, urging him to avoid stress eating and alcohol.
The two stayed in touch, even as Intrater came to write off his investment. When Santos appealed to him again for political donations in his second run for Congress, Intrater came through, donating tens of thousands of dollars to Santos’ associated PACs.
And he remained receptive to business opportunities presented by Santos, who helped to set up at least two other potential deals. Neither came together.
Neither Intrater nor his lawyer have heard much from the SEC since filing the declaration, they said, with the commission only replying in November 2022 to say that the civil case had been stayed.
By then, Santos had been elected to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional District. A few days later, Intrater had lunch with the congressman-elect and offered his congratulations.
Things changed in December after Santos’ deception became public. In the weeks since, Intrater said he has reached out to the Department of Justice offering information on Santos. The agency declined to comment.
The last time the men spoke, Intrater says, was after he saw Santos being grilled on Fox News, about a week after the Times ran its initial investigation.
“I said, ‘Dude, I saw your interview,’” Intrater said. “‘You look like you’re absolutely lying about everything.’”
Once again, Santos sought to reassure him. But Intrater was no longer interested in explanations.
He told Santos that he was convinced he was a liar and then cursed at him, he said. “I hung up the phone,” he added. “That was it.”
Russia’s relationship with U.S. at its ‘lowest historical point,’ Kremlin says
Niamh Cavanagh, Reporter – January 20, 2023
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov at a news conference in Moscow in December. (Sputnik/Valeriy Sharifulin/Pool via Reuters)
LONDON — The Kremlin said Friday that Russia’s relationship with the U.S. is at an all-time low.
Speaking to reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that despite timid hopes from the Geneva summit in 2021, bilateral relations were “at their lowest historical point.” He added, “There is no hope for improvement in the foreseeable future.”
The comments follow months of what has come to be a total breakdown in relations between the two powers. Relations went from bad to worse when after conducting several military drills along Ukraine’s border, Russia’s forces launched what it called a “special military operation” on Feb. 24, 2022. The invasion was met with immediate and harsh sanctions from the U.S. as well as Ukraine’s Western allies.
All hopes for any progress in relations were slashed when the Biden administration threw its full support behind Russia’s neighboring countries Finland and Sweden in joining NATO.
President Biden departs Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Sunday. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
This, according to reports, meant the U.S. would be going against its agreement with Russia in 1991 that NATO would not expand past East Germany. This part of the agreement has been hotly contested, as there had been no legal binding between the two nations that would prohibit countries in Eastern Europe from joining the military alliance.
Over the past 11 months, the Biden administration has made several announcements that the U.S. would be providing Ukraine with billions of dollars in military aid and assistance. With Russia’s recent onslaught of airstrikes on Ukraine, the U.S. and other allies have announced plans to provide the beleaguered nation’s military with more weapons.
On Friday, Peskov told reporters that the wave of assistance from the West would be met with consequences.
“We see a growing indirect and sometimes direct involvement of NATO countries in this conflict,” he said. “We see a devotion to the dramatic delusion that Ukraine can succeed on the battlefield. This is a dramatic delusion of the Western community that will more than once be cause for regret, we are sure of that.”
His remarks came as Western defense ministers gathered at an air base in Germany to discuss supplying further military assistance to Ukraine.
It’s mid-January and the Great Lakes are virtually ice-free. That’s a problem.
Caitlin Looby – January 20, 2023
It’s the middle of January, and the Great Lakes are basically ice-free.
Ice has been slow to form this year, with only 3.2% of the lakes covered as of Jan. 19. That’s a near-record low, and roughly 18% below average for this time of year.
And while it’s still unclear how things will shake out for the rest of the season, no ice isn’t a good thing for the lakes’ ecosystem. It can even stir up dangerous waves and lake-effect snowstorms.
So, what happens when the lakes are ice-free? What does it mean for the lakes’ food web? Is climate change to blame?
Here are five things you should know.
Ice fishermen stay close to shore Wednesday, January 18, 2023 on Green Bay off of Bay Shore Park in New Franken, Wis. Ice has been slow to form this year with only 3 percent of the lakes covered as of Jan. 13. The near-record low is roughly 18 percent below average for this time of year. Lake whitefish, a mainstay in the lakes’ fishing industry and an important food source for other fish like walleye, are one of the many Great Lakes fish that will be impacted by less ice cover.Lake whitefish spawn in the fall in nearshore areas, leaving the eggs to incubate over the winter months. Without ice, strong winds and waves can stir up the sediment, reducing the number of fish that are hatched in the spring.
Ice cover is at a near-record low, but things can change
The U.S. National Ice Center Forecast releases a seasonal outlook at the beginning of December, which showed a mix of predictions. According to the forecast, Lakes Michigan, Erie and Ontario are predicted to have less ice, while Lake Superior is expected to be above normal. Lake Huron is expected to have an average year.
But this three-month prediction has a great deal of uncertainty, and much can change, said Ayumi Fujisaki Manome, a scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan who models ice cover and hazardous weather across the lakes.
Ice growth is pretty dynamic; it’s course can realign in a matter of days, especially on the shallower lakes.
Ice cover jumped up to 7% on average across all the lakes after the December cold snap, for example, but then quickly fell as milder temperatures rolled in. The change was especially pronounced on Lake Erie, where ice cover rose to 23% and now sits at around 3%. Lake Erie typically freezes over the quickest and has the most ice cover because it’s the shallowest of the Great Lakes.
Lake Michigan saw more than 7.5% ice coverage after the December cold spell, and measured at nearly 3.2 percent last Friday. Nearly all of that ice is in the bay of Green Bay.
Less ice cover doesn’t mean that residents around the Great Lakes are getting an easier winter. In fact it can be the opposite.
In the winter, when cold, dry air masses move across the lakes, they pick up water along the way through evaporation. When the air mass hits land, it drops all that water through lake-effect snow.
Ice cover acts as a shield, stopping water from evaporating off the lake, Fujisaki Manome said. So, when there is less ice people around the lakes typically see more lake-effect snow.
Most lake evaporation actually happens in the fall and winter months opposed to the summer, Fujisaki Manome said.
Little ice cover can be disastrous
This winter has already proven how dangerous lake-effect snow can be.
At the end of November, more than six feet of snow fell on Buffalo, N.Y., which sits on the shores of Lake Erie. A few weeks later on Dec. 23, more than four feet of snow covered the city and surrounding areas once again. The storm resulted in 44 deaths in Erie and Niagara counties, which sit on Lakes Erie and Ontario, respectively.
During stormy winter months, ice cover tempers waves. When there is low ice cover, waves can be much larger, leading to lakeshore flooding and erosion. That happened in January 2020 along Lake Michigan’s southwestern shoreline. Record high lake levels mixed with winds whipped up 15-foot waves that flooded shorelines, leading Gov. Tony Evers to declare a state of emergency for Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties.
And while less ice may seem like a good thing for the lakes’ shipping industry, those waves can create dangerous conditions.
The Great Lakes are losing ice with climate change
The Great Lakes have been losing ice for the past five decades, a trend that scientists say will likely continue.
Personnel from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mobile Bay walk in the ice Wednesday, January 18, 2023 on Green Bay about 10 miles north of Green Bay, Wis. Ice has been slow to form this year with only 3 percent of the lakes covered as of Jan. 13. The near-record low is roughly 18 percent below average for this time of year.
Of the last 25 years, 64% had below-average ice, said Michael Notaro, the director of the Center on Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The steepest declines have been in the north, including Lake Superior, northern Lake Michigan and Huron, and in nearshore areas.
But this also comes with a lot of ups and downs, largely because warming is causing the jet stream to “meander,” Fujisaki Manome said.
There is a lot of year-to-year variability with ice cover spiking in years like 2014, 2015 and 2019 where the lakes were almost completely iced over.
No ice makes waves in the lakes’ ecosystems
A downturn in ice coverage due to climate change will likely have cascading effects on the lakes’ ecosystems.
Lake whitefish, a mainstay in the lakes’ fishing industry and an important food source for other fish like walleye, are one of the many Great Lakes fish that will be impacted, said Ed Rutherford, a fishery biologist who also works at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.
Lake whitefish spawn in the fall in nearshore areas, leaving the eggs to incubate over the winter months. When ice isn’t there, strong winds and waves can stir up the sediment, reducing the number of fish that are hatched in the spring, Rutherford said.
Walleye and yellow perch also need extended winters, he said. If they don’t get enough time to overwinter in cold water, their eggs will be a lot smaller, making it harder for them to survive.
Declining ice cover on the lakes is also delaying the southward migration of dabbling ducks, a group of ducks that include Mallards, out of the Great Lakes in the fall and winter, Notaro said. And if the ducks spend more time in the region it will increase the foraging pressure on inland wetlands.
Warming lakes and a loss of ice cover over time also will be coupled with more extreme rainfall, likely inciting more harmful algae blooms, said Notaro. These blooms largely form from agricultural runoff, creating thick, green mats on the lake surface that can be toxic to humans and pets.
Lakes Erie and Michigan are plagued with these blooms every summer. And now, blooms are cropping up in Lake Superior for the first time are raising alarm.
“Even deep, cold Lake Superior has been experiencing significant algae blooms since 2018, which is quite atypical,” Notaro said.
There is still a big question mark on the extent of the changes that will happen to the lakes’ ecosystem and food web as ice cover continues to decline. That’s because scientists can’t get out and sample the lakes in the harsh winter months.
“Unless we can keep climate change in check… it will have changes that we anticipate and others that we don’t know about yet,” Rutherford said.
Caitlin Looby is a Report for America corps member who writes about the environment and the Great Lakes.
It Would Be Nice If Republicans Would Actually Read A Bill
Bruce Maiman – January 19, 2023
From left to right: House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) talks to reporters during a news conference with Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.), Rep. Michael Cloud (R-La.) and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) on Jan. 10 in Washington, D.C.
While President Joe Biden’s document drama puts him in a tricky political situation, let’s not lose sight of the Republican Party’s “to be continued” style of incompetent governance.
Looking back at their first two weeks running the House of Representatives, you have to conclude one of two things: Either Republicans are stupid, or they think their constituents are.
Voters sent a clear message in the midterms: We’re tired of “crazy.” We want bipartisanship, not extremism.
Moreover, supporters of abortion rights, angered by the Supreme Court’s unraveling of Roe v. Wade, turned out in droves and delivered several key elections for Democrats, according to CNN exit polling. Republicans surely would have liked to win some of those districts, no?
Week two: Republicans passed a pair of anti-abortion bills and, in a real insult to everyone’s intelligence, voted to repeal tens of billions of dollars in IRS funding via the so-called Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act. Consider this tweet from Rep. Ashley Hinson (R), of Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District:
A screenshot of a tweet from Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa).
A screenshot of a tweet from Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa).
Look, you can have your opinion on abortion, and maybe you like the extremists, but can someone please read a bill? Or at least listen to some “Schoolhouse Rock”?
You have to love how these hoopleheads clamored for a rule requiring bills to be released at least 72 hours before a floor vote so lawmakers would have ample time to read them. At the same time, they had seven months to read the Inflation Reduction Act, but evidently couldn’t pencil that in. Passed in August, the act explains — justifies, really — its nearly $80 billion in IRS funding.
Incidentally, Democrats implemented that 72-hour rule in 2019 when Republicans rammed through a tax bill just hours after introducing a final version.
Hinson is probably just repeating what Republican leaders are saying now. Or what any Republican with a pulse was shrieking lastsummer. Or the howls of the campaign ads and political mailers you might have seen ahead of the November midterms: Eighty-seven thousand new IRS agents to audit small businesses and hard-working Americans!
Even seasoned Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who you’d think would know to read a bill, have been in full scaremongering mode, all deploying the same talking points.
Here’s the reality: The IRS is understaffed, overwhelmed and digitally dated. Thirty years ago, the IRS had 117,000 employees. Today, it has 78,000. It faces an expected wave of 50,000 retirements this decade. Its budget has been slashed by nearly 20% since 2010.
These circumstances have created a massive backlog. For example, according to the Treasury Department, nearly 200 million taxpayers called the IRS for assistance in the first half of 2021. There were 15,000 employees available to assist them. That’s one person for every 13,000 calls.
Funding from the Inflation Reduction Act aims to address these shortfalls by hiring 87,000 new IRS employees ― over the next 10 years, not all at once. And most of the hires will be to replace all those retirees.
So, dear Republican voter, did your favorite lawmaker explain any of that to you? No? Why not?
Will all the money go toward hiring IRS agents to audit taxpayers? Nope.
· $45.6 billion will go toward hiring more enforcement agents, shoring up legal support and investing in “investigative technology.”
· $25.3 billion will cover routine costs, like rent, facilities, printing and postage.
· $3 billion will go to customer services, such as prefiling assistance and education, and the possibility of creating a free direct e-file program.
· $5 billion will go toward modernizing the IRS’s business systems and customer service technology. Some agency computers still use programming language that dates back to the 1960s.
So, Republican voter: Why didn’t your favorite lawmakers explain that? Maybe they didn’t read the bill ― or reports from the Government Accountability Office, the Treasury Department, the Congressional Research Service or the Congressional Budget Office, or even a letter from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to the IRS commissioner, affirming these commitments ― which means they didn’t do their job. Maybe they’re just repeating someone else’s talking points. Maybe they’re stupid enough to believe those talking points ― or maybe they think you are. Maybe they think you’re too lazy to do your own research to learn what’s in the legislation.
Feel better?
Audits have declined most dramatically for the wealthy. For example: In 2012, the percentage of companies with at least $20 billion in assets subjected to audit was 93%. By 2020, it was just 38%.
The resulting tax gap — what people owe versus what they pay — is estimated to be more than $600 billion. Much of this is due to drastic cuts in the IRS’s budget, courtesy of Tea Party fanatics a decade ago.
Since then, the number of IRS auditors has fallen by more than 40% even as the tax code has gotten more complex. The agency’s auditors are no match for the battery of pricey accountants and tax attorneys who help the affluent avoid or evade their tax obligations.
Sidebar: In the past decade, the tax code has been amended or revised more than 4,000 times. Keep in mind that the agency doesn’t make those changes; Congress does. So while Congress was making tax law more complex, it gelded the agency tasked with tending to its directives.
The poster boy for this is former President Donald Trump. We still don’t know why the IRS didn’tenforce its own policy of mandatory audits of the sitting president.
If you hate paying taxes, you should really hate the people who don’t pay their fair share. If the uber-wealthy don’t pay all the taxes they legally owe, guess who makes up the difference through higher tax rates? You and me. As Leona Helmsley supposedly said, “Only the little people pay taxes.”
Taxes are monies we pay for services we say we want. Less tax revenue means more borrowing to pay for those services, which increases the deficit.
In fact, the Congressional Budget Office notes that without the new funding, the deficit would actually grow by about $114 billion over the next decade. In other words, the repeal would cost more than the actual funding. How’s that for stupid?
Sorry, but I don’t like being robbed by tax cheats. I want lots of IRS agents to keep them from picking my pocket. There is another consequence to all this neutering: The worse IRS customer service gets, the more cheating the wealthy can get away with, causing the rest of us to become more resentful toward and fearful of the agency.
The idea of the “overbearing IRS” is just another shibboleth Republicans use to rile up their base for the benefit of the GOP’s fat cats while securing votes for reelection. No honest, conscientious American has anything to fear from the IRS. Indeed, polls have repeatedly shown that most Americans regard paying taxes as a civicduty.
Remember: This month, a New York judge fined the Trump Organization $1.6 million (the max allowed by law) after convictions on 17 counts of tax fraud. Meanwhile, Trump’s longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg drew five months in prison for his involvement in the tax scams. These are the people who hate and fear the IRS.
How can Republicans continually whine about the deficit when they’re trying to undercut the means to collect the money that would help reduce it?
They whine about waste, but they waste time and tax dollars on votes for bills they know won’t go anywhere in the Senate, let alone survive a presidential veto. Where do they think the funding for their pork projects comes from? Magic?
Maybe you think taxes should be higher or lower, or that we should have a more simplified tax code. But so long as we have taxes (and unless you want anarchy, we need taxes), we’ll need an agency to manage and administer those monies, and to ensure that citizens and businesses are playing by the rules. And that agency must be properly staffed and funded.
House Republicans claim they want the IRS to function better. If they want a smaller, more efficient and effective government, they should be the first ones to leave ― especially the ones running interference and engaging in performance politics solely to score cheap points.
Unless, of course, we learn that the IRS funded Hunter Biden’s laptop. Ah, it’s all coming together now!
‘So much pain’: KC-area woman who spent 322 days on a ventilator with COVID dies
Lisa Gutierrez – January 19, 2023
COVID-19 began stealing Gwen Marie Starkey from her Missouri family nearly two years ago. It forced the retiree to spend 322 days, nearly all of 2021, hooked to an uncomfortable noisy ventilator.
But in the end, Starkey left this earth in peace, at home with family.
Starkey, 61, of Polo, north of Kansas City, died on Jan. 2, after contracting COVID-19 in February 2021. She leaves behind her husband, Troy Starkey, two daughters, four grandsons and three sisters.
Starkey caught COVID before vaccines were widely available.
“News I never wanted to share,” her daughter, April Shaver, told The Star after her mother died. “She passed on her own. She went on hospice by choice and passed in less than a week.
“It’s been terribly difficult but we had almost a year with her at home with us.”
Starkey had just retired after 30 years at the Ford Motor Co. Kansas City Assembly Plant in Claycomo when she and several relatives got infected during a family gathering a few days before the Super Bowl. She got the worst case.
“The next day our lives changed without us even knowing it,” said Shaver. “I even told her, ‘You died the day you got COVID because you have never been the same. I’ve been grieving you for two years.”
About a month after she was hospitalized, Starkey told her family on FaceTime that she didn’t work all those years at the Ford plant just to die in a bed with COVID.
Gwen Starkey spent her 60th birthday in a hospital bed. She spent nearly all of 2021 on a ventilator after getting COVID-19.
Taking on the naysayers
In the first of several stories The Star wrote about Starkey’s battle, Shaver said it shocked her to see her mother — healthy, active, an avid gardener — felled so quickly.
She had never seen her mother so helpless, her hands so gray and lifeless. She watched her mother become “a body in a bed” as life moved on around her.
Starkey’s father died while she was on the ventilator. She celebrated her 60th birthday in the hospital.
Outside of Kindred Hospital Northland in the summer of 2021, April Shaver of Kansas City held her 2-year-old son, Malakai, up to the window during a visit to see her mother, Gwen Starkey.
Watching her mother suffer, Shaver lost patience with the naysayers. She became so angry at people who called COVID a hoax that she posted a photo of herself holding her mom’s hand in the hospital. She wrote on Facebook: “This. Is. Covid. Please stop trying to say it’s not real.”
It was rare for COVID patients to spend that long on a ventilator. Sharkey became national news in July 2021 when Shaver appeared on “Erin Burnett OutFront” on CNN to talk about her mother’s health.
Starkey’s illness became a frustrating series of strides and setbacks, of hope and helplessness. She had collapsed lungs. Her kidneys failed.
She couldn’t speak for months after doctors tunneled into her throat with a tracheotomy tube. Sick as she was, she rode in ambulances several times, moving from one facility to another as her health waxed and waned.
She was admitted to Liberty Hospital in February 2021, transferred to Saint Luke’s in Kansas City, moved to a transitional care hospital in the Northland, returned to Saint Luke’s when she faltered, returned to Kindred Hospital Northland and entered MidAmerica Rehabilitation Hospital in Johnson County last January.
She finally returned home to Polo last February but was never able to get out of bed again, Shaver said. She was hospitalized several times during her year at home.
Gwen Starkey of Polo, Missouri, spent the last year of her life at home with family members, including her 4-year-old grandson, Kai.
‘Ready to go’
Having her at home wasn’t “your usual family time,” Shaver said. Mostly, her mom just wanted “uneventful” peace and quiet.
Starkey still had to endure dialysis, riding 40 minutes back and forth to nearby Richmond three times a week. Missing an appointment sometimes led to a short hospital stay. But some days it was just too much. She chose not to go because the trip alone exhausted her.
In early December, during one of her mother’s good spells, Shaver went to Texas and got a tattoo on her right forearm: a butterfly and flowers like the ones in her mom’s garden. “Before I left she was so full of life and I was so happy because I felt like she was bouncing back,” she said. “But when I came back it felt like she was declining again.”
The timeline of Starkey’s last days “was just so bizarre,” Shaver said.
The day after Christmas, Starkey decided she wanted hospice care. The next day, Shirkey Hospice and Palliative Care from Richmond arrived. Family members said goodbye.
“I had my breakdown, confessed all my childhood secrets to her,” Shaver said. “It was happy, sad, everything you’d expect a goodbye to be.”
But her mom had a dream that God told her: “It’s not your time.” So Starkey sent hospice away.
But on Dec. 30, Starkey went to yet another dialysis session and changed her mind. She was ready to go.
On New Year’s Eve, family members said goodbye again.
On New Year’s Day, Starkey was unresponsive.
On the night of Jan. 2, she died.
Gwen Starkey never fully recovered from COVID-19. She spent the last year at home in bed. This is one of the last photos of her with family members in December.
One regret?
“She was in so much pain. You could look at her and could just tell,” said Shaver. “When I had my heart-to-heart with her, I was sobbing, my dad was sobbing, my husband was sobbing. She was completely dry-eyed. She was ready to go. She was good with God.”
When Starkey first got sick, the family waited to take her to the hospital. Loved ones, and Starkey herself, were scared that if she was put on a ventilator she would die. They had heard horror stories about COVID patients dying on the machines.
No one wanted to take her to the hospital. She didn’t want to go either, said Shaver, who has had COVID three times. She is vaccinated and boosted.
“Had we known, we would have sent her to the hospital several days before,” Shaver told The Star.
Starkey’s husband of more than 25 years spent the last two years as her caretaker, at her bedside in all those hospital rooms, at her side at home. Shaver worries that he needs looking after now. “He went from being needed all day to sitting in a room that’s quiet and empty,” she said.
Her mom requested a party after she was gone. The family plans to have one in the summer.
“The last thing she said to me, Shaver said, was, ‘Everything is going to be OK.”
From Gwen Starkey’s funeral. She was an avid gardener and her daughter, April Shaver, got a tattoo of flowers in her mother’s memory.
Researchers find a more sustainable way to grow crops under solar panels
Translucent solar cells that split the light spectrum could allow for more productive use of arable land.
Kris Holt, Contributing Reporter – January 18, 2023
Andre Daccache/UC Davis
Researchers say they have determined a way to make agrivoltaics — the process of growing crops underneath solar panels — more efficient. They found that red wavelengths are more efficient for growing plants, while the blue part of the spectrum is better for producing solar energy. Solar panels that only allow red wavelengths of light to pass through could enable farmers to grow food more productively while generating power at the same time.
Previous studies have found that agrivoltaics can reduce the amount of water required for crops, since they’re shaded from direct sunlight. Researchers at Michigan Technological University determined in 2015 that shading can reduce water usage by up to 29 percent. Majdi Abou Najm, an associate professor at University of California, Davis’ department of land, air and water resources, told Modern Farmer that by splitting the light spectrum, crops can get the same amount of carbon dioxide with less water while shielding them from heat.
The researchers put the idea to the test by growing tomatoes under blue and red filters, as well as a control crop without any coverings. Although the yield for the covered plots was about a third less than the control, the latter had around twice the amount of rotten tomatoes. Abou Najm noted that the filters helped to reduce heat stress and crop wastage.
A blue filter over crops with a temperature reading super imposed.
For this approach to work in practice, though, manufacturers would need to develop translucent solar panels that capture blue light and allow red light to pass through. Matteo Camporese, an associate professor at the University of Padova in Italy and lead author of a paper on the topic, suggested that translucent, carbon-based organic solar cells could work. These cells could be applied onto surfaces such as glass.
There are other issues, including the fact wavelength-selective agrivoltaic systems may need to account for different crop types. Harvesting those crops efficiently might require some out-of-the-box thinking too. Still, the research seems promising and, with a growing global population, it’s important to consider different approaches to using our resources more productively.
“We cannot feed 2 billion more people in 30 years by being just a little more water-efficient and continuing as we do,” Abou Najm said. “We need something transformative, not incremental. If we treat the sun as a resource, we can work with shade and generate electricity while producing crops underneath. Kilowatt hours become a secondary crop you can harvest.”
