State Dept. Spokesman Ned Price, seen on Monday, says the Biden administration is willing to talk with Iranian and European officials about the nuclear deal.
Kevin Lamarque/AP
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Kevin Lamarque/AP
State Dept. Spokesman Ned Price, seen on Monday, says the Biden administration is willing to talk with Iranian and European officials about the nuclear deal.
Kevin Lamarque/AP
The United States said on Thursday it was ready to restart diplomacy with Tehran around a nuclear deal sealed between Iran and world powers, but which the Trump administration had abandoned in 2018.
“The United States would accept an invitation from the European Union High Representative to attend a meeting of the P5+1 and Iran to discuss a diplomatic way forward on Iran’s nuclear program,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said, referring to the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany.
Speaking to reporters on background, two senior State Department officials described two steps that Washington had taken to remove what they said were “obstacles to multilateral diplomacy.” The officials said the U.S. had reversed travel restrictions that the Trump administration had put in place on Iranian diplomats at the United Nations. The Biden administration also told the United Nations earlier on Thursday it was rescinding a Trump administration claim that U.N. sanctions against Iran “snapped back” and should be enforced.
Even if the meeting does happen, one of the officials noted, it would not necessarily be a “breakthrough,” but it was the first step toward a return to diplomacy.
Earlier on Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with major European allies – France, Germany and the United Kingdom – and reaffirmed President Biden’s position that should Iran come back into compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would do the same “and is prepared to engage in discussions with Iran toward that end.” Iran insists that the U.S. should return to the deal first before it makes any moves.
The Biden administration moves represent the first significant, if small, steps toward restoring diplomacy on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal sealed during the Obama administration, in which Iran’s nuclear program was restricted in exchange for sanctions relief.
The diplomatic offer also comes days ahead of a deadline Iran has set in which it has demanded the Biden administration start reversing sanctions imposed under the Trump administration, or else it would ban snap inspections by the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog.
Former President Trump had withdrawn from the accord in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran. A year later, Iran began breaching commitments made in the deal.
Rather than continue negotiations with Australia regarding paying for the news content circulating on its platform, Facebook decided to pull up stakes. Within hours, the company announced it would “restrict publishers and people in Australia” from sharing or viewing news content. This restriction was also global — Facebook users the world over would now be prohibited from posting links from Australian news publishers.
In other words, a sovereign national government attempted to assert itself against Facebook. And in response, Facebook canceled the country.
The details of this dispute largely concern ad revenue; details that are as complex as they are mundane. But to characterize Facebook’s actions as merely those of a private company engaging in contract negotiations wildly shades the reality of the near-hegemonic power Facebook has amassed over the global flow of information.
Facebook consistently polls as a major news source in countries around the world. In poorer countries like Myanmar, it is virtually indistinguishable from the Internet itself, which is why Myanmar’s government was able to successfully wield the platform to incite a genocide in 2018.
In countries the world over, Facebook has intentionally wound itself around the infrastructure of how societies consume news, transmit information, and speak to one another. It has become a chokepoint for vital information. What is now clear is how easily that power can be weaponized on Facebook’s behalf.
Within hours of Facebook’s announcement, the Facebook pages of Nine, News Corp, and the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corp, which acts as a central information source during natural disasters, were blank. So, too, were the Facebook pages of major regional health departments, where a quarter of the country’s 25 million people regularly gather information regarding COVID-19.
As bushfires rage across the country, the Facebook page of the Bureau of Meteorology was also wiped clean. Regional Department of Fire and Emergency Service offices were prevented from posting emergency bushfire warnings.
The extent of Facebook’s power allows it to threaten a country’s government by holding hostage massive amounts of its social infrastructure. What we are witnessing is hardly a contractual dispute, but a power struggle between a sovereign self-government and a private corporation so dominant it exists as a hegemon in its own right.
It is very much a proxy for how global governments and their citizens are struggling with Big Tech companies who, by controlling the flow of information, are shaping the very boundaries of free and democratic societies.
How this dispute ends, in Australia and the world over, will tell us who rules: is it the people, speaking through their self-government, or the tech authoritarians, who arrogantly wield their power as unaccountable private superstates, to whom we all must yield?
Rachel Bovard is the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute and a senior advisor to the Internet Accountability Project.
Texas was ‘seconds and minutes’ away from ‘monthslong’ power outages the embattled CEO of ERCOT said Thursday as he defended the grid’s rolling blackouts.
A week of below-freezing temperatures knocked about a third of the state’s generating capacity offline, resulting in the greatest forced blackout in U.S. history and exposing weaknesses of Texas’ unique approach to power grid management.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, operates the power grid that covers most of the state and was behind the decision to have rolling blackouts which left up to 4 million people enduring outages in subfreezing temperatures.
Its CEO Bill Magness told The Texas Tribune Thursday that if operators had not acted ‘immediately’ in implementing them Monday morning the state would have faced an ‘indeterminately long’ electricity crisis.
He said: ‘It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system.’
Texas was ‘seconds and minutes’ away from ‘monthslong’ power outages Bill Magness, pictured, the CEO of ERCOT said Thursday as he defended the grid’s rolling blackouts
A week of below-freezing temperatures knocked about a third of the state’s generating capacity offline, resulting in the greatest forced blackout in U.S. history and exposing weaknesses of Texas’ unique approach to power grid management. Cities in Texas are pictured on January 31 with power and then on February 16 without
Energy officials had seen huge amounts of supply dropping off the grid as temperatures cropped cold enough to freeze natural gas supply lines and to stop wind turbines from spinning.
Plunging temperatures also caused Texans to turn up their heaters, including many inefficient electric ones. Demand spiked to levels normally seen only on the hottest summer days, when millions of air conditioners run at full tilt.
Magness added: ‘What happens in that next minute might be that three more [power generation] units come offline, and then you’re sunk.’
Houston, Texas: Donated water is distributed to residents, Thursday. A water crisis was also unfolding after Texas officials ordered 7 million people to boil tap water before drinking it
Houston, Texas: : A person carries empty propane tanks Thursday, bringing them to refill at a propane gas station after winter weather caused electricity blackouts
Texans were on Thursday beginning to see power restored.
But the storm has left at least 15 people dead across the state; In the Houston area, one family died from carbon monoxide as their car idled in their garage.
A 75-year-old woman and her three grandchildren were killed in a fire that authorities said might have been caused by a fireplace they were using.
And Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has accused ERCOT of misleading the public with messages that the grid was ready for the storm.
Furious Texans are also demanding answers after it emerged energy producers were warned their equipment would not withstand such a cold snap.
After the state’s last major freeze, during the 2011 Super Bowl held in Arlington, Texas, a federal analysis found that energy producers’ procedures for winterizing their equipment ‘were either inadequate or were not adequately followed’ in many cases.
Wylie, Texas: Residents displaced by this week’s severe winter weather take shelter in a school
Austin, Texas: shopper walks past a bare shelf as people stock up on necessities at the H-E-B grocery store Thursday. Winter storm Uri has brought historic cold weather and power outages to Texas as storms have swept across 26 states
Killeen, Texas: Vehicles at a standstill southbound on Interstate Highway 35 on Thursday
Defending the grid, Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, told The Tribune: ‘As chaotic as it was, the whole grid could’ve been in blackout. ERCOT is getting a lot of heat, but the fact that it wasn’t worse is because of those grid operators.
‘The operators who took those actions to prevent a catastrophic blackout and much worse damage to our system, that was, I would say, the most difficult decision that had to be made throughout this whole event.’
But Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, rejected ERCOT’s claim that this week’s freeze was unforeseeable. ‘That’s nonsense,’ he said. ‘Every eight to 10 years we have really bad winters. This is not a surprise.’
Texas has a grid largely disconnected from others to avoid federal regulation.
That means it is not linked to other states and so cannot borrow power from them, a system the state implemented in order to avoid federal regulation.
The unique system, which avoids regulation in favor of market incentives, is now facing backlash for allowing power generators to shirk preparations for a once-in-a-decade winter storm.
Rolling blackouts are usually triggered when reserves fall below a certain level.
Grid operators say rolling blackouts are a last resort when power demand overwhelms supply and threatens to create a wider collapse of the whole power system.
ERCOT operates the power grid that covers most of the state and was behind the decision to have rolling blackouts which left up to 4 million people enduring outages in subfreezing temperatures. Houston is pictured from space during the blackouts
Usually, utilities black out certain blocks or zones before cutting off power to another area, then another. Often areas with hospitals, fire stations, water-treatment plants and other key facilities are spared.
By rolling the blackouts, no neighborhoods are supposed to go an unfairly long period of time without power, but that was not always the case this week in Texas.
Some areas never lost power, while others were blacked out for 12 hours or longer as temperatures dipped into the single digits.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Texas woke up Thursday to a fourth day without power.
A water crisis was also unfolding after Texas officials ordered 7 million people to boil tap water before drinking it.
The latest breakdown sparked growing outrage and demands for answers over how Texas – whose Republican leaders as recently as last year taunted California over the Democratic-led state’s rolling blackouts – failed such a massive test of a major point of state pride: energy independence.
Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who became Donald Trump’s energy secretary, has said that Texans would willingly endure longer periods of sub-freezing temperatures if it stymied Democrats’ energy policy and efforts to combat the climate crisis.
“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry was quoted saying in a blogpost published Wednesday on the website of the Republican congressman Kevin McCarthy.
The blogpost had asserted that those “watching on the left may see the situation in Texas as an opportunity to expand their top-down, radical proposals. Two phrases come to mind: don’t mess with Texas, and don’t let a crisis go to waste”.
Perry’s comments come as millions of Texas are struggling with a brutal winter storm, which created a surge in demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such extreme lows, buckling the state’s power grid and causing widespread blackouts. Frigid temperatures and snow have covered most of the central US this week, resulting in at least two dozen deaths, but Texas in particular has reeled because most of its power is on a state-run grid that has repeatedly been described as mismanaged.
Residents of the Lone Star state are lining up at grocery stores that are running out of food. Pipes have burst because of the cold, leaving residents without water to drink or prepare food. Many are scrambling to find shelter in buildings with electricity. Multiple municipalities have instituted “boil water” orders, as power outages have impacted water treatment facilities.
Meanwhile, many Texans slammed authorities for their handling of the crisis. The severe winter storm has, among some Republicans, been used to open up a new culture war around the expansion of renewable energy, which is a stated priority of the Biden administration in order to address the climate crisis.
Perry was among the many Republicans who falsely claimed that frozen wind turbines spurred the mass electricity shutdowns. In reality, the utility system’s failure to prepare for perils presented by cold temperatures – such as frozen natural gas pipes – had a significantly larger role in this crisis.
Renewable energy sources such as wind did see failures; these lapses contributed to 13% of Texas’ power outages, while generating approximately 25% of the state’s winter energy. But sources such as coal, gas and nuclear power ceded nearly twice as many gigawatts of power due to the low temperatures.
Nonetheless Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, voiced anti-wind sentiments similar to Perry’s.
“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” the Republican governor told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”
Abbott’s attack contradicts the operators of the Texas grid, which is overwhelmingly run on gas and oil, who have confirmed the plunging temperatures caused gas plants to seize up at the same time as a huge spike in demand for heating. Nevertheless, images of ice-covered wind turbines, taken in Sweden in 2014, were shared widely among conservatives on social media as proof of the frailty of clean energy.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman behind the Green New Deal platform, said that Abbott was “blaming policies he hasn’t even implemented for his own failures” while the renewable energy industry also hit back.
“It is disgraceful to see the longtime antagonists of clean power engaging in a politically opportunistic charade misleading Americans,” said Heather Zichal, the chief executive of the American Clean Power lobby group.
Sen. Ted Cruz touched down in Texas on Thursday afternoon with an armed police escort amid outrage over his 24-hour trip to Mexico during a catastrophic storm in the Lone Star State.
The Republican lawmaker could be seen chatting with two police officers who escorted him off his flight and through customs at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport in a 37-second clip obtained by CNN.
The former GOP presidential hopeful set off a political maelstrom on Wednesday evening when he was photographed boarding a flight to Cancun as millions of Texans braced for their fourth day without power or safe drinking water.
In a statement released Thursday afternoon, Cruz said that he was only chaperoning his daughters, ages 12 and 10, on a flight and was headed back to the US.
“This has been an infuriating week for Texans,” Cruz wrote.
“The greatest state in the greatest country in the world has been without power. We have food lines, gas lines, and people sleeping at the neighbors’ house. Our homes are freezing and our lights are out. Like millions of Texans, our family lost heat and power, too,” he wrote.
“With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon. My staff and I are in constant communication with state and local leaders to get to the bottom of what happened in Texas,” he added.
“We want our power back, our water on, and our homes warm. My team and I will continue using all our resources to keep Texans informed and safe.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz prepares to board a plane back to the U.S. from Cancun on Feb. 18, 2021.
REUTERS
The Texas Republican senator seen at the Cancun airport before his flight.
REUTERS
Sen. Ted Cruz leaves Houston for a Cancun vacation with his family (left) before returning on Thursday (right)
The powerful storm brought freezing temperatures which wreaked havoc on the state’s power grid, leaving more than 3.4 million people without power on Wednesday.
At least 30 people have died, including a woman and young girl who suffered carbon monoxide poisoning when they sat in an attached garage while a car was running because there was no heat in their home.
Texans have been forced to huddle in furniture stores and warming shelters, while at least two Austin hospitals have been evacuated after they lost running water.
On Thursday, 500,000 people remained without power as Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordered 7 million people — approximately a quarter of the state’s population — to boil their water before drinking it.
Mary Kay Hoffman holds a sign as she waits for Sen. Ted Cruz to arrive back in Houston on Feb. 18, 2021.AP
Severe weather is affecting more than 100 million Americans tonight and snow is still falling in the hardest-hit areas in Texas. While power has been restored to millions in Texas, nearly half of residents, 13 million, don’t have access to clean, running water.
In the city of Kyle, officials said water should “only be used to sustain life at this point.”
In Houston, America’s fourth-largest city, there are long lines for food, gas and supplies. Things are also bad in Oklahoma, where President Biden declared a state of emergency after the longest stretch of sub-zero temperatures there on record. At least 34 deaths were attributed to the storm, 20 of them were from Texas.
The winter weather also created a political storm. Texas Senator Ted Cruz was criticized for flying to Cancun with his family this week, while his constituents suffered in record-low temperatures.
Democrats in Congress introduced a comprehensive immigration reform bill on Thursday crafted around the priorities President Joe Biden articulated on his first day in office, including a path to citizenship for the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.
If passed, the long-anticipated bill, known as the US Citizenship Act of 2021, would mark the most sweeping reform of the US immigration system since 1986 — and would be a rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s nativist agenda.
But it’s unlikely that the legislation, which is a kind of mission statement for the Democratic Party on immigration, will attract the 10 Republican votes needed to proceed in the Senate — unless Democrats eliminate or alter the filibuster in such a way that could allow them to pass the bill without a single Republican vote.
The centerpiece of the bill is an eight-year path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US prior to January 1, 2021. It also includes provisions that would address the underlying causes of migration, expand the number of available visas and green cards, invest in technology and infrastructure at ports of entry on the border, remove obstacles to asylum, and shore up protections for immigrant workers.
Noticeably absent from the bill are provisions that would promote the kind of border security and interior enforcement measures that Republicans have long sought. For example, previous Republican proposals would have boosted funding for the construction of the border wall, made it a crime to be present in the US without authorization, and required children to be indefinitely detained together with their parents while they faced deportation proceedings.
Some Republicans have already warned the bill would “return to the radical left-wing policies that will incentivize illegal immigration and promote an unending flood of foreign nationals into the United States.”
But Democrats have so far been reluctant to say they are willing to bargain with Republicans on beefing up border security beyond modernizing ports of entry or narrowing the bill’s legalization provisions.
Sen. Bob Menendez, the lead co-sponsor of the bill in the Senate, said in a press call Thursday that the reason comprehensive immigration reform has failed time and time again over the last two decades is because Democrats have “capitulated too quickly to fringe voices who have refused to accept the humanity and contributions of immigrants to our country and dismiss everything … as amnesty.”
“We know the path forward will demand negotiations with others. But we’re not going to make concessions out of the gate,” Menendez said. “We will never win an argument that we don’t have the courage to make.”
California Rep. Linda Sánchez, who introduced a companion bill in the House on Thursday, also warned during the call that “cynicism can defeat us before we even try.”
Though advocates have expressed openness to starting out with smaller bills that might gain traction more easily — such as those legalizing DREAMers who came to the US as children, as well as farmworkers and other essential workers — Democrats are currently prioritizing comprehensive reform. In a call with reporters Wednesday, a senior administration official didn’t rule out the possibility that Democrats could also pursue piecemeal legislation, but said fixing the entire immigration system was imperative.
Practical considerations about the bill’s prospects have nevertheless continued to plague advocates who are simply trying to get relief for as many people as quickly as possible after four years of their communities living under siege.
“Even as I read and dissect this bill, the only question in my mind is HOW? Not just what. What’s the strategy?” Erika Andiola, chief advocacy officer at the immigrant rights group RAICES, tweeted. “How are Democrats planning to keep their promises to the immigrant community? Because I can assure you, the party of Trump won’t do anything good for us.”
The bill would implement reforms to legal immigration
The centerpiece of the bill is a provision that would allow undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status and, eventually, citizenship.
The process would take at least eight years. To qualify, immigrants would have had to be physically present in the US on or before January 1, 2021, unless granted a waiver on humanitarian grounds.
Initially, immigrants would be able to obtain a work permit and travel abroad with the assurance that they would be permitted to reenter the US. After five years, they could apply for a green card if they pass background checks and pay taxes. Immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and Temporary Protected Status, as well as farmworkers, would be able to apply for green cards immediately, however.
After holding their green card for three years and passing additional background checks, they could apply for US citizenship.
The impact of such legislation cannot be overestimated: It could potentially bring millions of people out of the shadows.
“For all of them, the broken immigration system stands in their way of being recognized for who they already are: important members of our communities,” Maria Praeli, government relations manager at the immigrant advocacy group FWD.us, said in a press call.
Among other reforms to the legal immigration system, the bill notably includes a provision to prevent presidents from issuing categorial bans on immigration. It would also remove barriers to family-based immigration, including lengthy visa backlogs and employment-based green cards, which have been relatively inaccessible for workers in lower-wage industries.
It would repeal Clinton-era restrictions that prevent people who have been present in the US without authorization for more than six months from reentering the country for a period of three to 10 years. Many of those immigrants would otherwise be eligible to apply for legal status, often through a US citizen or a spouse who holds a green card.
It would also strengthen protections for immigrant workers by helping to ensure that victims of serious labor violations receive visas, protecting those who face workplace retaliation from deportation, and setting up a commission to make improvements to the employment verification process.
In addition to substantive changes to the legal immigration system, the bill would also introduce rhetorical changes, substituting “noncitizen” for the word “alien” in federal immigration laws.
The bill seeks to address the underlying causes of migration
The bill aims to bring to fruition Biden’s vision for a regional approach to migration, addressing the factors that drive Central American migrants to flee their home countries.
As vice president, Biden developed a $750 million program in tandem with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — Central America’s Northern Triangle countries — aimed at improving economic development and curbing violence and corruption in the region, but the Trump administration halted that effort in March 2019.
The new bill builds on that concept, allocating $4 billion over the course of four years to address those push factors and incentivize Northern Triangle governments to improve living conditions.
It would also set up new processing centers throughout the region to register qualifying migrants as refugees and resettle them in the US. And it would reunify separated families by reinstituting the Central American Minors program — under which children can join their relatives in the US — and creating a new parole program for those whose family members in the US sponsored them for a visa.
The bill also seeks to improve the capacity of Central American countries to process and protect asylum seekers and refugees by working with the United Nations and other nongovernmental organizations.
The proposal appears to be substantially differently from the agreements the Trump administration brokered with the Northern Triangle countries, which allowed the US to return asylum seekers to those countries to seek protections — agreements Biden has vowed to terminate. The bill does not create any kind of obligation for asylum seekers to seek protection outside the US, but would instead aim to ensure migrants have due process and information about their rights, in addition to being properly screened and given documentation that allows them to move freely and access social services.
The bill could boost funding for immigration enforcement with a focus on technology
The bill would allow for an unspecified increase in funding for immigration enforcement. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas would have to assess the precise dollar amount required, but that could prove controversial, given that many immigrant advocates have spent the last four years calling for lawmakers to abolish or at least defund the immigration enforcement agencies, whose budgets ballooned under Trump.
Those funds would go toward improving screening technology, officer training, infrastructure at ports of entry, and border security between ports of entry, favoring alternatives to a border wall.
The bill would also establish mechanisms to address misconduct among DHS’s ranks, increasing staff at the DHS Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates such cases, and requiring the agency to create a use-of-force policy. It would be a critical first step in reforming the agency, which became politicized under Trump, at times acting as the mouthpiece of his immigration and “law and order” agenda.
It would also enhance penalties for criminal gangs and drug traffickers.
Biden is scheduled to address world leaders Friday at a virtual session of the Munich Security Conference, remarks sure to be watched carefully by Iran as well as other countries trying to divine his intentions for the nuclear deal.
The State Department said Thursday that the United States would accept an expected European Union invitation to attend a gathering of parties to the original deal, including Iran, the timing of which was not immediately clear.
In a briefing with reporters, a senior State Department official called the prospect of meeting the Iranians face-to-face “a step” more than a breakthrough.
Overall, developments so far suggest that a full restoration of the original deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), may be a far messier, longer-lasting set of negotiations than what many observers had expected – if it happens at all.
“There is a window of opportunity that simply will not last,” warned Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “The slow pace of deliberations on the part of the United States will jeopardize Biden’s stated goal, which is to restore the agreement and to build on the JCPOA.”
But there are “a lot of different views” within the administration, one of the people familiar with the discussions said, adding, “I think there’s an instinct to return to the deal, but that’s not a preordained outcome.”
“I don’t get the sense they have a timeline, like they don’t have dates and times” for reentering the deal, a Capitol Hill Democratic aide added.
How fast to move —
and how big?
One internal administration debate about the next steps has largely boiled down to this: Whether to aim for a return to the original nuclear deal first or seek a broader deal from the start. A broader deal could possibly include non-nuclear aspects, such as limits on Iran’s ballistic missile program, and have provisions that last longer than the original deal or are permanent.
Either way, one option on the table is to have some sort of interim agreement that can build confidence on both sides.
The interim agreement would not necessarily look like the original deal, people familiar with the discussions said. It could involve giving Iran some limited sanctions relief — such as allowing oil sales — in exchange for Tehran halting some of the moves it has made since President Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement, such as enriching uranium to 20 percent purity.
One senior Biden administration official, however, insisted that the debate has passed. The agreed-upon goal remains to return to the original nuclear deal if Iran complies with it, the official said. But exactly what steps must be taken to achieve that goal and at what pace are still a matter of debate and discussion, the official said.
The people familiar with the discussions did not know or declined to say who among Biden aides was arguing for which tactics. Some stressed that the administration, not even a month old, is still filling key positions at the State Department, White House and beyond that are relevant to the Iran discussion.
Three of the people, however, noted that Brett McGurk, a senior Middle East official on the National Security Council staff, is among the more hawkish voices on Iran – and that national security adviser Jake Sullivan at times takes a harder line than many of his colleagues.
Both of these senior national security officials may be more inclined to aim for a bigger deal immediately, rather than trying to resurrect the 2015 version, people familiar with the discussions said. That being said, Sullivan recently declared that containing Iran’s nuclear program is a “critical early priority” of the administration, signaling an eagerness to resolve the standoff.
Rob Malley, Biden’s special envoy for the Iran talks, is known to be more of an advocate for a return to the original nuclear deal. Others likely to be on his side include Jeff Prescott, a top official in the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. The people familiar with the discussions said they weren’t entirely certain where Secretary of State Antony Blinken stands.
A spokesperson for the National Security Council did not offer comment. A spokesperson for the State Department also did not immediately offer comment.
Allies and roadblocks in the Senate
Washington politics, too, are a factor, some analysts say.
Sen. Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is one of several Democrats who joined Republicans in opposing the original deal during the Obama years. (Menendez also opposed Trump’s decision to walk away from the deal without what the New Jersey senator considered a decent back up plan to constrain Iran.)
Menendez has pushed Biden to take a tough stance and said the president should not give Iran “significant sanctions relief” before it returns to the negotiating table.
Because Menendez plays a key role in Senate confirmation hearings for Biden nominees, there’s extra sensitivity about angering him when it comes to Iran, two of the people familiar with the Biden team’s discussions said.
The Iran nuclear deal isn’t America’s alone
The 2015 JCPOA lifted an array of U.S. and international economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for severe restrictions on the Islamist-led country’s nuclear program.
The deal was an international one: the United States, China, Russia, Germany, France, Britain and Iran were partners in the negotiation. The United Nations and the European Union also played key roles.
Struck during the presidency of Barack Obama, its supporters hailed it for dramatically curtailing Iran’s nuclear program, but its opponents cast it as too weak and too generous in terms of the sanctions relief it offered Iran in return.
After railing against the agreement for years, Trump formally pulled out in May 2018. The former president argued that the agreement was too narrow because it dealt only with Iran’s nuclear program and not other malign actions by Tehran, which has been a U.S. adversary for four decades.Trump also said he did not like the fact that some of the deal’s provisions would expire.
In the months and years after pulling the U.S. from the JCPOA, Trump not only reimposed the nuclear-related sanctions that had been lifted under the 2015 deal, but also added on new ones targeting an array of Iranian entities.
The beefed-up sanctions regime will complicate any return to the deal, especially given that many of the sanctions would penalize institutions from other countries – including U.S. allies in Europe – that want to do business in Iran.
Iran has technically remained a party to the agreement, which is still functional to a limited degree. But since the U.S. walked away from it, Tehran has taken several steps that have put it out of compliance and closer to building a bomb. The moves, analysts say, have been part of a campaign aimed at pushing America back to the negotiating table while also pressuring European leaders to find ways to ease the substantial economic pain the sanctions are causing Iran.
Brinksmanship and bluster from Tehran
Recently, Iran has warned that starting next week it will take steps to scale back the enhanced access it gives to international inspectors who monitor its nuclear program under what’s commonly called the “additional protocol.” However, Iran will continue to allow inspectors to access its facilities under its basic agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In a joint statement released Thursday, Blinken and his counterparts from France, Germany and Britain, called on Iran not to proceed with its clampdown on inspections. The three urged Iran “to consider the consequences of such grave action, particularly at this time of renewed diplomatic opportunity.”
Many Biden aides are hesitant to appear as if they are capitulating to Iranian pressure by making deal-related moves to coincide with next week’s deadline on the additional protocol, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The joint statement also stated that “Secretary Blinken reiterated that, as President Biden has said, if Iran comes back into strict compliance with its commitments under the JCPOA, the United States will do the same and is prepared to engage in discussions with Iran toward that end.”
Can Europe move the timetable?
The expected European Union invitation for the United States to rejoin the original participants in the deal will likely lead to the first discussions – at least in a publicly acknowledged way – between the Biden administration and Iran. Analysts anticipate that the gathering will take place in March at what was already a tentatively planned meeting of the joint commission that oversees the nuclear deal’s implementation.
Separately, the Biden administration on Thursday told the U.N. Security Council that it was rescinding a Trump administration claim last year that all U.N. sanctions had been reimposed on Iran, according to a Reuters report. Trump aides made that assertion by insisting the U.S. could still trigger a “snap back” of the sanctions despite having left the nuclear deal, a claim rejected by most members of the Security Council.
The rescinding of the Trump claim may appease Iran to some extent. But broadly speaking, people familiar with the Biden administration’s discussions said it has done little – at least publicly – to give Tehran hope that a resumption of the deal, and an end to sanctions, is likely anytime soon.
Even the U.S. rhetoric so far, from various podiums and Biden himself, has emphasized that Iran is out of compliance with the agreement, rather than acknowledging that the United States first initiated the breach of terms.
Malley has spent his short time so far as envoy reaching out to the other parties to the 2015 agreement, including Russia and China, but not to Iran itself, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Malley also has been in touch with representatives of Israel as well as Arab countries, people familiar with the discussions said. The Israelis and some key Arab partners of the United States opposed the 2015 agreement and have asked Washington to consult with them or even give them a seat at the table on future negotiations with Iran.
Some advocates of a speedy return to the 2015 agreement argue that time is of the essence, in part because Iranian presidential elections are set for June. The Iranian politicians likely to triumph are those who are even more anti-American than the ones who negotiated the deal.
Still, those who argue against any quick U.S. return to the deal point out that no matter who wins the Iranian election, the economic pain the country is suffering from sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic will force a return to the negotiating table.
“Iran is in desperate financial and political straits right now,” said Gabriel Noronha, a former State Department official. “We have no reason to relent on the pressure, especially to get back to a deal which is already well on the way to expiring.”
Houston residents Wednesday were warned to boil their water — if they had the power to do so– after water pressure plummeted throughout the Houston-area. Water pressure has improved across Houston, though a boil water advisory remains in effect and likely won’t be lifted until Monday.
Dozens of nearby municipalities, including the Pearland, Katy and Sugarland areas have also issued boil water notices.
Residents are advised to use bottled or boiled water for drinking, cooking and hygiene purposes like brushing your teeth or washing your face until the notice is lifted.
Amid the boil water advisory, several water distribution sites are opening in the Houston area.
City of Houston
During a briefing Thursday, Mayor Sylvester Turner announced that water distribution sites will open in each of the city council’s districts around 2 p.m. today.
City council members have not released details on every site slated to open Thursday. Each site will remain open until supplies run out. Amid the ongoing boil water advisory, demand for water is high. The water available at each site varies. We will update our list as more information is released.
Not sure which district you live in? View a map of the city’s council districts here.
District A
Supplies are very limited at the sites.
District B
Hot meals and water will be distributed on a first come, first serve basis. Drive thru only. For more information, call (281) 868-0774.
District C
Distributions will begin at 2 p.m. and will last until supplies run out.
District F
District K
Limited supplies available beginning at 3:30 p.m.
Harris County Precinct 4
Precinct 4 Commissioner R. Jack Cagle has directed his staff to distribute non-potable water to county residents in need until 5 p.m. today. Supplies are limited to 10 gallons per person. Recipients must bring an appropriate container (milk jugs, ice chests, etc.) to one of the following distribution sites throughout Precinct 4:
Emancipation Park and Texas Southern University
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee is distributing water at Emancipation Park and Texas Southern University.
“We’ll start at 3018 Emancipation then the truck will go to Texas Southern University and then to Greenspoint in the late afternoon. Delivering groceries and water,” Jackson said on social media.
Turkey Leg Hut
The Turkey Leg Hut , in partnership with US Foods, will give away 14 Pallets of bottled water Thursday beginning at 2:00 pm. Turkey Leg Hut is located at 4830 Almeda Road, in Houston’s Third Ward.
“We might use the vaccine internationally to buttress our relationships with allies, to potentially establish some positive cooperation with China, to deal with humanitarian issues in less developed parts of the globe,” Richard J. Danzig, who was the secretary of the Navy to President Bill Clinton, said in an interview late last year, lamenting the Trump administration’s indifference to the idea. Such an effort, he said, “could yield us very substantial national security advantage.”
The Biden White House appears to be headed in that direction. After taking office, Mr. Biden directed federal agencies to come up with “a framework for donating surplus vaccines, once there is sufficient supply in the United States, to countries in need,” including through the international program.
But, an official said on Thursday, the United States will not share vaccines now, while the domestic vaccination campaign is expanding.
The administration has secured 600 million doses of the two vaccines that have emergency authorization, enough for 300 million Americans. Those doses are expected to be in hand by the end of the summer, and Mr. Biden said this week that vaccines would be available for every American by the end of July. If additional vaccines are approved, as is most likely, that would add to the United States’ supply.
The international vaccine effort, known as Covax, has been led by the public-private health partnership known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, as well as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the World Health Organization. It aims to distribute vaccines that have been deemed safe and effective by the W.H.O., with an emphasis on low- and middle-income countries.
If you’re an Australian Facebook user who loves to share the news on your timeline, you may have noticed something different recently: You can’t.
Australia is on the cusp of passing a law called the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which would force Facebook and Google to pay publishers if they host their content. The law is a response to years-long complaints from news outlets around the world about the role that Google and Facebook — and their mammoth digital ad businesses — have played in the decline of journalism and the decimation of its business model in the internet age. The two companies have responded in different ways: Google is making deals with Australian news publishers; Facebook is cutting them off entirely.
Based on reasoning that the law won’t apply to it as long as news links can’t be shared on its platform, Facebook has banned all users from sharing links to Australian news sources; Australian publications’ pages from hosting any of their own content at all; and Australian users from sharing any news links at all, Australian or international.
This is what happens when you try to share a link to an Australian news source.
And this is what Australia’s news pages look like now.
Facebook also seems to be blocking anything it thinks is an Australian news source — which currently includes several sites that are decidedly not news outlets. There were reports of government pages being restricted, for example. (Also, bike trails.)
Even non-Australian news pages, like Vox.com, are blocked for Australian users.
The overzealous ban, however, was apparently intentional and maybe even a little bit punitive.
“As the law does not provide a clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted,” Facebook told Recode. “However, we will reverse any Pages that are inadvertently impacted.”
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Facebook’s move would only make his government more determined to pass the law — and might encourage a few other governments to do something similar.
“Facebook’s actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disappointing,” Morrison wrote in a Facebook post. “These actions will only confirm the concerns that an increasing number of countries are expressing about the behaviour of BigTech companies who think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them.”
He added: “We will not be intimidated by BigTech seeking to pressure our Parliament as it votes on our important News Media Bargaining Code.”
The law Facebook hates but Google is learning (and paying) to live with
The proposed law — which looks likely to be passed — says that digital platforms like Facebook and Google have to pay news organizations if their content is featured on those platforms, like in Google search results or Facebook shares. Google and Facebook are the only two companies that would be subject to the law currently, but it could also apply to any other digital platforms designated by the government. The platforms and the publishers have to come to a payment agreement, or else go before an arbiter who will decide a fair price for them that they will have to pay, or else face significant penalties.
Google and Facebook, who dominate a digital ad business that pays them billions of dollars while news organizations go bankrupt, have been vehemently opposed to the law. Over the last several months, both havethreatened to take their services away from Australians if it were to pass.
In the end, Google blinked. The search giant has already started working out payment deals with Australian publications. On Wednesday, it announced a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Murdoch, Australia’s exceedingly rich and powerful news magnate and native son, has been very vocal about wanting a law that forces digital platforms to pay his publications, and he may well have influenced the country’s decision to move forward with this law.
News Corp now has a multi-year deal with Google. Terms were not disclosed, but the New York Times reported it was worth tens of millions of dollars. Google also made a deal with Australia’s Seven West Media and has agreed to work out licensing deals with French publications as France considers a similar law.
Facebook, obviously, took a different tack. If Australians can’t share news links, and Australian news organizations can’t post their own content, then Facebook believes Australia’s law won’t apply to it — after all, there’s nothing to pay media companies for. But there’s also no law in place yet. Facebook cut Australian news publications off before it really had to, which gives them, their government, and their readers a taste of what’s to come if the media law goes through. Facebook may be hoping that a preview of the platform without Australian news will make lawmakers more amenable to passing a version of the law that Facebook prefers.
Facebook might be in the right here, depending on whom you believe
While some have cheered Australia’s move, reasoning that anything that gets tech companies to pay news organizations back for the content (or ad dollars) they’ve used to build their own platforms, other media analysts believe the law is a case of the government forcing companies to pay other companies — specifically, those owned by one of that government’s richest and most influential (former) citizens. What was well intentioned may end up only making rich people even richer, with little benefit to anyone else.
Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis called the law a case of “media blackmail” and said Google had “caved” to “the devil Murdoch.” Facebook, on the other hand, either “stood on principle” or just decided news content for Australian users wasn’t worth enough to the company to have to pay for it.
Facebook said on Wednesday that it doesn’t think the law “recognizes the realities of how our services work.” The social network believes that it’s actually the publishers that benefit from Facebook, not the other way around.
“Last year Facebook generated approximately 5.1 billion free referrals to Australian publishers worth an estimated AU$407 million,” Facebook said (take those figures, which have not been independently verified, with a very large grainof salt). And Facebook apparently barely needs news articles, which the company says makes up “less than four percent of the content people see in their News Feed.” That might be because Facebook has, in recent years, intentionally de-emphasized news links in News Feeds in favor of posts from friends and family, and removed the “Trending” box that featured links to news articles.
In fact, Facebook said, it lets news organizations use its services for free, posting links to their articles for Facebook users, who then click on those links and give those news organizations precious traffic. What Facebook didn’t say was that this traffic isn’t worth nearly as much to those publishers as it could be, because Facebook and Google control the majority of the digital ads market and make most of the money from it, rather than the outlets whose content those ads are posted on. This is why Australia wants to force them to pay those publishers fairly in the first place.
A few other places, including France and Canada — and even the much larger European Union — have suggested they might follow Australia’s lead, too.
Facebook claims that it’s not opposed to paying news organizations and had wanted to launch in Australia Facebook News, a platform on which the company would pay publishers to license their content, as it’s already doing in the United States and the United Kingdom. Those deals would, of course, be on Facebook’s terms. The company doesn’t like being regulated, so it’s cut Australia off before it can be.
In the Mission Support Area at Lockheed Martin’s campus in Littleton, Colorado, masked people sat close to computers, flying three spacecraft in orbit around Mars. These three—the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Maven, and Odyssey—were all tasked, in one way or another, with downloading data from another spacecraft: the Mars Perseverance rover, which was attempting to land on the Red Planet. Information from these orbiters would help engineers learn about Perseverance’s status as it made its way through the atmosphere, and determine whether it survived. “Space is not a place to go,” read the words painted on one wall. “Space is a place to do.”
Scattered among the usual notes about unauthorized visitors and classified meetings, signs about social distancing, masks, and symptoms were plastered around the building. “No masks with exhaust valves” warned one, aerospacily. One was posted behind the head of Lockheed’s David Scholz, who about an hour before landing had been standing in a conference room 6 feet from everything, sporting a blue surgical mask above his double-pocketed tan shirt. NASA’s video feed played in the background. Scholz had just described himself as a “confident nervous wreck.” That’s because he is the principal engineer for a device called an “aeroshell,” which cocoons the rover against the most extreme conditions of its downward trip toward the surface of Mars.
The Lockheed engineers had been working on this project for years, and today, Scholz and his team could finally watch it be put to use. But that’s all they could do: watch. Their system was automated, and would do its job without them.
And so they watched as a human-made object fell from the sky, aiming to touch down in a crater called Jezero. The landing, scheduled for 12:55 pm Pacific Time, would mark the end of the Perseverance rover’s journey through space and the beginning of its stay at this desolate destination: a depression that was—billions of years ago—home to a lake and a river delta. It’s a place where life could, theoretically, have once survived.
Looking for spots that seem like they might have been amenable to ancient life, and evidence of potential past habitation, are among the Mars 2020 mission’s goals. The rover will also collect and store geological samples for a future mission to retrieve, and try producing oxygen from the planet’s plentiful carbon dioxide, in anticipation of future human astronauts’ needs.
But to get there, the spacecraft had to survive a harrowing process that engineers call “entry, descent, and landing,” or EDL, which is what the Lockheed Martin team was now nervously awaiting. These final stages happen during what’s been called (to the point of cliché) the “seven minutes of terror”—the time when the spacecraft must autonomously orchestrate its own E, D, and L without smashing into the ground. During its wild ride, the rover would experience speeds of around 12,100 mph and feel the equivalent of 12 times Earth’s gravity during deceleration. Its protective sheath would heat up to about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. Much could go awry: The craft could get too hot; its bits might not separate when they were supposed to; even if they did separate correctly, they could “recontact” (read: hit) each other; Perseverance could land in the wrong location; it could end up making its own impact crater. Choose your own nightmare.
“The key thing about EDL is that everything has to go right,” Allen Chen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who leads the EDL team, had told me a couple of weeks before the landing. “There’s no partial credit.”
That 100 percent, A+ performance is what fires up nerves for even the confident engineers here at Lockheed Martin who worked on the aeroshell. The aeroshell has two parts: the heat shield, which looks like a steampunk space frisbee, and the backshell, a classic space capsule. The heat shield faces down toward the planet when the spacecraft smacks into the atmosphere, taking the business end of the pressure and heat. It’s made from tiles of a material called PICA, or phenolic-impregnated carbon ablator. “As it gets hot, it starts to decompose, and that decomposition absorbs a lot of energy and also creates gas that forms a boundary layer that protects the heat shield from the environment,” Scholz had explained ahead of the landing. The protected shield, in turn, protects its cargo. The device burns through the atmosphere at a tilt, which Scholz calls “an angle of attack,” and steers itself with thrusters.
The outages led to major public criticism of the legislators and state agencies over their apparent failure to heed warnings about the grid’s inability to handle extreme weather conditions. Energy experts said the collapse was due in part to the state’s decision to not require equipment upgrades for a more resilient system.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosisaid on Thursday that she expects the House Energy and Commerce Committee to probe the energy problems in Texas.
Jennifer Granholm, President Joe Biden‘s nominee for energy secretary, said the U.S. must upgrade its grid infrastructure as soon as possible. “One thing is certain: America’s electricity grid is simply not able to handle extreme weather events,” she wrote in a tweet on Wednesday.
Though the GOP has overseen the state’s energy sector for decades, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, along with other conservative state leaders, have falsely blamed the outages on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, which comprise only a small fraction of the state’s energy.
Abbott claimed in a Fox news interview this week that dependence on wind and solar power “thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power in a statewide basis,” an argument which was contradicted by his own energy department.
Julian Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, tweeted: “Governor Abbott failed to prepare for this storm, was too slow to respond, and now blames everyone but himself for this mess.”
“He neglected the state’s antiquated and deregulated electrical grid,” said Castro, who also served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and energy secretary for the Trump administration, proclaimed on Wednesday that Texans would prefer to endure even longer outages “to keep the federal government out of their business” and stop Democrats from implementing regulations to address climate change.
Mr. Cruz’s decision to leave his state in the middle of a crisis was an especially confounding one for a politician who has already run for president once, in 2016, and widely seen as wanting to run again in 2024 or beyond.
Mr. Cruz, 50, narrowly won re-election in 2018 against Beto O’Rourke, a former representative, with less than 51 percent of the vote. In that race, Mr. Cruz aggressively touted his efforts in a past emergency, Hurricane Harvey. He is not up for re-election again until 2024.
Even before he skipped town, Mr. Cruz’s critics were already recirculating tweets he sent last summer criticizing California for being “unable to perform even basic functions of civilization” after the state’s governor asked residents to conserve electricity during a spate of deadly wildfires. Mr. Cruz lampooned California’s “failed energy policy” as the product of liberal excess.
Mr. Cruz had been acutely aware of the possible crisis in advance. In a radio interview on Monday, he said the state could see 100 or more deaths this week. “So don’t risk it. Keep your family safe and just stay home and hug your kids,” he said.
More recently, in December, Mr. Cruz had attacked a Democrat, Mayor Stephen Adler of Austin, for taking a trip to Cabo while telling constituents to “stay home” during the pandemic.
Fox News contributor Lawrence Jones reacts to the federal government investigating the New York nursing home scandal.
After weeks of pressure, CNN has been aggressively covering New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D., as he faces accusations of covering up nursing home deaths in his state and threatening a member of his own party.
It’s a stark reversal in tone for the left-leaning network after hosts like Brian Stelter and Cuomo’s brother Chris Cuomo gushed over his leadership abilities throughout 2020, despite the state leading the country in COVID deaths. Stelter at one point said Cuomo was providing “hope, but not false hope” and said he would pass on some of the governor’s truisms to his own children.
Now, Cuomo is in political peril after an investigation from state Attorney General Letitia James, D., found he dramatically underreported coronavirus nursing home deaths, and Cuomo’s secretary Melissa DeRosa said he had hidden the scope of the fatalities for fear of a federal investigation by the Trump administration.
CNN reported Wednesday on New York assemblyman Ron Kim claiming Cuomo had called him at home and threatened his career if he didn’t cover up for DeRosa. Kim has been one of Cuomo’s strongest critics on the matter from within his own party, and Republicans have called for Cuomo to be investigated and even resign.
“No man has ever spoken to me like that in my entire life,” Kim said. “At some point he tried to humiliate me, asking: ‘Are you a lawyer? I didn’t think so. You’re not a lawyer.’ It almost felt like in retrospect he was trying to bait me and anger me and say something inappropriate. I’m glad I didn’t.”
CNN anchor Jake Tapper has referred to the nursing home matter as a “‘scandal” and ripped Cuomo during his closing monologue on his Sunday show “State of the Union.” Cuomo has protested that where people died of coronavirus is irrelevant, but critics note that the nursing home deaths were tied to his directive, which he eventually reversed, that they accept COVID-positive patients.
“Where those people died and why they died and if they died because of Cuomo’s March directive, that is information in the public interest,” Tapper said. “And fear of political enemies using the data against you, that’s not an excuse for covering it up from the public.”
Also, after facing sharp criticism for allowing Chris Cuomo to converse on the air with his older brother last year, CNN announced this week it reinstated a ban on Cuomo brother interviews.
The network said it lifted the original ban last year due to the extraordinary nature of the pandemic. Chris Cuomo interviewed the governor at least 10 times, where they discussed battling the coronavirus but also made jokes, talked about their mother, and even did prop comedy. Despite the conflict of interest, their routines were well-received by much of the media at the time, and the elder Cuomo enjoyed favorable mainstream press coverage throughout 2020.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo interviews his older brother New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo during a 2020 episode of ‘Cuomo Prime Time.’
CNN political writer Chris Cillizzaadmitted the reversal in fortune last month, writing a column headlined, “Andrew Cuomo’s Covid-19 performance may have been less stellar than it seemed,” followed by one last week headlined, “The story keeps getting worse for Andrew Cuomo on Covid-19.”
Last May, Cillizza warmly praised Cuomo for his work on the virus.
“Cuomo often came under criticism for being, essentially, a terrific bureaucrat but it’s that intimate knowledge of the state and its government apparatus that has served him extremely well in this moment,” he wrote at the time.
Bob Dole, a former longtime senator and the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, announced Thursday that he has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Dole, 97, said in a short statement that he was diagnosed recently and would begin treatment on Monday.
“While I certainly have some hurdles ahead, I also know that I join millions of Americans who face significant health challenges of their own,” Dole said.
Dole, a native of Russell, Kansas, represented the state in Congress for almost 36 years before resigning from the Senate in 1996 to challenge Democratic President Bill Clinton. Dole had unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination in 1980 and 1988, and he was President Gerald Ford’s vice presidential running mate in 1976, when Ford lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter.
Former Senator Bob Dole and his wife Elizabeth Dole wait as President Donald Trump arrives to participate in the Armed Forces Welcome Ceremony in honor of the Twentieth Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 30, 2019 at Summerall Field, Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Virginia.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
After his last run for office in 1996, Dole continued to be involved in Republican politics, offering endorsements and commenting on public issues. He was known during his congressional career for both a sharp tongue and his skills in making legislative deals.
Dole was a driving force behind the World War II Memorial on the National Mall, speaking poignantly at its 2004 dedication before tens of thousands of fellow veterans in their 80s and 90s, calling it “our final reunion.”
He served with Clinton following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as co-chairman of a scholarship fund for the families of the victims. He was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2018 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1997 for his public service.
Dole overcame disabling war wounds sustained near the end of World War II to forge his lengthy political career. Charging a German position in northern Italy in 1945, Dole was hit by a shell fragment that crushed two vertebrae and paralyzed his arms and legs. The young Army platoon leader spent three years recovering in a hospital but never regained use of his right hand.
Dole left the Army as a captain, but Congress in 2019 approved a promotion for him to colonel. He also received two Purple Hearts and two Bronze Stars for his military service.
A lawyer, Dole served in the Kansas House and as Russell County attorney before being elected to the U.S. House in 1960. He won a Senate seat in 1968 and became Senate majority leader after the 1984 elections. He led Republicans when they were in the minority for eight years, from 1987 to 1995, and then again as majority leader starting in 1995.
“We’ve seen anti-Semitism, white supremacy, Holocaust denial, by people both on the right in the Republican Party and by people on the left in the Democratic Party,” Cheney said Wednesday during a meeting with the Cheyenne Rotary Club, according to The Casper Star-Tribune. “They can have no place in our in our public discourse. We have to be very clear that we stand for freedom and justice and equality and that we’re going to fight for those things.”
Cheney did not specify to whom in each party she was referring but has made similar comments on a number occasions over the past several months, particularly in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, including adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
“We are not the party of QAnon or anti-Semitism or Holocaust-deniers, or white supremacy or conspiracy theories,” she said in early February. “That’s not who we are. We believe in conservative principles and conservative values and we believe in the Constitution.”
During impeachment proceedings last month, several House Democrats said the Jan. 6 incident was an act carried out by white supremacists emboldened by a president who has welcomed the ideology.
Cheney was one of only 10 House Republicans who joined every Democrat in voting to impeach Trump over his role in inciting the Capitol riot in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Senate acquitted Trump on Saturday, though seven Republicans voted to convict.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on Wednesday pushed back against a statement made by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in which he blamed recent widespread power outages in his state on a failure of solar and wind energy sources.
Millions of Texans have gone days without power this week as massive winter storms brought freezing temperatures and devastated the state’s power grid.
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During an interview with Sean Hannity Tuesday, Abbott decried the proposed Green New Deal and said frozen wind turbines and loss of solar power thrust Texas into the blackout situation.
“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. Texas is blessed with multiple sources of energy such as natural gas and nuclear as well as solar and wind,” Abbott said Tuesday.
“Our wind and solar got shut down and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid. And that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis,” he added.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance Wednesday, Gates said the governor’s claims were flawed.
“In terms of the current situation, you know, he’s actually wrong. The wind turbines, you can make sure they can deal with the cold. It probably wasn’t anticipated for the wind turbines that far south. But, you know, the ones up in Iowa and North Dakota are — do have the ability to not freeze up,” Gates told the outlet.
“Actually, the main capacity that’s gone out in Texas is not the wind. It’s actually some of the natural gas plants that were also not ready for these super cold temperatures,” he said.
Gates went on to say extreme weather events will become more likely due to climate change as normal wind patterns are broken down, allowing cold fronts to go further south more frequently.
Updated with Cruz saying he is returning after just one night abroad.
WASHINGTON — As 3 million Texans shivered in the dark, Sen. Ted Cruz jetted off to Cancun with his family, outed instantly by fellow vacationers and berated by critics for abandoning constituents during an epic statewide power crisis.
He spent just one night out of the country – not long enough for a sunburn, but plenty of time to get blistered.
Social media photos from Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport and aboard the flight to the sun-drenched beach resort flourished Wednesday evening. By Thursday, when temperatures along Mexico’s Caribbean coast were on track to hit 83 degrees, the pile-on was at full boil.
Detractors dusted off vintage Cruz comments denying the existence of climate change and decrying Democrats coastal elites who care not a whit for the plight of ordinary Americans.
With Cancun, CancunCruz and FlyinTed (an homage to Donald Trump’s “Lyin’ Ted” epithet) trending online – along with “Heidi,” as in Heidi Cruz, his wife – the senator remained uncharacteristically silent overnight. Aides ignored inquiries about the uproar the boss’s getaway triggered until just after noon Thursday, when they revealed that he would fly back to Texas within hours.
“With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon,” Cruz said in a statement that left it ambiguous as to whether he planned to return after just 24 hours all along, or abruptly changed his ticket as the condemnation piled up.
At the airport, he was spotted with a rolling bag that most travelers would consider far too big for one overnight, plus a beach bag. Thursday afternoon, he was spotted checking in at the Cancun airport with the same expanded rolling bag.
Cruz “is vacationing in Cancun right now when people are literally freezing to death in the state that he was elected to represent and serve,” Beto O’Rourke – the former El Paso congressman who narrowly lost to Cruz in 2018 – chided on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Houston is under a hard freeze watch. By Thursday morning, the number of Texans without power had dipped below 600,000. And as the relative handful of defenders pointed out, unlike a governor, a senator has no direct responsibility for emergency management.
“This has been an infuriating week for Texans. The greatest state in the greatest country in the world has been without power. We have food lines, gas lines, and people sleeping at the neighbors’ houses. Our homes are freezing and our lights are out. Like millions of Texans, our family lost heat and power too,” Cruz said. “My staff and I are in constant communication with state and local leaders to get to the bottom of what happened in Texas. We want our power back, our water on, and our homes warm. My team and I will continue using all our resources to keep Texans informed and safe.”
Ted Cruz going to Cancun for vacation as his constituents freeze to death is peak Ted Cruz
Meanwhile, Beto O’Rourke is working as hard as anyone in America to help the people of Texas
One of these two men deserves to be an elected official, the other a cabana boy at Mar-a-Lago
The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican group that has had its own massive public relations challenges lately amid allegations of sexual harassment by one of its founders, poked at Cruz by tweeting: “When the going gets tough… head to Cancun, baby!”
State Rep. Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat, posted a photo of Cruz boarding the flight and taunted: “Guess which US Senator from Texas flew to Cancun while the state was freezing to death and having to boil water?”
There was no doubt about the Cruzes’ identity.
Cruz wore the same mask he wore during President Joe Biden’s inauguration and Trump’s second impeachment trial: gray, with a black cannon and “Come and Take it,” a design reminiscent of flags used by Texans during the 1835 revolution against Mexico – a provocative choice, given the destination.
Online sleuths matched his hairline, glasses, ring and tennis shoes to previous photos of him.
Photos put the Cruz family, including daughters Catherine and Caroline, near the United Airlines gate for the 4:10 p.m. flight to Cancun, which landed just before 8 p.m.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wears a “Come and Take It” face mask to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s confirmation hearing on Jan. 21, 2021.(Stefani Reynolds)
It’s not as though Cruz can walk through a Texas airport unrecognized.
He’s been in the Senate for eight years. He was runner-up for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. His name ID in the state is near total; a University of Texas poll last fall found that 96% of Texans had some opinion about him.
For the flight back to Houston, Cruz wore a mask that looks like the state flag of Texas.
Unlike, say, Irving congresswoman Beth Van Duyne, who posted a photo of herself huddling near a fireplace because like millions of other Texans, she had lost power and heat, Cruz and his family suffered no such challenges that might prompt a trip to warmer climes.
On Monday, Cruz told conservative talk show host Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo that ”thankfully, my home, we didn’t lose power. So right now we’ve got a bunch of the neighborhood kids all over playing with our girls, because their parents lost power and our house was lucky. So we’ve got kids running up and down the stairs right now.“
Noting the dangerous conditions, he added this advice to fellow Texans, a day before heading to the airport: “If you can stay home, don’t go out on the roads, don’t risk the ice. … Don’t risk it. Keep your family safe, and just stay home and hug your kids.”
Julián Castro, a former Obama housing secretary and San Antonio Mayor, said Cruz “should be on the phone with federal agencies, not on a trip to Mexico,” asserting that “in crises like these, members of Congress play a critical role connecting their constituents to emergency services and assistance.”
Defenders such as Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative commentator pardoned by Trump in 2018 for making an illegal campaign contribution, argued there was little Cruz could do if he’d stayed in Texas, while in Cancun, “he’s not using up valuable resources of energy, food and water that can now be used by someone else. This is probably the best thing he could do for the state right now.”
“Senate is out, he can afford it,” wrote one reader, Dallas resident Mark Gist. “What exactly is the problem?”
Conservative pundit Erick Erickson called it “ignorance” for anyone to think a senator “can do anything about a state power grid,” drawing a rebuttal that, given his vast network and high profile, Cruz is “uniquely positioned” to catalyze relief efforts.
Actor Billy Baldwin and others invoked Marie Antoinette, the queen during the French Revolution who purportedly quipped “let them eat cake” when told that the people were starving and had no bread.
“Let them eat snow,” Baldwin quipped.
Calls for Cruz to resign have come with escalating frequency since Trump’s defeat in November, when he began amplifying Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen through fraud. Cruz has long shrugged off such unsolicited advice.
The Texas Democratic Party issued its 21st such demand amid the latest outcry. Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa accused “Cancun Cruz” of “abandoning us in our greatest time of need,” and said the vacation shows that “Texas Republicans don’t give a damn about you or me.”
That mirrored an allegation leveled at Democrats by Cruz, whose aides asked Houston police on Wednesday to escort him and his family at the airport before they headed south.
“If you’re a blue collar [worker], if you’ve got calluses on your hands, if you’re a cop, or a firefighter, or a waiter, or a waitress, or construction worker — this Democratic Party doesn’t care about you,” he said last month to Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
At American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic group, president Bradley Beychok said Cruz was apparently “sipping mai tais on a beach in Cancun” – though margaritas and cerveza would be more common – as millions of Texans freeze.
“It’s been clear since he unapologetically helped incite a violent insurrection on January 6 that Ted Cruz is not fit to represent Texas in the United States Senate,” he said.
CNN, Politico and other major outlets were hounding Cruz aides for any sort of explanation, with no more success than home state news media. Punchbowl News found what appeared to be Cruz’s name on the upgrade list for a United flight back to Houston Thursday afternoon, the first suggestion of a hasty retreat.
It’s not always a given that a comms office feels the need to confirm or deny bad intel. But you’d think at this juncture if that wasn’t Ted Cruz in Cancun his staff would have said so.
The Senate has been in recess since Saturday afternoon, when Cruz and 44 other Republicans voted to acquit Trump on a charge of inciting insurrection.
By Thursday morning, Cruz had remained quiet online. Shortly after the flight landed, he retweeted a tweet from Gov. Greg Abbott noting that 1.6 million customers had power restored on Wednesday.
In December, Cruz hit Austin Mayor Steve Adler and other Democrats as “utter hypocrites” for ignoring pandemic guidelines to avoid unnecessary travel.
“Don’t forget @MayorAdler who took a private jet with eight people to Cabo and WHILE IN CABO recorded a video telling Austinites to `stay home if you can…this is not the time to relax.’” he tweeted.
You’re right. But you and your fellow slime bags are hypocrites, too.
— Nobody over 17 should eat Takis (@Jaxon95228411) December 2, 2020
Charlotte Clymer, a former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, quipped that she was “kinda shocked Ted Cruz is able to fly anywhere with all his baggage” and that she expected to the radicalized Texas GOP to find a way to blame the uproar on Antifa.
“My grandmother is a third-generation Texan. She’s not in her own home right now. She’s at a relative’s house, where their power is still off, too, because they have a fireplace to keep everyone relatively warm. And Ted Cruz took a vacay to Cancún,” she wrote on Twitter.
My grandmother is a third-generation Texan. She’s not in her own home right now. She’s at a relative’s house, where their power is still off, too, because they have a fireplace to keep everyone relatively warm.
The issue of border security is expected to be a flashpoint of debate between Republicans and Democrats.
“This bill does contemplate investments in all of our ports of entry,” Sanchez said. “We feel very confident that we can be working more efficiently, rather than being fixated on vanity projects like the wall, which have proven to be ineffective.”
Sanchez suggested Democrats are open to a piecemeal approach in addition to a comprehensive package.
“We are pursuing an ‘all of the above strategy,'” Sanchez said at the news conference. “All options are on the table, and we hope to pass robust immigration reform, but there are other great immigration bills that we also will be taking up and hopefully passing as well.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., praised the legislation but also suggested the possibility of a piece-by-piece approach.
“I salute the president for putting forth the legislation that he did. There are others that support piecemeal, and that may be a good approach too,” Pelosi said a press briefing Thursday.
Biden and Congress are turning their attention to infrastructure as the Covid relief bill heads toward completion, so it’s unclear how much the administration and Democrats will prioritize passing comprehensive immigration reform.
When asked whether the president would support abolishing the Senate filibuster or using a budget reconciliation process that would only require a simple majority, Biden administration officials would not directly answer.
“It’s just too early to speculate about it now,” one White House official said. “We want to first defer to our sponsors of this bill about what’s possible and look to leadership on the Hill about how they want to move immigration.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who has sponsored previous bipartisan immigration legislation, including the Dream Act, said he doubts the feasibility of a comprehensive deal, but saw possibility in a narrower one that would trade a path to legalization for DACA-protected undocumented immigrants for more border security.
“The more people you legalize, the more things will be required to be given, so we’ll see. It starts a conversation,” Graham told NBC News. “You just can’t legalize one group without addressing the underlying broken immigration system. You just in incentivize more. So, a smaller deal may be possible.”
Congress has not passed a large, comprehensive immigration reform bill in decades. In 2013, a bipartisan bill passed in the Democratic-led Senate but was never considered in the Republican-controlled House.
At the time, conservative House Republicans opposed a broad pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and were against comprehensive legislation, favoring a piecemeal approach that prioritized border security. Former Republican Speaker John Boehner did not bring the bill up for a vote.
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