Good morning. The Trump administration repealed its own authority to fight climate change. Members of Congress left Washington without funding the Department of Homeland Security, putting the agency on a near-certain path to a shutdown this weekend. And Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer resigned after the Justice Department released files showing her extensive relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We have a lot more news below. But I’m going to start with the Olympics.
Postcards from ItalyMy family has been sprawled across the living room couch for much of this week, watching the Winter Olympics. Our group chat pings and buzzes throughout the day, announcing this medal or that one, a devastating fall, a victory charged with emotion. Heartbreak, redemption, repeat. The United States women’s hockey team, with a 4-0 record in the preliminary round, faces off against Italy in the quarterfinals this afternoon. Can’t wait. Still, there’s a sterility in much of what we see on the screens, as everything in Italy unspools before us in glossy montages built in editing suites, in crowd shots heavy with flags and nation-branded outerwear. Enjoyable as the Olympics have been, it can be difficult to get a sense of life on the ground in Milan and Cortina, in places where the cameras are not. To get one, I pinged a few of my colleagues who are covering the Games. I asked them to send us postcards, to let us know what they’ve seen. Bocce on iceHere’s one from Jason Horowitz, our Madrid bureau chief. He covered Italy for years as The Times’s Rome bureau chief: America’s curling fans were getting rowdy. On Tuesday night in Cortina d’Ampezzo, I sat up in the stadium’s old wooden rafters with die-hard fans of Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin, the American mixed doubles team playing for the gold against Sweden. They mostly chanted “Cory” or “Korey,” and “U.S.A., U.S.A.” But as the match grew tense at the end, and the Americans had an opening, the cheering took a turn. “Finish it!” screamed one man near me. “FINISH IT!” The “Sweep the leg” energy of the American fans elicited more than a few looks of disapproval from the non-Americans in the stands. But Dropkin, the pride of Broomstones Curling Club in Massachusetts and now a real estate agent in the American curling Mecca of Minnesota, egged them on. He pumped up the crowd by raising his broom. He spread his arms and made gimme-more motions with his fingertips. One of the fans, wearing a stars-and-stripes fleece, shouted, “Korey, show us your biceps,” and he flexed. A day earlier, the Americans had squeaked past the Italian team in a nail-biter, eliminating Cortina’s hometown favorite. Afterward, Dropkin rushed off the ice to the stands and delivered dramatic roundhouse fist pumps, a sort of curling end-zone dance. “Annoying,” said Cortina’s mayor, Gianluca Lorenzi. Himself a former curler on Italy’s national team, Lorenzi told me one of the best parts of the sport was its spirit of fair play, and the tradition in which winners buy a soda for the losers after the match. It wasn’t clear if the Swedish sister-brother team of Isabella and Rasmus Wranå, who quietly prevailed over the Americans for the gold, bought Dropkin a Coke. Blades of glory
Motoko Rich is the current Rome bureau chief and was previously the top reporter in the Tokyo bureau: I am, at best, a fair-weather figure skating fan, tuning in only once every four years for the Olympics. But I feel giddy with the privilege of having a press credential that allows me to watch the skating live. Even from a nosebleed seat in the media tribune, the view feels better than the highest-resolution television screen. I love the routines, of course. But also: the costumes that keep the glitter industry in business! The floppy mullets that seem so popular among the men! The throwback music! Ilia’s unbelievable backflip! I love those interstitial moments when television viewers are watching commercials and we’re sitting in the stadium waiting for the next group to come onto the ice for their final warm-ups. I am transfixed by the volunteers with buckets and shovels who go out onto the ice to clear up the chips created by the skaters’ blades, and then I sink into the Zamboni zone, watching the meditative resurfacing, back and forth and around the perimeter. Such a simple pleasure, seeing the scratched ice emerge pristine. Northern exposure
Kim Severson is a reporter who jumps in on any story that promises to let her see new stuff. She’s north of Milan, at the hubs for Alpine skiing: The Olympics look very different in Bormio, a medieval town tucked against the Stelvio national forest. There is no Uber and no ICE protests, but there are thermal baths built by the Romans. If you want, you can do as some of the roughly 4,000 residents do and amble around the streets just outside the feared Alpine course to watch the action. Also worth noting: This is the place where they will host ski mountaineering for the first time. To me, ski-mo is one of the purest Olympic sports, born of something people who live in the Alps have always needed to do: Go up and down the mountain. Livigno is another story. For centuries, no tax has been collected there (a quirk of isolation and politics). People who grew up in the Valtellina Valley remember it as the place where families would head on the weekends for cheap gas, sugar and electronics. Then the ski industry came. Now the ski set flocks here for the slopes and duty-free Gucci. Towering over everyone is a metal skeleton the height of a 15-story building that allows for a dramatically steep drop-in to the jump that ski and snowboard competitors use to launch themselves spinning into the sky. Just beyond it are the halfpipe and the ramps that make up the slopestyle course. It’s a more rock’n’ roll atmosphere than Bormio, with snowboarder vibes. Livigno is also a long way from Bormio, where several of us are staying. If you’re lucky, the slow, snaking bus trip through the mountains takes about an hour and 20 minutes. More on the GamesHockey: The U.S. opened the men’s tournament with a 5-1 win over Latvia. Brock Nelson, whose uncle was part of the Miracle on Ice in 1980, scored two goals. Snowboarding: Chloe Kim finished second in the women’s halfpipe, an event she had won in the two previous Games. Choi Gaon of South Korea, 17, won gold. Skiing: Elis Lundholm of Sweden became the first openly transgender athlete to compete in the Winter Games. Lundholm, who was born female and transitioned to male, finished 25th in the women’s moguls qualifying. More skiing: Breezy Johnson crashed in the women’s super-G and didn’t medal. But she walked away with a different prize: Near the finish line, her boyfriend got on one knee and proposed.
The E.P.A. yesterday officially rejected the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases threaten human health and the environment. That means, legally speaking, the agency is no longer allowed to regulate them. The danger of climate change has been accepted as fact by politicians, including many Republicans, for decades. But President Trump has dismissed it as a “hoax,” and his administration is now effectively saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong. Trump’s E.P.A. administrator called yesterday’s announcement “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” The administration claimed it would save auto manufacturers and other businesses an estimated $1 trillion, although it has declined to explain how it arrived at that estimate.
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