(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — President Joe Biden said Friday his administration is moving forward with a new student loan relief plan after the Supreme Court struck down his original program to wipe out $430 billion in debt.
Biden detailed the next steps in remarks delivered at the White House, where he was joined by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
“This new path is legally sound,” the president said. “It’s going to take longer. And in my view, it’s the best path that remains to student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible.”
Under the alternative strategy, Biden said the administration will invoke the 1965 Higher Education Act to allow Secretary Cardona to “compromise, waive or release loans under certain circumstances.”
In the meantime, Biden said they also have a plan to help alleviate the financial stress as loan payments restart in October after a three-year pause.
The administration will create a temporary, 12-month “on-ramp repayment program” that will remove the threat of default for borrowers who are unable to pay their bills. The Department of Education will not refer borrowers who miss payments to credit agencies for a year as they readjust to making payments again.
“Today’s decision has closed one path, now we’re going to pursue another,” Biden said. “I’m never going to stop fighting for you. I will use every tool at our disposal to get you the student debt relief you need and reach your dreams. It’s good for the economy and good for the country and can be good for you.”
Biden also noted other work by administration to provide relief, including modifications to the income-driven repayment plan to cut down the amount that borrowers have to make on their monthly payments by half — from 10% of their discretionary income to 5%. Biden said the change will save the average borrower $1,000 a year.
“It’s now the most generous repayment program ever,” he said.
In a 6-3 decision earlier Friday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said the administration overstepped its authority when it unilaterally moved to waive billions in debt for eligible Americans.
Biden said he thought the court “misinterpreted the Constitution” in its ruling.
Biden’s federal student loan program would have forgiven up to $10,000 in debt for borrowers making less than $125,000 a year. Borrowers who took out Pell grants to pay for college could have had up to $20,000 canceled.
Forty-three million Americans would have qualified for the program, and the Education Department had already approved applications for 16 million borrowers before it was put on halt last fall due to legal challenges.
Biden on Friday hit Republicans for opposing his plan, painting them as hypocritical for opposing relief for borrowers while some had their own business-related loans provided by the government during the pandemic forgiven.
“The money was literally about to go out the door,” he said of his original plan. “And then Republican elected officials and special interests stepped in and said no, literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars in student debt relief that was about to change their lives.”
Biden’s loan forgiveness program was rooted in the 2003 HEROES Act, a law passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that gave the president authority to waive or modify loans in national emergencies.
Chief Justice John Roberts said the text of HEROES Act didn’t authorize the program, and the court’s precedent “requires that Congress speak clearly before a department secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy.”
Biden pushed back after a reporter asked him why he gave Americans “false hope” on this issue.
“What I did I thought was appropriate and was able to be done and would get done,” he said. “I didn’t give borrowers false hope but the Republican snatched away the hope that they were given and it’s real, real hope.”
(NEW YORK) — As LGBTQ+ spaces continue to face threats across the country, a growing crop of lesbian bars look to chart a new path.
In 2020, the Lesbian Bar Project sounded the alarm on the slow disappearance of lesbian bars in the United States.
In the years since, new lesbian-led venues and events have opened up around the country, offering safe spaces that hosts say are sorely needed for the queer community.
Dave’s Lesbian Bar – a Queens, New York-based pop-up venue – is evidence of that, according to host Dave Dausch.
The pop-up has garnered hundreds to thousands of attendees at their events, said Dausch. Their events are part-concert, part-market, and part-party – combining the things Dausch loves the most as a bartender and performer.
But they weren’t sure of its potential for success: “I was looking around at my comrades and saying, like, ‘Should I do this? Is this insane?’ They are like, ‘No, we need this.'”
“I just think that femme space in general has never been prioritized,” Dausch said. “Men have the money and have been using it for their desires for a really long time. So it makes sense that a marginalized community … have not been prioritized.”
In the 1980s, there were roughly 200 lesbian bars in the United States. Today, there are fewer than 30.
Erica Rose, one of the filmmakers behind the Lesbian Bar Project, said many reasons have been cited for the decline in bars, including gentrification and economic inequality between men and women.
Several of these bars have opened in recent years, igniting hope that the community will continue to have inclusive spaces to gather, even as the country sees a rise in anti-LGBTQ legislation and political rhetoric.
“We’re going through a pattern that we’ve all seen before, where queer people are weaponized and marginalized, especially the trans community and trans children,” said Rose.
She continued, “I think that the evil forces in our society literally want us to disappear. They want to erase us, many of them want to kill us. And I think that what we can do is just keep showing up and being loud and being present.”
The creation and evolution of Dave’s Lesbian Bar has led to Dausch’s “own trans coming out story.”
Dausch said that even though queer rights are being targeted by legislators, their safe spaces where people can celebrate their community have kept them going.
“I have very much been feeling the effect of feeling like the nation is against who I am,” Dausch said. “But I’m relentless, and so are all the other queers around me. And I see what beautiful things – the web of beauty that’s spreading out. And how big that is.”
Stacy Lentz, CEO of The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, says that queer bars “are more important now more than ever.”
“Our movement started in a bar – Stonewall was a bar,” Lentz said. “Our activism was born in these queer spaces and in these bars, because that’s all we had … We really need folks to come out and support these places that cannot survive if you don’t show up.”
Learn more about the growing movement to establish lesbian safe spaces on ABC News’ “Perspective” podcast:
(NEW YORK) — LGBTQ+ advocates, and the dissenting Supreme Court judges, fear the recent Supreme Court ruling on free speech has opened the door to encourage discrimination.
The Supreme Court ruled on Friday in favor of an evangelical Christian website designer in a case involving whether businesses can refuse to do services that involve expressive speech because of First Amendment free speech rights.
The Court holds that the website designer cannot be forced by Colorado law to create expressive messages with which the designer disagrees.
In this case, the designs would be for a wedding website for an LGBTQ+ wedding, which the designer may be opposed to.
The ruling comes on the last day of Pride month, which celebrates the LGBTQ+ community.
It also comes amid an increasingly hostile political climate against this demographic, which has seen a rise in violence and threats.
“This decision by the Supreme Court is a dangerous step backward, giving some businesses the power to discriminate against people simply because of who we are,” said Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign.
She continued, “This decision continues to affirm how radical and out-of-touch this Court is, especially when 80 percent of Americans support robust and LGBTQ+ inclusive nondiscrimination laws.”
“Colorado seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance,” the opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch reads.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said this is the first time in history the court has granted a business open to the public a right to refuse service to members of a protected class.
“The law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment,” said Sotomayor. “Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group.”
Sotomayor warned the decision could lead to discrimination against other marginalized groups as well on the basis of free speech: “A website designer could equally refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple, for example,” the dissent read.
Dr. David J. Johns, executive director of the Black LGBTQ+ civil rights organization National Black Justice Coalition, criticized the far-reaching implications of the decision.
“The decision threatens the progress towards achieving full equality, creates a climate of uncertainty and fear for LGBTQ+ individuals who already face significant discrimination and violence when simply trying to live their lives, and, as a result, weakens democracy,” Johns said in a statement.
Nearly 500 bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community have been introduced in state legislatures across the country this year, according to the ACLU.
“This decision will bring harm and stigma to LGBTQ families and is yet another example of a Court that is out of touch with the supermajority of Americans who believe in fundamental freedoms and know that discrimination is wrong,” GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement. “Businesses that are open to the public should serve all in the public.”
(WASHINGTON) — FBI director Chris Wray was deposed under oath this week by lawyers for former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who are separately suing the federal government over their departures from the FBI, which came after months of public ridicule by then-president Donald Trump and his allies.
The closed-door deposition on Tuesday, confirmed by two people familiar with the matter, could pave the way for the sworn deposition of Trump himself in the coming weeks.
Many of Trump’s attacks were based on private text messages between Strzok and Page, discovered by internal investigators, that reflected strong anti-Trump sentiment.
“There is ample evidence that President Trump has long been fixated on — and in some instances personally involved in — matters relating to Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok,” lawyers for Page said in court.
In 2016, Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence agent, helped launched the FBI’s investigation into alleged ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia — a probe Trump has derided as a “hoax.”
Strzok initially joined special counsel Robert Mueller’s team when Mueller took over the probe, but Strzok was reassigned after internal investigators discovered the private text messages.
Page resigned from the FBI in May 2018, and Strzok was fired from the agency three months later. Though they filed separate lawsuits, their legal teams are working together to gather evidence and conduct depositions.
In her lawsuit, Page claims the Justice Department and FBI violated the Privacy Act by publicly releasing her private text messages, which she says were used “to promote the false narrative that [she] and others at the FBI were biased against President Trump, had conspired to undermine him, and otherwise had engaged in allegedly criminal acts, including treason.”
In his own lawsuit, Strzok claims wrongful termination, alleging the FBI and Justice Department violated his First Amendment rights, and that his firing “was the result of a long and public campaign by President Trump and his allies to vilify Strzok and pressure the agency to terminate him.”
The Justice Department has defended its actions, saying in court that the text messages were lawfully made public, that the text messages “risked serious harm to the FBI’s mission by undermining its perception of professionalism and impartiality,” and that any First Amendment rights were consequently outweighed by “the FBI’s interests in … protecting its reputation as a trusted, non-partisan investigative institution.”
Both lawsuits cite an array of tweets and public statements from Trump in the run-up to Page’s resignation and Strzok’s firing from the FBI.
“I am amazed that Peter Strzok is still at the FBI, and so is everybody else … Peter Strzok should have been fired a long time ago,” Trump said at the White House in June 2018, two months before Strzok was fired.
Ahead of Strzok’s termination, Trump and Wray both attended meetings that included discussions of Strzok and Page’s employment status. Those meetings were the focus of Wray’s deposition on Tuesday, which lasted two hours, according to court records and one person involved in the matter.
At least one of the former FBI employees was inside the room with Wray during the deposition this week, ABC News was told.
The judge overseeing both cases, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, said that any deposition of Trump would have to be limited to two hours.
The former president’s legal team has not asserted executive privilege over conversations that related to Strzok’s employment status, per court filings.
Judge Jackson has called Trump “a key witness to what took place.”
Page and Strzok had wanted to depose Trump before deposing Wray, but — after much legal wrangling — Berman Jackson denied that request, waiting to see if Trump’s deposition would still be necessary after hearing testimony from Wray.
Other former senior FBI and Justice Department officials have already been deposed.
In suing the Justice Department and FBI, Strzok is seeking reinstatement, backpay and unspecified monetary damages. Page is also seeking unspecified monetary damages, saying continued attacks from Trump and his allies have caused her “permanent loss of earning capacity due to reputational damage” and forced her to pay for therapy “to cope with unwanted national media exposure and harassment.”
Though a review of the broader Russia-related probe by the Justice Department’s inspector general found no evidence “that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions” made by Strzok and others, a more recent report by special counsel John Durham said “confirmation bias” led FBI officials to take unnecessarily intrusive steps. Still, according to Durham’s report, the evidence gathered did not support charges against Strzok or any other senior FBI official.
The FBI declined to comment on the matter to ABC News.
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Friday struck down the Biden administration program to forgive student debt for more than 43 million American borrowers at a cost of $400 billion.
The vote was 6-3, with conservative justices in the majority in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts.
Six GOP-led states had challenged the program as executive power overreach. The administration had argued it was supported by emergency powers Congress had passed under COVID relief legislation.
(NEW YORK) — Prosecutors urged a federal appeals court to uphold the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was found guilty of trafficking women and girls for Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse.
“The Government’s evidence at trial established that over the course of a decade, Maxwell facilitated and participated in the sexual abuse of multiple young girls,” prosecutors wrote in their reply brief.
Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence. From 1994 to 2004, Maxwell and Epstein worked together to identify girls, groom them and then entice them to travel and transport them to Epstein’s properties in New York, Florida, New Mexico and elsewhere, prosecutors said. The girls — some of whom were as young as 14 years old — were then sexually abused, often under the guise of a “massage.”
Maxwell argued she was only prosecuted “as a proxy for Jeffrey Epstein” after he died by suicide in jail. She said prosecutors brought a criminal case against her “to satisfy public outrage over an unpopular non-prosecution agreement and the death of the person responsible for the crimes.”
Maxwell said she was inoculated by a 2007 non-prosecution agreement federal prosecutors in Florida arranged with Epstein that allowed him to plead guilty to state charges and serve 13 months in a work-release program.
“In its zeal to pin the blame for its own incompetence and for Epstein’s crimes on Maxwell, the Government breached its promise not to prosecute Maxwell, charged her with time-barred offenses, resurrected and recast decades-old allegations for conduct previously ascribed to Epstein and other named assistants, and joined forces with complainants’ civil attorneys, whose interests were financial, to develop new allegations that would support charges against Maxwell,” her defense attorneys argued in their appeal.
Prosecutors said the district court correctly ruled Maxwell was not covered by the non-prosecution agreement.
“The NPA also provided that, if Epstein complied with the agreement, ‘the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to’ four named individuals, none of whom was Maxwell. Indeed, Maxwell was neither a party to the agreement nor involved in negotiating its terms,” prosecutors said in their reply brief.
The defense also appealed based on a juror’s omission on a pre-trial questionnaire that he was a victim of child sexual abuse. After the verdict, Juror 50 spoke publicly about the effect of his sexual abuse on his jury service.
“Irrespective of whether the juror’s false statements were intentional, which they clearly were, the similarities between the traumatic experiences described by the juror and the victims in the case, together with the juror’s public statements, established the juror’s bias,” the defense said.
Prosecutors argued the judge was right to conclude Juror 50, who said he made an inadvertent mistake, was able to be fair and impartial.
“This case is not within one of the rare, extreme circumstances where a mandatory presumption of bias applies,” prosecutors said.
(PARIS) — Widespread rioting continued in the streets of France for a third night amid anger over the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Nael M.
Protesters erected barricades, set buildings and cars ablaze, threw fireworks at riot police and ransacked stores. Police stations, schools and town halls were among the buildings targeted. Riot police used tear gas, water cannons and non-lethal dispersion grenades to fend off violent groups.
A total of 875 people were arrested, 3,880 fires were started, 2,000 vehicles were burned and 492 buildings were damaged nationwide on Thursday night as curfews were in place in multiple cities, according to the French Ministry of the Interior. About half of the arrests were reportedly made in the Paris region alone.
“Last night, our police, gendarmes and firefighters courageously faced rare violence,” Darmanin said in a Twitter post on Friday morning.
Among those arrested were 14 people who allegedly broke into a flagship Nike store at the Chatelet station in the heart of Paris, according to an official in the Paris Prefecture Office.
Some 40,000 law enforcement officers had been deployed across France on Thursday evening to quell potential violence, including about 5,000 in the capital and its inner suburbs. Nearly 250 of those officers were injured overnight, according to the interior minister.
Protests over the teenager’s death also took place in Belgium’s capital on Thursday night, with some rioters allegedly attacking officers in Brussels, a spokesperson for the Belgian Federal Police told ABC News. A least eight people were arrested there, the police spokesperson said.
Dozens of police officers were deployed in the city center of Brussels on Thursday night and two subway stations were shuttered.
The violent unrest in France kicked off after a 17-year-old driver was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic check in the northwestern Paris suburb Nanterre on Tuesday morning. The officer has been detained on suspicion of voluntary homicide amid an ongoing investigation into the incident, according to the local prosecutor’s office.
Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said Thursday that the officer did not meet the requirements to discharge his weapon and will remain in custody awaiting trial.
France’s Inspectorate General of the National Police, which investigates allegations of police misconduct, is also conducting a probe into the fatal shooting.
Lawyers for the victim’s family identified him as 17-year-old Nael M. and said they intend to file complaints against the officer accused of pulling the trigger and another officer who was at the scene. A funeral for Nael is set to be held in Nanterre on Saturday.
While tensions have remained highest in the Paris suburbs, almost every region of France has been hit with unrest since Tuesday. As a result, the southern port city of Marseille has banned all public demonstrations.
French President Emmanuel Macron and the interior minister have both repeatedly called for “calm” as authorities investigate the teen’s death.
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Friday ruled for an evangelical Christian website designer in a case involving whether creative businesses can refuse to serve LGBTQ+ customers because of First Amendment free speech rights.
(NEW YORK) — Weeks into Ukraine’s counteroffensive, political turmoil in Russia has raised new questions in the war and what it means for Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
In a fleeting but shocking show of rebellion against Russia’s top military brass, forces with the Russian paramilitary organization Wagner Group left the front line in Ukraine and claimed control of military facilities in Rostov-on-Don, a key Russian city near the Ukrainian border, late last week.
They then marched toward Moscow before the mercenary leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ordered them to halt on Saturday and return to their field camps in Ukraine, saying he wanted to avoid shedding Russian blood.
The 24-hour mutiny marked the most significant challenge to Russian President Putin’s authority in his more than 20 years of rule. In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia appeared to be suffering “full-scale weakness.”
Amid the brief drama, though, little has changed on the 600-mile front in southern and eastern Ukraine, as Ukrainian forces look for breakthroughs in what “continues to be a very long hard, difficult and bloody fight,” according to retired U.S. Marine Corps Col. Steve Ganyard, an ABC News contributor.
“It’s important to take what was going on with Prigozhin and with Putin and put that into a Russia context, because that’s something that’s going on behind the scenes in Russia,” Ganyard said. “As of now, it’s not going to have any significant effect on the battlefield. The battlefield remains what it was.”
Counteroffensive a ‘long, hard slog’
Ukraine’s probing operations followed a stagnant period during the winter, when the Russians had months to build up three lines of defense, with layers of minefields, tank traps and trenches, according to Ganyard.
“The Ukrainians haven’t even gotten through the first line of defense anywhere along the front lines,” he said.
Whether Ukraine has the equipment and manpower to make a major breakthrough against those fortified defenses will be pivotal in the direction of the war — and its possible end, Ganyard said.
“The world really hasn’t seen a fight like this, hasn’t seen a war like this, for almost 100 years. It’s very reminiscent of the Western Front in World War I, where you had trenches and progress was measured in hundreds of feet per day,” he said.
“Even today, where there’s some quote-unquote breakthroughs going on, we’ve seen the Ukrainians making advances of less than a mile per day,” he continued. “So it’s a long, hard slog. It’s gonna be very bloody, it’s gonna take a lot of men, material, and a lot of people are gonna get hurt along the way.”
As Ukrainian forces advance, they’re looking for weaknesses and lightly manned places along the long front line; it could take weeks or months to make a potentially “catastrophic breakthrough” that could signal success for the Ukrainians, according to Ganyard.
The static battlefield during the winter has given Ukraine time to train soldiers with new equipment from the U.S. and NATO — “theoretically it’s a better military than it was, say, 12 or 14 months ago” — though in some ways, Russia has an advantage being on the defensive and protected behind the multiple layers of trenches, Ganyard said.
Ukraine also may be at a disadvantage in terms of manpower and lack the 3-to-1 advantage of an attacker over a defender that is a “general truism in war,” he said.
“If things go badly for the Ukrainians, where they continue to lose men and machines at a rate that they can’t replace, then we are looking at another few months where we may end up in stalemate,” Ganyard said. “So it’s really going to depend on how well the Russians defend, whether the Ukrainians can find a breakthrough, and whether the Ukrainians have the means and the will to continue a fight even when they are at a sort of parity in a very defensive position with the Russians.”
The Institute for the Study of War said at the onset of Ukraine’s counteroffensive that the attack will likely vary in size and intensity over “many weeks,” with the initial phase likely to be the “most difficult and slowest” and resulting in the greatest Ukrainian losses as they go up against the prepared defense.
“Militaries have long identified the penetration phase of a mechanized offensive as the most dangerous and costly,” it said. “The success or failure of this phase may not be apparent for some time.”
Zelenskyy admitted in an interview with the BBC last week that progress has been “slower than desired.”
“Some people believe this is a Hollywood movie and expect results now. It’s not,” Zelenskyy said.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a news conference in Brussels last week that Ukraine is in the “early stages” of its offensive operations and that it would be “premature” to estimate how long the counteroffensive could last given that “there are several hundred thousand Russian troops dug in and prepared positions all along the front line.”
“This is a very difficult fight. It is a very violent fight. And it will likely take a considerable amount of time at high cost,” he said.
Potential impact of Wagner rebellion
Then there’s the question of the Wagner Group and Prigozhin, whose march toward Moscow represented the “most significant challenge to the Russian state in recent times,” the U.K. Ministry of Defense said on Saturday.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters this week that it’s “too soon to tell” what the impact of the Wagner rebellion could be on the ground in Ukraine.
Prigozhin had clashed for months with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, over the conduct of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Prior to the rebellion, Prigozhin, once a close ally of Putin, accused the Russian military of deliberately shelling his fighters in Ukraine.
After Prigozhin ordered his soldiers to halt their march on Moscow, the Kremlin announced it had made a deal that the mercenary leader will move to the neighboring country of Belarus and receive amnesty, along with his mercenaries, who were also invited to join the Russian army instead. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed to help broker the deal.
In his first public remarks following the march to Moscow, Prigozhin referred to the Wagner Group as the “most experienced and combat-ready unit in Russia, and possibly in the world.”
Taking Prigozhin and any Wagner troops off the battlefield could be to Ukraine’s advantage, Ganyard said.
“The most important thing that comes out of all of this with a disillusion or whatever happens to the Wagner troops, is that they get taken off the battlefield. It’s the only thing that’s good for the Ukrainian fight,” Ganyard said. “The Wagner troops were among the most effective and among the most capable on the battlefield.”
“But right now the defensive fight the Russians are able to put up with their multiple layers of defenses are going to be very, very tough for the Ukrainians to break through,” he added.
The Institute for the Study of War said in a recent assessment that the “ongoing Putin-Lukashenko-Prigozhin powerplay is not yet over and will continue to have short-term and long-term consequences that may benefit Ukraine,” including by potentially tying up heavy weapon and tanks for internal security “that could otherwise be used in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told ABC News that he believes “without a doubt” that the brief armed rebellion marks “the beginning of the end” of the war in Ukraine.
“The problem is this ‘end’ can last for quite some time and we have to understand that,” Podolyak said during an interview in Kyiv on Saturday.
“Russia has accumulated a lot of internal problems, but they are not ready to accept defeat because it would put an end to two decades of its domination in global processes,” he added. “It would mean the end of Russia’s ambitions, because I always said that the end of war must not mean just a victory for Ukraine. It should bring about reformatting Russia itself.”
Putin’s war effort might also suffer if front-line soldiers fighting in Ukraine learn of the armed rebellion.
“How do you motivate these guys who don’t want to be the last guy to die for a losing cause?” a senior U.S. official said Tuesday.
Ganyard noted that the Wagner Group revolt was a mutiny by a mercenary force — not one by regular Russian troops.
“So we don’t know how the regular Russian troops might have felt about this, if they even heard about it,” he said. “This is very different from something, say, if the Russian military itself had mutiny.”
Milley noted that Russian leadership “is not necessarily coherent,” and Russian troop morale is not high — “many of them don’t even know why they’re there.”
Ganyard said that while Ukraine may not have a 3-to-1 advantage, they do have “moral superiority” — which has been a key factor since Russia launched its invasion in February 2022.
“They are convinced that their cause is just. That is not the case on the Russian side,” Ganyard said. “Napoleon said that ‘[in war] the moral is to the physical as 3 is to 1.’ In other words, saying that whoever has the righteous, just cause has a 3-to-1 advantage over the other side.”
“The Ukrainians clearly feel that they’re trying to take back their country, that the Russians are in the wrong here, that the Russians were the attackers,” he continued. “And so the Ukrainians do have the kind of morale, the kind of support, the kind of esprit that is important to be able to continue these hard slog, bloody kinds of conflicts.”
If a stalemate persists, taking a toll on men and machines on both sides, that could lead to some sort of negotiated settlement, Ganyard said. However, neither Zelenskyy nor Putin can afford that politically at this time, he said.
“In many ways this is like two punch-drunk fighters in the eighth round of a prize fight,” he said. “Both want to continue fighting. Neither has the stamina or the strength left to fight the fight that they were able to fight before.”
(NEW YORK) — Whether you’re heading to the beach or a barbecue this Fourth of July holiday weekend, here’s what you need to know before hitting the highway or heading to the airport.
The roads
About 43.2 million people are expected to hit the road for the July 4 holiday — up 2.4% from 2022 and up 4% from 2019, according to AAA.
The quietest days to travel by car are anticipated to be Sunday, July 2, and Monday, July 3, according to transportation analytics company INRIX.
If you’re heading for the highway on Friday, June 30, the worst traffic is forecast to be from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., according to INRIX.
If you’re driving home on Wednesday, July 5, the worst traffic may hit from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Rental cars are averaging $47 per day, down 25% from the same time last year, according to Hopper.
The skies
More than 24 million are expected to fly out of U.S. airports from June 29 to July 5, with June 29 and June 30 expected to be the busiest travel days, according to Hopper.
But flight prices are dropping. Hopper said domestic tickets are more than $100 cheaper than they were last year.
American Airlines said it expects to fly nearly 3 million passengers from June 30 to July 4, with July 2 as its busiest day.
United Airlines said it’s planning to carry nearly 5 million passengers from June 30 to July 9, with June 30 as its busiest day.
United said its bookings are up 12% from 2022 and are now “nearly equal” to pre-pandemic levels.
The most popular U.S. destinations for the holiday are New York City, Los Angeles and Orlando, Florida, according to Expedia.
The most crowded airports are anticipated to be Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport, according to Hopper.
The Transportation Security Administration said it was prepared for a “record” number of travelers over the holiday weekend and is expecting to screen about 17.7 million people from June 29 to July 5.
The agency “is staffed and ready for the increasing travel volumes during this holiday travel period with the technologies and resources for improved security effectiveness, efficiency and passenger experience,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said.
