Zorro
Zorro's JournalJanuary 6 Committee Releases Final Report
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog/january-6-committee-transcriptsThere's a link to the report on the web page.
Florida Supreme Court OKs DeSantis request for grand jury on COVID vaccine issues
Source: Tampa Bay Times
TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday approved a request by Gov. Ron DeSantis to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate alleged wrongdoing related to COVID-19 vaccines.
The Supreme Court issued an order that impaneled a grand jury for a year and appointed Hillsborough County Circuit Judge Ronald Ficarrotta to preside over it. Grand jury members will be drawn from five judicial circuits.
The approval came after DeSantis on Dec. 13 submitted a request that alleged “there are good and sufficient reasons to deem it to be in the public interest to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate criminal or wrongful activity in Florida relating to the development, promotion, and distribution of vaccines purported to prevent COVID-19 infection, symptoms, and transmission.”
Chief Justice Carlos Muniz and Justices Charles Canady, Ricky Polston, John Couriel and Jamie Grosshans supported DeSantis’ request, while Justice Jorge Labarga opposed it, according to the order. Justice Renatha Francis did not take part.
Read more: https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/12/22/florida-supreme-court-oks-desantis-request-grand-jury-covid-vaccine-issues/
Putin's War
A Times investigation based on interviews, intercepts, documents and secret battle plans shows how a “walk in the park” became a catastrophe for Russia.They never had a chance.
Fumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training.
Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from half a century ago and virtually nothing to eat, they said. Russia had been at war most of the year, yet its army seemed less prepared than ever. In interviews, members of the brigade said some of them had barely fired a gun before and described having almost no bullets anyway, let alone air cover or artillery. But it didn’t frighten them too much, they said. They would never see combat, their commanders had promised.
Only when the shells began crashing around them, ripping their comrades to pieces, did they realize how badly they had been duped.
Flung to the ground, a drafted Russian soldier named Mikhail recalled opening his eyes to a shock: the shredded bodies of his comrades littering the field. Shrapnel had sliced open his belly, too. Desperate to escape, he said, he crawled to a thicket of trees and tried to dig a ditch with his hands.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/16/world/europe/russia-putin-war-failures-ukraine.html
Disaster scenarios raise the stakes for Colorado River negotiations
At Colorado River conference in Las Vegas, water managers debate how to make historic cutsLAS VEGAS — The water managers responsible for divvying up the Colorado River’s dwindling supply are painting a bleak portrait of a river in crisis, warning that unprecedented shortages could be coming to farms and cities in the West and that old rules governing how water is shared will have to change.
State and federal authorities say that years of overconsumption are colliding with the stark realities of climate change, pushing Colorado River reservoirs to such dangerously low levels that the major dams on the river could soon become obstacles to delivering water to millions in the Southwest.
The federal government has called on the seven Western states that rely on Colorado River water to cut usage by 2 to 4 million acre-feet — up to a third of the river’s annual average flow — to try to avoid such dire outcomes. But the states have so far failed to reach a voluntary agreement on how to make that happen, and the Interior Department may impose unilateral cuts in coming months.
“Without immediate and decisive actions, elevations at Lake Powell and Mead could force the system to stop functioning,” Tommy Beaudreau, the Interior Department’s deputy secretary, told a conference of Colorado River officials here Friday. “That’s an intolerable condition that we won’t allow to happen.”
Many state water officials fear they are already running out of time.
Ted Cooke, general manager of the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to central Arizona, said that “there’s a real possibility of an effective dead pool” within the next two years. That means water levels could fall so far that the Glen Canyon and Hoover dams — which created the reservoirs at Lake Powell and Lake Mead — would become an obstacle to delivering water to cities and farms in Arizona, California and Mexico.
https://wapo.st/3BIwabW
NBA draft pick retires from basketball citing anxiety, calls it 'the darkest times' of his life
Tyrell Terry, a 2020 NBA draft pick of the Dallas Mavericks, has announced his retirement from basketball, citing anxiety.
In an Instagram post on Thursday, the 22-year-old Terry called it “the darkest times” of his life while describing the anxiety basketball caused him.
“Intrusive thoughts, waking up nauseous, and finding myself struggling to take normal breaths because of the rock that would sit on my chest that seemed to weigh more than I could carry,” Terry said in the post.
“This is just a brief description of the anxiety this sport has caused me, and while I’m grateful for every door it has opened for me, I can’t continue this fight any longer for something I have fallen out of love with.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/sport/nba-draft-pick-retires-anxiety-spt-intl/index.html
Good for him.
House Committee Takes Step Toward Potential Release of Trump's Tax Data
Source: New York Times
WASHINGTON — A House committee is expected to vote on Tuesday on whether to make public six years of former President Donald J. Trump’s tax records, in what would be a significant act of transparency in the waning days of Democratic control of the House.
The Ways and Means Committee gave notice on Friday that it would meet behind closed doors at 3 p.m. on Tuesday for what is expected to be a vote on whether to release some data from Mr. Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020, including the possibility of sharing the filings. The panel obtained the information from the Treasury Department last month.
Such a vote, which Republicans are likely to oppose, would be the culmination of a nearly four-year battle stemming from Mr. Trump’s decision to break with modern precedent and refuse to disclose his personal financial information as a presidential candidate and then as a sitting president.
For now, lawmakers remain constrained by law about what they can say about the matter. Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, who as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee requested Mr. Trump’s tax returns from the Treasury Department, said it concerned “documents protected under Internal Revenue Code Section 6103.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/us/politics/trump-tax-data-house-committee.html
Ron DeSantis Paved the Way for Trump's NFT Money Grab
Earlier this year DeSantis rolled out a collection of trading cards using photos from his days as a baseball player at Yale. Trump’s newest project is more of the same.If he were not Donald Trump, you could almost feel sorry for him.
His “big announcement” on Thursday that he is selling virtual trading cards of himself as a fantasy superhero was ridiculous enough—but it turns pathetic when compared to Gov. Ron DeSanits’ sale seven months ago of actual trading cards of himself as a bona fide college baseball star.
The half-dozen Trump images now on sale are so bizarre that they can be taken as a parody of a narcissistic loser’s imaginings. The cost is $99, for which the buyer only receives a digital assurance that this “perfect gift for Christmas” is a “non-fungible” NFT.
The lone image on the cards sold by the DeSantis for Governor campaign in May features an iconic shot of a baseball hero taking a mighty swing that made him Rookie of the Year as a Yale freshman, ending with a .336 batting average as a senior. The 500 “limited edition Gov. DeSantis classic baseball cards” were priced at $49. The buyer received an actual card just like kids have been collecting and trading for decades.
There were also 10 numbered “relic” cards autographed by DeSanits. These were sold at auction, with six of them each going for the $3,000 maximum—set by a limit for individual campaign contributions. The other four went for at least $1,650.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ron-desantis-paved-the-way-for-donald-trumps-nft-money-grab
Is this a case of monkey see, monkey do?
Inside Mar-a-Lago, Where Thousands Partied Near Secret Files
A Times investigation shows how Donald J. Trump stored classified documents in high-traffic areas at Mar-a-Lago, where guests may have been within feet of the materials.Mar-a-Lago is the primary home of former President Donald J. Trump. It is also a private club reserved for 500 members and a venue for parties and fund-raisers that are frequently attended by hundreds of people at a time.
With the exception of the Trump family suite, members and their guests have access to much of the 20-acre property.
Since January, the federal government has retrieved three batches of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago. In a search in August, the F.B.I. seized the third batch — more than 13,000 items, including 103 classified documents — from a storage area and Mr. Trump’s office.
Classified documents are supposed to be turned over to the National Archives at the end of a presidential term. But after the end of his term in 2021, Mr. Trump stored the materials at Mar-a-Lago.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/15/us/mar-a-lago-trump-documents.html?unlocked_article_code=q3YriCqsZYm46MlVikZFOSxxh1HxQu988B3SaRklZT9VheTZaHBvXGDIstU3relp7rLEjpcIspcGdursxM3uvsbxmXyKRaiMDuADm1GNDBn-EMzguheVmZ3FApPdT81cTNm1LkmOvioGOlxBKY2V1XGH2_8vRW3DK5EMj6ND9jJX4EnQjdc55Ap_kFb4E_nirLfkgRHbvrw78iV7Rze7D2hdLkp2pDo-HIddFP3Ge-0V9tJOrbF2i9Fr0Ca0EniFGNOM5UNCBoVo7CBXOKD0fX0-HUA1DkhHq2_rkUSSnRVU5ADgzyDtXzQ15mFE-4g3MJqZJm2Rz7sm9FoFD3V6mrS4lxHel8rAL2GUai0Jbw&smid=share-url
Informative interactive article.
An Alternate Reality: How Russia's State TV Spins the Ukraine War
Leaked emails detail how Russia’s biggest state broadcaster, working with the nation’s security services, mined right-wing American news and Chinese media to craft a narrative that Moscow was winning.As Russian tanks were stuck in the mud outside Kyiv earlier this year and the economic fallout of war with Ukraine took hold, one part of Russia’s government hummed with precision: television propaganda.
Spinning together a counternarrative for tens of millions of viewers, Russian propagandists plucked clips from American cable news, right-wing social media and Chinese officials. They latched onto claims that Western embargoes of Russian oil would be self-defeating, that the United States was hiding secret bioweapon research labs in Ukraine and that China was a loyal ally against a fragmenting West.
Day by day, state media journalists sharpened those themes in emails. They sometimes broadcast battlefield videos and other information sent to them by the successor agency to the K.G.B. And they excerpted and translated footage from favorite pundits, like the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose remarks about the war were shown to millions of Russians.
“Be sure to take Tucker,” one Russian news producer wrote to a colleague. The email referred to a clip in which Mr. Carlson described the power of the Chinese-Russian partnership that had emerged under Mr. Biden — and how American economic policies targeting Russia could undermine the dollar’s status as a world-reserve currency.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/technology/russia-state-tv-ukraine-war.html?unlocked_article_code=SMXkLcRXuBotG3zU5ISlSGFLuHvIrTsRx8Hnp5rEgvw54os-Pujrqp2K4hnwguN4cXOX_0hfV39CVZvXTLxKwCZ7RzbkK-0xA_ETj9nRLnDx9nQSrnoskdQlhsfleuwV_LnsW_0U0Wdm5G-LwTsuJJJy1dR0msoREVJ-slz7Dr1JbxZMRswBxRZISU11EUi5w07KQz2vULtiRf2AX1KcvYWWKlUfiJY1T67LnuTAubLPTOuMZKaiE3OciDifD7UlxdW0uup4G5FzTT_-dkNHqDRaxoKpPu-L19lCjeu4uoaWPoBOJSmSjiNKp4ESFDprIcRrvFUwME5R1EmiMHZMitKIeaXR96hI&smid=share-url
Five down in Apt. 307: Mass fentanyl deaths test a Colorado prosecutor
COMMERCE CITY, Colo. — From the doorway of Apt. 307, District Attorney Brian Mason could see the five bodies inside. They lay awkwardly on the floor and couch, their arms and legs contorted — a sign of sudden collapse.
A man in jeans and closest to the door was splayed on his back, his left leg bent at an odd angle. Not far from him, a woman with long brown hair was slumped on the kitchen floor, her face pressed against a lower cupboard. Another woman, in a black sweatshirt, lay just past the kitchen counter nearby. On a love seat toward the back of the room, a man sat frozen. A woman in a gray T-shirt had toppled over him, her head resting on his chest. Blood dripped from their faces.
A mass murder, Mason thought.
Mason, a slim 45-year-old who grew up in Colorado, had arrived at the suburban Denver apartment complex shortly after 8 p.m. on Feb. 20. It was such a frigid night that his knees were shaking. He climbed the outside staircase to the third floor with Sgt. J.P. Matzke, the supervisor of a local drug task force.
The scene looked like a party gone terribly wrong, Matzke told Mason. Five people down. Crime-scene technicians collecting evidence inside were suited up in Hazmat gear. They were worried that whatever substance had caused so many people to die simultaneously might still be in the air. They had tested for carbon monoxide and ruled that out.
https://wapo.st/3YovRNf
Fentanyl is a real and dangerous menace to our society. It is unfortunate that instead of working together with Congressional Democrats to seriously address this critical social problem, Republicans will only use this escalating threat to attack Biden while hamstringing any actions to deal with the peril effectively.
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