Trump fails to halt contempt-of-court fine during appeal
NEW YORK — A New York appeals court denied former President Donald Trump’s request to suspend his $10,000-a-day fine for contempt of court while he challenges a judge’s ruling that he failed to respond to a subpoena.
Trump’s motion was denied Tuesday, one day after it was filed, according to the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who issued the subpoena in a probe of asset valuations at the former president’s real estate company.
The appeal was filed after New York state court Judge Arthur Engoron ruled the former president violated a court order by missing a March 31 deadline to respond to the state’s demand for any records related to the valuations in his personal possession.
Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, declined to comment on the appeals court decision.
Habba had asked the appellate court to place the fine on hold, calling it “patently improper and impermissible by law.” Shehas insisted that Trump doesn’t have any personal records that are responsive to the subpoena.
—Bloomberg News
As drought crisis deepens, government will release less water from Colorado River reservoir
After years of severe drought compounded by climate change, the water level in Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir on the Colorado River, has dropped to just 24% of full capacity and is continuing to decline to levels not seen since the reservoir was filled in the 1960s.
In effort to boost the shrinking reservoir, the federal government announced Tuesday that it plans to hold back water to reduce risks of the lake falling below a point at which Glen Canyon Dam would no longer generate electricity.
“Today’s decision reflects the truly unprecedented challenges facing the Colorado River Basin and will provide operational certainty for the next year,” Tanya Trujillo, the federal Interior Department’s assistant secretary of water and science,said in a statement announcing the measures.
It is the first time that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has invoked its authority to change its operations at Glen Canyon Dam on the Arizona-Utah border. The agency said the plan protects the dam’s ability to generate hydropower and the facility’s infrastructure and will ensure water supplies continue to be available for the nearby city of Page, Arizona, and a portion of the Navajo Nation.
The federal government’s plan aims to reduce the risks of Lake Powell falling to critically low levels. The measures will involve releasing about 500,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, which is located upstream, and leaving an additional 480,000 acre-feet in Lake Powell by reducing the volume of water released from Glen Canyon Dam this year.
For comparison, California, Arizona and Nevada used 6.8 million acre-feet of Colorado River water in 2020.
—Los Angeles Times
New coronavirus variants emerge: BA.4, BA.5 likely reinfecting omicron survivors
A pair of new omicron subvariants has emerged, raising the possibility that survivors of earlier omicron strains can get reinfected.
BA.4 and BA.5 have gained increasing attention in South Africa as weekly coronavirus cases tripled in the last two weeks,according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
“It really came out of the blue over the weekend. We were already settling down with BA.2.12.1, and then BA.4 and BA.5?” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases expert at the University of California, San Francisco. “It just seems like the latest chapter of a never-ending saga.”
The rapid growth of BA.4 and BA.5 in South Africa has implications for a potential future surge in California and the U.S.Until now, scientists had been reassured that people who survived the first omicron variant over the winter, BA.1, were unlikely to be reinfected by the even more infectious subvariant BA.2, which is now dominant nationwide.
But the surge in cases in South Africa of BA.4 and BA.5 follow an earlier omicron wave. An estimated 90% of South Africa’s population has immunity to the earlier omicron variants either due to surviving a natural infection or through vaccination.
“If 90% of people are immune already, and they’re seeing a surge in cases, it means that this particular dynamic duo (BA.4and BA.5) are causing more reinfections — even in people who already had omicron,” Chin-Hong said.
—Los Angeles Times
Obesity rates increase to ‘epidemic’ level in Europe, WHO warns
Most Europeans are overweight and rising rates of obesity threaten to undermine the region’s reputation for having a population that’s thinner on average than Americans, a new report showed.
Turkey and the U.K. are among Europe’s most overweight countries, the World Health Organization said Tuesday in a report.The United Nations body said it’s declaring an “obesity epidemic” after finding that 59% of adults in Europe had a high body-mass index in 2016.
Obesity is among the leading causes of death and disability and is responsible for about 1.2 million fatalities each year,accounting for 13% of mortality in Europe. No country in the region is on track to reduce obesity rates by 2025, the WHO report showed, predicting obesity will overtake smoking as the leading cause of preventable cancers in the next decades.
Almost 74% of adults in the U.S. are overweight or obese, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said, based on data from 2017 and 2018. The WHO said Europe has higher obesity rates than every other region except the Americas.
The WHO said unhealthy food consumption has increased during the pandemic and is expected to compound the issue. Almost 1in 3 children in Europe have a high body-mass index, the report found. The WHO urged governments to take action to fight obesity.
“We need attention at the highest level,” said Kremlin Wickramasinghe, acting head of the WHO’s European Office for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases. “We hope this report will be a driving force for the next decade.”
—Bloomberg News
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