Wednesday, May 19, 2021

A criminal capacity

The New York attorney general's investigation into the Trump Organization is now a criminal inquiry; Latin America's Covid-19 situation worsens. 

 

Tonight's Sentences was written by Gregory Svirnovskiy.

TOP NEWS
A bad week for Trump
James Devaney/GC Images
  • It's shaping up to be a rough week for former President Donald Trump. Today, House Democrats will likely vote to establish an independent panel to investigate the January 6 Capitol insurrection. More worrisome, New York's probe into the Trump Organization is now a full-scale criminal inquiry, according to the office of state Attorney General Letitia James. [NPR / Jaclyn Diaz and Andrea Bernstein]
  • The New York attorney general's office has been looking into the Trump Organization since 2019. They're working with the Manhattan district attorney's office, which has gone through millions of pages of financial documents relating to the Trump team, including the former president's tax returns. [Slate / Elliot Hannon]
  • At the core of the investigation: allegations that Trump unethically inflated and deflated assets to save money on tax returns, lied to lenders and insurance companies about property values, and improperly compensated employees. [CNN / Sonia Moghe and Kara Scannell]
  • "We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature," Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for New York AG Letitia James, said in a statement Wednesday. "We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time." [Mother Jones / Russ Choma]
  • Wednesday's House vote on the insurrection commission doesn't have the same legal ramifications for Trump, but the political consequences for the Republican Party may be just as significant. [CNN / Annie Grayer]
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have each announced their opposition to the bill. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer cast their opposition as "beyond crazy, to be so far under the thumb of Donald J. Trump." [CNN / Ali Zaslav]
 
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Latin American countries struggle with a second Covid-19 wave
  • In Latin America, countries that once had a tentative handle on the coronavirus pandemic are now struggling to deal with a punishing second wave of cases, driven by the P.1 variant, which first emerged in Brazil. [Washington Post / Maite Fernández Simon]
  • Six of the 11 countries with the highest Covid-19 death rates per capita are in South America. Uruguay in particular is suffering. More than 3,200 people have died of Covid-19 in the country, the highest per capita rate in the world in the past week, and the daily death total has been around 50 in recent weeks. The country shares a border with Brazil, full of walkways and binational villages that render border closures moot. [NYT / Daniel Politi]
  • Particularly in Brazil, the P.1 variant has emerged as a major concern. Coupled with the inadequate medical infrastructure and inequalities in access to care in the country, the variant has killed a jarring number of children. By some estimates, as many as 2,200 children under age 5 have died in Brazil since the beginning of the pandemic. [NYT / Ana Ionova]
  • But despite the rise in cases brought about by this variant-fueled wave, vaccinations in general have been slow all over the continent. Just one in eight adults in Brazil are fully vaccinated. [Reuters / Anthony Boadle]
  • The rollout has gone even worse elsewhere in the region. In 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries, under 12.6 percent of the population has gotten vaccinated. Paraguay has administered just 167,680 vaccine doses to its population of 7 million as of May 11. The situation is exacerbated by unequal vaccine distribution; Latin America and the Caribbean account for just 8 percent of the world's population but 30 percent of global reported Covid-19 fatalities. [Miami Herald / Jaqueline Charles, Shirso Dasgupta, Kevin G. Hall and Rosmery Izaguirre]
MISCELLANEOUS
Vaccinated Americans will soon be able to travel to the European Union, a spokesperson said Wednesday.

[NYT / Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Monika Pronczuk]

  • UFOs are in the news, with a wave of interest driven by an upcoming Pentagon report and new media coverage of Navy footage of mysterious flying objects. Even former President Obama weighed in on them on James Corden's late-night show. [NBC News / Jason Abbruzzese]
  • In a new interview, Anthony Fauci said that "Americans are misinterpreting the new rules" around masking. Unvaccinated people, he said, still need to take precautions and mask up when in public. [The Hill / Dominick Mastrangelo]
  • India set another daily record for Covid-19 deaths, which are increasing even as the rates of new cases stabilize. [AP / Sheikh Saaliq and Biswajeet Banerjee]
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VERBATIM
"As everybody surely knows, I repeatedly made my views about the events of January 6th very clear. I spoke clearly and left no doubt about my conclusions."

[Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell explaining his opposition to the formation of a commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol insurrection]

WATCH THIS
The 2020* Olympics


*Are being held this summer in Tokyo. And it's a mess. [Spotify]

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