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Sports

New Orleans Pelicans’ Zion Williamson puts up extra shots to find ‘flow’ after loss

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12:43 AM ET

  • Andrew LopezESPN

NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans Pelicans forward Zion Williamson was not happy with his performance in Wednesday’s 128-124 loss to the Chicago Bulls.

Williamson had 28 points, nine rebounds and five assists and once again shot over 50% from the field. He even attempted a season-high 16 free throws. The problem, however, was that he made only eight of them — and missed two crucial ones down the stretch.

So instead of going through his normal postgame routine, Williamson walked back out onto the floor at the Smoothie King Center and took extra shots.

He started his shooting routine under the goal and worked his way back to the free throw line. He needed to make at least 10 in a row before moving on to shoot at seven different spots around the 3-point line. When it was all said and done, and at least 100 shots or so later, Williamson spent 40 minutes working on his technique before speaking to reporters.

When asked why he went back out, his answer was simple.

“Y’all saw the game, man,” Williamson said.

He explained that this isn’t something that’s new for him, although he’s never done it on the floor at the arena before. He likes to find another gym, he says, and he’ll get shots up after losses or even after wins sometimes.

But Wednesday’s game felt different.

“I really felt like I let my team down, man,” Williamson said. “It’s like I tell y’all, I never want to let them down. All those free throws, it can’t go down like that. I gotta be better in those situations. If I want to be one of those great players, I gotta take a lot of responsibility and be ready for those moments. Right after the game, I just felt like I had to go back on the court and find my flow.”

Improving his free throw shooting was a key focus for Williamson entering the season after he shot 64% from the line a year ago. After he got off to a rough start, shooting 53.1% in his first four games, Williamson and Pelicans assistant Fred Vinson started to work on his shot some more.

In February, Williamson’s free throw percentage was up to 74.6%, and it was 70.7% heading into Wednesday’s game.

But after Williamson missed his first two free throws against the Bulls, he felt like something was off.

“I do feel like I was overthinking it,” Williamson said. “I feel like when I missed the first two, I started to think maybe I’m doing a lot of things wrong. I probably talk to Fred [Vinson], and Fred would probably say, ‘Oh, you didn’t load correctly,’ or, ‘You didn’t follow through properly.’ That’s Fred. I think I did overthink it when it was probably just one small thing and it probably would’ve went in.”

Williamson ended up missing his first four free throws but hit seven of his next eight. But he went 1-of-4 from the line in the fourth quarter, including missing two with 1 minute, 23 seconds to go that could have cut Chicago’s lead to two as the Pelicans tried to erase a 19-point deficit.

The Pelicans fell behind because of their leaky defense, which has been a cause for concern all season for New Orleans.

Getting that fixed — more so than any individual or team offensive issue — is what the Pelicans’ focus has to be on if they want to continue to fight for a playoff spot in the Western Conference.

“For us right now, our offense is fine,” Williamson said. “But we just, we gotta play great defense for four quarters. We have our moments where we play great for 3½ some games or we’ll play great for four, but tonight we started off the game slow.

“That was really the tone-setter. I know we hear it a lot with our defense, but we gotta do it. I still do feel like we’re close to it. It’s the NBA. Winning’s not easy. But I trust my teammates and my coaches, and we’re going to find it and we’ll figure it out.”

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World

US decision not to punish crown prince puts us in grave danger, Saudi exiles say | Mohammed bin Salman

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Exiled dissidents who have been warned about threats against them by Saudi Arabia said they have been put in greater danger by the Biden administration’s decision to forgo direct sanctions on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – even as US intelligence agencies acknowledged that he was complicit in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

The activists, including some who have previously been warned that they were possibly at risk of being hurt by agents of the kingdom, said in interviews with the Guardian that they believed the 35-year-old crown prince would be emboldened after the White House declined to sanction him.

“The Biden administration’s release of the ODNI report [into Jamal Khashoggi’s murder] is welcomed transparency, but the lack of direct accountability will give MBS permanent impunity, rendering him more dangerous,” said Khalid Aljabri, the son of a former senior Saudi official who is living in exile in Canada and whose siblings, Omar and Sarah, are being held in the kingdom.

“He is probably thinking he can get away with future assassinations as long as he doesn’t leave fingerprints,” Aljabri said.

The view was shared by a number of Saudis and others who are seen by Prince Mohammed as enemies of the kingdom.

In Norway, pro-democracy activist İyad el-Baghdadi, a Palestinian critic of the crown prince who is living under asylum protection, was rushed to a safe location in April 2019 following a CIA tip-off that he was facing a potential threat from Saudi Arabia.

“I am actually less safe now than I was before this. The combined facts of [the US saying] “Yes, he did it” and “No, we cannot do anything about it but sanction some of his henchmen” is very dangerous. What does this normalise?” El-Baghdadi said.

“In my mind, this cannot be it. It seems that people in the White House are thinking about conventional foreign policy and they need to wake the fuck up. They are bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

Another high-profile dissident, Omar Abdulaziz, who was a close associate of Khashoggi and was warned last summer by Canadian authorities that he was a “potential target” of Saudi Arabia, said it was evident the crown prince “can do whatever he wants”.

“No one is going to stop him, no one is going to punish him, they are going to call him a bad guy,” Abdulaziz, who is Saudi, and whose family and friends have been imprisoned in the kingdom, said. “I’m trying to be optimistic here, but justice has not been served.”

He also pointed with concern to a recent reported case of a Montreal-based Saudi activist, Ahmed Alharby, who sought asylum in Canada and has reportedly been returned to the kingdom under mysterious circumstances following a visit to the Saudi consulate in Ottawa. According to the Toronto Star, a new Twitter account belonging to Alharby has begun posting positive messages about Saudi Arabia, sharply contrasting with Alharby’s earlier previous criticisms.

Saudi officials in Canada have not responded to requests for comment.

In Washington, the Saudi academic and activist Abdullah Alaoudh praised the administration’s new “Khashoggi ban”, a policy the state department has said gives it additional tools to protect journalists and dissidents, but said Prince Mohammed was nevertheless being “let off the hook”.

Under the policy, the department said it would now be allowed to restrict visa issuance to any individual who, acting on behalf of a foreign government, engages in “serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities”, including suppression, harassment, surveillance and threats.

“This ban is meant to stop agents of foreign governments from carrying out another horrific murder like Khashoggi’s anywhere in the world,” a state department spokesperson said. But the US government has declined to comment on whether Prince Mohammed himself is one of the 76 Saudis who have been placed on the visa ban list.

Alaoudh, whose father is a prominent Saudi reformist and scholar facing the death penalty in a Saudi prison, said the new policy was a “big deal”, but did not represent “accountability or justice”.

He pointed out that, shortly after the administration released the report as well as sanctions against some Saudi officials, his colleague Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Dawn, a pro-reform group started by Khashoggi, tweeted in Arabic about an op-ed the two had written together calling “MBS” – as he is known – a thorn in the side of the world, and the Saudi people.

“It was read by tens of thousands of people, but that tweet got almost 3,000 responses from Saudi bots, with attacks and smears against her,” he said.

“If the intention [of the administration] was to send this guy a message, well the mission has not been accomplished. This is the exact same environment, or worse, that led to the killing of Khashoggi,” Alaoudh said.

Hala Aldosari, another Saudi dissident in the US, who is focused of women’s rights, said she had been forced to cut her ties and her work with women in Saudi because they are surveilled at home, and have faced investigations and torture for associating with her.

“In the charges against [some women] activists, my name came up. I was considered a hostile agent,” Aldosari said.

The Biden administration has highlighted the case of the prominent activist Loujain al-Hathloul, who was recently released from prison but still faces severe restrictions and a travel ban in Saudi Arabia, as a sign of progress. But Aldosari said there was no sign that the Saudi regime is changing course.

“I don’t think the Saudi regime is amenable to compromise. Since Mohammed bin Salman has come to power, it has been about centralising power and becoming the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. This is not something you can solve by making a classified report transparent,” she said. “There needs to be a visa ban, asset bans on Mohammed bin Salman.”

There are practical issues involved with the safety precautions Aldosari takes, like avoiding Saudi embassies and consulates, which has meant she has not been able to access an inheritance from her father.

“As a person of course I’m worried that I cannot see my family, I cannot contact them and talk to them freely. I always have this sense that they might be affected. And I think all of the activists in diaspora are having those sorts of issues and problems so they cannot actually be close to their own families,” she said.

Asked if she felt she could live with more ease now, given the new administration’s support, she said “of course not”. Even though she said she was grateful for Biden’s personal support for Loujain al-Hathloul – whose name he mentioned when she was released – she said it was important to remember that even this pressure did not ensure Al-Hathloul’s freedom or ability to get back to work as an activist.

“If that happens to someone whose name has been negotiated at the highest level, you can imagine what could happen to people like us,” she said.

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World

Mount Etna puts on its latest spectacular show

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ROME (AP) — Mount Etna, the volcano that towers over eastern Sicily, evokes superlatives. It is Europe’s most active volcano and also the continent’s largest.

And the fiery, noisy show of power it puts on for days or weeks, even years every so often, is always super spectacular. Fortunately, Etna’s latest eruption captivating the world’s attention has caused neither injuries nor evacuation.

But each time it roars back into dramatic action, it wows onlookers and awes geologists who spend their careers monitoring its every quiver, rumble and belch.

WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW?

On Feb. 16, Etna erupted, sending up high fountains of lava, which rolled down the mountain’s eastern slope toward the uninhabited Bove Valley, which is five kilometers (three miles) wide and eight kilometers (five miles) long. The volcano has belched out ash and lava stones that showered the southern side.

The activity has been continuing since, in bursts more or less intense. The flaming lava lights up the night sky in shocking hues of orange and red. There’s no telling how long this round of exciting activity will last, say volcanologists who work at the Etna Observatory run by the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

While public fascination began with the first dramatic images this month, the explosive activity began in September 2019, becoming much stronger two months ago. The current activity principally involves the south-east crater, which was created in 1971 from a series of fractures.

HARD TO MISS

Etna towers 3,350 meters (around 11,050 feet) above sea level and is 35 kilometers (22 miles) in diameter, although the volcanic activity has changed the mountain’s height over time.

Occasionally, the airport at Catania, eastern Sicily’s largest city, has to close down for hours or days, when ash in the air makes flying in the area dangerous. Early in this recent spell of eruptive activity, the airport closed briefly.

But for pilots and passengers flying to and from Catania at night when the volcano is calmer, a glimpse of fiery red in the dark sky makes for an exciting sight.

LIVING WITH A VOLCANO

With Etna’s lava flows largely contained to its uninhabited slopes, life goes in towns and villages elsewhere on the mountain. Sometimes, like in recent days, lava stones rain down on streets, bounce off cars and rattle roofs.

But many residents generally find that a small inconvenience when weighted against the benefits the volcano brings. Lava flows have left fertile farmland. Apple and citrus trees flourish. Etna red and whites are some of Sicily’s most popular wines, from grapes grown on the volcanic slopes.

Tourism rakes in revenues. Hikers and backpackers enjoy views of the oft-puffing mountain and the sparkling Ionian Sea below. For skiers who want uncrowded slopes, Etna’s a favorite.

IT CAN BE DEADLY

Inspiring ancient Greek legends, Etna has had scores of known eruptions in its history. An eruption in 396 B.C. has been credited with keeping the army of Carthage at bay.

In 1669, in what has been considered the volcano’s worst known eruption, lava buried a swath of Catania, about 23 kilometers (15 miles) away and devastated dozens of villages. An eruption in 1928 cut off a rail route circling the mountain’s base.

More recently, in 1983, dynamite was used to divert lava threatening inhabited areas. In 1992, the army built an earthen wall to contain the lava, flowing from Etna for months, from hitting Zafferana Etnea, a village of a few thousand people. At one point, the smoking lava stopped two kilometers (just over a mile) from the edge of town.

Over the last century, a hiccup in geological time, low-energy explosive eruptions and lava flows, both fed from the summit and side vents, have characterized Etna.

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Health

Yamaha’s YDS-150 digital sax puts practicality over performance

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There’s a move perfected by middle school orchestra members — mainly clarinet players, in my experience — that emerges directly after a musician makes a jarring mistake during a performance. The player will stop and look down at their instrument in shock, as if it had just grown sentient and created the former nasty sound of its own volition. They’ll shake their head as if to say, “Jeez, it’s so hard to find a reliable instrument nowadays,” and then rejoin the performance, hoping their audience bought the act.

I thought of this phenomenon while I was playing Yamaha’s YDS-150 Digital Saxophone the other day. I played alto and tenor saxophone regularly for about 10 years, from fourth grade through marching band and orchestra in my final year of high school. After that, I played less often, and nowadays I rarely touch the tenor that’s stashed in my closet. It’s been over 10 years since senior year, and honestly, when the YDS-150 showed up at my door, I wasn’t even sure if I would remember how to read sheet music.

Turns out, I did. I loaded up a few songs on Flat and gave them a try on the YDS-150, and the fingerings flowed naturally. I was about halfway through the solo from “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” by X-Ray Spex, happy to be playing again and incredibly pleased that I had retained some skill, when suddenly, the sax stopped making sound. I increased my air pressure and — nothing. I pulled the instrument away from my mouth and looked down at it in confusion, as if it had developed a mind of its own.

Only, this time, it kind of had. The batteries in the YDS-150 had died in the middle of my song, and the sax shut itself off. It made me think those middle schoolers might be onto something, after all.

Yamaha

“The sax shut itself off” is a strange phrase to type, and I find it difficult to express the exact feeling of surreality that comes with changing the batteries on an instrument that, in my mind, is solidly acoustic. But, that’s my own hang-up. After swapping out the four AAA batteries above the thumb rest and booting up the sax again, I quickly forgot about my anxiety over the unceasing progress of technology, and continued to have a fantastic time playing old favorites.

The YDS-150 is striking: It’s closest in size and shape to a soprano sax, and its body is matte black with pearlescent keys and a brass finish on the bell. The contrast between black and metal is tactical and sharp. The YDS-150 is also light — so light that I didn’t feel the need to use the neck strap for most of my playtime. As a recovering tenor player, this is a dream come true.

The electronic benefits of the YDS-150 far outweigh the potential for it to shut down in the middle of a song, especially considering it flashes a warning light when the batteries are running low, and it comes with a micro-USB power cable that can keep it running as long as it’s plugged in.

Benefits include reading nameless books to your YDS-150 late into the night.

Yamaha

The sax can connect to a speaker or headphones via a stereo-mini cable, and it can receive input via Bluetooth from a phone, tablet or computer. This allows players to hear and play alongside backing tracks from these devices. However, it can’t output sound via Bluetooth, meaning hooking up wireless earbuds isn’t an option. Wired headphones work just fine, but this feels like a missed opportunity for the AirPods era.

The instrument has 73 pre-programmed voices for soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and non-sax sounds, and it also allows players to input and save custom channels. These are editable in the YDS Controller app, which is incredibly convenient. After connecting the sax to the app via Bluetooth, players are able to edit voices, and also permanent settings like tuning, key response, reverb type, breath pressure resistance and breath response, all of which are applied immediately to the instrument.

Yamaha

There’s a separate tab just for fingering information and editing, allowing players to not only look up the standard, pre-loaded settings, but also change the button arrangement for any note. This is useful for accessibility reasons, and it provides potential shortcuts in performing tricky or experimental songs, too. The coolest function of the fingering tab is how it responds in real-time to any buttons a player presses on the connected YDS-150, automatically sweeping to the associated note diagram.

This feature is particularly useful for folks using the YDS-150 as a practice instrument, which is where I see its benefit. Though the diversity of voices and settings in the YDS-150 is impressive, the sounds that emanate from the instrument are tinny and keyboard-like. While some voices are more realistic than others, there’s no mistaking this thing for an acoustic saxophone. The YDS-150 isn’t quite performance-quality, from my perspective.

This is what one of the saxophonists who helped tune the YDS-150 can do with it:

And this is closer to what I can get out of it:

The YDS-150 costs $1,078, significantly more than a midrange alto or tenor, and Yamaha is marketing it as a studio instrument. And, hey, that’s fair. The YDS-150 is impressive; it contains a breadth of voices in a range of styles, from jazz to electronica to classical, and it packs four separate instruments into a sleek, lightweight container. The sax’s carrying case is slender enough to sling over your shoulder like a yoga mat. That’s magic.

The YDS-150 is worth the price of admission, though it’s not a replacement for an acoustic soprano, alto, tenor or bari sax. It’s a ridiculously customizable practice tool, an unexceptional performance device and a beautiful instrument all around.

Even when its batteries die.

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World

New Zealand puts Auckland into lockdown over three COVID-19 cases

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New Zealand put its largest city into lockdown Sunday — after just one family tested positive for COVID-19.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered the three-day lockdown for Auckland after a couple and their daughter tested positive in the nation widely hailed for virtually eliminating the spread of the contagion.

The new community cases make just four in the last three months — with the lockdown the first in New Zealand in six months.

“We have stamped out the virus before and we will do it again,” Ardern told a news conference in the capital, Wellington.

The level 3 restrictions require everyone to stay home except for essential shopping and essential work. It will also force a delay in America’s Cup sailing regatta.

“Three days should give us enough time to gather further information, undertake large-scale testing and establish if there has been wider community transmission,” Ardern said. “That is what we believe the cautious approach requires and its the right thing to do.”

Airlines were alerted because the woman in the infected family works for an airline catering company, LSG Sky Chefs, where she mostly works in laundry facilities, officials said. She had not been going aboard planes.

Her unidentified family was the first confirmed infection since a traveler returning from Europe tested positive on Jan. 24, which was the first case in two months.

New Zealand, with a population of 5 million, has reported a total of just over 2,330 cases and 25 deaths since the pandemic started.

Scientists are carrying out genome sequencing to see whether they are variants, and also to see whether they match with any infected passengers, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said.

“New Zealand has kept COVID-19 contained better than almost any other country,” Hipkins said of the nation that closed its international borders and introduced strict social distancing early in the pandemic.

“But as we have kept saying, there is no such thing as no risk.”

With Post wires

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Business

Tesla CEO Elon Musk puts up promised $100 million toward carbon capture through XPRIZE

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is following through with his promise to offer $100 million for the best carbon capture technology through a new XPRIZE challenge.

Carbon capture, which is also called “carbon capture and storage” (CCS), are processes that involve capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) at the source of emission and sequestrating in order for it to not leak into the air.

It also sometimes involves technologies to use the carbon for other purposes.

The concept has been suggested as a potential solution to slow down climate change by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere or even reversing it in the future.

However, current carbon capture technologies have often proven inefficient and add cost to energy production – making it uncompetitive without carbon prices. In fact, the only carbon capture plant in the US just closed.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said last month that he would donate $100 million to help develop the best carbon capture technology.

The competition will be through XPRIZE

XPRIZE, a nonprofit organization that designs and hosts public competitions intended to encourage technological development to benefit humanity, is going to organize the competition.

They confirmed that the $100 million in prizes donated by Musk result the biggest purses yet:

XPRIZE Carbon Removal is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity — fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone.

The full details of the competition will not be revealed until Earth Day, April 22, 2021, but they still released some broader guidelines.

They wrote on a new webpage for the contest:

To win the competition, teams must demonstrate a rigorous, validated scale model of their carbon removal solution, and further must demonstrate to a team of judges the ability of their solution to economically scale to gigaton levels. The objective of this XPRIZE is to inspire and help scale efficient solutions to collectively achieve the 10 gigaton per year carbon removal target by 2050, to help fight climate change and restore the Earth’s carbon balance.

Musk commented on the competition announcement:

We want teams to build real systems that can make a measurable impact at a gigaton level. Whatever it takes. Time is the essence.

As usual, XPRIZE tries to give out the prizes in the most optimal way to help develop as much useful technology as possible.

The contest will last up to four years, but after 18 months, 15 finalists will received $1 million each to kickstart their operating budget to deliver a full-scale demonstration of their carbon capture technology.

At the end, a grand prize winner will receive $50 million with the second and third places receiving $20 million and $10 million, respectively.

Also, 25 students will receive $200,000 scholarships.

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Business

Barstool’s Portnoy puts $700K into AMC shares following squeeze trade losses

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Barstool Sports president and founder Dave Portnoy on investing in AMC after losing $700,000 following squeeze trades, Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO and whether or not he’ll be attending the Super Bowl.

Dave Portnoy bought back shares of AMC after losing $700,000 following squeeze trades.

The Barstool Sports president and founder told FOX Business on Wednesday that he got out of all heavily shorted stocks on Tuesday, but bought back some of the movie theater company stock on because he “saw AMC going back out.”

“I put in $700,000 into AMC this morning,” he told Stuart Varney on “Varney and Co.” and he added that he is already “up” $60,000 on his investment.

When Varney asked when he would “get out” of the stock he responded: “That’s all feel… I think it could have another run.”

ROBINHOOD RESTRICTING GAMESTOP TRADING IS ‘FLAT OUT CRIMINAL,’ BARSTOOL’S DAVE PORTNOY SAYS

“The big question with it obviously is that stock has been restricted. Today I don’t think it is so it’s a little bit of a guessing game what’s going to happen,” he added. “This is not fundamentals. This is just watching the ball bounce… black, red or green in a roulette wheel.”

Portnoy said he also invested a “little bit” in Nokia and Naked Brand stocks.

Ticker Security Last Change Change %
GME GAMESTOP CORP 97.87 +7.53 +8.34%
AMC AMC ENTERTAINMENT HOLDINGS INC 8.68 +0.84 +10.72%
NOK NOKIA CORP. 4.64 +0.12 +2.54%
NAKD NAKED BRAND GROUP 1.28 +0.37 +40.76%

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Meanwhile, Robinhood on Wednesday announced that it would allow fractional share investing in GameStop and AMC.

Portnoy said the move would bring the little guy back, but also stressed that the app could halt trading if these names start “going nuts again like they did before.”

“The main issue I had is I didn’t know they could pause trading like they did and crater the price… I was jumping on the train trying to make quick money… I’ll still do that if the opportunity presents itself,” he said. “But it certainly opened my eyes to what can be done when the little guy starts getting the hammer.”

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World

Virus Surge in Portugal Puts Hospitals on the Brink

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Portugal, struggling to contain a coronavirus outbreak that has led to the highest death rate in Europe, has rapidly filled the beds in intensive care units established for Covid-19 patients and is being forced to turn away critically ill patients from hospitals.

Overwhelmed hospitals, particularly in the capital region of Lisbon, have asked patients to try to treat themselves at home, and some patients have been moved to hospitals in regions with less severe outbreaks. The government has also asked other European countries for assistance.

Those who do show up at hospitals in Lisbon are finding a system on the brink, with scores of people lining up outside and waiting for treatment in ambulances.

“I really didn’t believe this could ever have happened in Portugal, having patients going door to door to find a hospital to be saved,” said Tomás Lamas, a doctor who works in the intensive care units of two hospitals in Lisbon. Hospitals are now being forced to make life-or-death decisions about which patients to treat. “Three months ago, we had patients who were admitted to intensive care but who are now not being considered, basically because they have chronic diseases or are old,” he said.

Portugal, a nation of about 10 million people on the Iberian Peninsula, is in the grips of its worst crisis of the pandemic. It has recorded 12,757 total coronavirus-related deaths, 5,576 of those in the last month alone.

Last spring, during the first wave of infections, Portugal was one of Europe’s success stories after implementing a strict lockdown that helped keep its death toll low, particularly in comparison with neighboring Spain.

But since Christmas, Portugal has faced a surge in cases and fatalities. This week, while new cases appeared to be falling in some regions, the outbreak in Lisbon was raging. “We are looking at a couple of weeks that will be difficult,” Pedro Siza Vieira, the Portuguese economy minister, said in a phone interview on Tuesday.

Mr. Siza Vieira contracted the virus last month, and about a third of the government’s top officials have either fallen ill themselves or had to isolate after coming in contact with someone who had tested positive.

Mr. Siza Vieira said that “a lot of people” in Portugal had seen family members during the Christmas holidays. Many, he added, had crisscrossed the country, ignoring rules prohibiting domestic travel. “The evidence of the mobility in the country shows that people didn’t even respect the restrictions that we had in place,” he said.

The Portuguese authorities also believe the crisis has been amplified by the rapid spread of the virus variant first discovered in Britain, which was most likely brought to the country by Portuguese who work in Britain and traveled back for Christmas, Mr. Siza Vieira said. “We don’t have evidence of the Brazilian variant being significantly active in Portugal, while we have evidence that the U.K. variant explains more than half of new cases, particularly in the Lisbon area,” he said.

But British officials have expressed their own concern about the spread in Portugal of the variant first discovered in Brazil, leading Britain to announce travel restrictions on Portugal, which is popular with British tourists. The travel ban was part of a wave of border closures around the world as countries race to limit the spread of new variants as they began mass vaccination campaigns.

Isabel Vaz, who runs a network of 15 private hospitals, 11 clinics and one public hospital across Portugal, said that Portugal should be praised for doubling the number of intensive care beds over the past year, as well as for the close coordination between its public and private health care systems to make full use of available resources.

Ms. Vaz added that Portugal had been caught in a difficult balancing act in the run-up to Christmas, wanting to both revive its economy and take full account of the risks of another wave of infections.

“As a country, I feel we failed to understand the real enemy and the risks that we were facing over the winter,” she said. “But of course no country’s health system is prepared for a tsunami like this.”

Whatever is driving infections in Portugal, new cases are only now starting to show signs of slowing after a national lockdown was reinstated in mid-January. Across the country, residents are required to stay home and all nonessential stores are closed. Citizens have also been barred from traveling outside the country unless for exceptional reasons.

Portugal was initially one of the laggards in Europe in terms of vaccine distribution, with the rollout also tainted by some queue-jumping scandals. But Mr. Siza Vieira insisted that the country was now on track to vaccinate about 10 percent of the population by early March. He said that 270,000 first doses of the vaccine and 70,000 second doses had been administered as of Monday.

Inside Lisbon’s hospitals, employees are working against the clock to prepare for an anticipated rise in patients requiring emergency treatment. More wards are being converted into space for Covid-19 patients, but, Dr. Lamas said, “adding beds is not the same as adding human resources, and we are calling doctors and nurses from other specialties to help us, but who are not used to handling this kind of patients.”

“It is like starting from ground zero,” he continued, “because to teach people how to use different equipment — and in a safe way — is a gigantic work.”

Portugal assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union in January, and pandemic efforts appear to be its focus.

Mr. Siza Vieiria said that the bloc needed additional powers to deal with a pandemic, including “uniform criteria on how to open or close borders.”

“One of the lessons that this crisis teaches us is that we do really need a European Union that is empowered and has resources to deal with this kind of threat that humanity faces and can only be tackled at continental level,” he said.

Some bloc countries offered assistance to Portugal over the weekend. The German defense minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, said that her country was preparing to dispatch army personnel and equipment, noting that everyone deployed would be vaccinated. And Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria said on Twitter that his country would welcome patients transferred from Portugal, without detailing how many.

Ricardo Baptista Leite, an opposition lawmaker in Portugal who is also a doctor and head of the public health department at the Catholic University of Portugal, said he was grateful for the support.

“We now have international aid coming in to try to save as many lives as we can,” he said. “But the time will come to assess what went wrong.”



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Health

Oregon puts debate over race in vaccine rollout to test

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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The role that race should play in deciding who gets priority for the COVID-19 vaccine in the next phase of the rollout is being put to the test in Oregon as tensions around equity and access to the shots emerge nationwide.

An advisory committee that provides recommendations to Oregon’s governor and public health authorities will vote Thursday on whether to prioritize people of color, target those with chronic medical conditions or focus on some combination of groups at higher risk from the coronavirus. Others, such as essential workers, refugees, inmates and people under 65 living in group settings, are also being considered.

The 27-member committee in Oregon, a Democratic-led state that’s overwhelmingly white, was formed with the goal of keeping fairness at the heart of its vaccine rollout. Its members were selected to include racial minorities and ethnic groups, from Somalian refugees to Pacific Islanders to tribes. The committee’s recommendations are not binding but provide critical input for Gov. Kate Brown and guide health authorities crafting the rollout.

“It’s about revealing the structural racism that remains hidden. It influences the disparities we experienced before the pandemic and exacerbated the disparities we experienced during the pandemic,” said Kelly Gonzales, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a health disparity expert on the committee.

The virus has disproportionately affected people of color. Last week, the Biden administration reemphasized the importance of including “social vulnerability” in state vaccination plans — with race, ethnicity and the rural-urban divide at the forefront — and asked states to identify “pharmacy deserts” where getting shots into arms will be difficult.

Overall, 18 states included ways to measure equity in their original vaccine distribution plans last fall — and more have likely done so since the shots started arriving, said Harald Schmidt, a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied vaccine fairness extensively.

Some, such as Tennessee, proposed reserving 5% of its allocation for “high-disadvantage areas,” while states like Ohio plan to use social vulnerability factors to decide where to distribute vaccine, he said. California has developed its own metrics for assessing a community’s level of need, and Oregon is doing the same.

“We’ve been telling a fairly simple story: ‘Vaccines are here.’ Now we have to tell a more complicated story,” said Nancy Berlinger, who studies bioethics at The Hastings Center, a nonpartisan and independent research institute in Garrison, New York. “We have to think about all the different overlapping areas of risk, rather than just the group we belong to and our personal network.”

Attempts to address inequities in vaccine access have already prompted backlashes in some places. Dallas authorities recently reversed a decision to prioritize the most vulnerable ZIP codes — primarily communities of color — after Texas threatened to reduce the city’s vaccine supply. That kind of pushback is likely to become more pronounced as states move deeper into the rollout and wrestle with difficult questions about need and short supply.

To avoid legal challenges, almost all states looking at race and ethnicity in their vaccine plans are turning to a tool called a “social vulnerability index” or a “disadvantage index.” Such an index includes more than a dozen data points — everything from income to education level to health outcomes to car ownership — to target disadvantaged populations without specifically citing race or ethnicity.

By doing so, the index includes many minority groups because of the impact of generations of systemic racism while also scooping up socioeconomically disadvantaged people who are not people of color and avoiding “very, very difficult and toxic questions” on race, Schmidt said.

“The point is not, ‘We want to make sure that the Obama family gets the vaccine before the Clinton family.’ We don’t care. They can both safely wait,” he said. “We do care that the person who works in a meatpacking plant in a crowded living situation does get it first. It’s not about race, it’s about race and disadvantage.”

In Oregon, health leaders are working on a social vulnerability index, including looking at U.S. census data and then layering on things like occupational status and income levels, said Rachael Banks, public health division director at the Oregon Health Authority.

That approach “gets beyond an individual perspective and to more of a community perspective” and is better than asking a person to prove “how they fit into any demographic,” she said.

The committee’s recommendations also will undergo a legal analysis, Banks said.

That makes sense to Roberto Orellana, a social work professor at Portland State University who launched a program to train his students to do contact tracing in Hispanic communities. Data shows that Hispanic people have roughly a 300% higher risk of contracting COVID-19 than their white counterparts in Oregon.

Orellana hopes his students, who are interning at state agencies and organizations, can put their knowledge to use both in contact tracing and in advocating for vaccines in migrant and farmworker communities. Vaccinating essential workers, prisoners and those in multigenerational households will reach people of color and put them at the heart of the vaccine plan, he said.

“I don’t want to take away from any other group. It’s a hard, hard question, and every group has valid needs and valid concerns. We shouldn’t be going through this,” Orellana said. “We should have vaccines for everybody — but we’re not there.”

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Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative corps member Sara Cline contributed to this report. Follow Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus.



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World

Capitol Riot Puts Spotlight on ‘Apocalyptically Minded’ Global Far Right

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BERLIN — When insurrectionists stormed the Capitol in Washington this month, far-right extremists across the Atlantic cheered. Jürgen Elsässer, the editor of Germany’s most prominent far-right magazine, was watching live from his couch.

“We were following it like a soccer match,” he said.

Four months earlier, Mr. Elsässer had attended a march in Berlin, where a breakaway mob of far-right protesters tried — and failed — to force their way into the building that houses Germany’s Parliament. The parallel was not lost on him.

“The fact that they actually made it inside raised hopes that there is a plan,” he said. “It was clear that this was something bigger.”

And it is. Adherents of racist far-right movements around the world share more than a common cause. German extremists have traveled to the United States for sniper competitions. American neo-Nazis have visited counterparts in Europe. Militants from different countries bond in training camps from Russia and Ukraine to South Africa.

For years far-right extremists traded ideology and inspiration on societies’ fringes and in the deepest realms of the internet. Now, the events of Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol have laid bare their violent potential.

In chatter on their online networks, many disavowed the storming of the Capitol as amateurish bungling. Some echoed falsehoods emanating from QAnon-affiliated channels in the United States claiming that the riot had been staged by the left to justify a clampdown on supporters of President Donald J. Trump. But many others saw it as a teaching moment — about how to move forward and pursue their goal of overturning democratic governments in more concerted and concrete ways.

It is a threat that intelligence officials, especially in Germany, take seriously. So much so that immediately after the violence in the United States, the German authorities tightened security around the Parliament building in Berlin, where far-right protesters — waving many of the same flags and symbols as the rioters in Washington — had tried to force their way in on Aug. 29.

President Biden has also ordered a comprehensive assessment of the threat from domestic violent extremism in the United States.

For now, no concrete plans for attacks have been detected in Germany, officials said. But some worry that the fallout from the events of Jan. 6 have the potential to further radicalize far-right extremists in Europe.

“Far-right extremists, corona skeptics and neo-Nazis are feeling restless,” said Stephan Kramer, the head of domestic intelligence for the eastern German state of Thuringia. There is a dangerous mix of elation that the rioters made it as far as they did and frustration that it didn’t lead to a civil war or coup, he said.

It is difficult to say exactly how deep and durable the links are between the American far right and its European counterparts. But officials are increasingly concerned about a web of diffuse international links and worry that the networks, already emboldened in the Trump era, have become more determined since Jan. 6.

A recent report commissioned by the German foreign ministry describes “a new leaderless transnational apocalyptically minded, violent far-right extremist movement” that has emerged over the past decade.

Extremists are animated by the same conspiracy theories and narratives of “white genocide” and “the great replacement” of European populations by immigrants, the report concluded. They roam the same online spaces and also meet in person at far-right music festivals, mixed martial arts events and far-right rallies.

“The neo-Nazi scenes are well-connected,” said Mr. Kramer, the German intelligence official. “We’re not just talking about likes on Facebook. We’re talking about neo-Nazis traveling, meeting each other, celebrating together.”

The training camps have caused anxiety among intelligence and law enforcement officials, who worry that such activity could lay the groundwork for more organized and deliberate violence.

Two white nationalists, who attended a paramilitary camp run by the extremist Russian Imperial Movement outside of St. Petersburg, were later accused by Swedish prosecutors of plotting bombings aimed at asylum seekers. Last year, the United States State Department designated the Russian Imperial Movement a terrorist organization, the first white nationalist group to receive the label.

In 2019, the F.B.I director, Christopher Wray warned that American white supremacists were traveling overseas for training with foreign nationalist groups. A report that year by the Soufan Center, a nonpartisan think tank, found that as many as 17,000 foreigners, many of them white nationalists, had traveled to Ukraine to fight on both sides of the separatist conflict there. Among them were several dozen Americans.

Sometimes they inspire one another to kill.

The hate-filled manifestos of Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, and Dylann Roof, an American white supremacist who killed nine Black parishioners in South Carolina four years later, influenced Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who in 2019 live-streamed his murder of over 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Mr. Tarrant’s manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” in turn inspired Patrick Crusius, who killed 22 people in El Paso, Texas, as well as a Norwegian gunman who was overpowered as he tried to shoot people at a mosque in Oslo.

Many far-right extremists immediately interpreted Jan. 6 as both a symbolic victory and a strategic defeat that they need to learn from.

Mr. Elsässer, the editor of Compact magazine, which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classifies as extremist, described the storming of the Capitol as “an honorable attempt” that failed because of inadequate planning.

“The storming of a parliament by protesters as the initiation of a revolution can work,” he wrote the day after the riot. “But a revolution can only be successful if it is organized.”

“When it’s crunchtime, when you want to overthrow the regime, you need a plan and a sort of general staff,” Mr. Elsässer wrote.

Among those feeling encouraged by the mobilization seen on Jan. 6 was Martin Sellner, the Austrian head of Europe’s far-right Generation Identity movement, who preaches nonviolence but has popularized ideas like “the great replacement.”

After the storming of the Capitol, Mr. Sellner wrote: “The anger, pressure and the revolutionary mood in the camp of the patriots is in principle a positive potential.”

“Even though it fizzled out pointlessly in the storm on the Capitol, leaving behind no more than a few memes and viral videos,” he wrote, “one could form an organized and planned approach out of this mood for a more effective resistance.”

Mr. Sellner, who said in an interview that Mr. Trump would be even more galvanizing in opposition, personifies the reach of an increasingly global movement with his close links to activists across Europe and the United States. He is married to Brittany Pettibone, an American alt-right YouTube star who has interviewed prominent European extremists like the British nationalist Tommy Robinson.

Mr. Robinson met virtually with the American leader of the far-right Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, for an hour-and-a-half-long conversation on Nov. 19 that was billed as a unity summit to discuss the outcome of the American election.

The men spoke of their common struggle, against liberals, antifa (a loosely affiliated group of far-left anti-fascism activists) and the big tech companies that had barred both men from their platforms. They also spoke of the U.S. presidential election outcome in existential terms, warning that if the right failed to preserve the presidency for Mr. Trump, it risked annihilation.

The Democrats, Mr. Robinson said at one point, are going to “replace you like we’ve been replaced.”

“The borders will open, and they’ll replace you with foreign people,” he said.

Several members of the Proud Boys, whom Mr. Trump famously told to “stand back and stand by,” were among those who stormed the Capitol.

On Oct. 19, the Proud Boys shared on one of their Telegram groups that they had seen “a huge uptick in support from Germany over the last few months.”

“A high percentage of our videos are being shared across Germany,” read a message in the Telegram group that was also translated into German. “We appreciate the support and we are praying for your country. We stand with the German nationalists who do not want migrants destroying their country.”

Over the past three months, the Proud Boys posted several videos of German police officers confronting left-wing protesters in Berlin. In two of the videos, which feature the police violently beating a protester, the Proud Boys cheered the violence.

Although they mocked Mr. Trump as “a total failure” after he disavowed the Capitol rampage and left the White House, they have voiced support for far-right groups in other countries including France, Poland and Turkey.

And as America has exported QAnon conspiracy theories across the Atlantic, European conspiracy theories and disinformation are also making their way to the United States.

Within days of the U.S. election, German QAnon followers were spreading disinformation that they said proved that the vote had been manipulated from a C.I.A.-operated server farm in Frankfurt, though millions of votes were cast by paper mail-in ballots.

The disinformation, which the German researcher Josef Holnburger traced back to a German-language account, was amplified by at least one local chapter of Alternative for Germany, the far-right political party known by its German initials, AfD. It also ended up being highlighted by U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert and Rudy Giuliani, the Trump ally and former mayor of New York City.

From there, it went viral — a first for a German QAnon conspiracy in the United States, Mr. Holnburger said.

The transnational links are inspirational rather than organizational, said Miro Dittrich, an expert on far-right extremist networks. “It’s not so much forging a concrete plan as creating a violent potential,” he said.

Yet experts remain skeptical of the potential to forge more durable trans-Atlantic relations among far-right groups. Almost all such attempts since World War II have failed, said Anton Shekhovtsov, an expert on the European far right at the University of Vienna.

Most recently, Stephen K. Bannon, the architect of Mr. Trump’s successful 2016 presidential bid, toured Europe several years ago trying to knit together populist nationalist parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and Alternative for Germany.

“It was a fiasco, Mr. Shekhovtsov said. “Bannon was pushing very old white supremacist ideas. This is no longer accepted in Europe. You may be a radical-right-wing populist, but you can’t talk about white nationalism.”

There’s even division among far-right followers about whether such alliances are valuable or viable. For many, the idea of an international nationalist movement is an oxymoron.

“There is a common mood and an exchange of ideas, memes and logos,” said Mr. Sellner, the Austrian far-right campaigner. “But the political camps in Europe and America are very different.”

Rinaldo Nazzaro, the founder of the international white-nationalist group The Base, now lives in self-imposed exile in St. Petersburg, Russia, but says he has no interest in forging ties with Russian nationalist groups.

“Nationalists in America must do the heavy lifting themselves,” he said. “Outside support could only be supplemental, at best.”

Others, like Matthew Heimbach, an organizer of the 2017 violent far-right protest in Charlottesville, Va., disagree.

“American members of the far right and white nationalist groups have been trying to get Europe to return their calls for a decade now,” he said in an interview.

With some success, he spent years working to forge alliances with like-minded groups in the Czech Republic, Germany and Greece.

He even hosted a delegation from the Russian Imperial Movement in 2017, several years before the United States declared it a terrorist organization. Members of the group, which runs paramilitary-style camps to train Russian and foreign nationalists in military tactics, spent two weeks in the United States and traveled extensively.

Photographs of the trip show Mr. Heimbach and one of the group’s leaders, Stanislav Shevchuk, posing with a Russian imperial flag in front of the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

Mr. Heimbach, who denounced the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and claims to have renounced white nationalism, said he had also taken his Russian guests to Dollywood and the Country Music Hall of Fame in Tennessee.

The trip, Mr. Shevchuk later wrote, “opened my eyes to a different alt-right America and I was convinced that we Russians had a lot in common with them.”

Katrin Bennhold reported from Berlin, and Michael Schwirtz from New York. Sheera Frenkel contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin.



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