- PoliticsThe Independent
‘Very unpresidential’: Pro-Trump Newsmax launches bizarre attack on Biden’s ‘junkyard’ dog
Comments described on social media as ‘beyond parody’
- NewsThe New York Times
Extreme Cold Killed Texans in Their Bedrooms, Vehicles and Backyards
SAN ANTONIO — Carrol Anderson spent much of his life in southeast Texas, where the most feared natural disasters spin up from the Gulf of Mexico during the warm months of hurricane season. But last week, Anderson, a 75-year-old who breathed with the help of oxygen tanks, knew that a different kind of storm was heading his way. To prepare, he ordered a fresh supply of oxygen that his stepdaughter said never arrived. There was a spare tank, however, in the pickup outside his one-story brick house in Crosby, Texas, just northeast of Houston. So when Anderson, an Army veteran who went by Andy, was found dead inside his truck Tuesday, his stepdaughter figured he had gone outside to retrieve it. His main tank, back in the house, runs on electricity, and the power had gone out the night before as a deadly cold descended on much of Texas. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times While the final tally could be much higher, Anderson was among at least 58 people who died in storm-affected areas stretching to Ohio, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning, car crashes, drownings, house fires and hypothermia. In Galveston County, along the Texas Gulf Coast, the authorities said two residents had died from exposure to the cold and one person from possible carbon monoxide poisoning. Four other deaths remained under investigation and were possibly linked to the frigid weather. County Judge Mark Henry, the county’s top elected official, said he would have evacuated some of his most vulnerable residents before the winter storm had he known that power outages would plunge the county into darkness for a few days. He said the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid, had warned only of rolling blackouts. Instead, most residents were without power for at least 48 hours. “We would have been happy to order an evacuation if we’d been told Sunday the power was going to go out and stay out for four days,” he said, noting the county is more accustomed to ordering evacuations before hurricanes. A spokeswoman for ERCOT said Friday that the surge in demand stressed the power grid, a crisis so dire that the “local utilities were not able to rotate the outages.” At its height, about 4 million Texans were without power this week as temperatures plummeted to the teens and single digits. About 165,000 remained without electricity on Friday, though millions were still without running water or under notices to boil their tap water. Still, there were signs of relief. In hard-hit Austin, City Manager Spencer Cronk said Friday that more than 1 million gallons of water would arrive over the next two days. The city plans to set up distribution centers, and Cronk said water would be delivered to the city’s most vulnerable citizens, such as older people and those without homes. Greg Meszaros, the director of Austin’s water utility, said he expected that most residents would have their water pressure restored over the weekend. Boil water advisories should be lifted sometime next week, he said. Coming into clearer view were the dimensions of a public health crisis exacerbated by poverty, desperation and, in some cases, a lack of understanding of cold-weather safety. Texas hospitals and health providers saw more than 700 visits related to carbon monoxide poisoning between Monday and Wednesday. Thayer Smith, division chief with the Austin Fire Department, said his city had seen dozens of incidents of toxic exposure from people burning charcoal in their homes. The weather also hampered the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The White House on Friday said 6 million doses of coronavirus vaccines had been held up because of snowstorms across the country, creating a backlog affecting every state and throwing off the pace of vaccination appointments over the next week. In Texas, hospitals spent the week grappling with burst pipes, power outages and acute water shortages, making it difficult to care for patients. In Abilene, authorities said a man died at the Hendrick Medical Center after he was unable to get dialysis treatment at the site. Large amounts of filtered water, in addition to electricity and heat, are required to properly provide care for dialysis patients, and water at the hospital was shut down, said Cande Flores, the Abilene fire chief. Flores said that at least four people had died in Abilene as a result of the state power grid failure, including a homeless man who died from exposure to the cold, a 60-year-old man who was found dead in his home and an 86-year-old woman whose daughter found her frozen in her backyard. Elsewhere in the state, a 69-year-old man was found dead inside his home in a rural community south of San Antonio, where he lived alone. He did not have electricity, and the authorities said his bedroom was 35 degrees when they found him. In Houston, an Ethiopian immigrant died in her idling car, which was parked in her garage, where she sat while charging her phone. The woman, Etenesh Mersha, was talking to a friend when she started to feel tired. “She tried to drink water,” said Negash Desta, a relative by marriage to Mersha. “After she told her friend she couldn’t talk anymore, there was no response after that.” The friend tried to call the police in Houston but did not have an address, Desta said. The friend turned to Facebook, where she found Desta. Hours later, he eventually received a message about what had happened and alerted the police. They found an entire family, poisoned. “When they get in, they found the mother and daughter were just dead and the son and father alive. They had all fainted,” he said, adding that the car had still been running. The daughter, Rakeb Shalemu, was 7 years old. Mersha’s husband and 8-year-old son were hospitalized. Desta said that the husband has since been released and that the boy, Beimnet Shalemu, was still in the intensive critical unit. Near Houston in Conroe, Texas, an 11-year-old boy, Cristian Pineda, was found dead in his bed on Monday morning. His family had no power the night before, and the parents, the boy and his siblings had huddled together in one bedroom, Lt. James Kelemen of the Conroe Police Department said Friday. Like Anderson and Mersha and her family, Cristian was the focus of a hastily assembled GoFundMe page. It requested donations to cover the expenses of his burial in Honduras, where his family is from. It had raised more than $38,000 as of Friday afternoon. The page showed a picture of a boy in a thin red hoodie, smiling and standing in the snow. On Tuesday, while Anderson’s wife was mopping up their living room after a frozen pipe burst, he walked to the garage to try to get a generator going, hoping he could help clean up with a Shop-Vac. His wife would not know until later that he had walked to his truck in search of oxygen, said his stepdaughter, Brandi Campanile. It was 19 degrees. His spare oxygen tank, it would turn out, was empty. “He was trying to get oxygen and it was just a losing battle,” Campanile said Friday. “Texas is not meant to handle freezing temperatures. It’s not something that happens out here.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
- CelebrityCosmo
The Queen refuses to be photographed doing a certain activity
It's something we *all* do
- CelebrityUSA TODAY Entertainment
Kim Kardashian West officially files for divorce from Kanye West after almost 7 years of marriage
The "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" star, 40, has filed for divorce from rapper musician following almost seven years of marriage.
- NewsBusiness Insider
National Guard on standby in DC for March 4 - the day QAnon followers believe that Trump will become president
The conspiracy theorists are clinging on to the bizarre hope that Trump will be sworn in as president on March 4, 2021.
- NewsThe New York Times
Biden Tells Allies 'America Is Back,' but Macron and Merkel Push Back
President Joe Biden used his first public encounter with America’s European allies to describe a new struggle between the West and the forces of autocracy, declaring that “America is back” while acknowledging that the past four years had taken a toll on its power and influence. His message stressing the importance of reinvigorating alliances and recommitting to defending Europe was predictably well received at a session of the Munich Security Conference that Biden addressed from the White House. But there was also pushback, notably from the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who in his address made an impassioned defense of his concept of “strategic autonomy” from the United States, making the case that Europe can no longer be overly dependent on the United States as it focuses more of its attention on Asia, especially China. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times And even Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who is leaving office within the year, tempered her praise for Biden’s decision to cancel plans for a withdrawal of 12,000 U.S. troops from the country with a warning that “our interests will not always converge.” It appeared to be a reference to Germany’s ambivalence about confronting China — a major market for its automobiles and other high-end German products — and to the continuing battle with the United States over the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Russia. But all three leaders seemed to recognize that their first virtual encounter was a moment to celebrate the end of the era of “America First,” and for Macron and Merkel to welcome back Biden, a politician whom they knew well from his years as a senator and vice president. And Biden used the moment to warn about the need for a common strategy in pushing back at an Internet-fueled narrative, promoted by both Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, that the chaos surrounding the American election was another sign of democratic weakness and decline. “We must demonstrate that democracies can still deliver for our people in this changed world,” Biden said, adding, “We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of history.” For the president, a regular visitor to the conference even as a private citizen after serving as vice president, the address was something of a homecoming. The session was crunched down to a video meeting by Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, this year’s host, and the European leaders decided to do the same for a brief, closed meeting of the Group of 7 allies that Biden also participated in. The next in-person summit meeting is still planned for Britain this summer, pandemic permitting. Biden never named his predecessor, Donald Trump, in his remarks, but framed them around wiping out the traces of Trumpism in the United States’ approach to the world. He celebrated its return to the Paris climate agreement, which took effect just before the meeting, and a new initiative, announced Thursday night, to join Britain, France and Germany in engaging Iran diplomatically in an effort to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump exited. But rather than detail an agenda, Biden tried to recall the first principles that led to the Atlantic alliance and the creation of NATO in 1949, near the beginning of the Cold War. “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident,” the president said. “We have to defend it. Strengthen it. Renew it.” In a deliberate contrast to Trump, who talked about withdrawing from NATO and famously declined on several occasions to acknowledge the United States’ responsibilities under Article V of the alliance’s charter to come to the aid of members under attack, Biden cast the United States as ready to assume its responsibilities as the linchpin of the alliance. “We will keep the faith” with the obligation, he said, adding that “an attack on one is an attack on all.” But he also pressed Europe to think about challenges in a new way — different from the Cold War, even if the two biggest geostrategic adversaries seem familiar. “We must prepare together for long-term strategic competition with China,” he said, naming “cyberspace, artificial intelligence and biotechnology” as the new territory for competition. And he argued for pushing back against Russia — he called Putin by his last name, with no title attached — mentioning in particular the need to respond to the SolarWinds attack that was aimed at federal and corporate computer networks. “Addressing Russian recklessness and hacking into computer networks in the United States and across Europe and the world has become critical to protect collective security,” Biden said. The president avoided delving in to the difficult question of how to make Russia pay a price without escalating the confrontation. A senior White House cyberofficial told reporters this week that the scope and depth of the Russian intrusion was still under study, and officials are clearly struggling to come up with options to fulfill Biden’s commitment to make Putin pay a price for the attack. But it was the dynamic with Macron, who has made a habit of criticizing the NATO alliance as nearing “brain death” and no longer “pertinent” since the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, that captured attention. Macron wants NATO to act as more of a political body, a place where European members have equivalent status to the United States and are less subject to the American tendency to dominate decision-making. A Europe better able to defend itself, and more autonomous, would make NATO “even stronger than before,” Macron insisted. He said Europe should be “much more in charge of its own security,” increasing its commitments to spending on defense to “rebalance” the trans-Atlantic relationship. That is not a widely shared view among the many European states that do not want to spend the money required, and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are unwilling to trust their security to anyone but the United States. Macron also urged that the renovation of NATO’s security abilities should involve “a dialogue with Russia.” NATO has always claimed that it is open to better relations with Moscow, but that Russia is not interested, especially as long as international sanctions remain after its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine about seven years ago. But Macron, speaking in English to answer a question, also argued that Europe could not count on the United States as much as it had in past decades. “We must take more of the burden of our own protection,” he said. In practice, it will take many years for Europe to build up a defense arm that would make it more self-reliant. But Macron is determined to start now, just as he is determined to increase the European Union’s technological capacities so that it can become less dependent on American and Chinese supply chains. Biden, in contrast, wants to deepen those supply chains — of both hardware and software — among like-minded Western allies in an effort to lessen Chinese influence. He is preparing to propose a new joint project for European and American technology companies in areas like semiconductors and the kinds of software that Russia exploited in the SolarWinds hacking. It was Merkel who dwelled on the complexities of dealing with China, given its dual role as competitor and necessary partner for the West. “In recent years, China has gained global clout, and as trans-Atlantic partners and democracies, we must do something to counter this,” Merkel said. “Russia continually entangles European Union members in hybrid conflicts,” she said. “Consequently, it is important that we come up with a trans-Atlantic agenda toward Russia that makes cooperative offers on the one hand, but on the other very clearly names the differences.” While Biden announced he would make good on an American promise to donate $4 billion to the campaign to expedite the manufacturing and distribution of coronavirus vaccines around the world — a move approved last year by a Democratic-led House and a Republican led-Senate — there were clear differences in approach during the meeting. Underscoring the importance that the European Union accords to Africa, Macron called on Western nations to supply 13 million vaccine doses to African governments “as soon as possible” to protect health workers. He warned that if the alliance failed to do this, “our African friends will be pressured by their populations, and rightly so, to buy doses from the Chinese, the Russians or directly from laboratories.” Vaccine donations would reflect “a common will to advance and share the same values,” Macron said. Otherwise, “the power of the West, of Europeans and Americans, will be only a concept, and not a reality.” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, on Friday also urged countries and drugmakers to help speed up the manufacturing and distribution of vaccines across the globe, warning that the world could be “back at Square 1” if some countries went ahead with their vaccination campaigns and left others behind. “Vaccine equity is not just the right thing to do, it’s also the smartest to do,” Tedros said to the Munich conference. He argued that the longer it would take to vaccinate populations in every country, the longer the pandemic would remain out of control. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
- CelebrityPA Media: UK News
Royal baby name honours Eugenie’s grandfather Philip and Prince Albert
Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank have revealed their son’s name.













