Biden and gun control advocates want to flip an issue long dominated by the NRA

GUN CONTROL, ABORTION AND VOTING RIGHTS 

THE ELECTION ISSUES

BILL BARROW

Updated Tue, June 11, 2024

ATLANTA (AP) — Groups pushing tighter gun laws have been building political muscle through multiple elections, boosted by the outcry following mass shootings at schools and other public places, in addition to the nation's daily gun violence.

Now, gun control advocates and many Democrats see additional openings created by hard-line positions of the gun lobby and their most influential champion, former President Donald Trump. They also point to controversies surrounding the National Rifle Association, which has undergone leadership shuffles and membership declines after a key former executive was found to have expensed private jet flights and accepted vacations from group vendors.

At a Washington conference hosted by Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund on Tuesday, President Joe Biden rattled off a list of gun-related accomplishments during his administration, prompting huge cheers from the hundreds in the audience. He also called for a ban on assault-style weapons and universal background checks for firearms purchases.

Biden’s speech came as his son Hunter was convicted Tuesday of three charges for lying on a federal gun-purchase form in 2018 when he said he was not a drug user. The president, who has said he loves his son and also would respect the verdict, was leaving from the event to head to Delaware to be with his son and family. He did not mention his son during his address.

“We need you," Biden told the enthusiastic crowd members, whom he repeatedly praised for their advocacy. “We need you to overcome the unrelenting opposition of the gun lobby.”

Biden's campaign says gun control could be a motivating issue for suburban college-educated women who may be decisive in several key battlegrounds this fall. The Democratic campaign and its allies have already circulated clips of Trump, a Republican, saying, “We have to get over it," after an Iowa school shooting in January and then telling NRA members in May that he “did nothing” on guns during his presidency.

There have been 15 mass killings so far in 2024, according to data tracked by The Associated Press. A mass killing is defined as an attack in which four or more people have died, not including the perpetrator, within a 24-hour period.

Asked for comment, the Trump campaign pointed to the former president's previous statements promising no new gun regulations if he returns to the White House.

Trump has spoken twice this year at NRA events and was endorsed by the group in May. He alleged that Biden “has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.” His campaign and the Republican National Committee also announced the creation of a “Gun Owners for Trump” coalition that includes gun-rights activists and those who work in the firearms industry.

About 7 in 10 suburban college-educated women who voted in the 2022 midterm elections supported stricter gun control laws, although less than 1 in 10 named it as the top problem facing the country, according to AP VoteCast, a wide-ranging survey of voters.

An AP-NORC poll conducted in August 2023 found that about 6 in 10 independent voters said they wanted stricter gun laws. Only about one-third of Republicans wanted more expansive gun legislation while about 9 in 10 Democrats were in support.

Biden White House gets high marks from gun-control advocates

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris highlight their action on gun policy, notably the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, a compromise brokered after a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The law expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers, tried to make it harder for domestic abusers to obtain weapons and allocated billions of dollars to programs intended to curb gun violence.

It is the most sweeping federal gun legislation since a ban on certain semi-automatic weapons was signed in 1994; that ban expired a decade later.

Tougher gun laws are also a key pillar of Biden’s anti-crime message. In his speech Tuesday, the president pointed to the more than 500 defendants who have now been charged under the 2022 law for federal gun trafficking and straw purchasing crimes.

Biden also reenergized the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and he’s the first president to establish a White House office devoted to preventing gun violence.

Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action, called the Biden White House “the strongest administration we’ve ever seen on this issue.”

The idea of going beyond the 2022 law to enforce background checks on all potential gun buyers has bipartisan support, according to an August 2023 AP-NORC poll, with about 9 in 10 Democrats and about 7 in 10 Republicans in favor. A majority of U.S. adults wanted a nationwide ban on the sale of AR-15-style rifles, which can rapidly fire many rounds and are often used in mass shootings.

Last Thursday, Vice President Harris helped lead a gathering of health care leaders that West Wing aides highlighted as the first such White House summit to discuss guns as a public health crisis. On Friday, she discussed guns with Students for Biden, continuing a theme of her recent speeches on college campuses around the country.

“It is a false choice to suggest that you have to be in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away,” Harris said Friday in Maryland, where she spoke as part of a series of White House and campaign events focused on gun violence.

Gun-control advocates cite a potentially wider reach that extends across several parts of the Democrats’ coalition in recent elections: parents of schoolchildren, younger voters who grew up in an era of school shootings and safety drills, and Black and Hispanic voters. Biden’s approval among some of these groups has fallen during his term in the White House.

“The political calculus has changed so dramatically on this issue in a relatively short period of time,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. Legislating on guns, he said, was “an issue that elected officials once ran away from and now they run toward.”

Feinblatt said Everytown’s political arm plans advertising and voter outreach in presidential battleground states starting this summer.

The effort is modeled after Everytown’s strategy in Virginia’s 2023 legislative races, which yielded Democratic majorities. Everytown’s ads in suburban and exurban districts painted Republicans as threats to “public health and public safety.”

A still-powerful NRA

The NRA did not respond to a request for comment. It remains a force in Republican politics despite a series of headwinds. Wayne LaPierre, once one of the nation’s most powerful lobbyists, was found liable in a New York court for spending NRA funds on himself, ultimately stepping down. NRA membership and income dropped.

Ferrell-Zabala of Moms Demand Action labeled the group as “flailing.” She said the disarray has pushed some of the most conservative activists to burgeoning groups like Gun Owners of America. Self-described as “the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington,” the group opposes essentially any restriction on gun ownership and possession.

Matthew Lacombe, a Case Western Reserve University professor who studies gun politics, said the NRA's advocacy was a factor in Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton. Lacombe said the NRA remains a force and “represents an established base” for Trump.

“It’s part of a broader cultural identity” that goes beyond guns, he said, though he added that dynamics in the wider electorate have shifted.

“There was a time when the NRA successfully branded gun-control advocates as the extremists in this debate,” Lacombe said. “I don’t think most Americans see that idea of gun control as extreme anymore. They see the other side that way.”

___

This story has been corrected to show it was an AP-NORC poll, not AP VoteCast data, that found bipartisan support for going beyond the 2022 law to enforce background checks on all potential gun buyers.

___

Associated Press writers Amelia Thomson DeVeaux and Seung Min Kim in Washington and Will Weissert in Landover, Maryland, contributed to this report.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse requests information about Alito's 'improper' WSJ interview

Zoë Richards
Updated Tue, June 11, 2024 

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Judiciary Committee, requested information from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito tied to an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year in which Alito questioned whether Congress has the power to impose ethics rules on the Supreme Court.

In the letter made public Friday, Whitehouse, D-R.I., accused Alito of offering in an interview with the paper last year "an improper opinion regarding a question that might come before the Court" amid an ethical dilemma related to donors' funding of undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court justices.

According to the Journal interview, published July 28, Alito had asserted that Congress lacked authority to regulate the high court.“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period," Alito told the newspaper at the time.

Alito's interview appeared weeks after the Journal published his commentary rebutting a ProPublica report detailing his failure to disclose a fishing trip in Alaska with a Republican billionaire.

The interview, Whitehouse noted, was conducted by David B. Rivkin, an attorney representing Leonard Leo, who, according to ProPublica's report, coordinated Alito's 2008 trip with GOP donor Robin Arkley II.

Whitehouse argued that Alito’s assertions in the interview were made “to the benefit of yourself, as a recipient of undisclosed gifts that are the subject of our investigation.”

He further accused Alito of taking part in the interview "at the behest" of Rivkin, who was challenging the committee’s investigative efforts.

“From the outside, it looks like the attorney recruited you to prop up his legal case against our investigation, using the interview to advance the argument he and several colleagues were making,” Whitehouse wrote. “The interview seemed both solicited and timed for effect in the ongoing dispute.”

Rivkin and a spokesperson for the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday evening.

ProPublica had also published an article in April last year, detailing lavish trips taken by Justice Clarence Thomas that were funded by GOP donor Harlan Crow.

Whitehouse noted that the interview was published shortly after the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced his Supreme Court ethics bill, which would establish new disclosure rules for gifts and travel.

Whitehouse made similar points in an ethics complaint in September related to Alito’s Journal interview in which he demanded that Chief Justice John Roberts take action.

The Supreme Court later adopted a new code of conduct, but criticism related to its enforcement continues.

Alito last month declined to recuse himself from a pair of cases tied to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, after he was called on to do so when The New York Times reported that an upside-down American flag was displayed outside his home in mid-January 2021.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Dior Subsidiary Under Administration After Italian Labor Probe

Jasmin Malik Chua
Tue, Jun 11, 2024


First it was Alviero Martini, then a company belonging to Giorgio Armani. Now, one of Christian Dior’s Italian subsidiaries stands accused of working with Chinese-owned companies that exploited and mistreated workers, plunging the once-unimpeachable ethics of “made in Italy” luxury into further doubt.

And not just accused, either. On Monday, a Milanese court ordered that Manufacturers Dior be placed under judicial administration for one year, similar to Giorgio Armani Operations in April and Alviero Martini in January. Like GAO and Alviero Martini, which prosecutors said failed to prevent human rights violations in their supply chains, Manufacturers Dior did not take “appropriate measures to verify the actual working conditions or the technical capabilities of the contracting companies,” the ruling said. The company will still be allowed to make Dior-branded handbags during the time, albeit under the oversight of a special commissioner.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French conglomerate that owns Christian Dior, did not respond to a request for comment. LVMH shares tumbled 4 percent in the aftermath of the court’s decision, rallied later in the day, then fell by 4.5 percent from its June 7 close on Tuesday afternoon.

The Dior investigation, which began in March, focused on four factories—AZ Operations, Davide Albertario Milano, New Leather Italy and Pelletteria Elisabetta Yang, now all suspended—that together employed 32 workers on the outskirts of Milan, two of whom were in Italy illegally and seven without official documentation. Only two of the facilities were subcontractors; Davide Albertario Milan and Pelletteria Elisabetta Yang were Manufacturers Dior’s direct suppliers, the ruling said.

So-called “backdoor globalism” has brought waves of Chinese immigrants that have set up shop in Italy’s textile strongholds, including the Tuscan city of Prato, which is colloquially known as “Little China” for boasting one of Europe’s largest Chinese populations. The Chinese-run businesses have outcompeted their native Italian counterparts in terms of speed, productivity and price, though some of that success appears to have come at the cost of labor and workplace standards that margin-sensitive buyers may be willing to overlook—or at least not interrogate too much—particularly if subcontracting is involved. “Made in Italy” only requires that a product is planned, manufactured and packed in the country; it doesn’t specify by whose hands or under what conditions they’re made.

Prosecutors said that the workers earned less than the legal minimum wage while operating dangerously overclocked machines in “hygiene and health conditions that are below the minimum required by an ethical approach.” They were also made to sleep in the factories so they could be available 24 hours a day, a claim that was backed up by electricity consumption data that revealed “seamless day-night production cycles, including during the holiday.”

All of this allowed the suppliers to charge Dior as little as 53 euros ($57) per handbag, the ruling said, or a fraction of the $9,500 the high-end label can charge. LVMH doesn’t break down profits by brand, though Dior is among its most valuable. The entire group recorded 86.2 billion euros ($92.6 billion) in revenues in 2023, a 13 percent uptick from the year before.

While Dior doesn’t face criminal charges, it failed to adopt “appropriate measures to check the actual working conditions or the technical capabilities of the contracting companies,” the court said. Italian law requires brands outsourcing production to perform their due diligence on suppliers.

Amazon adds $1.4 billion to affordable housing fund for regions where it has corporate offices


A car passes by the Atworth at College Park building in College Park, Md., Tuesday, June 11, 2024. The apartment building was built using investments from Amazon's Housing Equity Fund. The company said Tuesday its adding $1.4 billion to the fund in order to help preserve or construct more affordable housing units in three regions.

 (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

HALELUYA HADERO
Updated Tue, Jun 11, 2024

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon is adding $1.4 billion to a fund it established three years ago for preserving or building more affordable housing in regions where the company has major corporate offices, CEO Andy Jassy announced Tuesday.

The Seattle-based company said the new sum would go on top of the $2.2 billion it had already invested to help create or preserve 21,000 affordable housing units in three areas: the Puget Sound in Washington state; Arlington, Virginia; and Nashville, Tennessee. When it launched its Housing Equity Fund in January 2021, Amazon said it aimed to fund 20,000 units over five years.

The additional money will go to the same regions with a goal of building or maintaining 14,000 more homes through grants and below-market-rate loans. To date, most of the funding went to non-profit and for-profit developers in the form of loans that allow Amazon to earn revenue through interest payments. Amazon said 80% of the units also benefited from government funding.

Like other tech companies that have made similar investments, Amazon launched its affordable housing fund following years of complaints that well-paid tech workers helped drive up housing costs in regions where their employers had set up major hubs.

Housing advocates in cities like Seattle and San Francisco have long blamed an influx of corporate workers for driving up the demand for housing and pricing out long-time residents.

Alice Shobe, the global director of Amazon Community Impact division, said 59% of the units Amazon supported so far have been preservation projects that make use of existing housing. They include donations and loans to nonprofits and local government agencies that can purchase buildings and stabilize rents, or otherwise maintain naturally occurring affordable housing.

In addition to maintaining housing stock, such projects prevent private developers from remodeling apartment buildings and putting the units on the market at much higher prices, Shobe said in an interview.

“We’ve made a big difference in both the amount and quality of affordable housing in these three communities,” she said.

Amazon targets its investments to provide housing for individuals with low-to-moderate incomes, which the company defines as those earning 30% to 80% of a given region's “area median income.” The company has said it wants to focus on what it calls the “missing middle," a demographic that includes professionals like nursing assistants and teachers who don’t qualify for government subsidies but still struggle to pay rent.

In September, Amazon made a $40 million investment to drive home ownership in the three regions. But the rest of the money so far has gone toward apartment buildings.

The company previously received some criticism in Northern Virginia for neglecting the housing needs of people on the lower end of the income spectrum. Projects designed for such individuals are likely to require more government subsidies and take longer to complete, said Derek Hyra, a professor at American University and a founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Center.

Shobe said Amazon has worked to maintain a “mixed portfolio” without losing its focus on the missing middle. Currently, the company says most of the units it has supported serve households earning less than 60% of the area median income, which goes up to $82,200 for a family of four in Washington state's King County, where Seattle is located.

Companies like Amazon can help with the supply of affordable housing, but their money alone won’t do much to move the needle without significant investments from the federal government, according to Hyra.

“They have a good amount of money, but not enough money to solve the problem,” he said.

An internal Amazon memo that was leaked last year to the nonprofit labor organization Warehouse Worker Resource Center and posted online shows the company sees its philanthropy as a tool that can help it burnish its reputation.

According to a person familiar with the matter, the housing fund previously sat under Amazon’s government and corporate affairs division. However, it was moved to the company’s public relations arm when Jay Carney, Amazon’s former public policy and communications chief, left in 2022, the person said.

Watch: India police deny presence of a leopard at PM's swearing-in

Ben Hooper
Tue, June 11, 2024 


June 11 (UPI) -- Police in India said an animal spotted in the live broadcast of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's swearing-in ceremony was not a leopard, despite rumors on social media.

Viewers of the live broadcast Monday noticed a large feline walking in the background while Modi was sworn in for his third term at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the prime minister's Delhi residence, and some social media users said it appeared that a leopard had found its way into the building.

The rumors ended up being reported on by news media, leading Delhi Police to respond on social media.

"Some media channels and social media handles are showing an animal image captured during the live telecast of oath taking ceremony held at the Rashtrapati Bhavan yesterday, claiming it to be a wild animal," police wrote. "These facts are not true, the animal captured on camera is a common house cat. Please don't adhere to such frivolous rumors."

Oxford University to return bronze sculpture of Hindu saint to India

Associated Press
Mon, June 10, 2024 

In this photo provided by Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford on Monday, June 10, 2024, a view of a 500-year-old bronze depicting Tirumankai Alvar. Oxford University has agreed to return a 500-year-old bronze sculpture of a Hindu saint to India. The Ashmolean Museum says the Indian High Commission had made a claim four years ago for the bronze figure of Tirumankai Alvar that was allegedly looted from a temple. (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford via AP)More

LONDON (AP) — Oxford University has agreed to return a 500-year-old bronze sculpture of a Hindu poet and saint to India, the university's Ashmolean Museum said.

The Indian High Commission in the U.K. made a claim four years ago for the bronze figure of Tirumankai Alvar that was allegedly looted from a temple.

Vijay Kumar, co-founder of India Pride Project, which seeks to reclaim stolen religious artifacts, said worshippers have something to cheer.

“We saw COVID delays and procedural drama between British and Indian authorities on what should have been an open and shut case,” Kumar told the Times of India on Sunday. ”But we have been voicing our opinions on social media and we are almost there."

The planned repatriation comes amid a push by foreign governments, including Nigeria, Egypt and Greece, as well as Indigenous peoples from North America to Australia, seeking to reclaim precious antiquities looted or acquired by questionable means during the heyday of the British Empire.

Oxford agreed two years ago to return nearly 100 Benin bronzes to the Nigerian government that were looted in 1897 when British soldiers attacked and occupied Benin City as Britain expanded its political and commercial influence in West Africa.

The return of those items has been held up by the Charity Commission, a regulatory body in England and Wales that decides if returning art undermines an organization's charitable mission. The Indian bronze will also need the commission's approval.

The Ashmolean said it reached out to the Indian High Commission in 2019 after research from photo archives showed the bronze in a temple in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu in 1957.

The museum issued a statement saying the university council supported the return of the item in March.

The museum said it bought the statue at Sotheby's in 1967. It said it didn't know how collector Dr. J.R. Belmont had acquired it.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/155

Egypt's Extreme Heat Is Ominous Warning for Global Economies This Summer

Salma El Wardany and Olivia Rudgard

Tue, Jun 11, 2024, 

(Bloomberg) -- On a sizzling hot day in April, Cairo meteorologist Amira Nasser points to a written chronicle of Egypt’s weather in the 1800s. Outside, the temperature is 41°C (105°F), or 46°C in the sun — hot enough to have killed the battery on Nasser’s phone. Inside, the records at the museum of meteorology have a page from April 1874, when the temperature in Cairo was 24°C.

“It’s only April and we’re dealing with heat waves already,” she says. “This was unheard of decades ago.”

While the planet has now seen 12 consecutive months of record-breaking heat, global warming is a particularly severe problem for Egypt, a desert country heating up at one of the world’s fastest rates. Experts at the Egyptian Meteorological Authority worry this summer will be even more brutal than last year, upending commodities and agriculture while wreaking havoc on daily life.

President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s administration — which recently secured a $57 billion bailout — is already being forced into the highest imports of liquefied natural gas since 2018 to keep up with whirring air conditioners. The declining yield of the wheat crop due to heat and water shortages has meant more dependence on imports of a grain that’s vital for feeding Egypt’s population.

Meanwhile, perpetual power cuts are sharply denting productivity. Laptops shut down during Zoom meetings. When cuts are announced in advance, office goers rush home early to avoid getting stuck in elevators — which local media reports say has caused at least a handful of deadly accidents with people trying to get out during sudden electricity outages.

A bellwether for the effects of climate change, Egypt offers a glimpse of what awaits economies worldwide over the coming summer as well as future ones. Dubai has already suffered the effects of extreme weather after torrential rains left homes and roads flooded for days. India’s tech capital, Bangalore, has struggled with water shortages. And as hot weather arrives in Europe and the Americas, other nations will feel their own pain.

Nasser — who is doing her Ph.D. on heat waves — fears other possible fallouts in Egypt. “One of the concerns we’re navigating is we start having a category of deaths that is death by heat,” she said. “Temperatures never reached 50°C and we’re not there yet, but we need to be prepared and have emergency plans like we have for floods.”

Egypt’s suffering is particularly acute because of its geographical makeup as a desert country with limited water resources. That’s making it warm up at twice the rate as the rest of the planet, showing the impact of extreme heat and highlighting the importance of accurately predicting extreme weather events for policymaking and business. Already, economists and climate specialists are forecasting severe heat this summer in many parts of the world.

In particular, large parts of the north Atlantic are still well above usual temperatures, which is likely to fuel continued hot weather in Europe. That means spiking energy demand for cooling, and an elevated threat of wildfires in Greece, Spain and the French Riviera. Heavier summer rainstorms could bring the risk of flash flooding and disruption to agriculture. Then there’s the human toll.

“We have seen over the last 20 years the heat-related mortality in Europe going up by 30% and this has affected the vast majority of European territory,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

Both Morocco and Mexico are facing droughts, while California and the US Southwest are looking at heat waves. In Thailand, more people have already died from heat this year than in all of 2023. In the US, experts are predicting a very active season for tropical cyclones.

In Egypt, another summer of massive rolling outages would pile pressure on the state budget and on a population already grappling with high inflation, a devalued currency and rising domestic fuel prices. The country only recently secured the bailout in the form of investments and aid packages.

Finance Minister Mohamed Maait said state subsidies on fuel amounted to 220 billion Egyptian pounds ($4.6 billion) in the current fiscal year and ending blackouts would require an additional $300 million a month to import enough energy.

Climate officials fear that some of this year’s crops could be badly hit in Egypt. The orange crop was almost destroyed last year and growers couldn’t export much. The mango yield is also estimated to have dropped between 14.6% to 50.5% last year while the corn harvest in southern Egypt also declined by 30-40%, according to the Met.

Holiday areas have also been hit. Aswan, a city with majestic Pharaonic ruins and temples, one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations and the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s famous Death on the Nile, recorded its hottest temperature ever with 49.6°C in the shade on June 6.

The country has one of the world’s oldest traditions of monitoring the temperature. In 1829, i​t started measuring the temperature five times a day in conjunction with the five prayer times in one room in its School of Engineers. Its Met department’s museum showcases weather measuring tools used by ancient Egyptians. These days its meteorologists are in constant contact with ministries from aviation and agriculture to navigation and energy. They provide forecasts essential for everything for urban planning to imports, seeking to mitigate the impact of extreme weather that in 2010 damaged Egypt's crucial wheat crop, caused dozens of heat-related deaths five years later and in 2018 flooded homes and cut power and roads in one of Cairo's most prestigious suburbs.

Now, many Egyptians organize their daily lives completely around the agency’s forecasts. In Cairo, Salwa Abdel-Azim, 49, doesn’t have an air conditioner. So, she’s been constantly checking the Met’s Facebook page to plan for heat waves, storing water in jerry cans to use for drinking and cooling the head and the back of the neck when the power is down. Her family tries to get everything done before electricity cuts off, finishing their studying, home chores, and charging the LED flashlight. She has to cook very early in the morning before rushing off to work.

“The only thing I’m looking forward to now is the time in between heat waves,” she said.

Climate change is making many cities globally dangerously hot due to the ‘urban heat island effect’ which occurs because buildings and dense construction capture the heat. It’s a particular problem for cities like the Greater Cairo region, which has a population of more than 20 million.

“My house is south-facing so it gets very hot,” said Sondos Ibrahim, a freelance graphic designer in Cairo. “So then I rush to a cafe in a shopping mall that I know doesn’t have power cuts, or I go and WFM — also known as Working From Mom’s — if she has electricity. But it’s a struggle to keep my business running.”

Egypt's Extreme Heat Is Ominous Warning for Global Economies This Summer

Russia says Putin won't die in a plane crash because their domestic aircraft 'are very reliable vehicles'

UNLIKE THE WAGNER GROUP LEADERSHIP

Kwan Wei Kevin Tan
Tue, June 11, 2024 

Recent aviation accidents have claimed the lives of Iran's president and Malawi's vice president.


But Russia says Vladimir Putin is safe if he travels on their "very reliable" domestic aircraft.


Russian flight safety incidents have more than doubled in the past year, per JACDEC.

A Russian official says the country's leader, Vladimir Putin, won't get caught in a plane crash if he travels on domestic aircraft, state news agency TASS reported on Tuesday.

"The Russian president uses domestic aircraft. These are very reliable vehicles," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

Peskov was speaking at a press briefing when he was asked about the recent aviation accidents that claimed the lives of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Malawi's Vice President Saulos Chilima.

Raisi was flying over northwestern Iran when his helicopter crashed on May 19. Iran's foreign minister, the governor of Iran's East Azerbaijan province, and other officials were also on board the helicopter. No one survived the deadly incident.

Chilima, meanwhile, was killed in a plane crash along with nine other passengers on Tuesday. Malawi's President Lazarus Chakwera said Chilima's plane was found "completely destroyed" near a hill in northern Malawi.

However, Peskov said such incidents were unlikely to occur with Russian aircraft, given what he said were Russia's rigorous safety standards.

"All machinery in our country that transports citizens is also maintained at the proper level. There are very strict standards in this regard, which are, of course, observed," Peskov said.

"We have monitoring agencies," he continued. "The system works."

To be sure, Russia doesn't exactly have the best record when it comes to flight safety.

In February, the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC) revealed that Russian flight safety incidents have more than doubled in the past year, going from 37 cases in 2022 to 81 in 2023.

The Russian aviation industry's flight safety problems are in large part due to crippling economic sanctions the West imposed following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Such restrictions have made it difficult for Russia's airlines to maintain their aircraft since they can't buy new planes or parts.

In fact, the number of flight safety incidents in Russia might be much higher, says JACDEC founder and CEO Jan-Arwed Richter.

"These numbers only reflect cases that became public. There is still a dark figure of unreported incidents," Richter told The Telegraph in February.

Business Insider

Kremlin Explains Why Putin Won’t Die in a Crash Like Iran’s Presiden

Allison Quinn

THE DAILY BEAST
Tue, June 11, 2024

The prospect of Russian President Vladimir Putin dying in a fiery plane crash came up Tuesday when the Kremlin was asked if it had any concerns about aircraft safety in the wake of two world leaders plummeting from the sky in recent weeks.

The vice president of Malawi was confirmed dead Tuesday in the latest plane crash, just a couple weeks after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed when his helicopter went down.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov assured that Putin uses “domestic aircraft,” which he claimed are “very reliable” and “subject to special maintenance.” In fact, he said, all Russian aircraft are maintained in accordance with “strict standards” that ensure safety.

Russians Terrified by Putin’s Bunker Mentality as He Turns 70 With His Finger on the Nuclear Button

“There are regulatory agencies, so the system works here,” he said.

His assurances, strangely, came just a few hours after the Russian Defense Ministry announced that a military jet had gone down in the mountains of North Ossetia and killed all crew members on board after a “technical malfunction.”

The International Civil Aviation Organization, part of the United Nations, deemed Russia one of the four most dangerous countries to fly in after at least 180 aviation accidents there last year, twice as many as in 2022, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported. The country had a poor flight safety record even before Western sanctions left airlines deprived of spare parts for foreign-made planes.

Data from the Aviation Safety Network shows more plane crash fatalities in Russia over the past two decades than in any other country.

Showdown Brewing Over Ballistic Missile Interceptor Site On East Coast

Howard Altman
Tue, June 11, 2024 

Artist rendering of NGI in flight.

The White House does not want to see a third ballistic missile interceptor site created on the East Coast in addition to the ones already in operation in Alaska and California.

“There is no operational need for such a site to protect the Homeland against potential ballistic missiles originating from Iran or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),” the White said in its “Statement on Administration Policy.”

North Korea Solid Fuel HWASONG18 ICBM. KCNA

The Biden administration is “strongly” opposing a measure in the House Armed Services Committee's (HASC) Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act legislation calling for the establishment by December 2030 of an “additional continental United States interceptor site, located at the Department of Defense’s conditionally designated preferred site of Fort Drum, New York.”


In arguing for the Fort Drum site, HASC had an opposite take from the White House, stating that it is “needed to enhance the protection of the United States homeland against potential long-range ballistic missiles originating from Iran or North Korea.”

HASC also mandated that the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) begin providing an annual report, starting no later than Dec. 31, about the status of the planning and design, construction, development, and equipment requirements for the interceptor site. In addition, the committee wants to know plans for deploying additional missile defense sensor discrimination capabilities there.

The HASC legislation does not include a price tag, but last year, then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley told Congress it “would take billions; I don't know exact cost figures, but take billions,” to build the Fort Drum interceptor site.

The U.S. now has two launch sites already established to counter long-range ballistic missile threats; the primary one at Fort Greely, Alaska, and a smaller one at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The missiles are Ground-Based Interceptors or GBIs.

A Ground-Based Interceptor. US Army

GBIs are part of the U.S. military's Ground-based Midcourse Defense missile defense system (GMD). GMD is designed to physically knock out long-range ballistic missile threats to the U.S. homeland while they are still in space. The entire GMD system architecture ties into a network of ground-, sea-, and space-based sensors and command and control systems. You can read all about how midcourse intercept works in this past explainer of ours.

The White House said that the existing sites will be sufficient to counter threats under the planned Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) program, which will ultimately replace the GBI. You can read much more about that program in our deep dive that questioned its exorbitant nearly $20 billion price tag here.

An infographic from Lockheed Martin on its NGI design., Lockheed Martin

The Pentagon “has prioritized improving the probability of successfully intercepting missile threats by completing development” of NGI, “ which will begin fielding in 20 available silos in Alaska in 2028,” the White House stated. “The NGI will protect all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico against existing threats from the DPRK and potential future threats. The Department will continue to monitor developments in these threats and evolutions in the capability of the nation’s Ballistic Missile Defense System.”

The NGI is a multiple-kill vehicle interceptor "hit-to-kill" kinetic weapon designed to destroy its targets by smashing into them outside the Earth's atmosphere. By contrast, the GBI features a single Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) that engages a single target. You can see a successful test of a GBI last year in the video below.

https://youtu.be/kxRDK2SYSlg?t=3

Multiple kill vehicles allow the NGI to engage more than one target at a time or assign more than one kill vehicle to an incoming target. That’s a big advantage over single-kill vehicle interceptors like the GBI, especially given the very limited numbers being produced. This will allow for better effectiveness defending against multiple missile attacks. This all relies on a multitude of sensors, from the sea to space, to help detect, classify and guide the warhead to the target or targets. The Pentagon’s developing satellite-based space tracking layer, which provides global indications, warning, tracking, and targeting of advanced missile threats, should eventually help make these engagements more seamless and less reliant on terrestrial sensors.

The Pentagon is asking for more than $2.5 billion in the Fiscal Year 2025 budget for the GMD program. That includes continuing NGI All-Up Round (AUR) development “to enhance homeland defense interceptor capability and capacity to increase current fleet size to 64 interceptors (44 GBIs and 20 NGIs) as early as the end of the decade.”

NGI funding provides for “the analysis, design, development, prototyping, integration and relevant environment testing to mature the booster, payload, sensor, and design-specific critical technologies and technology elements,” of the weapon, according to the Pentagon. It also “upgrades and consolidates ground testing infrastructure and facilities” as well as upgrades and replaces “ground system infrastructure fire control/kill vehicle software to improve the reliability and cybersecurity resiliency of the GMD weapon system.” In addition, it funds “Ground, Cyber and Flight testing to support the Integrated Master Test Plan.”

A notional rendering of the Next Generation Interceptor. Lockheed Martin

In April, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) downselected Lockheed Martin to be the prime contractor on the $17.8 billion NGI program. That was after MDA awarded development contracts for NGI to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in March 2021.

That's a very large price tag for a program that, as of now, includes just delivered 20 interceptors. As it sits, NGI will augment GBI, but there are hopes that it would replace the latter entirely as those older interceptors age out and become less operationally relevant.

While existing North Korean ballistic missile technology can reach the entirety of the United States, the reliability of its reentry vehicles and nuclear warheads remains in question. North Korea's rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal and long-range missile inventory has also drawn concerns that it could numerically outpace the GMD system in the not too distant future. As for Iran, it is developing its long-range ballistic capabilities as well but has yet to design one that can reach more than 1,200 miles.

Some have argued that a greater amount of focus is needed on securing the homeland against lower-end conventional threats, like long-range attack drones and cruise missiles, than against ICBMs. America’s GMD capability can only work against low-volume nuclear missile attacks by rogue states, not major powers like China and Russia.

NGI, which won’t come online until 2028 at the earliest, has yet to be flight-tested. The U.S. has made a huge bet that it will be able to add to and possibly replace GBI to meet North Korean and Iranian threats.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com