Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, eyeing a 2024 run for the Republican presidential nomination, has delivered his strongest rebuke yet of the president he loyally served, Donald Trump. Pence said Trump was personally responsible for encouraging the January 6, 2021, riot of Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol, trying to keep Congress from certifying that Joe Biden had defeated the 45th president in the 2020 election.

“President Trump was wrong; I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence told a group of elite Washington journalists and government officials at the annual Gridiron dinner Saturday night. “And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Pence last week asked a judge to block a subpoena for his testimony before a grand jury investigating the insurrection and Trump’s efforts to upend the election result. But at the dinner, he disparaged ongoing attempts, chiefly by conservative lawmakers and Fox News commentators, to downplay the rampage at the Capitol in which more than 1,000 Trump supporters have been arrested and about half, so far, convicted of an array of offenses.

“Tourists don’t injure 140 police officers by sightseeing,” Pence said. “Tourists don’t break down doors to get to the speaker of the House or voice threats against public officials.”

“Make no mistake about it. What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way,” Pence said at the dinner.

Pence also said people “have a right to know what took place” during the insurrection, praising journalists’ role in writing about the rampage, which for hours delayed lawmakers from certification of the Electoral College vote count showing Biden had won the election. In the United States, the president and vice president, running on the same ticket, are not elected by the national popular vote, but rather by state-by-state elections, with the biggest states holding the most Electoral College votes.

Trump had privately and publicly demanded that Pence block the outcome as the then-vice president presided over the vote count. Pence refused, saying his role was merely ceremonial.

Some rioters shouted, “Hang Mike Pence!” and protesters had erected a gallows on the National Mall within eyesight of the Capitol. As the rioters rampaged through the Capitol, security officials scrambled to keep Pence and his family safe, sheltering them at a loading dock inside the Capitol.

Meanwhile, officials in the White House that day say Trump watched the riot unfold on television and only after three hours issued a statement calling for his supporters to leave the Capitol. Officials have testified that Trump disparaged Pence for being weak in failing to block the election outcome and deserved to be hanged.

The annual white-tie Gridiron dinner features comedy routines by journalists poking fun at Washington officialdom and both Republican and Democratic officials making light of each other.

Even before turning serious about the riot at the Capitol more than two year ago, Pence, a devout Christian, jabbed at Trump.

“I once invited President Trump to Bible study,” Pence said early in his speech. “He really liked the passages about the smiting and perishing of thine enemies. As he put it, ‘You know, Mike, There’s some really good stuff in here.’”

Trump has announced his 2024 presidential candidacy and Pence has said he is weighing a run as well. Some Republicans have suggested or declared they won’t again support Trump, who is facing several criminal investigations, if he is the nominee.

Pence joked, “I will wholeheartedly, unreservedly support the Republican nominee for president in 2024. If it’s me.”
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Residents are complaining about burning eyes and breathing problems. Dead fish have washed up on beaches. A beachside festival has been canceled, even though it wasn’t scheduled for another month.

Florida’s southwest coast experienced a flare-up of the toxic red tide algae this week, setting off concerns that it could continue to stick around for a while. The current bloom started in October.

The annual BeachFest in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida, sponsored by a homeowners’ association, was canceled after it determined, with help from the city and the Pinellas County Health Department, that red tide likely would continue through the middle of next month when the festival was scheduled.

“Red Tide is currently present on the beach and is forecasted to remain in the area in the weeks to come,” the Indian Rocks Beach Homeowners Association said in a letter to the public. “It is unfortunate that it had to be canceled but it is the best decision in the interest of public health.”

Nearly two tons of debris, mainly dead fish, were cleared from Pinellas County beaches and brought to the landfill, county spokesperson Tony Fabrizio told the Tampa Bay Times. About 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms) of fish have been cleared from beaches in St. Pete Beach since the start of the month, Mandy Edmunds, a parks supervisor with the city, told the newspaper.

Red tide, a toxic algae bloom that occurs naturally in the Gulf of Mexico, is worsened by the presence of nutrients such as nitrogen in the water. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission warns people to not swim in or around red tide waters over the possibility of skin irritation, rashes and burning and sore eyes. People with asthma or lung disease should avoid beaches affected by the toxic algae.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on Friday reported that it had found red tide in 157 samples along Florida’s Gulf Coast, with the strongest concentrations along Pinellas and Sarasota counties.
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Brent Sass, the defending Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race champion, withdrew from this year’s race on Saturday, citing concerns for his health.

Sass scratched at the Eagle Island checkpoint, a statement from the Iditarod said. Eagle Island is about 966 kilometers into the nearly 1,609-kilometer race.

“He didn’t feel he could care for his team due to current concerns with his periodontal health,” the statement said. The condition typically relates to gum disease.

A plane was being sent to Eagle Island to fly Sass off the trail, according to a video posted on the Iditarod Insider webpage.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sad, but it is what it is,” Sass’ father, Mark Sass, told Alaska Public Media. “I just want him to be OK.”

The Iditarod said all 11 dogs on Sass’ team were in good health.

Sass was in the lead when he arrived at the Eagle Island checkpoint late Friday night with an almost four-hour advantage over his nearest competitor, Jessie Holmes of Brushkana.

Holmes was the first musher to leave the Eagle Island checkpoint early Saturday morning. The 40-year-old Alabama native in 2004 moved to Alaska, where he is a carpenter and appears on the National Geographic reality TV show Life Below Zero, about people who live in rural Alaska.

The race started for 33 mushers on March 5 in Willow. It takes the sled dog teams over two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and the treacherous Bering Sea ice en route to the finish line in Nome. Mushers had to contend with another issue during the first week of competition: Altering their race strategy because of high heat in interior Alaska.

The winner is expected to mush down Nome’s Front Street, a block off the Bering Sea, to the finish line either Tuesday or Wednesday.

Before the competitive start to the race, mushers greeted fans March 4 during a ceremonial start in downtown Anchorage and drove auction winners riding in their sleds for a 17.7-kilometer jaunt through the streets of the state’s largest city.

The 33 mushers represented the smallest field ever to start a race, one short of the first race run in 1973.

Since then, three mushers including Sass have withdrawn.
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U.S. President Joe Biden is poised to decide whether to pull the plug on a massive oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope or allow it to go ahead.

With the decision imminent, environmentalists have ramped up pressure on the White House, urging Biden to live up to the climate change pledges he made during his campaign.

During the 2020 presidential race, the Democratic candidate vowed not to approve any new leases for oil and gas projects on federal lands.

But Biden has found himself stuck in the middle of a years-long battle over the so-called Willow Project, a plan by US energy giant ConocoPhillips to drill for oil in the federally-owned National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s pristine western Arctic.

The Trump administration approved the Willow Project at the tail end of the former president’s term but it was blocked by a judge for further review.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in an environmental impact analysis in February, approved three drilling sites while striking down one and deferring consideration of another.

ConocoPhillips welcomed the BLM’s assessment, saying it can “provide a viable path forward for development of our leasehold.”

The Interior Department, which oversees the BLM, said, however, it has “substantial concerns” about the project “including direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and impacts to wildlife and Alaska Native subsistence.”

Biden has described global warming as an existential threat and promoted the development of renewable energy sources.

Temperatures in Alaska have been rising faster than in other regions of the planet and environmental groups have warned that the oil extraction project would make things worse.

The Willow Project will add more than 250 million metric tons of carbon emissions to the atmosphere over the next 30 years, the Sierra Club said, equivalent to the annual emissions of 66 coal plants.

Greenpeace described it as a “carbon bomb.”

A petition on Change.org seeking to halt the project has garnered more than three million signatures and a #StopWillow campaign on TikTok has drawn 150 million views.

180,000 barrels of oil per day

Backers of the Willow Project defend it as a source of several thousand jobs and a contributor to US energy independence with production of 180,000 barrels of oil per day at its peak or some 576 million barrels over 30 years.

Alaska’s two Republican senators and the state’s sole member of the House, Mary Peltola, a native Alaskan and a Democrat, met with Biden last week to urge him to approve the project.

“We hope the President will listen to the voices of indigenous Alaskans who live on the North Slope, the voices of labor leaders and union workers who are ready to help build Alaska’s economy (and) listen to the voices of national security officials underscoring the importance of Willow for American energy security,” they said.

Peltola, in an opinion piece published in The Hill, said Alaskans “aren’t blind to the impacts of climate change” but the Willow Project can serve as a bridge as the country transitions away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources.

“At the same time, we can reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of oil — which makes us all safer in a world that has grown more unpredictable after Russia invaded Ukraine,” Peltola said.

Biden has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 compared with 2005 with the goal of achieving a net zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.
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Four space station astronauts returned to Earth late Saturday after a quick SpaceX flight home.

Their capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida coast near Tampa.

The U.S.-Russian-Japanese crew spent five months at the International Space Station, arriving last October. Besides dodging space junk, the astronauts had to deal with a pair of leaking Russian capsules docked to the orbiting outpost and the urgent delivery of a replacement craft for the station’s other crew members.

Led by NASA’s Nicole Mann, the first Native American woman to fly in space, the astronauts checked out of the station early Saturday morning. Less than 19 hours later, their Dragon capsule was bobbing in the sea as they awaited pickup.

Earlier in the week, high wind and waves in the splashdown zones kept them at the station a few extra days. Their replacements arrived more than a week ago.

“That was one heck of a ride,” Mann radioed moments after splashdown. “We’re happy to be home.”

Mann, a member of Northern California’s Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, said she couldn’t wait to feel the wind on her face, smell fresh grass, and enjoy delicious Earth food.

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata craved sushi, while Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina yearned to drink hot tea from a “real cup” not a plastic bag.

NASA astronaut Josh Cassada’s to-do list included getting a rescue dog for his family. “Please don’t tell our two cats,” he joked before departing the space station.

Remaining behind at the space station are three Americans, three Russians and one from the United Arab Emirates.

Wakata, Japan’s spaceflight champion, now has logged more than 500 days in space over five missions dating back to NASA’s shuttle era.
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Authorities ordered more than 1,500 people to evacuate early Saturday from a Northern California agricultural community famous for its strawberries after the Pajaro River’s levee was breached by flooding from a new atmospheric river pummeling the state.

Monterey County officials on Saturday said the break in the levee — upstream from the unincorporated community of Pajaro along California’s Central Coast — is about 30.48 meters wide. Crews had gone door to door Friday afternoon to urge residents to leave before the rains came but some stayed and had to be pulled from floodwaters early Saturday.

First responders and the California National Guard rescued more than 50 people overnight. One video showed a member of the Guard helping a driver out of a car trapped by water up to their waists.

“We were hoping to avoid and prevent this situation, but the worst-case scenario has arrived with the Pajaro River overtopping and levee breaching at about midnight,” wrote Luis Alejo, chair of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, on Twitter.

Alejo called the flooding “massive,” saying it has affected Pajaro’s 1,700 residents — many of them Latino farmworkers — and that the damage will take months to repair.

The Pajaro River separates the counties of Santa Cruz and Monterey in the area that flooded Saturday.

Officials had been working along the levee in the hopes of shoring it up when it was breached early Saturday morning. Crews began working to fix the levee around daybreak Saturday as residents slept in evacuation centers.

The Pajaro Valley is a coastal agricultural area known for growing strawberries, apples, cauliflower, broccoli and artichokes. National brands like Driscoll’s Strawberries and Martinelli’s are headquartered in the region.

In 1995, the Pajaro River’s levees broke, submerging 2,500 acres (1,011 hectares) of farmland and the community of Pajaro. Two people died and the flooding caused nearly $100 million in damage. A state law that was passed last year advanced state funds for a levee project. It was scheduled to start construction in 2024.

This week’s storm marked the state’s 10th atmospheric river of the winter, storms that have brought enormous amounts of rain and snow to the state and helped lessen the drought conditions that had dragged on for three years. State reservoirs that had dipped to strikingly low levels are now well above the average for this time of year, prompting state officials to release water from dams to assist with flood control and make room for even more rain.

State transportation officials said Friday they removed so much snow from the roadways in February that it would be enough to fill the iconic Rose Bowl 100 times.

Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has declared emergencies in 34 counties in recent weeks, and the Biden administration approved a presidential disaster declaration for some on Friday morning, a move that will bring more federal assistance.

Emergency officials have warned people to stay off roads if they can and to carefully heed flash flood warnings.

The atmospheric river, known as a “Pineapple Express” because it brought warm subtropical moisture across the Pacific from near Hawaii, was melting lower parts of the huge snowpack built in California’s mountains. Snow levels in the Sierra Nevada, which provides about a third of the state’s water supply, are more than 180% of the April 1 average, when it is historically at its peak.

The snowpack at high elevations is so massive it was expected to be able to absorb the rain, but snow below 1,219 meters could start to melt, potentially contributing to flooding, forecasters said.

Lake Oroville — one of the most important reservoirs in the state and home to the nation’s tallest dam — has so much water that officials on Friday opened the dam’s spillways for the first time since April 2019. The reservoir’s water has risen 54.8 meters since December 1. Of the state’s 17 major reservoirs, seven are still below their historical averages this year.

State water managers also were grappling with the best way to use the storms to help emerge from a severe drought. On Friday, Newsom signed an executive order making it easier for farmers and water agencies to use floodwater to refill underground aquifers. Groundwater provides on average about 41% of the state’s supply each year. But many of these underground basins have been overdrawn in recent years.

Forecasters warned that mountain travel could be difficult to impossible during the latest storm. At high elevations, the storm was predicted to dump heavy snow, as much as 2.4 meters over several days.

Yet another atmospheric river is already in the forecast for early next week. State climatologist Michael Anderson said a third appeared to be taking shape over the Pacific and possibly a fourth.

California appeared to be “well on its way to a fourth year of drought” before the early winter series of storms, Anderson said. “We’re in a very different condition now,” he noted.
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