Where There’s A Villa, There’s A Way
January 19, 2022
Want answers? We’ve got you covered: DP 1/10 Quiz Answers. Hats off to Walter D., who scored a perfect 10 on last week’s quiz. Check back next week for another chance to test your current affairs acumen!
“Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.” – Robert Kennedy
On Court Notice
Supreme Court justices use the Rule of Four when deciding to take up a case. If four of the nine justices think a case has value, they will issue a writ of certiorari ordering the lower court to send up the records for review. Justice William Brennan, Jr., President Eisenhower’s mid-century appointee who became the liberal lion of the Earl Warren Court, had a tradition known as the Rule of Five. He would tell each new batch of law clerks that “with five votes, you could accomplish anything.” It wasn’t 100% accurate, because a five-justice majority is inherently fragile – it necessitates compromise and discourages overreach. Five justices tend to proceed with baby steps. The six-justice supermajority firmly in control of today’s Supreme Court, however, is the judicial equivalent of the monarchy’s “heir and a spare.” The pathways to victory are enlarged, and the overall impact is far greater than one might want to believe. And these six conservative justices are poised to make major changes when it comes to two of the most highly-charged social issues: abortion and religious expression.
In December, SCOTUS allowed the nation’s most restrictive abortion law, the Texas Heartbeat Act, to remain in effect while opponents proceed with challenges in state court. The court also decided against allowing the federal government to challenge the Act in a separate lawsuit filed by the Justice Department. The justices have yet to rule in another restrictive abortion case out of Mississippi, but they appear quite amenable to completely gutting precedent that’s been in place for half a century guaranteeing a woman’s Constitutional right to an abortion. On Monday, the challenge to the Heartbeat Act was sent to the Texas Supreme Court, a move expected to significantly delay the case and something anti-abortionists hoped would occur.
Several Supreme Court cases involve free speech and the separation of church and state. At issue in Carson v. Makin, argued December 8, is a challenge to a Maine program that pays tuition for some students to attend private school when their own school district doesn’t operate a public secondary school, but not if the private school provides religious instruction. On Tuesday, the court heard arguments in Shurtleff v. City of Boston, a case arising from a Boston program to promote diversity that allows outside groups to fly their flags on one of three flagpoles in front of city hall. But when a conservative group was denied permission to fly a “Christian flag,” the group sued. The justices have also agreed to hear Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, involving a high school football coach who lost his job after repeatedly kneeling to pray at mid-field after games. (WaPo, NYT, Texas Tribune, scotusblog.com, the74million.org)
Not Above ReCoach
- In 1898, the city of Amsterdam gave an extraordinary gift to Queen Wilhelmina, the first woman to sit on the Dutch throne. It was a horse-drawn, gold-covered coach, its side panels decorated with paintings by prominent Dutch artist Nicolaas van der Waay.
- One of the paintings, “Tribute from the Colonies” referenced Indonesia’s colonial past, when it was controlled by the Dutch from the 1600s until it gained independence in the 1940s. Slave trading was widely carried out during the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia, especially in North Sumatra. Van der Waay’s painting depicted a young woman on a throne, with an African in a loincloth bowing down before her and Asians dressed in batiks presenting her with gifts.
- These themes of slavery and Dutch colonialism have long made the carriage a target for critics, although others have defended it as part of the Netherlands’ history. On Thursday, King Willem-Alexander announced the royal family’s decision to retire the golden coach, which has been on public display as part of an exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum. (TheConversation, NYT)
The More Things Change, Zemmour They Stay The Same
- Far-right anti-immigrant pundit Eric Zemmour is running in France’s presidential elections. On Monday, Zemmour was convicted in criminal court on charges of inciting racial hatred and making racially insulting comments after he appeared on television in 2020 and called unaccompanied child migrants “thieves,” “rapists,” and “murderers.”
- Zemmour, who had stood by his comments and said courts should not police political speech, was fined 10,000 euros, or $11,400. It’s the third conviction and fine for the man, who has a long history of making incendiary comments, mostly about immigration. Zemmour still faces several trials for running afoul of French laws that punish defamation or acts provoking hatred or violence on the basis of race, religion, or other factors.
- Zemmour explicitly fashioned himself as a French-style Donald Trump; his inflammatory comments and attacks against the news media and French elites have served both to draw outrage and fuel his rise to prominence. Currently, he’s in fourth place, with about 13% support in the polls. President Macron is polling first and is expected to stay in office. (NYT)
Additional World News
- North Korean train makes first crossing into China since Covid border lockdown (Guardian)
- How do death rates from COVID-19 differ between people who are vaccinated and those who are not? (Our World in Data)
- Waves from eruption in Tonga cause an oil spill in Peru (ABC)
- A drone attack in Abu Dhabi claimed by rebels in Yemen has killed three people (NPR)
- Thousands take holy dip in India’s Ganges River amid Covid surge (NBC)
- Teachers in France strike over COVID-19 health and safety protocols (ABC)
- Poroshenko, ex-President, Returns to Ukraine, Roiling Politics (NYT, $)
A Bad Play
- Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has a bone to pick with the CDC over their ‘health guidance.’ In its current guidance for K-12 grades, the health agency said schools should consider testing for sports, choir, band, and other activities involving shouting or vigorous exercise, especially 24 hours before a competition or event.
- Also, school districts should cancel high-risk activities or hold them virtually in communities with high transmission unless everyone is fully vaccinated. COVID is more likely to spread during sports requiring close contact, such as wrestling, hockey, and football, and band is high risk because of increased exhalation.
- Schaffner, who has advised the CDC for decades, said it’s “unlikely, unreasonable, and unrealistic” to think Americans will follow either of the agency’s suggestions. “As we say in Tennessee, that dog won’t hunt.” Current and former health officials lament that such out-of-touch advice has long been a hallmark of many CDC recommendations, partly because the “science nerds” who write these things are sometimes stuck in a bubble. (CNN)
Charges Washed Away
- A team of prosecutors and investigators leading the investigation into the Flint water crisis from 2016 through 2018 were assembling a racketeering case against the architects of a bond deal that residents and experts say sparked the health disaster. The case, which would have come under the RICO statutes often used to charge organized crime groups, was widespread and set to implicate additional state officials who played a role in the crisis that occurred in 2014.
- Former Republican governor Rick Snyder’s administration redirected money meant for an environmental cleanup and issued a fraudulent environmental order mandating that the city of Flint, with its mostly Black population, change its water source from what Detroit used to untreated, toxic Flint River water.
- The original investigation’s momentum and impending racketeering charges vanished after the state’s newly elected Democratic attorney general Dana Nessel cleaned house and overhauled the investigation in 2019. In January 2021, Snyder was charged with two counts of willful neglect of duty, which carry up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine. (Guardian)
Additional USA News
- MLK’s memory is honored with demonstrations calling for voting rights reform (NPR)
- America struggles to keep schools open (Axios)
- Clyburn says he’s not giving up on voting rights legislation bills yet (CNN)
- Pioneering US military pilot Charles McGee dies at 102 (BBC)
- For Oath Keepers and founder, Jan. 6 was weeks in the making (AP)
- University of Michigan president fired for inappropriate relationship with university employee (CNN)
- Tornado victim’s family sues Amazon over warehouse collapse (ABC)
Where There’s A Villa, There’s A Way
- The Villa Ludovisi in Rome, built in 1570, has been in the Ludovisi family since the early 1600s. The ‘house’ contains the only known ceiling painted by Caravaggio. It was commissioned in 1597 by a diplomat and arts patron who had asked the young painter to decorate the ceiling of a small room being used as an alchemy workshop. The oil on plaster mural is the only ceiling mural that Caravaggio is known to have made, and quite historically significant.
- After Prince Nicolo Boncompagni Ludovisi died in 2018, the villa became the subject of an inheritance dispute between the children from Ludovisi’s first marriage and their step-mother, Princess Rita. To settle the dispute, the court ordered the villa to be auctioned off. An online auction organized by the Rome tribunal described the villa this way: “The “monumental property” on six levels is “among the most prestigious architectural and landscape beauties of pre-unification Rome,” with three garages, two roof terraces, and a “splendid garden with arboreal essences and tall trees, pedestrian paths, stairs and rest areas.”
- The villa was assigned a court-appraised value of $533 million; it went on the auction block Tuesday with a starting bid of $400 million, and a note that the villa would need an estimated $12.5 million in renovations. The auction closed shortly thereafter, with no bids. It will be put up again on April 7, at a reduced price. If it fails to sell then, it will be put up one more time at a still lower price.
- If Italian villas aren’t your cup of tea, consider what Sotheby’s Dubai will be offering in February. It’s a 555.55-carat black diamond believed to have come from outer space – either created from a meteoric impact or from a “diamond-bearing” asteroid that collided with Earth. The auction house says a natural faceted black diamond of this size is an “extremely rare occurrence.” The diamond is being exhibited in Dubai and Los Angeles, and is expected to sell for the bargain price of $6.8 million when it goes under the hammer in London. (ABC News, CNN)
Additional Reads
- Henry III gold penny: A coin found in a field by an amateur metal (CNN)
- ‘We started eating them’: what do you do with an invasive army of crayfish clones? (Guardian)
- Anne Frank may have been betrayed by Jewish notary (Guardian)
- Astronomers find growing number of Starlink satellite tracks (Ars Technica)
- Citizen scientists spot planet the size of Jupiter that NASA algorithms missed (CNET)
- A new NASA astronaut corps for the next era in space (Axios)
- ‘Worst house on best block’ of San Francisco sells for $2M (AP)