The Miami Herald reported yesterday that Miami Dade College is set to receive $15 million from a quartet of public and nonprofit entities to beef up its technology curriculum — and make artificial intelligence education available to all of its students.
The investment — $7 million from the Knight Foundation, $5 million from Miami-Dade County, $2 million from the City of Miami and $1 million from the Miami Downtown Development Authority — will be used to hire as many as 15 new faculty members with technology backgrounds that can satisfy surging enrollment in MDC’s School of Engineering and Technology. MDC is also launching MDCTECH, a web portal designed to serve as the hub for its tech efforts.
“There’s been a lot of talk about who Miami tech is for, and we want to highlight that there’s a trend here, that Miamians are seeking out these educational paths, career paths,” said Raul Moas, who recently took on new responsibilities as a senior director at Knight Foundation, in addition to his role as the Miami nonprofit’s program director. “We still have work to do to translate that into actual employment, but we see that Miamians are seeking out these opportunities. That’s an incredibly important part of the narrative.”
In addition to making an artificial intelligence course part of MDC’s core curriculum, the millions of dollars also will be used to establish a bachelor’s degree in applied artificial intelligence. MDC is building two AI centers, at its North and Wolfson campuses, to foster experiential learning and collaboration between industry and academia. They will join the college’s existing technology centers focused on animation and gaming, cloud computing and cybersecurity.“We have seen Miami and South Florida getting more investment, more startups, more venture capital, and what we now need is investment in our education system,” said Antonio Delgado, MDC’s vice president of innovation and technology partnerships, “so that we can create pathways for students and Miamians to participate.”
For the Knight Foundation, the $7 million donation represents the latest in what is now a total of $22 million invested in Miami tech and innovation in the past 12 months — following its $15 million commitment to Florida International University, the University of Miami, and Baptist Health South Florida — and $60 million in local tech investments over the past decade. Moas said the organization is responding to increased enrollment in tech programming it is seeing at these academic institutions.
“For us, it’s about meeting community demand,” Moas said. “More Miamianas than ever before are seeking out careers in tech, and we’re responding to that aspiration.”
Congratulations to Miami Dade College and its benefactors!
The unexpected development came not long after the high-stakes inquiry appeared to be gaining momentum and now throws its future into serious doubt.
The prosecutors, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted their resignations because the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicated to them that he had doubts about moving forward with a case against Mr. Trump, the people said.
Mr. Pomerantz confirmed in a brief interview that he had resigned but declined to elaborate. Mr. Dunne declined to comment. As reported by The New York Times.
Without Mr. Bragg’s commitment to move forward, the prosecutors late last month postponed a plan to question at least one witness before the grand jury, one of the people said. They have not questioned any witnesses in front of the grand jury for more than a month, essentially pausing their investigation into whether Mr. Trump inflated the value of his assets to obtain favorable loan terms from banks.
The precise reasons for Mr. Bragg’s pullback are unknown, and he has made few public statements about the status of the inquiry since taking office, but the prosecutors had encountered a number of challenges in pursuing Mr. Trump. Notably, they had thus far been unable to persuade any Trump Organization executives to cooperate and turn on Mr. Trump.
In a statement responding to the resignations of the prosecutors, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg said that he was “grateful for their service” and that the investigation was ongoing.
Time is running out for this grand jury, whose term is scheduled to expire in April. Prosecutors can ask jurors to vote to extend their term but generally avoid doing so. They also are often reluctant to impanel a new grand jury after an earlier one has heard testimony, because witnesses could make conflicting statements if asked to testify again.
And without Mr. Dunne, a high-ranking veteran of the office who has been closely involved with the inquiry for years, and Mr. Pomerantz, a leading figure in New York legal circles who was enlisted to work on it, the yearslong investigation could peter out.
In mid-January, reporters for The New York Times observed significant activity related to the investigation at the Lower Manhattan courthouse where the grand jury meets, with at least two witnesses visiting the building and staying inside for hours.
The witnesses were Mr. Trump’s longtime accountant and an expert in the real estate industry, according to people familiar with the appearances, which have not been previously reported. Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz also made regular appearances at the courthouse.
The burst of activity offered a sign that Mr. Bragg was forging ahead with the grand jury phase of the investigation, a final step before seeking charges.
But in recent weeks, that activity has ceased, and Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz have been seen only rarely.
The pause coincides with an escalation in the activity of a parallel civil inquiry by the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, whose office is examining some of the same conduct by Mr. Trump and is also participating in the criminal inquiry.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Ms. James’s office said of the criminal inquiry, “The investigation is ongoing, and there is a robust team working on it.”
Ms. James, who last week received approval from a judge to question Mr. Trump and two of his adult children under oath, has filed court documents describing a number of ways in which the Trump Organization appeared to have misrepresented the value of its properties.
She concluded that the company had engaged in “fraudulent or misleading” practices, and although she lacks the authority to criminally charge Mr. Trump, she could sue him.
Mr. Bragg’s office must meet a higher bar to bring a criminal case. And for his part, Mr. Trump has disputed the notion that he inflated his property values or defrauded his lenders and has accused Mr. Bragg and Ms. James, both Democrats who are Black, of being politically motivated and “racists.”
“I’ve been representing Donald Trump for over a year in this case, and I haven’t found any evidence that could lead to a prosecution against him, or any crimes,” said a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Ronald P. Fischetti. “I hope Mr. Bragg will now look again at all the evidence in the case and make a statement that he is discontinuing all investigation of Donald Trump.”
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As Mr. Bragg’s grand jury presentation has come to a halt, another serious criminal inquiry into the former president has been gaining steam. In recent weeks, a judge has approved the convening of a grand jury for an investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.
The Manhattan investigation, which proceeded in fits and starts for years, was the most developed of the three criminal inquiries into Mr. Trump. It resulted in the indictments last summer of the Trump Organization and its long-serving chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, on separate tax-related charges.
After announcing those charges, the prosecutors zeroed in on a subject that has spurred much debate over the years: Mr. Trump’s net worth.
They have questioned whether Mr. Trump defrauded his lenders — sophisticated financial institutions like Deutsche Bank — by routinely inflating the value of his assets, The Times has previously reported.
In particular, the prosecutors have focused on annual financial statements Mr. Trump provided to the lenders, scrutinizing whether he overvalued his various hotels, golf clubs and other properties to score the best possible loan terms.
Mr. Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, compiled the statements based on information provided by the Trump Organization, leading the prosecutors to question whether the company had given its accountants bogus data.
Early this month, Mazars notified the Trump Organization that it would no longer serve as its accountant and that it could no longer stand behind a decade of Mr. Trump’s financial statements.
Mazars said it had not, “as a whole,” found material discrepancies between the information the Trump Organization provided and the true value of Mr. Trump’s assets.
But given what it called “the totality of circumstances” — including its internal investigation and Ms. James’s court papers — Mazars instructed the company to notify anyone who had received the statements that they “should not be relied upon.”
Even with the retraction from Mazars, a criminal case would likely be difficult to prove. The documents, known as statements of financial condition, contain a number of disclaimers, including acknowledgments that Mr. Trump’s accountants had neither audited nor authenticated his claims.
And the prosecutors would have to show that Mr. Trump’s penchant for hyperbole crossed the line into criminality, a tall order when it comes to something as subjective as property values. A case like this might hinge on the testimony of a Trump insider, but the prosecutors have not persuaded Mr. Weisselberg to cooperate with the investigation, depriving them of the type of insider witness whose testimony can be crucial to complicated white-collar criminal trials.
Another challenge is that Mr. Trump’s lenders might not appear to a jury to be sympathetic victims. The lenders, which made millions of dollars in interest from Mr. Trump, conducted their own assessments of his assets.
Russian troops launched a wide-ranging attack on Ukraine yesterday (see video recap above), with explosions heard before dawn in the capital Kyiv and other cities.
In a televised address as the attack began, Putin warned other countries that any attempt to interfere would “lead to consequences you have never seen in history.”
Ukrainians started fleeing some cities, and the Russian military claimed to have incapacitated all of Ukraine’s air defenses and air bases within hours.
World leaders decried the start of an invasion that could cause massive casualties, topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government and threaten the post-Cold War balance on the continent.
U.S. President Joe Biden declared that the world will “hold Russia accountable.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg condemned Russia’s action as a violation of international law and a threat to European security.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said Russia’s intent was to destroy the state of Ukraine, a Westward-looking democracy intent on moving out of Moscow’s orbit.
Here are the things to know about the conflict over Ukraine and the security crisis in Eastern Europe as provided by the Associated Press.
PUTIN MAKES HIS MOVE
Putin said the military operation was needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine — a claim the U.S. had predicted he would falsely make to justify an invasion.
Putin accused the U.S. and its allies of ignoring Russia’s demands to block Ukraine from ever joining NATO and offer Moscow security guarantees.
Putin said Russia does not intend to occupy Ukraine but will “demilitarize” it. Soon after his address, explosions were heard in the cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa. Russia said it was attacking military targets.
He urged Ukrainian servicemen to “immediately put down arms and go home.”
Ukraine’s border guard agency said the Russian military has attacked from neighboring Belarus, unleashing a barrage of artillery. The agency said Ukrainian border guards fired back, adding that there was no immediate report of casualties. Russian troops have been in Belarus for military drills.
THE WEST REACTS QUICKLY
Biden, Stoltenberg and other world leaders quickly condemned Russia’s attack as unprovoked and unjustified.
Putin “has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering,” Biden said in a statement.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says Western allies will not stand by as Russia attacks Ukraine, and told Zelenskyy in an early morning call that he was appalled by events.
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Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said: “This Russian invasion stands to put at risk the basic principle of international order that forbids one-sided action of force in an attempt to change the status quo.”
UKRAINE’S PRESIDENT URGES CALM
Residents of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, could be heard shouting in the streets when the first explosions sounded. But some kind of normalcy quickly returned, with cars circulating in the streets in the early morning commute.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued a video statement declaring martial law. He told Ukrainians that the United States was gathering international support to respond to Russia. He urged residents to remain calm and stay at home.
WORLD MARKETS FALL
World stock markets have plunged and oil prices surged by nearly $6 per barrel after Putin launched Russian military action in Ukraine.
Market benchmarks tumbled in Europe and Asia and U.S. futures were sharply lower. Brent crude oil jumped to over $100 per barrel Thursday on unease about possible disruption of Russian supplies.
The ruble sank 7.5% to more than $87 to the U.S. dollar. Earlier, Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 index fell 1.8% to an eight-month low after the Kremlin said rebels in eastern Ukraine asked for military assistance.
PUTIN’S DECLARATION OVERTAKES EMERGENCY U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL SESSION
At an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by Ukraine that opened just before Putin’s announcement, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told Putin: “Stop your troops from attacking Ukraine. Give peace a chance. Too many people have already died.”
Guterres later pleaded with Putin, “In the name of humanity, bring your troops back to Russia.”
WHEN WILL THE WEST IMPOSE MORE SANCTIONS?
Ukraine’s forces are no match for Moscow’s military might, so Kyiv is counting on other countries to hit Russia hard — with sanctions.
Biden on Wednesday allowed sanctions to move forward against the company that built the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and against the company’s CEO.
Biden waived sanctions last year when the project was almost completed, in return for an agreement from Germany to take action against Russia if it used gas as a weapon or attacked Ukraine. Germany said Tuesday it was indefinitely suspending the pipeline.
Biden said more sanctions would be announced on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the European Union planned the “strongest, the harshest package” ever, to be considered at a summit on Thursday, according to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
“A major nuclear power has attacked a neighbor country and is threatening reprisals of any other states that may come to the rescue,” Borrell said.
“This is not only the greatest violation of international law, it’s a violation of the basic principles of human co-existence. It’s costing many lives with unknown consequences ahead of us. The European Union will respond in the strongest possible terms.”
WHAT SANCTIONS WERE UNDER U.S. CONSIDERATION IF RUSSIA INVADED?
The Biden administration had made clear it was holding tough financial penalties in reserve in case of just such a Russian invasion.
The U.S. hasn’t specified just what measures it will take now, although administration officials have made clear that all-out sanctions against Russia’s major banks are among the likely options. So are export limits that would deny Russia U.S. high tech for its industries and military.
Another tough measure under consideration would effectively shut Russia out of much of the global financial system.
HOW IS UKRAINE’S ECONOMY HOLDING UP?
It was Ukraine, not Russia, where the economy was eroding the fastest under the threat of war.
One by one, embassies and international offices in Kyiv closed. Flight after flight was canceled when insurance companies balked at covering planes arriving in Ukraine. Hundreds of millions of dollars in investment dried up within weeks.
The squeezing of Ukraine’s economy is a key destabilizing tactic in what the government describes as “hybrid warfare” intended to eat away at the country from within.
The economic woes include restaurants that dare not keep more than a few days of food on hand, stalled plans for a hydrogen production plant that could help wean Europe off Russian gas and uncertain conditions for shipping in the Black Sea, where container ships must carefully edge their way around Russian military vessels.
In addition to DDoS attacks on Wednesday, cybersecurity researchers said unidentified attackers had infected hundreds of computers with destructive malware, some in neighboring Latvia and Lithuania.
Officials have long expected cyberattacks to precede and accompany any Russian military incursion.
HOW HAS THE CONFRONTATION BEEN SEEN IN RUSSIA?
In the buildup to the attack, Russian state media portrayed Moscow as coming to the rescue of war-torn areas of eastern Ukraine where residents were tormented by Ukraine’s aggression.
“You paid with your blood for these eight years of torment and anticipation,” anchor Olga Skabeyeva said during a popular political talk show Tuesday morning. “Russia will now be defending Donbas.”
Channel One struck a more festive tone, with its correspondent in Donetsk asserting that local residents “say it is the best news over the past years of war.”
“Now they have confidence in the future and that the years-long war will finally come to an end,” she said.
Whether ordinary Russians were buying it is another question.
This article was forwarded to me by my colleague, Ray Schroeder, at the University of Illinois at Springfield. It was published in ZDNet.
DeepMind says its research could eventually help programmers code more efficiently and open up the field to people who don’t code.
Deciding which programming language to learn is a big question for developers today because of the huge investment in time it takes. But that question could be rendered redundant in a future where artificial intelligence (AI) models do all the heavy lifting by understanding a problem’s description and coding a solution.
Researchers from Google’s AI-focused unit DeepMind claim its AlphaCode system can express solutions to problems in code that achieves a median-level score in programming competitions undertaken by new programmers. Those competitions require humans to comprehend a problem described in natural language and then code an algorithm efficiently.
In a new non-peer reviewed paper, DeepMind researchers detail how AlphaCode achieved an average ranking of the top 54.3% of participants in 10 previously held programming competitions with more than 5,000 participants. The competitions were hosted on the Codeforces code competition platform.
DeepMind claims AlphaCode is first AI code generation system that performs at a competitive level in code competitions for human developers. The research could improve programmer productivity and may help non-programmers express a solution without knowing how to write code.
Human contestants and, therefore, AlphaCode needed to parse a description of a challenge or puzzle and quickly write a program to solve them. This is more difficult than training a model using GitHub data to solve a simple coding challenge.
Like humans, AlphaCode needed to comprehend a multi-paragraph natural language description of the problem, background narrative details, and a description of the desired solution in terms of input and output.
To solve the problem, the competitor would need to create an algorithm and then implement the algorithm efficiently, potentially requiring they select, say, a faster programming language like C++ over Python to overcome those constraints.
AlphaCode’s pre-training dataset included 715 GB of code from files taken from GitHub repositories written in C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Lua, Python, PHP, Ruby, Rust, and Scala. The team fine-tuned the model using datasets of competitive programming problems scraped from Codeforces and similar datasets.
The boost DeepMind gave AlphaCode was achieved by combining large-scale transformer models. Examples of these include OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s BERT language model. DeepMind used transformer-based language models to generate code then filter the output to a small set of “promising programs” that were submitted for evaluation.
“At evaluation time, we create a massive amount of C++ and Python programs for each problem, orders of magnitude larger than previous work,” DeepMind’s AlphaCode team explain in a blogpost.
“Then we filter, cluster, and re-rank those solutions to a small set of 10 candidate programs that we submit for external assessment. This automated system replaces competitors’ trial-and-error process of debugging, compiling, passing tests, and eventually submitting.”
DeepMind demonstrates how AlphaCode codes a solution to a given problem here.
DeepMind considers a few potential downsides to what it’s trying to achieve. For example, models can generate code with exploitable weaknesses, including “unintentional vulnerabilities from outdated code or intentional ones injected by malicious actors into the training set.”
Also, there are environmental costs. Training the model required “hundreds of petaFLOPS days” in Google’s data centers. But AI code generation over the longer term “could lead to systems that can recursively write and improve themselves, rapidly leading to more and more advanced systems.”
There is a risk that automation reduces demand for developers, but DeepMind points to limitations of today’s code completion tools that greatly improve programming productivity, yet until recently were limited to single-line suggestions and restricted to certain languages or short code snippets.
However, DeepMind emphasizes its work is nowhere near being a threat to human programmers, but that its systems need to be able to develop problem-solving capabilities to help humanity.
“Our exploration into code generation leaves vast room for improvement and hints at even more exciting ideas that could help programmers improve their productivity and open up the field to people who do not currently write code,” DeepMind researchers say.
Not sure where this will leave the programmers of the world!
World leaders yesterday announced financial sanctions, trade and travel bans and other measures meant to pressure Moscow to pull back from it’s aggression against Ukraine,
Nations in Asia and the Pacific also prepared for the possibility of both economic pain, in the form of cuts to traditional energy and grain supply lines, and retaliation from Russian cyberattacks. As reported by the Associated Press.
“We can’t have some suggestion that Russia has some just case here that they’re prosecuting. They’re behaving like thugs and bullies, and they should be called out as thugs and bullies,” Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said while announcing targeted financial sanctions and travel bans as a first step in response to Russian aggression toward Ukraine.
In Japan, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced sanctions targeting Russia and the two separatist Ukrainian regions.
Kishida told reporters that Tokyo will ban any new issuance and distribution of Russian government bonds in Japan because of “a series of actions Russia has been taking in Ukraine.”
Kishida said Japan will also stop issuing visas to people linked to the two Ukrainian rebel regions and will freeze their assets in Japan. Tokyo will also ban trade with the two areas. He said Japanese officials are finalizing further details and added that Japan could increase sanctions if the situation worsens.
Japan opened a temporary office in Lviv, in western Ukraine, to help evacuate about 120 Japanese citizens, and has arranged chartered flights in nearby countries, Kishida said.
Officials in South Korea, which relies on imports to meet nearly all fossil fuel demand, held emergency meetings yesterday to weigh how seriously events in Ukraine would hurt their country’s economy.
The fallout has so far been limited, but First Vice Finance Minister Lee Eog-weon said things could worsen if the situation in Ukraine escalates and there’s a “disruption of energy supply chains and an increase in market volatility.”
While South Korea relies heavily on imports from Russia and Ukraine for wheat and corn, Lee said the country has enough reserves to last until June or July.
The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy also discussed ways to secure alternative energy supplies in case the Ukraine crisis disrupts the current methods.
U.S. officials have said an invasion is all but inevitable. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled plans for a Thursday meeting in Geneva with his Russian counterpart, saying it would not be productive and that Russia’s actions indicated Moscow was not serious about a peaceful path to resolving the crisis.
More than two dozen European Union members unanimously agreed to levy their own initial set of sanctions against Russian officials. Germany also said it was halting the process of certifying the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia — a lucrative deal long sought by Moscow but criticized by the United States for increasing Europe’s reliance on Russian energy.
The United States moved to cut off Russia’s government from Western finance, sanctioning two of its banks and blocking it from trading its debt on American and European markets. The Biden administration’s actions hit civilian leaders in Russia’s leadership hierarchy and two Russian banks considered especially close to the Kremlin and Russia’s military, with more than $80 billion in assets. That includes freezing all of those banks’ assets under U.S. jurisdictions.
Australia’s cabinet Wednesday approved sanctions and travel bans that target eight members of the Russian Security Council, and agreed to align with the United States and Britain by targeting two Russian banks.
“It’s important that we play our part in the broader international community to ensure that those who are financing, profiting from an autocratic and authoritarian regime that is invading its neighbor should have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide when it comes to trying to move their money around,” said Morrison, the prime minister.
Australia also warned businesses to prepare for retaliation through Russian cyberattacks.
In New Zealand, Russian Ambassador Georgii Zuev was summoned to meet with top diplomatic officials and “to hear New Zealand’s strong opposition to the actions taken by Russia in recent days,” said Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta in a statement. Mahuta is currently traveling abroad.
At the United Nations, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the world is facing “the biggest global peace and security crisis in recent years.” He called Russia’s declaration of the “so-called `independence’” of separatist areas in eastern Ukraine a violation of its territorial integrity and accused Moscow of “the perversion of the concept of peacekeeping.”
He urged the international community to rally “to save the people of Ukraine and beyond from the scourge of war” without further bloodshed.
In Washington, lawmakers from both parties in Congress displayed a largely unified front backing an independent Ukraine and vowing continued U.S. support, even as some pushed for swifter and even more severe sanctions on Russia.
On Tuesday, members of Russia’s upper house, the Federation Council, voted unanimously to allow Putin to use military force outside the country — effectively formalizing a Russian military deployment to the rebel regions, where an eight-year conflict has killed nearly 14,000 people.
This situation will not end well for Ukraine, Russia, or anyone!
I just published an e-Book entitled, The Computer Wasn’t in the Basement Anymore: My Fifty + Years in Education Technology (1970-2021). Edited by my wife, Elaine Bowden, it traces fifty plus years of working with education technology. The idea for this book came from my colleague, Charles Graham, from the University of Utah, who read my novel, Our Bathtub Wasn’t in the Kitchen Anymore, that traced a young man’s life growing up in the South Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s.
After reading the novel, he sent me this email:
“I found myself wishing that you hadn’t ended where you did. Because the Vietnam War seemed to be such an important part of your learning and struggle with the truth around you…I was also hoping to find out how you chose to move into educational technology and ultimately online/blended learning and become a player in that domain. Volume 2:The Computer Wasn’t in the Library Anymore .” (Graham., May 20, 2020)
My major purpose in writing The Computer Wasn’t in the Basement Anymore.. is to share my insights and experiences, all of which involved some aspect of education technology, and included administrative, instructional and research activities. The title reflects how computer technology, once relegated to out of the way places such as basements, has blossomed with the ubiquity of the Internet, social networking, and smartphones. Computers are now everywhere in every room of every home, office, restaurant, industry, store, school, college, and in our pockets.
While my personal journey is the common thread in The Computer Wasn’t in the Basement Anymore…, the book also provides a history of the evolution of education technology between 1970 and 2021, the time during which I worked with all types of hardware and software – from plug board computers to large mainframes, to emerging PCs, to the Internet, and to the latest iPhones and handheld devices. In reflecting back, I came to see that these decades weren’t just about technology but about how events in the larger institutions (CUNY and SUNY), with which I was affiliated as well as the broader society were integrated into a complex web of interactions that shaped and molded everything. I also included over 300 mentions of students, faculty and colleagues with whom I worked.
One of the good guys at Fox News, host Neil Cavuto, returned to the airwaves yesterday after a month-long absence, revealing to viewers that he had been battling a life-threatening COVID-19 infection in an intensive care unit.
“I did get COVID again. But a far, far more serious strand. What doctors call COVID pneumonia. It landed me in intensive care for quite a while and it really was touch and go,” Cavuto said on Fox Business’ “Coast to Coast.”
“Some of you who wanted to put me out of my misery darn near got what you wished for. So, sorry to disappoint you,” he added, apparently referring to death threats and abuse he received last year after encouraging viewers to get vaccinated. He did so after he suffered a breakthrough COVID-19 infection in October.
In October and again last night, he credited the vaccine for saving his life.
“Because I’ve had cancer and right now I have multiple sclerosis, I’m among the vulnerable 3 percenters or so of the population that cannot sustain the full benefits of a vaccine,” he said. “In other words, it simply doesn’t last. But let me be clear, doctors say had I not been vaccinated at all, I wouldn’t be here. It provided some defense, but that is still better than no defense.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday recognized the independence of Moscow-backed rebel regions in eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas, a move that will further fuel tensions with the West amid fears of Russian invasion. He also told Russia’s defense ministry to deploy troops into the region to “keep the peace.”
Putin’s move follows days of heightened tensions in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, where Ukrainian forces are locked in a nearly eight-year conflict with Russia-backed separatists that has left more than 14,000 people dead.
The Associated Press provided the following background on the Donbas in eastern Ukraine that includes Donetsk and Luhansk.
SEPARATIST REBELLION IN THE EAST
When Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly president was driven from office by mass protests in February 2014, Russia responded by annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. It then threw its weight behind an insurgency in the mostly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine region known as Donbas.
In April 2014, Russia-backed rebels seized government buildings in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, proclaimed the creation of “people’s republics” and battled Ukrainian troops and volunteer battalions.
The following month, the separatist regions held a popular vote to declare independence and make a bid to become part of Russia. Moscow hasn’t accepted the motion, just used the regions as a tool to keep Ukraine in its orbit and prevent it from joining NATO.
Ukraine and the West accused Russia of backing the rebels with troops and weapons. Moscow denied that, saying any Russians who fought there were volunteers.
Amid ferocious battles involving tanks, heavy artillery and warplanes, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people aboard. An international probe concluded that the passenger jet was downed by a Russia-supplied missile from the rebel-controlled territory in Ukraine. Moscow still denied any involvement.
PEACE AGREEMENTS FOR EASTERN UKRAINE
After a massive defeat of Ukrainian troops in August 2014, envoys from Kyiv, the rebels and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe signed a truce in the Belarusian capital of Minsk in September 2014.
The document envisaged an OSCE-observed cease-fire, a pullback of all foreign fighters, an exchange of prisoners and hostages, an amnesty for the rebels and a promise that separatist regions could have a degree of self-rule.
The deal quickly collapsed and large-scale fighting resumed, leading to another major defeat for Ukrainian forces at Debaltseve in January-February of 2015.
France and Germany brokered another peace agreement, which was signed in Minsk in February 2015 by representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the rebels. It envisaged a new cease-fire, a pullback of heavy weapons and a series of moves toward a political settlement. A declaration backing the deal was signed by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany.
A FROZEN CONFLICT IN UKRAINE
The 2015 peace deal was a major diplomatic coup for the Kremlin, obliging Ukraine to grant special status to the separatist regions, allowing them to create their own police force and have a say in appointing local prosecutors and judges. It also envisaged that Ukraine could only regain control over the roughly 200-kilometer (125-mile) border with Russia in rebel regions after they get self-rule and hold OSCE-monitored local elections — balloting that would almost certainly keep pro-Moscow rebels in power there.
Many Ukrainians see it as a betrayal of national interests and its implementation has stalled.
The Minsk document helped end full-scale fighting, but the situation has remained tense and regular skirmishes have continued.
With the Minsk deal stalled, Moscow’s hope to use rebel regions to directly influence Ukraine’s politics has failed but the frozen conflict has drained Kyiv’s resources and effectively stymied its goal of joining NATO — which is enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution.
Moscow also has worked to secure its hold on the rebel regions by handing out more than 720,000 Russian passports to roughly one-fifth of their population of about 3.6 million. It has provided economic and financial assistance to the separatist territories, but the aid has been insufficient to alleviate the massive damage from fighting and shore up the economy. The Donbas region accounted for about 16% of Ukraine’s GDP before the conflict.
EFFORTS TO REVIVE PEACE DEAL
Amid soaring tensions over the Russian troop concentration near Ukraine, France and Germany embarked on renewed efforts to encourage compliance with the 2015 deal, in hopes that it could help defuse the current standoff.
Facing calls from Berlin and Paris for its implementation, Ukrainian officials have strengthened their criticism of the Minsk deal and warned that it could lead to the country’s demise. Two rounds of talks in Paris and Berlin between presidential envoys from Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany have yielded no progress.
The lower house of the Russian parliament, meanwhile, urged Putin last week to recognize the independence of Ukraine’s rebel regions.
PUTIN RECOGNIZES REBEL REGIONS’ INDEPENDENCE
Putin’s recognition of the rebel-held territories’ independence effectively shatters the Minsk peace agreements and will further fuel tensions with the West. He said that Moscow would sign friendship treaties with the rebel territories, a move that could pave the way for Russia to openly support them with troops and weapons.
The move follows several days of shelling that erupted along the line of contact in Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine and the West accused Moscow of fomenting the tensions to create a pretext for an invasion. Russia, in turn, accused Ukraine of trying to reclaim the rebel-held territories by force, the claim that Kyiv strongly rejected.
On Friday, separatist leaders released video statements announcing the evacuation of civilians in the face of what they described as a Ukrainian “aggression.” The data embedded in the video indicated that their statements had been pre-recorded two days earlier when the situation was still relatively calm, suggesting a deliberate plan to try to sever the regions from Ukraine.
The rebel chiefs put out new video statements Monday urging Putin to recognize their regions’ independence and the Russian leader responded quickly by convening a carefully orchestrated meeting of his Security Council and then signing the recognition decrees in a televised ceremony.
Depending upon how this situation plays out, we will be hearing a good deal about this part of the Ukraine in the days and weeks to come.
New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, had a piece yesterday, entitled, “Can Dems Dodge Doomsday,” commenting on the dismal predictions for the Democratic Party for the 2022 midterm elections. She quotes three long-time Democratic Party insides: James Carville, David Axelrod and Stan Greenberg. She goes on to comment that all three Dems are speaking out with startling candor about the impending Repubocalypse. Here is an excerpt:
“Many Americans are fed up. The jumbled Covid response has eroded an already shaky trust in government. Inflation is biting. War is looming. Things feel out of control. People are anxious and reassessing their lives. Democrats have to connect with that.
The Democrats are stepping all over themselves. And Republicans are doing all they can to prevent the Democrats from accomplishing anything, and then are trashing them for not doing anything. Voters like to punish the people in power. So if the Democrats don’t figure it out, Jim Jordan is going to be running the House and pushing investigations of Biden and Hillary. They can’t quit her.
Exhausted, confused, isolated and depressed Americans are not buying the Democratic line that things are better than they look.
Biden’s superpower was supposed to be empathy, but nobody’s feeling it.”
The entire article below is worth a read. It screams out for action on the part of Biden and the Democrats!
Tony
—————————————————————————————————————————————
The New York Times
Can Dems Dodge Doomsday?
Feb. 19, 2022
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist
It may be a TikTok world, but sometimes old hacks know best.
James Carville helped Bill Clinton get elected against stiff odds. David Axelrod helped Barack Obama get elected against stiff odds. And Stan Greenberg was the first to identify the fateful trend of Reagan Democrats.
All three Dems are speaking out with startling candor about the impending Repubocalypse. Many Americans are fed up. The jumbled Covid response has eroded an already shaky trust in government. Inflation is biting. War is looming. Things feel out of control. People are anxious and reassessing their lives. Democrats have to connect with that.
The Democrats are stepping all over themselves. And Republicans are doing all they can to prevent the Democrats from accomplishing anything, and then are trashing them for not doing anything. Voters like to punish the people in power. So if the Democrats don’t figure it out, Jim Jordan is going to be running the House and pushing investigations of Biden and Hillary. They can’t quit her.
Exhausted, confused, isolated and depressed Americans are not buying the Democratic line that things are better than they look.
Biden’s superpower was supposed to be empathy, but nobody’s feeling it.
“He is depriving himself of his strongest assets: empathy and an identification with the day-to-day lives of people,” Axelrod said. “One of Biden’s strengths is that, at his best, he speaks the language of America, not Washington. But he has been speaking more in the voice of government officials than he has of Scranton Joe. He needs to get back there.
“Gary Hart told me the smartest thing I ever heard in politics: ‘Washington is always the last to get the news.’”
Axelrod understands, from his days in the White House, that the Biden team is frustrated because they feel the public doesn’t appreciate their achievements, and they don’t understand why. Biden’s advisers are urging him just to sell harder and people will get it. Axelrod disagrees: “You cannot persuade people if their lived experience is telling them something different. We’ve been through hell in America and around the world.”
In a Times opinion piece, Axelrod said Biden should avoid “off-key” triumphalism in his State of the Union address, and remember the country is traumatized.
Carville, still a Ragin’ Cajun, took time out from his Mardi Gras planning to reiterate points he has made in a Vox interview and elsewhere: Democrats should not be defined by their left wing or condone nutty slogans like “Defund the police.” They should work not to seem like an “urban, coastal, arrogant party” indulging in “faculty lounge politics” that appeal to reason rather than emotion and use “woke” words like “Latinx.”
“Seventy percent of the people in San Francisco tried to warn us,” he said of the battle among Democrats that ended up with voters firing three far-left school board members who mandated a long break from in-person learning during the pandemic and who wanted to rechristen schools named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
“They’re not popular,” Carville said of such far-lefties, adding in a line spoken directly to them: “People don’t like you.”
Right now, he said, Americans are seeing “confusion and disorder.”
“You’ve got to give people the sense that they may not be all that happy in 2022 but if they vote for the Republicans, they’re going to lose a lot of the things they have now,” Carville said.
He’s mystified about the Trumpified Republicans. “If there’s one thing we were kind of united about, it was that you couldn’t trust the Russians,” he said. “Now people on Fox are pulling for the Russians. Go figure.” (Tucker Carlson asked, “Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?”)
Carville is also flummoxed that Republicans could defend the Jan. 6 madness as “legitimate political discourse.”
“Ninety-eight percent of people on the Mall on Jan. 6 were white,” he said. “We need better white people in the United States.”
In a blunt piece in The American Prospect, Greenberg warned Democrats not to use Obama as a closer in campaigns anymore or to present themselves as the party of Obama.
Once, Democrats believed that Obama’s multiracial coolness would animate his party. But his failure to prosecute any bankers after the near-collapse of the economy solidified fears that Wall Street and Washington were in cahoots.
“Obama did not give voice to the hurt and anger that working class voters were feeling,” Greenberg wrote, adding that Democratic leaders “stopped advocating for workers against corporate excess and stopped challenging the exceptional corruption that allowed billionaires and Wall Street to dominate politics. The result is that the Democratic Party has lost touch with all working people, including its own base.”
An Associated Press story’s headline echoed his point: “‘The Brand Is So Toxic’: Dems Fear Extinction in Rural U.S.”
Greenberg said he’s tired of trying to warn Democrats that they’re driving people away. Fretting about the threat of Trumpism, given that the Democrats are bleeding working-class voters, including Black and Hispanic ones, he told me, “If they don’t listen this time, we’re going to end up with fascism, dammit.”
New York State is getting too close to Trump for comfort and lashed out in the media about his long-time accounting firm’s decision last week to sever ties with the Trump Organization.
He insisted yesterday that the firm Mazars USA was “broken” by “Radical leftist racist prosecutors.”
As usual, Trump offers no evidence for his accusations that the prosecutors are racist. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and state Attorney General Letitia James — who are both investigating Trump Organization business practices — are Black.
Trump quoted Mazars’ statement that it “performed its work in accordance with professional standards.” But Mazars didn’t say the same about the Trump Organization.
Mazars terminated its relationship, it explained in a letter that was part of a court document filed last week, because ten years of financial statements it had prepared with records provided by the Trump Organization could no longer be considered reliable.
It ducked out of its relationship with Trump as the attorney general investigates whether Trump inflated asset values to obtain bank loans and entice investors, and reduced values to lower tax bills
Trump also claimed in his first, lengthy, statement about Mazars’ defection last Tuesday that the company had been “threatened” and “intimidated” by James’ office to back away from his business. He went on at length to discuss his own company’s finances and financial practices.
James quickly fired off a letter to the judge presiding over her investigation about Trump’s first Mazars statement, noting that it flatly contradicted claims by his own attorneys.
Clearly, Trump knows “exactly what OAG is investigating,” she wrote, referencing the Office of the Attorney General.
Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron last Thursday ordered Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. to sit for depositions to answer questions under oath concerning the Trump Organization and James’ probe.
According to some observers, such as conservative George Conway, the loss of his long-time accountants can be as bad, if not worse, for Trump than the consequences of his impeachment.
Tony
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