Author: News Polite

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in his latest address seized on an apparent Russian threat to use chemical weapons against the remaining defenders of Mariupol, as they prepare for what he called a “new stage of terror against Ukraine.”

Mr. Zelensky’s comments came after Eduard Basurin, a spokesman for the Kremlin-backed, separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, said on Russian television that Russia should bring in “chemical forces” to use in Mariupol, the besieged southern city. He said the remaining Ukrainian forces in Mariupol were dug in at a steel plant and that Russia should encircle it and “smoke out the moles.”

Referring to those remarks, Mr. Zelensky said in his latest video address, “We take this as seriously as possible.” The video was posted online Monday in the United States, and shortly after midnight on Tuesday in Ukraine.

Earlier in the day, a Ukrainian unit in Mariupol claimed on social media that Russian invaders had used chemical weapons there. Lesia Vasylenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, made a similar charge. But those reports could not be independently confirmed.

“We are aware of social media reports which claim Russian forces deployed a potential chemical munition in Mariupol, Ukraine,” John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said. “We cannot confirm at this time and will continue to monitor the situation closely. These reports, if true, are deeply concerning and reflective of concerns that we have had about Russia’s potential to use a variety of riot control agents, including tear gas mixed with chemical agents, in Ukraine.”

The British Defense Ministry said on Monday that prior use of phosphorous munitions by Russian forces in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine “raises in the possibility of their future employment in Mariupol as fighting for the city intensifies.”

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday night.

The Ukrainian Parliament said on Monday that it had learned of local reports from the police that Russian forces had fired on nitric acid tanks in the Donetsk region.

In his address, Mr. Zelensky called on Ukrainian allies to help supply “necessary weapons.”

“Unfortunately, we are not getting as much as we need to end this war sooner,” Mr. Zelensky said in a translation of his address shared by his office. “I am sure that we will get almost everything we need, but not only time is being lost. The lives of Ukrainians are being lost — lives that can no longer be returned.”

An Alaska man who pleaded guilty to threatening to murder two U.S. senators has been sentenced to 32 months in prison and a $5,000 fine.

The man, Jay Allen Johnson, 65, of Delta Junction, left a total of 17 voicemails laden with threats for Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Alaska Republicans, federal prosecutors said. The voicemails, placed from April to September 2021, were “intended to retaliate” against the two senators for doing their work, prosecutors said.

John E. Kuhn Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Alaska, said in a statement after the sentencing on Friday that nothing excused Mr. Johnson’s conduct and that threatening elected officials was “an act that attacks our very system of governance.”

“The erosion of civility in our political discourse will never justify threats or acts of violence,” he said.

Jason Weiner, a lawyer for Mr. Johnson, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

In a sentencing memorandum, Mr. Weiner said that Mr. Johnson’s health problems after decades spent performing manual labor, along with pandemic-related “heightened turmoil” and isolation, had contributed to his behavior.

“Between the prescribed narcotics, pain, and self-medicating, Mr. Johnson was not himself,” Mr. Weiner wrote in the memorandum, dated April 1, adding that his client had learned from this experience. “His actions did not take place in a vacuum.”

Senators Murkowski and Sullivan did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

In September 2021, Mr. Johnson called Ms. Murkowski at least two times, according to court documents. In one message, he said: “I will find out everything, where you’re at. I will find out all your properties and I will burn everything you hope to have, and I will burn everything you hope to own.” He also asked her if she’d ever seen what a .50-caliber shell does to a human head.

He left Mr. Sullivan 13 voicemails, stating in one that he would get his “.50 caliber out” and then hold an online fund-raiser for the shells.

An investigation by the U.S. Capitol Police and Federal Bureau of Investigation traced the calls to Mr. Johnson, and he was arrested on Oct. 4, 2021. While executing a search warrant, F.B.I. agents also seized seven unsecured firearms illegally owned by Mr. Johnson, who has a prior felony conviction in 2016 barring him from possessing guns, prosecutors said.

In January, Mr. Johnson pleaded guilty to two counts of threatening to murder a U.S. official. In addition to his prison time and fine, he has agreed to a three-year federal protective order forbidding him to contact Ms. Murkowski and Mr. Sullivan, their families, and staff members after he is released. Mr. Johnson will also forfeit his guns.

After former President Donald J. Trump was elected in 2016, threats of violence against lawmakers surged. A Times review found clear increases of threats around Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and then after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol last year.

There were 9,600 threats against members of Congress last year, a record that was double the previous year’s total, according to the Capitol Police. Callers have left messages detailing various methods to kill lawmakers, from hanging them to shooting them in the head.

LVIV, Ukraine — When war came to Ukraine in February, Helen Polishchuk made some adjustments in the six-story bar she manages in central Lviv.

The Mad Bars House in Lviv’s historic central square stayed open, but served coffee and hot food instead of alcoholic drinks. They turned off the rock music. And as displaced Ukrainians began pouring into the city from places devastated by Russian attacks hundreds of miles away, she had instructions for the wait staff.

“When guests leave the restaurant we normally say, ‘Have a nice day,’” she said. Instead she told them they could say something else, like “Glory to Ukraine,” or “We wish you blue skies.”

“Because to say ‘have a nice day’ in this period is stupid,” said Ms. Polishchuk, 33.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the end of February, Lviv, a historic city just 40 miles from Poland, was a popular European tourist destination, with 2.5 million visitors a year and the biggest jazz festival in Eastern Europe.

Now, instead of tourists, there are displaced Ukrainians fleeing the war-torn east of the country. Lviv and its residents are learning to live with what most now believe will be many months of conflict, if not years.

Several Russian airstrikes have targeted infrastructure here, including a rocket attack on a military training base last month that killed more than 30 people. Air-raid sirens warning of Russian fighter jets breaching the airspace sound several times a day. This small city, though, is still far from the active fighting that has devastated entire cities in the east of Ukraine.

The main challenge for Lviv has been to survive a wartime economy and manage the flood of displaced, traumatized people who are swelling the city’s population.

“We have learned to live in wartime,” said the city’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, who has recently lifted some municipal restrictions, including allowing bars and restaurants to sell wine and beer, although not hard alcohol.

Mr. Sadovyi, a former businessman, said that six months before the Russian invasion, he tasked city officials with finding a way to keep water supplies flowing if the electricity failed. They started buying diesel generators, as well as stockpiling medical supplies, and topping up blood banks.

“If I had not been bracing my city for this situation, we would be in a catastrophe right now,” Mr. Sadovyi, dressed in a black hoodie and black sneakers, said in an interview in the 19th-century Viennese-style City Hall. His office’s expansive stone balcony overlooked the market square, where displaced children shrieked with laughter and chased giant soap bubbles blown by a street performer.

Mr. Sadovyi said that civilians fleeing the fighting started coming into Lviv within hours of the invasion — 60,000 of them per day for the first three weeks. Now, with a new Russian advance expected, about 10,000 a day are arriving.

While many are heading across the border to Poland and other European countries, about 200,000 have remained, double the number the city administration was expecting and almost one third the city’s prewar population of 700,000.

Those with money are renting apartments or staying in hotels. But tens of thousands more are in shelters, dependent on aid. The Polish government has donated container homes for 1,000 people that are being set up in a city park. Others are being channeled from Lviv to other communities in Western Ukraine.

“This is a huge strain on our city,” said Mr. Sadovyi, 53. “Basically we have another city within our city.”

The war has sparked remarkable patriotism, and if some local residents note that they can no longer find tables at their favorite cafes or restaurants because they are filled with displaced people, they tend not to complain. Guides lead displaced families on free tours of the city. Passengers on the tourist trolley leaving City Hall are not foreigners these days but Ukrainians.

It makes for an odd juxtaposition. A significant number of the soldiers dying at the front are from Western Ukraine, and there are regular funerals in churches in the city center. On a recent day, the sobbing relatives of a steelworker and his factory colleagues stood outside a cathedral with wreathes of flowers.

Around the edges, longtime residents are trying to preserve some semblance of prewar life.

The Lviv National Opera recently resumed limited events, with snippets of ballet and choir performances. The number of tickets sold is limited to the capacity of the building’s bomb shelter, about 250 people. At the first performance, an air-raid siren sounded, sending audience members and dancers down to the shelter before resuming the show.

“We reopened because we received so many calls and emails from people,” said Ostap Hromysh, the opera’s international relations manager. The messages were apologetic, saying “of course we understand there is a war,” but asking if they had performances anyway.

“If people day by day are faced with sad news about death, about blood, about bombs, they need to feel other emotions,” he said.

At the Mad Bars House, Ms. Polishchuk said they planned to open a rooftop terrace next week, perhaps with nonalcoholic cocktails as well as wine and beer. They are bringing back more of their original 111-person staff.

She said the bar, which in normal times has a dance floor and serves increasingly potent drinks as patrons ascend its six stories, is losing money, but is committed to remaining open. On Sunday afternoon, the first and second floors of the bar were full.

The management has replaced the classic rock entertaining beer drinkers at the ground-floor bar before the war with Ukrainian songs, though on the floor serving wine to customers at tables, Frank Sinatra croons.

“We don’t want to pretend that nothing has happened, we understand that it’s a war,” Ms. Polishchuk said. “But we want to create an atmosphere of somewhere safe.”

On the menu, borscht, the beet soup that had few takers before the war, is now the biggest seller. Ms. Polishchuk said it was patriotism and stress. “We understand that people want comfort foods,” she said.

“Have a nice day” is not the only thing that feels off these days.

“This is not the time for carrot juice and green salads,” Ms. Polishchuk said.

America’s attempt to vaccinate the world against Covid is about to come to an end.

“We are at a point now where without additional funding we are going to have to start winding down our programming,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, the leader of the United States Agency for International Development’s Covid-19 task force. Such funding does not appear to be forthcoming. Our gruesomely dysfunctional politics are going to lead to more illness and death across the globe, and we’re increasing the odds that a new viral mutation will once again upend American life. If it does, we might call it the filibuster variant.

Even for a body as broken and ineffectual as Congress, this level of self-sabotage is hard to fathom. “The biggest risk we face domestically and globally is more new variants,” said Konyndyk. Such variants, he said, are most likely to emerge in chronically immunocompromised populations, including people living with diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis; because they have trouble clearing the coronavirus, it lingers and has more opportunities to evolve.

“That’s likely where Omicron came from, quite possibly where Delta came from,” Konyndyk said. “So making sure that we are targeting those populations for vaccination and then targeting them with the rollout of antivirals is the best insurance policy we have against new variants. It’s not foolproof, but it’s the best we can do.”

But it seems we are not going to do it. Part of the blame for this lies with House Democrats. Far more belongs to Senate Republicans.

The Democrats miscalculated last month when, amid internal dissension, they stripped a $15.6 billion Covid aid package from the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill. Senate Republicans had insisted that the Covid aid come from money that was already appropriated but unspent. So congressional leaders devised a scheme drawing $7 billion from funds that had been set aside for state and local governments in last year’s American Rescue Plan.

House Democrats — as well as governors in both parties — had good reason to object, because state and local lawmakers had made their budgets with that money in mind. Twenty states got their American Rescue Plan money all at once, but in the remaining 30 states it was supposed to come in two tranches. Those states were suddenly looking at substantial budget cuts.

“A bunch of House members said no, we’re not going to vote to cut our own state budgets and have to go home and explain why we’ve cut these budgets,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

After a revolt among her own members, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to pull the Covid aid from the omnibus bill. But if House Democrats thought they’d get another chance to negotiate international Covid funds, they underestimated the nihilism of the Republican Party.

Because of the filibuster, Senate Democrats need 10 Republicans to support a stand-alone Covid bill, and Republicans are balking at more money for international Covid programs. “I’m frankly struggling,” Chris Coons, a Democratic senator known for his commitment to bipartisanship, said of trying to negotiate an agreement. He describes a basic disagreement between the caucuses over the threat posed by Covid. A number of his Republican colleagues, said Coons, have told him, “We’re done with this pandemic.”

Since they’re largely indifferent to whether additional Covid funding passes, some Republicans have used it as leverage in their demand for tougher border policies. They’re holding up authorization of any more Covid aid unless the administration reinstates Title 42, a policy adopted in 2020 to rapidly expel migrants without letting them apply for asylum, all in the name of protecting public health.

The U.S.A.I.D. funding is not fungible — the agency can’t simply transfer resources from other programs to keep its vaccine program going, or to start providing antivirals like Paxlovid. As a last-ditch measure, Coons tried to get Republicans to agree to give the agency emergency authority to move its own money around to address the pandemic, but he couldn’t get enough of them onboard.

As a result of this intransigence, many of the vaccine doses America already donated could go to waste. At this point, there’s no longer a global vaccine shortage — the problem is that many countries lack the infrastructure required to transport and administer them. The impasse in the Senate, Coons said, means we aren’t delivering millions of vaccine shots that we’ve already paid for.

Coons holds out hope that there could be a breakthrough in the Senate in three or four weeks, after it returns from recess. But it’s not easy to restart programs once they’ve been stopped, and in the meantime, we’re pointlessly imperiling both our own health and the health of people all over the planet.

There’s also a political cost to abandoning the rest of the world on Covid. At a time of renewed great-power competition, America’s effective vaccines could give us a diplomatic advantage. Last year, said Coons, “both Russia and China made big fanfares about delivering planeloads of vaccines to dozens of countries in the developing world. Those vaccines are ineffective against Omicron. Our vaccines are effective.” Our Congress, unfortunately, is not.

The Atlanta Dream, looking for a versatile player to help rebuild their roster, selected guard Rhyne Howard from the University of Kentucky as the No. 1 pick in the W.N.B.A. draft on Monday at Spring Studios in New York.

Ahead of the draft, Dream General Manager Dan Padover said the team was looking for a player who brought “fresh energy and sparks something underneath our franchise.”

The Indiana Fever selected NaLyssa Smith, a senior forward from Baylor University, with the No. 2 overall pick. At No. 3, the Washington Mystics chose Shakira Austin, a center from the University of Mississippi.

Howard said she planned to bring to the Dream the same “competitive spirit” she had with Kentucky, where she made sure to stay “calm, cool and collected” to make an impact. In Atlanta, Howard said, she will “continue to make everyone better.”

There is very little Howard can’t do. She is in the top 10 of almost every statistical category at Kentucky, and has scored the second-most points in program history for women and men. Last month, Howard led Kentucky to its first Southeastern Conference tournament title since 1982 when the team handed South Carolina, the 2022 national champion, its second and final loss of the season. Howard, who is from Chattanooga, Tenn., finished her senior year averaging 20.5 points and 7.4 rebounds per game.

Kentucky, a No. 6 seed in the N.C.A.A. Division I women’s basketball tournament this year, lost to No. 11 Princeton in the round of 64. But Howard’s career at Kentucky has helped draw attention to the women’s basketball program at a school best known for its powerhouse men’s team.

To be able to select her, the Dream shook up the draft last week by acquiring the No. 1 pick in a trade with the Washington Mystics. In return, the Mystics will get the Dream’s No. 3 and No. 14 overall picks. The Mystics also have the right to swap first-round picks in the 2023 draft, which is expected to draw deep talent from around the country.

Atlanta finished last season 8-24, the second-worst record in the W.N.B.A., and has missed the playoffs for the past three seasons. Adding Howard to the Dream’s roster immediately bolsters their perimeter game, which should help after the team traded guard Chennedy Carter to the Los Angeles Sparks in the off-season.

“Some drafts are top-heavy; some are deep,” Padover said. “This one is probably the most deep more than anything.” He added that this year’s draft offered the best talent since 2018 or 2019.

This year, 108 college players renounced their remaining N.C.A.A. eligibility to be considered for the draft, more than double than in 2021. International players and those who are no longer eligible to play in the N.C.A.A. will also be considered. But the chances of getting a spot on a roster are slim: There 36 draft slots for the W.N.B.A.’s 12 teams, which have just 12 roster spots each. With only 144 roster spots in all, many players and fans are calling for bigger rosters and more teams, wishes the W.N.B.A. has resisted.

One reason for the increase in college-eligible draft prospects may be the pandemic. College athletes are normally eligible to play four seasons over the course of five years. After the pandemic disrupted schedules, the N.C.A.A. added a special bonus year of eligibility for any athlete who lost playing time during the 2019-20 season.

Should they not make it to the W.N.B.A. this year and still have a season of eligibility, athletes can return to their college (assuming there is still a place for them on the roster).

Julie Roe Lach, the commissioner of the Horizon League, said this year’s draft class mimics the parity seen in the 2022 N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament, which saw six double-digit-seeded teams make it to the round of 16.

“You’ve got some of the names you would expect to see, but we’re seeing more schools with players that look like strong draft prospects,” she said. “That speaks to the increase of talent we’re seeing across the country of these great women basketball players.”

The W.N.B.A. season starts May 6 with eight teams, including the reigning champion Chicago Sky, in action.