The Price of War: French President Emmanuel Macron is travelling to Russia this week in an attempt to mollify Vladimir Putin’s complaints about national security ad head off a possibly invasion of Ukraine. 

  As Russia keeps building its forces around Ukraine, a Biden administration official has ominously  warned members of Congress that an invasion could cost 50,000 civilian lives and cause a refugee crisis in Europe.

  In six hours of closed meetings with House and Senate members last week, officials warned that Vladimir Putin’s army could take Kyiv within days and topple the Ukraine government. They say he has positioned about 70 percent of the forces he would need.

  They told lawmakers that a full blown invasion could result in the deaths of 5,000 to 25,000 members of the Ukrainian military and 3,000 to 10,000 Russians.

  Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, dismissed the whole notion in a tweet saying, “Madness and scaremongering continues. … what if we would say that US could seize London in a week and cause 300K civilian deaths?”

  The briefing came with the caveat that the administration does not know whether Putin has made his  final decision to invade. They say he is likely to wait until later this month when the ground is fully frozen to support armored vehicles. And they say he is likely to wait until after the Olympics are over in China so he will not steal the spotlight of benevolence from Xi Jinping. 

Viral News: New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is lifting the state’s mask mandate after having some of the strictest rules in the country. Masks will be optional for school students and staff.

  New cases of Covid-19 in New Jersey have dropped 71 percent over the past two weeks. 

Drawing Lines: In what may be a critical decision in a year in which election districts are being re-drawn across the country, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that congressional and state legislative maps were partisan gerrymanders designed to lock in Republicans in violation of the State Constitution.

 The Republican-controlled legislature will be required to re-draw the maps and, according to the ruling, demonstrate “a significant likelihood that the districting plan will give the voters of all political parties substantially equal opportunity to translate votes into seats” in elections.

  The maps pretty much assured the Republicans 10 of 14 seats in Congress even though the voters are close to 50-50 Republican/Democrat. Even so, The Republicans had argued that the court had no right to judge whether the maps exceeded acceptable partisanship..

  Interestingly the justices’ decision was split 4-3 along party lines. 

In the Swim: Sixteen members of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team have joined in a letter asking the University not to fight a new NCAA policy on transgender athletes that could disqualify a member of their team. The new NCAA policy says transgender athletes will now have mandatory testosterone testing, starting with the 2022-23 academic year. 

  The issue at UPenn is Lia Thomas, a former member of the men’s team who now competes as female. Despite undergoing hormone therapy, she performs like a speedboat compared to the women.

  The letter says, “We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity,” but, “Biologically, Lia holds an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category, as evidenced by her rankings that have bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female.”

Five Ring Highlights: US skiing star Mikaela Shiffrin skidded out and disqualified in the first run of the women’s giant slalom, the event she won four years ago. She’s expected to ski in four more events.

  After the event was delayed a full day because of high winds, 34-year-old Beat Feuz of Switzerland won the men’s downhill ski race.

  Russia’s 15-year-old figure skater Kamila Valieva Saturday night became the fourth woman in Olympic history to land the extremely difficult triple axel jump. The triple requires the skater to do 3 ½ rotations, launching from the outside edge of the forward skate and landing going backward on the opposite skate.

  American-born figure skater Zhu Yi, 19, who renounced her US citizenship to compete for China, is getting trashed on Chinese social media after falling during the women’s short program team event, knocking her country down from third to fifth place. “Zhu Yi has fallen” immediately became the top trending topic on Weibo — the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. 

  New Zealand snowboarder Zoi Sadowski-Synnott won the country’s first ever Winter Olympics gold medal in the women’s slopestyle. 

  American bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor has been cleared to compete after testing negative for Covid-19 twice. She had tested positive for Covid-19 two days after arriving in Beijing. 

Don the Ripper: Little known about Donald Trump during his presidency was that he had a habit of ripping up documents in violation of the Presidential Records Act, so much so that the staff had to implement special procedures to save what Trump shredded.

  The Washington Post reports that Trump  “tore up briefings and schedules, articles and letters, memos both sensitive and mundane.” The paper says, “He left the detritus on his desk in the Oval Office, in the trash can of his private West Wing study and on the floor aboard Air Force One, among many other places.”

  He kept doing it even though he was told it was wrong.

  Staffers from the White House Office of Records Management were left to stick the documents back together with clear tape. This came to light recently when the House January 6^th investigating committee was handed documents taped together. 

  “He didn’t want a record of anything,” a former senior Trump official said told the Post.“He never stopped ripping things up. Do you really think Trump is going to care about the records act? Come on.”

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