It’s a chaotic time for the Consumer Electronics Show 2022, the world’s largest technology event. Last-minute COVID-19-related cancellations have wreaked havoc on the organizers’ plans to host exhibitors and welcome visitors in person in Las Vegas and online. But as VOA’s JulieTaboh reports, the show will go on.
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A survey of U.S. adults found a majority consider democracy and the rule of law in the country under threat. 

Sixty-six percent of respondents to the CBS News poll released Sunday said democracy was either somewhat or very threatened, with 33% saying democracy is secure. 

The poll comes days ahead of the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol last year during which supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the site as lawmakers inside were meeting to certify President Joe Biden’s election win. 

Among poll respondents, 83% said they disapprove of the people who forced their way into the Capitol. 

Majorities categorized the actions of those involved as an insurrection, an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government, trying to overturn the election to keep Trump in power, and also as a protest that went too far. 

As the country prepares for midterm congressional elections this year, 68% said they viewed the January 6 attack as a sign of increasing political violence in the country. With the next presidential vote in 2024, 62% of respondents said they expect violence from the losing side. 

Two-thirds of respondents said they consider Biden the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, about the same number as in a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released Saturday. 

The Post poll also included 45% of respondents saying Trump had a great deal of responsibility for the attack, while 28% said not at all. 

It also included a long-term uptick in the number of people who said it is sometimes justified for citizens to take violent action against the government. The latest poll had 34% of respondents saying yes, up from 23% in 2015 and 13% in 1995. 
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U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reported Sunday that he has contracted COVID-19, as the highly infectious omicron variant sweeps across the United States.

In a statement, the Pentagon chief said that his symptoms were “mild” and that he will quarantine at home for the next five days.

Austin said he is fully vaccinated and boosted, which had “rendered the infection much more mild than it would otherwise have been.”

“The vaccines work and will remain a military medical requirement for our workforce,” Austin said. “I continue to encourage everyone eligible for a booster shot to get one.”

Austin said he was last in contact with President Joe Biden on December 21, more than a week before he started to experience symptoms and he tested negative for the virus that morning.

He will retain all authority and attend key meetings and discussions virtually “to the degree possible,” he said in the statement.

Austin is the latest high-profile U.S. official to contract COVID-19 as the omicron variant drives a record surge in infections.

Several prominent members of Congress recently revealed they had tested positive for the virus. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, contracted COVID-19 in October.
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Hollywood closed out 2021 with more fireworks at the box office for “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which topped all films for the third straight week and already charts among the highest grossing films ever. But even with all the champagne popping for “No Way Home,” the film industry heads into 2022 with plenty of reason for both optimism and concern after a year that saw overall ticket revenue double that of 2020, but still well off the pre-pandemic pace.

Movie theaters began the year mostly shuttered but ended it with a monster smash. Sony Pictures’ Marvel sequel “No Way Home” grossed an estimated $52.7 million over the weekend to bring its three-week total to $609.9 million. That ranks 10th all-time in North America. Worldwide, it’s made $1.37 billion, a total that puts it above “Black Panther” and makes it the 12th-highest-grossing film globally. 

“No Way Home,” Tom Holland’s third standalone film as the webslinger, gave a huge lift to the box-office recovery that started in earnest last spring when U.S. cinemas opened after a year of COVID-19 closures. Marvel films dominated the turbulent year, accounting for the top four movies of 2021: “No Way Home,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” and “Black Widow.” 

The North American box office in 2021 amounted to $4.5 billion, according to data firm ComScore. That’s about 60% down from 2019 — back before the days of masked moviegoers, social distancing and virus variants like the currently surging omicron. 

Whether the movies will ever reach those pre-pandemic totals again is uncertain, given that exclusive theatrical windows have since shrunk, studios have experimented with hybrid releases and little besides superhero films are packing theaters. Partly due to COVID-19 disruptions, the 2022 release schedule is unusually packed with potential blockbusters, including “The Batman,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Jurassic World: Dominion,” “Thor: Love and Thunder” and “Avatar 2.” 

Second place over the weekend went to Universal Picture’s animated sequel “Sing 2.” It took in $19.6 million in its second weekend to bring its two-week total to $89.7 million. That’s a steady result given that family movies and films skewing toward older moviegoers have been the slowest to bounce back during the pandemic. “Sing 2” added another $54.9 million internationally. Its trajectory should make it the top animated release of the pandemic. 

But after “No Way Home” and “Sing 2,” there was little that appealed to moviegoers over the holiday weekend. 

“The King’s Man,” the third installment in Matthew Vaughn’s “Kingsman” series, grossed a modest $4.5 million in its second week after a lackluster debut. But that was still good enough for third place. The Disney release, produced by 20th Century Studios, has made $47.8 million globally. 

Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” sold $2.1 million in tickets in its fourth weekend. While holding well (the film dropped 26% from the week prior), the once-envisioned holiday upswing for the acclaimed musical hasn’t materialized. “West Side Story” has grossed a disappointing $29.6 million domestically. 

After flopping on its debut last week, Warner Bros.’ “The Matrix Resurrections” dropped a steep 64% in its second weekend with $3.8 million. The film is simultaneously streaming on HBO Max, a 2021 practice that the studio has pledged to end in 2022. The long-in-coming “Matrix” reboot was even edged by the second week of the Kurt Warner NFL drama “American Underdog,” which grossed $4.1 million for Lionsgate. 

One of the only new releases of the week was Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria,” with Tilda Swinton. Its distributor, Neon, has laid out a novel strategy for the art-house release, playing the film in only one theater at a time, with no plans for a future streaming or physical release. “Memoria” started its quixotic, cross-country journey with $52,656 since opening Dec. 16 at New York’s IFC Center. 

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday. 

1. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” $52.7 million.  

2. “Sing 2,” $19.6 million.  

3. “The King’s Man,” $4.5 million.  

4. “American Underdog,” $4.1 million.  

5. “The Matrix Revolutions,” $3.8 million.  

6. “West Side Story,” $2.1 million.  

7. “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” $1.4 million.  

8. “Licorice Pizza,” $1.2 million.  

9. “A Journal for Jordan,” $1.2 million.  

10. “Encanto,” $1.1 million.
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U.S. President Joe Biden told Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Sunday that the United States and its allies would “respond decisively” should Russia further invade Ukraine.

In a phone call, the two leaders also discussed diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions over Russia’s massive troop buildup along Ukraine’s eastern flank.

Biden and Zelenskiy discussed measures to “de-escalate tensions in Donbas and active diplomacy to advance implementation of the Minsk Agreements,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement released after the call ended.

However, Biden “reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the statement said, adding that Biden also “underscored the commitment” of the U.S. to the principle of “nothing about you without you.”

Biden has made little progress with Russian President Vladimir Putin to get him to withdraw about 100,000 troops stationed along Russia’s border with the former Soviet republic, although U.S. officials do not believe Putin has decided whether to invade Ukraine.

The U.S. and Russian leaders held a 50-minute phone call last Thursday, with Biden again warning Putin that the United States and its Western allies would impose significant economic sanctions against Moscow were Putin to carry out a Ukraine invasion, although Biden has ruled out a military response.

Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, with the West protesting and imposing weaker sanctions.

The Kremlin in turn said last week that Putin told Biden in their call that new, tougher sanctions could lead to a complete rupture In Washington-Moscow relations.

The U.S. has been dispatching small arms and ammunition to Kyiv, along with Javelin missiles it says should only be used in defense.

The White House says that Russian and American officials will participate in three separate rounds of talks this month: first through bilateral talks scheduled to start January 10, and then through multiparty talks with the NATO-Russia Council, and with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.  

“President Biden reiterated (in his call with Putin) that substantive progress in these dialogues can occur only in an environment of de-escalation rather than escalation,” Psaki said.  

In the talks ahead, Russia is demanding that NATO, the seven-decade-old military alliance formed after World War II, deny membership to Ukraine and reduce its deployments in central and eastern Europe. White House officials have declined to discuss details of private talks. 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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Twitter on Sunday banned the personal account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for multiple violations of its COVID-19 misinformation policy, according to a statement from the company. 

The Georgia Republican’s account was permanently suspended under the “strike” system Twitter launched in March, which uses artificial intelligence to identify posts about the coronavirus that are misleading enough to cause harm to people. Two or three strikes earn a 12-hour account lock; four strikes prompt a weeklong suspension, and five or more strikes can get someone permanently removed from Twitter. 

In a statement on the messaging app Telegram, Greene blasted Twitter’s move as un-American. She wrote that her account was suspended after tweeting statistics from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a government database which includes unverified raw data. 

“Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth,” Greene said. “That’s fine, I’ll show America we don’t need them and it’s time to defeat our enemies.” 

Twitter had previously suspended the account for periods ranging from 12 hours to a full week. 

The ban applies to Greene’s personal account, @mtgreenee, but does not affect her official Twitter account, @RepMTG. 

A Greene tweet posted shortly before her weeklong suspension in July claimed that the virus “is not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65.” According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people under 65 account for nearly 250,000 of the U.S. deaths involving COVID-19. 

Greene previously blasted a weeklong suspension as a “Communist-style attack on free speech.” 
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The winter grassland fire that blew up along Colorado’s Front Range was rare, experts say, but similar events will be more common in the coming years as climate change warms the planet — sucking the moisture out of plants — suburbs grow in fire-prone areas and people continue to spark destructive blazes.

“These fires are different from most of the fires we’ve been seeing across the West, in the sense that they’re grass fires and they’re occurring in the winter,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. “Ultimately, things are going to continue to get worse unless we stop climate change.”

Flames swept over drought-stricken grassy fields and neighborhoods northwest of Denver on Thursday with alarming speed, propelled by guests up to 105 mph (169 kph). Tens of thousands were ordered to flee with little notice.

“I came out of Whole Foods, which is about a half mile from ground zero, and felt like I had to jump in my car and make a dash for my life as the smoke and wind and nearby flames were engulfing the area,” Susie Pringle of Lafayette said in an email. “It was scary!”

Three people were missing as of Saturday and at least seven were injured but no deaths were reported. Officials estimated nearly 1,000 homes and other buildings were destroyed.

Many whose homes were spared remained without power while temperatures dropped to the single digits. The blaze burned at least 9.4 square miles (24 square kilometers).

The cause of the blaze is still under investigation, but experts say it’s clear what allowed it to spread so fast.

“With any snow on the ground, this absolutely would not have happened in the way that it did,” said Keith Musselman, a snow hydrologist in Boulder. “It was really the grass and the dry landscape that allowed this fire to jump long distances in a short period of time.”

Three ingredients were needed to start this fire: fuels, a warm climate and an ignition source, said Jennifer Balch, a fire scientist with the University of Colorado, Boulder. “And then you add a fourth ingredient, wind, and that’s when it became a disaster.”

Temperatures in Colorado between June and December were the warmest on record, Balch said. The grasses grew thick because they had a wet spring, but saw no moisture until snow flurries arrived Friday night. 

“All of Colorado is flammable, our grasses are flammable, our shrubs are flammable, our trees are flammable,” Balch said. “This is a dry landscape that is flammable for good chunks of the year, and those chunks of time are getting longer with climate change.”

The lesson learned throughout this event is that the “wildland-urban interface is way bigger than we thought it was,” Balch said. That means a wider area is under threat of wildfire.

That border area — where structures built by people meet undeveloped wildland prone to fire — has always been the foothills, she said. Fire-fighters in Boulder consider the interface west of Broadway, a busy road that passes through the center of town. But Thursday’s fire sparked east of that line, next to thousands of houses that have sprouted up on the east side of the Rockies since the 1990s, Balch said. 

“There were stretches between Denver and Fort Collins that had no development, but now it’s just like one long continuous development track,” Balch said. “And those homes are built with materials that are very flammable — wood siding, asphalt roofing.

“We need to completely rethink how we’re building homes.”

The other important change is understanding how these fires start in the first place, she said.

“There’s no natural source of ignition at this time of year. There’s no lightning,” she said. “It’s either going to be infrastructure-related or it’s going to be human caused.”

“The way we live in the landscape and our daily activities make us vulnerable,” she said.

Over the last two decades, 97% of wildfires were started by people, according to a recent study by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Causes have ranged from accidents at construction sites, to a car with a hot tailpipe, to tossed cigarettes.

“I like to say, we need Smokey Bear in the suburbs,” she said. “We need to be thinking about how our daily activities can contribute ignitions or sparks that start wildfires.”

Unless people stop climate change by cutting back on fossil fuels, wildfires will threaten communities, Overpeck said.

“There’s little doubt in my mind that the conditions conducive to really bad wildfire, whether it’s grass or forest, are only going to get worse,” he said.

As more people move to areas where wildfires occur, the threat goes up.

“We’re building towns and cities and infrastructure and so it’s just a matter of time before we have whole towns burning down like we had in California and events like this in Colorado.” 
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Looking west from Hazel Mountain, Brad Kreps can see forested hills stretching to the Tennessee border and beyond, but it is the flat, denuded area in front of him he finds exciting.

Surface coal mining ended on this site several years ago. But with a clean-up underway, it is now being prepared for a new chapter in the region’s longstanding role as a major energy producer – this time from a renewable source: the sun.

While using former mining land to generate solar energy has long been discussed, this and five related sites are among the first projects to move forward in the coalfields of the central Appalachian Mountains, as well as nationally.

 

Backers say the projects could help make waste land productive and boost economic fortunes in the local area, part of a 250,000-acre (101,171-hectare) land purchase by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in 2019, one of its largest such acquisitions.

“There’s very little activity going on this land, so if we can bring in a new use like solar, we can bring tax revenue into these counties that are really trying to diversify their economies,” said Kreps, a TNC program director.

Besides creating a new source of green energy, the project offers a model for solar development that does not impinge on forests or farmland, he said.

TNC, a U.S.-based environmental nonprofit, has identified six initial sites for solar plants in the area and is now moving forward with projects on parcels covering about 1,700 acres.

The two companies that have bid to do the work – solar developer Sun Tribe and major utility Dominion Energy – estimate the projects could produce around 120 megawatts (MW) of electricity, potentially enough to power 30,000 homes.

Construction is expected to start in two or three years after pre-development work and permitting are completed.

“This is a ground-breaking model,” said Emil Avram, Dominion’s vice president of business development for renewables in Virginia.

Dominion believes it is the largest utility-scale renewable energy initiative to be developed on former coal mining land, and could be replicated elsewhere, Avram added.

Renewables targets

The U.S. government formally began looking at putting renewable energy installations on disturbed land – including mines, but also contaminated sites and landfills – in 2008.

Since then, the RE-Powering America’s Land program has mapped over 100,000 potential sites covering more than 44 million acres, and helped establish 417 installations producing 1.8 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, according to March data.

A toxic landfill site in New Jersey, for instance, now hosts a 6.5-MW solar installation, while a former steel mill in New York has been turned into a wind farm with capacity of 35 MW.

Yet on mine land, the work has so far been mostly limited to doing inventories and providing technical assistance, resulting in fewer than a half-dozen projects, said Nels Johnson, TNC’s North America director for energy.

That has stunted solar developers’ interest in mine land, he said – a knowledge gap he hopes the new projects can help fill, particularly amid a surging focus on meeting clean energy goals.

“After five to 10 years of almost nobody paying attention to this, there’s an awakening starting to take place,” he said. “As more and more states pass renewable energy commitments, it’s kind of a situation of the dog catching the car.”

Virginia, for instance, has a 2020 clean energy bill that, among other things, pushes for Dominion Energy’s electricity in the state to be carbon-free by 2045.

There are about 100,000 acres affected by coal mining in southwest Virginia alone, said Daniel Kestner, who manages the Innovative Reclamation Program for the state’s energy department.

“Reusing land like former coal mines makes a lot of sense instead of looking at prime farmland … or lands near populated areas where there may be conflict,” he said.

Kestner’s team is now exploring renewable energy development as an approved option for required post-mining reclamation work.

 

‘LIFE AFTER COAL’

Appalachia had harbored a deep-rooted skepticism toward renewable energy, said Adam Wells, regional director of community and economic development with Appalachian Voices, a nonprofit that works in former coal communities.

But recent years have seen a turnaround, he noted, with the recognition that the coal industry – the region’s longstanding main economic driver – will not return to its former strength.

Across the country, the number of coal mines dropped by 62% from 2008 to 2020, based on U.S. government figures, translating into a loss of 100,000 jobs since the mid-1980s, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Starting around 2015, Wells said, “it became necessary to talk about what life after coal looks like in Appalachia. And so, as a result, it became safe to talk about solar.”

While the number of jobs from utility-scale solar development does not compare to coal-industry jobs, he said, it could still be significant.

“It does generate notable and meaningful tax revenues for localities at a time of declining revenues from coal,” he added.

For now, communities are watching the shift with a “wait-and-see” attitude, he said.

Dominion Energy’s 50-MW project is the largest of the six local solar initiatives now underway.

While Dominion does not have job and tax revenue estimates for that project, it noted in a recent regulatory filing that 15 newly proposed solar projects across Virginia would generate more than $880 million in economic benefits and support almost 4,200 jobs associated with construction.

The company is under major pressure to increase solar production and is planning for an additional 16,000 MW by 2035, executive Avram said, requiring new capacity of about 1,000 MW annually through that date.

“That will require a fair amount of land – a thousand acres per project, roughly,” he said.

While the initial mine-land project in southwestern Virginia is relatively small, he said, it is an important “stepping stone” in learning how to work on previously disturbed sites.

TNC’s Kreps sees much more opportunity, literally on the horizon.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of acres like this across the region – and in many cases, right now they aren’t creating a lot of economic value,” he said.

His organization, he added, aims to demonstrate “that we can manage these lands for nature outcomes and people outcomes.” 
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Prince Andrew’s effort to immediately block the progression of a lawsuit by a woman who says he sexually assaulted her when she was 17 — on the grounds that she no longer lives in the U.S. — was rejected by a federal judge as oral arguments were set to proceed Monday on the prince’s request to dismiss the lawsuit.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, in a written order Friday, told the prince’s lawyers they must turn over documents on the schedule that has been set in the lawsuit brought in August by Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre says she was abused by the prince on multiple occasions in 2001 while she was being sexually abused by financier Jeffrey Epstein. The prince’s attorney, Andrew Brettler, has called the lawsuit baseless.

The order was filed three days before the scheduled public release Monday of a 2009 settlement agreement between Epstein and Giuffre. Lawyers for Andrew say that the agreement protects the prince from claims like those brought by Giuffre and will be sufficient grounds for the lawsuit’s dismissal.

The prince’s lawyers had claimed that the evidence was so strong that Giuffre does not reside in the United States that it was pointless to exchange evidence until that question is resolved because it could result in the lawsuit’s dismissal.

They argued that Giuffre has lived in Australia for all but two of the past 19 years, has an Australian driver’s license and lives in a $1.9 million home in Perth, Western Australia, where she has been raising three children with her husband, who is Australian.

In a statement, Giuffre attorney Sigrid McCawley called the request to halt the case “another in a series of tired attempts by Prince Andrew to duck and dodge the legal merits of the case Virginia Giuffre has brought against him. All parties in litigation are subject to discovery and Prince Andrew is no exception.”

Kaplan, in a one-page order, noted that the prince’s lawyers have requested that extensive materials be turned over by Giuffre by Jan. 14, including documents related to where she has lived. And he said the prince’s attorneys have not yet formally raised to the defense that the lawsuit cannot proceed on the grounds that Giuffre has been living in Australia rather than Colorado, where her lawyers say she is a resident.

His order expressed no opinion on the merits of the prince’s claims that Giuffre should be disqualified from suing because she lives in Australia.

Oral arguments via a video teleconference on the prince’s request to dismiss the case are scheduled for Monday morning.

In October, the prince’s lawyers attacked the lawsuit on multiple grounds, saying Giuffre had made false claims against Andrew because he “never sexually abused or assaulted” her.

“Giuffre has initiated this baseless lawsuit against Prince Andrew to achieve another payday at his expense and at the expense of those closest to him. Epstein’s abuse of Giuffre does not justify her public campaign against Prince Andrew,” the written arguments said.

Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan federal jail in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.

His former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, 60, was convicted Wednesday of charges including sex trafficking and conspiracy after a monthlong trial.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they choose to come forward publicly, as Giuffre has. 
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